We Dream Together

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 ANNE ELLER

We Dream Together
Dominican In­de­pen­dence, Haiti, and the
Fight for Ca­rib­bean Freedom

Duke University Press Durham and London 2016

© 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper ∞
Typeset in Quadraat and Avenir by Westchester Publishing Ser­vices

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Eller, Anne, [date] author.
Title: We dream together : Dominican in­de­pen­dence, Haiti, and
the fight for Ca­rib­bean freedom / Anne Eller.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2016. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers:
lccn 2016024763 (print)
lccn 2016025626 (ebook)
isbn 9780822362173 (hardcover : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822362371 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 9780822373766 (e-­book)
Subjects: lcsh: Dominican Republic—­History—1844–1930. |
Dominican Republic—­Politics and government—1844–1930. |
Dominican Republic—­Colonization. | Dominican Republic—­
Relations—­Haiti. | Haiti—­Relations—­Dominican Republic. |
Ca­rib­bean Area—­History—­Autonomy and in­de­pen­dence
movements.
Classification: lcc f1938.4.e45 2016 (print) | lcc f1938.4 (ebook) |
ddc 972.93/04—­dc23
lc rec­ord available at [Link]

Cover art: Adapted from “Emboscada de los insurgentes en Santo

Domingo,” El Mundo Militar, 20 December 1863, 404.

This book was published with the assistance of The Frederick W.

Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University.
 for kevin lee
who knows all of this
already
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

ix Timeline
xv Acknowl­edgments

1 
i n t ro d u c t i o n  ​Roots and Branches of the
Tree of Liberty
21 
o ne  ​Life by Steam: The Dominican Republic’s First
Republic, 1844–1861
59 
t wo  ​Soon It ­Will Be Mexico’s Turn: Ca­rib­bean Empire
and Dominican Annexation
87 
t h r e e  ​The White Race Is Destined to Occupy This
Island: Annexation and the Question of ­Free ­Labor
117 
f o u r  ​The Haitians or the Whites? Colonization and
Re­sis­tance, 1861–1863
144 
f i v e  ​You Promised to Die of Hunger: Re­sis­t ance,
Slavery, and All-­Out War
178 
s i x  ​The Lava Spread Everywhere: Rural Revolution,
the Provisional Government, and Haiti
207 
s ev e n  ​Nothing Remains Anymore:
The Last Days of Spanish Rule
229 e pi l o g u e  ​Between Fear and Hope

237 Notes
335 Bibliography
369 Index
 BAHAMAS
Grand Turk
Salt Cay

GE A T L A N T I C O C E A N
S SA
CUBA PA
R D Monte
A Port-de-Paix Cap-
W Haïtien Cristi
D Puerto Plata
IN Samaná
W HAITI Ciba
o Peninsula
Hinche
Santiago VMoca
al
PUERTO
de los le y RICO
Caballeros
Jérémie Port-au-
Prince DOMINICAN REPUBLIC Higüey
Santo Domingo

GE
Les Cayes Neiba
Azua San

SA
Jacmel Mayagüez
S
Baní Cristóbal
Île-à-Vache PA
A
ON
M

Historic Borders
1777 C A R I B B E A N S E A
0 50 Miles
1856 Scale 1: 6,800,000

Map 0.1 ​Map of the Dominican Republic and Haiti. By Annelieke Vries.
Timeline

c. 1474 Anacaona born in Yaguana, chiefdom of Xaragua, Ayiti

1500 Spanish authorities declare the island a Crown
colony, Santo Domingo
1502 First Africans brought in slavery to Santo Domingo
1508 Indigenous rebellion in Higüey
1545 Maroon communities reach about seven thousand
1585–86 Siege of Santo Domingo by Sir Francis Drake
1605–6 Spanish authorities forcibly resettle colonists ­
toward the southeast
1664 France names a governor in the west of the island,
Saint-­Domingue
1697 Treaty of Ryswick recognizes Saint-­Domingue (west) and
Santo Domingo (east)
1721 Revolt in Santo Domingo’s Cibao valley against trade
prohibitions with Saint-­Domingue
1777 Treaty of Aranjuez fixes borders and authorizes trade
1791 Revolutionary fighting begins in Saint-­Domingue
1793 Abolition won in Saint-­Domingue
1795 Spain cedes Santo Domingo to France, midfighting
1796 Major rebellion at Boca Nigua sugar mill in Dominican
territory
 1801 General Toussaint Louverture reaches Santo Domingo;
1801 constitution affirms abolition
1802 Arriving French forces pursue Louverture, reestablish
slavery in Santo Domingo
1804 Haiti proclaims in­de­pen­dence
1805 Haitian emperor Jean-­Jacques Dessalines invades Santo
Domingo ­after direct threats from the French governor
in the east
1806 Haiti fractures into a northern republic (kingdom, 1811)
and southern republic
1808–9 Dominican rebels and allies expel French administration,
reinstate Spanish flag
1810s Multiple rebellions and conspiracies in Santo Domingo
1820 President Jean-­Pierre Boyer reunifies Haiti
1821 Dominican in­de­pen­dentists proclaim the In­de­pen­dent
State of Spanish Haiti
1822 Unification of the ­whole island begins; Boyer abolishes
slavery in the east for a second time
1825 France demands an “indemnity” to cease its aggression
­toward the island
1838 Haiti and France renegotiate payments; abolition in British
Ca­rib­bean islands
1842 Major earthquake devastates Cap-­Haïtien and other towns
1843 Reform movements threaten Boyer; Dominican politicians
ponder French annexation; Boyer flees
1844 Unification ends, Dominican Republic proclaimed;
antislavery rebellion and repression in Cuba
1840s Restrictive l­ abor codes passed in Danish West Indies,
other nearby islands
1854 Dominican treaty with United States fails over popu­lar
opposition

x | Timeline
1856 Haitian emperor Faustin Soulouque rebuffed from an
invasion attempt on the east, his last
1857 Cibao politicians rebel against the administration in
the Dominican capital
1859 President Fabre Nicholas Geffrard restores republican
government to Haiti
1861 Spain annexes Dominican territory as the province of
“Santo Domingo” once more

Timeline | xi
Figs. 0.1 and 0.2 ​Monuments to guerrilla fighters, Santiago de los Caballeros. Photos by
author, 2008.
This page intentionally left blank
Acknowl­edgments

This book represents the work of many over a significant expanse of time, and
I can only begin to describe the debts. For dif­fer­ent parts of this proj­ect, I
relied on the support of Meriwether-­Sattwa, Henry Mitchell McCracken,
Fulbright-­Hays, Doris Quinn, Hawkinson, and Macmillan Center writing
and research fellowships. Support from the Frederick W. Hilles Fund of Yale
University facilitated production. I am grateful to the diligent (and patient)
interlibrary loan staff at Bobst Library, as well as the rest of its staff. In New
York University’s Department of History, sincere thanks to the administra-
tive staff, Karin Burrell, and King Juan Carlos Center’s employees. At the
library of the University of Connecticut at Stamford, I am very grateful to
Nancy Romanello, Phara Bayonne, and the student assistants. Rest in peace,
Nancy Comarella. At Yale’s library, I am grateful to David Gary for all of his
resourceful suggestions, camaraderie, and support. Dana Lee, Essie Lucky-­
Barros, Denise Scott, Marcy Kaufman, Liza Joyner, and Lina Chan have been
invaluable. Thank you to Noelia Ruzzante and the Centro Cultural Eduardo
León Jimenes in Santo Domingo for figure 1.1 and to Bethany Wade for her
pivotal assistance. My sincere thanks to Annelieke Vries and Heather Rosen-
feld, who made beautiful maps, and to Santiago Castro Ventura for the cover
image. I am very grateful to the staff of Duke University Press, including Lydia
Rose Rappoport-­Hankins, Liz Smith, and Susan Ecklund, and the careful eye
and encouragement of Gisela Fosado.
I feel so grateful and humbled to have had the chance to learn over the last
de­cade from Ada Ferrer, whose brilliance, guidance, and scholarship are a
constant inspiration. I feel deep gratitude to Michael Gomez for his training,
innumerable insights, engagement, and support. Sinclair Thomson, Barbara
Weinstein, and Sibylle Fischer also have been incredibly generous and have
led with the example of their own proj­ects and commitments. The warmest
thanks to a brilliant multiyear cohort, which included Rashauna Johnson,
Abena Asare, Franny S­ ullivan, Kendra Field, Michelle Thompson, Kiron
Johnson, Priya Lal, Ezra Davidson, Jorge Silva, Michelle Chase, Nathalie Pierre,
Evelyne Laurent-­Perrault, Daniel Rodríguez, Joaquin Chávez, Jennifer Adair,
Tracy Neumann, Yuko Miki, Zawadi Barskile Walker, Carmen Soliz, Claire
Payton, and o­ thers, for their intellect and community building, and for laugh-
ter, memories, support, editing, and so many conversations. Over nearly the
past ten years, Aldo Lauria Santiago has offered last-­minute readings, struc-
ture, encouragement, and so much valuable guidance; his mentorship is above
and beyond anything I might have hoped for, and I am so grateful. Without
Louis (Bob) Turansky’s classes, I never would have begun ­these studies.
I am deeply appreciative of the feedback and insight of a number of
wonderful scholars, especially Neici Zeller, whose knowledge and perspec-
tive guided impor­tant parts of this proj­ect. Jessica Krug’s brilliant critical
insight has always been a revelation. Other generous mentors, colleagues,
and friends who read chapters and offered other invaluable kinds of input
and support include Grégory Pierrot, Robin Lauren Derby, Marisa J. Fuentes,
Kristen Block, Dixa Ramírez, Lara Putnam, Vincent Brown, Greta Lafleur,
Jason McGraw, Greg Jackson, Julie Gibbings, Matthew J. Smith, Naomi
Lamoreaux, Alan Mikhail, Oscar de la Torre, Kahlil Chaar-­Pérez, Ernesto
Bassi, Kate Ramsey, Mike Bustamante, Jennifer Lambe, Heather Vrana,
Reena Goldthree, Natanya Duncan, Martha S. Jones, Dan Magaziner, Man-
uel Barcia, Frances Ramos, Tamara Walker, Brendan Thornton, Alejandra
Bronfman, Harvey Neptune, Christy Thornton, Melanie Newton, Caree Ban-
ton, Matthew Casey, and E. Tracy Grinnell. Special thank you to Gil Joseph,
Stuart Schwartz, Joe Manning, Steve Pincus, Laurent Dubois, Thomas C.
Holt, Kevin Bell, and Katherine Caldwell for reading large chunks or entire
drafts and offering indispensable comments. Your input made this proj­ect
so much better. Christopher Schmidt-­Nowara, gone far too soon, always of-
fered tremendous generosity, perspective, and insight. He is deeply missed.
On this long proj­ect, I have had the ­great fortune of ­researching and writing
alongside Juan-­José Ponce Vázquez and Elena Schneider, who are ­great col-
leagues, travel partners, and friends.
For their colleagueship, community-­building, and perspective, my deep-
est thanks and affection to some not already mentioned, including Joel Blatt,
Mary Cygan, Fred Roden, Ingrid Semaan, Annamaria Csizmadia, Shirley
Roe, Jason Chang, Mark Healey, Mark Overmyer-­Velázquez, Alejandra Dub-
covsky, Edward Rugemer, Jafari Alan, Carolyn Dean, Valerie Hanson, Van-
essa Agard-­Jones, Ned Blackhawk, Marcela Echeverri, and Jenifer Van Vleck.

xvi | Acknowl­
e dgments
I am grateful for productive conversations with Crystal Feimster, Quisqu-
eya Lora Hugi, Maja Horn, Kaiama Glover, Elizabeth Manley, April Mayes,
Kiran Jayaram, Lorgia García Peña, Paul Austerlitz, Raj Chetty, Richard
Turits, Graham Nessler, Wendy Muñiz, Melissa Madera, Natasha Lightfoot,
Edward Paulino, Andrew Walker, and Charlton Yingling, among o ­ thers, and
I look forward to more of them to come. Kate Marsh, Kathy López, C ­ amilla
Townsend, Jason Chang, Jonathan Booth, and Jason McGraw helped me
greatly with details of the emancipation map. Tanya Golash-­Boza’s and
Sandy Placido’s kindness, commitment, and activism match the brilliance
of their respective proj­ects, ni una más. In the classroom, I have learned so
much from Jennifer Veras, Darlene Then, Estephanie Reyes, Clebis Grullon,
Rondell López, Richard H. Ramírez, Krystal Gourgue, Christie Sillo, James
Shinn, Juan Ruíz, Nathalie Batraville, Shanna-­Dolores Jean-­Baptiste, Em-
manuel Lachaud, Emily Snyder, Brandi ­Waters, and far too many ­others to
list. None of you are forgotten. Rest in peace, Jessie Streich-­Kest.
The kindness, generosity, and expertise of many archivists, hosts, schol-
ars, and friends ­shaped the proj­ect’s research and made it pos­si­ble. In Santo
Domingo, my deepest thanks to Quisqueya Lora Hugi, Ingrid Suriel, Rey-
naldo Espinal, Antonio Báez, Oscar Féliz, Oscar Mota, Joel Abreu, Ivan Hen-
ríquez, Rosmery Fanfán, Amparo Candelario, Campo (qepd), Raymundo
González, Santiago Castro ­Ventura, and Roberto Cassá. Ercilia (qepd) and
Miguel Henríquez, María del Carmen González Rosario, and Belkis, Pamela,
and Mundy offered so much. In San Juan, thank you to Humberto García
Muñiz and the staff of the Institute of Ca­rib­bean Studies at the Universidad de
Puerto Rico–­Río Piedras. In Havana (and also in diaspora), I am very grate-
ful for the camaraderie, talent, and intellect of Jorge Amado Pérez Machado,
Yasser Yero Feraude, Gloria Loretta Herranz Peña and Angel Suárez, Angel
(Boly) Ramírez, Maritza and Adis María, Lillian Lechuga, Pepe y Mirlay, Diar-
marys Sarabaza Cuesta, Zuley Fernández, Omaida Pereira, Jorge Luís Chacón,
Sandy Capote Gutiérrez, Elizabeth Fernández, and Karmen Yerith Aguilar
Cruz. At the archive, thanks to Julio López, Bárbara Danzie León, Belkis
Quesada Guerra, and research comrade, mentor, and friend David Sartorius.
Thank you to Kak Lam Yip and Lan Jo Wu for translating the C ­ antonese letter
in chapter 5. Thanks also to the employees of the archives in Madrid and
Sevilla, to Esther González and Yurnia Montes Castro, and to Cristina Violeta
Jones and Charlie at the National Archives in Washington, DC.
Some brilliant and generous friends still need mention, and I regret I
cannot name ­every single one. Steven (Tzvi) Frankel is part of ­every single
page. Helmus Ramírez Herranz, Gregg Parrish, Lani Milstein, Federico Torres,

Acknowl­e dgments | xvii

Yesenia Fernández Selier, Dillon, Vladimir Marcano, Beth Krafchik, Tito
Román Rivera, Margaret Urías, Michael Guerrere, Nicole Anziani, Willy An-
nicette, Cassie Morgan, Raquel Otheguy, Didier Lobeau, Nelcy Valdiris, Brad
Rouse, A.B.B., Mary Fitzpatrick O’Rear, Jeff O’Rear, Philip Cartelli, Kara
Bolduc Martínez, Wendy Toribio, Rachel Lang, Jessica Krug, Lamin Brewer,
Jamel Oeser-­Sweat, and Kate Caldwell: you are so wonderful, you already
know that. I cannot thank Dr. David Slavit, Dr. Subinoy Das, Barbara Van-
Wert, and Melanie Clark enough for giving me my life back. Fede, let’s keep
­running and talking. Joe Murphy, I look forward to more lunches to come.
For my parents, Peter and Karen, I feel more gratitude than I can possi-
bly express. Your love, encouragement, perspective, and insight spring from
­every page, just like they always have. For Michael, Stephanie, Ian, and the
rest of the ­family (Springfield, Minnesota, ¡presente!), too, thank you for toler-
ating a huge proj­ect with grace and humor. Love you always.

xviii | Acknowl­
e dgments
Introduction
ROOTS AND BRANCHES OF THE TREE OF LIBERTY

Listen, then: ­there is an Antille

in the ­middle of the Ca­rib­bean sea
that gets light and life
from the sun of Liberty
—­manuel rodríguez objío, “Mi patria” (1868)

­ fter dark on a late spring night in 1864, an anonymous group toppled a tow-
A
ering palm tree, the Tree of Liberty, in the town square of Santo Domingo.
Planted by officials from Jean-­Pierre Boyer’s administration four de­cades
earlier, the tree represented a cele­bration of Dominican emancipation, in­
de­pen­dence, and the unification of the former Spanish colony with the revo-
lutionary Haitian state.1 ­Those who won abolition in 1822 called themselves
“freedmen of the Palm.” The tree grew just meters from the plaza’s whipping
post.2 The unification of Santo Domingo and Haiti lasted for more than two
de­cades before it dissolved, and a mobilization in the east created a separate
republic. The night the palm fell, however, in­de­pen­dence had vanished. A
colonial slave power ruled Dominican territory again, warships threatened
Port-­au-­Prince, and fighting raged throughout the east. Spanish troops, who
controlled the Dominican capital, moved into f­ ree black neighborhoods and
other parts of the city to prevent protests over the tree’s destruction.3 “The
tree of our glories is toppled to the ground,” a Dominican poet decried, imploring,
“Brave Dominicans, why do you suffer so much insult?”4
We Dream Together considers anticolonial strug­gle in an island at the heart
of Ca­rib­bean emancipation and in­de­pen­dence, Hispaniola, Quisqueya,
or Ayiti.5 Spanish Santo Domingo was the oldest site of indigenous deci-
mation and Eu­ro­pean colonial settlement in the Amer­ic­ as, as well as the
first nucleus of sugar slavery and marronage. The French colony of Saint-­
Domingue, established in the west of the island, gave the world nearly one-­
third of its sugar, at a staggering h­ uman cost. Tremendous upheaval from
1791 to 1804—­a collection of strug­gles that became known as the Haitian
Revolution—­swept the ­whole island and region into pitched ­battles for
freedom. One might easily extend the dates of emancipation and in­de­pen­
dence fighting to include the military campaign of Jean-­Jacques Dessalines
in 1805, when a French governor, poised in the east of the island, threatened to
capture and enslave Haitian ­children across the mountains. The dates of rev-
olutionary strug­gle might include the 1810s, when French warships arrived
repeatedly and the northern Haitian empire braced for war, as w ­ hole cities
emptied at the threat of ­battle. They might even extend into the 1820s, as
so-­called indemnity payments to France for recognition and in­de­pen­dence
rocked the Haitian administration, then extended to the ­whole island. They
might extend into the 1850s, the first time both states on the island, now
separated, had anything like regular international recognition. In 1861, how-
ever, an eastern leader gave the Dominican Republic back to Spain, a slave
power. Fighting was not over.
We Dream Together recounts the im­mense opposition to self-­rule directed
­toward the island and a popu­lar Dominican and Haitian mobilization,
when the Dominican Republic was annexed back to Spain, to defend that
autonomy at any cost. The Dominican Republic and Haiti, two countries
with impor­tant postslavery peasantries born of marronage and revolution,
grappled with state making as anti-­emancipation voices grew the loudest, as
slavers continued to ferry tens of thousands of p
­ eople past their shores, and
as new imperial proj­ects deepened.6 Atlantic empires ­were in a moment of
profound transition. Power shifted in the Gulf of Mexico, where plantation
regimes faltered but indenture expanded, large swaths of Central Amer­ic­ a
changed hands, steam power and canal proj­ects loomed, and U.S. interests
grew. In domestic contests and imperial expansion, the hemi­sphere was
an uneven geography of slavery and precarious sites of refuge. Although
Spanish authorities promised they would protect f­ree ­labor in Dominican
territory, administrators dreamed of new proj­ects of agricultural production,
settler colonization, and ­labor control. Dominican elites shared the same
hopes. Rural residents, who or­ga­nized their lives with their own author-
ity networks, confronted both ­these domestic and occupying authorities
si­mul­ta­neously.

2 | Introduction
 In response to Spanish reoccupation in 1861, w ­ hole communities left
their homes, made new alliances, burned down their own towns, and risked
their lives. They did so collectively, despite divisive elite narratives and with
barely any resources. Their commitment was unrelenting, even as Spanish
authorities sent a host of warships to defeat them. Over a two-­year period,
more than fifty thousand troops arrived from Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico
to crush the rebels, as Spain poured millions into military offense.7 Not even
prominent military men had control over the insurgents, who grew more
radical in the course of the fighting. Residents of the island, fully immersed
in Civilization’s assault, forged lucid, alternative solidarities. They defended
self-­government and community, confronting opposition from both domestic
and imperial authorities. They fought, explic­itly, against the reestablishment
of slavery, and they understood the stakes of their ­battles to reach far beyond
the island. In their victory, guerrilla fighting spread from the island to
the rest of Spain’s Ca­rib­bean empire. Many demands and solidarities of the
rebellion, however, like rural freedom in Santo Domingo, quickly became
obscure to rec­ord and memory beyond the island. They w ­ ere written in
­battle, even at home.

Severing Colonial Bonds

A common refrain in the pres­ent-­day Dominican Republic reminds listeners
that the country was “the only one in the hemi­sphere” to become in­de­pen­
dent from another American state, when politicians of the territory pro-
claimed separation from Haiti in 1844. This aphorism is not true, of course, as
Panamanians, Ec­ua­dor­ians, Belizeans, Uruguayans, or o ­ thers could affirm.
Extrication from formal Eu­ro­pean colonialism, the settling of borders, the
forming and re-­forming of federations, and lasting regional divides bedev­
iled new national proj­ects. In cases like Paraguay’s border conflicts with Bra-
zil and Argentina in the 1860s, nationalist mobilizations and the settling of
borders caused tremendous bloodshed. Although leaders compared vocifer-
ously, Santo Domingo’s conflicts ­were minor in comparison.8 Regional fis-
sures nagged, however, even grew. Economic and po­liti­cal divisions caused
power­ful residents of León to tangle with Granada, Córdoba with Buenos
Aires, Les Cayes with Port-­au-­Prince, Santiago with Santo Domingo, Quet-
zaltenango with Guatemala City. Proponents of federalism tangled with
centralists, regional leaders competed for power, and divisions proliferated.
Leaders vied, variously and alongside their constituents and clients, for local
authority or centralized government. One constitution followed another.
­These fissures brought Venezuela to bloody civil war in 1858, for example, in

the Tree of Liberty | 3

­ attles that often drew on questions of racism, land tenure, po­liti­cal rights,
b
and the very idea of autonomy itself. Limited economic integration and in­
de­pen­dent peasantries made leaders’ wishful centralization more difficult.
The only way to avoid tyranny was for rule by “cumaneses in Cumaná; apure-
ños in Apure,” combatants earnestly argued.9 Where growing U.S. aggres-
sion in the Gulf of Mexico disrupted sovereignty and divided elites, state
consolidation became all the more difficult.10
Old colonial divides carved up and united Hispaniola. A ­ fter Columbus
­initiated a violent pro­cess of Spanish attacks and settlement, Eu­ro­pean
powers recognized the island as juridically Spanish for more than one
hundred years. French adventurers reached the western part of the island in
the seventeenth ­century; ­after a series of ­battles, Spain recognized French
Saint-­Domingue in 1697. In the intense colonial milieu of Ca­rib­bean em-
pire—as ­imperial powers tacked back and forth for way stations, planta-
tions, geopo­liti­cal influence, and brutally gleaned profits—­division of the
island had ample pre­ce­dent. The Dutch and the French had divided Saint
Martin (Soualiga) in two, just de­cades before. Many more Ca­rib­bean sites,
including nearby Jamaica, had simply changed hands at the muzzle of a
cannon. Symbiotically, Santo Domingo and Saint-­Domingue grew together.
Just as the ­Middle Colonies formed part of a greater slave system that con-
nected to the U.S. South, so w ­ ere the ­cattle, hides, and foodstuffs of Santo
Domingo directly essential to the functioning of the deadly, and growing,
plantations in Saint-­Domingue. Dominican colonists fought to break mer-
cantilist restrictions across the island. Like many other Ca­rib­bean plantation
landscapes, the two colonies ­were nodes of an interdependent system.11 By the
late eigh­teenth ­century, Dominican elites sought to parlay profits into more
slavery of their own. Their hopes w ­ ere similar to t­ hose of the elites in Cuba,
whose plantation aspirations w ­ ere rising si­mul­ta­neously.12 As elite supplicants
vied for state attention, ranchers and a flourishing peasantry continued to
trade. The population qua­dru­pled.13 And then, in 1791, revolutionary fight-
ing exploded.
Dominicans’ in­de­pen­dence unfolded over de­cades, propelled by this
fighting. Revolution in French Saint-­Domingue engulfed the ­whole island.
Spanish authorities, ­after abetting western rebels for a time, hastily ceded
Dominican territory to France. Toussaint Louverture, claiming a French
mandate, reached Santo Domingo. Four Dominicans signed Louverture’s
1801 constitution, which abolished slavery on Dominican soil for the first
time.14 A­ fter Louverture’s defeat, however, two successive French generals

4 | Introduction
occupied the Dominican capital, threatening newly in­de­pen­dent Haiti.
Both generals ­were pro-­slavery, and the latter introduced unpopular new
taxes.15 In this light, one can see the 1808–9 Dominican effort to expel them
and to restore a Spanish flag—­even as other territories in Latin Amer­ic­ a
­were beginning to mobilize for in­de­pen­dence—as a devolution of authority
back to the island, a ­battle against French domination on both sides of the
Atlantic.16 A party of Dominicans and Puerto Rican allies, aided by British
ships and Haitian munitions, expelled the French occupation. A Dominican
stepped in as a Spanish figurehead. He ruled by verbal edict, and he made
significant diplomatic entreaties to the in­de­pen­dent Haitian states, now
split into a northern kingdom and a southern republic.17 For more than a
de­cade, as Spanish authorities practically ignored the territory, colonial
sovereignty eroded. Dominican conspirators regularly appealed to Haitian
rulers for arms and support for the many revolts and conspiracies that en-
sued, and pro-­unification plans emerged.18 Dominican residents of center-­
island towns held ceremonies that celebrated Haitian in­de­pen­dence.19
Authors of a brief in­de­pen­dence conspiracy in 1821 sought to link the terri-
tory, to be called “Spanish Haiti,” to Gran Colombia, in a scheme that would
have maintained slavery. Within two months, however, a wave of Domini-
can support ushered in Haiti’s president, Jean-­Pierre Boyer, into the eastern
capital.20 Boyer was a republican who had defeated the northern monarch,
King Henry I. Boyer proclaimed Dominican emancipation for a second time
on 9 February 1822, as the colony became part of Haiti. Officials planted the
Tree of Liberty less than two weeks l­ ater.21 The w ­ hole island was now Haiti,
the only in­de­pen­dent nation in the Ca­rib­bean. One man l­ater remembered
Dominicans everywhere expressed solidarity with their “new fellow co-­
citizens,” in­de­pen­dent at last.22
For the next twenty-­t wo years of political unification, stability reigned.
Emancipation proceeded smoothly. In the former Dominican capital, many
freedmen joined the ranks of the African Battalion, two regiments of freed-
men in the city who also regularly welcomed escapees from neighboring
­islands. Outside of the capital, where sugar plantations had endured, families
reclaimed the land. Small, local, unpro­cessed sugar production continued. In
eastern ­cattle country, l­ ittle changed.23 New communities of regional mi­grants
fleeing slavery formed on the northern coast. In urban settings, it is likely that
proponents of “vernacular citizenship” demanded, fundamentally, new recog-
nition and stature.24 Dominican elites grudgingly admitted, “Boyer’s mea­sures
[­were] very just,” even as they complained about his policies of “spreading

the Tree of Liberty | 5

employment and official recognition indistinctly among p ­ eople of this and
that color.”25 Coffee, tobacco, and wood selling thrived, with direct encour-
agement from Port-­au-­Prince.26 The reach of the government into rural areas
all over the island, however, was minimal. As if by some miracle, the regime
endured for two de­cades, despite the fragility of its infrastructure. Residents
in most areas lived within networks that w ­ ere centripetal to Port-­au-­Prince
or Santo Domingo. Small ships traveled along the coast, ­because overland
travel was prohibitively difficult. Travelers and mi­grants connected, some-
times furtively, port-­town residents to islands and coasts near and far. They
articulated “public rights,” positive claims to authority, belonging, and l­ egal
personhood, rooted in their own autonomy and in the in­de­pen­dence of the
island itself.27
Years passed, and a w ­ hole new Dominican generation was born into
Haiti’s autocratic, but defiant, republicanism. Residents of the unified is-
land grew up with in­de­pen­dence and emancipation while in close contact
with mi­grants, sailors, travelers, and traders from islands where slavery was
steadfast. The freedmen regiments guarded the pacific Dominican capital
the ­whole time, led by veteran officers of the Haitian Revolution. Haiti’s
constitution broadcast a welcome for p ­ eople of color everywhere.28 Groups
of enslaved men and ­women from Jamaica arrived to the north coast in cir-
cuitous routes by small craft, hiding “­under the lee of the Caicos reeds.”29
­Others from Puerto Rico and the United States chose the Dominican capital
and other towns, as they had done even in de­cades before Dominican
emancipation. Purposefully eluding official notice, they left few traces.30
Dominicans lived ­free and in­de­pen­dent for sixteen years before hundreds
of thousands of their neighbors won full emancipation in the British West
Indies. The unified administration, meanwhile, survived despite French
threats and the ominous burden of Haiti’s so-­called indemnity debt to
France, which brought warships to Haitian shores. A veritable discursive
defense industry sprang up in Haiti, defending black nationhood.31 Do-
minican writers defended the administration, too.32 ­Those arriving from the
United States brought their own elegies about, and ideas of, Haitian free-
dom, as they joined and ­shaped vari­ous north coast communities.33 Region-
ally, however, the island was entirely alone in po­liti­cal in­de­pen­dence. All
the islands in Dominicans’ immediate po­liti­cal and commercial sphere—­
Saint Thomas, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Jamaica, Curaçao, Puerto Rico,
Cuba—­remained colonized, and the ­waters percolated with illegal ­human
traffic. No other Ca­rib­bean territory inched ­toward self-­rule.

6 | Introduction
 Port-de-Paix Monte Cristi
Môle-Saint-Nicolas Cap-Haïtien Puerto Plata
Le Trois
Fort-Liberté Santiago
Les Gonaïves Marmelade
Moca
Saint-Marc Samana
Mirebalais San Juan de
Arcahaie la Maguana
Jérémie
Port-au-Prince Grand-Bois
Nippes
Léogâne Cx-des- Neiba Azua
Tiburon Bouquets Santo Domingo
Aquin
Jacmel Bani
Les Cayes

Towns and surrounding settlement

Deep rural spaces, ca. 1830 0 50 Miles N

Map I.1 ​Map of settlement and rural spaces, ca. 1830. By Heather Rosenfeld. Adapted
from Jean-­Marie Dulix Théodat, Haïti et la République dominicaine: Une île pour
deux (Paris: Karthala, 2003), 140, with the consultation of Neici Zeller and Raymundo
González.

In early 1844, a small movement changed Dominican flags again, as dis-

sidents in the east seceded and proclaimed a new state. Opponents, reform
movements, and peasant opposition proliferated all over the island, from
Les Cayes to Santo Domingo, fed up with Boyer’s mono­poly on the adminis-
tration. Participants marveled at the pan-­island catharsis from 1843 to 1844,
during which “democracy flowed full to the brim.”34 Boyer fled the island,
and the east seceded, all within a ­matter of months. At the time, the pro­cesses
of early spring 1844 w­ ere commonly known as Separation. T ­ here was a fair
amount of continuity, again, as the pro­cess unfolded. Dominican legisla-
tors merely ­adopted most of the articles of an 1843 joint reform constitu-
tion that almost ruled.35 Moving forward in trying economic and po­liti­cal
circumstances, politicians of Haiti and the Dominican Republic remained at
once vulnerable and hopeful for greater integration. The nineteenth ­century,
a journalist reported, was “the c­ entury of lights,” and island elites expected it
to shine on their own endeavors. “The world has taken on a new character . . . ​
the fogs have dis­appeared and ignorance has taken refuge,” another writer
proclaimed.36 Politicians praised Giuseppe Garibaldi, dreamed of partici-
pation in the rise of nations, and contemplated cash crop expansion. As
in other states, debt, po­liti­cal and regional divisions, and frequent armed
movements, driven by opponents with conscripted armies, challenged both
administrations.37 They warily took stock of the imperial climate, which

the Tree of Liberty | 7

seemed only to be worsening. “­Every nation is f­ ree, as small as it might be,
and has the right to make its own laws,” the Dominican foreign minister
proclaimed.38

Emancipation, Empire, and Caribbean Freedom

Ca­rib­bean in­de­pen­dence faced more menacing scrutiny than Latin Amer­
i­ca’s movements did. The liberation strug­gles of the Haitian Revolution
unleashed an unrelenting torrent of international attention. Hemispheric
master classes invoked Haiti’s existence as a specter of black rebellion, and
they used the moment to shore up and expand their own plantation re-
gimes.39 As a direct response to Haiti’s in­de­pen­dence, imperial authorities
ruled surrounding islands in a state of exception.40 ­After abolition in Brit-
ish and French islands, elites judged abolition to be a failure, compounding
old discourses about the supposed dysfunction of sugar-­island spaces with
new layers of racist disappointment.41 Authorities paid indemnity to slave-
holders, tidily celebrated their own beneficence, restricted the rights of the
emancipated, capaciously expanded indenture, and resented, judged, and
excoriated the tenacious efforts of individuals and communities to carve out
spaces of autonomy, even where land was scarce.42 The fiction of experi-
mentation, of “hopefulness,” Diana Paton observes, was “itself profoundly
connected to coercion and to ideas of white superiority.”43 Precisely through
Ca­rib­bean emancipation, scientific racism enshrouded the putatively race-
less liberal subject.44 As plantation production declined—­and postslavery
peasantries grew—­Britain opened up its islands to ­free trade, depressing
prices further. Politicians began to recast the Ca­rib­bean sugar islands as an
imperial burden, dependencies that a magnanimous, white empire would
only have to bear as it expanded further.45 British abolitionists envisaged
Sierra Leone to be a refuge precisely in its capacity as an “anti-­Caribbean”
space where ­free ­labor would actually prevail.46
Opposition to Ca­rib­bean self-­rule fed on t­ hese anti-­emancipation narra-
tives, racist pseudoscience, and an increasingly voracious imperial appetite.
Scholars described neat hierarchies of race cultures and fantasized about
permanent subordination. White travelers journeyed from island to island
and told the same story: that the freed communities of color they encoun-
tered (or rather ­imagined) ­were “lazy,” and their “wants . . . b ​ ut few,” their
religious practice “witchcraft,” their resolutions for self-­governing, ultimately
absurd.47 Only force could compel t­ hese subjects to l­ abor, imperial proponents
argued. Maybe they would cease to exist entirely.48 In the islands, po­liti­cal
practice followed this useful pessimism. French authorities eliminated vot-

8 | Introduction
ing rights almost as soon as they ­were extended.49 In Jamaica and other Brit-
ish possessions, white colonists deepened their commitment to empire and
actively abnegated the island’s self-­rule. In­de­pen­dence, from the perspec-
tive of a white minority, was out of the question.50 Ca­rib­bean indenture and
new proj­ects of Asian and African imperialism represented a global imperial
promise that weathered, and even took strength from Ca­rib­bean abolition:
unfree ­labor had an expanding territory, a brown or black face, and a lucra-
tive ­future. As one U.S. southerner remarked, confidently, the increased in-
terlinking of the world markets and imperial reach meant that the “civilized
Nations of the Temperate Zone” would continue to profit from “tropical
regions” ­after emancipation.51 Power­ful En­glish figures, relentless, argued
that slavery should not have been abolished at all.52
In the Spanish Ca­rib­bean forced ­labor and colonialism ruled. Sugar slav-
ery dominated western Cuba, as planters reor­ga­nized, centralized, and ex-
panded their holdings. Cuban planters, like their peers in the U.S. South and
Brazil, had doubled down against emancipation, ­adopted technological in-
novation, expanded infrastructure, committed to the illegal slave trade, and
profitably integrated brutal plantation regimes into growing international
markets.53 Colonial officials relied on elite loyalty in exchange for official under­
girding of slavery.54 Authorities made extensive inquiries into the reform and
expansion of vagrancy laws, trying to draw rural and urban residents into state
control.55 In Puerto Rico, sugar and coffee production doubled from an amal-
gam of slave and ­free ­labor.56 “Force could domesticate them externally, but
they would continue internally to be bad citizens, disgruntled [infelices], and
traitors, invisible enemies,” one Puerto Rican official insisted.57 Skepticism
easily turned to persecution.58 Nearly one in ­every four Cubans was enslaved,
and the trade, though illegal, was massive. In Spain, abolitionist proponents
amounted to “a voice in the wilderness.”59 Indenture complemented chattel
trade. Spanish senator Argudín boasted that he planned the importation
of forty thousand African “apprentices”; observers claimed he had struck a
deal with the British to maintain slavery in Cuba u ­ ntil 1900.60 Like pro-­slavery
­advocates and imperial abolitionists alike, ­these authorities invoked the
emancipated Ca­rib­bean as a specter. When the governor of Puerto Rico
claimed that abolition led to “indolence and ruin,” he directed his condemna-
tion squarely at Haiti.61
Dominican separation from Haiti emerged at this precise midcentury
moment of retrenchment and contest, in which Haiti faced a veritable “pro-­
slavery clamor,” and pro-­slavery entrenchment in the United States only
grew louder.62 Mapmakers and politicians of nearby Latin American nations,

the Tree of Liberty | 9

in their first de­cades of in­de­pen­dence, increasingly distanced themselves
from their own Ca­rib­bean shores, insisting that autonomy existed else-
where. Intelligent­sia in new nations like Costa Rica and Colombia in­ven­ted
normative Atlantic geographies, through which they drafted themselves
outside of the Ca­rib­bean. Rather, they chose the “Atlantic” to bind them.63
When representatives from Costa Rica, Mexico, New Granada, Peru, El
Salvador, and Venezuela met to draft an emergency treaty meant to fore-
stall U.S. incursion in the Ca­rib­bean and Central Amer­ic­ a in 1856, they did
not invite ­either Haiti or the Dominican Republic, not only b­ ecause they pre-
ferred not to but b ­ ecause neither had the formal recognition of the United
States at all.64 One African American author assessed Santo Domingo to be
a dysfunctional, if fertile, space. He prescribed “Anglo-­African empire” to
better it.65 Island politicians, keenly aware of the content and scope of dis-
cursive hostility, meticulously embraced Civilization’s precepts. Referring
to his invitation to African Americans to ­settle in Haiti in 1824, President
Boyer wrote that he was saving them from “the alternative of ­going to the
barbarous shores of Africa.”66 “Civilization is a fact in our days, a semiuni-
versal doctrine,” a Dominican politician opined, agreeing—­but pessimism,
vio­lence, and anxiety pursued them.67
The pact made by some Dominican elites in dialogue with hemispheric
white supremacist and imperial pressures is infamous: effusive anti-­Haitian
intellectual production and racism. A vocal portion of Dominican elites
blamed Haiti for their territory’s ills, and they did so, from the earliest
years, in explic­itly racist terms.68 Like other hemispheric elites, writers in
the capital embraced dichotomous language: of pro­gress versus backward-
ness, civilization versus barbarism, order versus atavism, Chris­tian­ity versus
fetishism, and Providence versus disorder; in the absolute weakness of their
administration, they externalized the entire narrative.69 To Dominican writ-
ers’ distinct advantage, however, they conjured an external vector for their
anx­i­eties that outsiders readily embraced. A minority literate group in the
Dominican capital and other towns, e­ ager to cement distance between their
national proj­ect and the west, began a furious anti-­Haitian writing cam-
paign. They excoriated Haiti’s black citizenship as exclusionary; they reas-
sured international imperial audiences of Dominican eagerness for outside
(white) investment and capital. Several Haitian military mobilizations—­
but, overwhelmingly, the relentless poverty and precarity of the Dominican
Republic itself—­inflamed their sentiments. White travelers, journalists,
and politicians from slaveholding socie­ties w­ holeheartedly agreed with, and
amplified, t­ hese Dominican elites’ narrative of a race war on the island and

10 | Introduction
agreed that protections against capital w
­ ere backward, if not monstrous.70
Accordingly, they demonstrated a preoccupation with the whiteness of
the Dominican Republic—as a calculus for its annexionability as well as
victimhood—­that bordered on obsessive.71 “The entire universe ­will judge
between the haitians [sic] and the Dominicans,” a Dominican writer unctu-
ously agreed, and these accounts dominated new national narratives.72

Annexation, Belonging, and Sovereignty

Although scholars sometimes characterize Dominican annexationists as a
uniquely conservative minority, politicians’ recourse to outside aid and terri-
torial cession was quite common throughout the hemi­sphere.73 Annexation-
ism embodied the crux of elite, lettered anxiety over “race,” autonomy, and
citizenship vis-­à-­vis a rural and nonwhite majority, regional divisions, a frac-
tured partisan scene, economic difficulties, and imperial incursion. Especially
in moments of economic necessity, politicians throughout the hemi­sphere
toyed with outside intervention and territorial cession. Usually, t­ hese ­were
short-­term bargains to keep their own power against po­liti­cal opponents, but
the proj­ects sprang from a durable distrust of popu­lar politics.74 Annexation
was an enduring psychological refuge and a po­liti­cal tactic. This experimen-
tation was everywhere, but it was particularly enduring in the crucible of
the Gulf of Mexico, where Eu­ro­pean powers, U.S. interests, and international
pressures converged. Foreign reparations demands and outright aggression
­were common. Cuba’s annexationists knew they had willing U.S. ears. Some
Mexican elites, in turn, looked eagerly to the island.75 As po­liti­cal turmoil
and poverty plagued them, many Dominican elites deci­ded nationhood was
uncertain, even undesirable. Foreign interest in the poor territory, which
began slowly, quickly grew more pronounced. Dominican annexationists
­were markedly omnivorous in response, offering their struggling adminis-
tration ­every which way: to Britain, Spain, the Low Countries, the United
States, Sardinia, and especially France.76 “They know perfectly well that their
republic, without any other resource than the port taxes of a few boats and
the printing of continually depreciating paper money, ­isn’t v­ iable,” one visitor
to Santo Domingo asserted smugly.77
Spanish annexation of the Dominican Republic in 1861 tested an Atlan-
tic empire in transition. As other scholars have observed, facile narratives
of Spanish imperial decline a­ fter the 1820s preempt discussion of the po­
liti­cal contests that followed.78 As U.S. expansion, antislavery re­sis­tance,
and the threat of Ca­rib­bean in­de­pen­dence movements loomed, Spanish
reformers realized administrative restructuring that had been debated

the Tree of Liberty | 11

since the i­ n­de­pen­dence movements several de­cades before, centralizing
overseas administration. Constitutional repre­sen­ta­tion remained in limbo,
but Spain shared ­these debates with Britain, France, and other imperial
powers that had not yet neatly codified distinctions between imperial and
national subjects.79 In settler proj­ects on multiple continents, debates over
incorporation and autonomy accelerated, vacillating between assimilation,
association, and other models, as legislators circumscribed po­liti­cal inclusion
along bound­aries of lineage, “race,” and culture.80 Many Spanish liberals sup-
ported federalism, popu­lar in new Latin American states as well, as a means
to po­liti­cally integrate, and save, Spain’s Ca­rib­bean empire.81 Cuban po­liti­
cal elites looked to U.S. annexation and to the models of semi-­autonomous
government in the British Ca­rib­bean and Canada with pointed cupidity.82
Si­mul­ta­neously, Spanish authorities also quietly grappled with the idea of
abolition in ­future de­cades. Puerto Rican plantation ­owners, without the
capital to compete, tangled with the idea more immediately.83 The Cuban
governor, a driving force for annexation, proposed to incorporate the Do-
minican territory as a province without slavery, purposely to call the ques-
tion of legislative unity and ­labor modes into debate. Once more, po­liti­cal
impetus in the Ca­rib­bean catalyzed imperial debates.84
Annexationists exulted, at the same time, in a heterodox diffusion of ra-
cialist thinking, nationalist rhe­toric, and imperial force. Massive territorial
grabs, armed filibusters, trade imbalances, and conspiracies facilitated the
urgent fraternal language on which Spanish and Dominican annexationists
traded. Expansion by the United States, piratic and power­ful, catalyzed ur-
gent debates over race and po­liti­cal destiny among Latin American politi-
cians, who began to identify collectively as such.85 The language of the rights
of nations, self-­determination, and federalism saturated both American and
Spanish po­liti­cal discourse.86 Dominican and Spanish annexationists con-
sidered that a shared raza—­a racial collective of language, religion, culture,
and “blood”—­offered a workable paradigm for Dominican integration, a
“language of affiliation.”87 Dominican emissaries deployed fraternal narra-
tives of Spanishness tactically in recognition missives, even as they made
myriad appeals to other powers si­mul­ta­neously. Just as in Central American
contexts, their fraternity was a whitened one.88 They asserted the existence
of a “permanent war” with Haiti to an audience that was immediately recep-
tive to a race-­war paradigm. In response, Spanish annexationists traded on
old revenge fantasies ­toward Haiti and lofty egalitarian promises in breezy
tandem. Romantic language of racial destiny and voluntarism abetted uto-
pian thinking and masked the vio­lence of territorial gain. As other scholars

12 | Introduction
have observed, proponents of ­these utopias usually indulged in ­free-­soil
claims that belied explicit plans for racial hierarchy.89 A U.S. filibuster,
meanwhile, suggested that the Dominican Republic could become “another
California.”90 So the French consul dreamed of establishing a massive “im-
migrant empire” in Samaná.91 Unaware of the territory’s tiny and inconsis-
tent electoral history, the Cuban governor enthusiastically swore not a single
Spanish soldier would arrive ­until approved by universal suffrage.92
As with other imperial proj­ects, discursive justifications w ­ ere win­dow
dressing for economic and strategic interests that drove Spanish policy.
Keen enthusiasm for renewed colonial expansion, or at least the preserva-
tion of Spanish Ca­rib­bean power, outweighed discourse about prestige, the
reclamation of Columbus’s island, and other florid narratives.93 The territo-
ry’s potential value in staving off U.S. interests was paramount. The Samaná
peninsula was perfectly located to establish a coaling station. “Samaná is
to the Gulf of Mexico what Mayotta is to the Indian Ocean,” a British con-
sul agreed. “It is not only the military, but also the commercial key of the
Gulf.”94 Around the new administration, the coterie of Dominican elites
gathered who ascribed to proposed proj­ects of l­abor control and indenture
schemes, distanced from the Dominican rural majority.95 “I give you a ­people
without journalists and devoid of ­lawyers,” the Dominican president report-
edly bragged.96 Industrialists proposed a railroad “like the French have done
from Puebla to Veracruz,” canals and communication infrastructure “like
the En­glish have done in India,” an import scheme “like Java or Mauritius,”
and a naval station to “block the mouth of the Mississippi.”97 Annexation
was fundamentally experimental, but the Spanish officers felt confident that
the moment demanded innovation. “Annexation of Santo Domingo is an
event as rare as it is new . . . ​and it is beyond our normal rules,” the Cuban
governor urged. “Many of the mea­sures we ­ought to adopt must also be of a
most special and very extraordinary character.”98
International imperial powers, meanwhile, ignored Dominican elites’
pronouncements of Spanishness or, in fact, any narrative of Dominican agency.
It was easy to imagine, in 1861, that an in­de­pen­dent Ca­rib­bean nation might
dis­appear. Massive territorial loss to the United States threw Mexican poli-
tics into a tailspin ­after 1848, Nicaraguans confronted armed conspiracies,
and Eu­ro­pean groups launched a joint intervention in Mexico. ­These same
countries deepened networks in Africa, moralized about so-­called legitimate
commerce, and mounted new plantation experiments. Commentators de-
ployed ­toward the island the same benevolence narratives honed in other
imperial sites. “The Christian and the Philanthropist must hail the event

the Tree of Liberty | 13

which w ­ ill put Hayti ­under any influence or dominion,” one pamphleteer
declared.99 “Dominicana has a government—so poets have empires,” a U.S.
man concluded, predicting their demise.100 A French columnist urged Span-
ish authorities to discard the voluntary pretext. “[Spain] would do better
just simply to say that she is retaking Santo Domingo ­because she wants
to,” he remarked dispassionately.101 Fi­nally, other Eu­ro­pean powers looked
with equanimity and even approval on Dominican annexation not only
­because they naturalized its absorption but ­because, at a crucial moment
of U.S. weakness, Spanish annexation might forestall several de­cades of U.S.
expansion in the Gulf. The timing was incredibly propitious. Just months be-
fore annexation began, states in the U.S. South began to secede, one by one.

