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  • Unexpected Opposition: Independence and the 1809 Leva de Vagos in the Province of Caracas
  • Olga Gonzalez-Silen (bio)

In late 1809 and early 1810, the city of Caracas witnessed an extraordinary spectacle as over 350 men were marched into its prisons. Local provincial authorities had apprehended these men as part of a leva de vagos, a campaign to coercively recruit vagrants into the army.1 Such recruitment campaigns were neither novel nor particularly controversial in the late Bourbon period.2 However, Napoleon’s invasion of Spain in 1808 had unhinged the Spanish world, inspiring a profound re-examination of values and traditions. In this context, this new leva generated an unexpected opposition that stunned the new captain general of Venezuela, field marshal Vicente Emparan y Orbe. The opposition, which was led by the Caracas audiencia—the province’s highest court—ostensibly questioned the legality of the procedures being used to validate charges of vagrancy, but beneath the surface, the resistance reflected a broad-based coalition dedicated to the defense of a status quo that was unraveling under the twin forces of Napoleon and the Junta Central.3 In this essay, I argue that the Leva de Vagos of 1809 contributed decisively to the overthrow of Emparan, paving the way for the creation of the Junta of Caracas in April 1810. [End Page 347]

The foundational texts of the Junta of Caracas, and later those of the Confederacy of Venezuela, evidence the importance of the Leva de Vagos of 1809 to the province of Caracas. The Junta’s founding declaration of April 19, 1810 upheld Spanish law with only three exceptions, the first of which was the orders “that have been given on vagrants, since they are not in accordance to the laws and practices that govern these dominions.”4 In 1811, in its Manifesto to the World, the Confederacy of Venezuela listed the following as one of Emparan’s unbearable abuses: “to chain and to sentence to labor in the public works, without proper trial, a multitude of honest men [who were] torn from their homes with the pretext of being vagrants.”5 For almost two centuries, these foundational documents have been extensively copied and paraphrased by historians. Yet, despite the many references to the Leva that provoked them, much about the campaign has been rendered unintelligible by time and largely forgotten.6

Recovering the Leva de Vagos of 1809 illuminates the dynamics behind the unraveling of the local Spanish government at the eve of independence.7 To preserve [End Page 348] Caracas within the empire, Emparan sought to gain American support for the Junta Central by reforming the province. This leva, for example, not only aimed at strengthening the Caracas military by recruiting new soldiers, but—equally important—it also attempted to reaffirm the preeminence of the local elites vis-à-vis other social groups by targeting the provincial free lower classes. The recruitment effort, however, proved to have the opposite effect, weakening the social and institutional ties that linked provincial life to the empire.8 Legal challenges to individual apprehensions exposed the audiencia as an ineffective mediator between vassals and the local authorities. In addition, the public suffering surrounding the recruitment campaign antagonized the anonymous yet powerful majority that formed the popular bulwark of the Spanish government.9 When the Caracas elite challenged Emparan’s leadership on April 19, 1810, it seemed to many contemporaries that the fate of the humble vagrants validated the elite’s accusation that the local Spanish government was becoming a tyranny.

The Royal Army and the Vagrants of the Province of Caracas

The province of Caracas in 1810, with a population of 427,000, had experienced profound social, economic, and political transformations in the late Bourbon period.10 In 1777, the crown created the captaincy-general of Venezuela [End Page 349] out of the provinces of Caracas, Maracaibo, Cumana, Margarita, Trinidad, and Guayana, with the city of Caracas recognized as the center of power. Soon after, the province of Caracas gained an intendancy, an audiencia, a consulado, and a tobacco estanco (royal monopoly) and became the seat of an archbishopric. These institutional developments coincided with a growing and diversifying export economy based on cacao...

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