Venezuela’s First Declaration of Independence and US Republicanism: Convergences and Divergences

On the eve of the nineteenth century, Venezuela was a rich dominion of the Spanish Empire in South America. Coffee, indigo, and cacao, grown on large plantations and sold to European merchants, connected the rural region to the burgeoning Atlantic economy. Production of these valuable tropical commodities elevated local elites who—supported by the labor of enslaved people—created a culture of refinement. Central to Venezuela’s economy, slavery shaped a racially stratified society marked by great disparities. Creoles, elites who were born in Venezuela, remained loyal to the Spanish king because the monarchy guaranteed stability and order. They complained mildly about Spanish privilege and obstacles to free trade supported by the Spanish bureaucracy. Yet they knew they had much to lose, and their resentment did not flame into a rebellion against absolutism. The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) reminded Venezuelan oligarchs about the risks of independence to their lives, families, fortunes, and expectations.

Unlike Britain’s American colonies, Venezuela followed the strict rules of the ancient regime where honor, hierarchy, and position perpetuated the social order. At the top of society were elites born in Spain. Their origins made them suitable for the colony’s top positions as administrators commanding intendancies, fiscal structures that reinforced imperial centralization during the Bourbon era, when Spain was ruled by French kings. Creole elites, also known as mantuanos, were farmers, merchants, lawyers, military officers, and clergy. They married among themselves and struggled to keep their blood free from African and Indian admixture. Free Blacks and people of mixed origins worked in a myriad of jobs that were essential to the economy, but non-Whites had no say in public affairs. They served in militias, but only as soldiers. Religious festivities and civic rituals reaffirmed social divisions and class subordination.

Local support for the king survived Spain’s deteriorating situation in Europe, when the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars compromised Spain’s sovereignty. After initial hesitation, Spain allied with France against England and Portugal. This old alliance, dating from the early eighteenth century, was reframed in the context of trans-imperial warfare. But the long war intensified internal divisions in Spain. Bourbon institutions could not hold against a prolonged crisis that included the fleet lost at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805). Rising criticism of King Charles IV and his minister, Manuel Godoy, worsened when French troops crossed Spain to attack Portugal (1807). After the fall of Lisbon, foreign troops remaining around Madrid ignited a popular revolt, replacing Charles IV with his son, Ferdinand VII, known as “the desired.” Spain’s integrity disintegrated when Napoleon imprisoned both Charles and Ferdinand, and installed his own brother, Joseph Bonaparte, as Emperor of Spain and all her colonies. With the demise of the Bourbons, the Spanish Empire fragmented into eighteen republics in just fourteen years.

Spaniards reacted to the Bourbons’ removal with outrage. They formed regional government councils and a Central Junta at Seville to resist French occupation. It was six years before Spanish patriots could expel the French invaders in a bloody war that cost them the Empire. In Venezuela, mantuanos followed Spaniards in their allegiance to king and crown. For two years they struggled to form a local council loyal to Ferdinand VII, finally succeeding in 1810. Creoles in the new council assumed command of provincial administration, lowered taxes, and sent missions to England and the United States to establish friendly relations and gain international support for their recent autonomy. After the fall of Seville in 1810, the collapse of Spain’s Central Junta, and its replacement by a Council of Regency, the Venezuelan Assembly moved forward, installing a National Congress and declaring independence on July 5, 1811. Responding to the chaos in Spain, Venezuelans proclaimed their right to self-determination, adopting many elements of the American Declaration of Independence issued on July 4, 1776. Juan Germán Roscio and Francisco Iznard wrote the document that was approved by the assembly.

The Acta de La Independencia appealed to an all-powerful God and a glorious past for rights it intended to recover. These privileges applied only to descendants of the discoverers, conquerors, and settlers—not to descendants of those conquered or enslaved in more than 300 years of colonization. Consequently, despite copying the list of grievances in the US Declaration and adopting a similar format, the Venezuelan Declaration failed to address individual rights, presenting itself as the restoration of an older polity, rather than as a revolution. It erased the assumption of equality among all men presented in the US Declaration’s Preamble—a pivotal omission considering that Creoles comprised less than 20 percent of the population. The Acta consecrated the privileges of a few, instead of expanding rights to the many. In this sense, the document appealed to “a natural dignity,” alluding to those “united to us by the same ties of blood, language, and religion.” This was not a universal pledge of freedom and liberty, but a compromise with the liberal order via the creation of a sovereign state that imposed an official religion on the new nation, in alliance with the Catholic Church.

Venezuelan Creoles intended to establish a federal republic similar to that of the United States, with a division of powers that enabled them to overcome absolute rule. But the realities were quite different from those of the northern republic. As Simón Bolívar observed when criticizing the Assembly’s naivete, “[Hispanic] America was denied not only its freedom but even an active and effective tyranny . . . [and had] been kept in a sort of permanent infancy with regard to public affairs.” Lack of experience in government at local or regional levels compromised the Venezuelan Republic’s ability to rule, and an unequal, divided society challenged its ability to apply the ideals of the American Declaration to the realities of Caribbean colonialism. This fragility was magnified by conflicts over territorial jurisdiction among the provinces, as many pueblos claimed their own sovereignty. This struggle plagued the republic for years as many regions refused to obey the government in Caracas and sided with the Spanish Cortes of Cadiz, a parliamentary assembly that included representatives from the colonies. Civil war ravaged the country for the next decade, destroying infrastructure and contributing to a demographic catastrophe.

The North American colonial rebellion against Great Britain emerged from internal transformations in imperial management after the Seven Years’ War. Relatively well organized politically, the thirteen colonies responded to efforts to subordinate their liberties, which many colonists considered unacceptable. Not all British subjects reacted in the same way and American secession did not end British colonial rule in other parts of the continent. In contrast, Venezuelan independence was linked to the implosion of the Hispanic monarchy. Both the French invasion and the ensuing power retroversion to cabildos, or local councils, marked the demise of Bourbon rule. When Spanish rule in America collapsed, multiple new polities struggled to affirm their sovereignty. The consequences in terms of lifestyle and power reorganization became evident in the post-independence period. Venezuela’s emergence as a sovereign constitutional state faced enormous obstacles compared to the US government, the structure of which was improved through ratification of the Constitution (1788). For Venezuelans, the route to constitutional government would involve long and troublesome processes of national definition and bloody transformations affecting whole populations.

Further reading

Adelman, Jeremy. Sovereignty and Revolution in the Iberian Atlantic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Armitage, David. The Declaration of Independence: A Global History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Bolívar, Simón. Letter from Jamaica (1815). Available at https://library.brown.edu/create/modernlatinamerica/chapters/chapter-2-the-colonial-foundations/primary-documents-with-accompanying-discussion-questions/document-2-simon-bolivar-letter-from-jamaica-september-6-1815/ .

Graham, Richard. Independence in Latin America: Contrasts & Comparisons. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013.

Guerra, François-Xavier. Modernidad e independencias: ensayos sobre las revoluciones hispánicas . México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2001.

Langley, Lester D. The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750 –1850. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.

Plank, Geoffrey. Atlantic Wars: From the Fifteenth Century to the Age of Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Vitor Izecksohn, professor of history at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, is the author of Slavery and War in the Americas: Race, Citizenship, and State Building in the United States and Brazil, 1861–1870 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014).