The Living Nightmare of Slavery

Beyond the capital, confronting the critical test of annexation, w ­ ere the
­people. A small canon of early national writing, from a tiny group of elites,
obscures them relentlessly. As Raymundo González observes, elites’ “anti-
peasant, racist mindset” sprang from their disdain for the very formation
of the Dominican peasantry itself, which was born, in many areas, from an
in­de­pen­dent rural maroon population who worked on the margins of ­cattle
society or entirely for their own subsistence.102 Elites w ­ ere studiously s­ ilent
on race not only out of putative republicanism but precisely in defiance of
Haiti’s privileging of black citizenship. The relentless invective directed
­toward Haiti for its defense of black sovereignty compounded their silence
further; Dominican elites defined the nation as the purposeful absence of
­these discussions.103 As Haitian heads of state issued periodic invitations for
African American mi­grants, Dominican ministers secretly wrote to agents
in New York demurring any new schemes of black migration.104 Rumors
of black mi­grants’ arrival spurred alarm among officials, who wanted mi­
grants from the Canary Islands, Spain, or another Eu­ro­pean country.105 A
submerged wave of popu­lar politics burgeoned in the rural areas and towns,
which elites minimized and denied as they gambled with foreign powers and
renarrated Dominican identity. Politicians regularly ignored popu­lar antira-
cism and anti-­imperialism, even when it led to public protests, as they toyed
with slave powers on a razor’s edge. Writers admitted that popu­lar warn-
ings about reenslavement, for example, ­were an “eternal ghost . . . ​the night-
mare of slavery,” but insisted they ­were a ridicu­lous relic, “from the time of
Boyer.”106
Most Dominicans left no written response. ­There was no planter class
fastidiously observing them, no logbook, no epistolary archive. T ­ here was no

14 | Introduction
archivist even of the Dominican government for the first fifteen years of
separation.107 Rural residents lived outside of documentation regimes as they
made lives from woodcutting, hunting, livestock, honey and wax, and lim-
ited coffee production.108 Contraband, slow and small-­scale migration, and
the lived geographic linkages to nearby island towns and coasts produced
­little rec­ord. Transportation between any of the regions was difficult, usually
undertaken by ­horse or mule. Carts, even small ones, ­were largely limited to
the towns, further impeding trade.109 Communities relied more on orality
than the written word, personal distribution of justice rather than bureau-
cratic dissemination, local networks more than state ambit and resources, in-
terpersonal obligations more than contracts, usufruct rights versus titled
owner­ship, subsistence rhythms more than other par­ameters of time, and
so on. As for l­ abor, their governing logic was more the moral economy of a
day’s manual l­ abor than “­labor discipline” in any industrial iteration, slow or
seasonal production and storage more than accumulation or capitalization,
and a relative nonspecialization of ­labor, except perhaps along gendered
lines. Like other peasantries with limited market production, t­ here was ­little
tying them to administrative centers.110 Their dispersal was a purposeful,
centuries-­old marronage.111 As a con­temporary observed from one central
valley town, they ­were the ­children of slavery.112
We Dream Together explores a po­liti­cal consensus shared by this rural
majority, and also by many in towns: vigilance over emancipation outside of
plantation spaces, anticolonial commitment, keen understanding of the rac-
ism that surrounded them, and discourses of community and pride they
articulated in response. Although they left no writing, seeking “collective
biographies and community studies” reveals the many intersecting frames
of a precarious entente.113 Dominican autonomy emerged out of de­cades
of revolutionary fighting and strug­gle, of small-­scale regional migration,
interchange, and constant domestic conversations, vigilance, and esteem.
Throughout the territory, Dominicans’ commonsense assumptions differed
gravely from the small group who held power in the capital. Understanding
of emancipation and in­de­pen­dence was grounded in generations of con-
versation and interchange, at the heart of popu­lar sentiment, and directed
to defense of the ­whole island against outside hostility, which many under-
stood to be constant.114 Scholars of annexation often analyze it in nationalist
terms. ­These interpretations tend to downplay domestic discussions about
racism, which elites refused to rec­ord, as well as Dominicans’ engagement with
the ongoing ­battles over emancipation throughout the Ca­rib­be­an.115 As
with many rural would-be citizens throughout the hemi­sphere, Dominicans

the Tree of Liberty | 15

shared a commitment to relative egalitarianism, general rights to po­liti­cal
decision-­making in one’s community (a personhood more expansive than
bourgeois citizenship), and a hybrid assemblage of positive rights, including
that of military belonging.116 The most impor­tant of t­ hese rights was prob­
ably the right to the means of subsistence (that is, in­de­pen­dence and land),
and for many it also included a certain degree of autonomy from the reaches
of a formal state. With annexation, their articulation became clear.117
The m
­ iddle chapters of this book detail the immediate conflicts that Do-
minicans confronted in the new occupation, as the colonial proj­ect immedi-
ately betrayed Spain’s fraternal promises. In the face of material scarcity and
subsistence l­abor, administrators constantly produced colonial difference
in narrative and practice. Their registers ­were marvel, classification, and
disdain.118 Officials passed a series of reforms that w ­ ere abrasive and alien,
and the frank racism of everyday officials betrayed their explic­itly race-­blind
mandates. Both parties felt they had preexisting knowledge of each other,
and neither was pleased. The occupation was intimately linked to plantation
slavery. The captain general of Cuba planned it, Spanish troops who had re-
cently been stationed in Cuba guarded it, Cuban coffers funded expansion,
and secret slaving missions buzzed the island’s north coast as the Cuban
governor celebrated the inauguration of Jefferson Davis.119 Even when the
proj­ect was only a rumor, widespread rejection and anticolonial sentiment
­were evident in Dominican territory. One early small uprising over enslave-
ment, quickly crushed, ­ought to have warned authorities of the conflicts
to come. Legend grew around the man who had led the small revolt in the
next two years ­after his trial and execution; residents said that he was very
old, blind, heroic.120 Within weeks of the first renewed rebellion, fighting
exploded across the territory. Pop­ul­ar anticolonialism, republicanism, citi-
zenship language, and ties of solidarity with Haiti flooded public discourse
against the Spanish, which became known as the War of Restoration.
The rebellion gave voice to rural politics, trenchant critiques of colonial
despotism, and republican and demo­cratic ideas that outpaced feasible
implementation. As in many rural uprisings, including the Haitian Revolu-
tion, authorities had ­little inkling of the scale of the ­battle before them.121
Every­one commented, in awe, on the popu­lar nature of the war. “The current
revolution was the masses rising up, dragging the rest with them,” a town
resident marveled.122 The Dominican former president supposed that the
mobilization was a military one, that he could simply neutralize the uprising
by ­going ­after prominent opponents. He was wrong; the rebellion was more
massive and more total than anything that had come before in his lifetime.123

16 | Introduction
Fear of reenslavement, particularly, electrified the ­whole territory. ­These
slavery discussions, which Spanish authorities characterized as “rumor,”
­were rather a precise win­dow into the living discussions of autonomy, an
unwritten assessment of Ca­rib­bean emancipation as news of other contests
reached Dominican shores, and only lastly a response to the precipitously
arrived new state.124 They ­were ubiquitous, and the fighting spread like a
whirlwind. Whole families left towns and refused to return. Rebels barely
had munitions, but they w ­ ere willing to burn their own towns to destroy
Spanish advantage. The Spanish w ­ ere exasperated. “In Santo Domingo one
fights against invisible enemies,” one lamented, “chasing ghosts.”125
Rebels had heterogeneous tactics, allegiances, and goals. The war had
no front line. As in other Ca­rib­bean contests, Dominicans and their allies
resisted the Spanish troops in local networks that ­were constantly shift-
ing, with very l­ittle outside help.126 They called on de­cades of experience.
Mobilization—­even the very language of it—­called on the island’s shared
military history.127 Average soldiers who had previously fought for separa-
tion came to call for reunification.128 Prominent generals espoused a range
of ideologies. Like other midcentury leaders, their language was capacious,
often contradictory, with ample space for pragmatism.129 As with the loyalists,
­there was a portion of the rebel leadership who clung to an absolute silence
on race, who insisted any mention of it was “unprincipled,” that their fight
was one of raceless national liberation.130 All ­these leaders made overtures
to the Haitian president, however, calling on his republicanism. Members
of the newly formed Provisional Government extolled, “Liberty! Liberty!
Poetry in ­every language!”131 As the fighting continued, a more radical lead-
ership grew to share popu­lar irreverence ­toward civilizationist claims, and
their anticolonial vocabulary became more explicit. Their overtures to Haiti,
especially, reflected a “black recognitionist” discourse.132 They praised the
real democracy of Restoration ranks, called for direct suffrage, and moved to
forge lasting alliances with other anticolonial activists. Other leaders, in
horror, sought to topple them.
Dominicans and their Haitian allies defeated the Spanish in 1865, with
the rapt attention of regional neighbors and increasing anticolonial ties.
One Spanish senator invoked the Haitian Revolution and recent rebellions
in India when he called, in vain, for a massive troop surge to crush them.133
News of Spanish defeat spread even faster than in earlier de­cades, as prison-
ers, travelers, missives, elegies, newspapers, sailors, and returning troops
circulated descriptions of Hispaniola’s triumph. Dominican rebel leaders
traveled, too, reaching Curaçao, Saint Thomas, Venezuela, New York, G ­ rand

the Tree of Liberty | 17

Turk, Haiti, Mayagüez, and numerous other ports. Together with other an-
ticolonial activists from other islands, they acted with a keen sense of a
heroic and historic pres­ent. The fighting inaugurated a period, much like
Latin American in­de­pen­dence that preceded it, that was “improvised and
reactive . . . ​[a] time of macrosocial change.”134 Plans for an in­de­pen­dent
Ca­rib­bean federation bloomed. The fraternity that bound them was hybrid
and multiple.135 Rulers came and went; some stayed long past their wel-
come. Rebels often found themselves in outright antistate alliances. But
new anticolonial alliances formed; imperial pressure constantly renewed
them. Coastal towns served as vital regional outposts centuries a­ fter their
outsize importance in the construction of Ca­rib­bean empire.
The Dominican War of Restoration coincided with, and contributed to,
a renewal of emancipation energy, won through tenacious, constant fight-
ing. As in­de­pen­dence and antislavery fighting began in Cuba, Hispaniola
provided concrete and ideological refuge in a deeply transcolonial space.136
Intra-­Caribbean migration accelerated, as thousands left for seasonal work,
and steam travel, for some residents, made the Ca­rib­bean smaller by incre-
ments.137 Even t­ hose who w ­ ere not supporters of pan-­Caribbean federation
readily admitted its feasibility. “The idea of the ‘Antillean League’ can be
realized one day, the day that G ­ reat Britain gives its permission . . . ,​ so
the Spanish Government should open its eyes,” predicted one prominent
Dominican liberal.138 Idealists rallied for po­liti­cal “regeneration” and frater-
nal, voluntary alliances that could bridge po­liti­cal divides, defeat logistical
difficulties, and overturn absolutism. Technological changes like the tele-
graph abetted their sense of the pos­si­ble. “This is quite an era in [the] West
Indian story,” a visiting Jamaican man remarked.139 In a hard won moment,
optimists felt like all tides might rise, that Providence and pro­gress might
uplift every­one.140

Independence and Sacrifice

In­de­pen­dence came at a high cost. Imperial threats and state fragility kin-
dled the new po­liti­cal experiments. As with other new states, on Hispaniola
­there ­were “a number of competing utopias,” po­liti­cal frames that ranged
from regional autonomy, to larger federations, to proj­ects of sheer personal
ambition.141 Co­ali­tions of guerrilla fighters trickled apart as the fighting
ended, as individuals and families returned to their homes in a devastated
landscape. In the division and exhaustion on Dominican soil, a wealthy,
prominent po­liti­cal figure, a familiar face, handily reclaimed power. Once
again t­here was a widening of the distance between popu­lar visions and

18 | Introduction
the praxis of ­those at the helm. Foreign attention, and loan offers, loomed.
­There existed a “mercantile oligarchy, that has never been Dominican, and
has always used any means to realize its traitorous plans,” one veteran pro-
tested, in exasperation.142 ­After Restoration fighting, opponents of annexa-
tion still felt the danger acutely. The scope of their imagination sprang not
just from optimism but also from the relative insecurity of the two nations
themselves, and possibility took root not only from a hostile international
climate but also from internal regionalism, separatism, fracture, and repres-
sion. Many idealists lived lives of almost constant fighting. In “stable . . . ​
instability,” life went on.143
Popular solidarities, forged by Dominicans, Haitians, and their neigh-
bors, faced concrete and discursive opposition. Dominican elites renar-
rated the fighting even as it was happening. Within forty years, an unrecog-
nizable narrative expunged all of the uncertainty, all plural visions, and all
of the contests of the period. A small group of writers supplanted them with
tales of the heroism of a single blond-­haired, blue-­eyed man who was barely
in Dominican territory at all during t­hese de­cades, Juan Pablo Duarte.144
They re-­remembered separation from Haiti as cataclysmic and the devotion
of the Dominican public to nation as unwavering and inevitable.145 In the
gendered memory production of military glory, authors redrafted ­women’s
signal contribution to Restoration fighting into larger narratives of abnega-
tion.146 Through the eyes of an exile narrative, in fact, the nation became a
morality tale of tragedy, sacrifice, and obedience for most Dominicans.147
Outsiders minimized and marginalized the guerrilla war, too, in de­cades
that followed. With in­de­pen­dence and pan-­Caribbean organ­izing famously
described as “Cuba and Puerto Rico, two wings of the same bird,” the geo-
graphic body, in the form of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, sustains the
wings without mention.148 In the wake of t­ hese willful counternarratives, au-
thors work hard to recover the neglected historiographical space for Haitian
po­liti­cal thought in the east, when elites sought to silence it most avidly.149
Pop­u­lar memories eluded this erasure, refused silencing, and frustrated the
discipline of t­hese unitary narratives. So Dominican authorities must have
worried, when they arrested a group of men and ­women for commemorating
the War of Restoration with vodou rites during Trujillo’s dictatorship sixty
years ­later, in the heart of the capital.150
Being alive on Hispaniola in t­ hose de­cades, on ­either side of the island,
kindled a constant and vigilant defense of autonomy itself. President Boyer’s
Tree of Liberty on Dominican soil—­adopted, embraced, toppled, mourned,
forgotten—­exemplifies the vibrant faith in autonomous citizenship, born of

the Tree of Liberty | 19

the revolution, that emerged on both sides of the island and endured across
generations, but that always faced incredible contest. In a critical moment
in a fight for self-­rule, many Dominican rebels overwhelmingly rejected
divisive narratives that had brought about annexation itself. In their solidar-
ity, enduring and obvious, Haitian citizens helped them frankly, repeatedly,
generously, and simply ­because their own survival was also at stake. It was a
collection of ­battles that escaped the control of the leaders for a time. In the
po­liti­cal and military contests that followed, ­these active negotiations con-
tinued. Investment, capitalization, and industrialization loomed, but nei-
ther the rate, nor the authors, nor the impact was predetermined. One writer
described the pitched strug­gle that persisted: “Tyranny and liberty fight
each other tenaciously and fiercely: the first are all the forces of hate and
desperation, the second, love for the homeland and hope for the f­ uture.”151

20 | Introduction
one

Life by Steam
THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC’S FIRST REPUBLIC, 1844–1861

“The ­people are miserable:—­true, but not as much as in the Haitian time,” a
journalist in Santo Domingo argued in late summer 1846, two years ­after
Separation. “Paper money has no value:—­it has more than that of the Haitians,” the
author persisted.1 In the Dominican capital, columnists condemned Hai-
tian politics in order to externalize po­liti­cal scrutiny and to deny the dire,
authoritarian po­liti­cal drama that was unfolding in Santo Domingo at the
same time. They allowed themselves considerable hyperbole. “We have a
liberal Constitution and an honorable and patriotic leader who executes it
punctually,” one writer boasted, hopefully. He claimed that the newly sepa-
rated east would have reduced military forces and civil rights for all citizens.2
Instead, repression and insecurity mounted. “The public is groaning in mis-
ery,” another admitted.3 Soldiers mocked the new Dominican motto (“God,
Country, Liberty”), changing it to “God, Country, Slavery, and Lean Meat.”4
Residents of the capital marked the anniversary of the constitution signing
with “embarrassing coldness and indifference,” and one man compared the
new republic to someone slowly d ­ ying of fever.5
Over a series of months between 1843 and 1845, as President Jean-­Pierre
Boyer’s power collapsed, Haiti fractured into two administrations. In cha-
otic and depressed circumstances, the men who held on to the reins of power
in the east, the newly in­de­pen­dent Dominican Republic, w ­ ere largely the
same southern elite who had worked with the Unification regime. The first
Dominican president, Pedro Santana, ­rose to power at the head of an army
of loyal followers from his home province, and his prestige made him a “true
feudal seigneur,” contemporaries observed.6 Buenaventura Báez, the man
 who emerged to be Santana’s primary po­liti­cal rival, was a large landowner.
Well traveled and wealthy, Báez was a high-­level politician who easily weath-
ered the changes in flag. Separation came easily, but consolidating a new
state proved difficult. In the Dominican capital, a tiny electorate rallied
around the administration, but censorship, exile, and executions cooled the
atmosphere. Alternating terms in power, Santana and Báez controlled the ad-
ministration with heavy hands. Both invoked a war powers clause of the consti-
tution, Article 210, for autocratic license. They used the clause domestically,
restricting freedom of the press, relentlessly pursuing critics, and trading
off power in a continuous pattern of usurpation, corruption, and revenge.7
Reformers had ­little recourse but to complain about “the plague of parties.”8
Most Dominicans, meanwhile, lived far from the capital, in­de­pen­dent
and dispersed. No export bonanza or internal migration brought them in
closer contact, nor could authorities in Santo Domingo generate resources
with which to expand their administration.9 Internal travel was treacher-
ous, and small boats, yolas or balandras, ­were the only practicable way to
reach other coastal towns.10 ­After de­cades of flag changes and rural in­de­
pen­dence, power had devolved “from one to many”: to regional military
networks, ­family units, religious brotherhoods, tobacco, wood, and c­ attle
trade, and, only lastly, to the nominative southern administration.11 As Sep-
aration unfolded, the idea of a new republic did not extend beyond a handful
of towns.12 Residents might have considered themselves at vari­ous points
“Haitian-­Spanish,” “Dominican-­Spanish,” or even “not Spanish nor French
nor Haitian”; more likely still, they embraced local identities that w­ ere more
salient.13 Residents of the north coast ­were deeply tied with Cap-­Haïtien,
surrounding islands, and the Atlantic. In the Cibao, politicians wealthy from
tobacco trade pulled away from the capital. They wanted a federalization of
power, or to relocate the government totally. In the center of the island, the
unpopularity of Haiti’s emperor stymied solidarities for a time, but residents
­were hardly faithful. In the new state, domestic flashpoints became more
critical with each passing year.
This chapter details how citizens made their lives between foreign
powers and po­liti­cal revolution. Even in the capital, few p ­ eople thought
­autonomy was pos­si­ble.14 British, French, U.S., and Spanish authorities
­intervened constantly in Dominican affairs. They jockeyed for competing
concessions, supported vari­ous protectorate, citizenship, or colonization
schemes, manipulated treaty negotiations, meddled in domestic po­liti­cal
strug­gles, demanded indemnities, sent warships as implied menace, and

22 | Chapter 1
generally intervened aggressively for their own interests, all while with-
holding recognition.
As capital city figures made increasing bargains with ­these powers, residents
engaged in active debates about identity and citizenship. Feeling anxiety over
the ­future, Dominicans in multiple sites responded to ­these developments
with steady vigilance, frequent protests, and warnings of slavery. From rural,
center-­island spaces, where de­cades of trade, travel, and po­liti­cal connec-
tion tied them to Haiti, military men occasionally drew a handful of local
residents into intrigues to re­unite the island. As years passed, the very fra-
gility of the Dominican administration, wracked with po­liti­cal competition,
economic crises, and growing imperial aggression, made t­ hese pacts more
urgent. The grip of the capital was loosening.

Reform and Separation, 1843–1846

Unification of the w­ hole island, which began in early 1822, lasted ­under the
rule of President Boyer for two de­cades. ­After abolition in Unification’s first
days, many lived life much as before.15 In towns, the administration had an
uneven impact. The government employed several hundred officials in the
Dominican capital and dozens in other towns. Much of the quotidian ad-
ministration continued in Spanish.16 Prominent Dominicans like Manuel
Joaquín Delmonte earnestly and unctuously praised the regime. “Let us all
toast to the day that the knot that binds us gets tighter,” he urged, from a
Masonic lodge called “Perfect Harmony” in Azua.17 Black regiments in and
around the capital, which predated Unification, enjoyed larger ranks and
status.18 Black Dominicans forged “the tightest of bonds” with arriving Hai-
tian soldiers and administrators, one traveler remarked.19 In the Cibao val-
ley, Dominican tobacco merchants and o ­ thers benefited from stability and
government support.20 In rural areas, the reach of the state was minimal.21
As years passed, however, and as outside observers heaped noisy judgment
on Boyer’s regime, fissures grew.22 Boyer’s autocratic style, the po­liti­cal and
economic burden of a so-­called indemnity debt to France, regional divisions,
and a plurality of other grievances rankled an increasing number of po­liti­cal
opponents.23 Dominican periodicals l­ ater blamed a parasitic administration
and a bloated administrative and military class.24 Boyer’s aides had sheltered
him from rumblings of discontent for years, the journalists argued.25 By
the early 1840s, a significant group in the Dominican capital had begun to
support separation, Delmonte and other former Unification supporters in-
cluded. In the west, anti-­Boyer voices grew louder si­mul­ta­neously.

Life by Steam | 23
 A natu­ral disaster accelerated the fracture, heralding a providential reck-
oning. A massive earthquake struck the heart of Haiti on 7 May 1842. It
seemed like the apocalypse. In towns across the island, “not one stone was
left on top of the other,” an observer wrote in horror. The calamity destroyed
homes, churches, and businesses and left thousands more on the brink of
collapse. Vis­i­ble devastation surrounded the living. On the northern coast,
from Port-­de-­Paix to Monte Cristi, a wall of seawater flooded over residents.
Rivers overflowed, and the deluge covered w ­ hole fields. Violent aftershocks
“frightened and made the p ­ eople more desperate.” The island’s capital,
Port-­au-­Prince, burned day and night on end.26 “I w ­ ill tell you the horror, the
death, the tears, the endless havoc into which the miserable nation of Haiti
has sunk,” an eastern poet wrote. “What confusion! What horror! What
fright!” He wrote of religious fear and of the “reckless pride” of his compa-
triots, swallowed up in a horrible din.27 A hurricane followed that summer.
Port-­au-­Prince burned again in the beginning of the new year.28
Boyer’s regime, already on the precipice of collapse, quickly crumbled.
Po­liti­cal “excitement . . . ​spread like a contagion to e­ very nook,” observers
reflected.29 Earnest island liberals, Dominican separatists and annexation-
ists, ambitious military figures of varying allegiances, prominent southern
Haitian families, and growing rural opposition in the western south all vied
for power. A handful of Dominican nationalists had recently returned to
Santo Domingo from San Juan, inspired by liberal discontent and pro-­
in­de­pen­dence murmurings in the late 1830s.30 They joined a secret society
in the capital, the Trinitarios, whose members w ­ ere a small group of urban
elite with insular f­ amily and geographic ties.31 Their critiques w ­ ere moderate
but increasingly nationalist in elocution. Other plans proliferated, including
renegotiating the terms of Unification. Dominican commentators remem-
bered the possibilities of the moment acutely. “It seems to me that Boyer
knew best the true path of happiness for all Haitians,” one Dominican wrote,
de­cades ­later. “He was only wrong about one ­thing: not having founded the
­union of the two pueblos on a more equal and advantageous base, for example
a confederation,” he concluded.32
From dif­fer­ent sites, anti-­Boyerists tried to salvage a federation. In Les
Cayes, Haitian and Dominican reformers formed the Society of the Rights
of Man and Citizen, demanding wide-­ranging government changes.33 At a
constitutional convention in Port-­au-­Prince, Puerto Plata deputy Federico
Peralta y Rodríguez spoke frankly of “atrocious oppression . . . ​and total
ruin” of many prominent families—­his frankness already revolutionary—­but
also expressed enthusiasm for proposed reforms, “so liberal and demo­cratic”

24 | Chapter 1
Fig. 1.1 Domingo Echavarría (1805–1849, attributed), “Terremoto en la isla de Haití,”
1842. Colección bibliográfica J. R. Marquez, Santo Domingo.

as they ­were. He and ­others hoped for serious constitutional changes.34 Re-
formers tried to save the u­ nion, drafting a Haitian-­Dominican Constitution
that was unmistakably liberal, according much more power to the legislative
branch, abolishing presidency-­for-­life, and reducing the army. They hoped
to maintain and strengthen island unity, proposing a trilingual national
school (En­glish, Spanish, and French).35 In Santo Domingo, meanwhile,
Haitian opposition leaders Alcius Ponthieux and General Étienne Desgrotte
plotted together with Dominican Trinitaria members to take the fort of the
capital in the spring of 1843, but no mobilization materialized. In solidarity,
­whole regiments deserted Boyer’s unpopular campaign against the south-
western conspiracy.36 Boyer fled for Jamaica in February 1843, ending more
than two de­cades of rule.

Life by Steam | 25
 As months passed, however, po­liti­cal turmoil increased. General Charles
Rivière-­Hérard increasingly presided over the reform convention and ma-
neuvered to impose his authority, proclaiming himself president. He re-
ceived, and then imprisoned, Trinitario emissary Ramón Mella, as he moved
to squash other reforms. Southern Haitian peasants protested his betrayal
and mobilized in­de­pen­dently; the movement became known as the Piquet
Rebellion.37 A popu­lar song rebuked the presidential usurper:

President Rivière was cross-­eyed!

He thought he was the king!
He thought he was the king!
He thought he was the king!38

Dominican commentators expressed dismay. An editorial critiqued Rivière’s

January 1844 Constitution and scolded him for his excesses, calling him
a “dictator who only use[d] the liberal title of president.”39 “[Without our
cooperation] the revolution would not have been more than a crazy plan,”
another disillusioned Dominican columnist reflected. “And what was our
prize . . . ? What ­were the considerations, the improvements, the guarantees,
for our unalienable rights? Dark dungeons in Port-­au-­Prince!”40
French interference loomed as many Dominican politicians grew di-
vided between separation or a French protectorate. From Port-­au-­Prince, a
prominent southern Dominican, Buenaventura Báez, tried to sabotage other
movements. He warned Rivière of Dominican opposition and furiously tried
to conspire for a French protectorate instead, continuing to do so a­ fter he
became the mayor of the Dominican town of Azua.41 “Frenchified” Domini-
cans (los afrancesados) in Azua boasted their own flag: red and white vertical
stripes, with a small tricolor in the top-­left corner.42 The strongest clarion
call for total separation from Haiti was actually Azuans’ demand for French
annexation; authors of a separation statement from the Dominican capital
simply called for provincial autonomy.43 Meanwhile, prominent rancher Pedro
Santana led a military mobilization for separation from further east, marshal-
ing a loyal band of peons and peasants from his home province, Seybo. He
wrote confidentially that he feared many Dominicans opposed separation,
and may have even briefly lent his own allegiance to the French cause.44
French officials collaborated and encouraged Dominican protectorate
plans, but they insisted that residents of the east continue to pay Haiti’s in-
demnity. In a menacing and opportunistic stance, they lobbied for cession
of the Samaná peninsula in exchange.45 Diplomats felt confident that the
plan could be secured in a ­matter of weeks.46 Both Unification and protec-

26 | Chapter 1
torate advocates faltered; the indemnity was a major sticking point, even for
reform proponents. Cap separatists made a last-­minute call to make a new
North Haiti–­Dominican union—­they freed all Dominican prisoners in the
town, designed a new red and blue flag with a star at the center, and sent
overtures proposing a federative alliance to central and northern Dominican
towns—­but eastern observers worried that a clash with France was immi-
nent. Unity seemed too costly.47
Quietly, secession proceeded in the Dominican capital and spread piece-
meal to other towns. With most western troops already departed, a group of
Dominicans proclaimed Separation in Santo Domingo, fairly uneventfully,
on 27 February 1844. A number of Haitian residents in the town openly sup-
ported the movement, and a handful of Dominican residents left for Saint
Thomas to avoid taking sides.48 Official secession occurred the next day,
with a cordial withdrawal accord for property guarantees, re­spect, dignity,
and “frankness and loyalty” on all sides.49 In March, the leading men of
several towns in the Cibao valley and elsewhere declared themselves in ­favor
of an eastern republic. As news reached Haiti, President Rivière called for
a mobilization. Trying to reach the Dominican capital, he occupied Azua,
where Santana defeated him. Dominicans quickly defeated his auxiliary in
Santiago, too, and a series of small skirmishes in border towns came to l­ ittle
that spring. Some central towns changed hands several times, but the en-
counters often involved only small groups of soldiers.50 Southern Haitian
peasants, still in a demo­cratic mobilization of their own, observed Rivière’s
defeat by Dominicans with satisfaction. “The Spaniards chased him, he ran
like a dog ­after fresh carrion!,” one song rebuked him.51 Losing everywhere,
Rivière was unseated by May 1844. He, too, left for Jamaica.52
As Pablo Mella observes, traditional accounts maintain a conspiracy of
silence about Dominican racism and class divisions, framing the uncertainty
of 1844 as mere conflict between “liberal” and “conservative” factions.53
Among the tiny formal po­liti­cal class ­there did exist a plurality of positions,
of course, and regional elites in the Cibao also hoped for power. Much more
salient, however, w ­ ere the divides between the tiny elite who w ­ ere assum-
ing power and most Dominicans. T ­ hese w
­ ere the men in the capital whom
most dubbed “white Spaniards,” whom many residents considered almost a
foreign group.54 Defiantly, the Separation junta held whites-­only meetings,
and government emissaries bragged to foreign authorities that it had been
whites who had led Separation.55 At one meeting, liberal Juan Pablo Duarte
proposed an amendment arguing, “The unity of race . . . i​s one of the fun-
damental princi­ples of our po­liti­cal adhesion,” but to his alarm, other

Life by Steam | 27
a­ ttendees tore up the proposal.56 At the head of the military forces, Santana
aligned himself with ­these prominent whites, who appealed abroad for rec-
ognition, annexation, and white immigration si­mul­ta­neously.57 Santana’s
collusion with ­these elites disgusted and worried prominent military offi-
cers of color in the capital, even t­ hose who had previously supported him.58
Town residents ­were abuzz that the group was considering reinstating slav-
ery, ­either in a new Gran Colombia-­like federation, like the pro-­slavery sepa-
ration movement of 1821, or through a French protectorate.59 A col­o­nel of
the African Battalion, Santiago Basora, blocked the entry of separatist forces
to the capital.60 General José Joaquín Puello, a prominent officer from the
Unification period, joined Duarte and o ­ thers in spreading the alarm among
soldiers and concerned citizens.
Tension between the governing group and the town’s black regiments
and other citizens peaked during the summer. To ­counter General Puello
and to silence ner­vous town residents, Santana arrived with two thousand
of his own followers from outside the city. In a tense compromise, Santana
allowed Puello to keep command of the plaza, and several of the most vocal
antiblack Junta members resigned.61 The governing group published a de-
cree in July reaffirming the abolition of slavery. L­ ater the same month uproar
returned to the capital, however, when a wealthy planter arrived from Puerto
Rico, intent on recapturing nine men who had escaped to freedom. The
group of men, who had already joined the town’s black regiment, recognized
the slavemaster on the street, and a large group of armed Dominicans aided
them in cornering him in a private ­house. The men’s protectors very nearly
attacked Santana, who arrived to the planter’s rescue. Promising to jail him,
Santana merely snuck him off in a boat u ­ nder the cover of night. Santana
went on the offensive, trying to neutralize the black regiments entirely. He
dispatched many of them off to the border, “with extensive promises about
their continuing liberty.”62 To assuage the alarm of town residents, the Junta
reiterated once more that Santo Domingo was ­free soil and decreed that any
Dominican who mounted a slave voyage would be classified a pirate, tried,
and executed.63 Assuming the title of “Supreme Chief of the Republic,”
however, Santana expelled and exiled a number of the reformist legislators.
Observers continued to report that the government, other than Santana, was
all white.64
Adding their support to the opposition, families and soldiers in the out-
skirts of the capital and the center-­island distrusted new Dominican rule
and continued to support Unification. Through July 1845, a number of men
in Santa María refused to join the new Dominican forces, convinced that

28 | Chapter 1
the proj­ect was to reestablish slavery.65 Unification loyalists raised the Hai-
tian flag in San Juan, Las Matas, and Bánica in 1846; authorities from the
capital gave chase and made arrests as best they could. In the spring of the
following year, rumors of unification intrigue in ­these same central towns
­rose again. Only “brute force” pacified the towns, an observer noted.66 Some
military officials changed sides in the ensuing months, throwing their al-
legiance back to Unification.67 Arrests continued on the border and in the
capital, and rumors abounded. Within the year, Santana executed several
prominent Trinitarios and military men of color in the capital, including
General José Joaquín Puello and his b ­ rother, Gabino, just before Christmas.
The power strug­gle had reached a dramatic moment. All manner of town
elites ­were satisfied with the executions, including proponents of a French
protectorate. Unrepentant biographers ­later claimed Puello was simply “ar-
rogant” and “hostile to the white race.”68
By the end of the year, a small administration fi­nally solidified around
Santana, who ruled autocratically. Legislators borrowed 113 articles of the
new Dominican constitution directly from the defunct Port-­au-­Prince re-
form constitution of 1843.69 They kept much of the civil code, but they at-
tacked civil marriage and a recent expansion of ­women’s property rights.70
Santana filled his cabinet largely with loyal allies. Unification authorities had
appropriated church lands around the capital into state possession; San-
tana maintained control over ­these properties and simply distributed them
among his supporters.71 He pursued his opponents and perceived opponents
quickly and mercilessly. Some wrote anguished poetry from exile.72 Observ-
ers compared his government to a hierarchical “­family” and his forces, who
­were mostly from his home province, to his “henchmen.”73 One columnist
rhapsodized about Santana’s “tender and sweet name,” while another wrote
a thinly veiled poem critical of the “abuse of a f­ ather.”74 Archbishop Thomas
de Portes threatened excommunication to Santana’s opponents.75 Santana
wielded his military power constantly, justifying his heavy-­handed rule on
the pretext of permanent war with Haiti. Observers w ­ ere not convinced of
Santana’s feeble justification for his virtual dictatorship. “The War with the
Haitians is preoccupying weak spirits and serving as a pretext to the malin-
tentioned and egotistical, who benefit exclusively from the revolution,” one
Spanish official wrote.76
The rest of Separation was anticlimactic. A short-­lived successor to Rivière,
General Jean-­Louis Michel Pierrot, tried to mount a campaign to take the
Dominican capital. Dominican columnists appealed directly to a hy­po­thet­
i­cal Haitian readership to chide Pierrot for his hy­poc­risy and lament the

Life by Steam | 29
continued fighting. Pierrot was just “a puppet chosen by Boyeristas,” and se-
rious po­liti­cal men ­were fleeing the vio­lence, one argued.77 Capital city writers
became bellicose, even bloodthirsty. One poet rhapsodized about the “last
Haitian biting the dust” in ­battle.78 They told sentimental fables of Domini-
can unity and exaggerated Haitian excesses. Priests argued Separation was
divinely ordained; papers republished their sermons.79 The paper’s editors
announced that ­every issue of Santo Domingo’s first regular newspaper, El
Dominicano, would “refute the apocryphal writings” from official presses in
Port-­au-­Prince that claimed official Haitian victories.80 Dominican papers
ridiculed hawkish propaganda for its dishonesty to the Haitian public.81
They need not have bothered; or, rather, the ­whole island was in agreement.
Haitian enlisted men refused to mobilize, and Pierrot’s own troops overthrew
him. They did so, not casually, on the 27 February 1846.82 With the periodic
border spats all but uneventful, Dominican journalists turned their focus to
economic and po­liti­cal concerns.83
The new administration’s economic predicament was dire and urgent.
Foreign currency was the only hard specie, British and Saint Thomas mer-
chants demanded exorbitant loan terms, the government printed reams of
paper money, and even prominent men from the capital refused to lend the
new administration any funds. Beleaguered elites bragged of extroversion
and dreamed of foreign capital, condemning the supposed isolation of the
wealthier state from which they had just emerged. Haiti’s property protec-
tions, Dominican journalists and politicians argued, w ­ ere as “absurd as they
­were ridicu­lous.” In real­ity, many Haitian elites shared the same capital
84

development dreams, publishing front-­page critiques of barriers to foreign

investment and land owner­ship and promoting cash crop production.85 Do-
minican policy vis-­à-­vis immigration and investment, anyway, remained more
similar to Haitian law—or Mexican, which they also occasionally excoriated—­
than dif­f er­ent.86 Lawmakers passed a 30 ­percent tax on the sale of territory to
foreigners, who also had to rely on individual dispensation of naturalization
from the president.87 Critically, they maintained a Unification-­era policy of
restricting foreign traders to ­wholesale activity.88 They also left tariffs at
Unification levels.89
Boasting of their extroversion was essentially a rhetorical exercise, one
which Dominican elites could practice without par­tic­u­lar consideration for
consequences: few investors came. Meanwhile, the entire state bud­get hov-
ered between $200,000 and $300,000, declining slightly over time.90 Domes-
tic agriculture was insufficient even to maintain the population; all manner
of ­things ­were imported into towns of the republic, even staples like flour.91

30 | Chapter 1
Grass grew in capital city streets, and ­houses slowly crumbled.92 The trade
balance was abysmal. “In Saint Thomas se vende pero no se compra,” journalists
lamented.93

Geography, Racism, and Town Politics

Over the next two de­cades, a small group held power. Both of the republic’s
first long-­ruling presidents ­were wealthy men of color. Pedro Santana was
born in the rural center of the island and grew up in the ­cattle country of
the east. The son of a military hero, he confidently justified his power as
a heroic crusade, immune to outside assessment.94 Divine vindication and
a loyal army afforded him pronounced immunity to any sort of deference.
Years ­later, he pointedly received the Cuban governor barefoot.95 Imperial
outsiders directed racism, disdain, and pity t­ oward t­ hese presidents. White
French observers could not contain themselves from commenting on the
texture of President Báez’s hair, nor from mocking the impoverished girls of
the capital.96 The po­liti­cal coterie around the executive, meanwhile, except
for high military officials, was largely white. Baptized in twenty-­t wo years of
governance with the revolutionary Haitian state, ­these figures never publicly
breathed a word against e­ ither leader along racist lines, even as small snip-
pets of song from the capital betray how phenotype preoccupied them.97 As
power was reshuffling at the beginning of the republic, a few liberals did
speak about race openly, even if seeking to “transcend” it.98 Overwhelm-
ingly, however, elites renounced any division and repudiated discussion
entirely. Rather, they defended the republic in oblique, civilizationist terms,
and many poured massive intellectual energy into didactic anti-­Haitianism.
Both Santana and Báez assented and collaborated extensively with ­these
allies. ­There was only one press in the capital, owned by the state.99
Members of the small but po­liti­cally dominant elite who lived in the
capital ­were the protagonists of settler and protectorate schemes. Promi-
nent families ruled: the Delmonte, Alfau, Bobadilla, Galván, and Guridi,
among them. Many owned land around the capital and profited from the
sales of mahogany in other parts of the south, as far east as Higüey. Visitors
referred to “wealthy non-­workers” and “patrician families”; they reported,
too, on the families’ “faithful” servants.100 They established small private
seminaries to educate the “higher classes of society.”101 The sugar indus-
try near the Dominican capital had left its mark, ideologically and materi-
ally, de­cades ­after its absolute decline, but plans to revive it with Canary
Islander colonization proj­ects predated Separation.102 The ­daughter of one
large plantation owner, wealthy in property if not capital, ran one of the few

Life by Steam | 31
guest­houses in the capital.103 An intermittent diaspora of Dominican elites
to Cuba during the nineteenth ­century—­fleeing the Haitian Revolution,
fleeing Unification—­meant that a handful of wealthier residents in Santo
Domingo had ­family in Havana, Santiago de Cuba, San Juan, and other sites.
­Others had sojourned in Havana for ­legal education or po­liti­cal exile, and
they wrote poems about planning never to return. All casually avoided men-
tioning slavery.104
As scholars demonstrate in nearby republics, republican universalism
both “enabled and constrained” debates over po­liti­cal belonging. Even as
elites in the Dominican capital had to subdue overt racism in governance,
it circulated in normative language, po­liti­cal rumors, and private sphere.105
Travelers observed, “It is clear that the whites and the sons of Spain have
the most influence, even if they have a touch of color.”106 Antiblack rhymes
betrayed the limits of so-­called civil discourse, and prejudices restricted pat-
terns of settlement, as they did in neighboring islands.107 Writers in the capi-
tal ­were unabashedly bold in their phenotypic hierarchies:

For a ­woman to be a total beauty, she has to have:

Three white ­things;—­Her skin, teeth, and hands.
Three black;—­Her eyes, eyelashes, and eyebrows.
Three red;—­her lips, cheeks, and nails . . . 108
​

“Spanishness” offered them a useful, and vague, vocabulary to articulate

distance from Haiti. They authored b ­ attle hymns, urging, “Rise Up in Arms,
O Spaniards.” El Dominicano’s journalists sometimes called the eastern
109

troops Spanish, sometimes Dominican, within the same piece.110 ­Actual

connections to Spain ­were few, of course, as Spain refused to recognize the
republic for more than a de­cade. Elite affinities extended to regular adula-
tion of the south’s semirecent French connections. The richest Dominicans
toasted “à votre santé,” sent their ­children abroad for education, and contin-
ued, actively and constantly, to entertain French protectorate prospects.111
French tutors advertised in the capital.112 Responding uneasily to a foreign
observer at a dance, a columnist wrote, “Come on, speak franchement (openly)
with me (­because as you know, Sirs, in addition to the Gallicisms we do all
the time, we love mixing in a few French words, damn custom)!”113 The most
regular and impor­tant connections of the capital, meanwhile, w ­ ere with
nearby islands, sites of mahogany and c­ attle trade. Not a single Eu­ro­pean
ship came to Santo Domingo’s port in the first six months of 1848.114
Elite narrators remained purposefully elusive, maintaining a treacherous
silence on racism in public policy. From the first months of the republic,

32 | Chapter 1
columnists highlighted what they assessed as a ­labor shortage, an implicitly
antiblack strategy shared by elites in neighboring islands.115 “Depopulation
is the principal cause of our misery,” a columnist wrote in 1845, calling for
an immigration commission in each province.116 Lawmakers passed a colo-
nization law in 1847 offering land, advances, tools, and an exemption from
military ser­vice for arriving mi­grants. Legislators wanted them to be white,
even as they had cautiously avoided mentioning race. Rather, officials sim-
ply blocked plans for mi­grants of color individually.117 Similarly, individuals
privately lobbied for French support, the consul alleged, by slandering the
British flag as “the flag of the blacks.”118 Agents from the United States re-
ported similar race-­based, closed-­door entreaties.119 So did the Spanish.120
As they excoriated Haiti, then, they maintained a deafening silence on race
thinking domestically. Privately, Báez warned the Cuban and Puerto Rican
governors that Dominicans feared foreign occupation and slavery, and that
most Dominicans would not hesitate to call on Haiti for help.121 Publicly,
however, he blamed outside agitators, “slavery propagandists,” for t­ hese
fears. The archetype of the “slavery propagandist,” or of “denaturalized” or
“Haitianized” Dominicans, stood in for any elite ac­know­ledg­ment of popu­
lar discourses about foreign threats and dismissed Dominican antiracist
discourses.122
Elites challenged the legacy of the recent Haitian past and, along with it,
emancipation. Legislators affirmed commitment to a f­ ree-­soil republic; in
fact, at popu­lar vigilance, they affirmed it many times. In practice, however,
they made and ­imagined bargains that would have imperiled ­free l­ abor if they
had been realized, from colonization schemes to protectorate appeals to
slave powers. They did so repeatedly, even as they observed, evidently dis-
passionately, the popu­lar opposition that such plans provoked.123 Writers
set about anti-­Haitian mythmaking si­mul­ta­neously, anxious to create dis-
tance from a nation, the target of so much hemispheric aspersion, which
had only very recently been their own. Given the almost total lack of writ-
ten patrimony—­Thomas Madiou’s Histoire d’Haïti was the only history book
to circulate in the Dominican capital—­the story of Dominican difference
was an “extremely urgent necessity,” ­these columnists deci­ded.124 Capital
city journalists veered to the openly didactic, taking pains to explain anti-­
Haitian slurs for their audience with an asterisk.125 They worried the pub-
lic did not heed them. “No one writes h ­ ere ­because no one reads, and no
one reads ­because no one writes,” one paper’s motto fretted.126 Even elites
who ­were enthralled with nationhood felt deeply pessimistic of aggressive
international interests and their own po­liti­cal opponents. “Civilization! Is

Life by Steam | 33
the favorite word of 1855,” one columnist observed, “[but] it has shielded
rapacious politics on bayonet ­point.”127
Anti-­Haitianism, beyond appealing to North Atlantic powers, offered
elites a proxy to exorcise their anx­i­eties about their own po­liti­cal predica-
ment, an outlet for impatient and proscriptive visions of development, for
scorn t­oward popu­lar religious and marriage practices, and for their own
racism. It facilitated “raceless” republican fictions and maintained a puta-
tive domestic unity with rural and poor Dominicans, especially of color, by
invoking a target that was simply, elusively, external.128 Elite unease t­ oward
rural Dominicans—­over whom they had precious ­little influence—­was usu-
ally oblique, but it was constant. Columnists criticized small farming plots
as an “excuse for laziness,” critiqued poor Dominicans’ work habits, and
praised the “absolute obedience” of soldiers.129 Adopting a script of a Hai-
tian “other,” they made accusations of “relaxed habits,” a supposed lack of
religion, “libertine” cohabitation, and so on, hoping to discipline common
Dominicans si­mul­ta­neously.130 Legislators passed vagrancy laws, although
they ­were prob­ably as unenforceable as t­hose of the Unification period.131
Authors argued that domestic vagrancy was “the seed of so many vices” and
a deterrent to both local development and international investment.132 They
urged the creation of civic honors for productive domestic laborers, a practice
the Haitian government already embraced.133 When discussions veered to
leisure and religion, tensions mounted perceptibly. Anxious commentators
tried to “deport” merengue back to Haiti, calling it “horrible” and “loath-
some.”134 One columnist described the dance: “When a merengue starts,
¡Holy God! One man grabs the other one’s partner, the other one runs around
­because he ­doesn’t know what to do, this guy grabs the arm of a young
­woman . . . ​every­thing is confusion. . . . ​Could that be agreeable to any-
one?”135 Columnists acknowledged familiarity with unease. In one i­ magined
Spanish-­Kreyòl dialogue, a Dominican character remonstrates a Haitian
man for allegedly allowing himself to be abused by his leader. At the close
of the conversation, the Dominican man bitterly rejects the latter’s offer of
a guangá (a “disgusting talisman . . . ​of h ­ orse­hair, salt and ashes,” the char-
acter claims derisively), but the bilingual conversation—in all its po­liti­cal,
religious, and linguistic context—is perfectly understood by both parties.136
Poorer Dominicans lived alongside the wealthy in the capital, which was
as isolated from the north as “two dif­f er­ent countries” but tied to ­cattle plains
and woodcutting in the nearby south.137 The town was materially poor, with
few stores and paltry regional trade.138 ­Because foreign merchants could
only be ­wholesale traders, however, a local market did flourish.139 Traders

34 | Chapter 1
brought inland products—­fruit, corn, root vegetables, and small amounts
of tobacco, raw sugar, and coffee—­downstream by two-­person canoes for
consumption in the capital and shipped logwood out of the country. On the
banks of the Ozama, a small market bustled for hours.140 In Santo Domingo
and other towns where individuals confronted prejudice and structural in-
equalities, it is prob­ably true that some individuals sought to assimilate the
privileges of whiteness and anti-­Haitianism, but it is also certainly true that
residents of color proffered explicit discourses of esteem, including total
rejection of ­these norms, in direct response. Dominicans of color some-
times used “white” as a ­simple shorthand for “foreigner,” similar to usage
in Haiti.141 During Unification, anonymous poets celebrated the upending
of racist order in the capital.142 Another unknown poet offered reassurance
to black Dominican listeners who endured in­equality, promising that some-
day, “the omelet would flip to the other side.”143
A number of distinct Afro-­Dominican organ­izations ­shaped the capital
landscape. The black regiments remained a separate force years ­after in­de­
pen­dence, receiving a “large number” of men escaping from slavery in Cuba,
Puerto Rico, and other islands into their ranks as soldiers and officers.144
Churches, brotherhoods like the Cofradía of San Juan Bautista, and mutual
aid socie­ties blossomed.145 African American mi­grants, who arrived in the
1820s at the invitation of President Boyer, maintained a sizable mutual aid
society and English-­language Methodist church in the capital in the 1850s.146
The small capital outlay required to participate in the market meant that
African American ­women from Baltimore and other sites integrated them-
selves easily into the public space of the town as vendors, selling fruits and
other wares. They joined ­others on the streets of the town who ­were curious
about news from abroad and ready to debate with travelers about slavery.
They asked visitors for news of their former homes, but they also informed
witnesses of the horrors they had suffered ­there.147 Travelers reported that
black Dominicans w ­ ere loath to serve as servants, and that when elites
sought replacements from Saint Thomas and other islands, ­these individu-
als promptly chose in­de­pen­dent living as well. One white U.S. traveler called
them “impertinent.”148
Unlike the group in po­liti­cal power, most capital residents felt a deep
wariness ­toward Eu­ro­pean powers. Spanish warships had demanded that is-
landers salute their flag in the 1830s, and many residents felt an uneasy “fear
of the uniformed” (miedo a los uniformados).149 When a Spanish ship docked in
1846—on its way to Cap-­Haïtien to demand reparations—­townspeople left
“joys of mardi gras to watch in somber silence,” distrustful of the few Spanish

Life by Steam | 35
authorities who disembarked, an observer remarked.150 Spain’s slaveholding
proj­ects ­were always close to Dominican shores. The French consul main-
tained that foreign interference would inspire “serious re­sis­tance,” fears of
slavery, and calls for Haitian reunification in the capital.151 Years l­ater, the
British consul reported much the same.152 At least since the 1820s, men and
­women from Puerto Rico are on rec­ord as having reached the Dominican
capital; how many elusively crossed the Mona passage in smaller crafts to
other sites, perhaps with their w ­ hole families, is difficult to estimate.153 Se-
cret antislavery socie­ties, or­ga­nized by Ramón Emeterio Betances and other
Puerto Rican activists, may have ushered an increasing number to Domini-
can shores. An unknowable number of Cubans arrived, too, on the northern
coast and in the capital. The British consul remarked in 1861 that many had
“enjoyed liberty for many years.”154 One Chinese tailor slipped out of Cuba
on a passport to Jamaica, heading instead to Santo Domingo.155 The gover-
nor of Puerto Rico warned that mi­grants of “very advanced po­liti­cal opinions
and of very dangerous tendencies” sought out Dominican soil, prob­ably
precisely to win this freedom.156
Outside the capital, the landscape bore witness to a long history of sugar
slavery and of in­de­pen­dent black settlement. San Carlos, an extramuro com-
munity less than two kilo­meters northwest of the old city, lodged many
traveling day laborers and ­others passing through to the southern wood mar-
kets, Baní, and other towns.157 The settlement had a small wooden church
and about a hundred huts made with palm leaves, distinct both in their man-
ner of construction and in their purposeful arrangement amid vegetation.
As much for its distinctive construction as for the residents’ skin hue, the
community had “the most marked aspect of an African p ­ eople of Zambeze
[sic] or Lake Nianza [sic],” a Spanish soldier supposed. Its “original and
158

happy” arrangement contrasted with the “Eu­ro­pean taste and aspect” of the
nearby capital.159 To the west, five small rivers converged to San Cristóbal, long
a site of large estate sugar production. In 1822, residents seized a plantation
that had enslaved 145 p ­ eople, transforming it into small-­scale production
of raw sugar and rum, which they continued to trade in Santo Domingo,
along with vari­ous foodstuffs.160 Los Mina, chartered as a f­ ree black town in
the late seventeenth ­century to receive ­people fleeing slavery from Saint-­
Domingue, was just east of the capital. Monte Plata, to the north, ­housed
one of the black regiments whose members had opposed Separation. For
­those returning to the capital from Monte Plata, foreboding landscape lay
ahead: the Pass of the Dead and then the Cold Sugar Mill (Yngenio Frio).
Maroon settlements endured farther west. Afro-­Dominican residents of La

36 | Chapter 1
Fig. 1.2 Detail from Wm. M. Gabb’s “Geological Map of the Republic of Santo
­Domingo,” 1872.

