O'Leary, Daniel Florencio (1801–1854)

Daniel Florencio O'Leary (b. 1801; d. 24 February 1854), Irish officer in the Venezuelan Liberating Army and close aide of Simón Bolívar. In 1817, at the age of sixteen, O'Leary traveled to Venezuela as a member of the British volunteers who united to fight for the cause of independence in America. He came to Venezuela by way of the town of Angostura and rapidly gained the confidence of Simón Bolívar, who included him in his honor guard in 1818. O'Leary participated in the New Granada campaign in 1819, and in 1820 Bolívar appointed him as his aide-de-camp. He took care of Bolívar's correspondence and records, and remained very close to him throughout the Southern campaign. In the November 1820 negotiations that concluded with the Trujillo armistice, O'Leary acted as Antonio José de Sucre's secretary. When Bolívar and Pablo Morillo, leader of the royalist armies, met on 27 November 1820 in the town of Santa Ana to ratify the treaty, O'Leary acted as Bolívar's emissary in arranging the details of the meeting. O'Leary participated in the liberating campaigns of Venezuela (1821) and Ecuador (1822) and closely collaborated with Bolívar in his political projects concerning the integration of the Americas. He accompanied the leader until the latter's last days in Cartagena.

After Bolívar's death, O'Leary organized and compiled his voluminous archive, augmenting it with a great number of documents solicited from men who had been involved in the War of Independence. In Spain he visited Morillo, who handed over the documentation in his possession for inclusion in the collection. After O'Leary's death, his family gave the archive to the Venezuelan government. It was published in thirty-two volumes under the auspices of the Antonio Guzmán Blanco administration and was known as the Memorias del General Daniel Florencio O'Leary (1879–1888).

After 1833 O'Leary undertook various diplomatic missions as Venezuelan minister to England, Spain, France, and the Vatican. As a diplomat in the service of the British government, he was named chargé d'affaires in Caracas in 1841 and in Bogotá in 1843.

See alsoBolívar, Simón; Morillo, Pablo.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alfonso Rumazo González, O'Leary edecán del Libertador (1956).

Manuel Pérez Vila, Vida de Daniel Florencio O'Leary, primer edecán del Libertador (1957).

R. A. Humphreys, ed., The "Detached Recollections" of General D. F. O'Leary (1969).

Additional Bibliography

Rayfield, Jo Ann. "Después del Santuario: La pacificación de Antioquia por O'Leary, 1829." Boletín de Historia y Antigüedades 70 (January-March, 1983): 291-320.

Rumazo González, Alfonso. Ocho grandes biografías, 3 vols. Caracas: Ediciones de la Presidencia de la República, 1993.

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