Francisco de Paula Santander
Francisco de Paula Santander (born April 2, 1792 in Villa del Rosario de Cúcuta, Viceroyalty of New Granada ; † May 6, 1840 in Santa Fé de Bogotá , Republic of New Granada) was a general of the New Grenadine Union, Vice-President of Greater Colombia and President of the Republic of New Granada .
Childhood and youth
From the will of Santander Tablet and bust in the house where Santander was born in Villa del Rosario
The son of the plantation owner Juan Agustín Santander Colmenares and his third wife Manuela Antonia de Omaña y Rodriguez, first studied at the school in Villa del Rosario and at his father's hacienda, one kilometer east of Plaza Bolívar. The provincial governor, who also grew coffee and sugar cane, bought the building and the fields on which he cultivated ten thousand cocoa trees in 1783. Destroyed after an earthquake in 1875, rebuilt and restored in 1971, the courtyard is now a museum.
1805 his parents to thirteen Francisco José de Paula Santander y Omaña sent to Bogota to the College of San Bartolomé, where he in 1808 his Bachiller (bachelor's degree) in philosophy took off and later Jura began to study.
Military career
Career start in rebellion
At the beginning of the uprising in Bogotá in 1810, the great-grandson of a chief joined the rioters of July 20 without having formally completed his studies; However , he had submitted his doctoral thesis on practical forensics a good week earlier. Initially employed as a secretary in the military inspection, the volunteer held this position from November as a sub-lieutenant in the National Guard .
Manuel Castillo y Rada, one of Cartagena de Indias originating officer , he was in March 1811 Mariquita and Honda sent to prevent to a counter-coup of royalists, but subsequently he was at Castillo's side in the incorporation of the province into the Cundinamarca , in which Antonio Nariño ruled centralistically .
In 1812 Santander was the secretary of Castillo and within a short time he was promoted to lieutenant and captain. When Antonio Baraya was sent to Cúcuta in July 1812 to fight the Spaniards invading from there (see The First Republic of Colombia), he was part of the campaign as Adjutant Barayas and was with the defectors, who preferred federalism to centralism in Bogotá . He was involved in the campaign from December to January 1813 on behalf of the Congress of Tunja against Nariño, which was ultimately lost to the federalists. With a leg injured, he was taken prisoner by the Centralists after the Battle of San Victorino (January 9, 1813).
Santander at Bolívar
Nariño sent the released federalists Simón Bolívar when he asked for support for his Campaña Admirable . As a major, Santander took part in the fighting with the remnants of the soldiers of Ramon Correa y Guevarra, who had come from Venezuela and whom Simón Bolívar had badly defeated when taking Cúcuta , under the command of Castillo (Angostura de la Grita, April 13, 1813). Outstanding was his criticism of the planned Venezuela campaign of the newly crowned Brigadier General Bolívar, which he considered too daring. He and Castillo opposed Bolívar at the beginning of his Campaña Admirable until the latter threatened them with shooting for insubordination at the end of May.
Border guard in his home
As a colonel, the Tunja Congress had him patrol the border with Venezuela with 280 men after he had allowed himself and his troops a break from preparing for the Venezuela campaign. In October 1813 Santander succumbed to the overwhelming power of Bartolomé Lizón, who, coming from Maracaibo , and the men of Ildefonso Casas, had used guerrilla methods to war on Cúcuta in the Carillo plain and only narrowly escaped. As a deputy in the division of the Edinburgh Gregor MacGregor , he soon faced the situation again against a numerically superior opponent, this time the guerrilla Aniceto Matutes, which had reinforced with Lizon and Casas', which led to the retreat to Bucaramanga .