Vereda, a settlement outside of Baní, preferred and cultivated selective iso-

lation throughout the colonial period and all of the nineteenth c­ entury.161
A small, fairly endogamous elite lived in town.162 North of Baní, members
of a maroon enclave founded San José de Ocoa. Paths ­were so tight and ar-
duous that animals could barely pass, much less rest. “One false step or the
twist of a girth would have thrown us into eternity,” a traveler marveled.163
Almost a week’s r­ide distant was the Cibao valley, the most populous,
prosperous, and agriculturally intensive Dominican region. Travelers took
pains to assert the whiteness of the ­people they spoke to in the Cibao, and
the often-­repeated pronouncements of “whites of the earth” also emanate
from their reports.164 The largest town, Santiago de los Caballeros, boasted
a bustling artisan and retail class that had benefited from Haitian protec-
tionism.165 A small urban elite, la gente de primera, claimed roots in Spanish
colonial families, even if their prosperity was quite recent. Pedro Francisco

Life by Steam | 37
Bonó reflected that his grand­mother, “of one of the richest classes of plant-
ers [of Saint-­Domingue] . . . ​drank to France with ­every pore” a­ fter she ar-
rived to Santiago in exile.166 Elites lived in the town center but also in rural
areas, alongside poor families. Lack of capital meant that landowners ac-
quiesced to informal sharecropping or squatting rather than waged work.167
In the towns, liberal writers i­magined isolated, noble, bronzed peasants,
the poorest of whom w ­ ere “ugly, but strong and healthy.”168 Mythical fig-
ures like the black comegente (“­people eater”) haunted public consciousness
in the Cibao valley, embodying the wealthy region’s troubled and inchoate
relationship to the island’s revolutionary past.169 Residents had strong com-
mercial ties, mostly via the north coast but also overland, connecting them
to Cap-­Haïtien, a richer city than most Dominican port towns. Wealthy men
like Teodoro Heneken traveled regularly to the commercial and po­liti­cal cen-
ters of the island, Santiago de los Caballeros, Puerto Plata, Cap, and the two
capitals.170
Cibao politicians, easily richer than many in the southern capital, felt
Santana’s and Báez’s subjugation acutely, but they could not easily rally
popu­lar support. Báez dismissed the province, writing, “El Ozama thinks,
Cibao works.”171 A flourishing literary culture grew in Santiago and other
towns, along with progressive socie­ties and Masonic lodges.172 The members
­were men educated in Havana, Paris, London, and occasionally Philadel-
phia; they took a dim view of what they perceived as the provincialism and
antidemo­cratic impulses of Báez and Santana and southern oligarchs gen-
erally.173 Anti-­Santana songs, stories, sayings, and décimas (short poems)
abounded. The presidents’ repeated printing of paper money caused deflation
that devastated tobacco merchants.174 Markets, roads, and rivers led north,
to the línea noroeste (northwest line) of settlement and trade of tobacco, fine
woods, and other products. Recueros (muleteers) and prácticos (guides) man-
aged to travel t­ hese routes well enough, but urban Cibao residents’ integra-
tion even with surrounding tobacco cultivators was not extensive.175 Tobacco
production led to centripetal settlement patterns in the surrounding coun-
tryside. Farms could be scattered around the areas of best soil; tobacco was
light, transportable, and slow to rot. One historian estimates that an indi-
vidual cultivator could produce anywhere from four hundred to two thou-
sand pounds of tobacco a year, with fairly rudimentary technology.176 The
material culture was meager, and most rural cultivators prob­ably relied on
­horses to counteract the physical isolation, even in Santiago’s immediate
surroundings. Overland travel south, meanwhile, was so arduous that most

38 | Chapter 1
news from the capital reached, circuitously, from the northern coast. ­There
­were no places to sleep except for “the big bed” (the ground) or a hammock,
and many ­horses, already expensive, could not weather the trip.177
Residents of Puerto Plata ­were a keenly cosmopolitan public. Mi­grant
and commercial networks linked them regularly to Eu­rope, the north coast
of Haiti, the Turks and Caicos, Saint Thomas, southern Florida, and other
sites. A f­ ree port since 1756, Puerto Plata earned the nickname “la Novia del
Atlántico” (the Bride of the Atlantic) for the town’s intense macroregional
connections. Many residents w ­ ere bi-­or trilingual.178 Germany dominated
the tobacco trade, but the roster of ships that sailed in and out of the Puerto
Plata—­which funneled lumber and Cibao tobacco to Denmark, Bremen,
and other primarily Eu­ro­pean sites—­was considerable. At about two or
three ships per day, it amounted to nearly ten times the traffic of the south-
ern capital.179 For regional trade, British and Danish vessels traded vari­ous
goods for Dominican foodstuffs. The Turks and Caicos, which traded salt,
depended completely on this exchange.180 ­People came, too. Mi­grants from
Saint Thomas, Tortola, Nassau, Providenciales, G ­ rand Turk, Jamaica, Saint
Kitts, Nevis, Martinique, Guadeloupe, the United States, Germany, France,
and elsewhere trickled into Puerto Plata, Monte Cristi, and other north
coast towns. A profusion of monikers like “el Inglés” (the En­glishman) or
“la isleña” (the islander) highlights the ready manner with which ­these mi­
grants ­were received, and visitors described black mi­grants who earned a
steady living in town as boatmen, laundry ­women, carpenters, and other pro-
fessions.181 Hundreds of African American émigrés came to Puerto Plata, es-
tablishing multilingual schools, churches, and mutual aid socie­ties. Groups
came at Boyer’s invitation, through w ­ aters long familiar to Franco-­Haitian
corsairs.182 ­Others escaped to freedom in following years. Individuals arrived
from South Carolina and Georgia, often through the Keys, leading book-
keepers to rec­ord all of them as Floridian.183 Trade and travel united the
north coast. Cap-­Haïtien was just one day’s sail away. Monte Cristi residents
sent wood along for resale in Puerto Plata, but they also engaged in an intense
­cattle and goat trade westward, to northern sections of Haiti.184 ­People some-
times relocated along the coast a­ fter major life events. Theresa Smith, for
example, moved back to Cap-­Haïtien from Puerto Plata a­ fter her husband’s
passing.185
Regional mi­grants fleeing slavery also built communities alongside Do-
minicans in the Samaná peninsula. Faithful groups established an African
Methodist church as early as the 1780s. When President Boyer issued an

Life by Steam | 39
invitation for African American émigrés in 1824, hundreds made a perma-
nent home in Samaná, in settlements like Protestant Heights, ­Free Fort,
and Palenque.186 Where the mi­grants to many other sites had eventually
moved to nearby towns, on the peninsula, many chose farming, shipbuild-
ing, and other activities.187 In relative isolation, they made a community,
working on sixteen-­acre plots. By midcentury, the peninsula was sparsely
populated—­fewer than two thousand ­people—­but it boasted a healthy
trade of foodstuffs to the Turks and Caicos.188 Like Puerto Plata, the com-
munity was actively multilingual. Town residents and visitors conversed in
En­glish, Spanish, and Kreyòl.189 Prob­ably the most regular regional news
arrived from the nearby British islands, although the healthy salt-­cowhide
trade and a small stream of mi­grants connected them to Puerto Plata as
well. Residents kept in contact with ­family and pastors in Philadelphia and
other North American cities. Community residents remained Protestant,
sometimes marrying with Turks and Caicos Islanders. They wrote to U.S.
congregations praising the freedom of religion. “We enjoy our home-
steads, and our freedom of worship, in neighborly peace,” one parishioner
reported.190
Filibuster intrigue, slave ship traffic, and imperial threats made north
coasters very attentive to regional politics and vigilant about anticolonial-
ism and antislavery. Puerto Plata authorities rushed into action when a
suspected slaver docked in their harbor, for example. Against the protest of
Spanish merchants, town officials immediately embargoed the vessel and
sent the captain to Santo Domingo to stand trial, where he and his crew ­were
convicted.191 Despite their relative isolation, Samaná residents ­were keenly
aware of foreign designs on the peninsula percolating in the capital and
nearby ­waters.192 An 1822 French expedition betrayed interest in the strategic
peninsula that was de­cades old.193 In the 1840s, French diplomats argued that
a series of specious debts o ­ ught to justify their occupation of the peninsula,
and they sent warships on numerous missions t­here.194 By the 1850s, U.S.
envoys angled for plans of their own. They very nearly negotiated for per-
petual rent and a ­free port. The British and French sent warships; negotiations
summarily ceased.195 More than a few recent community members—­like
“Norberto [Ebora] el isleño, María la isleña”—­became mixed up in antico-
lonial organ­izing in Puerto Plata and elsewhere.196 Many maintained their
first citizenship. In 1854, a group of Samaná residents traveled all the way
from the peninsula to the capital to oppose a proposed U.S. treaty. Santana
meant “to trick the population of color to subjugate them to slavery,” they
warned.197

40 | Chapter 1
New Terms for the Dictionary: Rural Identities and Politics
Many, if not most, Dominicans resided far from the coasts and towns, where
they lived in rich autonomy and material paucity. Perhaps 8,000 lived in the
capital, per one estimate, and about 12,000 lived in the rest of the towns
of the country.198 About 200,000 other Dominicans, more or less, lived dis-
persed in expansive rural areas, with perhaps just 7.4 inhabitants per square
mile in 1860, compared with Puerto Rico’s 169.199 Almost everywhere but
the Cibao, land pressure was very low. “The population of the African race
are so spread out at points that one can travel large distances without the
one hut in which to take refuge from the sun,” a Spanish traveler complained
in 1860. Few roads, dense vegetation, and rain-­choked waterways made his
travel even more difficult.200 ­Little long-­distance overland transport meant
that most rural communities thrived in relative isolation. Since the colonial
period, Dominicans of color sought respite from exploitation through rural
pursuits, including ranching.201 Scholars like David Barry Gaspar have
emphasized the separate social and psychological space carved out even in
the most intense modes of plantation slavery by the enslaved. This in­de­pen­
dence and selective impenetrability would have been even more pronounced
in the autonomous rural contexts of postslavery Santo Domingo.202 Narra-
tives of national identity and difference forged in the capital amounted to a
foreign construct, or simply an additional lexicon. In describing themselves,
rural Dominicans throughout the territory might have invoked a discourse
of relationship rather than describe a unitary identity.203 More likely still,
within their community they ­were endowed with plural histories and plural
identities.204 Mostly, they governed themselves.
Rural Dominicans, even the most poor, lived semi-­independently. Even
near the capital, just one month’s work woodcutting afforded three months’
leave.205 ­Others took ­cattle-­trading paths leading west into Haitian territory,
as they had for more than a ­century. In highlands, rural dwellers subsisted
on vari­ous tactics of slash-­and-­burn farming, animal grazing, capture of
semiferal pigs and other animals. Semisedentary monteros, who lived in this
way, might also work for a ­family who raised c­ attle without dramatic strati-
fication.206 ­Those who lived in ser­vice to a landowner did so in exchange for
land use and other rights, rarely for salary.207 Some looked to wealthier fami-
lies for credit, employment, or godparentage. In the south particularly, large
landowners involved in lumber and ­cattle held considerable influence over
poorer area residents.208 Even in t­ hose areas, however, the extent of available
land greatly eased de­pen­dency. Residents had ­free-­ranging pigs and ­cattle

Life by Steam | 41
of their own, and they often cleared dif­fer­ent lands e­ very few years. Some-
times ­women managed farm plots as men traveled.209 Common lands ­were
usually not clearly delineated, but negotiation and the idea of community
belonging and usufruct ­were ave­nues of access.210 The system of common
land use rights, terrenos comuneros—­which had flustered President Boyer in
his attempts to commercialize agriculture in the 1820s—­remained well into
the twentieth ­century.211 Only products near natu­ral ports or small-­scale
transport of rivers moved longer distances. Pack animals could carry to-
bacco and cacao, light but valuable, and livestock moved themselves. Sugar
in Azua and lumber in northern and southern pockets ­were the other prod-
ucts that traveled by mule or small boat, without refinement. Agriculture did
not transform substantively from the early nineteenth ­century, nor would it
for de­cades.212
In their obligations, eastern rural residents prob­ably behaved similarly
to rural residents of other islands, leaving jobs when they felt they could live
in­de­pen­dently for a while.213 Rural dwellers’ party allegiances may have been
more stable than party politics in towns, as land patronage was readily avail-
able.214 As other scholars have argued, although caudillo lit­er­a­ture has shied
away from personalistic explanations, t­here was nothing at all illogical about
­either president’s personal appeal, as far as the influence of e­ ither actually ex-
tended. Reciprocity, mythogenic appeal, and the language of “moral preser-
vation” sustained them.215 In decentralized and capricious circumstances, the
idea that a power­ful individual, not a distant state, might disseminate justice
was an appealing recourse.216 Fear also governed, as rivalry led to displays of
public vio­lence. “Santana was very popu­lar among rural leaders and the masses
of the countryside. . . . M ​ any thousands viewed him with re­spect and even
more saw him with fear, true terror,” observed Alejandro Guridi, a onetime
supporter of Santana.217 In center-­island areas, rumors circulated that Báez’s
supporters, too, had superhuman capacities, including magical bullets.218
In ­every situation, however, the relative abundance of land abated in­equality
and increased rural Dominicans’ leverage. A general aversion to state
interference—­only irrelevant and possibly costly or disruptive—­prob­ably
typified the attitude of many. While some might have been caught up in the
to-­and-­fro of caudillo anglings, o ­ thers likely abstained from the enterprise.
“He did not follow any government at all,” several neighbors l­ ater observed
of a day laborer who had been accused of rebellion.219
Rural residents constructed for themselves a dif­fer­ent moral universe,
with dif­fer­ent po­liti­cal imperatives from the politicians of the capital. They
embraced an epochal and moral sense of time: the Haitian Revolution, for

42 | Chapter 1
example, ended “the time of the whites”; o ­ thers remembered “when the
whites hung” or made a ­future prophecy, “when the whites hang.”220 Simi-
larly, villains and heroes could transcend temporality. The legend of Don
Melchor, greedy slave owner from San Cristóbal who met his end falling
from the sky as he tried to reach heaven, endured from the 1500s as a caution-
ary tale.221 Fighting, emancipation, natu­ral disasters, migration, illnesses,
drought, pests, famine, and the arrival of strangers punctuated po­liti­cal be-
liefs and epistemologies, even as ­labor modes and technologies remained
fairly constant. Interpersonal connections ranged from autarky, to ties be-
tween extended ­families, to bonds of formal patronage. Some communi-
ties may have valued periodic re­distribution from their more prominent
members.222 Authority sprang from multiple reserves, from the geo­graph­i­
cally close to the celestially distant. Settlements may have remembered their
found­ers with special veneration; it is likely, furthermore, that residents based
their claims to local belonging on a genealogy of kinship.223
Distinctiveness and in­de­pen­dence ­were fundamental to the language of
everyday life. Dominican residents of southern coast towns ­were fascinated
by what they saw as the extreme, even super­natu­ral, solitude of the nearby
mountain areas. Town residents claimed to have captured biembienes—­several
maroon individuals so isolated that they supposedly had no language—in
the 1860s.224 One traveler to the center of the island marveled at distinctive
rural vocabulary: “New terms for the dictionary! ­Here, to say ­there ­were a
bunch of ­things or many ­people: había pila. For a gathering of troops, embar-
bascáos. For saddlebags, cerones, for jacket, celeque, to say that anyone could do
something, esgarita, to do something on purpose, expresmente, for rolls, güal-
imones, for the flies in t­ hese areas, prieta, to catch someone by surprise, they
caught him nete.”225 French and Kreyòl loanwords and regionally specific
rural vocabulary demonstrated wholly distinct cultural inflections, from re-
gion to sparsely populated region. One scholar has argued for as many as
eight dif­fer­ent regions whose geography and agriculture all distinguished
them from the next in the center of the island alone.226 Well beyond endur-
ing maroon settlements in the central mountains, rural residents believed
that biembienes populated the hills, sometimes characterized as ominous
creatures, sometimes ­human. Biembienes’ name evoked an invitation of the
­people who had escaped slavery in de­cades past: “Come! Come!”
The administration’s reach was small. Although the constitution called for
five regional courts, just two existed, in Santo Domingo and Santiago de los
Caballeros, and their rec­ords ­were minimal. No one translated the civil code
out of French ­after Separation, and given the dispersal of the population and

Life by Steam | 43
 the costs of traveling, many cases dragged on extensively.227 Most rural resi-
dents likely resolved their disputes beyond formal proceedings. The wealthy
administered justice extrajudicially as well, “without soiling our hands with
­these expensive nuisances—­courts and prisons.”228 Government legislation
was similarly informal. In the capital, charisma and military prowess had
supplanted written dicta since the days of Juan Sánchez Ramírez (“all seems
to have been by [his] verbal order,” a con­temporary observer marveled in
1811).229 Buenaventura Báez and Pedro Santana, similarly, governed largely
by decree. As the earliest arriving Spanish-­Cuban officials lamented in 1861,
“no fixed legislation” ruled, leaving citizens in the hands of t­ hese authori-
ties.230 The executive dictated law according to his inclinations, even as he
paid lip ser­vice to popu­lar ­will.231
Military authority reached somewhat further. Most served irregularly,
often by conscription, which many resented.232 “Al pobre no lo llaman para
cosa buena” (the poor person is never called on for good t­ hings), one writer
­later ventriloquized.233 ­There w
­ ere few funds to pay soldiers, so local admin-
istrators rewarded men with rank and commissions.234 Borrowing structure
from the Haitian National Guard, regional divisions ­were self-­ruled and de-
centralized, and soldiers still used some French commands.235 “Each division
general is a ­little president of his own province, and pronounces any odious
decree, ‘in virtue of Article 210,’ even though that power is only conceded to
the president,” an observer claimed.236 The Dominican army boasted at least
330 officers by 1861, prob­ably many more, and officers had special rights,
both for logging and to distribute ­wholesale goods brought in by foreign
merchants.237 ­Those at the highest ranks at times ruled abusively in towns.
“He ­doesn’t re­spect married ­women, girls, maidens, nor honorable men nor
any class of person,” read one complaint about a habitually drunk general,
“and he is a disturber of the peace wherever he arrives.”238 Rank-­and-­file sol-
diers prob­ably enjoyed much less prominence. They prob­ably made claims
to military sacrifice as a mode of po­liti­cal belonging, rather than a language
of rights.239 As with other armies, however, po­liti­cal elites valued their obedi-
ence.240 “Our former life was the life of a soldier, or the life of a citizen who
armed himself,” one journalist in the capital remarked, “but ­here on out . . . ​
that should change.”241 Journalists frequently lamented the burden of mili-
tary expenses on the administration’s meager bud­get.242
Spiritual knowledge informed Dominican life intensely. Pop­ul­ ar religious
practice differed from the doctrinal “fervent Catholicism” of urban elites, but
it was by no means less integral to daily life.243 Religious brotherhoods, in fact,
­were an impor­tant rural social network, and members administered them

44 | Chapter 1
largely outside of clergy supervision.244 In homes, popu­lar practice prob­ably
had more of what some sociologists have termed a “matriarchal core,” which
not only venerated female figures such as the Virgin Mary but also afforded
spiritual importance to female prac­ti­tion­ers in general, as devotees, ritual
experts, or simply w ­ omen of faith.245 The practice of promesas and personal
altars, wakes and pro­cessions for deceased community members, and reli-
gious festivals and pilgrimages connected individuals directly to divinities
and to each other. Collective rites and the veneration of a regional patron
saint w ­ ere impor­tant organ­izing princi­ples.246 Annual pilgrimages to the
Virgin of Altagracia in Higüey united the faithful across the territory.247 All
of t­ hese modifications of priest-­centric practice—­from the authority of re-
gional brotherhoods to practices of divination—­disseminated alternative
authority among community members. Like Obeah in other islands, Domini-
cans embraced epistemologies of justice that w ­ ere parallel to and in­de­
pen­dent of bourgeois discourses of legality. Religious fraternal socie­ties
248

(cofradías) existed as rural o­ rders just as they did in towns, like the black
Brotherhood of Saint Antoine in the Cibao valley. “­These blacks have always
lived in a state of in­de­pen­dence . . . ​which has never permitted [officials]
to collect any goods from them,” an official complained in 1806.249 Scholars
would judge the 1844 invocation “Viva la República Dominicana y la Virgen
Maria!” to be a “naive and charming cry,” but the marriage of the two was
not surprising.250
In their faith, Dominicans and Haitians shared overlapping lexicons, in
a connection so fundamental that Dominicans and Haitians venerated the
Virgin of Altagracia together for centuries.251 Call-­and-­response ­music and
liturgy, an emphasis on the Holy Spirit, and emotional conversion experi-
ences characterized practice across the island. All-­day dances on saints’ days
and other festivals embodied joyous or mournful expressions of faith.252
Drumming added an impor­tant ritual ele­ment in some areas, including
palos de muerte (to commemorate the deceased) and fiestas or bailes de palo (to
celebrate saints’ days).253 Disapproving outsiders remarked that Dominican
cele­brations became raucous and that “singing and shouting” a­ fter baptisms
was common.254 One might seek to clean up or improve one’s luck, bind a
spouse or lover, gain protection from a resguardo, and seek the aid (or ven-
geance) of the deceased.255 Many faithful performed special veneration for
saints, like San Miguel, whose importance crossed pantheons, and Erzulie,
Ogou, and marasa twins also appeared.256 Especially in center-­island areas,
one might have appealed to papabocó or papalúa ritual experts, and some
eastern faithful accorded special authority, or “generative potency,” to western

Life by Steam | 45
prac­ti­tion­ers.257 That authority might transcend time and space, even in-
dividual bodies, in what one scholar describes as “traveling spirithood.”258
Dominican families’ mourning rituals—­nine-­day funeral vigils and rites like
baquini for deceased infants—­evoked ­those in Jamaica, Colombia, Puerto
Rico, and elsewhere.259 The repetition of ­these rites, one year and seven
years ­after the death, underscore the central importance of ancestors. Fig-
ures like la jupia and la ciguapa (taína spirits who roamed the fields), nimitas
(glowing firefly-­like creatures who watched over the living), and potentially
malevolent creatures like barsélicos, galipotes, zánganos, and bacás all embodied
the vibrant connection between the Dominican countryside’s ­human in-
habitants and other life.260 At harvest time, Dominicans performed l­ abor in
some areas with the collective help of neighbors and extended ­family. Their
collective work songs, convite, echoed konbits of the west.261
In dif­fer­ent commercial and familial cir­cuits, Dominicans traveled to
Haiti often. Whole families traveled regularly from Puerto Plata and Santiago
to Cap-­Haïtien, for example. José del Carmen Rodríguez’s wife was Haitian,
and she had ­family throughout Haiti, whom she had not seen in eigh­teen
years. José, his wife, their four c­ hildren, and “un peón” made the trip to visit
her relatives, perhaps to stay.262 Some had left spouses and parents in Haiti
and hoped to return. One fourteen-­year-­old boy, Rudolfo Ovidio, wanted to
meet his m ­ other’s ­family. Nicasio Jiménez reported that his wife’s m ­ other
and ­sister had been living in Haiti “ever since the Separation,” when he in-
tended to visit them nearly twenty years ­later.263 Some moved multiple times
in their life, like José Maria Sanchez, who moved from Higüey to Cap, over-
land, via Dajabón, as a child. He ­later settled elsewhere in the center of the
island, farther to the south.264 Southern residents traveled to the northern
coast by ship, as Anna María LaPlace did, leaving Santo Domingo for Cap-­
Haïtien, for reasons of f­ amily.265 Haiti’s government paper published acts of
naturalization. Dominican w ­ omen could contract their own naturalization
in the west.266 North-­coast commercial trade in both directions was brisk.
Meanwhile, small-­scale Haitian merchants, pacotilleurs, regularly traveled all
the way to Higüey, selling their goods to country ­people along their route.267
In the porous southern center-­island region, migration was as old as the ma-
roon communities that had welcomed fleeing slaves in the colonial era and
the ­cattle trade that still burgeoned. Settlement patterns amounted to living
geographic memory of the semirecent past.
Residents of the border or, more accurately, the center-­island region in
the south, ­were aware of but strategically removed from po­liti­cal proj­ects of
the island capitals. Relatively less direct travel connected the island capitals,

46 | Chapter 1
Fig. 1.3 ​A grave in Jacmel. Biencité Santana’s given and f­ amily names suggest he was
one of many who had ­family from both sides of the island.

which could take as long as two weeks in unfavorable conditions. News of

Santo Domingo often arrived in Port-­au-­Prince via relay in Saint Thomas or
Turks and Caicos Islands, and vice versa. By contrast, bustling ­cattle and
wood trade connected the “deep south” (sur profundo) with the west, and
coffee came eastward. By midcentury, ­there may have been some interna-
tional enclaves of individuals and families engaged in wood selling on both
sides of the island for de­cades.268 “­Free trade across the border” continued to
be a primary negotiation concern in 1850s treaties.269 In some center-­island
areas, settlement was shifting. In the nearly ninety years since the Treaty of
Aranjuez had fixed borders on the island, decades-­long demographic shifts
blurred the bound­aries of ethnicity and community. Hinche or Hincha, in
the north-­central area of the island, slowly transformed, becoming more
Haitian, a pacific shift that became obvious at Separation. Several de­cades
­later, a man recalled that Separation had provoked something of a land grab,
with wood sellers quickly coming forth with specious titles to continue to do
business as they had before.270
In the center of the island, both governments had a collection of military
outposts, but l­ittle more. In areas of so much commingling, “nation” was as
much a tactic as it was a community. Residents’ identity and filiation

Life by Steam | 47
overlapped, intermingled, and transformed. Travelers and residents regu-
larly negotiated differences, perhaps through humor, where they w ­ ere not
irrelevant.271 Towns like Neiba ­were founded on a centuries-­long history
of marronage from the west. Expressions for the fundamental language of
every­d­ay life—­words for hunger, fear, markets, scandals, and so on—­easily
blended center-­island Kreyòl and center-­island Spanish.272 Town residents
of San Juan de la Maguana, and o ­ thers to the north, lived off c­ attle trade
to Haiti. For c­ attle traders, Port-­au-­Prince was much closer than Santo Do-
mingo.273 Not particularly loyal to the east (much less “anti-­Haitian”), peasants,
­cattle rustlers, and military men of central and central-­southern regions of
the island presented a direct challenge to po­liti­cal authority. Whole towns
had reputations for fluid and charged allegiances. Neiba was of “well-­known
poor disposition,” a French consul observed in 1847.274 Neiba’s “denatural-
ized citizens . . . ​threaten the country with anarchy,” one Dominican paper
warned, a de­cade ­later.275 Haitian authorities also conceived of the region as
a space for criminals, and they accused the Dominican government of sup-
porting ­cattle rustling.276 Dominican authorities returned the accusations,
and they repeatedly complained that lower-­level Haitian military officials
sought to spread “letters of seduction” to Dominican military officials and
other residents.277
Po­liti­cal schemes in the center-­island area never ceased. Santana’s oppo-
nents repeatedly fled to the area to regroup.278 Local military men espoused
goals that ranged from personal military ambitions, to vague declarations
of subregional autonomy, to outright opposition to the Dominican state
and proposals of reunification with Haiti. Capital city papers described
their actions as “criminal” or “denationalized.” Some became infamous; their
nicknames—­“el Quirí,” “Cabulla,” and so on—­well known to authorities and
the public alike. Their goals ­were similar to ­those of the ambitious separatists
and prominent local leaders in Haiti and other state periphery sites through-
out the Ca­rib­bean. Officers invoked national rivalries for their own purposes
and argued that their ser­vices, rather than any ethnolinguistic claim, af-
forded them belonging in the national structure they chose to support.279
Historian Ismael Hernández Flores argues that the youth of the region moved
on from any rancor that had touched the region in 1844, quickly returning to
centuries-­old patterns of community, trade, and po­liti­cal collaboration.280

Provocation, Instability, and Revolution

Economic crises, diplomatic aggression, popu­lar discontent, and po­liti­cal
vio­lence constantly plagued the new republic. France, Spain, and the United

48 | Chapter 1
States all withheld recognition, seeking leverage for concessions, especially
the cession of the Samaná peninsula.281 Britain, the first to recognize the
republic in 1850, actively sought to stymie other treaties. To forestall U.S.
influence, collect debt, or simply b­ ecause it did not please their sensibilities
that two “negro states” be divided, both British and French agents occasion-
ally lobbied for reunification of the island.282 ­These authorities ­were nakedly
interventionist in Dominican local politics, too. Their ­favor fell to the cau-
dillo they perceived to be more receptive to concessions. The French tended
to f­ avor Báez for his repeated (although far from exclusive) annexation en-
treaties. U.S. agents deci­ded Santana would give them the concessions they
sought, and one Spanish diplomat initiated a citizenship scheme that of-
fered tantalizing (and disruptive) po­liti­cal immunity. Commercial agents
from the United States, a growing presence, fantasized about large-­scale
land speculating and colonization. As they became more ambitious, t­hese
agents complained that the Dominican Republic was too “semicolonial” even
to contract concessions without Eu­ro­pean nations intervening.283 Sometimes
the agents’ machinations proved so outrageous that Dominican authorities,
in exasperation, arrested them.284 Dominican officials and other prominent
figures, anxious, responded with annexation and protectorate overtures.
Chaos grew.
By the close of the 1840s, the capital city administration was in crisis.
The trea­sury was empty, despite ten printings of paper money.285 The French
consul alleged that a protectorate plan had near-­unan­i­mous support; indeed,
the Dominican Congress may have secretly passed a resolution.286 Haiti’s new
president, Faustin Soulouque, looked on, with French worries of his own. His
po­liti­cal opponents ­were demonstrating for demo­cratic reforms, along the
lines of the revolution that had occurred in France the previous year. De-
spite repression and executions, their opposition continued, and rumors of
the French-­Dominican protectorate provoked him further.287 He insisted on
the indivisibility of the island. The British consul egged him on, proposing
a plan that would re­unite the island while leaving Dominican governors and
military forces intact.288 Although his overtures ­were mostly bellicose, Sou-
louque also tried to appeal directly to Dominicans, highlighting the racism
of Santana’s administration.289 He invoked the memory of General Joaquín
Puello, killed by Santana for his opposition to early Separation plans.290 He
reminded Dominicans, too, of the disastrous incident of the men fleeing
Puerto Rico and the pro-­slavery complicity of Santo Domingo officials.291 He
called Dominicans “our ­brothers of the east,” which journalists particularly
loathed and resented.292

Life by Steam | 49
 A few months into the French treaty negotiations, Soulouque launched
an ill-­fated campaign in Dominican territory. He held Azua for a ­little more
than two weeks; his subordinates engaged in smaller conflicts in several
center-­island towns.293 Santana met him near the southern town of Baní,
soundly defeating him. The aggression was so unpopular in Port-­au-­Prince
that Soulouque’s opponents w ­ ere purposely s­ ilent, ex­pec­tant that the mobi-
lization would bring his downfall.294 Tightening his grip instead, Soulouque
named himself emperor. Dominicans led a small naval offensive against
Haiti in 1849, burned Anse-­à-­Pitres, and attacked one other town, but both
sides quickly demobilized.295 The French consul was not chastened in the
least. He dreamed of a “white trade” to Samaná, in new French settlers, and
wrote to Dominican legislators promising it.296 French authorities contin-
ued to lobby for both administrations to pay Haiti’s indemnity, and they did
not recognize the Dominican Republic for several more years.297 British and
French diplomats intervened as “mediators” in the peace that followed. Do-
minican ministers found few complaints too small to report.298
Santana’s victory, easily won, gave him a temporary burst of popularity,
but he quickly squandered it. He persecuted po­liti­cal rivals and eviscerated
constitutional reforms. An “infernal party spirit” reigned.299 Some journal-
ists asserted Santana was a “magic name for the country”; o ­ thers, that he
was “fratricidal and ferocious.”300 “What a country we live in!” a columnist
complained, when Santana exiled another newspaper editor.301 Authors of a
new paper, La Acusación—­perhaps the most roundly critical of all antidemo­
cratic tendencies in the city—­leveled themselves squarely at Santana, ac-
cusing him of appropriating 16 million pesos fuertes and warning that the
“thieves” might soon spirit away the remaining 300 million. The editor
earned himself a beating.302 Papers turned to satire and allegory. El Domini-
cano mocked a fictional “Don Chameleon,” who threw his allegiances wher-
ever jobs ­were to be found.303 A play, entitled “The Conspiracies, Seen from
One Side,” depicts characters motivated by jealousy, arrogance, ignorance,
and self-­interest.304 In a satirical dream sequence, El Oasis depicted a society
where a “Pueri-­Cracia” ruled, with a constitution ordering the deportation
of all men and w ­ omen over age thirty, polygamy, continuous revolution, the
beating of foreign consuls, and constant conflict between legislative and
executive branches. Meanwhile, military men had license to “do absolutely
what­ever they wanted.”305
U.S. filibusters soon came to the island in earnest, joined by a diplomatic
corps who supported their ambition. Although Dominican officials sup-
ported white American migration, incoming proposals w ­ ere not agricultural

50 | Chapter 1
proj­ects but rather armed filibuster operations, intending to attack Cuba.
One Georgia operation associated with a failed Narciso López expedition
offered “8,000 mi­grants” for Dominican settlement. President Báez was so
suspicious that he warned the outfit that Spanish troops w ­ ere prepared to de-
fend the northern coast if necessary. The French consul also offered ships.306
Tensions ran high. The French consul predicted that north coast residents
would “revolt and unite with Haiti” if French troops, meant to forestall
U.S. filibusters, arrived precipitously.307 Báez passed regulations restrict-
ing mi­grants’ ports of arrival, preventing the disembarkation of guns, and
demanding proof of employment within two months.308 New proposals con-
tinued cropping up; the Dominican government opposed them, one by one,
and sent secret agents to investigate.309 Several years ­later, swashbuckling
Texas veteran William Cazneau arrived aboard the uss Columbia, intending to
draft a recognition treaty. He followed his ardently pro-­filibuster wife, Jane
Storm Cazneau, to the republic. Both harbored e­ ager and aggressive settle-
ment plans. Jane Cazneau wrote effusively that Dominican land for sugar
and coffee could be had for just three dollars an acre, compared with forty or
fifty dollars in Cuba.310 Privately, she suggested armed colonization.311 In ex-
change for recognition, William Cazneau demanded cheap rent of Samaná.
British, French, and Spanish agents worked furiously to oppose him, dock-
ing warships in Samaná and the capital.
Dominican popu­lar opposition to U.S. plans was acute and growing.
Cazneau’s proposal was so wildly unpopular in Samaná that demonstrators
traveled to the capital to make their opposition plain. A Spanish observer
remarked, contentedly, “Samaná has not been sold ­because ­there is a fear of
revolution of the ­people of color.”312 In the capital, the treaty collapsed, too.
Controversy about Article 3, ­under whose provisions Dominicans would be
subject to U.S. laws, ostensibly put Dominicans at risk for enslavement upon
visiting Baltimore and other southern ports. ­Under intense public pressure,
the Dominican Congress soundly rejected it, Cazneau refused to alter it, and
the negotiation was brusquely dropped.313 Cazneau blamed opposition in
Santo Domingo on “­adept . . . ​and malicious” Haitian propaganda, trying to
minimize or dismiss the obvious discontent in the town.314 The “liberty . . . ​
to treat the colored Dominican Consul as it treats any other negro, was too
large a bone for the Dominican Congress to swallow. . . . ​General Cazneau
is distressed, Mrs. Cazneau is mortified,” the New York Times reported.315
The Spanish consul expressed satisfaction that joint diplomatic action had
helped to block the treaty negotiations. “I hope that the Dominican govern-
ment w ­ ill be demoralized,” he wrote.316 They w­ ere not. Diplomats continued

Life by Steam | 51
talks for a naval station in Samaná as the United States sent warships to Port-­
au-­Prince on the pretext of private debt collection.317
In this tempest, Soulouque mounted a second, final, disastrous campaign
in late winter 1855, opposed by his own troops and the majority of the Haitian
public. He imprisoned southern peasant activists, and as opposition popped
up in other towns, he restlessly looked eastward.318 Dominican newspapers
knew he was trying to occupy restive high-­ranking opponents.319 The French
consul in Haiti, Maxime Raybaud, goaded Soulouque in f­ avor of unification.
Raybaud then menaced Dominican officials with the suggestion that forced
reunification or U.S. occupation was imminent.320 Santana promised a fight
to the death.321 Capital city journalists furiously refuted Soulouque’s propa-
ganda about solidarity and unification, but they w ­ ere much more calm.322
Soulouque was “pumped up by a ­little devil, by sycophants, or maybe by liars
who wanted to see his downfall,” Dominican paper El Oasis asserted drily.323
Other than a six-­day occupation of one center-­island town, Soulouque and
supporting generals made few gains. Haitian soldiers hated the expedition,
and they chided the emperor in song, “ça pa zaffair a nous” (it’s not our
cause).324 Even before a second and final encounter, Dominican journalists
reported confidently that “perfect tranquility reigns on the borderlands”
and warned Soulouque he would soon lose power.325
Soulouque’s last foray into Dominican territory did not disrupt Domini-
can domestic strug­gles very long, nor did it forestall growing U.S. aggres-
sion. A major uprising challenged him in Les Cayes, and U.S. adventurers
claimed a small, uninhabited island off the coast for their own guano ex-
ploitation.326 News of filibuster aggression in Nicaragua filled Dominican
and Haitian headlines.327 Dominican capital city officials, undeterred, never
relented to U.S. negotiations, as U.S. officials demanded more coaling
concessions. Meanwhile, Santo Domingo residents protested nightly in the
capital at the ­house of U.S. agents. Cries of “Down with the Yankees!” could
be heard on the streets. The U.S. flag had to be raised out of reach of ­those
throwing rotten eggs. The Dominican capital was in disorder.328
Revolution brewed. By the summer of 1856, papers lamented that Santana
was exiling ­people “by the thousands” and executing ­others without trial.329
He made a spectacle of having the condemned dig their own graves.330 One
poet ventriloquized Santana: “Blood, always seeking blood! . . . ​Men hate
me: I hate them!”331 Other authorities, including the archbishop, threw their
support to his rival.332 Spanish consul Antonio María Segovia allowed Báez
supporters to register as Spanish citizens in order to claim po­liti­cal asylum.
In a popu­lar rhyme, an anonymous person celebrated:

52 | Chapter 1
 I’m not scared of Santana
Or the Alfau ­brothers
Just of Segovia
’Cause I’m matriculated.333

Critics lamented their impotence to quell the disorder as Santana lost his
grip. The country was “lost to disorder and anarchy, plagued by hypocrites
and demagogues,” one writer argued, gravely, and he observed that common
­people ­were suffering the most of all from the unrelenting disorder.334 The
economic crisis continued unabated, as inflation brought nearly 80 ­percent
devaluation each year on average, from 1847 to 1855.335 A priest lamented,
“Whoever . . . ​looks at the history of our country . . . will ​­ cry over its
disasters.”336 Santana hurriedly retired to his ranch, ending a term he had
originally claimed would last another ten years. ­After a brief interlude, Báez
again ascended to the presidency. He, too, filled the Senate with his sup-
porters, ordered his rivals’ arrest and exile, and called for multiple printings
of millions of pesos. E
­ ng­land, France, and Spain refused the new exchange
rates. Adopting the voice of a foreign lender, an anonymous Dominican au-
thor penned a poem called “Another Pirate”:

My till is my trea­sure
My God is interest
My happiness is when I calculate
Five ­percent each month.337

Dutch creditors ­were so unpopular that one was nearly murdered on the
street in the capital, just steps from the British consul’s door.338 Baez’s print-
ing of paper money had left the exchange rate at 4750 pesos to one dollar.339
Particularly for tobacco merchants of the Cibao valley and northern coast,
inflation made prices intolerable.340
In the summer of 1857, merchants and liberals of Santiago de los Caballe-
ros and surrounding towns of the Cibao valley threw their lot into revolution.
“revolution! conspiracy!” screamed El Eco’s headlines in the capital.341
Delegates drafted a constitution in Moca, calling for an end to the death
penalty, extensive civil liberties, more government control of the army, term
limits, and other reforms. They named a provisional president, to serve in a
new capital, Santiago.342 The leaders could not easily mobilize local cultiva-
tors, who favored Báez’s paper money policies. Cibao’s agriculture-­intense
valley had less of a tradition of military mobilizations, anyway, even if local
peasants had been supportive.343 Only one man could mobilize a familiar

Life by Steam | 53
and loyal following, and, so, the Cibaeño leaders called on Santana to com-
mand a siege of the capital. France and Britain docked warships in the har-
bor, and Spain clamored to do the same. The British consul in the capital and
the vice consul in Puerto Plata openly supported the rebels.344 The Moniteur
Haïtien published a letter from the besieged capital that read, “We do not
know when this war w ­ ill end, nor what the result w
­ ill be; . . . ​The picture of
every­thing is so sad, my pen cannot paint it. Dominicans are divided among
themselves. The dead! The injured!” Famine and pillage w ­ ere coming, the
writer warned.345 ­After months of desperate standoff, Báez capitulated and
fled the country. A “bloody strug­gle divides us,” he inveighed.346 The Cibae-
ños lost, too, however. Santana easily wrangled power back from them, re-
placing the reform constitution with a familiar, draconian one.347

Unrest and the Eve of Annexation

Patience for the constant foreign intrigue wore thin. “Fulano [that guy] (and
­there are lots of t­ hose guys) ­today is involved in French politics, tomorrow
he’s En­glish, and the next day you have a Rus­sian,” a writer complained.348
Furious editorials railed against the Spanish matriculation scheme. One au-
thor commented acerbically, “Where are fraternity, equality, and liberal laws . . . ​
where one must craft a document of limpieza de sangre?”349 Nearly eight hundred
in the capital had taken Spanish citizenship, opponents claimed. Supporters
dismissed opponents as “Boyerists.”350 “It has been a long thirteen years . . . ​
[and] if ­people are demoralized, it is not by the matriculation, but b ­ ecause of
the country’s failures,” another writer countered. Writers tired of escapist
351

Europhilic sentiment amid the disorder and chaos. In an editorial entitled

“Spirit of the Times,” an author condemned the frivolities of his small read-
ership for their “damned craze . . . t​ o do every­thing by steam and in accor-
dance with the fashions of overseas.” He warned them, “Well, if by some
misfortune the course of t­ hings ­doesn’t change, and becomes more laugh-
able, then ­we’ll just also have to live by steam, so that we can leave this treach-
erous world as fast as pos­si­ble and go enjoy all the good stuff of the next in
the sky.”352 A poet mocked Santo Domingo elite citizens who pretended to
Eu­ro­pean birth, similarly:

Upon seeing my friend Lola

With a fancy black skirt and a fan
I asked her, ¿are you Spanish?
And the manola answered me
Yes, me born in Potorico353

