"Quixote but not mad"

Francisco de Miranda leads an unsuccessful rebellion against the Spanish in Venezuela. The Venezuelan rebel, personally opposed to slavery, offered freedom in return for 10 years military service.
Francisco de Miranda, who had read the works of the philosophes during his army service in Spain in the 1770s, transformed ideology into activism. It was in New York, in 1784, that Francisco de Miranda conceived the idea of 'the liberty and independence of the whole Spanish American continent'. The model of revolution offered by France had less appeal. As Miranda observed in 1799, "We have before our eyes two great examples, the American and the French Revolutions. Let us prudently imitate the first and carefully shun the second."
Spanish American revolutionaries anxiously disassociated themselves from the Haitian revolution. Miranda in particular was concerned about its effect on his reputation in England: "I confess that much as I desire the liberty and independence of the New World, I fear anarchy and revolution even more. God forbid that the other countries suffer the same fate as Saint-Domingue, scene of carnage and crimes, committed on the pretext of establishing liberty; better that they should remain another century under the barbarous and senseless oppression of Spain."
Miranda argued that it was vital for him to reach Venezuela first, before the Haitians did, and in 1806 he led a tiny expedition to his homeland. Unfortunately for his reputation he stopped to re-group in Haiti, where he was advised not to be content with exhorting the Creoles to rise but "to cut off heads and burn property", and where a rumour started that he planned to use black Haitians.34 In fact, Miranda was as socially conservative as other Creoles and he had no intention of inciting a race war. But the damage was done. At Coro he was met first by a stony silence then by opposition from Creole landowners, who denounced him as a "heretic" and a "traitor".
At that time both mantuanos and the population at large rallied to the side of the Spanish authorities against Miranda, whose call for outright independence still appeared too radical. The fear of inadvertently setting off a Haitian-style uprising among slaves and free pardos, who together amounted to over half the population of Venezuela, was a particular reason for caution among upper-class Creoles. At the same time, fear of the masses was an important reason for not leaving the maintenance of order to the appointed servants of a weakening and seemingly unreliable Spanish government, which had already on various occasions shown itself too willing to encourage the aspirations of the pardos.
Simon Bolívar, who followed Miranda as a leading figure in Venezuelan revolutionary circles (and who was a member of the group that arrested Miranda and turned him over to the Spanish), actively recruited slaves beginning in 1816, and would not have succeeded without drawing them away from the royalist cause.