By February 1814, the Scot had reinforced his troops to the point where he could retake Pamplona, which Matute and Casas had evacuated. In the pursuit of Casas Santander rubbed him up in San Faustino on February 6th, MacGregor drove the decimated Lizon on Maracaibo. This was only able to escape because he received a relief attack by troops from Merida on MacGregor (Portachuelo near Estanques, February 16, 1814). When MacGregor was appointed head of the border troops and moved into quarters in Villa del Rosario, Santander accompanied him. Rafael Urdaneta , who had led the remnants of the western army of the Second Republic of Venezuela to Cúcuta in the autumn, took over the supreme command of the border troops and Santander as vice. When Urdaneta was recalled to Casanare in December , Santander was given command of the border troops, which had been reduced to a minimum. His job was limited to delaying and maneuvering and, in the worst case, to occupy passports.
The invasion of the Spanish expeditionary army
At the height of El Chopo he saw the entry of the Spanish expeditionary army into the Cúcuta valleys in 1815. Santander cleverly avoided the fight with the superior enemy until he was called to Ocaña in July to strengthen himself there with the garrison and take command of the to take over remaining troops of the New Grenadine Union in this region. The invading division of Sebastian de Calzada controlled the region, but could not take Santander. After the fall of Mompós in May, while de la Calzada was occupying Pamplona , he withdrew to Girón (directly at Bucaramanga). This celebrated evasion of the enemy under difficult conditions allowed him to incorporate in Piedecuesta the remnants of the troops of Urdaneta and Custodio García Rovira after their defeat in Chitagá on November 25, 1815 against de la Calzada. By the end of January 1816 he had created an army of two thousand reasonably disciplined troops, including the remnants of the units from Bogotá and the northern Eastern Cordillera . García Rovira took command and Santander the vanguard.
With this army he pushed north again on the Eastern Cordillera, and this time it was Calzada who had to retreat. In search of him, García Rovira found him with a division on the heights of Cachiri on February 8, 1816. The separatists defeated the royalists in five hours , but the victory was insufficient and Calzada recovered quickly. Just 14 days later, after Calzada had received reinforcements from Morillo, he attacked again not far from the first battle site, in Alto Cachiri, and inflicted a devastating defeat on the patriots. Because at the same time the March Mantillas on Cúcuta ended with a defeat for relief, García Rovira was recalled from the New Grenadine Union and replaced by Colonel Manuel Roergas de Serviez, a native of France. Santander remained deputy.
Serviez had the difficult task of evading an army twice as strong, better equipped and better trained than his. So the patriots withdrew ever further south towards Bogotá, until they finally evaded into the plains of Casanare after Tunja fell into the hands of the Spaniards on April 18th. The battered division could not prevent the fall of Bogotá at the beginning of May; it had to secure its retreat and find a gap to penetrate the wide plains. The two conquerors of Bogotá, de la Calzada and Miguel de la Torre , who had reinforced the units of Calzada, chased the patriots through the plains in the rainy season . Santander took an active part in the fighting at Guachiría (April 29) and Cabuya de Cáqueza (May 11). In the first battle the Spaniards prevented a meeting with Urdaneta's horsemen, whom he had become in Chire; the union did not take place until July 1st. The second battle is the slaughter that the Spaniards wreaked at a river crossing among the patriots fleeing Bogotá.
With the last insurgents
In July 1816, the leaders of the three remaining units in the plains, Serviez, Urdaneta and Manuel Valdéz, met with José Antonio Páez and some political leaders of the collapsed first Colombian republic in Arauca . At the same time, to his surprise, and rather reluctantly, Santander was elected commander in chief of the troops of the plains in eastern Colombia and western Venezuela.
First he ordered the gathering of all troops in Guasdualito, on the Venezuelan side of the border. During the two months there, he had to contend with riots in the troops until he handed over the command to Páez. The reasons for this lay in the fact that he was too distinguished to lead above all the coarse lancers from the Venezuelan llanos . Páez continued the Apure campaign with the army divided into three brigades : Urdaneta with the first, Santander with the second and Serviez with the reserve brigade. In September Santander was involved in the fighting at El Yagual on the 16th, which led to the capture of the (then) province of Barinas . Despite the murder of Serviez and Valdéz, for which Páez was ultimately responsible, he, unlike Urdaneta, stayed with Páez until the end of the year and took part in his Apure campaign.
