THE FOLLOWING study does not pretend to be based on new material. It is an account and an interpretation of Bolivar in the light of the large number of documents which have been printed since the last English biography was written in 1910. These documents include copious primary sources: the complete edition of the Letters, in ten volumes, by Vicente Lecuna (1929-30), the personal papers printed in the third volume of O’Leary’s Life (suppressed until 1915), the original reports of the interview between Bolivar and San Martin at Guayaquil published by Carlos Villanueva (1913), and various other collections of diplomatic documents concerning Bolivar’s foreign policy, notably F. J. Urrutia’s Pa'gz'nas diplomáticas (1917), and Sir Charles Webster's Britain and the Independence of Latin America (1938). Particulars of these, and other works, will be found in the Appendix.
I have tried particularly to bring out the importance of Bolivar’s political theories, because they distinguish him from all other liberators. A chronological arrangement has been chosen; and though, by this method, military campaigns and romantic constitutions follow one another in an order which may well seem bewildering, an attempt to segregate political theory in one chapter, strategy and tactics in another and revolutionary politics in a third would have created an impression almost entirely hotitious. The thoughts and actions of Bolivar’s life are only intelligible when taken together at the same time.