Bernardo O'Higgins

Supreme director of Chile (1817-1823)

• Born: Probably August 20, 1778
• Birthplace: Chillán, Viceroyalty of Peru (now in Chile)
• Died: October 24, 1842
• Place of death: Lima, Peru

O’Higgins is widely regarded by Latin Americans as the George Washington of Chile. Inspired by both the American and the French Revolutions, he followed the lead of the great Argentine general José de San Martín and helped Martín liberate Chile from Spanish colonial rule. Although he was not a political administrator, O’Higgins was able to inspire both the troops under his command and the Chilean civilian population to overthrow a long-detested regime.

Early Life

Born in what is now Chile when it was still under Spanish rule, Bernardo O’Higgins was the illegitimate son of an Irishman, Ambrosio O’Higgins, who distinguished himself in the Spanish government’s Chilean bureaucracy and as viceroy of Peru. His mother was a Chilean woman of impoverished background. O’Higgins went to primary school in Lima, Peru, and London, England. The latter school was especially important. A bright and energetic student, O’Higgins met Latin American anti-Spanish revolutionaries in London whose liberation ideas stayed with him, greatly influencing his later military career.

When his father died, O’Higgins went back to Chile to oversee lands that his father had willed him. From all appearances, he was but one of many wealthy, ambitious young Chileans who, benefiting greatly from the hacienda system of landholding, would spend the rest of his life overseeing a large estate. However, perhaps as a result of the revolutionary contacts he had made in England, O’Higgins grew increasingly bitter about the ongoing Spanish occupation of Chile, resolving to help free the country from these bonds in a future struggle for independence.

Together with other patriotic, anti-Spanish aristocrats of liberal tendencies, O’Higgins in 1810 joined a group of delegates to Chile’s congress, which was attempting to decide the country’s political future. Unfortunately for all concerned, the congress was violently divided over which kind of governmental system Chile required. Some wanted a return to old ways of doing things, instituted centuries earlier by the conquering Spanish; others favored a republican form of government; still others hoped for a complete transformation of society that would do away with the past. Those who were not interested in the radical approach decided that working with others in the Santiago congress who failed to share their utopian vision of Chile was futile; thus, they left the congress, an act that allowed their political foes, calling themselves the Executive Power, to claim control of the Chilean government.

The rebels were ruthlessly defeated by José Carrera, who had fought against Napoleon I’s army in Spain. Carrera, in a manner confusing to friend and enemy alike, supported constitutional reform while continuing allegiance to Spain’s King Ferdinand, the latter action having been to camouflage true anti-Spanish intent.

The new constitution created a ruling triad, which included O’Higgins, who zealously believed in the reform of both society and government and in the creation of a benevolent state encouraging the betterment of the human condition. O’Higgins’s first efforts were quashed by Peru’s viceroy when the combined forces of O’Higgins’s and Carrera’s armies were routed in 1814, a rout that allowed the capture of Santiago, Chile, by Spanish forces and a setback to the budding revolution that resulted.

O’Higgins narrowly avoided being executed by the vengeful government forces; he took his army—what remained of it—over the AndesMountains to Argentina, in itself a heroic feat. Discouraged by this untimely defeat, O’Higgins appeared to have become merely one more victim of the Spanish occupation, which was victoriously reasserting itself in the New World. In this defeat, Chile was joined by other countries elsewhere in Spanish America—Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru—that unsuccessfully battled oppression.

Life’s Work

O’Higgins is often referred to as the liberator of Chile as well as a kind of George Washington figure. Like Washington, O’Higgins suffered early defeats, only to pull together his beaten forces and win the war. After the loss in 1814 to Spanish and loyalist troops, O’Higgins, like Washington, had the good fortune to have help from outside his nation. Argentina’s José de San Martín , governor of Cuyo Province, was able to give O’Higgins the right sort of assistance when he most needed it. Actually, without San Martín’s expertise in military matters as well as his experienced army, the liberation of Chile would most likely have remained a dream unfulfilled. This tall, handsome man was clearly a classic leader who, like O’Higgins, had the respect of his troops. San Martín became O’Higgins’s mentor and friend.