Back at Bolívar
In February 1817 he was on the Apure, en route to Barcelona to meet Bolívar, who had returned from his second expedition to the Caribbean islands . He took him on to his general staff and on the Guiana campaign. Santander took an active part in the capture of Ciudad Guayana in August.
At the end of the year he embarked on the center campaign of 1818 with Bolívar and accompanied him during the major battles of this campaign (Calabozo, February 12; El Sombrero, February 16; Semén, March 16; Ortiz, March 26, and the assassination attempt on Bolivar at the Rincon de los Toros, April 17th). Santander received the Orden de Libertadores and his promotion to Brigadier General in the middle of the year. Due to the absence of Carlos Soublette, he has meanwhile been appointed Chief of Staff. In August he received the medal "Star of the Liberators of Venezuela" for his achievements.
The New Granada Campaign
With 1200 rifles and a few officers, Bolívar sent Santander back to Casanare at the end of August 1818 to support the rebels who remained there and to prepare for Bolívar's New Granada campaign (see The Battle of Boyacá ). When Bolívar arrived in Tame in June 1819, he was able to provide a division with four battalions, which Bolívar made the vanguard. Bolívar, seeing the poor condition of his troops, thought of marching back to Guasdualito in order to advance to Cúcuta from there. Santander and José Antonio Anzoátegui managed to change the mind of the liberator and march on Bogotá as planned. On June 27, Santander came across a camouflaged position of the Spaniards at Paya, which he had excavated. This cleared the way for an unnoticed crossing of the main ridge of the Eastern Cordillera.
He took part in the march over the Páramo de Pisba and fought in the battles and skirmishes until the decision at the Bridge of Boyacá on August 7, 1819, so to the satisfaction of Bolívar that he was promoted to division general with Anzoátegui in August . On the 10th he rode into Bogotá alongside Bolívar.
A month later, after New Granada was incorporated into Bolívar's Greater Colombia, Santander became Vice President and Deputy Bolívar in Bogotá, while Bolívar led his campaigns first to pacify New Granada and later in Venezuela, Ecuador and Peru . As a lawyer, Santander was also an administrative specialist who ran the affairs of state and raised the funds for Bolívar's campaigns. Despite some differences in their conception of the state, the two were united by a close friendship that was not only political. Bolívar honored his friend with the words: "The army in the field and your Excellency in the administration are the originators of the existence of the freedom of [Greater] Colombia."
rating
Santander was neither a great strategist nor a shrewd tactician. Military autodidact , his strengths lay in the skills acquired during his law studies: building, structuring, organizing and managing the troops. The New Grenadine Union took this into account, always making him the deputy who was always able to develop his skills away from the battlefield when the commander in chief changed. Bolívar also sent him to Casanare because of this, in order to have a well-organized army of Colombians available for his New Granada campaign.
Political career
Vice President of Greater Colombia
In mid-December 1819, the Angostura Congress decided to convene a constituent assembly in Villa del Rosario de Cúcuta . At the beginning of May 1821, Antonio Nariño, who had just returned from captivity in Spain, was in charge, but after only two months he resigned and Santander took over the management. On September 7th, Congress appointed Bolívar as President of Greater Colombia and Santander as Vice-President. They officially took up their posts on October 3rd.
The “organizer of victory” ruled in the following years according to the maxim of a lawyer formulated in a letter of December 2, 1821: “The weapons gave us independence, the laws give us freedom.” With his attitude that there are laws and not the government of the people who have to rule the country, he earned his nickname "man of the law". In December 1821 Bolívar gave him the order to pacify the country by all means, while the liberator took care of the royalists in Pasto and Ecuador. From then on he was, with the parliament , the actual ruler of Greater Colombia, because the president was rarely in Bogotá for years.
