Carabobo decided the War of Independence throughout South America.  It snapped the chain which held Venezuela down, and the Spaniards, hemmed in for two years longer at Puerto Cabello, which place they defended with honorable pertinacity, were finally expelled from the free Republic in November, 1823.  The city was taken by storm on the 7th of that month, and on the 9th the citadel surrendered.  General Calzada, the commandant, with all his officers, and four hundred men, was shortly afterwards shipped for Spain.

Here the career of the Llanero closes.  A new and still more brilliant avenue to distinction opens before Paez.  At this, however, we can scarcely glance.  Our business has been to study him in the saddle, wielding lasso and sword and lance; nor have we left ourselves room for adequate allusion to his subsequent life as President and private citizen, deliverer of his country, and exile in these Northern States.  Yet the record could not be called complete, unless we passed briefly in review the vicissitudes of the past thirty years.

After the taking of Puerto Cabello, Paez administered the affairs of Venezuela as Provisional Chief of the State, and held that office under the Congress of Colombia, until the two republics were dissevered in 1830, when he was elected first President of Venezuela.  Only partially disturbed by a military insurrection, headed by the turbulent General Jose T. Monagas, which was soon suppressed, the administration of Paez was such as surprised all lookers-on in America and Europe.  He displayed administrative talents of a high order, with all the firmness and resolution of a soldier, yet with all the business capacity and peaceful proclivities of a civilian.

Laying down the Presidential office in 1834, he was again called upon to assume it four years later, and until the close of 1842 Venezuela prospered under his direction.  The foreign and domestic debt was liquidated by the products of national industry, and three millions of dollars were left in the treasury on the accession to the Presidency of General Soublette, in 1843.  Honors had rained on the ci-devant impetuous horseman, whose shout had once so frequently been the prelude to slaughter and devastation.  William the Fourth of England presented General Paez, in 1837, with a sword of honor; Louis Philippe of France invested him, in 1843, with the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honor; and two years later, there arrived from Oscar of Sweden the Cross of the Military Order of the Sword.

But in 1850, and thenceforward, until 1858, Jose Antonio Paez trod the streets of New York as an exile from his native land.

General Jose T. Monagas was elected President of Venezuela in 1848, and created dissatisfaction by his course of action.  Paez placed himself at the head of an insurrectionary movement against him, and, being defeated, was imprisoned in the city of Valencia.  General Monagas, influenced, it is probable, by feelings of ancient friendship, and remembering the pardon extended to himself on a former similar occasion, contented himself with a decree of exile against the captive veteran, and Paez embarked for St. Thomas on the 24th of May, 1850.  He passed from St. Thomas to the United States.