The campaign for the independence of Chile began in 1817 at Mendoza, Argentina, where San Martín gathered together great amounts of ammunition and guns for the coming war. Buenos Aires was in the mood to supply what O’Higgins needed—another bit of good fortune.

In O’Higgins, San Martín recognized a strong, purposeful young leader, with whom he could share military leadership. However, what faced them both was the daunting prospect of moving an army across Andean passes much more than three thousand meters in elevation. Nevertheless, supplies, including equipment designed for traversing gullies and ravines, were readied, though O’Higgins was not certain that they would take them where no army had gone.

Using the Los Patos and Uspollata passes in the Andes, the troops united under San Martín and O’Higgins met the Spanish and Chilean loyalists near Santiago at the town of Chacabuco. It was O’Higgins, however, who achieved the greatest triumph in that battle: He rose from relative obscurity that day to be numbered among Latin America’s most illustrious liberators. San Martín also added to his already impressive reputation as a military genius.

Bravely, with little thought to his personal safety, O’Higgins led two sweeping cavalry charges into the Spanish ranks, causing the latter considerable losses and creating confusion in the ranks. These great attacks set the stage for San Martín’s being offered the supreme directorship of Chile, as the new title was known. San Martín, however, graciously declined the position. The title was given to O’Higgins, an honor he happily accepted.

The independence of Chile was proclaimed by O’Higgins on February 12, 1818. Because of Spanish and loyalist entrenchment in the southern part of the country, however, the war was not over. It took San Martín’s brilliant defense of Santiago and the repulse of counterforces at Maipu, near the capital on April 5 of that year, before O’Higgins could truly announce that Chile was free of its long Spanish occupation.

Deeply indebted to San Martín, who took over the Maipu battle after O’Higgins himself had fallen ill, O’Higgins returned the favor by assisting his friend in the battle to liberate Peru, the astute O’Higgins realizing that if the fledgling Chilean government were to survive, it would require that Peru and other neighboring states be free from Spanish enslavement. To this end, he joined San Martín once more, this time in acquiring a flotilla of ships, which were presented to a Scottish sailor, Thomas Cochrane, who created a Chilean fleet that was superior to anything operating in the Southern Pacific region. On August 20, 1820, the fleet left Valparaiso, and it included at least eight well-armed men-of-war and various other vessels. In September of 1820, the army under San Martín’s command invaded southern Peru while Cochrane blockaded the Peruvian coastline, attacking several Spanish ships in the process.

For O’Higgins, however, the main arena was no longer battle, but warfare of the political sort, wherein he would have to take charge of a newly free nation without any Latin American precedents to follow that would suit Chile’s unique situation. To O’Higgins, the only workable way to govern a turbulent, newly freed country such as Chile was for him to declare himself a virtual dictator, which he did.

It was O’Higgins’s and Chile’s misfortune—since O’Higgins was a man of tremendous ability—that he could not be as successful a leader as he had been a soldier. It may have been that he lacked the skills that were needed to govern effectively, and it may have been the case that he simply was not interested in politics. Whatever the cause, history records that after trying to force various liberal social reforms on unwilling Chileans, O’Higgins was forced to resign as supreme director. In 1823, O’Higgins was deposed peacefully and sent into exile in Peru, where he stayed until he died.

O’Higgins was a true reformer by nature, his most pressing interest being in educational reform, for he believed that Chileans deserved to have widespread—even universal—public education. Thus, he re-created the once-defunct Instituto Nacional in Santiago and opened a number of schools for the people under the auspices of the English educator James Thompson.

