The Wars of Independence in Spanish America (review)

In this admirable collection of essays and contemporary pieces, Christon Archer, one of Mexican independence historiography's best regarded scholars, has used his special interest in counterinsurgency as one of many keys to the Wars of Independence. We find, for example, Félix Calleja--Hidalgo's nemesis--showing up in 1811 with his stringent regulations for civilian populations designed to make the cities of Mexico into royalist strongholds. Later Archer has Calleja's successor, Viceroy Apodaca, give a candid and detailed appraisal of New Spain's chaotic society in 1818. Later, still, we find a selection from Stephen Stoan's 1974 book on Pablo Morillo, the Peninsular commander who was sent in 1815 by the restored King Ferdinand VII in the ultimately futile effort to crush insurgency in Venezuela and New Granada.

From the patriot side Archer chose as his lead author Brian Hamnett. In an effort to avoid excessive attention to Mexico, Hamnett here writes about regionalism's role in Colombia rather than his classic Roots of Insurgency on New Spain. Archer cannot resist, however, another regional study that is Peter Guardino's war in Guerrero.

Archer introduces his collection with a deftly crafted "Setting the Scene for an Age of Warfare." His very title suggests caution in using the old words "Independence" and "Revolution." This essay explores the dynamics of the eighteenth-century age of the Bourbon reforms. This includes significant attention paid to the casta society generally and the condition of castas in the military of the late eighteenth century. This theme reappears again in later selections, especially that by José de Cevallos, Capitan General of Caracas, who observed that the struggles were really civil wars that divided not Spaniards from Americans but rather cut across a racially mixed population. Archer also weighs the importance of the influence of the French Revolution and Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808. Students will be well-prepared by the time they begin the readings.

While most of the essays are overarching in their scope--take for example, Timothy Anna's study of the fall of royalist Peru--Virginia Guedea delves into microhistory with her cogent tale of a Mexican insurgent courier fighting in the dirty little war for rural New Spain. When he is caught red-handed, the courier is spared execution because influential local citizens feared insurgent reprisal against them for his death.

Bolívar's enormous presence is inescapable in this collection. Archer's solution is to pit the hero worshipper Daniel O'Leary, an Irish general who recorded his service to The Liberator, against the less well-known German General Ducoudray Holstein. The latter's more skeptical view is summed up when he wrote that the "predominant traits in the character of . . . Bolívar are ambition, vanity, thirst for absolute undivided power, and profound dissimulation" (p. 193). A frankly royalist perception of Bolívar and the war in Venezuela appears in a selection by an unemployed soldier from the Napoleonic wars. An Englishman, George Flinter attributed atrocities to Bolívar and few if any to the royalist cause. O'Leary appears again to bring us back in another piece to the famous encounter at Guayaquil between Bolívar and José de San Martín.

Before the final familiar essay by Margaret Woodward on the Spanish army and loss of America, there is Rebecca Earle's "'A Grave for Europeans'? Disease, Death, and the Spanish-American Revolutions," which originally appeared in War in History , a journal not all Latin Americanists see. Yet, this essay may be of such great significance regarding the outcome of the wars for independence to put even Bolívar into the shadows. Morillo, for example, reported in 1817 that in two years his army had lost one-third their number to disease. "The mere bite of a mosquito often deprives a man of his life," wrote the...