54 | Chapter 1
Many residents of the Dominican capital continued to demonstrate their
opposition to U.S. interests. They detested the U.S. commercial agent, Jona-
than Elliot. For some months, he had been suffering daily harassment; the
final straw, he reported, was a young man menacing his wife at her parents’
home. Before the end of the year, he wrote hurriedly to request a passport
to leave with his ­family and servants, “by first opportunity that offers.”354
Capital residents continued to protest, however. In the summer of 1858,
a U.S. commander condemned “nightly mobs” issuing “abuse and threats”
about their “inimical feelings against the Agent and the flag of the United
States.”355 He demanded a twenty-­one-­gun salute for the “public abuse” before
leaving. The next year, a U.S. outfit tried to seize an island off the coast for
guano exploitation, the second to have done so in as many years. The m ­ atter
caused a massive uproar in the press. Across the island, Jane Cazneau de-
356

scribed constant unrest in Puerto Plata. She blamed annexation rumors on

town residents of color.357
Despite popu­lar opposition to colonization and protectorate plans, San-
tana’s inner circle pushed forward. Columnists continued to support the
idea of colonists for cash-­crop products, and Dominican officials reached a
migration agreement in Paris in April 1857.358 When mi­grants arrived in Sa-
maná that fall, the Dominican government sent some shipments of food, as
promised.359 The attempts ­were disastrous. Illness killed many of the new ar-
rivals, and French authorities advised the remaining colonists that it would
be wise to forfeit the proj­ect.360 An even more ambitious coterie neverthe-
less dreamed of larger transformations. Santana’s vice president, General
Antonio Abad Alfau, and his b ­ rother, General Felipe Alfau, lobbied for both
a protectorate and an indenture revolution si­mul­ta­neously. The Alfaus and
their supporters wanted contract laborers from India and China.361 They
wrote enthusiastically about the hundreds of Canary Islanders and Span-
iards who arrived from Venezuela, fleeing social unrest.362 The Spanish con-
sul added his approval, noting that they had begun setting up plantations
near the capital.363 In a secret meeting with Cuban authorities in 1860, Anto-
nio Abad Alfau argued that Dominicans loved Spain—­especially the “most
notable”—­and suggested that Santana was considering declaring annexa-
tion unilaterally. Santana’s machinations for Spanish annexation ­were an
open secret.364
Conditions continued to deteriorate. Santana soon printed 10 million more
pesos; the public refused to accept them. British, French, and Spanish warships
all threatened military action.365 Santana responded by printing millions
more.366 His officials rushed to sign long-­term mining, wood, and guano

Life by Steam | 55
concessions with French companies in exchange for up-­front payments.367
A flood of po­liti­cal exiles arrived in Haiti, Curaçao, Saint Thomas, and
Venezuela as censorship and repression continued. Some men cited their
Spanish matriculation to avoid military ser­vice, long ­after the w ­ hole affair
had ended; ­others deserted to British ships.368 Santana used his army to pur-
sue Báez supporters in Azua.369 In an 1860 debate, participants made veiled
judgments about Santana through a debate about Julius Caesar. “Some
say the ­great crime of Caesar was to have killed the Republic,” one partici-
pant observed, testily. “A fairly specious paradox. Can a cadaver be assassi-
nated?”370 “The life of a tyrant is never long,” a poet warned. In front of San-
tana, a liberal priest gave a defiant sermon, threatening, “The ­people always
begin with a murmur, and end by toppling their tyrants.”371 December 1860
began with an attempt on Santana’s life.372

Libertad, Igualdad . . . ​

At the close of the 1850s, echoes of the 1843 mobilizations rumbled across
the ­whole island and in rebel networks as far as Venezuela, Saint Thomas,
and Curaçao. Port-­au-­Prince burned in 1857, inflation soared, and open re-
bellion began in the north.373 Rebellion spread from Gonaïves as foreigners
evacuated. A collaborative Dominican and Haitian surge supported the
anti-­Soulouque revolution. “Dominicans recently made a revolution, or
what they more pompously called a combined movement among the island resi-
dents,” to instate General Fabre Nicholas Geffrard, a hostile Spanish official
recorded.374 A ­career officer, Geffrard had participated in Soulouque’s 1856
campaign. Among his Dominican supporters in the center-­island area and
in exile, all was obviously forgiven. Francisco del Rosario Sánchez, himself a
veteran of 1844 Separation strug­gles, allied with Geffrard to overthrow Sou-
louque. Rumors abounded about Emperor Soulouque’s assassination, and
in January 1859, he departed for Jamaica as Boyer and Rivière had done.375
Geffrard’s republicanism electrified the public. Citizenship language was
everywhere. The Moniteur promised that the revolution would “regenerate
the country and make it retake its place among the ­peoples who are friends
of civilization,” reestablishing liberal institutions immediately.376 Lawmakers
took to wearing special hats to emphasize that civilian rule would replace
military power at last.377 Town politicians praised Geffrard’s demo­cratic
commitments. “We promise to bury ourselves beneath the ruins of the country before
living in slavery.—­We furthermore promise to obey nothing but the empire of law and
never to the despotic w
­ ill of any individual,” one group of citizens effused.378 The
new president offered immediate conciliatory gestures to the east. He con-

56 | Chapter 1
demned his pre­de­ces­sor’s aggressions in ringing terms. Quickly, his minis-
ters drafted a five-­year treaty. All the while, po­liti­cal refugees fled Santana’s
repression. Often their first stop was Port-­de-­Paix or Cap, both easy to reach
on the northern coast. Occasionally, they continued on to the Haitian capi-
tal to seek audience with high po­liti­cal officials.379 By 1860, Sánchez was in
exile in Saint Thomas but organ­izing opposition to Santana. He and other
activists had Geffrard’s frank support.380 Geffrard praised the rebels publicly
and urged that they sought “fraternity and conciliation.” He also warned
that many ­were discussing annexation rumors, raising the alarm as far as
Curaçao.381
Anti-­Santana figures, military authorities, their families, and allies mobi-
lized, meanwhile, in the center of the island. They celebrated the new demo­
cratic regime in the west and opposed mounting rumors about annexation
in the east.382 News that center-­island residents and ­these po­liti­cal figures
wanted “indivisibility of territory” quickly reached the Dominican capital,
and the border percolated with “unusual intensity.”383 Authorities mandated
that all communication between the two nations cease. Already that spring,
Dominican officials tried to restrict the travel of any foreigner who had
been in the west, a mea­sure that irritated the foreign consuls.384 Gen-
eral Valentín Alcantara, a Dominican officer who had switched to serve
the Haitian army ten years earlier, found a new “denaturalized” ally: Do-
mingo Ramírez y Parmantier.385 In a manifesto with a handwritten Spanish
heading of the Haitian motto, “Libertad-­Igualdad,” Ramírez addressed his
compatriots:

Our efforts have as their goal

1. To remove ourselves from the ferocity of Santana, whose bloody

character ­pardons neither ­women nor ­children.
2. To extricate ourselves from the shocking misery in which his igno-
rant administration has submerged us.
3. To return to their destiny an infinite number of noble Dominicans
kept in cruel ostracism by his tyranny.
4. To break the chains of the g ­ reat mass of our co-­citizens, shackled
by that despot.
5. To impede Santana, whose relationships with foreigners, enemies
of our race, threaten to alienate our territory from us and compro-
mise our liberty and po­liti­cal existence.
6. To unite ourselves ­under one sole flag, so that the country can be
indivisible and strong through the fusion of all of us.

Life by Steam | 57
 ­ hese goals, as you see, are not just laudable; rather, they are the funda-
T
ment of our common prosperity—­the fate of our ­family—­the guarantee
of a ­future for our ­children!
Co-­citizens, you have nothing to fear!386

Santana himself rounded up loyal men to crush the movement.

Santo Domingo’s officials refused to acknowledge the rebels’ po­liti­cal
goals. They dismissed the rebels as “ambitious men,” “robbers,” or “traitors,”
and they demanded that the Haitian government provide restitution for the
­whole affair. To foreign consuls, the Dominican foreign minister insisted
that a total ban in communication with Haiti would prevent further disor-
der.387 He claimed a “general mobilization in all of the Republic” had crushed
Ramírez’s “totally infamous and criminal treason,” and that “the Dominican
soldier . . . ​was always ready to fight the Common ­enemy,” a willful misun-
derstanding of Ramírez’s own identity.388 Another minister admitted, uneasily,
that the movement was Dominican.389 Puerto Plata’s residents warned each
other that slavery was to be reestablished.390 Capital city officials responded
to the growing unrest only by declaring that spreading slavery rumors was a
capital crime.391 The common ­enemy was not very clear at all.

58 | Chapter 1
t wo

Soon It ­Will Be Mexico’s Turn

CA R
­ IB ­B EAN EMPIRE AND DOMINICAN ANNEXATION

At eight in the morning on 18 March 1861, a small group of Dominican offi-

cials lowered the national flag from government buildings in Santo Domingo
as a few hundred observers, mostly Spanish, watched. “Españolismo lives,” ef-
fused a Spanish diplomat.1 Although the republic had been separated from
Spain for nearly forty years, Pedro Santana insisted that the annexation was
voluntary. The Spanish official with whom the Dominican president had
been most closely in communication—an activist governor of Cuba, Cap-
tain General Francisco Serrano—­emphasized his agreement and support.
Only ­after the ceremony did both officials send word to the governor of
Puerto Rico and to Queen Isabel II and her ministers in Spain. Annexation
was a fait accompli. Preparations had been the talk of Havana for months.
“This proj­ect is discussed publicly in cafés, paseos, in e­ very h
­ ouse; . . . ​no
one doubts its quick and total completion,” a Havana resident remarked. He
was unreservedly ambitious, bragging, “Spain should not limit her aims to
the Dominican Republic; it needs the w ­ hole island, and the Haitian Repub-
lic ­will be invaded before long.” He urged Spain to be inspired by its recent
victory in northwestern Africa ­toward more wars of conquest. “The deplor-
able po­liti­cal situation of the United States,” where southern secession had
already begun, offered a par­tic­u­lar opportunity for other powers. The man
predicted more Spanish expansion imminently, boasting, “soon it w ­ ill be
Mexico’s turn.” 2

Santana and his ministers had a fair amount in common with supporters
of French intervention in Mexico, which unfolded almost si­mul­ta­neously.
Both ­were a small, mainly conservative elite who ­were tired of po­liti­cal
fighting, wary of the populace, and e­ ager for outside military resources to
secure order. They hoped a foreign monarch would centralize the po­liti­
cal administration, defeat opponents, and offer strong defense to external
threats. They shared ready economic extroversion, but also strong local po­
liti­cal commitments.3 They ­were nationalists ­after a fashion, believing that
po­liti­cal order, u
­ nder a foreign monarch, might create more local merito-
cratic government appointments than successive fractious administrations.4
The strategy of asking for a protectorate in exchange for limited territorial
concessions was nothing unusual, of course; it was an emergency recourse
for embattled leaders throughout the hemi­sphere. The exaggerated po­liti­
cal chaos of the Gulf, however—­where U.S. power was entering rapidly—­
made both annexation proj­ects real.5 Their ease with monarchism was
nothing uncommon, ­either. From Haiti to Brazil, it was a common state-­
making strategy of the moment, one that was challenged by republicanism
but had ample liberal language of its own.6 ­After succession b ­ attles in the
1830s, Queen Isabel II herself initially represented a symbol of the victory
over absolutism in Spain, where moderate liberals enjoyed electoral power.7
Observers, meanwhile, ­were surprised but hardly shocked about ­either an-
nexation, which occurred with the United States deeply preoccupied. Most
predicted the Spanish would move into Haiti, too.8
This chapter details how Spanish officials, working with Santana and his
allies, came to incorporate Santo Domingo as a f­ ree-­soil Spanish province.
For more than fifty years, Spain’s remaining overseas possessions—­Cuba,
Puerto Rico, and the Philippines—­had been in ­legal limbo, outside of
constitutional rule. Centralized, militarized government ruled the islands
instead, and “special laws” to reincorporate them never materialized, fore-
stalled both by po­liti­cal divides on the peninsula and by the question of
slavery.9 Cuba’s governor, a power­ful Spanish authority, believed Dominican
incorporation might precipitate liberal reforms throughout the empire.
Vari­ous Spanish politicians and writers, meanwhile, toyed with unstable dis-
courses about federation, sometimes racial, sometimes moral, sometimes
po­liti­cal, sometimes all of t­ hese. They intermingled fraternal and racist mis-
sives ­toward Santo Domingo, always with added aspersion for Haiti. “Blacks
are in Haiti and not in Santo Domingo,” a Madrid journalist insisted.10 Do-
minican elites indulged and reciprocated them. Beyond ­these inconsistent
narratives of inclusion, real pragmatism drove Spanish officials in the Ca­
rib­bean. They envisioned a territory that could forestall U.S. advances and
host new proj­ects of ­labor indenture, already dawning in sites around the
Atlantic.

60 | Chapter 2
Antillean Geopolitics and Spanish Empire, 1840–1861
By the mid-­nineteenth ­century, both the newly in­de­pen­dent states of Span-
ish Amer­i­ca and Spain had definitively emerged from the wake of the wars
of in­de­pen­dence. The American republics ­were increasingly integrated in
global markets, and their administrations grew.11 In Spain, General Leopoldo
O’Donnell led the moderate Liberal Union Party, which won a majority in the
Cortes and presided over a period of po­liti­cal peace. Si­mul­ta­neously, penin-
sular liberals fi­nally succeeded in centralizing colonial administration, a­ fter
years of debate. In 1851, legislators created the General Overseas Director-
ate (Dirección General de Ultramar), which ­later gained full ministry status
as the Overseas Ministry (Ministerio de Ultramar).12 Cuba’s captain general
post was a power­ful and impor­tant one; multiple Spanish generals solidified
their po­liti­cal ­careers in Havana to return to top positions in Spain. Cuba
was Spain’s most impor­tant possession and the economic heart of Spanish
empire.
An unsteady diplomatic rapprochement between Spain and its former
colonies grew across the Atlantic, fueled by a transforming imperial climate
in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Ca­rib­bean. As direct investment, loans, and mili-
tary intervention increased, politicians of the new republics responded col-
lectively to strengthening outside threats in a manner that sometimes drew
them, at least discursively, closer to Spain.13 As the U.S. presence in the re-
gion grew stronger, Central American liberal elites called on racial solidar-
ity in murky but insistent terms. They extolled raza hispana’s putative racial
inclusion (although, crucially, not qua equality but rather via miscegena-
tion) and as a loose aggregate of cultural attributes through which to insist
on difference from a potential aggressor, “the Yankee race.”14 Participating
republics invited Spain to the 1847 Lima Congress that pondered defensive
federation, and Spain fi­nally signed treaties of recognition and peace with
a number of the new nations.15 Journalists of El Museo de Ambas Américas and
La Revista Española de Ambos Mundos sought to tighten Atlantic relations.16
Spanish politicians embraced the miscegenation tropes, invoking them as
a “white legend” for their colonial endeavors.17 Privately, Spanish diplomats
­were often derisive about the new states, mocking their civil strife. The po­
liti­cal opponents in Venezuela w­ ere “more atrocious than savage tribes,” the
Spanish consul in Santo Domingo reported derisively.18 In public, however,
Spanish commentators waxed poetic about the fraternal possibilities. “Yes,
we have lost our rich colonies in Amer­i­ca, but ­there are still millions of men
that ­ought to be our natu­ral allies, given that they are united with us by the

Soon It ­Will Be Mexico’s Turn | 61

intimate and solid ties of religion, custom, language, and civil legislation,”
the consul argued, concluding, “Spanish politics should impede at all costs
that the raza ibero-­americana be absorbed by the raza yankee.”19
Near Spain’s Ca­rib­bean possessions, U.S. expansion was growing both
incrementally and through dramatic aggression. Many islands bought food-
stuffs from the United States, and U.S.-­bound exports also increased. By mid-
century, U.S. markets consumed two-­thirds of Puerto Rico’s sugar.20 The 1850
Clayton-­Bulwer treaty, which negotiated canal rights through Nicaragua,
seemed to signify the peaceful consolidation of joint U.S.-­British commer-
cial hegemony in the Gulf region. Britain avariciously consumed cotton
from the U.S. South, its financiers supported railroad proj­ects expanding
westward, and many eagerly predicted growing U.S. influence, even even-
tual control, over its nearby neighbors.21 Massive watershed events, like the
War of U.S. Intervention (the “Mexican-­American War”) and filibustering
in Nicaragua, posed dramatic military threats. Even po­liti­cal overtures bore
aggressive and meddlesome undertones. Presidents Polk and Pierce tried to
buy Cuba, and some northern politicians supported the plans, despite the
complications that expansion posed.22 Pro-­slavery advocates gleefully cal-
culated that new slave states could be carved out of the acquisition, despite
Spanish officials’ defiant reply that they would “rather see the island sink.”23
Outright extralegal expeditions plagued Cuban authorities during the 1850s.
The filibuster efforts of Narciso López—­whose third invasion attempt ended
in defeat in November 1851—­enjoyed minority support among some Cuban
elites. Disappointed supporters attacked the Spanish consulate in New Or-
leans when he was captured and executed. Faced with commercial and mili-
tary aggression, the Spanish Crown was outraged. “Anglo-­Americans easily
put down roots wherever they manage to get a foothold,” a Spanish diplomat
complained.24 “Two rival races are fighting for the new world,” Madrid’s La
América agreed.25
Massive domestic in­equality on the islands—­the contests of plantation
slavery—­made Spanish officials all the more paranoid about retaining con-
trol. The conspiracies they feared reflected the ubiquity of the resentment
they ­imagined, their unwillingness to afford agency to domestic re­sis­tance,
and their preoccupation with what they i­ magined to be race imperialism. Au-
thorities warned colonial whites that “race war” would result from domestic or
international conflict; they ­imagined “machinations . . . o ​ f destroying the
white race” at e­ very turn.26 Authorities feared that individuals w­ ere plotting
in Curaçao, Jamaica, Saint Thomas, Trinidad, Venezuela, and elsewhere to
join Haiti in an unnamed “Machiavellian abolitionist plan” or in­de­pen­dence

62 | Chapter 2
conspiracy.27 Years ­later, the Spanish minister from Washington reported
that ­free and enslaved blacks of vari­ous socie­ties from New Orleans (includ-
ing some Dominican émigrés), New York, and Philadelphia and “­those who
had been expelled to Mexico” ­were planning a “simultaneous strike” on
Cuba and Puerto Rico, also aided by the British government.28 ­Others wrote
credulous reports of Haitian emperor Faustin Soulouque receiving aid from
Africa and Britain, organ­izing thousands and thousands of troops for an as-
sault on Cuba.29 Ca­rib­bean officials petitioned constantly to increase Cuba’s
and Puerto Rico’s military defenses. A “certain tone of anguish” character-
ized their repeated letters to Directorate officials in Madrid.30 In response
to a number of real and perceived threats, Puerto Rican and Cuban officials
pleaded for more troops and argued that the islands’ defenses w ­ ere woefully
insufficient. Undisciplined troops, lack of supplies, poor infrastructure,
meager funding, and a lack of ships usually topped the complaint list. Their
refrain—­a “permanent complaint,” in the words of one historian—­rarely
met with satisfactory response from the metropole.31 In response to filibus-
ter threats, Cuban officials relied on secret agents in a number of U.S. cities
for counterintelligence. Governor Juan de la Pezuela re-­formed the militia of
color in the island, disbanded since 1844.32 Power concentrated in the office
of the captain general, and conservatism reigned.33
­These same Ca­rib­bean authorities lent a sympathetic ear to Domini-
can petitions. Peninsular Spanish officials had virtually ignored Santo Do-
mingo in its last days as a colony, sending paltry funds just twice between
1809 and 1821. Their attitude reflected, in the words of Luís Álvarez, “the
politics of manifest indifference.”34 Authorities in Cuba and Puerto Rico,
however, periodically considered reannexation, sending exploratory mis-
sions without directives from Madrid. In the de­cade a­ fter Santo Domingo
joined Haiti in in­de­pen­dence, an official traveled from Cuba several times,
taking a small del­e­ga­tion to Port-­au-­Prince to discuss the possibility of the
devolution.35 Haitian officials must have greeted the entreaty exceedingly
coolly, but the envoy leader hoped for “further friendly negotiations” in the
­future.36 The Puerto Rican captain general sent along a letter of approval
with a Dominican annexation petition to Madrid in 1847, and the next gov-
ernor, General Juan Prim, also wrote to Madrid to suggest that annexation
would be a strategically sound policy.37 Madrid officials w ­ ere slower to be
convinced. Spain had virtually no commercial interests in Haiti or the Do-
minican Republic, and peninsular authorities generally viewed protection
requests with a mixture of distaste and disinterest. Too many international
complications—­and ­little material gain—­would arise from annexation, they

Soon It ­Will Be Mexico’s Turn | 63

concluded. In response, Dominican envoys appealed directly to Ca­rib­bean
officials, making entreaties in Cuba from 1843 through 1845, to Puerto Rico
in 1845, again to Puerto Rico in 1846, and so on. So many of t­ hese island-­to-­
island missions ­were conducted that the queen passed a royal order insisting
that the Ca­rib­bean officials consult with the peninsula before they took any
actions whatsoever.38
­After the massive U.S. expansion of the late 1840s, however, peninsular
authorities began to direct their attention more acutely to growing U.S. in-
terests on Hispaniola. The northern Dominican coast—­Puerto Plata and
Samaná Bay in particular—­was a likely center of filibuster organ­izing. The
Puerto Rican governor sent an alarmist report in 1852 that a massive filibus-
ter immigration scheme to Hispaniola was underfoot.39 A coded royal order
authorized the governor of Cuba to work with Báez and the governor of
Puerto Rico to disembark Spanish troops in the republic should it be nec-
essary. Spain would have to take ­great precautions in mounting a military
response, the report cautioned. If they seemed like an invading force, the
“emancipated ­peoples from both sides of the island, fearing the reestablish-
ment of slavery, would rise up against the government itself and call on the
Haitian Empire, thus establishing race war,” the author fretted.40 “Rare is
the boat that enters [Curaçao] that ­doesn’t bring adventurers of all nations
seeking passage to Haiti or Santo Domingo,” another informer reported.41
Spanish authorities named a secret agent to keep an eye on the republic,
commissioned major reports on the state of the island, and ordered further
news to be sent regularly to Washington, DC, and Cuba.42 Spanish officials
sent home reports that filibusters planned to take Haiti as well and sug-
gested it would be done easily.43 The rumors ­were inchoate: that the French
might help reunification (this one was plausible), that reunification would
make the island into a “refuge” to thousands of U.S. filibusters (this one
was far less likely), and that Haiti would mount some sort of filibuster cam-
paign of its own (this one tapped old fears of ­imagined Haitian imperial-
ism).44 Officials worried that the Haitian government itself was “making
­great sacrifices” to attract Dominican émigrés and other “adventurers of all
nations” for unspecified anticolonial ends.45 With just three hundred men
and propaganda, Haitian agents could “revolutionize the island of Cuba,”
authorities fretted.46
With U.S. treaty attempts in 1854, Spanish authorities considered the U.S.
threat even more concrete. The U.S. diplomatic corps in Santo Domingo had
impeccable filibuster credentials, and they w ­ ere dedicated and aggressive.
Jane Storm Cazneau reached Santo Domingo in 1853 ­after more than a de­

64 | Chapter 2
cade of pro-­slavery and pro-­expansion advocacy, as well as tours and boost-
erism in Texas, Mexico, and Cuba. She wrote for the United States Magazine and
Demo­cratic Review, the New York Sun, and a number of other periodicals u­ nder
a pen name. She knew infamous filibusters Narciso López and William
47

Walker personally and used her connections with Secretary of State William
Marcy to secure her husband’s position as special diplomatic envoy to the
Dominican Republic.48 The British and French consuls conspired to oppose
Cazneau’s 1854 treaty proposal; even though it collapsed, Spanish authorities
sprang into action. Spanish secret agents to the Dominican Republic began
to report directly to Cuba as well as Madrid, and Cuban and Puerto Rican of-
ficials chose diplomatic staff for Santo Domingo at long last.49 Spain’s first
commercial agent, Eduardo San Just, arrived in Santo Domingo in 1854. Re-
cent events had only “awoken the Spanish spirit and lively enthusiasm of the
inhabitants to repel all the hordes of adventurers from the North who invade
this privileged soil,” San Just rhapsodized confidently; he added, “The North
American question is totally dead for now.”50 Still, concern over the United
States’ pending treaty (and the alleged concession of the Samaná peninsula)
spurred Spain into signing a treaty of recognition in 1855. The treaty authors
remonstrated that the territory—­the “favored jewel of Columbus”—­must
be “kept in the command of the raza that ­today populates them, never
passing, in ­whole or in part, to the hands of foreign razas.”51
Spain fi­nally recognized the republic in 1855 and sent diplomatic staff to
both parts of the island, without recognizing Haiti. For all its coercive fra-
ternal language, Spanish diplomacy was totally brusque and tactless. The
Spanish consul in Santo Domingo intervened so aggressively to disrupt on-
going negotiations with the United States that even the British consul, him-
self only recently opposed, expressed chagrin. Privately, San Just permitted
even more hostility. He wondered if Santana’s administration could “even
be called a government” and claimed he was surrounded by “blacks from
Seybo, half-­naked.” The “Dominican government, if you can even call it that, is
totally demoralized,” he reported, with some satisfaction.52 He was so rude
to Dominican officials that they registered a complaint with the Spanish sec-
retary of state.53 The newly named emissary to Haiti, Manuel Cruzat, was
far worse. Besides being involved in British intrigue that supported Haitian
reannexation of the Dominican Republic—­“even though I blush to admit it,”
he managed—­his approach was generally blundering and malicious.54 Seek-
ing an audience with the emperor, Cruzat instead sent his secretary, who
“barely [spoke] French, and not a word of Creole,” and who subsequently
refused to take off his hat in Soulouque’s palace when ordered to do so by a

Soon It ­Will Be Mexico’s Turn | 65

functionary.55 Cruzat demanded reparations by Haiti’s foreign minister for
what allegedly happened next: the emperor himself appeared in the win­dow,
Cruzat claimed, and allegedly insulted the secretary, “What a person, that
fucking white man d ­ oesn’t want to salute my palace!”56 “Haitians hate the
entire white race,” Cruzat complained.57 The Spanish secretary of state,
irritated—he had explic­itly told Cruzat to take pains to avoid incident, given
the sensitivity of relations between the slave power and Haiti—­instead rec-
ommended Cruzat’s decommission.58
The first Spanish consul, Antonio Maria Segovia, reached Dominican
soil in late 1855, marking a new escalation of Spanish intervention. Fear-
ing that po­liti­cal divisions in Santo Domingo would inevitably invite U.S.
intervention, Segovia proposed a protectorate scheme in which military
and foreign policy ­matters would be ­under Spanish control.59 A protectorate
was a fairly typical po­liti­cal construction, one that Spanish contemporaries
praised. Just a few years l­ater, proponents compared Mexican protectorate
plans favorably with Britain’s protectorate in Greece and Belgium. Forfei-
ture of sovereignty might actually “secure . . . i​n­de­pen­dence” by bringing
po­liti­cal order and preventing U.S. aggression, Spanish writers argued.60
Felipe Fernández de Castro, the same official who had made missions from
Cuba to regain Santo Domingo from Haiti in the 1820s and 1830s, penned
“Proyecto de pacificación de los Estados Hispanoamericanos” from London
in 1857, with the idea of a Hispano-­American confederation. He was heartily
in support of Dominican annexation, arguing that forfeiture might combat
ambitious opportunists within the country and also help reduce poverty.61
Segovia’s proposal in Santo Domingo gained no traction, but his matricula-
tion of Dominicans as Spanish citizens did. El Oasis, a capital city paper that
was fiercely critical of sitting president Santana, ran advertisements for the
matriculation throughout the spring and summer of 1856. The consul dis-
missed all opposition in the capital as mere “calumny.”62
Through the late 1850s, a number of incidents rattled Spanish nerves
about U.S. intent and collaboration on Hispaniola. Diplomatic ties brought a
more regular flow of information to both neighboring islands. In the spring
of 1859, the newly arrived Cuban governor, Francisco Serrano, warned other
authorities that a thirty-­five-­person expedition of U.S. filibusters had ar-
rived in Haiti with their eyes trained on Cuba, and the Haitian navy seized
a Spanish ship suspected of trafficking slaves.63 News followed that another
handful of Cuban exiles arrived in Port-­au-­Prince the following month.64
Serrano, meanwhile, was listening attentively to pro-­annexation advocates.
Mariano Álvarez, the new Spanish consul in the Dominican Republic and an

66 | Chapter 2
advocate of annexation, submitted an extensive report that piqued Serrano’s
interest; the two officials corresponded throughout the year. “­There is no
country in which nature offers more resources, nor where inhabitants are in
a worse state,” Álvarez proclaimed.65 Álvarez saw tremendous prospects for
trade and regional strategic advantage, extolling the virtues of Samaná Bay
as a fueling station and suggesting that agriculture and the ­cattle trade—­
particularly with the plantations of Cuba—­could be easily stimulated.66
Lumber and fine woods (especially mahogany), coal, cotton, tobacco, sugar,
coffee, cacao, and mineral resources might all follow, he argued. A hand-
ful of wealthy Dominicans, Canary islanders, and Venezuelan émigrés ­were
already planning “large plantations of coffee, sugarcane, and other seeds”
on the riverbanks near the capital, he continued.67 He estimated that an-
nexation could be realized with just two thousand troops and a number of
civil servants.68 Other reports echoed his.69 For the moment, however, the
Crown remained impervious. “We consider all in­de­pen­dent republics our best
friends,” it demurred to one such entreaty in 1859, “so I ­will limit myself to
wishing that your republic might prosper.”70

Mythmaking of a Faithful Populace

As negotiations between the Cuban governor and Dominican officials es-
calated in 1860, Santana and his ministers offered a streamlined, two-­part
annexation argument: the threat of Haiti and fidelity to Spain. Serious re-
visionism was necessary. In previous de­cades, Dominican annexationists
had been wildly omnivorous in their petitions. Dominican foreign minister
Manuel Joaquín Del Monte was as ready to sign away sovereignty to a French
protectorate in 1843 as he was to support Spanish annexation in 1861, for
example.71 In the interim, the French consul reported, quite reasonably, that
Santana was “a man of a very French heart.”72 An annexationist minority in
the Cibao valley steadily preferred the United States, but they w ­ ere simply
too distant from the southern machinations.73 U.S. speculators ­were close to
impor­tant officials in the capital, too. Lobbying with her husband, Jane Caz­
neau bribed officials regularly. The Cazneau ­house was “always so full of of-
ficers that he seems almost a member of the Government,” one journalist observed.74
Despite professions of fidelity, Santana was not particularly close with the
Catholic Church, ­either. He kept its lands, seized during unification, to dis-
tribute to his allies, and he battled with the archbishop. The new interim
archbishop, Fernando Arturo de Meriño, hated annexation and Santana
equally.75 Nor was t­ here anything like an imminent threat from the west.
Years ­after Soulouque’s resounding defeat, Geffrard had sought a treaty

Soon It ­Will Be Mexico’s Turn | 67

for peace and trade between the two states the very moment he r­ ose to the
presidency, roundly critiqued the policy of his pre­de­ces­sor, and redoubled
his dedication to domestic reforms.76 Dominican reporters knew this, and
they had long since turned their attentions to domestic po­liti­cal instability
and pressing economic concerns. “Haiti is not thinking of invading the Do-
minican Republic, nor any similarly exaggerated idea,” the Spanish consul
in Haiti confirmed.77
Both Santana’s allies and local Spanish officials ­were invested in new nar-
ratives. As his presidency was collapsing, again, in 1860, Santana’s petitions
sounded desperately urgent. Haiti was “an oppressor who made it its task to
destroy [Santo Domingo],” he insisted.78 The new Spanish consul, Mariano Ál-
varez, was an indefatigable ally, colluding closely with both Santana and his
vice president, Antonio Abad Alfau. As Alfau’s b ­ rother, also a high-­ranking
general, traveled to Madrid to lobby for guns and material support, the an-
nexationist coterie focused their attention on the Cuban governor, escalat-
ing a letter-­writing campaign that lasted all year. In a secret meeting with
Cuban authorities, Alfau suggested that Santana was considering declaring
the annexation unilaterally.79 Meanwhile, Consul Álvarez produced a mas-
sive report. Like other Spanish officials in Cuba and Madrid, he emphasized
annexation as a means to forestall U.S. aggression, an argument that was
almost totally absent from Dominican elites’ petitions. He readily accepted a
general paradigm of race war, however. His report described the whiteness
of Dominicans (“eight-­tenths” and “all Catholic,” he specified, except for
“one miserable Methodist church for the black Americans”) alongside the
strategic value of the territory itself.80 “Two e­ nemy races covet this precious
Antille,” he maintained.81
On the question of Dominican fidelity to Spain, extensive rewriting was
necessary. Álvarez and Alfau discussed the history of the country at some
length. Together, they rewrote the previous forty years, arguing for an ever-­
faithful populace who remembered Spain’s “paternal affection” fondly. Both
of them insisted that the country’s unique in­de­pen­dence pro­cess demon-
strated Dominican faithfulness to Spain. The 1821 “Brief In­de­pen­dence” (in
which a junta in the capital simply declared Santo Domingo to be part of
Gran Colombia, several months before the 1822–44 unification with Haiti)
had been the work of an “ambitious and traitorous” few, both argued. Unlike
other young republics that had broken violently with Spain, the Dominican
Republic had, “on the contrary, been the model of fidelity and love to the
afflicted Metropole,” Álvarez told the Cuban governor.82 If the 1821 in­de­
pen­dence, which lasted two months, was treason or a fluke, neither man

68 | Chapter 2
could easily account for unification with Haiti, which lasted peacefully for
twenty-­t wo years. T­ here was no space for the Unification period in annexa-
tion history, so both men ignored it. The Spanish consul jumped ahead to
an entirely fanciful account of 1844 separation from Haiti, alleging that Do-
minicans hoped “it was an opening for the return of Spanish sovereignty
that they had so desired.”83 Forty years ­after in­de­pen­dence, many expressed
“constant desire to tighten relations,” he asserted.84 Alfau added a hint of
elitism to t­hese claims, praising the “most notable of the population” for
their Spanishness.85 Álvarez continued to write letters to the governor and to
meet with Cuban officials through the end of 1860 and the beginning of 1861,
capitalizing on short visits of Cuban ships.86
To cement support for annexation, Governor Serrano commissioned
another report from a high-­ranking officer in Havana, who submitted a
hyperbolic tale of Dominican Spanishness, with ample racist marginalia.87
Brigadier Antonio Peláez y Campomanes began the memoir with (what he
considered to be) praise, reporting, “­There are sons of Spain ­here who pre-
serve our customs with purity.”88 Even as Peláez tried to emphasize what he
perceived to be laudable aspects of Dominican society (i.e., loyalty, whites,
anti-­Haitianism), he could not contain explicit antiblack venom. The report
continued with the traditional narrative of the republic’s 1821 separation—­but
Peláez embellished his version to make José Núñez de Cáceres, the principal
author of Brief In­de­pen­dence, not just an ambitious traitor but a “miserable
black.” He assured Governor Serrano that the population was “half white”
and insisted that they w ­ ere “noble, hospitable, proud of being Spanish.”
Segovia’s ­mistake in allowing some Dominicans to matriculate as Spanish
citizens in 1856 was not the policy itself, Peláez argued, but having allowed
black Dominican men to register for Spanish citizenship.
Seasoned in Cuba, Brigadier Peláez indulged extensively in tropes and fan-
tasies of black submission. The idea of Dominican loyalty played easily into
elite loyalist fantasies in Cuba and Puerto Rico, the idea that affective bonds
of “Spanishness” could override and sublimate massive social inequalities.
Although Dominicans w ­ ere overwhelmingly f­ ree ­people of color, the officer
rushed to emphasize that t­ hese Dominicans shared deep and visceral affin-
ity for Spain. “I have heard el­derly ­people [of color] recall, on the brink of
tears, the happiness and tranquility that they enjoyed with Spain,” he rhap-
sodized.89 He in­ven­ted a servile “poor, black man,” who carefully saved a
Spanish coat of arms through all the years of Haitian rule. “Valiant, doc-
ile, and submissive, they recognize in whites more capacity and knowledge
for leadership and only aspire not to be repressed,” he fantasized. “Despite

Soon It ­Will Be Mexico’s Turn | 69

twenty-­t wo years of unification with Haiti, the pardos and morenos of Santo
Domingo preserve the language and customs of their former masters,” he
continued, as though black Dominicans ­were recently arrived from Africa.90
He insisted, too, on a common “hatred” for Haiti.91 Pleased with the briga-
dier’s report, Governor Serrano charged Peláez with leading the forces into
the newly recolonized territory.92
One last figure remained for reinvention: Santana himself. Santana,
the same head of state who had been “far too horrible, even for ridicule” and
surrounded by “blacks from Seybo, half-­naked,” according to the former
Spanish consul, became a capable collaborator.93 Consul Álvarez cast him as
a pliant partner who listened to Spanish advice; he was an “astute and wise
campesino,” he remarked with satisfaction.94 Santana was “the guarantee of
security for the country” in a critical situation, the consul concluded, and
other authorities agreed.95 A subsequent report in Madrid summarized San-
tana’s arguments, calling the risk of Haitian and U.S. incursion “more criti-
cal each day.” Although not ignorant of Santana’s claims to military heroism
and amenable to his narratives about the “constant threat” of Haiti, ­these of-
ficials made their security priorities clear. The “more formidable e­ nemy . . . ​
appearing as a disarmed friend” was the United States, the official assessed:
“[U.S.] success, sooner or ­later, cannot be fought . . . e​ ven if all the Domini-
cans are Spanish at heart.”96
Santana’s annexation address of 18 March 1861 cemented narratives of
sanguine fidelity. “Our national glories are inherited from the g ­ rand and
noble lineage to which we owe our origin,” he began. He continued, “Nu-
merous, spontaneous, and popu­lar missives have arrived in my hands; . . . ​
­today you hope that what your loyalty has always desired might come to pass.
Religion, language, beliefs, and customs, all we preserve with purity . . . ​;
and the nation to which we are so tied t­oday opens her arms as a loving
­mother who gathers up her son, lost in the tempest in which his b ­ rothers
have perished.” The entire weight of annexation now lay on Núñez de Cáce-
res’s shoulders alone. “Only the ambition and resentment of one man sepa-
rated us from the m ­ other country,” Santana announced. Before becoming
enveloped in civil war like “­those other disgraced republics . . . [​ Spain] w ­ ill
give us the civil liberty that her pueblos enjoy [and] w ­ ill guarantee us natu­
ral liberty,” he argued. All laws of the former republic w ­ ere to be respected.
In the new state of peace, “She ­will protect us . . . ​making one ­people, one
united ­family, as we always ­were . . . ​raising the flag next to the cross that
Columbus dug in t­hese unknown lands,” he concluded. “Long Live the

70 | Chapter 2
Queen! Long Live Liberty! Long Live Religion! Long Live the Dominican
­People! Long Live the Spanish Nation!”97

Annexation in the Shadow of Slavery

By the 1850s, the idea of po­liti­cal federation, including protectorates, circu-
lated throughout the Spanish empire. The Cuban elites’ dissatisfaction with
exclusion from power had drawn a significant minority into support of U.S.
annexation in the previous de­cade. One plan from 1851 proposed local au-
tonomy ­under a reduced Spanish authority in response.98 One Puerto Rican
author called for a partial decolonization of sorts, an evolution of Ca­rib­bean
holdings into a loose moral Spanish federation; authorities prevented his
work from circulating on the island.99 Federation was a common plan on the
peninsula as well. Contemporaries proposed renewing po­liti­cal federation
between Spain and Portugal, constructing binational infrastructure and
education.100 Liberal commentators, in support of Dominican annexation,
pointed out that Cuba and Puerto Rico’s lack of integration into the Spanish
constitution was a “most dangerous in­equality.”101 When General Serrano
reached Cuba in 1859, he married the ­daughter of a rich Cuban ­family, re-
vived the idea of white Cuban repre­sen­ta­tion in Madrid, and hinted that his
own executive post might at long last be curtailed.102 The Cuban governor
hoped that Dominican annexation would be the first step in a more cen-
tralized ­legal regime and a transformation of the Ca­rib­bean empire from
“­simple colonies that produce benefits, more or less,” to a resurgent, united
Overseas Spain.103 Spain would make Ca­rib­bean residents feel “truly Span-
ish,” on the path to “total assimilation . . . s​ lowly and gradually procured,”
Serrano urged. He had “profound conviction” that the humiliation caused
by ­legal differences prevented pro­gress.104 With a stronger moral and cul-
tural foothold, Spain could move beyond the three largest Antilles to extend
its influence to “the bosom of Mexico” and beyond.105
Proponents of Dominican annexation vacillated between narratives of
inclusion and exclusion in the same work, even in the same sentence. Mari-
ano Torrente’s Política ultramarina (Overseas Politics, 1854) argued hard for
Dominican annexation to preserve Spanish familial ties in the Ca­rib­bean,
even as the author viciously condemned emancipation and distanced him-
self from Dominicans themselves.106 A longtime official in Cuba, Torrente dis-
missed the British and French islands as failures and was bald in his antiblack
racism and support for imperial aggression in Africa. “In e­ very emancipa-
tion system, t­ here are the same evils, the same vices, and inevitable ruin,”

Soon It ­Will Be Mexico’s Turn | 71

he spat.107 He unequivocally condemned Dominican subsistence ­labor and
cast doubt on individuals’ capacity to transcend it. He warned that the ma-
jority of Dominicans—­“who are all of color,” he interjected—­demonstrated
“the laziness typical of proletarians, ­because one cannot obligate them to work.”
He mystified material scarcity in the territory, complaining, “They prefer to
go around in rags, eat nothing more than sugar and plantains, which are
obtained with very ­little ­labor.”108 ­After reviewing at some length the chang-
ing dynamics of power and commerce with the United States and Britain,
Torrente clearly supported annexation of the Dominican Republic, even as
he periodically claimed neutrality.109 Just three hundred men would be nec-
essary if the government w ­ ere to want to take Santo Domingo as a protector-
ate, he urged, dismissing the idea of international opposition. “Our rights
over that country are undeniable,” he wrote. “No nation could justly allege
that it had the right to intervene in what can be called purely a ­family ques-
tion.”110 Quickly, his language shifted from familial meta­phors to possessive
ones. “Anglo-­Americans . . . ​cannot detain us in any way, “ he persisted, “as
it is only a m
­ atter of the legitimate owner of an errant or lost resource com-
ing back to collect it in light of his indisputable right to do so.”111
Torrente reconciled Dominican annexation with the imminent end of
the slave trade and new controls of f­ ree ­people of color. “The slave trade
debate . . . ​has taken . . . ​the direction of speculation and politics,” he
began, in his report for Dominican annexation. The trade had already effec-
tively ceased, with some exceptions, to Puerto Rico. More than a thousand
enslaved Africans and Afro–­Puerto Ricans ­were sold from Puerto Rico to
Cuba in the late 1840s. “An island with only 50,000 slaves . . . will ​­ not fall
apart,” the governor announced. He did not tolerate open abolitionist dis-
course on the island, but he felt fairly confident about the island’s potential
course. “­There are enough f­ ree workers h ­ ere to replace them,” he wrote, “I
hope the exodus continues.” An expanding coffee economy raised prices
112

on the coast and drove rural Puerto Ricans to formerly uninhabited interior
lands. Their participation in coffee cultivation slowly tied them into systems
of credit that bound them more to the coast and the colonial state.113 Author-
ities and planters used vagrancy decrees, meanwhile, to push ­others onto
export-­oriented farms. Workers w ­ ere supposed to carry a passbook (libreta)
that established their occupation, listed their debts, and attested to their
conduct.114 Spanish authorities and planters in Cuba also sought to control
­free Cubans of color, whose numbers doubled from 1846 to 1861.115 East
Asian contract laborers first arrived in Cuba in 1847; nearly 125,000 arrived in
the next two de­cades.116 Torrente’s proposal for Santo Domingo, similarly,

72 | Chapter 2
was indentured African and Asian immigration, to be supervised by Spanish
settlers. The indentured workers could “cover the most urgent cultivation
needs,” while the abolitionists “could calm down and be sure their wishes
had been fully realized,” he wrote.117 White colonists would oversee every­
thing, and would s­ ettle as a “bronze wall” against Haiti and U.S. filibusters.
“The greatest degree of prosperity would soon result,” he urged.118
Six years ­after Torrente’s report, Governor Serrano placed heavy empha-
sis on Dominican consent as annexation began precipitously. A royal order
from December 1860 authorized Serrano to take what­ever mea­sures nec-
essary to protect the Dominican Republic from foreign invasion. Despite
condemnations of annexation from Madrid, the governor felt the order gave
him ample leeway to proceed.119 Another military del­e­ga­tion brought back
reports of annexation’s “voluntary” nature ­after discussions with Santana’s
officials.120 Meanwhile, Santana wrote to Governor Serrano announcing
that he planned to effect the turnover to Spain no ­later than February 1861;
­later, one of his ministers pushed the date to March.121 At Serrano’s direc-
tive, Santana’s officials solicited signatures of approval in a number of towns
throughout the territory. Thirty-­three towns and two military posts remitted
signatures, totaling about 4,000 signatures out of the republic’s population
of about 200,000, or about 2 ­percent of the country’s citizens.122 A total of
636 men signed in the capital. By contrast, only 140 did so in Santiago de los
Caballeros. The majority of the proclamations, twenty-­t wo out of the thirty-­
five, ­were straightforward ac­know­ledg­ments of reincorporation with l­ittle
­else added; they amounted to a pro forma ac­know­ledg­ment of Santana’s
coup. Just seven of the thirty-­five statements mentioned Haiti—­allegedly
Santana’s primary reason to seek Spain’s protection—­whereas ­others fo-
cused on agriculture, po­liti­cal peace, and ­legal reform.123 Significantly for
annexation’s ­future, two towns, distant from each other—­Barahona and La
Vega—­reminded the Crown of their promise to leave the republic’s laws in-
tact, mentioning explic­itly the continued abolition of slavery.
In Puerto Rico, the governor acted altogether startled by the news, which
was sent not by the Cuban governor but preemptively in the form of a let-
ter hand delivered by a Dominican official.124 Santana “has told me the de-
tails . . . ​and asked for forces and money,” Rafael Echagüe noted. But, he
continued, distinctly irritated, “As the Governor of Cuba has been the au-
thority elected by Her Majesty to deal with General Santana relative to this
delicate negotiation, as the circumstances [of the ­matter] have been com-
pletely strange . . . ,​ and as I have received no communication, neither from
the Government of Her Majesty nor from the indicated Governor, not even

Soon It ­Will Be Mexico’s Turn | 73

in case an eventuality of this sort might pres­ent itself, . . . ​I cannot adopt
any resolution whatsoever.”125 He declined to send aid to Santana but re-
solved to write the Cuban governor immediately.
Although news had not yet reached Madrid ­either, the annexation proj­ect
was quickly expanding. From Santo Domingo, Mariano Álvarez wrote to the
Ministry of State immediately, and Serrano did so as well. The Cuban gov-
ernor’s 26 March letter to Spain emphasized security; Spanish troops must
move in immediately in order to solidify authority, he argued. He urged
metropole officials, “Now that we are involved, i­sn’t our honor at stake?”126
In the summer of 1861, he sailed to Santo Domingo himself to confront first-
hand the po­liti­cal realities of the newly annexed territory. In fact, Serrano and
his Havana-­based officials threw themselves immediately into the details of
the annexation. All Spanish officials involved in the initial annexation and
occupation accepted t­ hese basic premises that Dominican envoys had laid
out: that the laws of the republic be respected, that the rampant and almost
worthless paper money be amortized, and that slavery remain absolutely
abolished. The task at hand was to reconcile t­ hese stipulations—­particularly
the slavery clause—­with Spanish overseas law, and to do so quickly. In June
1861, Governor Serrano named José Malo de Molina, an auxiliary (suplente) of
Havana’s municipal government, as a special commissioner charged to sub-
mit a report on the government and social or­ga­ni­za­tion of the extinguished
republic; he finished less than a month ­later and presented it to the governor
in Havana in September.127 Malo de Molina averred that he had gathered data
as best he could given the constraints of time and the immensity of the task.
“If the subject ­were not so urgent, perhaps I would tear up ­these smudged
pages,” he wrote.128
Both Malo de Molina and Governor Serrano pondered the issue of legis-
lative reform for the new colony. As the Madrid newspaper Crónica de Ambos
Mundos asked, “If it is true that the same special laws that govern Cuba, Puerto
Rico, and the Philippine Islands [­will apply]—­that is, dictatorial ones—­how
­will Spain respond to the votes and wishes of the residents, who, according
to the letter of general santana, want to adopt the liberties of the Spanish p­ eople
as their own?”129 “It is beyond doubt that the Dominicans are anxious to estab-
lish Spanish legislation as soon as pos­si­ble: but which legislation should this
be?” Malo de Molina asked.130 Another writer suggested that Havana be the
capital of a three-­island federative government.131 Havana’s elite would have
supported such a plan. In anticipation—or at least desire—of more legisla-
tive power in the empire, Cuban authorities had gone so far as to name four