O’Higgins also ordered that aristocratic titles and coats of arms be abolished and asked that estate entailment, the backbone of the hacienda system, be destroyed, measures that infuriated the rich landlords of Chile, who became convinced that O’Higgins was a threat to their pleasant, tradition-bound lifestyle. Other high-minded ideas of O’Higgins outraged more than the elite members of Chilean society, for he wanted to do away with cockfighting and bullfighting, both highly popular pursuits among the poor. The enslavement of black people, another popular institution, was also declared immoral by O’Higgins, much to the general consternation of the populace. To add to his problems, it was not only the rich who were angry but also the liberals and moderates from whose ranks O’Higgins himself had risen. Moreover, powerful military men found the director’s ideas intolerable, and this turned out to be O’Higgins’s undoing, for the military, under the leadership of Ramón Freire, led the revolt that ousted him in 1823 and sent him into Peruvian exile.

It was Chile’s misfortune to lose one as capable as O’Higgins in its national infancy, when it needed a strong leader. After his departure, more than ten different directors came to and left office, each of them trying in his own way to keep Chile from disintegrating completely. Although stability did eventually come to Chilean government, it was a long time in coming.

Significance

Whatever ill might be said of Bernardo O’Higgins’s last years in Chile, he remains that nation’s greatest hero and its political benefactor supreme. Without him, Chile might have languished under Spanish rule for several more decades than it did. O’Higgins knew that the time had come for Latin American nations in general to rise up against their colonizers.

Along with Simón Bolívar, San Martín, and, most recently, Fidel Castro, O’Higgins is one of the Latin American men of destiny who profited from a political and social climate in which revolutionary thought and action could flourish. The lessons drawn from France’s bloody revolution and from the inspirational American experience in its war with England taught people of intellect and patriotism living after those revolutions had triumphed that it was possible to fight against and eventually conquer the most powerful of tyrannies. Notions also drawn from the French and American conflicts that became current in Latin America’s revolutionary period—freedom, liberty, and self-direction—helped O’Higgins fight against Spanish oppressors, for older notions about being subservient to foreign masters seemed stale and lifeless.

Although it was not transformed immediately from a distant province of New Spain into a modern nation after O’Higgins and San Martín won the war of independence, Chile would eventually become known as one of Latin America’s most reliably democratic nations. O’Higgins was shrewd enough and sufficiently visionary to realize that an opportunity had finally presented itself. He alone was able to take appropriate actions that would lead to the destruction of Spanish power in his part of the world. If he was not a dynamic politician or even a well-loved one, he created the new Chile almost single-handedly, and for that Chileans owe him much.

Bibliography

Collier, Simon. “The Story or Part of It at Least.” In From Cortes to Castro: An Introduction to the History of Latin America, 1492-1973. New York: Macmillan, 1974. An insightful reevaluation of the political, social, religious, and economic currents shaping Latin American history over several centuries. A valuable account of the liberation movement led by O’Higgins and San Martín.

Collier, Simon, and William F. Sater. A History of Chile, 1808-2002. 2d ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. A chronicle of political, social, economic, and cultural developments in Chile from independence until the early twenty-first century. Includes information on O’Higgins.

Eyzaguirre, Jaime. O’Higgins. 3d ed. Santiago, Chile: Editorial Zig Zag, 1950. An excellent biography that is likely the finest one about O’Higgins. The author has at times an overinflated opinion of O’Higgins’s attributes, yet the book does full justice to his seminal role in Chile’s struggle for independence.

Harvey, Robert. Liberators: Latin America’s Struggle for Independence, 1810-1830. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2000. A history of Latin America’s struggle to overthrow Spanish rule, focusing on O’Higgins and six other liberation leaders.

Kinsbruner, Jay. Bernardo O’Higgins. New York: Twayne, 1968. An invaluable contribution to O’Higgins scholarship that goes into considerable depth about O’Higgins’s revolution and how he achieved all that he did in such a short time. Includes a selective bibliography.

Mehegan, John J. O’Higgins of Chile: A Brief Sketch of His Life and Times. London: J & J Bennett, 1913. One of the better general introductions to the life and times of O’Higgins.

Worcester, Donald E., and Wendell G. Schaeffer. “The Wars of Independence in the South.” In The Growth and Culture of Latin America. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970-1971. Discusses how Chilean society evolved during and after the revolution O’Higgins helped lead. Also good for placing O’Higgins in a historical context.