While working more on my timeline project for teaching the history of Latin American independence today, I spent some time thinking about one of the colorful characters of the Atlantic Revolutions–Francisco de Miranda–and how he confounds the standard World History class narrative on revolution in Spanish America. The painting below commemorates the declaration of the first Venezuelan republic in 1811. Miranda is declaring independence as a member of the first Venezuelan national congress. Signers of the Declaration, including Miranda. Miranda also designed the first Venezuelan national flag with yellow, blue, and red horizontal stripes, a color pattern that is still used. He is a national hero in Venezuela.
Miranda fits in the standard narrative of Latin American independence as a product of Enlightenment thinking and earlier revolutions in the northern Atlantic world. He left Venezuela as a young man and spent much of his twenties serving in the Spanish navy. This brought him into direct contact with the American Revolution as a Spain allied with the American Patriots. As the war ended, Miranda began traveling the world, including meeting George Washington, an officers commission in Revolutionary France, and residence in London where he expressed admiration for English Constitutional monarchy. He even proposed a constitutional monarchy for América at one point, with an “Inca” as monarch.
He even brought a printing press and a national flag, along with armed men whom Miranda hired in the United State, when he landed in Venezuela in 1806 and proclaimed independence for neither the first nor the last time. These hired men were a sign that Miranda did not have popular support. The French uniform that he was wearing may not have had a rallying effect, especially amongst White Venezuelans who feared French influence in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. Miranda’s ideas and his revolutionary experience did not create a revolution. With Venezuelan militias mustering around Coro, the coastal town where Miranda landed, he left Venezuela, again, after less than week.
When an independent junta formed in Caracas in 1810 it did so in the name of Spanish King Fernando VII, recently deposed by Napoleon in favor of his brother. The junta embraced some Enlightened policies, freeing trade and prohibiting trafficking enslaved persons. It also considered Francisco de Miranda persona non grata as a disloyal subject of Fernando VII. Like in Haiti, some Spanish America some revolutionary leaders were monarchists, either out of conviction or strategy. Miranda’s protégé Simón Bolívar persuaded the Caracas junta to allow Miranda back into the country and then into the national constitutional assembly where he declared independence, again.
This time, more people followed Miranda’s call and an independent republic came into existence. While it outlasted his venture launched in Coro five years earlier, within a year and three weeks it was gone, a casualty of regional, ideological, social divisions. Royalist forces supported by White Venezuelans who feared Miranda’s appeals to racial egalitarianism defeated Republic as juntas outside of Caracas remained neutral. Miranda’s return in 1810 was contingent on the political crises in Spain, and the establishment of a republic, as became clear, was dependent on building national sentiment among a critical mass of Venezuelans. This only developed after the restored Fernando VII attempted to reassert control over Spanish America.
Not only does this story illustrate the contingent nature of historical change, but it also shows how ideas are never the sole driving force of historical change. Miranda’s idea–an independent, constitutional Venezuela –faced resistance from elite’s interest in racial status, enslaved labor, and, for those outside of Caracas, their local notability. Working-class pardos may have been more active in support of the Republic if a devastating earthquake and collapse in coco prices as a result of the disruption to international shipping had not dominated their lives. Simón Bolívar did, eventually, carry out his mentors vision. Revolutionary ideas and examples did matter, but they were not determinative. Students can handle this complexity.
Bibliography
Chambers, Sarah C., and John Charles Chasteen, editors. Latin American Independence: An Anthology of Sources. Translated by Sarah C. Chambers and John Charles Chasteen, Hackett Publishing Company, 2010.
Chasteen, John. Americanos: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence. Oxford University Press, USA, 2008.
Soriano, Cristina. Tides of Revolution: Information, Insurgencies, and the Crisis of Colonial Rule in Venezuela. University of New Mexico Press, 2018.