74 | Chapter 2
potential senators to Madrid in the event that their repre­sen­ta­tion might be
recognized.132
None of the federative options answered the question of l­egal freedom
in Santo Domingo. “­There is no doubt that the princi­pal desire of ­those in-
habitants is to be equal to the Peninsula, not just b ­ ecause they solicited
it at the time of incorporation, but also ­because it would be positive and
infallible proof that slavery would not be reestablished, as some suspect,
and as the Haitians have tried to convince the p ­ eople of color and o ­ thers
who are discontented [with annexation],” Malo de Molina wrote.133 Serrano
concurred that Cuba’s code would not do,

with the supposition that the race of color has limited civil rights, and ab-
solutely no po­liti­cal ones, . . . a​ pplied to a country where pardos and even
pure morenos have occupied and occupy high posts in administration and
the military, and in which the every­thing for every­one of liberal governments
has been known ­here for so long. . . . I​s it feasible to establish, for ex-
ample, a personal legislation that allows the sentence of flogging for one
race, the law that excludes all participation in public office, and all their
ramifications, in a country whose social dictionary has erased the word
servitude, and in which ­there is a perfect and absolute leveling among its
inhabitants, no ­matter what their origin?134

“The Majesty’s wish is that . . . t​ he province be ruled by the same laws as the
other overseas dominions, especially by ­those of Cuba,” Serrano wrote, but
he warned the sovereign that “if such a t­ hing w ­ ere to happen, it would be to
introduce an ele­ment of distrust, motivating malcontents . . . ​to make false
interpretations.” The “most essential difference” between the island and its
colonial neighbors lay in its social norms; the “same strong and numerous
race . . . ​kept in constant domination” by the laws of Cuba was “interlaced
with the white in Santo Domingo, making it impossible, or at least not with-
out ­great difficulty, to mark the dividing line that law and custom maintain
in Cuba and Puerto Rico,” Serrano argued.135
Despite royal edicts from May 1861 to the contrary, therefore, both Gov-
ernor Serrano and Commissioner Malo de Molina concluded that metro-
politan law should rule in the newly annexed territory. Peninsular law would
suit the territory just fine, Malo de Molina insisted, advising Serrano to
disregard earlier recommendations he had made to the contrary. Without
slavery and a “diversity of castes,” the issue would not arise, he asserted.136
Serrano was equally optimistic, even pointed, in his recommendation for

Soon It ­Will Be Mexico’s Turn | 75

metropolitan law. “I see the annexation of Santo Domingo as a providen-
tial event that pres­ents Spain with the necessity of thinking of the means to
resolve for itself the grave question that is ­today being aired in the United
States of Amer­ic­ a, and whose solution must have a very direct influence on
the destiny of Cuba,” he wrote.137 The application of the civil code of Spain
in Santo Domingo, “already published so that it may be practically studied,
­will be perhaps opportune,” Serrano argued. “I do not think ­there would
be a big prob­lem with testing them. . . . F​ ew times has such an opportune
situation emerged for a test of this kind: Santo Domingo is a totally virgin
populace in this aspect.”138 “Sooner or l­ater the laws with no po­liti­cal char-
acter have to be made extensive to [Cuba and Puerto Rico],” he continued.
Colonial reforms already made Cuban law so similar to metropolitan law, he
asserted, that “just one step would produce perfect equality.”139 Certainly,
­there existed “incon­ve­niences” in Cuban and Puerto Rican society, he ad-
mitted (with wild understatement); testing the law in f­ree territory would
be the perfect first step to reforms in all of Spain’s Ca­rib­bean islands.140 The
mood among the Cuban officials was euphoric.141

The First Jewel in the Spanish Crown: The Debate in Madrid

Noble and humanitarian work! How much blood and money the overseas
possessions have cost Spain! How many sacrifices Spain makes even t­ oday
in the deadly islands of Africa! How much did the continent of Amer­ic­ a cost
her, and how liberal and giving has Spain been! How much has Spain been a
true ­mother to ­those who gather at her lap in the shadow of her glorious flag!
—­francisco serrano

For several de­cades, Spanish imperial policy had grown more ambitious by
increments. In 1844, Spain reclaimed the west-­central African island of Fer-
nando Po (Bioko) from the British. A handful of unsuccessful settler proj­ects
to the island—­including a small group of illegally transported African men,
­women, and ­children (emancipados) who sought to leave Cuba—­followed
shortly thereafter.142 Members of the O’Donnell administration ­were ready,
even ­eager, to launch joint imperial military expeditions. Spanish troops
fought alongside French forces in Cocinchina (Nam tiến) beginning in 1858.
They ­were involved in the joint expeditionary force that arrived in Mexico in
1862 as well, although the expeditionary leader protested a­ fter Napoleon III’s
plans to instate the Austrian archduke became clear. Spain was unilaterally
aggressive as well. The so-­called War of Africa (1859–60), a one-­year conflict
with Morocco over the borders of the North African Spanish towns of Melilla

76 | Chapter 2
and Ceuta, enjoyed wild popularity in Spain. Other confrontations stopped
short of conquest; Spanish warships aggressively demanded reparations for
their merchants or for other perceived slights in Port-­au-­Prince, Monrovia,
and other ports.143 ­After Dominican annexation, similar conflicts over recla-
mations escalated to the seizure of the Chincha Islands as putative payment,
bringing outright conflict with both Peru and Chile.
In April 1861, however, when news of Dominican annexation first reached
Spain, official reception was initially tepid. Despite repeated entreaties from
Dominican officials, both members of the Unión Liberal government and
the queen herself had explic­itly rejected the idea of annexation in late 1860,
the latter suggesting a one-­year moratorium on consideration of the m ­ atter
­until November 1861.144 In fact, the queen denied Governor Serrano’s request
to send more troops to fortify the island, although the news reached Havana
­after Cuban boats had already sailed.145 Prime Minister Leopoldo O’Donnell
also had Ca­rib­bean government experience: he served as governor of Cuba
from October 1843 to February 1848, during the height of the repression
of antislavery mobilization. He had resolved near the end of his tenure in
Havana that Spain should avoid even the smallest reforms, “even ­those that
appear insignificant.” “Alarming concessions have been obtained by s­ imple
reforms [that have been] exploited in ways that ­were not foreseen,” he in-
sisted; rather than open up any win­dow for such dangerous reforms, Spain
­ought merely to send its “most capable and active governors.”146 Any sort
of social disorder would yield “the triumph of the colored castes, but if the
evil is certain and the danger possibly imminent, the remedy is easy and
known[;] it is enough to conserve the status quo with the most scrupulous
mea­sures,” he insisted.147 O’Donnell had opposed Dominican annexation
entreaties since the 1840s, arguing that Spain should merely cultivate good
sentiment in the republic, while “avoiding compromises of any kind.”148
Madrid’s vibrant newspaper sphere reflected only tepid interest in repeated
Dominican entreaties throughout 1860. The progressive and demo­cratic
press did not even consider that annexation was a possibility and discounted
it entirely.149 When news arrived of Santana’s and Serrano’s actions, a num-
ber of journalists expressed literal disbelief at the event, insisting instead
that the Cuban governor must have been merely protecting Spanish soldiers
in the area.150 Journalists voiced serious doubts about the strategic wisdom
of the proj­ect. The moderate newspaper El Contemporáneo noted, “The news
that we have about the origin and unfolding of such an impor­tant event is so
scarce . . . ​we do not know the role of the Spanish government, nor has any
information at all been gathered that guarantees us the una­nim­i­ty of the

Soon It ­Will Be Mexico’s Turn | 77

movement.”151 Moderate La Época published a number of condemnations,
fretting that relations with other Latin American republics would become
“impossible” if they, too, ­were to fear any such usurpation of sovereignty.152
The government should take necessary “precautions and guarantees to
make clear that the annexation is not an act of ambition by Spain,” another
writer opined.153 The moderate paper La España suggested that some sort
of a confederation would be a cheaper, more optimal option for Spain, a
position it continued to hold for months, even a­ fter the debate had been
resolved by the queen.154 Fi­nally, writers at El Clamor Público worried about
the cost of such a proj­ect and reminded their readers that Spain needed de-
velopment of its own. An author argued that Spain o ­ ught to direct all its
resources to internal development “before thinking of extending its territory
with acquisitions of dubious utility.” Spain’s own industry was “meager and
backward,” the author argued, and domestic infrastructure should be the
primary focus.155 Nearly two-­thirds of Spain needed colonization of its own,
another concluded.156
Journalists cast pointed skepticism on Santana’s motives and demanded
more proof of una­nim­i­t y on the part of the Dominican p ­ eople. The issue
of popu­lar consent was key. The Dominican leader was being pragmatic,
not sentimental or nationalist, and he had acted b ­ ecause he had “no other
means of salvation,” they argued.157 La Época warned that the move might
have stemmed from party intrigue.158 A number of periodicals, then, sug-
gested that a plebiscite ­ought to be effected before Spain accept the annexa-
tion as l­egal. Not surprisingly, vocally skeptic La Época urged O’Donnell’s
government not to take “any definite steps in the question of annexation,
nor even protectorate, . . . ​­until the sentiments and needs of the island are
perfectly clear.”159 The Correspondiente de España optimistically assured its
readers that a plebiscite would ­settle the ­matter, writing, “In no way ­will
Spain reject the annexation, when they have the conviction that it is the re-
sult of a general and spontaneous vote of the p ­ eople and their legitimate
authorities.” It must have seemed, of course, that no such mea­sure was
160

forthcoming. Demo­cratic La Discusión complained scathingly, “­There is an

extremely impor­tant difference between president Santana cheating the
liberty and in­de­pen­dence of a ­people for his advantage and the Dominican
­people themselves asking for annexation.”161 Even ­after the queen made
an official decree recognizing annexation on 19 May, La Discusión persisted
in demanding approbation by universal suffrage. “That way ­future complica-
tions would be avoided,” the editorial insisted.162 As the fact of the queen’s
approval sank in, such complaints fell on deafer ears.

78 | Chapter 2
 As the fact of annexation set in, Spanish papers became pragmatic, echo-
ing the uncertainty of Cuban officials about the legislative status of the new
colony. The progressive press, clearly unacquainted with Santana’s strong-­
arm po­liti­cal style, wondered aloud if annexation would curtail po­liti­cal lib-
erties in the former republic. They hoped instead that the annexation might
foster more self-­government and repre­sen­ta­tion in the region, perhaps even
repre­sen­ta­tion in the Cortes. Colonial reform was absolutely on the agenda.
La Discusión urged that the former republic be admitted with all the same
rights as a Spanish province and observed, “If this requires us to be more
liberal with Cuba and Puerto Rico, let’s be so, the time has come.”163 Las
Novedades concurred, arguing that annexation marked a “propitious occa-
sion” in order to make metropolitan rights more general in the Ca­rib­be­an.164
The moderate press, however, toed a more conservative line. Authors w ­ ere
very much opposed to po­liti­cal reforms, citing not only the pre­ce­dent of
past in­de­pen­dent movements but also the authors’ own investment in the
plantation economies of Cuba and Puerto Rico.165 More po­liti­cal rights to
Cuba and Puerto Rico “would reduce them to the miserable state in which
the Mexican state finds itself t­ oday,” editorials argued. Rather, Spain should
just send its best and brightest legislators, La España concluded, echoing
O’Donnell’s own proclamations from the Ca­rib­bean more than a de­cade
before.166 As for Santo Domingo, moderate papers urged that a protector-
ate status ­ought to be conferred instead. Any liberal tendencies would thus
be detained on the island, and slavery, a “social necessity,” would meet far
fewer ­legal complications.
As 1861 progressed, the Spanish press nevertheless soon stirred from
its relative ambivalence on the Santo Domingo question to proffer increas-
ingly enthusiastic support. Narratives began to depict the territory as an
untapped resource: Santo Domingo was a “magnificent portion of the New
World” whose generosity, nobility, and patriotism “overshadowed Spanish
ministers’ recalcitrance.”167 Its natu­ral resources and strategic Samaná Bay
would render it not only an impor­tant Spanish stronghold against grow-
ing U.S. interests but also a potentially profitable one, Madrid newspapers
argued. Many cited the annexation as an act of mercy t­ oward a threatened
state destined to be swallowed by Haitian or—­“worse for us, though not
for the Dominicans”—­Yankee imperialism.168 Not to accept the annexation
offer would be to invite U.S. incursion and imperil Cuba.169 El Contemporáneo
now found the annexation to be a “necessity” and urged “Columbus’s is-
land should not be abandoned again by Spain.”170 Despite their misgivings
in April, the bulk of the press became largely supportive of the apparently

Soon It ­Will Be Mexico’s Turn | 79

“spontaneous” nature of the event.171 Revisionism came full circle in an ar-
ticle by La América, which argued that not to accept Dominican annexation in
fact would be a violation of liberal princi­ples:

The novelty of the annexation, was neither as unexpected nor as unfore-

seen as some think. . . . I​t is very strange that the liberal theories that
predominate ­today in educated nations are not being applied to the Do-
minicans’ resolution. . . . ​It is clear that the Dominicans are fully within
their rights to rid themselves of their sovereignty. . . . S​ pain would be
unjustified in the eyes of humanity, if it ­were to ignore the cry for help
from a ­people in whose veins the same blood runs, whose religion and
language are the same as ours, and who is nothing more, in effect, than a
ramification of our own ­family.172

Echoing Félix de Bona’s aspirations of cultural confederation, the papers

brimmed with optimism about the possibilities of the remarkable pre­ce­dent.
In quick succession, the “African War” in Morocco and Dominican an-
nexation caused something of nationalist fervor to be whipped up over the
prospect of new imperial gains for Spain.173 Florid elegies of Spain’s past
achievements and the language of heroism and civilization permeated the
national press. The “drunkenness of a war in Africa [and] a new adventure
in Mexico on the old and glorious routes of Hernán Cortes” sparked roman-
tic reveries about Santo Domingo, the “Land of Columbus,” as well.174 Dis-
courses about ­these exploits, of course, lent themselves to exaggeration and
fancy; historian Francisco Febres-­Cordero Carrillo argues that their “rhe­
toric of action” was intended principally to “anesthetize the m
­ iddle class, who
lacked the means of effective po­liti­cal participation.”175 Nonetheless, bor-
rowing from the British lexicon of empire, one newspaper reported thusly
on the new annexation of Santo Domingo: “The event could not be more
felicitous, and we congratulate the Queen of Spain, the Nation, and the
Ministry. . . . ​In just over a year, the Monarchy in which [once] the sun never
set, dismembered by revolution, has considerably broadened its limits in Af-
rica and Amer­i­ca.”176 Politicians envisioned nothing less than an adjustment
in the balance of power in the hemi­sphere.
A number of Cubans—­creole and Spanish born—­offered to serve in the
Morocco campaign, petitioning for passage from Cuba with “the ardent
desire . . . ​to march into ­battle for the holy Spanish cause.”177 One specta-
tor from Havana urged the creation of a voluntary battalion of ­free men of
color, a plan that he saw as “eco­nom­ical” but also in the interests of “the
aggrandizement of the Spanish name,” particularly “should the war take on

80 | Chapter 2
another aspect a­ fter Tetuán’s occupation.”178 A pamphlet from Barcelona—­
which would ­later circulate in newly annexed Santo Domingo—­proclaimed,
“The Africa War is one of the most glorious pages in the history of the Spanish
nation in the pres­ent ­century. Every­thing is ­great and memorable: the jus-
tice of our cause, the enthusiasm of all the classes of the country, the valor
and suffering of our soldiers, the intelligence and bravery that guide them
to victory, which is the triumph of the Christian Civilization over Islamism
and barbarity.”179 The Times says Haiti ­will soon be annexed, we say “let it be
so,” La Época proclaimed. “With all of la Española, discovered by Isabel I and
recuperated by Isabel II, the strength of the Spanish in the Antilles is un-
matched.”180 Dominican elites praised the Morocco campaign, too. Rhap-
sodized the official Spanish paper in Santo Domingo, “­Every Spanish bullet
carried an idea.”181
On 19 May 1861—­a ­little more than two months ­after Pedro Santana pro-
claimed annexation and ordered a 101-­cannon salute to the Spanish flag in
Santo Domingo—­the Spanish Ministry of State officially approved the mea­
sure.182 “Her Majesty’s Government could not ever be indifferent to the fate
of the Spanish part of Santo Domingo,” the decree read. “To abandon her to
foreign intrigue, expose her to the invasions of an e­ nemy race, would have
been a very grave po­liti­cal error, and a total forgetting of honor and even hu-
manity.”183 Assured that the act was “spontaneous,” “unan­im ­ ous,” “in perfect
harmony with the sentiments of all of the population,” and even “against the
­will” of its closest collaborator, Francisco Serrano, the Crown promised to act
“for the growth and prosperity of its overseas provinces, benefiting from the
benefits of peace and institutions in harmony with modern civilization.”184
“Señor Santana” (who was in fact acting governor from the outset) should
announce the news to all the authorities and influential p ­ eople of Santo Do-
mingo, the report concluded. When the Spanish Parliament convened ­after
a six-­month recess in November, the queen reiterated the same now-­familiar
arguments: that annexation was spontaneous, that a glorious role awaited
Spain in the former republic and the rest of the Spanish world, that po­liti­cal
in­de­pen­dence had wreaked dangers in young republics, and so on.185 Some
representatives bristled at the fact that annexation had been declared in
their absence, but news of the event had already been circulating in Cuban
and Puerto Rican newspapers for months. Thus, one of the “first Jewels in the
Spanish Crown” was officially incorporated by a vote of 200 to 80.186
On the issue of legislating the new colony, a royal decree announced a
compromise: the criminal and commercial codes of Spain would provisionally
rule, but the civil code was to continue to be governed by laws from the

Soon It ­Will Be Mexico’s Turn | 81

former republic, admitting custom and traditional practice.187 Of slavery,
the Crown wrote that it was “one disastrous ­thing of many that afflicts socie­
ties, but a necessary one in some regions. It ­will not be extinguished in Cuba
nor in Puerto Rico, but neither ­will it be established in Santo Domingo nor
consented to in any form. Santo Domingo finds itself between two Spanish
provinces governed by special laws as per the Constitution of the Monar-
chy.”188 Some modifications might be necessary, the proclamation admit-
ted, but it insisted that the constitutional distinctions would remain firm.
In Santo Domingo, Pedro Santana’s response, passed along to the Ministro
de Guerra y Ultramar together with Governor Serrano’s and Malo de Mo-
lina’s reports, seemed to presage a peaceful transition to this new admin-
istration.189 The “too-­embarrassing case” of Dominican legislation being
written in a “strange language” necessarily called for its replacement by
Spanish law, he agreed.190 So, too, did the glowing missive of the newly
named regent of the Real Audiencia, Eduardo Alonso Colmenares, laud the
changes in government at g ­ reat length; he announced that the legislative
body would take up the Supreme Court cases of the “extinguished republic”
right away.191
Félix de Bona, president of the ­Free Society of Po­liti­cal Economy in Ma-
drid, rushed to publish a text that announced a new era in race-­based federa-
tion. Believing the annexation to be voluntary, he called the reincorporation
“of extraordinary importance . . . ​the only example in history . . . [​with]
immea­sur­able transcendence” and with the potential to spark “a moral
confederation . . . ​of the Spanish race on both continents.”192 He proposed a
convention of Spanish American nations, where Spain could have “a pacific
and conciliatory influence, an honorary presidency, and without threatening
in the least the autonomy of each State . . . ​an economic ­union” that would
in turn foment “the strength of the raza.”193 “Races, like nations and indi-
viduals, have an instinct for their self-­preservation,” de Bona argued, and
would gain both freedom and strength through confederation.194 “Races,
like nations and individuals, benefit from the right to live and exercise their
industry,” he continued.195 This utopic fraternity was not based on imperial
dominance, de Bona claimed; “it does not suit us to enlarge our dominions
in Amer­ic­ a, ­because it does not suit us to dominate anywhere,” he insisted.196
He continued, “We ­don’t have the strength to dominate, and even if we did,
it would be insanity to spend it on an unproductive and hateful domina-
tion.”197 Spain would be a guarantor of justice and security, beginning in
Santo Domingo.

82 | Chapter 2
International Reception of Dominican Annexation
By February 1861, Haiti’s government paper, Le Moniteur Haïtien, began pub-
lishing alarming annexation rumors circulating from neighboring islands.198
L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-­Orléans reported that it seemed Spain had purchased
Santo Domingo and predicted that Spain would be a “dangerous neighbor.”199
In the weeks that followed, the Port-­au-­Prince papers published responses
from Paris, Liverpool, London, Jamaica, and a number of U.S. cities. The
Massachusetts legislature passed a resolution unanimously condemning the
annexation. From Jamaica, the Morning Journal impugned an “unscrupulous”
Dominican president and decried, “The news presages nothing less than the
annihilation of the Haitian nationality.”200 Haiti’s Moniteur reprinted critical opin-
ions that predicted French and British opposition, as well as early signs of
confusion from Madrid papers.201 President Geffrard issued a formal protest
when news of the annexation definitively arrived; Kingston’s Gleaner repub-
lished Geffrard’s protest in its entirety. “Haiti and Jamaica are the only two
countries in the world where blacks and their descendants are permitted to
exercise their rights,” the paper asserted, gravely. Absent other foreign inter-
vention, they urged Geffrard to resist.202
Less than one month a­ fter Dominican annexation was declared—­surely
the news had barely reached U.S. shores—­a Confederate attack on Fort
Sumter summoned an ever-­increasing conflagration. It was in this moment
of circumstantial opportunity that Dominican annexation slipped onto the
international stage; Spain hoped it would cause as ­little disturbance as pos­
si­ble. Given their impossible preoccupation, U.S. complaints “might as
well be directed at the sky,” one Madrid newspaper exulted.203 Anyway, the
annexation fit with the aggressive colonial imagination of the moment. A
French paper, La Presse, found Spain’s “voluntary” premise a bit disingenu-
ous and predicted some opposition, without summoning much outrage.204
Observers even speculated that Spain might subsume Haiti ­under the Span-
ish flag as well. “It ­will now be for Spain to prove the sincerity of its pledges
and to develop the riches of this noble island,” one British observer wrote,
blandly.205 Le Siècle concluded that France might have just as much claim to
the island and supposed Spain “might soon [have] a tour of Mexico!”206
On the ground in Santo Domingo, members of Santana’s government
marked annexation without a hitch. The French consul was not invited, and
the Spanish consul awaited instruction. In fact, the act of annexation bore
Santana’s signature alone; he did not solicit a single consul signature. The
French consul allowed as how his only instructions had been to prevent

Soon It ­Will Be Mexico’s Turn | 83

cession to the United States, and he predicted immediate recognition from
Paris.207 Even U.S. opportunist and sometime commercial agent Joseph
Fabens considered that the proj­ect had “begun well.” He felt his commer-
cial pursuits might even be abetted by the change in flag. He praised the
idea that they might be inviting in U.S. settlers: “How suggestive t­ hese facts!
What amazing significance in them! Young Spain, breaking through her
traditional meshes of intolerance and oppression, at one bold leap . . . !”208
British consul Martin Hood admitted he was sober, remaining “perfectly
quiet” in the ­matter.209 He was skeptical of popu­lar reception of the change
of flags in the capital, which took place “in complete silence, it was ­really a
melancholic spectacle: men and w ­ omen ­were crying; no applause or even
an audible whimper . . . ​and no one shot guns,” he claimed.210 He predicted
the territory’s difficult economic situation was likely to continue and re-
marked with concern that he would continue to verify the status of any resi-
dents of the territory who had escaped from slavery from neighboring Cuba
and Puerto Rico.211
From Union officials and observers, reception of the annexation was re-
soundingly chilly but ultimately muted. Annexation represented a flagrant
violation of the Monroe Doctrine and directly opposed U.S. interests in Sa-
maná, authorities observed. New secretary of state William E. Seward took
office in March 1861 and urged Lincoln to stir from the inaction of President
Buchanan on the Dominican ­matter. He submitted strongly worded memos
from the president to Spain’s representative in Washington, Gabriel Tas-
sara.212 Nevertheless, President Lincoln explic­itly forbade him from issuing a
direct ultimatum to Spain. U.S. officials in Madrid did issue protests, but
no action whatsoever was taken.213 “I say, fix your own h ­ ouse,” the former
consul to Santo Domingo reported from New York, smugly.214 A number
of newspapers—­the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times among them—­
expressed disbelief at the events and called for action in defense of the
Monroe Doctrine.215 James Redpath’s Pine and Palm gathered protests from
readers and news of opposition elsewhere, protesting that the event was “of
­great importance not only for American commerce, but for the interests of
freedom in general, and more particularly, of the races of color in the Amer­
i­cas.”216 Despite Seward’s urging and popu­lar opposition across the U.S.
press, however, the Union was simply too occupied in the secession strug­gles
at hand. Other times, the occupation did not figure into press coverage at all.
In a largely disparaging article from 1862, the Atlantic Monthly called Spain’s
exploits in Morocco “a silly affair” and bristled at Spain’s “entitlement”
­toward its former colonies, even as it assessed that Spain was “now demand-

84 | Chapter 2
ing for their country admission to the list of the G ­ reat Powers of Eu­rope.”217
Although published nearly a year a­ fter annexation, the article, inscrutably,
did not mention Santo Domingo at all. At least if Spain retook Mexico, the
territory might be a bulwark against the “lawless spirits of the South . . . ​
only one step below the devil,” the author supposed.218
Disgraced Spanish diplomat Manuel Cruzat—he of the Haitian diplo-
macy debacle in 1855—­provoked a strong reaction from the British consul
several weeks ­after annexation. Serving as the diplomatic secretary to Rear
Admiral Rubalcava, who had arrived with military forces from Cuba, Cru-
zat spoke cavalierly to British consul Hood. Spain did intend to reintroduce
slavery, he remarked casually, and ­owners of fugitive slaves from Cuba and
Puerto Rico escaped to the former republic would have “a perfect right” to
reclaim them as property.219 Hood was flabbergasted. “If Spanish rule is en-
forced of considering all ­children of slaves as the property of their masters,
­there ­will hardly be a single black or coloured person in the country who w­ ill
be safe from persecution,” he wrote. A flurry of high official communication
was exchanged, including repeated promises from Spanish prime minister
O’Donnell himself, and British officials’ fears w ­ ere allayed somewhat. “His
Excellency further said that public feeling in Spain was against the Slave
Trade,” even if O’Donnell claimed its suppression could not be effected
“before mea­sures for substituting other ­labor ­were matured,” Lord Russell
reported.220 As a country “naturally inclined to peace, and systematically
addicted to commerce,” Britain’s main concern was to avoid foreign con-
flict, Russell averred.221 “The formal and repeated declarations of Marshal
O’Donnell that ­under no circumstances ­will slavery be introduced . . . ​have
removed the main cause which would have led hmg to view the proposed
annexation with dislike and repugnance,” the British consul agreed. Given
that the other major powers also seemed to be quiescent, and that Britain
held itself “as a Power naturally inclined to peace, and systematically ad-
dicted to commerce,” the consul concluded that peaceful recognition was
undoubtedly the best route.222
As weeks passed, general response grew more and more positive. British
journalists w­ ere sanguine about the prospect for an emancipated Spanish
Ca­rib­bean empire. The Quarterly Review, a London journal, outlined a bright
­future for Spanish government and economy in which imperial proj­ects such
as the annexation of Santo Domingo played an impor­tant part. Constitu-
tional government and a growth in national revenue in the 1850s w ­ ere ample
evidence of Spain’s upward trend, the author praised. He disapproved of
223

Spain’s recent military expeditions into Morocco—an acquisition of territory

Soon It ­Will Be Mexico’s Turn | 85

that the Review judged superfluous to Spain’s economic advancement—­but
was enthusiastic and effusive about the annexation of Santo Domingo.224
Clearly unfamiliar with the history of the republic, the writer made a number
of errors in describing its recent history; nonetheless, he concluded that the
annexation—as Spanish officials insistently claimed—­had been a “­free and
spontaneous act of the President and ­people” and as such was “one of the
most remarkable events of an age full of startling changes and surprises.”225
The Spanish government has given the most satisfactory pledges that slav-
ery s­ hall not be reintroduced, he concluded; “indeed, the re­introduction
of slavery . . . ​is morally impossible.” This ­free l­ abor experiment reflected
the growth and optimism of Britain’s ally, the journal argued. “It w ­ ill be for
the Spanish Government now . . . ​to develop the riches of this noble land.
Ag ­ reat experiment ­will soon be in pro­gress in the attempt to raise tropi-
cal produce by f­ ree ­labour. We believe it w ­ ill be a successful one. It must,
should it so prove, effect an entire revolution in the pres­ent colonial econ-
omy of Spain. ­There ­will no longer be even a pretext for conniving at the
slave trade, and the gradual extinction of slavery within the Spanish do-
minions ­will be assured.”226 Of Spain’s role in the emancipated republics
of Latin Amer­i­ca, the author writes, “It is natu­ral that Spain should, in her
renovated strength, turn her thoughts ­towards t­hose vast countries. . . . ​
The resumption of her ancient dominion [in Mexico], ­after the recent an-
nexation, . . . ​may appear to be within her grasp.” He predicted Haiti might
follow.227
In the face of such limited opposition, it seemed that all was well with
the new annexation proj­ect. Santana and Cuban officials echoed choruses
about the event’s spontaneity and support. The Gaceta de la Habana reprinted
­these promises and marveled at annexation’s auspicious nature for Span-
ish empire.228 Congratulations arrived from Spanish authorities in Manila
by midsummer, praising, too, the voluntary demonstration of fidelity by
the Dominican p ­ eople.229 U.S. influence was at an ebb; only eight U.S. ships
reached Dominican ports from January to November 1861, and William Caz­
neau wrote to Secretary of State Seward that Spanish officials planned on
controlling the Mona passage tightly.230 Elsewhere, hemispheric observers
watched the developments with concern. Peru issued a formal proclamation
condemning the annexation, and petitioners gathered more than thirty-­
seven hundred signatures in Jamaica.231 President Geffrard of Haiti would
soon follow with a statement of condemnation. For the moment, however,
it seemed that a new era in Spanish colonialism—of the “utmost satisfaction
and glory”—­was at hand, beginning in the Ca­rib­be­an.232

86 | Chapter 2
three

The White Race Is Destined

to Occupy This Island
ANNEXATION AND THE QUESTION OF F
­ REE L
­ ABOR

As they reached Santo Domingo from Havana, a Spanish naval commander

took pains to issue a reminder to his troops as they disembarked from the
steamship:

1. As slavery does not exist ­here, and all citizens are equal in rights, the
class of color enjoys the same consideration as the white.
2. As a natu­ral consequence of the above: that in the island ­there are
men who are generals, leaders and officials who are colored and
white; but they must all be given equal re­spect and consideration that
royal ­orders and the respective hierarchies afford them.

He admonished his troops to observe “prudent and caring conduct with

the residents, avoiding disputes, and winning, at all cost, the affections and
admiration of the Dominicans.” He urged that high officers ­were to be ab-
solutely inflexible in inculcating their subordinates with the gravity of this
responsibility.1
A ­simple edict, of course, could do l­ittle to alter the mentality of arriv-
ing Spanish troops, authorities, and would-be colonists disembarking from
Cuban ships. The w ­ hole proj­ect, precipitously realized, was somewhat hap-
hazard. They “embarked, with no ­orders, no proclamation, like filibusters
sneakily united for some awful escapade,” one general wrote, retrospec-
tively. “Neither officer nor soldier knew if that territory was ­enemy or friend,
if they arrived as masters, allies, or conquistadors,” he described, “no rule of
conduct, no policy warning of any of the contingencies that might immediately
arise from the sudden interchange of peninsular soldier and that population
of color.”2 Officials called the territory “the extinguished republic” (extin-
guida república), awkwardly, and authorities even inquired of archivists in Se-
ville as to what the island most appropriately was called: Santo Domingo,
La Española, or Haiti.3 In the days following annexation several foreigners
briefly raised flags of their own nations in one small southern town, to the
consternation of authorities.4 Nevertheless, Spanish high authorities stayed
on message: rule of law and its equal application ­were to reign in the new
colonial experiment. “Individuals of this race are very sensitive to their treat-
ment by public authorities; Your Excellency should keep this in mind,” the
Crown reiterated.5 Soldiers ­were less guarded, writing home about their
shock at the spectacle of black troops and the material deprivations of the
territory.6 Among themselves, ministers ­were also less circumspect. “­Under
the auspices of Spain, in my ­humble judgment, the white race is destined to
occupy this ever-­green tropical island, enriching it and animating it with the
triumphs of science, industry, and art,” the overseas minister predicted.7
Authorities maintained that Dominican annexation presented a new di-
rection in Spanish Ca­rib­bean rule: a jurisdiction without slavery or legislative
distinctions of race. Despite a veneer of fraternity, however, Spanish offi-
cials felt that the annexation was an act of charity, a “generous act of the
­Mother Country” t­oward an impoverished and inferior territory.8 That the
reestablished proj­ect was to be a f­ ree-­labor “experiment”—­and a province—­
complicated Spanish intent further. The newly arrived authorities reveled at
the prospect of the “inexhaustible riches” from the “virgin land,” but Do-
minican coffers, which had been in a state of more or less permanent eco-
nomic crisis for de­cades, offered no immediate help.9 In effect, the Spanish
sought to jump-­start a market economy where t­ here was almost none and
to rule with Dominican local officials and Spanish high authorities; their
endeavor amounted to an early effort at “hegemony on a shoestring.”10 They
floundered for means to make it profitable, or at least less of a drain on the
coffers of Cuba, whose authorities sent 150,000 pesos in July 1861 alone. ­After
his brief stay in the capital and several hours in the port of Samaná, the Cuban
governor ordered a “complete reor­ga­ni­za­tion of a tattered [desquiciado] . . . ​
administration” and left.11
Forced ­labor, transformed once by the Haitian Revolution and by sec-
ond slavery, was on the precipice of another fulcrum, in which expanding
markets for tropical goods intersected with a sudden crisis in the southern
United States and new international proj­ects of migration and l­ abor control.
As secession and warfare decimated U.S. cotton production, industrialists
schemed for new sites to fill the void.12 Well prior to war­time disruption, in

88 | Chapter 3
fact, cotton’s high prices made Manchester merchants impatient to foment
production in more territories, an ambition that neatly reinforced imperial
expansion.13 British joint-­stock cotton companies in the Ca­rib­bean prolifer-
ated overnight, including an Anglo-­Spanish com­pany in Cuba.14 Haiti’s new
president, Fabre Nicholas Geffrard, committed to cotton production plans,
sending officials to conduct a vast survey of potential production sites.15
The government facilitated credit to private buyers to purchase cotton and
sugar machinery and offered bounties for production.16 Cotton was highly
sought ­after, could be planted on all types of terrain, could be produced with
reasonable start-up capital, and would improve the country’s trade balance,
Geffrard urged.17 High war­time prices made cotton bounties unnecessary.
Haiti’s production soared from less than 700,000 pounds in 1860 to more
than twice that by 1862, and samples w ­ ere displayed at the G
­ reat Exhibition
in London that year.18 Meanwhile, Manchester cap­i­tal­ists sent cottonseed
to Trinidad, Tobago, Antigua, British Guiana, Barbados, Dominica, Tortola,
and a plethora of other semitropical sites.19 Investors and authorities em-
braced a “myth of tropical exuberance,” e­ ager and confident that they could
profit in new locations.20
New programs of cash-­crop export and ­labor control, rather than being
a departure from slavery, ­were eminently legible to Caribbean elites. In
conjunction with imperial offices across the Atlantic, Ca­rib­bean officials
mobilized new programs of indenture. Beginning in the 1820s, more than
430,000 predominantly young men and ­women arrived as contract laborers
in the British Ca­rib­bean, more than 76,000 to the French Ca­rib­bean, and
more than 125,000 to Cuba.21 They arrived from dif­fer­ent sites in A ­ frica,
only just released from having been kidnapped onto slave ships, and by con-
tract from dif­f er­ent Indian states, China, and Madeira. Britain occasionally
jealously opposed the importation proj­ects of other empires, but programs
thrived.22 Across the islands, in Brazil, Peru, and elsewhere, the men and
­women w ­ ere bound to an individual employer, faced criminal charges for
civil offenses (including ­labor discipline), and had to ­labor for as long as
ten years to earn return passage.23 Planters intentionally tried to isolate
the newly arrived into a “cycle of coercion.”24 The very language of ­labor
scarcity was one of division and control, of course, directed as a weapon
against the in­de­pen­dence of the emancipated. On islands where land was
available, the formerly enslaved had tenaciously carved out small plots, de-
spite all manner of restrictions.25 Low wages, surveillance, intolerable dis-
cipline, and an aversion to economic dependence, not any sort of absolute
demographic shortage, had hastened freed ­peoples’ exodus and planters’

Destined to Occupy This Island | 89

ire si­mul­t a­neously. On smaller islands with no available land, the balance of
power tipped hard to planters (or, in the case of Turks and Caicos Islands,
salt mine ­owners). ­Here, elites colluded with authorities to try to prevent the
formerly enslaved from leaving the island at all.26
Even authorities who explic­itly promoted cotton as a chance to “acquit”
­free ­labor looked to immigration proj­ects and to expand control over rural
­labor. Haiti’s secretary of state, François Jean-­Joseph, concluded that both
state and private plantations needed foreign agricultural laborers, and he
proposed immigration bureaus domestically and in the United States.27
Geffrard invited African Americans to immigrate; U.S.-­based abolitionists
James Redpath and James Theodore Holly served as formidable allies who
promoted the plan widely.28 The administration awarded ­free passage to
­those who would ­settle on larger plantations as sharecroppers; artisans
­were to repay travel costs in three months’ time. About two thousand Afri-
can Americans arrived, but the program dwindled a­ fter 1862; the families
reported poor conditions, unsatisfactory land distribution, and other con-
flicts. As many as a third quickly bought return passage.29 An isolated scheme
to populate Île-­à-­Vache quickly collapsed not long a­ fter.30 Disappointed but
not deterred, Geffrard hoped Haitian peasants would also flock to the cot-
ton industry, out of personal interest and an abstract patriotism. “Rural
populations, I like to think, w ­ ill not remain deaf to t­ hese exhortations,” he
remarked, “and ­will know to enter in a path which, while taking them indi-
vidually to well-­being, ­will bring the country to an elevated position . . . ​,
through their industriousness and the importance of their production, . . . ​
[and ­will] make them indispensable.” Authorities urged district generals to
encourage, without requiring, cotton production, and to submit regular re-
ports.31 Wealthy Haitians approved of t­hese mea­sures and called for sugar
production, too, and even suggested seeking contract laborers from India.32
All around the island, an elaborate geography of l­ abor restrictions, contract
­labor, and other restraints emerged alongside emancipation and slavery, a
map that was well known to Ca­rib­bean residents.33
This chapter details the quotidian details of Spanish reoccupation of
Dominican territory as they planned to remake the Dominican landscape
and to reorder the way its residents labored and lived. Authorities intended
to make Dominicans into “productive” subjects, to formalize and commer-
cialize peasant l­ abor, and to bring them u­ nder the authority of the colonial
state. Spanish authorities focused on the investment of new industries and
public works, and individual cap­i­tal­ists brought them numerous petitions
for cotton plantations, railroads, and a series of other proj­ects, which ranged

90 | Chapter 3
 United States 1865 [1864–1928]
ATLANTIC OCEAN

GULF Bahamas 1838 [1811–1860]

OF
MEXICO Cuba 1886
[1847–1874]
Mexico 1829,
1837 [1870]
British Honduras
1838 [1865–1870] 1. British Guiana
Honduras Jamaica 1838 1838 [1838–1843,
1824 [1841–1916] 1845–1917]
Guatemala 1824
El Salvador 1824 Nicaragua 1824, [Link] 1863
1857 [1869, 1884] [1872–1931]
3. Guyane 1848
Costa Rica 1824 [1855–1870s] [1856–1877]
Venezuela
Panama 1821, 1852 1854
[1852–1854]
Colombia 1
2
1821, 1852 3
PACIFIC OCEAN
Peru 1821,
Ecuador 1854 [1849–74] Brazil 1888 [1821–1856,
1821, 1852, 1854 1855–1874, 1850s]

Turks and Caicos 1838 [1840s–1910s]

Haïti 1793, 1801 Santo Domingo 1801, 1822

Puerto Rico 1873
[1804–1820] Saint Martin 1848
[1849–1873]

St. Croix 1848 [1863–1878] Antigua 1834

Sint Maarten 1863 [1847–1881]
Saint Kitts 1838 [1860–1865]
Guadeloupe 1794, 1848 [1853–1888]

CARIBBEAN SEA Dominica 1838

CARIBBEAN SEA
Martinique 1848 [1853–1888]
Saint Lucia 1838 [1858–1895]

Saint Vincent 1838 [1860–1880]

Curaçao 1863 Barbados
Aruba 1863
Bonaire 1863 1838 [1863]
Grenada 1838
[1857–1885]
Trinidad
Colombia and Tobago
1821, 1852 Venezuela 1854 1838
[1845–1917]

Map 3.1 ​Map showing emancipation dates, with major proj­ects of indenture, l­abor
control, or indenture emigration in brackets. By Annelieke Vries. For clarifications, see
note 33.
from the mundane to the outlandish. One merchant even proposed camel
transport.34 The Crown supported ­these proposals, ordering land surveys
and abrogating tariffs on the import of machinery. Authorities predicted
that Dominicans might be willing to grow export crops for low wages.35
Confidentially, the Crown suggested that Dominicans might be impressed
into public works proj­ects for a small wage, too, as they had “been obliged to
live arms in hand and ready to serve for so long.” The administration should
pay for, or at least promote, proj­ects of Spanish migration, early edicts de-
termined.36 A handful of established planters asked for liberated Africans
or other foreign indentured laborers instead. Meanwhile, the queen passed
a royal order in June 1861 that banned the arrival of f­ ree ­people of color to
the island, intending to prevent enslaved ­people from Cuba and Puerto Rico
from reaching the island and escaping to freedom. Santo Domingo, as a
province of Spain, had a dif­fer­ent status than its neighbors—­with Domini-
can civil code and Spanish criminal codes set to rule—­but separation from
the plantation states proved immediately and fundamentally troublesome.
In Santo Domingo as in Haiti and elsewhere, discourses about f­ ree peas-
ant ­labor ranged from paternalism to outright moral panic. Authorities
harbored didactic fantasies that “instruction” would make emancipated or
peasant individuals behave as was eco­nom­ically and po­liti­cally con­ve­nient;
they ­were particularly obsessed with inculcating respect—or, at least, the
per­for­m ance of re­spect—­for the rule of law.37 In Haiti, authorities codi-
fied an archetype of the rural agricultural worker (habitant agriculteur) as a
national symbol, unequally integrated into the state. They celebrated 1 May
as “la fête de l’agriculture,” with equal parts pomp and moralizing. “­Fathers
and m­ others, prepare your ­children from their youth for the love of work, the
submission they owe the law, and the re­spect they owe to the authorities of
the Empire!” Soulouque exhorted.38 Geffrard’s first promises ­were to amend
the Rural Code to create a stronger rural police, local inspectors, and stronger
antivagrancy strictures.39 Authorities fretted about l­abor control through the
lens of moral formation. “In [Puerto Rico and Santo Domingo] immorality
and the lack of religious education deprive men of the essential bases to keep
them in line with their duties,” Puerto Rico’s governor asserted.40 White is-
land residents fantasized that German, Irish, French, and other white laborers
might “model” agricultural wage work; it was a common enough reverie that
combined the preservation of a white plurality and the dream of a subordi-
nate and docile sector of color, all at once.41 As coercive reform “experiments”
eroded in some islands, moral panic grew, about sexuality, marriage practices,
religion, medicine, and all manner of i­magined deviance.42 Geffrard directed

92 | Chapter 3
his attentions to vodou, making it a central ­legal target.43 His minister pro-
claimed “idleness and vagabondage are a leprosy” that authorities would
“work tirelessly to repress.”44 ­Later, his opponents would say he did not go far
enough. “Surely what they are wanting then is the reestablishment of forced
­labor for the benefit of aristocracy, as with during Christophe,” the president
retorted, in frustration.45
Among the small southern Dominican elite coauthors of annexation—­
and the commercial class in the Cibao valley—­a significant sector entered
­eager to benefit from Spanish plans for investment and ­labor control.46 Do-
minican politicians had long argued that the country’s raw potential was
undeniable, a “hidden mine . . . a​ n earthly paradise.”47 A small but enthusi-
astic group of elites in the Cibao mentioned development in their manifesto,
hoping for an end to the inflation that had crippled the tobacco exports of
the region for so long (and forced the trade into the hand of Danish and Ger-
man banks). Financial reform, the idea of “sacred property,” and the military
tools to control unrest appealed to them greatly.48 From the capital, elites
wrote enthusiastically that reunification should henceforth “never be erased
in the minds of Spaniards,” and they joined authorities in celebrating Span-
ish arrival with ceremony and pageantry.49 But they also subscribed, enthusi-
astically, to indenture schemes. When a cotton cap­i­tal­ist wrote asking for “ten
emancipados per caballeria [about thirty-­three acres],” Manuel de Jesús Galván
and other town council members endorsed the proposal. “It is certain that
[cotton] ­will soon thrive in Santo Domingo,” Galván wrote.50 Prominent
capital residents urged cash-­crop development as a means of vindication.
“The Dominican ­people are victims of calumny when they are supposed to
be lazier than other p ­ eople,” Pedro Valverde explained to Spanish adminis-
trators. “Augment [their needs], as one would expect in the course of good
government . . . ​, and their productivity ­will grow proportionately.”51 Val-
verde was ­eager to discipline rural Dominicans. His antivagrancy proposals
­were so stringent that incoming administrators thought them too harsh to
implement.52
Before the end of 1861, major fissures became obvious. The lack of com-
mercial endeavors was “incredible . . . i​ n a country where sugar cane grows
by itself, where coffee growers just have to plant the seed and then harvest
the plants at the right time, [and] where corn grows wild,” a Spanish official
remarked in disbelief.53 As the new administration floundered from lack of
funds, authorities sought to privilege literate subjects and disenfranchise
­others, rigidify the laws in urban centers, rebuild and expand the prison
system, tighten military discipline, foment f­ ree white immigration and east

Destined to Occupy This Island | 93

Asian and African indenture, enforce strict religious reforms, and restrict
the travel of ­free p
­ eople of color to the territory. Compounding t­hese re-
strictions and indignities w ­ ere the often blundering, insensitive, and racist
actions of Spanish authorities themselves, whose actions betrayed their
experiences in the neighboring colonies and their fundamental unease with
emancipated subjects. Soldiers and administrators ­were “accustomed” to
­these prejudices, one general observed, and they “did not hesitate to mani-
fest as much.”54 Still, loyalists rallied, with new newspapers and new proj­
ects. Spanish journalists entered the discussions, arguing for open ports like
that of Singapore to stimulate ­free trade.55 Annexation supporters wrote to
the Queen with breathless optimism, describing “the vehement desire . . . ​
to equal, and even to exceed if pos­si­ble, the pro­gress made in neighboring
Puerto Rico and Cuba.”56 “The Spanish government knows perfectly well that
Eu­ro­pean immigration ­will not come to fertilize this fertile but hot soil,”
an anonymous French observer argued, and predicted slavery would soon
follow.57

Laws Are Absolutely Lacking: Assembling the Spanish Colonial State

Troops arrived quickly. Two thousand from Havana and 800 from Puerto
Rico arrived in the capital within three weeks. Nearly a thousand of them
moved from the capital to Puerto Plata by steamship. A few hundred contin-
ued on to the nearby southern town of Azua.58 The next real order of occu-
pation was to set up a new bureaucracy. Colonial governments in Cuba and
Puerto Rico had multiplied many times in size since the 1830s; colonial sub-
jects paid taxes at rates higher than ­those on the peninsula.59 Famously, in-
frastructure was so advanced in the plantation centers of eastern and central
Cuba that the cap­i­tal­ists had begun a railroad system ­there by 1837, twelve
years before construction began in the metropole itself. Frequent steam
communication connected the islands to their own coastal extremities, to
each other, and to the Spanish peninsula. Troops w ­ ere everywhere; ­there
­were more than twenty thousand infantry in Cuba and about four thousand
in Puerto Rico. The mandate for governing, however, resided in Spain and
its delegates. The centralization of power was an extreme enough retreat that
one po­liti­cal aspirant in Cuba complained, “Cuba went from being an inte-
gral part of the monarchy to becoming an enslaved colony.”60 “To be born
in Cuba is a crime,” complained another would-be delegate.61 The colonial
governments in the neighboring possessions ­were large, professionalized,
and overwhelmingly Spanish.

