Simón Bolívar · Politics

Abolition and the American Race

Bolívar’s decrees freeing the enslaved, his debt to Haiti’s president Pétion, and his vision of a single mixed-race ‘American’ people - together with the hard gap between the ideal of equality he proclaimed and the reality that outlived him.

What you'll be able to recall

You learned that Bolívar decreed the abolition of slavery (from Carúpano in 1816), honouring a debt to Haiti’s Pétion, whose aid came on the condition that he free the enslaved; that he described the American people as a racial ‘compound of Africa and America’; and that the ideal of equality far outp…

Leads to Thomas Jefferson.

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