These two volumes reflect the continuing interest of Colombian historians in the men and events of the struggle for independence. Each is by a Miembro de Número of the Colombian Academy of History.
The first is a short biography of Pedro Acevedo Tejada, the son of José Acevedo y Gómez, Colombia’s famed “Tribune of the People” (who played a leading role in the dramatic events of July 20, 1810). Pedro, the “Boy Hero,” enlisted at eleven as a subteniente in the patriot forces, “distinguished himself heroically” at sixteen in the Battle of Palo, later served as a high official in the Secretariat of Marine and War and in the Estado Mayor General at Bogotá, rising to the rank of colonel. He was a close friend and supporter of Santander, participated in Bogotá’s intellectual and literary life, and wrote a brief Jeografía Política for use in the nation’s schools (based largely on the work of Caldas) which was reprinted in both New York and London. He died in 1827 at twenty-eight. Monseñor Romero’s book, though presented as a “full biography” and as “the complete life” of an “unjustly forgotten” prócer, is actually but an extended essay of less than a hundred pages on a figure whose historical importance, after all, was minor. The book, nevertheless, does utilize some valuable new source materials which may prove of interest to scholars. Most of these are drawn from a family collection of documents made available to the author by a descendent of Acevedo Tejada. They include twenty-nine previously unpublished letters of Santander (in some of which he describes his activities in Bogotá’s Masonic lodge), and 154 letters exchanged between Pedro and his brother, José, mostly during the hectic years of 1826 and 1827. These letters reveal the growing concern of supporters of the Santander administration over the Páez revolution of 1826 and also over the erratic behavior of Simón Bolívar as he traveled northward from Peru to Bogotá to deal with that revolution. The Santander letters are reprinted in their entirety in one of a series of Anexos. Also included in the Anexos is the complete text of Acevedo Tejada’s Political Geography.
The nature and content of the second book, by Oswaldo Díaz Díaz, is accurately indicated by its subtitle. It is an episodic account of the patriot “resistance” activity against the restored royalist regime during the years 1817-1819, focused on the activities of the guerrilla leaders, Vicente and Ambrosio Almeyda. Following the Spanish reconquest, the Almeydas were associated with the subversive activities of the famed heroine, Policarpa Salavarietta. Imprisoned by the Spanish, they escaped and organized an uprising which was savagely put down by Carlos Tolrá, after which they fled to Casanare, returning in 1819 as members of Bolívar’s liberating army. The author’s purpose is to describe these events and the men involved in greater depth and with more literary skill (animación) than they have been dealt with before, utilizing not only the standard histories, printed sources, and memoirs of contemporaries but also much new documentary source material drawn from the national archives, the archive of the historian Restrepo, and local archives. In these endeavors he has, by and large, succeeded. His narrative is both interesting and clear, and his scholarship is sound. An extensive amount of the new source material is included in the text (in italics), and the book contains a number of helpful maps, portraits, and illustrations. Even so, it is questionable how valuable the book will be to non-Colombian scholars, that is, to those not patriotically involved or interested in local history and genealogy. Though we are given much new information concerning these events and the people involved in them, few new insights emerge. The standard accounts of Restrepo and others are modified only in unimportant details.
