Ambitious Rebels: Remaking Honor, Law, and Liberalism in Venezuela, 1780-1850

Chapter One. From Colony to Liberal Republic: The Enlightenment Experiment

22 chapter one From Colony to Liberal Republic The Enlightenment Experiment Commerce is a cure for the most destructive prejudices; for it is almost a general rule, that wherever we find agreeable manners, there commerce flourishes . . . the spirit of commerce unites nations. . . . The spirit of trade produces in the mind of man a certain sense of exact justice. —montesquieu, the spirit of the laws, 20:1 when I observe that we pay for all that we consume from Europe with commodities and money, which are the product of our work and indus­ try. . . . This is the measure of the civilization of a country. —pedro mendinueta, viceroy of new granada, 18031 This chapter provides a quick overview of Venezuela’s history from the late colonial period through early independence, approximately 1780– 1830. In so doing, it focuses on two specific narratives that marked Venezuela and numerous polities in the Age of Revolution: (1) the contest between the effort to form a more centralized, rational government and the effort to maintain more local control, and (2) the tension between the growing appeal of liberalism and the traditional honor code and hierarchies . Liberalism’s premise of legal and social equality contradicted the traditional honor code and therefore, for some people, represented not only a loss of privilege but also the decay of morality. Late Colonial Venezuela Christopher Columbus first encountered northern South America on his third voyage in 1498. The following year an expedition led by Alonso de Ojeda and the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci (the namesake of “America”) From Colony to Liberal Republic • 23 encountered natives around Lake Maracaibo who lived in houses built on stilts. Inspired by this architecture, Vespucci named the region “Venezuela ,” meaning “little Venice.” Colonial Venezuela, which coincides very closely to the country’s modern borders, was an enormous territory with a highly diverse geography and population. At approximately 352,000 square miles, it was slightly larger than modern France and Germany combined. With the towering Andes Mountains in the west, 1740 miles of Caribbean coastline and a coastal mountain range in the north, tropical plains in the center (the llanos), rain forests in the south, and the Orinoco River with its delta in the east, the geography offered a grand array of exhilarating opportunities and impassable obstacles. The pre-Columbian population was far smaller than that of the empires and city-states found in the Andes and Mesoamerica and was not urbanized. As elsewhere in Spanish America, a mixture of Native American, Spanish , and African stock formed late colonial society, with whites at the top of the social hierarchy. In 1804, Alexander von Humboldt estimated the population of the Capitanía General de Venezuela (its late colonial name) at approximately 800,000, whereas an official census in 1811 placed the number at 1 million. The majority of the population was poor and illiterate, including the whites. Poor whites provided cheap labor (serving as agricultural workers, artisans, domestic servants, majordomos, and subsistence farmers), held little political power, and had few opportunities to improve their conditions .2 Most Indians lived apart from the rest of the population, and by the eighteenth century most non-assimilated Indians lived in the sparsely populated forests and plains of the south and east.3 The single largest ethnic group was the pardos (free people of African descent, whether pure African or mixed with white or Indian ancestry), who made up roughly half the population. Pardos typically comprised the lower classes, subsisting as artisans, farmers, or laborers, though some had wealth and prestige. By the late eighteenth century, some urban pardos had acquired wealth, married into white families, and entered into professional trades.4 Rural pardos were mostly poor, less financially diverse than their urban counterparts, and typically worked as subsistence farmers, laborers , and artisans. The rural poor, pardo and white alike, often lived with very little oversight from white elites and the state. Landed elites typically preferred to live in the cities and so were often absent landlords. Whites often preferred not to work as overseers, so that pardos and even slaves worked as estate supervisors. Contraband trade, therefore, was widespread in the countryside, as local poor and elites had little oversight from 24 • Chapter One Figure 1.1. Ethnographic Breakdown of Late Colonial Population* Race/Ethnicity Number Percent Whites 200,000 20.51% Pardos 435,000 44.62% Slaves 58,000 5.95% Indians 282,000 28.92% Total 975,000...