Santander used his tenure to improve education by establishing schools, universities and museums. He instructed his Chancellor to improve and develop the foreign relations of Greater Colombia, which resulted in the international recognition of the republic. He initiated a series of political, economic and social reforms with the aim of transforming the country, which had been torn by more than ten years of war, into a democratic civil republic, while strengthening its central government.
Differences with Bolívar
The differences of opinion, which already emerged during the Ecuador campaign in 1822, worsened during the Peru campaign in 1824, when Santander first refused to deliver urgently needed material to Bolívar and finally, in July 1824, withdrew from him the supreme command of the Greater Colombian expeditionary army let. Because Santander could not put the concerns of the Peruvians above those of his great Colombians, who were in the process of reconstruction, while Bolívar could not abandon his view of the complete liberation of the continent, since the return of the Spaniards was not to be feared only with a complete victory. Antonio José de Sucre therefore took over the supreme command for the rest of the campaign and ended the rule of the Spaniards in South America.
In the middle of 1825 Santander had himself (together with the absent Bolívar) confirmed by election in office by the neo-Renadin people. Both were re-elected despite the dissatisfaction of various parts of the country with the central government. Some provinces in all three departments of Greater Colombia would have preferred national governments.
The secession tendencies were particularly pronounced in Venezuela under Páez. In view of the execution of the death sentences, he did not want to answer to a court in Bogotá for setting up militias alongside the regular armed forces. In his dispute with Páez over the so-called Cosiata, an uprising in Venezuela against the Republic of Greater Colombia in favor of Venezuela's independence, Santander insisted on the letter of the law instead of cooperating with the extremely impulsive but also very popular Páez. He certainly also remembered his stay with the Llanero in the years 1816-17.
Bolívar himself took on the uprising around the turn of the year 1826/27 and prevented Venezuela's separation from Greater Colombia. The differences with his government in Bogotá intensified. In March 1827, Bolivar of Caracas broke off the friendship from Santander. Against the background of the possible form of monarchical government rejected by Bolívar, the liberator has handed down the following with regard to Santander: "Regardless of whether it is monarchy or republic: The Indians are the Indians, the Llaneros are the Llaneros, but the lawyers are the schemers!" Bolívar resigned his presidency, which had long since degenerated, but Congress had not yet rejected his resignation. Because his resignation was not accepted, Bolívar resumed government in Bogotá in September and in February 1828 he curtailed the power of his vice president.
End of the Vice Presidency
The tensions with Santander, which probably had their origin in the first meeting in the run-up to the Campaña Admirable in early 1813, intensified during the Congress of Ocaña , when Santander, in his function as deputy, led the opponents of Bolívar, who described themselves as " liberal " . After its dissolution in June, because neither party was able to implement changes, Bolívar ruled dictatorially (August) by means of the "Organic Decree".
Santander was, in fact, no longer involved in government, even if he was not dismissed as Vice President. He then tried to push Bolívar out of office, but failed. Other “liberals” planned and carried out an assassination attempt on the liberator, which led to their immediate execution. Santander, who could only be proven to have been an accomplice, escaped the death sentence and because José María Castillo y Rada, the brother of Manuel, who was executed in 1816, stood up for him. His sentence was converted into exile.
exile
Via various prisons in the vicinity of Cartagena, where he stayed until June 1829, he was shipped to Hamburg in June of the following year 1829 , where he arrived on October 15. In the following two years he toured Germany , Holland , Belgium , France , England , Ireland , Italy and Switzerland .
On 17 August 1830 he met in the Berlin Museum of Natural History with Alexander von Humboldt together. The conversation, which both of them found stimulating, continued the next day. Four days later, the two met for breakfast together in Humboldt's apartment. Both mention the encounters in their diaries.