94 | Chapter 3
 The informality of law and government, particularly the lack of rec­ords,
in Dominican territory shocked arriving Spanish authorities from Cuba.
“The Government has not provided me with the data for which I have asked
and which are indispensable, public archives have not been at my disposi-
tion, no collection of laws exists, nor even historical books which extend be-
yond the last third of the past ­century, [and t­ here] are no statistics, not even
approximated ones,” José Malo de Molina complained. He could not procure
any court rec­ords, ­either. Even the Catholic Church’s archive was “nothing
more than a few Council books, almost all illegible, and a few boxes in ­really
poor condition,” another concerned Spanish official wrote.62 The existing
laws, based on the more recent Bourbon restoration codes, had been only
inconsistently translated and applied; it was “almost always an imaginary
­thing, and administration is more often through common sense or custom,”
Malo de Molina sniffed.63 “Laws are absolutely lacking,” Governor Serrano
echoed, calling the overlapping l­ egal codes an “unintelligible chaos.”64 Malo
de Molina continued, “For all its written laws, the Government nonetheless
has been r­ eally just verbal, and the highest-­ranking officials condescend to
dictating the smallest details. . . . ​The four Ministers of State have just one
[assistant] of whom they c­ an’t even ask very much, given the stingy and in-
sufficient state salaries. The employees are such just to avoid military ser­
vice, and even high dignitaries had to dedicate themselves to commerce or
another occupation to provide them with subsistence.”65 Malo de Molina
fretted at the lack of credentials required to preside over the courts and
other irregularities. Serrano hastily appointed the archivist of public works
in Cuba to a new secretarial post in the capital.66
Royal o­ rders established Santo Domingo’s Real Audiencia and other parts
of the administration in October 1861. As promised, the civil code of Spain
ruled, replacing the French-­Haitian civil code that had technically been in
place since 1822 (Spanish authorities first sought to translate it into Span-
ish, but they repressed the publication of articles about civil marriage).67
Municipal juntas w ­ ere to govern in the small cities of the island, with five
civilians and three military officials (although just six had been established
by early 1862).68 Law divided the territory into six military districts; neigh-
boring Cuba had more than thirty.69 The island was linked by weekly steam
ser­vice to Puerto Rico and Cuba, but the ferrying of internal mail was an-
other ­matter entirely. The roads throughout the republic, which w ­ ere in
poor condition often to the point of being impassable where they existed,
presented a significant challenge. Expanding the mail system generated a

Destined to Occupy This Island | 95

tremendous paper trail in Spanish correspondence, and the bud­get for mail
ser­vices quickly r­ ose above 10,000 pesos annually.70
General Pedro Santana continued as head of state, and Spanish officials
explic­itly agreed that other Dominican officials would be integrated into the
new colonial administration. In the first months of the occupation, it was
so.71 Malo de Molina made recommendations for two Supreme Court judges
(both Dominicans of “notorious integrity”); in his report, Governor Serrano
named nineteen more officials, just five of them from Havana.72 Santana’s
former vice president became a field marshal, and a handful of former min-
isters joined the Real Audiencia.73 Two prominent Dominicans held high
civil governor positions in the capital and in Santiago de los Caballeros. Still
­others remained in provisional posts closely linked with Santana.74 Appoint-
ments ­were contingent on a number of mea­sures to professionalize the po-
sitions. Dominican ministers, at least in theory, ­were to be paid more, and
they w ­ ere no longer to engage in other professions while in office. Commis-
sioner Malo de Molina drafted salaries for Royal Audiencia legislators and
other governors at levels significantly higher than their current pay; even-
tually, the salaries w­ ere fixed to be comparable to t­hose of Puerto Rico.75
Judges ­were to serve and be ­housed in the same building as the Audiencia
­because in so ­doing they would “be more respectable, avoid the trou­ble of
having to find them in their homes . . . ​and keep them from [undesirable
living conditions] and incon­ve­nient f­ avors.”76
The loyalist response, particularly in the capital, was effusive. Ten promi-
nent Dominican residents of the capital formed an ad hoc Economic Com-
mittee to advise trea­sury officials. Their ac­cep­t ance letters ­were gushing.
Pedro Ricart y Torres wrote enthusiastically:

As a loyal servant of my country and the Queen; as an enthusiastic co-­

participant in the po­liti­cal transformation that has just taken place and
that opens to Santo Domingo a vast opportunity to better its luck and
change the sad situation. . . . I​t ­will be my true plea­sure to cooperate
with my small component of insight and experience in the noble and diffi-
cult enterprise. . . . ​I cannot go without mentioning my feelings of grati-
tude that I, as a son of this soil, feel at hearing the praise you have for its
inhabitants, whose self-­denial, loyalty, and sacrifice ­ought to earn that
estimation from all patriotic and educated Spaniards.77

The “mission was as grave as it was delicate,” admonished Ricart y Torres,

himself a prominent landowner and former minister of foreign relations
and finance for the ex-­republic. “The transition from one system of govern-

96 | Chapter 3
ment to another by the offspring of the same m ­ other must be conducted as
smoothly as pos­si­ble, in the ­family,” he wrote. Electing the right high offi-
cials would demand selectivity, he continued, but it o ­ ught to be done “with-
out losing sight of public opinion or of honorable men who have made ­great
sacrifices over many years to regain the autonomy of this brave pueblo that
owes its name, religion, language and civilization to the same raza in whose
arms they return.”78
An expeditionary brigade had gathered on the island by late spring 1861,
which included Spanish soldiers from the peninsula, Cuba, and Puerto Rico;
­there was also a Militia of Color, origin not recorded. Spanish troops arrived
in the capital, San Cristóbal, Azua, Samaná, Puerto Plata, Santiago de los
Caballeros, and Samaná, constituting a standing force of ten thousand.
Even the capital, however, had housing that was barely sufficient for half
of a battalion. Soldiers w ­ ere forced to split off into the convent, the base-
ments of the court­house, fort, and palace, and other temporary shelter. In
Samaná they stayed in seventeen huts (bohíos); in Puerto Plata, they took ref-
uge in two government ­houses and another rented one.79 Provisions ­were
no easier. “They are forced to import every­thing, even bricks,” one diplomat
reported. Flour was imported from the United States, “all manner of mer-
chandise” arrived from Eu­rope, and medicines w ­ ere exceedingly difficult to
procure. Prices w ­ ere high; a s­ addle cost 150 pesos fuertes, “even as the fields
are full of ­cattle,” he observed grimly.80 “The ­people of the country maintain
themselves generally on wild plants [viandas] and f­ ree-­range pigs,” an officer
explained, and “articles of primary necessity are not just in shortage, but the
few that are around are sold at ­really outrageous prices.” The corps sought
additional supplies from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Saint Thomas, but the official
asserted “the troops and even the Commanders and Officers have suffered
hunger and privation without mea­sure from this ­matter.”81 To incoming ad-
ministrators, the capital city was a sorry sight. Even the archbishop’s h ­ ouse
and the Convent of Santa Clara ­were in ruins, and the government buildings
­were ­little better.82 Few ­houses had much furniture at all; most ­people made
do with very ­little.83 Coconut-­oil lighting had only barely been introduced
the year before; outside of the capital, most of the rest of the cities and towns
prob­ably went dark at sundown.84

Dominican Soldiers and the Classification Committee

Regulation of the military presented a particularly thorny prob­lem for arriv-
ing Spanish authorities. Working-­class men from all over Spain comprised
the incoming troops, many of whom had already been stationed in Cuba

Destined to Occupy This Island | 97

and Puerto Rico for a number of years. Discipline for common infractions—­
misspending petty cash, drunkenness, gambling, sleeping outside of the
barracks, insubordination, fighting, and other common misdeeds—­was
strict.85 An anonymous letter from a soldier of the King’s Regiment pleaded
with Brigadier Antonio Peláez to review the harsh punishments its com-
manding officers inflicted. “It is a m ­ atter of nothing less than killing us or
making us desert,” he implored.86 A circular forbade beating the soldiers
with palos; it “humiliates rather than corrects the soldier,” authorities ad-
monished.87 About ten thousand troops ultimately arrived from the neigh-
boring islands and from Spain. Authorities stationed the steamship Tetuán
in Samaná, and temporarily deployed eleven other warships to the east of
the island.88 If the militia of color ­were among the troops recently arrived
from Havana, it seems that they did not stay long, and it is evident that Gov-
ernor Serrano halted their commission very quickly.89
For a few months, the status of Dominican soldiers remained uncomfort-
ably indeterminate alongside the newly arrived Spanish regiments. In the
eyes of Spanish authorities and colonial troops, the Dominican army that
­these Spanish soldiers encountered could hardly be called an army at all. “All
Dominican men w ­ ere soldiers” in the conflict-­ridden period of the First Re-
public, Spanish authorities observed grimly, and their discipline—­relative
to that of the Spanish regiments—­was poor.90 The regular practice of leav-
ing ranks to attend to home duties irked officials so much they offered a
ten-­peso reward for remission of ­these men, whom they considered desert-
ers.91 Military titles ­were effectively honorary, the arriving officials asserted.
“Dominican generals ­didn’t know anything other than to rise up against one
another to take power of the government,” a general sniffed.92 Immediately
lurking ­behind Spanish resentment was their dismay at seeing men of color
in positions of authority. “The soldier of the Spanish race c­ ouldn’t compre-
hend that a black or a mulato was r­ eally a general or col­o­nel,” he observed,
and a “­great number of generals and chiefs” ­were men of color.93 Some fought
with Santana in the border conflicts that broke out in May and June of that
year. The campaign proved to be a taxing first meeting between the two
groups of soldiers. High-­ranking officials perpetually praised the Spanish
troops for their exemplary conduct; they had faced difficult conditions with
“superior discipline . . . ​fraternizing with the residents and in every­thing la-
boring with such prudence and tact,” the Cuban governor claimed.94 ­Behind
­these reports, however, a number of incidents prob­ably caused officials to
scramble to reform the Provisional Guard during the hot summer of 1861.
Plans to create a standing army of Dominicans collapsed by August.95 It is

98 | Chapter 3
likely that Spanish officers never wanted to integrate Dominicans into the
forces at all, ­unless as separate standing militia of white and nonwhite regi-
ments (as in Cuba and Puerto Rico). More likely still, they had not consid-
ered the prospect at all.
During the summer months—­while the status of Dominican soldiers
remained in limbo—­conflict between Spanish officers and the rank and
file proliferated. The regiments seem to have been led separately during
the summer campaigns of 1861, but a few Dominicans appear to have been
integrated directly into Spanish regiments in auxiliary roles. T
­ here, the harsh
discipline of the Spanish officers—­likely in a climate of racist distrust—­
created a volatile atmosphere. Harsh punishments, in par­tic­ul­ar, grated on
observers. Twenty-­year-­old Enrique Padilla, a young, literate Dominican who
was serving as a porter for the military command stationed in Azua, faced
charges of “speaking heatedly to vari­ous soldiers of the Provisional Guard,
trying to influence them with princi­ples contrary to subordination,” for ex-
ample.96 The young defendant had intervened when he saw an officer from
the Crown Regiment punishing a bugle player, prob­ably a Dominican. The
brigadier accused Padilla of walking up to the soldiers and

bitterly criticizing the punishment, saying among other t­hings that he

would have liked to have seen [the guard] try that with him, and that
soldiers ­shouldn’t have to suffer like that, adding some more insults
to said officer of the Crown. The [brigadier himself ] approached them,
unsure of what he was hearing, sure that ­there could not possibly be such
irresponsible nonsense being said. But he heard [Padilla] repeat them,
loudly so that he would hear it; in fact he started shouting as he tried to
leave. At that time the [brigadier] told two soldiers to arm themselves to
arrest him.

“I saw him give the bugle player a big smack [plantazo] with a sword,” Padilla
explained defiantly, admitting to all the charges. “If it had been me treated
like that, I would have reacted very differently,” he continued. Another wit-
ness had come to his support, Padilla testified, exclaiming, “May God let
that sword break!”—to which a defiant Padilla added, “May his heart stop
instead!” (¡que había de ser el corazón y no el sable!). Spanish authorities felt un-
sure how to adjudicate Padilla’s insubordination. The prosecutor (himself
a lieutenant of the Crown Regiment) reserved judgment on the case, pass-
ing it on to Captain General Pedro Santana. “He should be severely pun-
ished according to royal law, but as we must consider him ignorant of ­these
laws . . . ​it could not have been out of malice,” the fiscal concluded. Another

Destined to Occupy This Island | 99

officer, also in Azua, wrote to the Spanish officials to complain about a cer-
tain Agustín Feliz (whose alias, “Prieto,” prob­ably indicates he was dark-­
skinned). Spanish superiors w ­ ere frustrated with Feliz, who “never wanted
to obey his officers . . . ​and has just been rebellious.”97
By the fall of 1861, Spanish military authorities demoted the g ­ reat bulk
of Dominican soldiers. First, authorities separated Dominican soldiers into
a new body, the Provincial Reserves. A Classification Committee began to
review Dominican soldiers’ rank and status. In order to be in the active
reserves, an individual had to pres­ent to the commission a ser­vice sheet
(hoja de servicio) describing his military feats and any other supporting docu-
ments. The decision would be based on “aptitude, ser­vice, and other cir-
cumstances,” the commission announced vaguely. Authorities assiduously
avoided mentioning race in any written description of the committee, al-
though it could not have escaped notice that all of its own members ­were
white.98 As the committee continued its revisions, it expanded t­hose dis-
qualified to include ­those of “advanced age or poor health, [with] lack of
instruction, poor capacity, more civil than military.”99 Of the first 227 ap-
plicants the commission reviewed—­mostly captains and other subordinate
officers, but some generals as well—it gave fewer than half active status. The
committee declared the rest “passive,” usually ­because the men could not read
or write. This decommissioning extended to ­those who asserted they had
been active soldiers since the 1840s, some of whom retired rather than suffer
declassification.100 On a very selective basis, high-­ranking officers from the
reserves could apply to Madrid to solicit integration into the principal corps
of Spanish forces.101 For his part, Santana faithfully related all the gener-
als and other high-­ranking officers in the dif­fer­ent provinces. In a dif­fer­ent
handwriting, however, someone added three generals’ names and the follow-
ing observation: “de color.”102
In a ­matter of months, Spanish officers created a three-­tier hierarchy:
Spanish troops, active reserves, and passive reserves. All members of the
reserves ­were prohibited from wearing Spanish uniforms. Active reserves
earned twice as much as ­those who had the misfortune of being made
“passive,” but Spanish men of the equivalent rank earned considerably
more. Authorities published the (de)classifications from the “old Domini-
can army” (antiguo ejército dominicano) on the front pages of the Gaceta de Santo
Domingo for months in late 1861 and 1862, which must have been embarrass-
ing for ­those who ­were being publicly decommissioned, even as the loyalist
press celebrated the regularization effort.

100 | Chapter 3
Good Subjects, Honorable Citizens: Catholic Religious Reform
Santana claimed it was a “dear wish of the Dominican p ­ eople to fix the dis-
graceful situation of religious practice,” and arriving officials agreed.103 A
perceived lack of formal religiosity among rural residents should not have
surprised t­hese officials, who ­were themselves arriving from a prosperous
but relatively impious plantation state. In Cuba, outside of urban centers like
Havana and Matanzas, residents also lacked brick-­and-­mortar churches, in
part ­because plantation ­owners sought to be f­ ree from the church’s meddle-
some influence.104 “The country ­people of Cuba . . . ​are not very religious,”
a traveler passing through Cuba in the late 1850s wrote. He allowed himself
some condescension: “Most of them learn a few prayers by heart, which they
repeat without understanding their import. This does not prevent, however,
images of the Virgin and of saints being in ­every ­house.”105 The material
culture of the most remote areas of Santo Domingo might have been more
barren still. The Dominican Catholic Church was in a state of disarray. It
had been without an archbishop since the spring of 1858. Just twenty-­eight
parishes served the entire territory, of which five w­ ere totally vacant for lack
of funds. Only three—­Puerto Plata, Santiago, and San Cristóbal—­had act-
ing high officials.106 ­There was no church council, no convent, and “no hope
of one,” the acting ecclesiastical governor reported grimly.107 The Domini-
can clergy displayed an “exaggerated superstition. . . . [​ and ­were] poor and
ignorant generally” but with significant power over the populace, another
wrote. He and other Spanish observers described rural priests who shirked
their duties, demanded large fees for travel and ser­vices, practiced free­
masonry, openly had mistresses, and married.108 Dominican writers, long
in irreverent dialogue with ­these men, crafted tales that ­imagined the assas-
sination of intractable priests.109 The priest who held Mass in the capital to
celebrate annexation prob­ably had ­children.110 Officials conceived prosely-
tization and the regularization of Catholic practice essential. Promoting
Catholicism was promoting Spain, the Cuban governor observed; peninsular
officials agreed.111 In the capital, loyal prominent citizens felt ­eager to lend a
hand; Don Miguel Lavastida even ceded some of his property to the church
to construct a chapel commemorating the first Catholic Mass on the island.112
Authorities fretted that Dominican families lived in “tremendous liber-
tinism.”113 Most Dominicans living outside of towns w ­ ere not confirmed,
and young ­children went without clothing.114 One general claimed that
“adolescents strolled nude on the streets of the capital, and . . . ​illicit u
­ nions
abounded.”115 The be­hav­ior of w ­ omen in the capital especially troubled

Destined to Occupy This Island | 101

him. “Young ­daughters of the ­family enjoyed a ­grand liberty to leave the
paternal house—­ which would in Spain be inconceivable—­ going about
with whom they wanted most and who seemed the most opportune,” he re-
marked in horror.116 Single w ­ omen, he continued, “­were not embarrassed to
live maritally with a man,” and “the word infanticide had no application in
Santo Domingo.” He disapproved heartily of civil marriage. Polygamy, even
incestuous marriages, revealed how “relaxed and perverted” the nation was,
he accused.117 Drinking, prostitution, and “rampant immorality” plagued his
flock, a priest reported.118
The Protestant population, especially in Samaná and Puerto Plata, trou-
bled Spanish authorities. As many as one-­third of all the residents of the
Samaná peninsula ­were Protestants of color from the United States.119 Con-
gregations maintained contact with Methodist and Anabaptist churches in
the States, as well as British Wesleyan missionaries.120 When the minister
in Samaná died, parishioners sought a U.S. replacement (although he did
not stay long). Samaná congregants had built a large, wooden chapel atop a
small hill, where they met multiple times a week. In Puerto Plata, t­ here w
­ ere
dif­f er­ent sects, which also met regularly on Sundays—­all-­day services—­and
one or two midweek nights, and they held baptisms, marriages, and pub-
lic burials regularly. Their public meetings and ­house visits brought them
into close contact with Catholics, a cleric wrote, contemptuously, and they
freely offered Spanish-­language books, pamphlets, and flyers “to pervert
them.” The pastors “have worked and continue to work to spread their er-
rors among the Catholics, inviting them to listen to the sermons and take
part in their ceremonies, impregnated with error and Heresy,” the official
concluded. “Most painfully,” he noted, they had a public school “to teach
Heresy to the innocent ­children.”121
Authorities proved deeply divided on how to treat open practice of Prot-
estants and ­Freemasons. Catholic-­only territories ­were “a fundamental law
of monarchy . . . ​with no exception whatsoever,” the acting church head
noted, suggesting that open practice disrespected Spain’s “historical glories,
our venerated traditions, our habits, our customs,” and that it could lead to
“dangerous ideas . . . a​ nd insurrection.”122 He promised that he would l­ abor
tirelessly to abolish the “­grand abomination” from Dominican soil, replac-
ing it with “the unity of religion for which our ­fathers fought.” “Since Spain
has retaken this country, the old order should dis­appear,” he insisted, in-
cluding “tolerance of cults.” Other authorities w ­ ere more circumspect, not-
ing that prohibition could provoke prob­lems of international relations and
public order. The ­matter remained undecided for two years—at one point,

102 | Chapter 3
superior Spanish authorities even declined to comply with church officials.
As “one of the most delicate issues of all consequences of annexation, I can-
not comply [with banning the public cele­bration of non-­Catholic faith],” the
governor wrote. He cited the intervention of the British consul in Samaná
as evidence of international complications.123 In the last months of 1862,
­orders from Spain arrived to persecute Protestant practices; again, officials
on the ground in the capital quickly deci­ded against it and wrote to northern
town officials to that effect.124 More word came in February 1863 insisting
that all subjects should be Catholic; banishment or imprisonment loomed
for infractors.125 For the moment, however, the residents could continue to
practice openly. Masonic lodges received no such consent, and authorities
ordered them closed.126
A new archbishop, Bienvenido Monzón, arrived with a certain amount
of pomp in the summer of 1862. The Gaceta Oficial republished the dual-­
language—­Latin and Spanish—­royal order that celebrated his disembar-
kation. Like-­minded men accompanied him; individual clerics resident in
Santiago de Cuba, Puerto Rico, Cartagena, and Spain solicited passage and
assignment in the new colony.127 Monzón ordered honors distributed to
local prominent Dominicans, but he refused to assign them to positions of
high authority. Of the eleven proposed high church officials, all ­were Span-
ish, and only three had experience from the neighboring islands. Monzón
urged authorities to copy recent reforms in Puerto Rico in its new Span-
ish neighbor.128 Even before his arrival, a few Dominican officials wrote for
permission to marry; Monzón was not satisfied.129 “I soon realized that the
institution of the ­family, the primary ele­ment of ­every society, was being
degraded and illegitimized by the remnants of the so-­called civil marriage
of the French code (­adopted during the republican era) and also by the prac-
tice of keeping concubines,” he wrote.130 The leading story in June’s second
installment of La Razón announced the end of civil registries for marriage
and the nullification of all parts of the French civil code to that effect.131 For
the first time in de­cades, the church was relatively flush with cash for re-
pairs; the archbishop’s salary alone was 14,000 pesos fuertes.132 The reforms
promised to forge “good subjects, good heads of ­family, and good and hon-
orable citizens,” one official observed.133

­Labor, Capital, and Profit

“­There is no country where nature offers more resources, nor where the
inhabitants are in a worse state,” one Spanish official wrote in the year be-
fore annexation.134 When the Cuban governor Francisco Serrano arrived

Destined to Occupy This Island | 103

from ­Havana in the summer of 1861, he agreed. “The ­people are living in
such a way that it can even be called miraculous,” he marveled. “Unculti-
vated lands, virgin forests with plants still just as the explorers found them,
sparse population, barely any production, industry dead, commerce al-
most unknown . . . ​[and] miserable paper money.”135 Serrano’s parting
recommendations—­fortification of the Samaná peninsula, regularization
of the government, and economic reform—­signaled a fairly ambitious plan
for state reor­ga­ni­za­tion of the former republic intended to orient it ­toward
commercial agriculture. “It pains me to see such magnificent terrain, much
more fertile than ­those rightly praised in the Island of Cuba . . . w
​ ithout one
generous heart to rebuke the unhappy Dominicans,” wrote another Havana
official paternally.136 Authorities began a flurry of small proj­ects in early
months, including new wooden ­houses in Monte Cristi, a new dock in Santo
Domingo, and the groundwork for more infrastructure proj­ects.137
Officials implemented a mixture of Cuban and Puerto Rican legislation.
They deci­ded that direct taxation of residents would be too onerous, opt-
ing for sales and other indirect taxes instead, including the lottery, which
they noted was popu­lar.138 Dominican goods became “national” products,
along with goods from the rest of the empire.139 Serrano and other officials
urged the regularization of rural landownership, creating registries where
pos­si­ble.140 Officials looked into the idea of cargo shipments between Cuba,
Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico, and special attention was given to plans
for strengthening the defenses of Samaná, which was to be a ­free port.141 A
steamship connected Santo Domingo to Saint Thomas twice a month; Sa-
maná was linked into a Veracruz–­Puerto Rico–­Havana route by early fall.142
Twice-­monthly ser­vice was supposed to connect the island to Cuba and
Cádiz.143 Travel to Havana on the Pájaro del Océano or Cuba was available to
all ­those who could buy a ticket on their biweekly voyages. While the lack
of pharmacies meant that prohibitively high prices of medicine persisted,
military health officials offered civilians basic medical training.144 Joaquín
Manuel del Alba, intendente of Puerto Rico, assumed the position of comisario
regio, where he would serve for the next two years, charged with assessing the
financial status of the island and the extent of paper money.145
News of the annexation caused a relative stir of excitement among resi-
dents in other Spanish territories, mostly over the idea of new investments,
large and small, that might be made in the colony. Even as Serrano, Santana,
and Molina waited for approval from Spain, news of annexation produced
immediate interest. A handful of priests requested transfer to Santo Do-
mingo from Sevilla, Puerto Rico, and Santiago de Cuba, and at least sev-

104 | Chapter 3
Fig. 3.1 Industrialists sent many pamphlets, like this one about shelling coffee beans,
to Spanish administrators. Journalists at La Razón regularly published on industry
proposals.

eral individuals requested that their pensions be transferred to Santo Do-

mingo.146 A handful of wealthy Venezuelans, fleeing po­liti­cal unrest, set up
plantations on the Ozama River.147 A British subject sought to profit from
“abandoned” lumber in the center-­island region.148 ­Others proposed canals,
light­houses, a bridge over the Ozama River in the capital, and gas lighting
for all the towns of the island.149 One wealthy man proposed building a café
in the ruins of the capital city theater; another proposed a submarine tele-
graph cable; Don Vidal from Santiago de Cuba proposed a covered market;
and vari­ous British cap­i­tal­ists proposed dif­fer­ent railroad developments (at
least one of which was approved).150 Some small-­business ­owners applied
for licenses for businesses that ­were already ­running—­suggesting perhaps
greater official scrutiny—as Dr. Guillermo Gothburg did for his small phar-
macy in Puerto Plata.151 Other small-­scale plans abounded: fabric making,
an ice­house (nevería), printing presses, and so on. Not ­every small proj­ect
gained approval; officials denied a rum maker license on moral grounds, for
example, despite the “extremely backward” state of distilling.152
Large-­scale proj­ects like coal mining, cotton production, and the fo-
menting of tobacco cultivation generated huge amounts of official documen-
tation as officials responded to the proposals of interested cap­i­tal­ists and

Destined to Occupy This Island | 105

directed their own surveys.153 Spanish authorities w ­ ere very interested in
Samaná’s coal, and they sent teams of military engineers to inspect pos­si­ble
mining sites. The standards and licenses ­were to mirror Cuban legislation,
but experts arrived from Puerto Rico and Spain as well.154 Several financiers
competed for rights to introduce new cotton-­processing technology, and
the Cotton Association of Manchester offered to send numerous informa-
tional leaflets, translated into Spanish.155 Another individual requested re-
imbursement for importing strains of tobacco into Puerto Plata, as had been
requested by royal order.156 Repeated royal o ­ rders directed officials to ex-
plore the possibility of cotton cultivation, compared agricultural conditions
with ­those in Puerto Rico, and so on.157 Enthusiastic planters recopied and
sent Cuban edicts back to Spanish authorities, asking for the same conces-
sions and promising f­ uture profits for Cataluña’s cotton mills.158 Well into
the thick of conflict in 1864, mining development efforts and other fomenta-
tion schemes, particularly cotton, never ceased.

Immigration and Indenture

Most export agriculture proposals to the Crown involved immigration, too.
The plans of new colonists in Santo Domingo in 1861 involved semifree
contract ­labor, moralization schema, and, invariably, white supervision.
The Spanish media wrote approvingly of such plans, suggesting that “freed
blacks, African prisoners, Chinese coolies, and Irish settlers” would all be
ideal laborers for the colony.159 Specifics varied. A cotton cap­i­tal­ist sought
tools and emancipados to ­labor on his land; he deferred to the “wisdom of the
government” on how to proceed. His own land, already planted, could be
“a small example of the richness and fertility of this virgin land,” he urged,
adding that “with a l­ ittle manpower, the land could produce torrents of rich-
ness.”160 The proposal of another cotton planters’ association urged, “the
island was a source of inexhaustible riches that only needed the strength
of . . . ​colonization based on the princi­ples of morality, police, and order” to
thrive.161 The proposal suggested that black laborers w ­ ere adapted to the hot
climate and that, ­under watchful white rule, they would bring the province
prosperity. “One thousand or more apprentices of the African nation . . . ​
are the only race who can make Antillean soil productive,” the letter writer
argued. ­These “apprentices” would be signed “of their own spontaneous
­will” to ten-­to fifteen-­year contracts cultivating cotton and tobacco, “­under
the same conditions and regulation that Asian colonization has taken place
in the neighboring island of Cuba.” To oversee the indentured Africans, the
com­pany promised to bring in one “Spanish head of ­family . . . i​ ndividuals

106 | Chapter 3
of good customs, morality, and intelligence” for e­ very ten contract laborers.
The association could pay for machinery and nominal taxes for each Spanish
colonist, he boasted, as long as land was provided for ten years for f­ ree.
One individual’s ambitious railroad proposal to connect the Cibao val-
ley forty miles to the northern coast exemplifies the “racial knowledge” that
typified the proposals authorities received. The railroad industrialist effused
antiblack sentiment and fantasies of “coolie” docility. For the hard l­abor of
construction, he called for ten thousand indentured men and ­women “from
Calcutta, Hong Kong, or Cuba,” specifically b ­ ecause of the perception that
Asian laborers would stay separate from black Dominicans and would also
thus serve as a racial bulwark against Haiti.162 He maintained that t­ hese sub-
jects would be more adapted than Eu­ro­pean emigrants to the climate, and
that they might have “convincing moral and po­liti­cal influence” for the
entirety of the colonial endeavor, not just the proposed regional railroad.
In Cuba, t­hese laborers had “consistently demonstrated that they are not
to be confused with the enslaved African race,” one high official insisted,
concurring.163
From the very first days of the reoccupation, Spanish officials and pri-
vate white industrialists called for large-­scale white immigration, too, most
often to oversee indentured nonwhite laborers. Authorities liked the idea
of Spanish immigration particularly. Individual Spanish settlers might apply
for support, and authorities passed laws welcoming white settlers identical
to Cuba’s.164 The Spanish consul to Haiti proposed a proj­ect of immigration
of two to three thousand white individuals from within the “Spanish” com-
munity of the U.S. South, especially Florida and Louisiana. He suggested
that the government award each f­amily a substantial plot of two to three
hundred caballerías of land—­ostensibly vacant—­along with materials to
build ­houses, the state honors afforded to colonizers, and a ten-­year reprieve
from any kind of tax. The government should also furnish Asian contract
laborers as aides, “given that they are already acclimated.”165 The Overseas
Ministry quizzed Santana on which professions might be the most useful
for potential Spanish émigrés. Authorities felt no compunction telling San-
tana, himself a man of color, that the white race was ­going to be the motor
of the colony’s pro­gress. It was “of utmost necessity that the population be
increased: luckily, the conditions of the country allow that the white race
fulfill this most impor­tant need,” one official informed him.166
Outside cap­i­tal­ists proposed similar schemes of white immigration. Wil-
liam Cazneau, the U.S. agent, proposed a colonization plan of one thousand
white families u­ nder ten to fifteen years of indenture. “­Under the direction

Destined to Occupy This Island | 107

of proper superintendents,” they would cultivate sugar, cotton, tobacco, and
rice, “­those species of tropical products for which the fertile soil of Santo
Domingo appears so remarkably adapted.”167 The laborers—to “be of an
orderly and well-­disciplined class”—­would follow Spanish law, Cazneau as-
sured his readers. The settlers should be h ­ oused on “unappropriated public
lands” near the capital, with one square league afforded to each one hun-
dred male laborers between the ages of sixteen and fifty. The advantages of
a white settlement proj­ect ­were not just economic, Cazneau wrote, “but also
a ­wholesome example to the existing population of the province . . . ​able,
industrious, and well disciplined.” López and Com­pany was one of the com-
panies that sought compensation from the Crown for individual passengers,
although they w ­ ere remonstrated to seek individual approval first.168 Spanish
authorities expressed suspicion at U.S.-­led proj­ects, however, and it does
not seem that any came to fruition.169

Discipline and Leisure

In addition to immigration and indenture schemes, authorities ­were cen-
trally concerned with inducing Dominicans to ­labor. Vagrancy preoccupied
Spanish authorities and their loyalist allies. In a letter to the arriving authori-
ties, Pedro Valverde described the “drunken scandal and disorder” caused by
male vagrants and of “prostitutes and corrupt ­women whose licentious life
significantly affects . . . ​public morale.”170 Vagrant men eluded prosecution
by citing their occasional (weekly or monthly) day l­abor gigs; the ­women
usually hid ­behind claims of being washerwomen, pastry sellers, cooks, or
servants, Valverde complained. U ­ nder the existing laws, vagrants spent a few
days in jail in lieu of the fine (that they could not pay); then they returned to
the streets once more. New laws proposed that all vagrants be presented to
the police, where they would be given work, provided they w ­ ere of age, and
beggars ­were to seek a license proving disability. Valverde sought harsher
171

sentences still. He wanted three-­time vagrants to be deported to Samaná

for one year. Valverde also argued that foreigners should have a guarantor
to vouch for them, just like in Puerto Rico, followed by steadily renewable
provisional licenses—­available at a small fee—­for the first year of their resi-
dence. They should be deported outright for vagrancy, he continued.172
Valverde’s zeal was praised by other authorities, if not the specifics of his
plan. Sending vagrants to nearly deserted Samaná would “simply put them
in a place where they could not work, rather than inculcate in them the de-
sire to do so,” one reply concluded, expressing caution about the rights of
foreign residents who antedated Spanish reoccupation.173

108 | Chapter 3
 In August 1861, Santana signed into law an extensive antigaming bill,
which legislators borrowed directly from codes in the neighboring islands.
“It has come to my attention . . . ​that ­there are frequent meetings of ­people
of all classes to engage in the pernicious vice of game playing,” the bill began.
“I am responsible to Her Majesty Our Queen (God protect Her) . . . t​ o repress
and correct this vice.” The ordinances banned all games, even ­legal ones,
from most public businesses, on the penalty of a fine of 250 pesos. Public
officials, civic or military, faced the same stiff fine; ­others owed sixty pesos,
all doubled for repeat offenses. Loss of businesses and even exile loomed
for three-­time offenders. Fi­nally, the bill laid out explicit instructions for
registration of the offenders’ names and steps to prosecution.174 The fines
had to be paid in pesos fuertes, not paper money, authorities emphasized.175
Other provisions extended the ban to all games of luck, rayuela (hopscotch),
dogfighting, gaming during work hours, prostitution, and even boisterous
be­hav­ior during theater per­for­mances. Some new provisions, like the ban-
ning of clothing to impersonate public officials or of masks (outside of fes-
tivals), represented clear security concerns. Other strictures sought control
of leisure, especially in public and semipublic spaces. Cockfights could only
be held with a license. Dances, too, required licenses, and the holandés, da-
nois, tango, and tambulá dances ­were of par­tic­u­lar concern. Along with jodú,
they caused “frequent scandal,” authorities alleged, and w ­ ere to be held by
permission only. Jodú remained totally prohibited. Some provisions, like
176

Article 69—­which banned “using dress that pertains to another sex, class,
or category that is not one’s own”—­arguably implied ­legal distinctions that
­were not supposed to be operative in the colony at all.177
New statutes created new costs, supervision, and the threat of fines.
School administrators, merchants, street vendors, and other small enter-
prises required licensing. Female cooks, washerwomen, and sweets and
fruit sellers w
­ ere to register with their local municipality.178 Midwives who
wanted to continue to practice their skill w ­ ere to pres­ent themselves to the
newly formed Medicine Committee, where they would pay twenty pesos
for the title. In addition, the ­women ­were expected to report the sex of the
baby, the address, and other details immediately or face a stiff fine.179 F­ amily
heads ­were expected to in­de­pen­dently report their ­house­hold numbers as
well. Even visiting sailors ­were expected to register with authorities.180
Residents w ­ ere further expected to adhere to a number of public health pro-
visions (from dampening their stoops twice daily during dry spells to adher-
ing to a ban on throwing laundry ­water into the street), and public nudity,
even for small ­children or when bathing animals in the river, was explic­itly

Destined to Occupy This Island | 109

prohibited. Architects ­were to vet blueprints with authorities. The new, al-
beit small, force of watchmen in Santo Domingo and other towns imple-
mented ­these laws and increased state contact with town residents. In Santo
Domingo, they enforced minor rules (such as one stating that doors to the
street should open inward), announced the time hourly, and conducted a
rudimentary census of the city center, counting 686 brick ­houses and 767
huts.181
Authorities intended to rebuild and expand the colony’s prison system.
The first change was literally nominal, as town jails across the island acquired
names like “The Royal Prison of Azua.” The conditions in the territory’s few
prisons ­were atrocious, reflecting their absolute lack of resources since the
republican period; the arrival (and imprisonment) of Spanish soldiers ex-
acerbated the prob­lem of space, conditions, and supplies.182 In Santo Do-
mingo, prisoners complained of the rations, which ­were only a half pound of
raw meat and five platanos a day amid gloomy, humid conditions and terrible
smells. A­ fter repeated inquiries, authorities nominated a full-­time commis-
sioner to monitor the conditions.183 In Santiago de los Caballeros, prisoners
had survived during the period of the republic on fifty papeletas (the devalued
paper currency) and ­family aid. ­After 1861, prisoners received one peseta
daily, but the amount was wholly insufficient for imprisoned peninsular sol-
diers, who had no ­family to bring them meals. Officials observed that they
­were obliged to beg for money as they cleaned the streets and performed
other menial tasks.184 After months of delay, the allocation was increased.185
Blueprints for new prisons, civil and military, arrived from Madrid for Sa-
maná and other sites.186 Still, officials continued to ask that money for pris-
oners’ upkeep be paid in advance, so paltry w ­ ere the rations and unhealthy
the conditions of the jails, and complaints continued into 1863 and 1864.187
Some individuals languished for a year or more in detention with no trial.188
Slowly, the population transformed to include a segment of prisoners
serving long sentences from elsewhere in the Spanish empire, ideal candi-
dates for the re­introduction of prison l­abor on public works proj­ects. The
Cuban governor ordered a brigade of a hundred prisoners to rebuild gov-
ernment buildings in the capital almost immediately.189 The Samaná pen-
insula in particular—­strategic as it was for ships arriving from Spain and
Havana—­became a veritable center of prisoners from vari­ous corners of the
Spanish empire. It h ­ oused prisoners from Cádiz, Puerto Rico, and Cuba
serving long sentences; they ­were destined to work in mines and on the forti-
fication of the bay itself.190 The first East Asian prisoner ordered to Samaná
was prob­ably twenty-­three-­year-­old “Antonio” from Macau, who had already

110 | Chapter 3
begun to serve a ten-­year sentence in Cuba for the murder of another man
on a plantation. He was transferred to Santo Domingo in the fall of 1861.191
More Chinese prisoners arrived in groups of twenty or thirty.192 The East
Asian prisoners in Samaná did not have enough to eat, especially given the
“rude” nature of their prison l­ abor, Santana wrote.193 A handful escaped im-
mediately ­after they arrived, and their capture often entailed serious bodily
harm.194 In Azua, as in Samaná, sometimes foreign prisoners fled together
with Dominican nationals, who likely ­were able to serve as guides for the
group; Spanish officials gave pointed phenotypic descriptions of such es-
capees.195 Documentation is sparse regarding the specific public works proj­
ects on which prisoners w ­ ere made to work, but it is clear that officials in
the capital, including antivagrancy champion Pedro Valverde, came to rely
on prisoners’ ­labor and even squabbled over their allocation to dif­fer­ent
proj­ects.196 More than six hundred prisoners crowded Samaná’s prison by
fall 1863.197

A General Organ of the Interests of the Country:

Dominican Loyalists and the New Press
Authorities and supporters of annexation collaborated on two publications
that ­were meant to inform and propagandize to the public about the Spanish
presence. The first, La Gaceta de Santo Domingo, published official govern-
ment proceedings and decrees and announced the arrival of “illustrious”
Spanish authorities (although it was printed by private presses for months
­until the state printer became operational).198 Although the Gaceta’s journal-
ists primarily reprinted perfunctory summaries of official business, certain
government proceedings received par­tic­u­lar attention. The Gaceta’s editors
painstakingly reprinted in biweekly installments all of the civil code that had
been approved for Santo Domingo, for example, and it was so voluminous
that it filled more than six months’ worth of columns.199 Likewise, they re-
printed the “Decree of Police and Governance” over more than a month’s
time. The back page informed ­those interested of steamship comings and
­goings, books for sale, or other minor commercial activities. For five pesos
fuertes, one could purchase the French civil code; the Spanish penal code
cost just one peso fuerte. Other leisure reading included an illustrated War
in Africa, detailing Spanish exploits, and The World as It W
­ ill Be in Year 3000, by
Émile Souvestre. A short one-­week loop connected inhabitants of four dif­
fer­ent stops in Cuba and three in Puerto Rico, Saint Thomas, and the capital
of Santo Domingo on steam liners such as the Pájaro del Océano and the Cuba.
The three islands ­were more connected than they had been in forty years.

Destined to Occupy This Island | 111

 The second official paper, La Razón, was decidedly more polemic. The for-
mer El Oasis editor, Manuel de Jesús Galván, billed it as “the General Organ
of the Interests of the Country,” and its pro-­annexation stance was aggres-
sive.200 La Razón’s writers followed an official line: that annexation was the
spontaneous ­will of the Dominican p ­ eople, that Spain was generous to ac-
cept them back into her maternal arms, that Haitian provocation was the root
of Dominican instability, and that annexation promised a new era of pros-
perity for the colony and its residents. The “deplorable state” of the coun-
try had made it “absolutely impossible to conserve . . . ​our sick and poorly
realized nationality,” La Razón argued, and articles focused in par­tic­ul­ar on
internecine strug­gles in republican Venezuela as an analogy.201 Echoing of-
ficial proclamations, the paper promised major public works and urged soli-
darity with the colonial proj­ects in Cuba and Puerto Rico, “­brother” islands
in the shared Spanish ­family.202 Journalists published “Noticias Nacionales”
that ­were often news tidbits from Málaga and other Spanish cities. Beyond
fraternal hispanidad, annexation was a motor of pro­gress, columnists argued.
Other prominent Dominicans joined the pro-­Spanish effort. Wealthy writer
and businessman Francisco Javier Ángulo de Guridi asked to publish a “po­
liti­cal, industrial and literary” journal in Santiago de los Caballeros.203 A pri-
vate citizen asked (and was granted) permission to print and sell copies of
major Spanish edicts.204
La Razón’s writers sought to make polemic links between Spanish iden-
tity, pro­gress, and a community of “civilized nations.” Writers extolled Span-
ish imperialism elsewhere, celebrating that the “unhappy blacks of Manila
[had been] brought to Chris­tian­ity” and praising Spain’s victories in North
Africa.205 The paper republished José Ferrer de Couto’s reincorporation mis-
sives in weekly installments that lasted well into the spring. De Couto, a
decorated Spanish authority living in Cuba by the time of the occupation,
was a tenuous ally at best—he would ­later write scathing condemnations
of the colonial proj­ect, Dominican government, and ­people of color more
generally—­but in his early pamphlets, his enthusiasm was unbridled. Adjunct
to the pro-­Spanish missives, writers at La Razón took up a familiar central
objective, that of distancing Dominican identity from Haiti. Just as Galván’s
and ­others’ newspapers had done in the First Republic, the journal repeat-
edly took aim at Haiti. Once again, Haiti’s perceived exclusivism—­limiting
foreign residents to coastal cities, preventing them from acquiring controlling
amounts of Haitian land—­distanced them from the community of civilized
nations (including Spain), editorials argued.206 Haitians w ­ ere “governed by a
tyrannical, exclusivist, and savage constitution, have convinced themselves

112 | Chapter 3
that conviviality [el trato social] is a violation of h
­ uman rights,” one writer
accused, “without ever realizing that that isolation, that incommunication
deprives them.”207 It amounted to nothing less than “ingratitude . . . ​an
inhospitable instinct ­toward the rest of humanity,” the author scoffed. La
Razón taunted President Geffrard for his opposition to annexation and insisted,
“We are sons of Spain!”208

A Sacred Decree . . . ​A Categorical Prohibition

For all of the public proclamations about Santo Domingo as the “­free” Span-
ish colony, not only was isolating the colony from slavery difficult, but the
attitude of some Spanish authorities was chillingly cavalier. For example,
the Spanish consul in Haiti allegedly suggested not only that fugitive slaves
from Cuba and Puerto Rico would be sought out and apprehended but that
slavery would be reestablished, and even the descendants of slaves could be
reenslaved. Although his statements flew in the face of the a­ ctual annexa-
tion statutes, they reflected the ease with which some Spanish authorities
­imagined such an eventuality.209 Other Spanish authorities wrestled—­often
secretly, in classified documents—­with the prob­lem of unequal status be-
tween their three Ca­rib­bean colonies. They deci­ded that Santo Domingo
should be kept as separate as pos­si­ble from its plantation neighbors.
Meanwhile, repeated public decrees promised that abolition was a “sacred
guarantee . . . ​a categorical prohibition.”210
In June 1861, fearing that enslaved men and w ­ omen might flee to
Santo Domingo, the Queen issued a royal order banning the entry into Santo
Domingo of ­free ­people of color from Cuba and Puerto Rico. Such self-­
emancipation was a very reasonable fear for Spanish authorities, given the
rec­ord of ­people ­doing just that from Puerto Rico, Martinique, British islands,
and the U.S. South during the previous several de­cades.211 A local commit-
tee to verify a person’s status would likely have been unpopular, impossible,
or both. In fact, a secret edict insisted that ­under no circumstances could
any search be conducted for escaped slaves who might have taken refuge in
Santo Domingo, ­because it would stir tremendous panic among Domini-
cans.212 Initially, Dominican authorities did not support the new prohibition
of ­free travelers of color, arguing that the race-­based ban was unnecessary
and even alarming. Santana argued that the ­matter was “of utmost transcen-
dence and offensive to public morality, [capable of ] causing all manner of
distrust.”213 Allowing ­free p ­ eople of color to enter the colony would “give
the men of color of this Province a better guarantee by calming the spirits
of the suspicious,” he urged, “whose fears, even if they stem from la­men­ta­ble

Destined to Occupy This Island | 113

ignorance, w ­ ere no less easy to spread by malevolent men among the ­simple
masses of that part of the population.” At the Dominican governor’s insis-
tence, it does seem that the provision was temporarily suspended in the fall
of 1861.
Quickly, however, the prohibition proved necessary to prevent a practice
that officials had not foreseen: wealthy colonists and authorities, arriving
from Cuba and Puerto Rico, trying to sneak enslaved p ­ eople into Santo Do-
mingo, one by one. Government officials and Spanish officers often arrived
with their families, and sometimes they brought domestic servants whose
status was questionable.214 One such case, of María Lucas Soto, reached the
desk of authorities. Soto, abused by her female mistress a­ fter their arrival
from Puerto Rico, fled and sought help. Upon examination of her case, au-
thorities determined that “a number of other families have subsequently
arrived in the capital with individuals of color as maids. . . . ​A [pos­si­ble]
pretext for better hiding slavery.” Authorities averred that it was “essential
that authorities redouble their zeal and adopt strict mea­sures on a m ­ atter
of so much transcendence.” Soto’s abusive mistress managed to have her
215

case dropped for lack of evidence, but Dominican officials observed that Soto
was to “enjoy the full rights of liberty and the l­egal guarantees of all p
­ eople
sui generis” in Santo Domingo. Authorities all over the island received a firm
216

reminder that both men and ­women of color ­were strictly prohibited from
entry and that all maids w ­ ere to be presented to authorities as soon as they
disembarked, so that officials could examine their passports. A royal order
from Spain on 4 December 1861 reiterated the ban. Nevertheless, incidents
continued in which slave o ­ wners employed “noticeably altered passports”
in attempting to sneak in enslaved ­women as ­family members.217 Domini-
can officials responded with concern. Sometime in the fall of 1861, Santana
changed his position to support the ban himself; in fact, he even argued that
it should be extended to include ­people of color arriving from Curaçao.
Violations, however, continued occurring at the very highest levels of
colonial administration. Malo de Molina himself—­the same commissioner
charged by the Cuban governor to study and ingratiate himself into the tran-
sitioning administration—­flagrantly ignored the law. Civil governor Pedro
Valverde, a Dominican of some standing, who had received royal honors for
his role in annexation, protested that Malo de Molina and another Cuban
official had traveled with maids without notifying authorities.218 When
Valverde sent word to the two men to send the w ­ omen to the government of-
fices for paperwork inspection, Malo de Molina responded defiantly: if Val-
verde wanted to meet his maids, he retorted, he should come to his h ­ ouse

114 | Chapter 3
personally.219 Valverde, himself a prominent man, bristled at this hostile com-
portment. “I would have punished this discourtesy and the disrespect that
it represents as it merits, if it had not fallen on no less than the Fiscal of Her
Majesty,” he protested. He was indignant of the challenge to his station. “I
know how to fulfill the job with which Her Majesty the Queen (God protect
her) has deigned to distinguish me, and I ­will execute it even at the price of
my life, which I would happily sacrifice as long as it ­were in the fulfillment
of my obligations and respecting the highest authority,” he insisted. Santana
delicately encouraged Valverde to persist in inspection, although the resolu-
tion is not clear. The m ­ atter was handled quietly, and the prohibition against
­free ­people of color definitively reinstated.
It is difficult to determine how the expanded travel ban was or was not
enforced; prob­ably, it was targeted primarily at white Spanish travelers ar-
riving in the capital with an entourage, or at individual mi­grant travelers of
color reaching the northern coast. Certainly it could not have been directed
at ­every Dominican of color who traveled to and from the island; it seems
likely that the regular travelers to Saint Thomas and Curaçao must have been
granted some sort of individual pass, for example, or w ­ ere other­wise able
to easily establish their residence and status. Poorer, more infrequent, and
more inexperienced travelers must have had a more difficult time, however.
In one such instance, Julieta Enriquez, described as a parda originally from
Curaçao, discovered to her dismay that she could not return to her ­children
in the fall of 1862. When attempting to return from a sojourn in Curaçao,
she was detained upon arrival in Puerto Plata. Subsequently, she was sent
to Mayagüez—­a Puerto Rican town, where she likely knew no one, far from
her f­ amily, and where slavery persisted—to wait for nearly a month for per-
mission to reenter Santo Domingo, while officials verified the existence and
whereabouts of her two ­children. Although she was fi­nally allowed to re­
unite with them and return to her home, the ordeal must have been arduous
and traumatizing for the entire ­family.220
As 1861 wore on, high-­ranking officials wrote missives that betrayed their
hostility. Spanish authorities arriving in the colony should be men “already
proven in t­hese countries,” of good reputation but also “without or cured
of ­those reservations . . . c​ ommonly held against p ­ eople of color, for the
repugnance they inspire in us when we arrive from Eu­rope . . . ​to consider
them inferior and despicable,” one official wrote. Betraying his own biases,
he urged arriving Spanish authorities to be ready for “the customs and ten-
dencies of the inhabitants, be experienced in the evil arts of some, know
how to animate and bear their carelessness, their laziness, [and] their

Destined to Occupy This Island | 115

lethargy.”221 Such “indigence” highlighted “a most desolate inertia, the most
total indifference to the joys and benefits of a social life that spurs advance-
ment, and the natu­ral delay and passive re­sis­tance to all improvements as a
result,” the Cuban governor echoed.222 They had lost “their habit and love
for work,” an incoming governor claimed, “leading the fields to be so aban-
doned, that it is difficult to find more than pure forests designated for c­ attle
and pig raising.”223 His report made his plans and prejudices evident: “If the
cultivation of tobacco and cotton are to be fomented on a large scale, many
hands are necessary, b ­ ecause the natives are more deplorably apathetic than
can be ­imagined.”

