Dominican Republic - Struggle for Sovereignty
The nineteenth-century struggle for independence of what was to become the Dominican Republic was an incredibly difficult process, conditioned by the evolution of its neighbor. Although they shared the island of Hispaniola, the colonies of Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo followed disparate paths, primarily as a result of economic factors.
Saint-Domingue was the most productive agricultural colony in the Western Hemisphere, and its output contributed heavily to the economy of France. Prosperous French plantation owners imported great numbers of slaves from Africa and drove this captive work force ruthlessly. By contrast, Santo Domingo was a small, unimportant, and largely ignored colony with little impact on the economy of Spain.
Although by the end of the eighteenth century economic conditions were improving somewhat, landowners in Santo Domingo did not enjoy the same level of wealth attained by their French counterparts in Saint-Domingue. The absence of market-driven pressure to increase production enabled the domestic labor force to meet the needs of subsistence agriculture and to export at low levels.
Thus, Santo Domingo imported far fewer slaves than did Saint-Domingue. Spanish law also allowed a slave to purchase his freedom and that of his family for a relatively small sum. This fact contributed to the higher proportion of freedmen in the Spanish colony than in Haiti; by the turn of the century, freedmen actually constituted the majority of the population. Again, in contrast to conditions in the French colony, this population profile contributed to a somewhat more egalitarian society, plagued much less by racial schisms.
With a revolution against the monarchy well underway in France, the inevitable explosion took place in Saint-Domingue in August 1791. The initial reaction of many Spanish colonists to news of the slaughter of Frenchmen by armies of rebellious black slaves was to flee Hispaniola entirely. Spain, however, saw in the unrest an opportunity to seize all or part of the western third of the island through an alliance of convenience with the British. These intentions, however, did not survive encounters in the field with forces led by the former slave Francois Dominique Toussaint Louverture. By mid-1795, Spain had signed a peace treaty with France in which it surrendered the eastern part of the island; the terms of the treaty reflected Spain's setbacks in Europe and its relative decline as a world power.
In recognition of his leadership against the Spanish (under whose banner he had begun his military career), British, and rebellious royalists and mulattoes, Toussaint was named governor general of Saint- Domingue by the French Republic in 1796. After losing more than 25,000 troops, Britain withdrew from the island in April 1798. Toussaint marched into Santo Domingo in January 1801; one of his first measures was to abolish slavery.
France occupied the devastated Spanish-speaking colony in February 1802. The Spanish and Dominican elites on the Spanish part of the island allied themselves with the French, who reinstituted slavery in that part of the island. However, the expeditionary force dispatched by Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated by the forces of the former French slaves, led by Toussaint —and later by Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Yellow fever, malaria, and war led to the loss of 52,000 French soldiers. Upon defeating the French, Dessalines and his followers established the independent Republic of Haiti in January 1804. A small French presence, however, remained in the former Spanish colony, in spite of Haitian pressures.
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