President of the Republic of New Granda
In mid-1831, only six months after Bolívar's death, the Congress, in his absence, through the new Vice President, gave him back all honors and dignities. At the end of the year, Santander arrived in New York , where he received news from Congress six months later that he had been appointed interim president for the New Granda Republic in May. In November 1832 he took over the office in Bogotá. Less than five months later, in March 1833, the lawyer was officially elected and constitutional president of his home country; he held this office until March 1837. Right at the beginning of his term in office, in June, there was a conspiratorial revolt, which he put down. 19 participants in the revolt were executed.
Again he put the law at the center of his tenure and did not exclude himself from it. "I will govern us how I want it and how I want to be governed: in accordance with the law." He continued the reforms of the state and society that he had begun as Vice President of Greater Colombia. Ultimately, it was he who changed the attitude of the Colombians from a colonial Spanish society dependent on the mother country to a republican-democratic one.
He finally abolished the colonial economic structures in agriculture and the state monopolies that had been in force until then in mining as well. Santander also established the currency unit in the country and introduced pensions for civil servants. By establishing further educational institutions, he ensured a comprehensive improvement in popular education, which was deliberately kept low in the colonial era, by tripling the number of primary schools . Foreign policy he succeeded in 1835 the recognition of his republic by Spain. The liberal education he introduced resulted in a polarization of social ideas that resulted in the founding of the conservative and liberal parties.
Wife and offspring
A few weeks after his inauguration as president, his first son was born (who later also became a general), but his marriage to María de la Paz Piedrahita Murgueitio y Saénz de San Pelayo did not take place until two and a half years later, on February 15, 1836, in Bogotá instead of. Two more sons, one of whom died early, and a daughter arose from this marriage.
Last years
After his tenure, Santander opposed his conservative successor. However, because he had not been able to unite his supporters for re-election, he was defeated and was elected as senator in the House of Representatives in 1838 , where he temporarily held the chair.
At the end of March 1840, after a heated debate with personal accusations against him, his chronic kidney disease came to light and after a few weeks of illness Santander died of it in Bogotá. Shortly before he had said: "I am dying with a clear conscience that I have not committed the crimes that I have been accused of, more from ignorance than from malice: I have forgiven all of them."
rating
As during his military career, Santander worked best, as a deputy who now translated orders into administrative regulations and in areas where there was consensus between Bolívar and Santander, the latter was again very successful. His insistence on laws, including against Bolívar, who considered himself to be above the law, ultimately led to a breach and Santander's disempowerment, and ultimately even to exile. Later as President of the Republic, he continued the path of republicanization and democratization of society that had been dependent on for centuries. Despite his success, however, he did not manage to keep the ranks of his supporters closed in order to continue his work as president. To do this, he would have had to jump over his own shadow and - illegally - also slander his opponents. The social and economic changes he achieved, as well as those in the education system, are on an equal footing with his successes as a military man, making him an outstanding figure in a time of massive upheavals in South America.
swell
- Antonio Cacua Prada ( [1] )
- Luis Ociel Castaño Zuluaga ( Biblioteca Luis Angel Arango, Bogotá )
- José María Baraya: Biografías militares - Jeneral Santander
- Constancio Franco: Rasgos Biograficos de los próceres - Francisco de Paula Santander (Jeneral)
- María Teresa Calderón: Museo Santander. Presidencia de la República. (Brochure on the house where Santander was born in Villa del Rosario)
literature
- Carl Nicholas Röding: Biographical sketch of General Francisco de Paula Santander, . Hoffmann and Campe , Hamburg 1830 ( google.de ).
Web links
- German-language website on the Wars of Liberation with the corresponding sources
- Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas
| predecessor | Office | successor |
|---|---|---|
| José Ignacio de Marquez |
President of New Granada 1832–1837 |
José Ignacio de Marquez |
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Santander, Francisco de Paula |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Colombian military and politicians |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 2, 1792 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Villa del Rosario de Cúcuta, Colombia |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 6, 1840 |
| Place of death | Bogotá , Colombia |