116 | Chapter 3
four

The Haitians or the Whites?

COLONIZATIO N AND RE S
­ IS T
­ ANCE, 1861–1863

For the new administration to have any chance at survival, one major obstacle
loomed: Haitian opposition and anticolonial organ­izing on Dominican soil.
President Fabre Geffrard’s connections with republican idealists, anti-­Santana
figures, and center-­island generals made his immediate military mobili­
zation a real possibility. Among Geffrard’s Dominican collaborators was
Francisco del Rosario Sánchez, who was a self-­taught ­lawyer, military man,
and one of the few men of color in the foundational Trinitario society of the
Dominican capital. An idealist, Sánchez was no stranger to Santana’s ire.
Released from prison in August 1859, he quickly traveled to Saint Thomas.
In January 1861, he and o ­ thers issued a proclamation from Saint Thomas
condemning annexation.1 At some point, he returned to Hispaniola, tak-
ing refuge in Port-­au-­Prince. In late spring, he fi­nally arrived at the center
of the island. Santana could not know the specifics of Sánchez’s months of
communication with President Geffrard, but he almost certainly recognized
the center-­island campaigns for what they ­were—­a collection of republican,
nationalist, anticolonial alliances, with capable military leadership—­and he
was determined to crush them. With all the might of Spanish forces, San-
tana relentlessly pursued the small rebel groups. Within a few weeks, he
overtook Sánchez and executed him. Santana blamed Haiti alone for the
mobilizations, and the capital city paper agreed. “The dark propagandists of
the Haitian idea . . . ​who try to justify or exculpate the invaders are wasting
their time,” La Razón insisted.2
The massive demonstration of Spanish military power effectively silenced
open collaboration and re­sis­tance for a time, and months of apparent peace
 followed. In the capital and other towns, some prominent individuals weath-
ered the po­liti­cal transition without much interruption, perceiving immedi-
ate financial and po­liti­cal opportunities. As property o ­ wners, they benefited
by renting buildings to the administration, continued to forward develop-
ment proposals, and sometimes served in the local administration.3 The
most optimistic speculated that Spanish rule would bring respite from party
politics and, along with it, pro­gress, peace, and order. Capital city writers
pointed to the unrest and bloodshed in nearby republics and counted them-
selves lucky that po­liti­cal peace might fi­nally be at hand.4 ­These individuals
liked Catholic orthodoxy and the language of order. They used a familiar
vocabulary to condemn domestic and foreign opponents of the new regime,
calling opponents disorderly, uncivilized, traitorous, or Haitian, just as they
had in previous de­cades. Without writing about it explic­itly, they embraced
Spanish racial taxonomies. As months passed, some whites in the capital
and other towns began to indulge their prejudices more openly.5 A handful
of prominent Dominican families drafted limpieza de sangre documents for
­daughters who married Spanish officials.6 Poets wrote odes to Cuba.7 When
they condemned and ridiculed Geffrard that spring in the columns of La
Razón, Spanish journalists joined them, producing an effusion of antiblack
invective that reverberated on both sides of the Atlantic.8
Many residents of towns across the territory, on the other hand, hated
the occupation from its first moments. In Sabaneta, a man cut the Spanish
flag into ­little pieces at once.9 The officer who announced annexation in the
capital was assaulted a few days ­later.10 In Puerto Plata, preannexation alarm
gave way to immediate tension. It was the last town in the territory to wit-
ness a transition ceremony; officials waited, cagily, for hundreds of troops
to arrive the night before.11 A priest absconded with and hid the lowered re-
publican flag. The next day, someone raised Haitian colors; just as quickly,
they also dis­appeared.12 An observer noted Puerto Plata’s residents treated
the arriving troops “with the utmost coldness and marked disgust, [and] they
contemptuously gave them the nickname ‘the whites.’ ”13 In and outside of
the capital city, a Spanish soldier provided a similar account, describing
­whole black communities—­“the descendants of . . . ​slaves,” he deci­ded—­
who manifestly demonstrated their distaste at the change of flag.14 “­These
are not the Spaniards I knew: they are very white,” another capital resident
remarked, disapprovingly.15 As more troops arrived quickly, fugitivity was a
central tactic. Samaná residents wrangled approval to worship in the woods,
for example, and the governor even gave them lumber to build the chapel.

118 | Chapter 4
Other opponents to the arriving officials w ­ ere left watching and waiting,
furious.16
As months passed, paltry infrastructure, lack of funds, and interpersonal
conflicts dealt successive blows to the loyalties of many o ­ thers. From declas-
sification to the daily comportment of Spanish administrators and soldiers,
racism, scarce resources, and disenfranchisement contributed centrally to
public discontent. Spanish appointees replaced Dominican interim officials,
and Santana could not exercise patronage as he had promised. Meanwhile,
many active reserve soldiers remained faithful to superior officers, who
took up a ­career with the Spanish. As months passed, relationships dete-
riorated, however, sometimes violently. In the Cibao, the military governor
was so hostile that he became legend. “¡Más malo que Buceta!” (Worse than
[Brigadier] Buceta!) became an invective for a particularly cruel, arrogant,
or volatile authority; every­one hated him, and even other Spanish authori-
ties ­were galled by his be­hav­ior.17 Spanish officials tended not to participate
in the daily life of towns, even public ceremonies and church festivals.18 In
the capital, one ­woman’s florid poetry praised the occupation, but observers
claimed that ­there was “no cordiality” between Spanish and Dominicans,
and that many in the capital w ­ ere distressed and fearful.19 They w­ ere “sadly
submitted” in the capital, one observer claimed, explaining that with all of
the shortages and unrest of recent years, “the ­people ­were of an ill humor to
start with.”20 Still, an apparent calm persisted.

Summer, 1861
Although Spain still refused to recognize Haiti, President Geffrard issued an
official protest against Spanish occupation on 6 April 1861. “Our ­brothers of
the East have been tricked,” he wrote, observing solemnly, “[and] the sur-
vival of one p
­ eople is intricately tied to the survival of the other.”21 Santana
had broken treaty mandates, Geffrard warned, giving Haiti “a complete free-
dom of action,” and a duty, to restore the island’s security. “We . . . ​declare
that we continue to have feelings of brotherhood and our most sincere sym-
pathies for this population,” Geffrard wrote, carefully explaining that the
Dominican ­people had been “surprised and tricked.” In Spanish, he warned
Dominicans directly: “Santana is disposing of you en masse.”22 Weeks passed,
and Geffrard’s condemnations continued, which Port-­au-­Prince journalists
published alongside extensive coverage of outside disapproval. Geffrard
considered Santana a cynic and a traitor. He referred specifically to the
deep roots of “antinational designs” in the east, citing de­cades of intrigues.

The Haitians or the Whites? | 119

Santana was a criminal by his own constitution, the president argued, and
he proceeded to cite all seven constitutional articles in question.23 Some
weeks ­later, Haiti’s government paper printed excerpts of a Dominican an-
nexation pamphlet, which also detailed a litany of crimes. The pamphleteer
called on fellow Dominicans to unite in common cause with Haiti. “The
interests of the two p ­ eoples are compromised . . . i​t is time to fight with
what weapons remain,” the Dominican author urged.24 Slavery rumors
spread in Port-­au-­Prince and other towns.25 Geffrard issued a simultaneous
call to arms: “To arms, Haitians . . . F​ reedom or Death!”26 “Our climate, our
geo­graph­i­cal and po­liti­cal position vis-­à-­vis foreign [powers], our preservation,
our needs and our hopes are the same,” another Haitian writer commented.
“This annexation, it is the cannon of alarm, it is the poison, it is death: yes,
it is death.”27
Si­mul­ta­neously with Geffrard’s call, a handful of veteran Dominican
generals launched coordinated campaigns that they had been planning for
months. Francisco del Rosario Sánchez praised Haiti’s “wise and just Repub-
lican cabinet” in his proclamations that spring. “I am persuaded that this Re-
public, against whom yesterday we fought for our nationality, is t­ oday just as
dedicated as we are so that we might preserve it,” he wrote.28 A small, mixed
group of rebels gathered in the tiny center-­island town of Las Caobas, not
far from Mirebalais. Some had only recently returned from Curaçao, Saint
Thomas, and vari­ous towns in Haiti, where anti-­Santana organ­izing had
gained ­great urgency. General José Maria Cabral, veteran of partisan politics
and exile, addressed his followers with an exhortation, which the Moniteur
Haïtien promptly published: “The country is in danger, and we cannot save
her without a revolution. [The president] has sold the Republic. . . . ​¡Tomor-
row we ­will be slaves! . . . ​We must rise up in the name of liberty, to the cry
of ¡Viva la nación!”29 As the rebels mobilized in the center of the island,
Santana himself went ­after them, leading several thousand Spanish soldiers
in hot pursuit. Two battalions of Spanish troops from Puerto Rico, two from
Spain, a number of Spanish volunteers, and a militia of color from Cuba ar-
rived to join them.30 Cabral and his followers retreated into Haitian territory,
but ­others ­were not so lucky. Near Las Matas, Santana ordered the execution
of Sánchez, whom he knew very well. At Santana’s ­orders, and despite the
protest of Spanish officers, troops executed nineteen other men in a hor-
rible manner on the after­noon of 4 July 1861; some w ­ ere shot, o
­ thers beaten,
and o ­ thers killed with machetes.31 “The first stories of the atrocities . . . ​
are beyond belief,” the French consul reported. “­These poor men asked to
be judged before a military tribunal made up of Spanish soldiers and wrote

120 | Chapter 4
a plea to the Queen. All was denied.”32 Authorities in Madrid w ­ ere just as
shocked.33
It is difficult to determine exactly who participated in the small cam-
paigns, although it seems to have been Dominican officers, a number of
Haitian soldiers, Dominican refugees living in Haiti, and center-­island resi-
dents, who both expected and warmly received the arriving troops.34 Do-
mingo Ramírez, who had proposed reunification in 1860, was on the front
lines.35 Of the very few firsthand documents that survive from the rebellion
itself, one is a ­simple letter from a w­ oman in Neiba, Ramona Recio, to a
certain “Juan Florian” in Haiti. Her “suspicious” letter, seized by Spanish au-
thorities, and the subject of her interrogation, referred cryptically to a “burro
that ­ought not be sold, but rather be turned over to her ­brother”—­code for a
firearm, perhaps?—­but the m ­ atter was dropped a­ fter a brief interrogation.36
Other surviving clues are more explicit. Segundo Mateo was prototypical
of residents’ alliances, general mobility, and support for the anti-­Spanish
campaign. Mateo had been born in Dominican territory but resided twelve
years in Hincha (or Hinche), then governed by Haiti. He worked both with a
local Haitian commander, carry­ing weapons, and for Cabral, as a spy against
Spanish authority in San Juan de las Matas. The arriving troops, he report-
edly confessed, w ­ ere composed both of Haitian regiments and of “Haitian-
ized Spaniards” (españoles haitianizados).37 Geffrard may have pressured some
Dominican refugees to make their way to the campaign or lose the salaries
they had been collecting from the Haitian state.38 Someone got hold of a
Spanish flag that had been seized in the center-­island fighting and brazenly
dragged it through the mud in front of the Spanish del­e­ga­tion in Port-­au-­
Prince.39 Families trickled back into the center-­island towns only slowly. A
total of 207 ­people returned over the next eight months. Most ­were “Trini-
dad,” “Acosta,” and “Pérez,” but ­there ­were a number of “Divals” and “Dilils”
as well.40 Many ­others stayed in Haiti, perhaps fearful of reprisals.41 Despite
Spanish persecution, a few ethnic Haitians did return to their homes in the
east; the el­derly Borni Beliard and his ­family came back to Guayubín, for
example, ­after his conduct was universally vouched to have been “good.”42
The residents “do not want to be Spanish citizens,” the Crown complained.43
Delighting in a narrative as old as the republic, annexation authorities
repeatedly insisted that the rebellion was only Haitian. “The Haitians fled
Neyba and Las Matas like cowards!” a writer at La Razón proclaimed.44 ­Those
few Dominicans who had been involved in the “humiliating defeat,” jour-
nalists argued, ­were “merely a handful of misfits with the exaggerated pre-
tentions of the descendants of Toussaint.”45 Cabral, Sánchez, Ramírez, and

The Haitians or the Whites? | 121

their followers “are, [like Judas], Haitian men who have renounced their
faith, honor, and country,” the writer of another editorial continued accus-
ingly, arguing that they sought the destruction of the country and should be
disowned.46 Pro-­annexation journalists followed up with an indulgent, racist
press offensive. A writer rhapsodized about an unnamed young Dominican
who had been canonized as a Spanish patriot for having saved a Spanish flag
from the “Haitian hordes.”47 Madrid journalists ­were even more overt, un-
leashing a torrent of slurs.48 The defeat of the “cowards” had been easy, loyal-
ist writers concurred. “We w ­ ill see if the Haitians doubt now the spontaneity
of Dominicans in the annexation,” one editorial exulted.49 La Razón writers
went so far as to embrace rumors of French reoccupation of Haiti—­albeit
dubious, they admitted—­with glowing prose.50 Dominicans ­were “work-
ing energetically with [the Spanish] . . . t​ o reject the invasion of their black
neighbors,” Madrid papers agreed.51 “Let us throw up our voices to give most
fervent thanks to Divine Providence!” a proclamation attributed to Santana
exhorted. “We are ­children of the same August M ­ other of all Spaniards . . . ​
of all Spaniards born in Eu­rope, Amer­i­ca, Asia, and Africa!”52
Military reprisal was fast and brutal, directed squarely at Port-­au-­Prince.
Spanish agent Manuel Cruzat arrived in late April and tried to force his way
into having an audience at the presidential palace.53 He demanded that Gef-
frard immediately renounce opposition, recognize annexation, expel any
conspirators, and pay an indemnity for his call to arms. In fact, the Span-
ish actions of that summer very nearly destabilized the government in Port-­
au-­Prince. On 5 July 1861, six Spanish steamships appeared in the harbor of
Port-­au-­Prince, causing “­great sensation.”54 General Joaquín Rubalcaba, the
commander of Havana’s naval forces, demanded 200,000 pesos fuertes, one
hundred cannon shots in salute of the Spanish flag, and assurances of no
further disturbances within the Haitian territory, all to be satisfied within
forty-­eight hours. Geffrard refused his demands and declared martial law.
As hours passed, citizens became frantic, storing valuables and heading
miles outside of the city.55 The situation was so tense that Spanish authori-
ties urged foreigners to evacuate; the Spanish press wrote almost gleefully
about the terror and the tension of the peasant residents of the surrounding
area. ­After five days of mediation with the British and French consuls, Gef-
frard consented to saluting the Spanish forces and negotiating compensa-
tion.56 One month ­later, Spanish authorities demanded an additional 25,000
pesos fuertes as indemnity for damages caused in the Dominican towns of
Las Matas, Neiba, and Cercado, a “most moderate” sum, the Spanish Crown
announced.57

122 | Chapter 4
 Seeking to protect his republic, Geffrard acquiesced to all signs of con-
ciliation. He ordered Cabral and a handful of ­others out of Haiti, and they
quickly absconded to Saint Thomas.58 In Port-­au-­Prince, residents quietly
criticized both Geffrard’s capitulation and his quick recourse to martial law,
and they feared more Spanish aggression was to come.59 The Moniteur Haïtien
was forced into silence. A report on Jamaicans’ opposition to annexation
was buried on the second page of a July paper, and a l­ ater issue praised Gef-
frard for having navigated “difficult and delicate” negotiations with Spain.60
Months ­later, a journalist nearly echoed the Spanish line: that 1861 border
trou­bles had caused “complications,” he wrote, but that they w­ ere “smoothed
out by the wisdom of both governments.” The writer pointedly returned to
domestic questions of agricultural development and education.61 The “in-
demnity” the government was to pay received passing mention.62 Geffrard
was in a difficult diplomatic position, and he faced increasing domestic
opposition. He clung to constitutionalism and pronounced clemency to
conspirators who cropped up in vari­ous towns, but he also warned that unau-
thorized small vessels, milling about the coast, would be treated as pirates.63
In the Dominican capital, meanwhile, the summer executions had chilled
the populace. Santana’s brutality ruled tenuously once again.64

Alarming Reports, Not at All Satisfactory:

The Erosion of Spanish Optimism
Although calm was reestablished in late summer, Spanish frustration grew.
General Santana, author of annexation and Spain’s first collaborator, proved
a troublesome and frustrating proxy who rarely fulfilled his duties as Span-
ish authorities would have liked. Publicly, Cuban governor Serrano referred
to him positively, but in an “internal and most confidential report,” he re-
counted a very dif­fer­ent opinion. “Alarming reports, not at all satisfactory,”
had been arriving about Santana’s cruelty, and soon the Cuban governor
himself became convinced that the Dominican caudillo was “an almost in-
superable obstacle to the or­ga­ni­za­tion of the territory.”65 Through maneu-
vering and vio­lence, Santana was in command of a “completely loyal” party
of followers on whom he rained patronage. He and his followers “have so
exaggerated their pretensions . . . ​and ambition for salaries and posts, that
it constitutes a ­great obstacle for continuing to or­ga­nize [the administra-
tion],” the visiting governor reported. “They want the top posts and refuse
the lower ones that have been generously offered them,” he complained.66
Furthermore, Santana was implacable with his Dominican enemies. He tried
to block former opponents from government posts, even denying their reentry

The Haitians or the Whites? | 123

to the country on an individual basis.67 Serrano had arrived in Santo Domingo
determined to declare total amnesty, a mea­sure that he quickly learned San-
tana opposed.68 Santana’s favoritism and strong-­arm tactics extended as far
as the clergy; Santana urged that prelate Moreno del Cristo be removed for
being anti-­Spanish, but Serrano determined his motivations to be wholly
personal.69 “Underhanded machinations [stemming] from po­liti­cal enmity
and envy,” Serrano concluded, disapprovingly.70 The regente of the Real Au-
diencia, Eduardo Alonso y Colmenares, was even more critical. He accused
Santana and his coterie of purposely provoking conflict with officials in
order to regain lost popularity; he was uncooperative and narrow-­minded,
Alonso accused. The be­hav­ior and corruption ­were alarming, he continued,
and advocated that Santana’s replacement should be immediate.71
­Whether Santana’s resignation in mid-1862 was due to fevers and rheu-
matism, as he claimed, or to increasing Spanish pressure is not clear. He
was obviously unhappy; he had tried for months to resign, writing repeated
requests. A critical observer remarked that he had profited from the sale of
supplies to Spanish troops in hard currency and sought to retire to the east
with his earnings.72 Certainly, too, he was no longer the pragmatic ­Spanish
choice for captain general. Spanish authorities admonished Santana to
defer to Governor Serrano regarding any foreign policy concerns, includ-
ing Haiti.73 Santana retreated from official business—as he had been wont
to do throughout the First Republic. “Off with his ­cattle,” one Spanish gen-
eral sneered.74 At other times he was irascible and withdrawn, “complaining
about ­every decision that is not his,” one confidential report accused, observ-
ing, “He only wants to govern with the arbitrariness, vio­lence, and exclusivity
of the Republican era, with dif­fer­ent names.”75 To remove him without con-
troversy, Serrano suggested he be called to Madrid, “­under a plausible pretext
of meeting his August Sovereign.”76 Not long ­after Serrano’s visit, Santana
retired to his Seibo ranch permanently, anyway. “If his ailments ­were in part
responsible for his resignation, it is no less certain that his impotence ver-
sus the near absolute control of . . . ​an upstart bureaucracy in the pro­cess
of replacing his intimate collaborators was a decisive f­ actor,” historian Luis
Álvarez observes.77
As 1862 proceeded, so did a progressive increase in Spanish replacements
for government positions. New captain general Rivero acknowledged that
a dramatic replacement of partisan and problematic appointments would
be “extremely impolitic in the eyes of the country,” but he proposed to neu-
tralize the appointments by adding army officers “of recognized skill and
talent” as secretaries.78 Other professionals faced new restrictions. Prior to

124 | Chapter 4
the Spanish administration, public defenders in the republic had needed
only proof of upstanding status and a two-­year apprenticeship. Spanish com-
missioners suggested that the l­ egal ranks be weeded out significantly. Only
­those who had been practicing law for fifteen or more years could con-
tinue; ­others would need to pass an examination, and in some cases, an
additional apprenticeship.79 Authorities disqualified three former members
of the Dominican Supreme Court in this manner.80 A handful of promi-
nent letrados sought licenses to continue in their public clerk (escribano pú-
blico) posts, but candidates arriving from Puerto Rico supplanted them.81 As
the administration stabilized, Spanish authorities methodically purged the
prominent Dominicans who had overseen the transition. Spanish bureau-
crats Victoriano García Paredes and Mariano Cappa replaced Fernandez de
Castro and Miguel Lavastida in their high-­ranking posts, leaving them only
a semiofficial advisory capacity.82 Manuel Cruzat—­former consul in Mobile,
Galveston, and disastrously in Haiti—­became the director of mail. Eduardo
Alonso y Colmenares, a Madrid-­educated ­lawyer, became the regente of the
Real Audiencia. Dominican officials Pedro Ricart y Torres, Miguel Valverde,
Pedro Curiel, and ­others w ­ ere ousted in subsequent months.83
Logistical and economic prob­lems plagued the new administration. Few
public works proj­ects began. As an interim mea­sure, authorities instructed
local officials to use proceeds from fines for municipal funding, but they
­were insufficient, onerous to citizens, and only slowly disbursed.84 The ad-
ministration never repaid wealthy loyalists for their out-­of-­pocket support
in crushing the 1861 revolts. Salary complaints w ­ ere common.85 “It seemed
like the [Spanish] government had forgotten the town,” a frustrated ob-
server proclaimed in one center-­island town, citing repeated requests for
military supplies and nearly six months in pay arrears.86 Administration
costs mounted: thousands to repair the few standing government buildings,
payments for renting of private homes and furniture, and other start-up ex-
penses. Some of the expenditures highlight the formalistic costs of Spanish
return: 81 pesos to celebrate the entry of the royal seal, 27 pesos for new
flags in Puerto Plata, 430 pesos to relocate a w
­ oman living near a sixteenth-
century chapel marked for restoration, and other incidental costs.87 Of-
ficials proposed purchasing the land on which the island’s first Mass was
celebrated and finding and restoring Columbus’s h ­ ouse in Santo Domingo,
historically dubious but symbolically significant proj­ects.88 The new watch-
men forces cost 14,000 pesos in the capital alone and almost 34,000 pesos
island-­wide.89 Trea­sury authorities, meanwhile, ­were frustrated with the
difficulty of organ­izing First Republic documents, and could not precisely

The Haitians or the Whites? | 125

ascertain what constituted state property.90 Madrid officials w ­ ere very criti-
cal of the accounting ­going on in Santo Domingo generally.91
Slow official responses aggravated every­thing. The lack of regular steam-
ship ser­vice made governing difficult, officials complained.92 Mail took
about a week to arrive from the east to the capital, and about the same
amount of time to get from the northern coast to the capital by boat, but it
took almost two weeks to reach Santo Domingo from the territory’s most
impor­tant town, Santiago. Authorities in Santiago de los Caballeros com-
plained about the slow speed of correspondence.93 Mail from Santo Domingo
to Madrid regularly took as long as two months. Santana asked Spanish
authorities to send ships directly to the capital, as the roads ­were so poor
crossing the island to Samaná that dispatches took a long time to arrive.
His request was denied on the basis that the route amounted to too much of
a diversion from Havana, obviously a priority destination.94 Administrators
waited on funds and instructions, but the chief postal administrator, like
­others, quit to find more lucrative employment.95
Some posts simply went unfilled. Try as they might, officials could not fill
the position of minister of justice. Although notification of the post’s creation
was mailed to the colony’s mayors in January 1862, a number of them replied
that they had never received word, even six months ­later. Exasperated, capi-
tal city officials reissued a thirty-­day call: baptized Catholic men with robust
constitution, twenty-­five years or older, and “certified of good morality and
conduct” ­were welcome to apply, it urged, and the edict was to be read and
repeated in impor­tant public places. “We read the edict,” the Azua mayor re-
ported months ­later in late summer, “but ­there is absolutely no person who
could possibly be a candidate.” The Puerto Plata mayor also complied, “but
no one solicited the post,” he regretted. The post was provisionally filled—­
more than a year l­ater—by a French citizen living in the capital, who ­later
deserted, leaving for Saint Thomas u ­ nder an assumed name. Anyway, funds
­were short and would have to be borrowed from Puerto Rico. No further
rec­ords suggest what exasperated officials did next.96 Even the prized port
of Samaná—­where a new mayoral position was tentatively created in late
1861—­could not find any notaries at all to perform secretarial duties t­ here.97
In the capital, meanwhile, the Royal Audiencia begged the Crown for more
money—­repeatedly arguing that the administration of justice could not
possibly be administered with so few personnel.98 Elsewhere, officers criti-
cized the pace of public works proj­ects. An officer in Azua complained of
the impossibility of finishing barracks ­there, “­whether b ­ ecause of the loss of
materials, or the slowness of the laborers who are not sustained by anything

126 | Chapter 4
other than the Government’s ration.” He asked for funds to be able to pay
them according to their pro­gress, with the hope of speeding ­things along.99
Spanish troops ­were not prepared for the conditions u­ nder which they
met the rebels in the spring of 1861, and conditions w ­ ere difficult gener-
ally. With more troops arriving in Azua from Havana in mid-­June, conditions
during the summer campaign “against Haiti” w ­ ere unimaginably bad, the
Cuban governor reported. According to authorities on the ground,

It is impossible from all ­angles to form a worthy idea of the difficulties

one fights against in this country for the simplest ­thing. I w ­ ill leave out
the housing of troops in a town composed of insufficient barrack-­huts, in
such poor condition that when it rains it is as if one w
­ ere in open country.
I ­will not tire Your Excellency by describing the Hospitals where it has
been necessary to put two sick men in the same bed for days, nor w ­ ill I
report the scarcity of articles of the first necessity, nor the high cost of
living, not even how it is necessary to travel three leagues and more amid
heavy rainfall and overflowing rivers to provide forage for the ­horses.
Your Excellency ­will easily understand every­thing when I simply tell you
that since the moment of arrival I have been buying burros at any price,
and despite Santana’s presence and help, it has not been pos­si­ble for
me to buy more than forty—­and that a­ fter having left Santo Domingo
twenty-­five days ago.

The ­horses w ­ ere tired, he reported, and oxcarts difficult to find. “With re­
spect to the depopulation of the country and the poor condition of roads I
­will just tell Your Excellency, that in more than twenty leguas from Azua to San
Juan de la Maguana, ­there are just six miserable huts [bohíos] in three spots,
hours apart on the road. . . . ​Often ­there is no other remedy than sleeping
on the ground, and the forest is too dense for hammocks,” he lamented.100 As
always, however, Spanish authorities ­were e­ ager to underscore the harmony
between Spanish troops and the Dominican peasants they encountered.
The Spanish soldiers had faced the adverse conditions with such “superior
discipline . . . ​fraternizing with the residents and in every­thing laboring
with prudence and tact, that it is the admiration of the country,” the Cuban
governor insisted.
Arriving Spanish settlers fared worst of all. ­There was confusion over who
would cover the costs of arriving Spanish families, especially if their deals had
been struck before annexation was official. They arrived in small groups from
port cities like Cádiz; often, expeditions of larger groups failed in planning
stages.101 Officials agreed that white ­labor was necessary and resolved to

The Haitians or the Whites? | 127

adhere to pro-­colono statutes from the neighboring islands, but they quib-
bled on land allowances and other costs. ­After the settlers arrived, they
fared overwhelmingly poorly. Some of them sought government aid im-
mediately; ­others tried to return to Spain.102 ­Widows, orphans, and the sick
­were left stranded. A number who w ­ ere reported to be d­ ying in Samaná had
no money to return to Spain. ­Future colonists must not be sent in the height
of the summer, which had caused so high a mortality rate “that they ­were
terrified of all the island residents,” one report warned.103 The proj­ects ­were
so unsuccessful that a royal order in March 1863 allowed ­widows to return
to Spain.
Spanish authorities endeavored on a good faith mission to redeem the
paper money of the republic for pesos fuertes, just as Dominican politicians
had negotiated. Authorities began the program slowly, however, and they
quickly ran into prob­lems.104 First, the Classification Panel found that it
was difficult to know if the paper bills they w ­ ere receiving w ­ ere real; they
considered it simply impossible to validate them all.105 In fact, the Crown
issued paper ious of its own, papers that ­were themselves subject to ram-
pant falsification and inflation.106 When redemption began, the panel of-
fered to redeem paper currency with copper. As paper money was already
not accepted, small merchants scrambled to exchange the copper for silver
or gold, often at unfavorable rates.107 Just one year in, Puerto Plata was abuzz
with discontent. The state of the town was “alarming,” Santana reported,
and the discontent centered on the paper money. The tone of the pam-
phlets circulating—­railing against the “Despotic Spanish Government” and
demanding “the blood of the traitor of he who sold us as vengeance”—­gave
ample reason to make him ner­vous.108 Poorer individuals often could not get
authorities to accept their money, sometimes in so deteriorated a condition
that it was in multiple pieces. One anonymous letter writer ­later observed,
“This disgusted the masses, as the mea­sure, on top of being arbitrary, dis-
credits their limited means.” 109 Currency gained some stability, but the cost
of living ­rose along with it, raising the price of daily goods in the capital by
20 ­percent almost immediately, and more in the long term.110
At the end of Santana’s tenure, the colonial government was in dire fi-
nancial straits. Railroad, canal, highway, and bridge plans w ­ ere on hold, and
Samaná’s mine awaited an engineer. Even Santo Domingo’s port could not
be dredged ­until further notice, nor could a much-­needed railroad connect-
ing the tobacco fields of the Cibao to port cities be constructed.111 The public
works department had only an inspector at pres­ent and an annual bud­get of
fewer than 40,000 pesos. Money was “a delicate subject”—­there existed a

128 | Chapter 4
“total lack of capital . . . t​o make large-­scale industry”—­and so contribu-
tions from Cuba ­ought to continue for a time, the incoming governor ar-
gued. He would study the tax system as ordered—­but in the meantime, it
was vital that the stipends from Cuba came with “strict regularity, as in this
island ­there is not a single resource, nor a merchant to whom one could ap-
peal in the case of urgency.” Santo Domingo officials asked the Cuban trea­
sury to cover its summer costs in 1862, but neither the 120,000-­peso stipend
requested for August nor the 200,000 pesos for September arrived.112 The
captain general of Santo Domingo would have to take a pay cut by 1863, the
overseas minister warned.113 Cuban governor Serrano was gone, too, retiring,
as Santana had, for health reasons.
As the new captain general, Felipe Rivero, began his tenure, however, of-
ficial Spanish sentiment was stubbornly optimistic. Rivero himself assured
the Spanish Overseas Ministry that he was taking careful notes and reading
the reports of “very authorized p ­ eople who have had the chance to study
and learn the nature and character of the inhabitants.”114 Religious reform
would continue apace. Despite early failures with Spanish settlers, he urged
that more rural laborers ­and Asian laborers ought to be drafted. General
Santana retired with laurels and a healthy half-­pay salary, honored with
the “­Grand Cross of the Royal American Order of Isabel the Catholic” and
the title of “Marques of Las Carreras,” recalling an 1849 b ­ attle with Haitian
troops. Dominican officials also wrote approvingly of Santana’s replace-
115

ment by Rivero.116 Apart from a few minor incidents, the country was tranquil,
authorities wrote. “Dominicans, embrace your new f­ ather!” Santana wrote
before taking leave of the capital. “Peace and happiness await,” the arriving
Spanish governor reminded the public, arguing that a new era of prosperity
was to be gained through their voluntary obedience.117

Conflicts with the Spanish State

To the average Dominican resident living somewhat near a larger town, the
arrival of the Spanish troops and administrators steadily impacted daily
life. Spain’s first visibility was military; nearly three thousand troops had
arrived by 5 April. The larger state—­government spending grew in Santo Do-
mingo from 241,000 pesos in 1860 to more than twice that figure within
two years—­brought Spanish priests, Spanish civil and military governors, and
new Dominican authorities to the payroll.118 Although much of the bud­get
was funded by Cuban coffers, at least some of it came from residents them-
selves; the income exacted from Dominicans doubled from 1860 to 1862.119
Merchants felt the impact first. It was they who suffered new licensing fees,

The Haitians or the Whites? | 129

f­aced difficulties exchanging the paper currency from the former repub-
lic, and—as rebellion broke out—saw ­few of the capital improvements for
which they had so greatly hoped. ­Those authorities who had served in Cuba
in par­tic­u­lar ­were arriving from a colony with a large civil and military struc-
ture. “You can go nowhere in Cuba without meeting soldiers,” a resident of
the neighboring colony complained.120 While residents of the biggest urban
centers—­the capital, Santiago de los Caballeros, Puerto Plata—­prob­ably felt
the expansion most immediately, therefore, o ­ thers received Spanish alcaldes
and low-­level Dominican officials (alcaldes pedáneos) charged with spreading
Spanish law to the smaller towns.121
Few authorities w ­ ere as famously unlikable as Brigadier Manuel Buceta,
charged with governing the Cibao province from its capital, Santiago de los
Caballeros. Buceta was irredeemably heavy-­handed, authoritarian, and con-
descending, driving even prominent, loyal Dominicans to disgust. Alejan-
dro Ángulo Guridi, the son of Dominican parents who had left the island in
1822, raised and educated in Puerto Rico and Havana, was such a subject.
Guridi had returned to the island in 1852, involving himself in liberal politics
and pro-­immigration schemes, and supported annexation on the grounds it
would usher in peace, with prosperity soon to follow.122 When Spanish offi-
cials began arriving, therefore, he and other loyalists made ideal transitional
authorities; in fact, a number of them constituted the municipal govern-
ment (ayuntamiento) that was to collaborate with Buceta in Santiago, prob­
ably the wealthiest and most impor­tant city of the east. Faithfully, Guridi
and ­others labored to establish a new town hall, in a large ­house with a side
room. “We decorated the ­tables and floors of the meeting room, made a
carpet-­canopy for the President’s place, and hung a painting of our August
Sovereign,” Guridi reported. Of the result, he wrote, “Well, it is clear, Excel-
lent Sir, that the location ­doesn’t look like the Ayuntamiento of Madrid nor
that of Havana; but every­thing is relative in this life,” explaining, “And we
are satisfied in having done every­thing within our means to create a meeting
room for decent men who have seen ­those of other countries.”
The conflict between Buceta and Santiago’s municipal government esca-
lated quickly. Buceta’s response was indecorously haughty. Guridi explained:
“Well, Excellent Sir, the first day that Sr. Brigadier Governor saw it fit to
attend our meeting, he said that it was an indecency, and that it was not fit
even for troops to sleep in; and why ­were we meeting at that time anyway, if
it was not the set hour.”123 Buceta exited, threatening jail for anyone who was
not pres­ent again at seven that night. When the meeting convened that

130 | Chapter 4
eve­ning, Buceta refused to listen to the members’ reasoning on a number of
legislative decisions. Guridi and o ­ thers tried to remain calm. “Excellent Sir,
we continued carry­ing out our duties without complaining, without the tini-
est bit of venting escaping from our lips,” he reported, both composed and
exasperated. Buceta’s supercilious manner was not placated. Unsatisfied with
the contractor chosen by the Ayuntamiento for trash collection—­neighbors
had simply left refuse in the wrong street, “unused to the ser­vice,” Guridi
insisted—­the Spanish commander ordered the trash to be piled at the door
of the municipal meeting­house, blocking its entrance entirely. Residents
­were abuzz—­some surprised, some furious. The Ayuntamiento members,
for their part, felt humiliated, and they wrote individual scathing letters to
the captain general directly. “I would not be worthy of my parents’ name or
even my own . . . p ​ lease let me quit, and tell the governor not to oppose my
passport,” Guridi pleaded. Governor Rivero, perplexed at the events, wrote
to Buceta for more information, but it was too late. Guridi left the country
again in 1863; he published the oppositional pamphlet Santo Domingo and
España anonymously from New York the following year.124
Town residents often resisted paying fines to the new Spanish state, es-
pecially if they ­were men of military rank. In the town of Guerra, a group of
a dozen men w ­ ere interrogated about a game of juego del monte (a card game
similar to poker). Town officials detained the owner of the ­house, Pedro
Pineda, and ordered him to pay sixty pesos; the rest ­were to pay a smaller
amount or spend some time in jail. Pineda refused to submit to his sentence.
His re­sis­tance flummoxed authorities, who ­were unused to enforcing such
statutes. The mayor—­whose own secretary riddled the ensuing correspon-
dence with numerous chirographic errors—­was bewildered. “I am relating
this to Your Excellency so that you might answer us as quickly as pos­si­ble,
saying what should be done on the m ­ atter; of course the sentence should
not be illusory ­under any context,” his report read.125 Pineda escalated his
opposition, now claiming to be a “Spanish Col­o­nel” and insisting that he
would listen only to military authority. “No ­matter what, [that authority]
falls to me,” the army commander Miguel de los Santos wrote, urging, “so
I hope Your Excellency can tell me what I can do to oblige him to pay, as he
has been too abusive and even now continues abusing the authorities. . . . ​
I hope that you ­will have the kindness to answer me on the ­matter using the
same porter.”126 Officials in the capital replied sternly; not only was Pineda
not exempt, but the fines for all the infractors should actually be double or
­triple the original amount. ­Under some confusing circumstances, Pineda

The Haitians or the Whites? | 131

himself defiantly delivered this order of punishment from the capital back
to the town. Guerra’s army commander balked and asked Pineda only to pay
the original amount, in installments.127
Passports proved complicated. A larger administration prob­ably caused
more p ­ eople to worry about official passports than before, although it is
difficult to state conclusively that this is so. It does seem like making one’s
resident status official became impor­tant, as was the case for a Bavarian mer-
chant who applied for naturalization, despite having already been a resident
for more than ten years.128 Some individuals, like Blas C. Jiménez, had served
in the military in both countries, with long-term residency both places.
Jiménez had moved to Port-­au-­Prince without any intention of returning to
the east, and ­there he married a young Haitian ­woman and raised a ­family,
all the while as a Haitian military officer, even traveling abroad u ­ nder the
auspices of a Haitian passport. Authorities ­were perplexed as to w ­ hether he
should be admitted as a Spanish citizen again. ­After the fighting began, first
in 1861 and then steadily in 1863, travel became even more fraught. Spanish
authorities insisted that the families who had left in the earliest rebellions—­
which they characterized as “invasions” from Haiti—­had been forcibly re-
located westward, for example, and they bid the eastern residents return
quietly to their homes. Despite their reportedly destitute conditions and
official prodding, however, they ­were slow to return to Spanish jurisdic-
tion.129 Petitions to travel westward persisted long a­ fter the fighting height-
ened scrutiny; residents’ commercial and familial interests w ­ ere simply too
impor­t ant. Ana Maduro asked for a passport to travel to Port-­au-­Prince to
recoup a sick d ­ aughter she had left t­ here in 1864, for example, and o ­ thers
applied for ­cattle trading and other business interests.130 Dozens, if not hun-
dreds, of ethnically Haitian residents in towns like Las Matas Cercado and
Sabana Mula did not return east a­ fter fighting erupted, as both scrutiny and
chaos grew.131
Animal impressment grated on every­one. Given the extraordinarily poor
condition of the territory’s roads and a lack of Spanish pack animals, the
governor created a system of bagajes in September 1862 authorizing Spanish
commanders to impress oxen, burros, and ­horses to carry supplies, often
without recourse for their Dominican owner. An anonymous letter writer
described the rude manner with which impressment was effected: “The
arbitrary bagaje system: suffice it to say that they threw what the h­ orses w ­ ere
carry­ing into the ­middle of the street (the loads of the campesinos), saying
that the urgency of Royal Ser­vice demanded it, and that the beasts, thus em-
bargoed, ­didn’t always make it back to the hands of their ­owners.”132 In San

132 | Chapter 4
Cristóbal, Spanish troops w ­ ere encroaching on residents’ farms and seiz-
ing the animals they encountered. Not even prominent area residents w ­ ere
safe. One of the accusing vecinos was prominent military officer (and ­future
in­de­pen­dence fighter in Cuba) Modesto Díaz, another a former senator.133
One reservist complained that he had waited more than three months for
repayment (108 pesos) for his h ­ orse, which the Spanish forces had seized
with no indication of forthcoming payment. The Spanish captain was ex-
traordinarily curt in his reply to the query, even as he took advantage of his
letter to complain of the disorder of Spain’s collection of pack animals. Of
forty animals borrowed, he could locate only twenty-­five, he admitted, and
­didn’t know what ­else to say.134
With new civil codes ruling the towns, other costly daily irritations
emerged. Where some locals had appealed to their town officials (usually
an alcalde ordinario) for redress during previous years, now they sometimes
had to travel to court in the municipal capital, a prohibitively costly propo-
sition.135 In the capital, building codes seemed punitive to t­ hose who tried
to set up new public establishments, and homeowners had just one year to
bring their ­houses up to architectural and hygiene codes.136 Merchants seek-
ing licenses (derechos de patentes) in smaller towns grumbled at the fact they
­were to pay the same rates as the capital.137 The revenue from fines was suf-
ficient that in the small town of Guerra officials proposed building a church
from the proceeds.138 As months passed, authorities became well aware of
how onerous the fees ­were for much of the population, and they admit-
ted that they had too closely modeled the police and government codes
­after Cuba’s ordinances. ­After the first year, the Consejo de Administración
proposed some reforms. They called on the governor to relax or suppress or-
dinances about h ­ ouse repair and painting, animal tethering, clothes hanging,
­children’s dress, licenses for small-­time vendors, and animal impressment.
Demanding a license from nearly destitute, small-­time vendors “would be the
same as taking away from them the only means they have from not d ­ ying of
misery,” the council noted, empathetically, arguing that even ­free licenses
­were a prob­lem.139
Protestants in Puerto Plata and Samaná, as well as other towns, faced state
discrimination. Spanish officials at the highest level vacillated on the issue of
religious tolerance, and lower-­level authorities bungled local relationships.
In Samaná, the army seized a Wesleyan chapel that served a number of Brit-
ish subjects for use as an infirmary, for example, only to hastily retract their
occupation at the behest of the British consul and the Spanish governor.140
The following year, authorities in Samaná found themselves defending the

The Haitians or the Whites? | 133

Protestant population, refusing to enforce newly restrictive mea­sures ­unless
they heard directly from the governor.141 As policymakers vacillated, resident
Americans felt extra hostility; they suspected Spanish hostility to their com-
munity was an extension of imperial pro-­Confederate sentiments.142 The
­father of a ­free black Methodist ­family of five from New York—­who had been
living in Samaná since at least the 1850s and who worked in the custom­house
as a bookkeeper—­sought protection from Spanish persecution by hoisting
a British flag, but British consul Hood acerbically dismissed him.143 Some
residents fled scrutiny, even to Turks and Caicos. ­Others appealed to the
British consulate, or even President Lincoln, for intervention and protection
of their churches, schools, and civil marriages. Even the smallest day-­to-­day
dealings, like opening a small pharmacy, became problematic for Protes-
tants who refused to swear a Catholic oath. Archbishop Monzón was hostile
to their appeals; the prac­ti­tion­ers amounted to “diverse and contrary sects,”
he replied scornfully.144 Only their central importance to the Puerto Plata
merchant community, long roots in other northern towns, and the threat
of international incident with the British unevenly protected them. Samaná
officials ­were acidly critical of the Catholic priests who served the area; they
also demanded more funds.145
Invigorated Catholic orthodoxies ­were widely unpopular. Santana himself
opposed inquiry into masonry in the territory, for example.146 Some of the
territory’s most prominent men w ­ ere masons; they too faced censure from
the pulpit. Authorities even forced some to hand over secret documents
to church authorities.147 Parishioners of local Catholic churches resented
new fines. Marriage in the church, which had been at once fairly uncom-
mon and ­free, was now an expectation and cost an onerous 250 pesetas.148
In one instance, a local Neiba official attempted to intervene on the part
of the area residents, arguing that infractions like child nudity ­were inno-
cent. The incoming cleric’s repression had left ­children “marooned in their
­house,” the sympathetic writer urged, and he testily pointed to the priest’s
own shirking of his duties.149 Even the regional authority, Eusebio Puello,
concurred. The commanding clergyman was absolutely curt and unsympa-
thetic in response. “Your protests are useless and in vain, ­because I ­will still
correct the scandalous be­hav­ior of nudity and common-­law marriage, not
just in the church, but in the street, plazas and montes. . . . ​It is diabolical,”
he replied.150 Meanwhile, the archbishop muted complaints about priestly
abuses, like Bonao’s drunken cleric, who had wandered the streets, naked.151
The mea­sures divided local religious authorities. While some prob­ably
­adopted the hardline stance of the incoming archbishop, other town clergy,

134 | Chapter 4
even ­those who had initially supported Spain’s arrival, resented their new-
found role as tax collector for vari­ous sacraments.152 Spanish authorities la-
mented the loss of their “impor­tant support,” and retrospective accounts
point centrally to the harsh actions of the archbishop as a source of discon-
tent.153 A few Dominican-­born priests vocally opposed annexation from the
outset, and the most prominent faced unwanted repression and deporta-
tion. ­Father Fernando Antonio Meriño, a longtime opponent to Santana and
interim ecclesiastical governor, was an immediate opponent. He attacked
the proposition at an in­de­pen­dence day Mass in February 1861, even before
Spanish arrival, and refused to take a loyalty oath to the queen or to add a
prayer for the life and health of the kings at the end of Mass. His open dis-
sent earned him immediate censure and expulsion by mid-­June 1862; subse-
quently, he spent time in Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Spain lobbying against
annexation. In frustration, he wrote in his diary, “Damn the Spanish Govern-
ment, may the Devil take them!”154
­Women confronted all manner of new mea­sures, civil and religious. It
is likely that their low-­capital ventures—­fruits, vegetables, alcohol, and so
on—­fi­nally gained official exemption from licenses with the code reforms of
1863. Other ordinances w ­ ere not as easy to elude. Spanish zeal for reformed
Catholic marriage was “double-­edged empathy,” as administrators sought
to instill a sense of “shame” and gender differences through marriage and
restricted ideals of female propriety.155 In towns and rural areas through-
out the republic, most w ­ omen lived informally with their partners, a posi-
tion known locally as mancebinas. Many poorer town ­couples had their own
small-­scale commercial enterprise, but usually both partners w ­ ere very cash
poor. One Neiba ­couple, in which the man sold small amounts of tobacco
(among other endeavors) and his partner sold dif­fer­ent kinds of liquor (or
sometimes traded it in kind), was perhaps typical.156 Spanish priests of vary-
ing disposition arrived in towns across the territory. Few archival traces re-
flect how ­women might have received and responded to their strictures. The
licensing of midwifery—at a prohibitive twenty pesos—­must have been an
obstacle that many tried to avoid, for example.157 Other decrees, like that re-
quiring clothing for young ­children, might have been simply troublesome,
frustrating, and impossible.
The logistical demands of thousands of new residents in the capital, how-
ever, presented opportunities that a number of ­women eagerly took. Very
few wealthy families had domestic servants in the capital; it was “notorious,
domestics are im­mensely difficult to find and charge very high day rates,”
authorities observed. Also, w ­ ater was hard to come by. The town council

The Haitians or the Whites? | 135

recommended that cooks, washerwomen, and ironers not have to seek a li-
cense.158 Although some of the highest-­ranking officers brought with them
domestics from Cuba and Puerto Rico—as the enslaved maid scandals
proved early in the occupation—­most arriving Spanish personnel prob­
ably entrusted their laundry to enterprising local w ­ omen. The occupation
sanctioned an impor­tant public presence and source of income for urban
­women, and the multiple-­day turnover demanded considerable interac-
tion with their clients in towns and army outposts.159 Port cities like Puerto
Plata attracted ­women mi­grants from other islands, like the young Josepha
Debra, from Turks and Caicos, who moved to Puerto Plata when she was
very young and “perfectly understood Spanish.”160 She and other w ­ omen,
usually unmarried, moved again from Puerto Plata down to the capital as
washerwomen and sweets sellers, prob­ably to capitalize on the troop and
governmental concentration t­ here. Often they moved in with other unmarried
­women of greater means, including Spanish residents of the capital. Some
struck up relationships with the soldiers that w
­ ere subject to considerable
scrutiny ­after fighting began.161

Call on Me, I’m No Coward!

