Read Bolivar: American Liberator for Free Online

college of lawyers, known for his progressive views on education. An avid reader and writer, he had labored for years to persuade colonial authorities to allow him to import the first printing press to the colony. He was never able to accomplish it. Nevertheless, Sanz was highly respected by Spaniards, admired by fellowCreoles—what’s more, at age thirty-six, he was the very model of a conscientious young father. It would have been difficult to find a better surrogate for the boy. As administrator of Simón Bolívar’s fortune, Sanz had dutifully visited his young ward and seen for himself the extent of the boy’s cockiness. But before Simón turned six, Sanz decided to take fuller responsibility andbrought him to live under his own roof.
    Blind in one eye, grim in demeanor, Sanz could be an intimidating presence, even to his own wife and children, but not to Simón, who is said to have issued many a brazen response to his demands.“You’re a walking powder keg, boy!” Sanz warned him after one of Simón’s more blatant insubordinations. “Better run, then,” the six-year-old told him, “or I’ll burn you.”
    As punishment for his many transgressions, Sanzlocked Simón in a room on the second floor of his house and instructed his wife to leave him there while he went off to see about his many court cases. Bored, exasperated, the boy yelled and made his fury known, and Sanz’s wife, taking pity, tied sweets and freshly baked breads to a long pole and passed them to him through an open window. She swore Simón to secrecy, making him promise not to reveal her disobedience. Every afternoon when the lawyer returned and asked how he had behaved, she simply smiled and said the child had been the essence of tranquillity.
    Eventually, Sanzhired a learned Capuchin monk, Padre Francisco de Andújar, to come to his house and give Simón a moral education. The mathematician priest, hoping to ingratiate himself with his student, tempered instruction with a liberal dose of entertaining stories, but no amount of patience or charm could budge the boy from what he was: a joker, a prankster, a pampered child. It’s not clear how long Simón remained under Sanz’s care or whether he actually spent nights under his roof, but certainly before his eighth birthday he was back in the house on San Jacinto Street. By then, his mother’s health was failing and she was finding it difficult to focus on the management of her family, much less the comportment of her younger son. Worried that she might infect her children with her disease, she quarantined herself on the sugar plantation at San Mateo and left them and the servants to their own devices. Simón spent his days cavorting with the slaves’ children, running wild.
    If Doña Concepción had one driving ambition during her swiftdecline, it was to secure for her older son, Juan Vicente, the marquisate that her father-in-law had purchased so many years before. The Palacios family, unlike the Bolívars, had always attached great importance to prestige and nobility, and when Don Juan Vicente de Bolívar had died, making the title potentially available to her sons, Doña Concepción had sent her brother Esteban to Spain to hurry along the enterprise. When Esteban reported that the proceedings had come to a halt because of Josefa Marín de Narváez’s questionable lineage, Don Feliciano Palacios called off the venture, unwilling to press a case that could reveal unwanted blood in the Bolívars and potentially smear them all. To be sure, managing the Bolívar fortunes had become a cash cow for the Palacios. The income from the properties that stood to be inherited by Juan Vicente and Simón was supporting their mother’s siblings. The in-laws had been living on Bolívar assets for years.
    On one of her long, recuperative visits to San Mateo, Doña Concepción stayed into the rainy season, and her affliction took a grave turn for the worse. Shereturned to Caracas and died of acute