Page:The History of San Martin (1893).djvu/394

364 population was classified as convicts, and gangs of them were forced to work on the public roads. Truly the system adopted by the Spaniards at the conquest was now reestablished in America in the cause of Spanish absolutism, and for a King who was spoken of by his own mother as "tiger heart and mule head."

Bloodshed and absolute power clouded the mental faculties of Morillo; he dreamed of destroying the Argentine Republic, and of then returning in triumph to Mexico to repeat there the cruelties of Cortes, but the course of events in Venezuela soon opened his eyes. He left a garrison of 3,800 men at Bogotá, Venezuelans and Pastusos, and with 4,000 Spanish troops crossed the Cordillera in November, 1816, taking some prisoners with him to shoot on the frontier line. This march convinced him, for the second time, of his impotence to prosecute his enterprise; by his own confession, he could neither pass the rivers nor procure supplies without the help of the Llaneros who went with him. General Sámano remained in command at Bogotá. His first act was to erect a gallows in the great square, in front of the windows of his palace, and to set up four execution-posts (banquillos) on the public promenade. One of his first victims was a beautiful young woman, convicted of sending information to the Patriot guerillas on the plains of Casanare. She was shot in the back, with seven men implicated in the same affair. She died encouraging her companions to meet their fate like men, and prophesying that her death would soon be revenged. Under the name of La Pola her memory is still preserved in the songs of her native land.

Morillo, finding Sámano so apt a pupil in his school of terrorism, made him Viceroy in place of Montalvo, whose more humane nature shrank from the perpetration of such cruelties.