Even for t­hose citizens who did not find themselves on the wrong side of
any gaming law, commercial code, or sacrament, the presence of Spanish
troops marked a novel quotidian real­ity. In smaller towns, their profile was
likely minimal. However, as the troops settled into larger towns across
Santo Domingo, their comportment proved to be volatile. General and ­later
governor of Santo Domingo José de la Gándara praised the “admirable
instinct . . . ​and inalterable discipline” of the Spanish troops for avoiding
incidents as they disembarked, even as he cryptically alluded to “irregu-
larities” in how they first treated Santana.162 Rank-­and-­file soldiers and
officers alike met taxing conditions—­difficult travel, poor housing, make-
shift hospitals—­and many of the soldiers w ­ ere very young, just eigh­teen or
nineteen years old, unused to their new assignment.163 Officers and rank-
ing soldiers alike w ­ ere frustrated that their transfer to Santo Domingo had
restarted se­niority clocks for promotion; often, too, their abrupt transfer
meant that they had been separated from families they had already estab-
lished in Cuba or Puerto Rico. A new theater com­pany in the capital, whose
directors had been excited for a new public, closed when arriving officials
simply did not fill the seats as they had ­imagined.164
With its extremely sparse material culture, Santo Domingo was not
the most agreeable place for transfer. In their downtime, troops ­were often

136 | Chapter 4
bored. Higher-­ranking officers held social events like masked balls, os-
tensibly with well-­off Dominicans (or, at the very least, with Dominican
­women). “Given that in this town [Santiago] t­ here is absolutely nothing to
do, sometimes the officers got together to eat dinner or lunch [sometimes
with two Dominican pharmacists],” one officer testified during an inquiry
about socializing. The m ­ atter was resolved without any discipline.165 Spanish
rank and file and Dominican town residents clashed over the former’s bored,
and hostile, misconduct. Some incidents w ­ ere as innocent or thoughtless as
soldiers leaving open farm gates as they exercised, repeatedly allowing local
farm animals to escape.166 Infantrymen wandered to towns’ outskirts, often
for extraofficial reasons. In one criminal case, seven Spanish soldiers from
three dif­fer­ent regiments, apparently friends, ­were arrested on a variety of
charges: patrolling a ­house without ­orders to do so, having an unlicensed
firearm, and stealing coconuts and sugarcane. They ­were “skulking about,”
the official reported.167
An excess of enforced leisure and alcohol frequently bred conflict. In
Puerto Plata, a few drunken soldiers tried to crash a f­ amily baptism party in
the early morning of 18 August 1862, for example, demanding beer and say-
ing “lots of crazy stuff ” (muchos disparates), witnesses claimed. The h ­ ouse’s
owner informed them that the party had ended, but the soldiers proceeded
to trash the home, looking for its female residents. At some point, the
­women of the ­house did emerge and began throwing rocks at the intruders.
“I told them that they had no authority to enter . . . n ​ ot even my husband
did,” Juana Silberia testified. A soldier threatened her, telling her not to “get
involved in men’s affairs, and that if she ­didn’t be quiet he would break every­
thing in the ­house [and] kill her.” Bravely, Juana responded by pushing the
menacing soldier out of the h ­ ouse, but when the soldiers pried the door open
again, she fled to her ­sister’s home. A policeman arrived and began to beat
Juana’s husband, at which point her s­ ister María threw herself on him, rip-
ping his uniform in several places. With several rocks in her hand, she threat-
ened the officer, “Kill me or I’ll kill you!” It seems unlikely the w­ omen ever
received justice. One soldier freely admitted that the band of soldiers had
been partying—­three sergeants, three policemen, and two Dominican men
had been drinking, then six more had joined their group, he testified. More
tellingly, however, another soldier dismissively referred to the incident as a
“dispute with some morenos in the street,” and the case was never resolved.168
Sometimes conflicts caused a public spectacle, as when a low-­ranking
Dominican officer from the reserves got into a drunken fight with a Spanish
sergeant in Cotuy. P­ eople poured out of the town church into the street. “All

The Haitians or the Whites? | 137

the locals who ­were in ser­vice for Holy Friday became very upset [se alboro-
taron], and all the w ­ omen went r­ unning in the streets to their h­ ouses,” Span-
ish officials reported.169 In the southern town of Baní, a fight between “vari­ous
officers” of Battalion Vitoria and several local men—­“a wholly personal
­matter, without the smallest mention of politics,” one observer argued—­
was resolved with minor disciplinary mea­sures.170 Bored and prone to over-
react, soldiers at times became violent. A soldier roughly disciplined a local
child for fighting, bruising the child in the pro­cess; officials admonished
him not to repeat the incident.171 One soldier was accused of a very brutal
beating of an el­derly shoemaker ­after he refused the soldier a drink.172 Sol-
diers felt the division between Santana and Spanish officials acutely. One
Dominican lieutenant asked Santana, snidely, “How many Captain Generals
are ­there in the island?”173
Interpersonal relationships between the soldiers sometimes soured. A
fight during a card game won one Spanish soldier two months in prison.174
When a Spaniard got in a squabble over which of his fellow soldiers was to
give him a shave—he spoke heatedly to one, in whispers—­the resulting
melee caused the death of a bystander from a stray bullet. A military judge
sentenced the soldier to be shot.175 Military judges came to doubt Span-
ish accusations. One Spanish sergeant testified, for example, about how a
Dominican soldier, Manuel Martínez, had behaved flippantly in a church—­
dumping drinking ­water into the holy ­water basin and defiantly refusing to
remove the cup. The sergeant described how another Dominican volunteer
had joined Martínez and made physical threats against him, adding to the
insubordination. Based on evidence unclear in the testimony fragment,
however, the Spanish military commission was not convinced of the Span-
ish commander’s accusations. “The superior officer forgot his responsibility
not to abuse power . . . ​[The commission determines] that ­there was nei-
ther irreverence nor insubordination,” the report concluded.176
For the numerous Dominican men who found themselves expelled from
the military by declassification, the sight of Spanish troops must have been
even more difficult to bear. T ­ hose who w ­ ere disqualified from active ser­
vice in early fall 1861 received a small pension, one half of what active re-
serves earned. Hundreds of o ­ thers w
­ ere demoted, however, not just to the
Provincial Reserves (where “active” Dominicans served) but out of military
ser­vice entirely.177 They ­were forbidden from wearing military uniforms. For
soldiers used to the privileges of rank—­where pay had been inconsistent in
the years of the republic, title had compensated—­these expulsions threat-

138 | Chapter 4
ened their livelihood and dignity. One former general reported that he had
presented his papers directly to the Cuban governor Serrano, only to wait
eight agonizing months to hear of his declassification. It was “a ­great shame
for me,” he wrote, and he swore “that if the Spanish Government would call
me to ser­vice, I would not serve, ­because according to them I was not worthy
of attention, nor merit, nor appreciation for classification, then she could
not be worth serving.”178 Gratingly, too, favoritism reigned. Some former
soldiers ­were integrated, but mostly ­t hose who had direct connections
to Santana. Members of his immediate coterie received classification, some-
times ­after only a few years of ser­vice, and Santana was put in charge of the
troops arriving from Puerto Rico. Even t­ hose who had been classified into
the reserves felt the indignity of separation, however. In a distinct uniform,
they ­were clothed, literally, as second-­class soldier-­citizens. Observers com-
mented widely about the resentment the mea­sure caused. It was a blow to
the amor propio of the men, an anonymous report observed.179
Conflict erupted between active reservists and decommissioned men.
General Marcos Evangelista had been classified as passive—­certainly a tough
blow for a thirty-­eight-­year-­old, and a general at that—­and, indeed, the in-
sult was almost too much for him to take.180 When the local government of
Seybo called on all soldiers to report, he did so, ignoring that his passive sta-
tus disqualified him. Upon arriving in the town plaza, he was dismissed by
the military commander—­“T ­ here is just a lot of enmity between us,” Evan-
gelista insisted, alluding to prior disagreements—­and the general became
positively irate. “The authorities of Seybo are cowards, what­ever their status,
and muy habladores, too!” he reportedly said. “When ­things are bad, call on
me, ­because I’m no coward!” he allegedly yelled, drawing a machete. He re-
fused to leave the plaza. Waving the machete, he shouted, “No one come
close to me!” “My ­brother, drop it, let it go,” another Dominican officer
urged. Evangelista pushed him and raised his hands as if to strike. “I’m ­every
bit a man,” he insisted. “You think ­you’re the only one?” queried another on-
looker. Still enraged, Evangelista retreated, protesting that he was leaving of
his own accord, not ­because he had been ordered to do so. Santana and the
Spanish w ­ ere losing popularity anyway, he allegedly muttered. He originally
had been sentenced to deportation, but his sentence was commuted in the
amnesties granted by the queen that spring.181 Other declassified officers—­
Evangelista among them—­joined the armed opposition to the Spanish. At
least twenty-­seven ranking passive officers ­were suspected in Puerto Plata
disturbances in 1863, and some of the passive generals—­Jacinto de Lora,

The Haitians or the Whites? | 139

Gaspar Polanco, Pedro Florentino, and ­others—­became leaders in the Res-
toration forces, where they joined countless more who had been demoted
from the infantry and other ranks.182
Active Dominican officers received abuse as well. Santana himself,
General Juan Suero, and General Gregorio Lora w ­ ere all belittled by dif­fer­
ent individuals—in the presence of their subordinate troops—­for not being
white. One incident caused Suero, then governing Puerto Plata, to resign
his post, and the offending soldier was only minimally disciplined.183 Span-
ish generals ­were aware of the lack of fraternal sentiment, and they read-
ily admitted that rank-­and-­file Spanish soldiers “denigrated or refused the
com­pany of men of color.”184 One Spanish soldier—­a young man who had
served in the “African War” in Morocco—­loudly insulted Santana and other
Dominican authorities as he was expelled from a dance, protesting drunk-
enly, “Who has seen blacks govern whites?”185

Which Party Are You?

Spanish aggression ­toward Haiti reverberated everywhere. ­After the “indem-
nity” demands, Spanish authorities dropped the pretense of conciliation and
became aggressive about reclaiming central territories that had been settled
by Haitian residents since the last treaty, nearly ninety years earlier. The Spanish
warship Don Juan de Austria arrived at Port-­au-­Prince’s harbor in March 1862.
Haitian foreign minister Victorin Plésance was “disconcerted . . . ,​ and his
countenance revealed deep feeling for a moment; recomposed a bit he an-
swered me that as soon as the President and the rest of the Ministers arrived,
they would take up the ­matter and give me a response,” the Spanish consul
Mariano Álvarez reported, gleeful at the minister’s discomfort.186 Given that
­there had never been revisions of the 1777 treaty to reflect the shifting demo-
graphics in the communities of Las Caobas, Hinche, and San Miguel, “Spain
­will get what no other nation has been able to obtain from t­ hose blacks [ces-
sion of territory],” the consul gloated.187 The Spanish emissary’s invective
grew daily, and his viciousness harbored ambitious territorial resolve. Ac-
cording to him, the “country of barbarians” had won its in­de­pen­dence ille-
gitimately. “This is the right by which the white race can assert possession of
the west side of Hispaniola,” he exulted, “and with such pre­ce­dent, who can
dissent against the reclamation that I have just proposed?” In his strong-­arm
tactics, Álvarez was in close communication with the French consul but not
the British vice-­consul Byron, who had married a Haitian w ­ oman. “I imag-
ine he listens to t­ hose p
­ eople more than the nation he represents,” Álvarez
sniffed.188 His communiqués from Haiti w ­ ere so vitriolic that they often pre-

140 | Chapter 4
cluded any meaningful reporting at all. He openly and frequently fantasized
about conquering the ­whole island.189
Spain’s threatening imperial posturing came at a particularly critical time
for President Geffrard. Already saddled with the complicated po­liti­cal posi-
tion of official neutrality on annexation, the president faced numerous po­
liti­cal rivals. Some opponents agitated against proposed reforms to Article 7
of the Constitution; some decried conciliation with Spain (without present-
ing evident alternatives); o ­ thers represented ambitious military families
and more opportunistic po­liti­cal complaints. The president’s opponents
blocked each new mea­sure he sought to pass through Congress.190 A small
revolt broke out in Gonaïves, and the wealthy Salomon ­family rallied peasant
opposition in the south. Spanish diplomats ­were well aware that Spain was
tightening the legislative bind on Geffrard and his party. The opposition
also exploited the border reclamation conflict, Álvarez happily reported.191
Geffrard sought conciliation, pardoning a number of generals involved in
recent po­liti­cal intrigues, and even an individual suspected of collaboration
in the murder of his d ­ aughter, Cora Geffrard, four years prior.192 “Despite all
this, it seems like any day now the tranquility ­will be broken,” Álvarez con-
tinued, “the conditions for unrest exist and the enemies of the government
are numerous.”193 Recent unrest promised to repeat, and the president had
support only from his National Guard. “The enemies of the administration
are advising the p ­ eople to resist [both the Spanish presence and Geffrard],”
a Spanish general observed from Port-­au-­Prince.194 The president sent his
­family to France that spring, anticipating po­liti­cal turmoil.195
At once provocative and conciliatory, Spain’s actions spread fear for Hai-
ti’s territorial integrity and the prospect of reenslavement in Dominican soil.
Haitian observers speculated that Samaná Bay would help with illicit slave
trading to the other Spanish possessions.196 Confederate fighting reached
the island’s shores—­such as when the aptly named Confederate steamship
Havana docked outside of Port-­au-­Prince with seventeen Union prisoners.197
Debt anxiety and foreign aggression fed off each other. Troubling rumors
­were spreading: the first, that the Spanish government had ceded the ­whole
island to France in order to s­ ettle Haiti’s debt; the second, that Geffrard was
also in talks to cede the island to a foreign country. Santana blamed ­these
rumors on Geffrard’s enemies and the French consul in Santo Domingo,
M. Landais, “an open party loyalist.”198 “To maintain the favorable opinion
of the blacks of Haiti, and even also a part of ­those of this Province,” Santana
suggested that Spanish-­Dominican newspapers o ­ ught to address t­ hese con-
cerns directly. Spanish diplomats warned that the language used to discuss

The Haitians or the Whites? | 141

Haiti in La Razón should be “as moderate and prudent as pos­si­ble,” and avoid
accusing Geffrard of complicity. Port-­au-­Prince’s citizens w ­ ere interested
and troubled by Spanish coverage, and they ­were “noisily disturbed,” the same
diplomat advised.199 The Spanish governor was intransigent, however, and
did not recoil from making new threats. He wrote to Spain, asking for more
forces to defend the Cibao valley from its “600 legua frontier with this e­ nemy
race.”200
Rebellion continued to brew in the center of the island and in other
sites, and authorities could do very little. T ­ here w
­ ere hushed rumors that
opponents ­were pondering concessions to the United States for naval back-
ing, or that Dominican rebel agents sought a new alliance with the Haitian
state.201 Through the fall of 1861 and into the next year, disquiet in center-­
island areas continued. Captain Manuel Feliz (“Quirí”) and Lieutenant Man-
uel Feliz (“Cabulla”) ­were disturbing public order in the region, authorities
complained, perhaps responsible for the rumors that revolution was g ­ oing
to break out in Cibao, that the queen was seeking to jail Santana, and that
Báez would soon return.202 Authorities scrambled for more information on
­these men. Spies along the border predated annexation, and they remained
on the payroll as the new regime began.203 The data they managed to gather
­were minimal, however. Supposedly Quirí had a girlfriend or wife in a place
called Juan Herrera; his nearly eponymous fellow rebel had been involved
in skirmishes with the authorities near Neiba at least since June, but both
men continued to elude capture well into the fall.204 Intermittent shows of
“good faith” by the Haitian government that entailed expulsion of frontier
groups only served to contribute to chaos in the region, a Spanish general
asserted.205 The men regularly took refuge in Ouanaminthe, la Visite, and
other center-­island towns.206 It is “of utmost importance to be vigilant of
Hincha,” an 1862 report insisted, continuing, “Hincha is the place where all
the bad men of the east and the west of this island have gathered.”207
Even as Haitian authorities, ­under pressure, collaborated in the cap-
ture of suspected conspirators, anti-­Spanish alliances surfaced steadily.
In Jacmel, western authorities detained a small group of travelers who had
arrived from the interior of the island, claiming that the purpose of their
voyage was to sell wax and buy fabric. The accused came from all corners
of the eastern territory: Neiba, Santiago, Las Matas, and Higüey; they even
had in their com­pany a man from Puerto Rico. Authorities accused them of
meeting up with Domingo Ramírez and his forces—­rumored to be as many
as four thousand—of Dominican expatriates, recent rebels, and Haitians.
Their intent was revolutionary. One of the defendants, Pedro Curro of Neiba,

142 | Chapter 4
was allegedly seeking a literate man to write a proclamation of loyalty (to
Haiti) for another small town, Petritut. Curro may not have known how to
read or write passably enough to draft the document himself, but other wit-
nesses testified that he spoke capable French, had some sort of association
with power­ful Ramírez, and had coordinated the group’s travel to Jacmel.
Furthermore, other witnesses reported that he grilled a number of individu-
als whom he encountered: “Which party are you, Haitians or the whites?”
“That’s a strange question, you know I serve the Spanish,” one reportedly
answered, deflecting. “Haitian or Spanish?” another witness reported. Span-
ish authorities, unable to prove that the defendants ­were not in fact on a
commercial venture, jailed the men for months for unauthorized travel, but
party loyalties ­were deepening.208

The Haitians or the Whites? | 143

five

You Promised to Die of Hunger

RE S
­ IS ­TANCE, SLAVERY, AND ALL- O
­ UT WAR

Do you not hear the terrible stampede that shakes the earth?
—­manuel rodriguez objío, “War” (August 1863)

On 9 February 1863—­forty-­one years to the day after Haitian Unification

and emancipation began in the Dominican capital—­a group of day laborers,
farmers, and other residents from the outskirts of the center-­island town of
Neiba deci­ded to overthrow the Spanish administration. One of the ring-
leaders, Cayetano Velázquez, grew up in the capital during Unification, but he
moved to the interior some years ­later. To the ­others in the assembled group,
which came to be about thirty or forty p ­ eople, Velázquez and another man al-
legedly suggested that Haitian help would soon come, and that they “would
become Haitian” (se harían haitianos).1 Not every­one supported that par­tic­u­
lar proposal, arrestees ­later testified. Nevertheless, the group gathered with
a range of b ­ attle cries: “­Free Dominicans!” and even a “Long live Santana!”
­After paying ­house calls and amassing a paltry collection of machetes, the
group marched an hour or so into the town, shot off the cannon, took over the
jail from its four Dominican guards, and went ­after the military commander,
also Dominican, managing to take him captive. They tried to convince the
priest, a Spanish man from Tarragona, simply to leave town, but he refused.
­After just seven hours, the rebellion collapsed that same after­noon, over-
powered by the town’s own small outpost of reserve soldiers. One of t­ hese
soldiers testified that the ­whole disturbance had been “a drunk’s affair.”2
A l­ ittle ­later in February, however, the residents of two towns in the Monte
Cristi province ­rose up as well. T ­ hese rebellions ­were slightly larger. A
­ fter
overcoming the loyalist forces in Sabaneta—­really just a symbolic number
of troops—­about eight hundred area residents marched t­ oward Guayubín,
about thirty kilo­meters away. ­There was plenty of forethought to ­these
campaigns. More than twenty-­t wo hundred men arriving from Haiti joined
them: Haitian soldiers, area residents, and Dominican refugees. Together,
they or­ga­nized three informal regiments. The rebels successfully appropri-
ated a Spanish munitions stash in the second town.3 Other north-­central
towns witnessed short, nearly simultaneous local disturbances; guerrilla
fighting predominated. The fighting reached Santiago, which was a dif­f er­ent
campaign proposition entirely: a large Spanish and Dominican loyalist gar-
rison, nearly eight hundred men, guarded the city.4 Pitched hand-­to-­hand
combat began in the city at nightfall. Spanish troops and loyal Dominican
reservists, however, managed to crush Santiago’s fighting first. Next, troops
­were able to pacify the northwestern movement. Many fled into Haiti, but
no rebellions followed.5 As quickly as the February fighting began, it was
crushed again. Authorities warily pronounced victory. Late spring and summer
1863 ­were exceedingly tense.
By late summer 1863, fighting began again, however, and this time the
­whole landscape exploded. Center-­island towns ­were again the staging site
and one of the early hearts of mobilization. In Haitian Capotille, a group of gen-
erals and five hundred men issued an official statement, the “Cry of Capotillo,”
naming a president of a revolutionary provisional government that had yet to
exist. Even as Spanish authorities dispatched troops to chase them, however,
revolution took hold in the Cibao valley and the northwest.6 The fighting
spread everywhere, and for the next two years, the b ­ attles amounted to nearly
total social war. ­Later dubbed the “War of Restoration,” widespread guerrilla
activity took up more than three-­fifths of the entire territory.7 Weapons w ­ ere
in constant shortage. In most areas the fighting involved blocking roads and
access to rivers, avoiding open spaces, and even hand-­to-­hand combat.8 In
larger towns, the rebels devised trenches to face off with the large stand-
ing regiments. They went further, burning Santiago de los Caballeros and
Puerto Plata to the ground. The rebels regularly faced regiments of as many
as five thousand men, led by prominent Spanish and Dominican generals
alike.9 And yet, the fighting only spread. Families left their homes and re-
fused to return. The fighting, nearly general from its earliest days, sealed the
fate of annexation as early as summer 1863. It was a “simultaneous and total
uprising,” a general ­later wrote, noting, soon, “the vacuum was complete.”10
A tiny fraction of the fighters, t­ hose who w­ ere unlucky enough to get ar-
rested, left imperfect rec­ords of rebels’ heterogeneous complaints and aims.

You Promised to Die of Hunger | 145

­ nder duress, they told Spanish jailers and judges information they hoped
U
would be exculpatory, or simply as ­little as pos­si­ble. Some recounted stories
of poverty and frustration. “It seemed like the [Spanish] government had for-
gotten [habían botado] the town,” a frustrated soldier testified in one small
town, citing repeated requests for supplies and describing being nearly six
months in arrears on pay.11 Some wealthier, literate town citizens wrote
anonymous protest letters that ­were positively staid, focusing on po­liti­cal
appointments, salaries, and the like.12 The Provisional Government, as it
came into being in the midst of the fighting, made pronouncements that
­were overwhelmingly nationalist in grievance. The government represen-
tatives also spoke of daily indignities, however. “The customs of a ­people
­free for many years have been tactlessly v­ iolated,” their Proclamation of In­de­
pen­dence read. “Mockery, disdain, marked arrogance, unmerited and scan-
dalous persecution, and even execution are the final result.”13 Traveling rebels
proudly represented their region. “¡Viva el Cibao!” shouted one group, far
from home, as they surrounded pro-­Spanish reservists in an eastern b ­ attle.14
In the earliest fighting, it seems that residents had to rouse, even threaten,
prominent citizens to take up arms. They did so in Guayubín, before firing
cannon shots and proclaiming “¡Viva la república!”
Most salient of all to the bulk of the population, and what drove them
from their homes, was a fear that was more than a sum of any grievances: the
fear of enslavement. To the despair of Spanish authorities, “false ideas and
abundant rumors” of renewed chattel slavery emptied ­whole towns and rural
areas, well before fighting became widespread.15 As authorities tried to keep
residents calm in the intermittent early fighting, they soon discovered that
the slavery prediction was durable, electrifying, and everywhere throughout
the territory. The warnings ­were specific: fleeing Dominicans discussed ex-
plicit predictions of where boats might be docked, waiting to abscond with
­those captured by Spanish troops; they discussed who might be targeted and
where the unfortunate ones would be sent. Such rumors w ­ ere per­sis­tent and
prevalent, and they held tremendous weight in the desperate anticolonial
strug­gle. In their interpretation, they w ­ ere discussions of the probable,
the pos­si­ble, and the potentially disastrous. ­These debates rested, in the
words of Luise White, on “a store of historical allusions” about slavery in
Dominican soil—­and discussions of slavery in Haiti—­that gained rein-
vigorated urgency with the loss of Dominican control.16 In places like the
northern coast and elsewhere, accounts about slavery and postemanci-
pation restrictions reinforced the news that Dominicans received regularly.

146 | Chapter 5
Conflicts with the new administration itself made the slavery discussions
more acute. As the fighting began, the hostility of the Spanish troops in
­battle electrified the debates, which spread everywhere.
In their practical expression, what the Spanish called slavery “rumors”
­were functionally the scaffolds, and justification, of a plan to revolt. “As [in]
the preamble of any rural uprising, ­there was a true ‘­silent war’ ” that pre-
ceded the Dominican rebellion, one historian observes, an “unease” that
continued to grow.17 In the countryside, Dominicans prob­ably held gatherings
and discussions about the perils and promises of re­sis­t ance for weeks, even
months. Groups may have gathered to recruit, to plan, even to train. F­ ree
spaces abounded, if weapons did not. Outside of Neiba, the conspirators
had gathered at the wake of a young child. Weddings, funerals, saints’ days,
major farm ­labors, even the pursuit of a criminal: all of ­these ­were collec-
tive activities.18 The lack of weapons alone required a pooling of resources.
In this collective mobilization, an intense field of speculative debate arose
in which group dynamics and trust ­were expected and paramount.19 In
occupied towns, tensions w ­ ere high. Even a cautious pro-­Spanish reply to
watchmen on the street could cost a ner­vous pedestrian an arm, one un-
lucky Puerto Plata man learned.20 With incredible speed, fighting enveloped
entire communities and rural landscapes. It was relentless and urgent not
only ­because of the stakes but ­because t­ hose fighting knew they could not
count on the formal army to help them. The rebels committed arson, de-
stroyed rec­ords, scavenged munitions, moved on, and remained fugitives.
They ­were prepared for total war.
As Aisha Finch establishes in rural antislavery insurgencies in Cuba,
­women “shared and helped or­ga­nize larger critiques” of colonial abuses, they
had a direct, personal relationship with the targets and geographies of re­
sis­tance, and their lives w ­ ere also directly at stake.21 In the Dominican con-
text, outside of plantation surveillance, loyalist generals tried to appeal to
Dominican men that w ­ omen and ­children swept up in the uproar w ­ ere ex-
periencing ­great hardship. They need not have bothered, ­because ­women
committed to the mobilizations in­de­pen­dently. During the fighting, many
rural w­ omen continued to manage homestead agriculture; t­ hese ­labors rep-
resented continuity from peacetime practices but u ­ nder circumstances for
provision that w ­ ere much more desperate. In b ­ attle-­torn areas near towns,
some left to forts, but even ­those who remained ­behind ­were involved in the
fast-­moving developments of guerrilla confrontation. As participant wit-
nesses to an itinerant strug­gle, ­these same rural w ­ omen and town dwellers

You Promised to Die of Hunger | 147

created the neural pathways of revolt. Their information sent armed fight-
ers from town to town, warned of loyalist troop movement, and speculated
on the prospects, and consequences, of rebel fighting. As Stephanie Camp
notes, again in a plantation context, ­women’s in situ collaboration, and
small flights, facilitated male mobility and vital information networks in the
face of vio­lence and serious provision shortages.22 That is not to say that
the ­women got equal recognition, even in the midst of their strug­gles. As in
other contexts, discourses of armed heroism, and citizenship in the nation
they contested, ­were the realm of male entitlement.23
At the highest levels of administration, authorities tried to dissuade and
defuse the opposition movement. Although they privately discussed the re-
bellion as a race war, in public addresses, authorities meticulously kept to fra-
ternal language. The arriving captain general, Felipe Rivero, made all outward
signs of conciliation, firing a number of offending civil ser­vice figures, offer-
ing amnesty, and trying to strike an affable tone in his public correspondence.
Santana returned to the armed forces when fighting began, and a number
of prominent Dominican generals, like General Juan Suero, joined him. Al-
though Suero had resigned ­after conflicts that included a racist insult, when
the fighting resumed in the spring of 1863, he returned to loyalist lines.24
No conciliatory discourse could possibly diminish the dynamics of war,
however, as military tribunals tried the rebels, sent prisoners in chains to
the capital, and on ships to Havana and other sites. Repeatedly, Spanish sol-
diers threatened and insulted the citizens they encountered. “On occasion
some white man would tell a black that if he ­were in Cuba or Puerto Rico,
he would be a slave and would be sold for a certain price,” a general ­later re-
called, dispassionately.25 Soldiers dropped all mask of civility, and they told
anyone who would listen that the government was ­going to send black Do-
minicans to work on coffee and sugar plantations.26 E ­ very Dominican in the
capital and other towns knew that Madrid papers ­were printing ­bitter, racist
missives from administrators writing home.27 Despite Spanish authorities’
frequent dissimulation, rebels w ­ ere clearly mindful of the dynamics at hand.
One popu­lar song exulted:

The whites have already left

from Yamasá
What a beating they got!28

Beginning in late summer 1863, the fighting never stopped. A rebel passport
was just as succinct: “The Dominican Republic still lives—­liberty or death—­
and a war of extermination to all Spaniards and their blood.”29

148 | Chapter 5
Never More Slavery!
The first rebellion explic­itly over the threat of reenslavement took place deep
in the Cibao valley, only weeks a­ fter annexation began. Col­o­nel José Con-
treras rallied with him a group of men, mostly day laborers, from the town
of Moca. Contreras and his allies warned of reenslavement, not of a meta­
phorical nation, but of friends and neighbors. Spanish observers described
the incident as “a mutiny of morenos.” “If Spanish troops ­were to withdraw,
the pillage and assassination of whites would begin immediately,” one con-
cluded.30 A firing squad shot Contreras and three o ­ thers on 19 May, the same
day the annexation was officially recognized by the queen. On several oc-
casions in ­later weeks, La Razón vehemently reminded its readers “never
more slavery” while repeating the Spanish promises of annexation, pro-
tection, and prosperity.31 All the talk that first summer was on the “Haitian”
mobilization in the center of the island, which had taken place almost si­
mul­ta­neously with Contreras’ attempted revolt. A Dominican general, loyal
to the Spanish, assured the Crown that the fears of Contreras and his allies
­were “completely isolated” and wrote, “The state of our troops could not be
more satisfactory, and their comportment is unbeatable.”32 “Dominicanos-­
Españoles” should be “alert to the deceitful suggestions of treason, and trust
in your authorities,” a Dominican official ­chided.33
Center-­island residents’ reluctance to return to their homes ­after Sánchez’s
and Cabral’s simultaneous mobilization that summer demonstrates how
widespread ­these assumptions about slavery ­were, however, even as annexa-
tion was only a few weeks old. ­Those families uprooted from border towns in
the first rebellions of 1861 w
­ ere terrified to return from Haiti, “continually given
false news by the enemies . . . a​ bout the poor treatment that t­ hose of their class
­were being given in this territory,” an official argued.34 Hundreds of ­people re-
mained across the border, anxious about returning, even a­ fter an amnesty was
announced. Even a­ fter the administration offered small amounts of money,
appropriated from the indemnity that officials had demanded from Geffrard,
residents ­were only slowly returning.35 Whole families had fled to Haiti and
endured months of dislocation.36 They continued to trickle in through early
spring 1862, nearly one year a­ fter the short disturbances.37 Some parts of the
border w ­ ere quite desolate. “­There are barely any resources for housing and
subsistence [near Las Matas]; the towns are in a calamitous state,” a Spanish
official reported.38 A large handful of men allegedly involved in the 1861 Moca
rebellion still languished in the poorly supplied jails a full year ­later; commis-
sioners advised that they should be tried or released in the short term.39

You Promised to Die of Hunger | 149

 Slavery discussions continued unabated throughout 1862. A slow boil of
unease simmered on the island. As soon as Santiago’s military governor had
left town, “revolutionary enemies of Spain” immediately tried to sway the
morale of the city’s residents, “especially the s­ imple country ­people,” the
governor complained.40 He described the provocation: someone, or a group
of ­people, pointed out that the reserves ­were not being paid and claimed
that high-­ranking officials had been arrested in the capital. They ­were telling
­people, he alleged, of new policies of “all sorts of sacrifices” and “the absurd
ideas of slavery.”41 The general mood in the Cibao is “alarming and hostile
to the highest degree,” the governor reported in December.42 He blamed
“revolutionary enemies” for the rumors that disturbed public order. Warn-
ings of slavery and other abuses proliferated. The four thousand petitioners
from Jamaica who opposed annexation—­explic­itly ­because they predicted
Spain would bring slavery back to Dominican territory—­fell s­ ilent, but re-
gional eyes w ­ ere still trained on the island.43 Journalists in Port-­au-­Prince
compiled and republished accounts of Confederate ships as they stopped
at nearby islands; the Confederate Alabama regularly docked at Dominican
ports.44 Geffrard’s opponents stoked anxiety, suggesting that Spain might
offer Haiti to France, and that slavery would take root all over the island.45
­People discussed ­whether Spain would demand disarmament so that black
Dominicans could be enslaved.46 In Puerto Plata, slavery rumors had cir-
culated for several years. As months of Spanish occupation passed, public
signs and graffiti escalated rampant discussions about slavery and direct
threats of vio­lence. Fully three months before fighting began in other towns
of the north, one prisoner warned his jailers that “this February, the streets
­will run with Spanish blood.”47 A massive illegal slaving vessel, which almost
certainly passed the northern Hispaniola coast, made headlines in Havana
that same month.48 In the capital, authorities continued to check passports
of ­women arriving as domestics, vigilant of slavemasters’ attempted smug-
gling practices.49
­After the February 1863 uprisings, Rivero suspended civil law and pro-
claimed the entire island in a state of siege, and a long spring of repression
began. In the Cibao, no gatherings larger than three ­people ­were permitted
­after dusk, on the penalty of being shot.50 The governor created military tri-
bunals to adjudicate the fate of alleged conspirators.51 As the commissions
handed out sentences—­hefty jail time and the death penalty—­some offi-
cials felt uneasy. For one, some of the alleged participants w ­ ere being con-
demned in absentia. “It is impossible to defend men I h ­ aven’t even met,” the
Spanish defensor, a lieutenant, noted with concern.52 Sabaneta was “new and

150 | Chapter 5
unenlightened [sin luces] . . . ​only recently introduced to the law,” another
defender argued; he insisted that even the town council members ­were “rus-
tic and s­ imple laborers” with no formal education.53 In the capital of the
Cibao, Santiago, officials w ­ ere in a less lenient mood. Members of the city
council itself had clearly been involved in the conspiracy, and authorities ar-
rested a number of them as they tried to board ships in Puerto Plata. Military
officials decreed that active members of the Reserve Forces caught with sus-
pected rebel conspirators would be shot.54 A firing squad shot five Domini-
can men at seven in the morning on 26 April, “in perfect order . . . ​despite
the large crowd of both sexes who had gathered to witness the execution,”
an authority grimly noted.55 Authorities executed two more reservists the
following week. Martial law, instead of restoring order, caused panic; Cibao
residents who had returned to their h ­ ouses ­were so alarmed that they fled
again. “The towns are practically deserted,” Governor Rivero admitted.56
Spanish administrators did not raise the specter of race-­based conflict
openly; they merely called for all Dominicans to remain calm and wrote
dismissively of popu­lar fears. Authorities argued that the February 1863
­battles w
­ ere of ­little importance, and that the country was on a “progressive
march.”57 Privately, however, Spanish observers perceived the conflict as a
race war. In court cases that summer, a Spaniard claimed that among the
“acrimonious enemies” of Spain w ­ ere implacable race enemies. A certain
Santiago “el Francés” reportedly received a promotion in the rebel ranks
for “having killed many whites,” the witness insisted.58 In the Cibao val-
ley, “prominent citizens” resisted the incoming rebels, Spanish authorities
claimed, and they w ­ ere violently assaulted, burned, targeted, and killed. “It
is supposed that the current rebellion is a race one, since the rebels who
have been seen are black, and t­ hose against whom the excesses have been
committed are whites, counting among ­those victims some whites: but the
lack of details on the m ­ atter impede me from confirming this,” their report
speculated.59 Governor Rivero pleaded for more troops. He also asked for a
new bud­get for secret police, but funds from Havana arrived very slowly.
The slavery rumors gained further strength and specificity that spring.
Many of Santiago’s citizens fled to the countryside, where they remained for
weeks, ­until a decree offered amnesty. In one specific incantation, rebels
told each other that the Spanish were first slitting the throats of Domini-
can men and then capturing Dominican women and children, selling them
into slavery. Nearly three hundred ­people hid from authorities on the bor-
der. Rejected from asylum in Haiti, they had built a makeshift fort out of cut
wood, ready to defend themselves to the last. Luckily, the Spanish officers

You Promised to Die of Hunger | 151

took note that many of the families ­were unarmed and dispersed the group
instead by diplomatic means. “El­derly ­people, ­women, and c­ hildren, truly a
disconsolate portrait,” an official reported of the return march, appalled.60
The Dominican loyalist general in Santiago, José Hungria, sent an envoy to
talk specifically with the prominent black landowners of the northwest, the
Fermin ­brothers, Furey Fondreu, and a handful of ­others. Using them, he
hoped to convince rural Dominicans not to fear reenslavement.61 Another
Dominican leader urged Santiagueros “of all colors and conditions” to obey
Spain. “Let us reject such vile rabble [canalla] and group together, blacks and
whites, in the shadow of Law . . . a​ nd have some patience,” he insisted.62
June edicts repeated slavery’s total abolition. Hungria was satisfied with the
pacification.
Meanwhile, Santiago’s military tribunals of spring 1863 created greater
tensions in the city. Authorities insisted on a profound racial taxonomy. They
grilled witnesses about the “condition, class, and color of the insurrectionists”
and sometimes borrowed terms (like criollo) that made ­little logical sense in
the Dominican context. The form of the t­ rials produced another very specific
stratification; as a m
­ atter of practice, Spanish officers and wealthy merchants
testified first, then any Dominican reserve soldiers, then common Domini-
can men, and fi­nally, any ­women. In the Santiago ­trials, the most prominent
witnesses against the rebels w ­ ere prominent Dominicans. Some, like the
Grullón f­ amily, w­ ere wealthy merchants. O ­ thers, like Pedro Francisco Bidó,
­were part of the Spanish government itself.63 Often Spanish authorities re-
corded reservist soldiers within proceedings as “laborers,” suggesting that
the latter category was a blanket categorization for many Dominican men,
whose “condition” (as f­ ree men), in the scribes’ view, also merited constant
notice.64 Following this ontology, Spanish witnesses and wealthy Domini-
can merchants encouraged dichotomous and color-­specific interpretations
of the participants. They ­were “almost all day laborers from the countryside,
blacks, with the exception of a few dark mulatos,” one such observer testi-
fied.65 Spanish authorities diminutively referred to one witness, Dionisio “el
Inglés”—­prob­ably a ­free man of color from one of the British islands—as
“morenito.”66 When a white man stood accused of joining the rebels, the
Spanish officer who reported the incident expressed doubt at his origin. “We
have caught a white man, who says he was born h ­ ere,” the officer reported.67
As the ­trials concluded, a royal order granting sweeping amnesty reached
the Cibao.68 The captain general dissolved the military commission of San-
tiago and declared the state of siege lifted. He promised to be “humane but

152 | Chapter 5
upright . . . ​judge me yourself,” he urged. General clemency, he warned,
could be offered only once.69
At the same time that t­ hese ­trials ended in partial conciliation, racist vio­
lence escalated in Santiago at the hands of Spanish authorities. Alexander
Merriman, a black British subject and resident of Santiago, met the brunt
of racist frustration at the hands of Spanish soldiers. Municipal authorities
summoned him over a minor m ­ atter, but, as they notified him on a Sunday,
he did not go. Subsequently, he lodged a complaint with authorities that the
police ­were threatening him. The authorities’ response proved profoundly
hostile. They told him, “The police have a right to act as they please,” and
one officer proceeded to beat Merriman with the flat side of a sword on a
public street, drag him, prone, to jail, and throw him into a cell, where he
continued abusing him. The mayor himself threatened to order the police to
“cut him to pieces and kill him, as it was his wish to finish with all the negroes,”
a distraught and injured Merriman reported. Nor did officials re­spect his
claim to protection as a British citizen; the jailer persisted in national and
racial slurs, stuck him in stocks, and continued to beat him severely with
a stick as he was bound. Afterwards jail staff locked him in a windowless
cell, even as Merriman was bleeding profusely. Only hours l­ ater, seeing how
much blood he was losing, did the jailer send Merriman to the hospital, then
in a critical state. His ­family brought him every­thing, as the jailers did not
even supply him with ­water. Weeks passed, and officials filed no charges.
British ambassador Hood quickly found himself frustrated at the efforts of
local authorities to obstruct inquiry into the incident. More than a month
passed—­Hood sent the vice-­consul from Puerto Plata to Santiago to inves-
tigate the m­ atter himself—­before Spanish authorities opened an inquiry.
Merriman barely survived.70
Confidentially, Governor Rivero expressed concern for the long-­term
stability of the colony and asked for a massive increase in forces and fund-
ing. He called for “a very large army, capable of occupying even insignificant
sites” in order to “suffocate” re­sis­tance on difficult terrain. At a minimum,
a heavy presence on the frontier, improved troop transport by w ­ ater, and
at least six infantry divisions ­were of utmost necessity. Two vessels, real
71

steamships, ­were needed, he explained, to replace the small frigates cur-

rently fulfilling the postal tasks, most of which could not even dock sat-
isfactorily at Dominican ports, much less quickly reach Cuba and Puerto
Rico. Chronic supply and trea­sury shortages suddenly seemed more ur-
gent. Funds ­were so short that the municipal government of Puerto Plata

You Promised to Die of Hunger | 153

used 760 pesos of private money and borrowed 4,000 more for expenses.72
The reserves w ­ ere ­behind in their pay, and public works—­“which should be
what drives agriculture and commerce in the territory”—­were in a “laugh-
able state; they have not even been begun yet,” the governor admitted.73 The
colony’s needs so greatly outpaced funding and supplies that he found him-
self pressed to send a special envoy to Spain.74 It was impossible “to sustain
the interests of national decorum . . . a​ nd of the Queen” without addressing
money prob­lems, especially given Cuba’s slow remission of funds, he main-
tained. Furthermore, many local officials ­were not of the “necessary apti-
tude,” he argued grimly, although he conceded that replacing them would
cause alarm. While totally decommissioning them would be impolitic, pay-
ing them a similar “passive” salary, giving them “some special commission
of ­little importance,” or pairing each with an officer of the army might pro-
vide a temporary solution, he mused. And the priests ­were ­either “totally
uneducated . . . ​or not faithful to the Spanish cause.”75 More land and navy
forces ­were an “absolute necessity,” he repeated fi­nally.76
A chaotic and volatile scene brewed in the center of the island as rebel
leaders, refugee families, residents, and outlaws mingled in the frontier re-
gions and northern Haitian towns. Despite the superficial peace and general
amnesty, many did not return to their homes as the authorities intended.77
In fact, families continued to flee to the countryside, frustrating officials
who believed that e­ nemy rumors w ­ ere more likely to reach gentes medrosas
(fearful ­people) outside of urban centers. “I ordered the police to stop the
emigration as much as pos­si­ble without alarming p ­ eople and to spread news
about the rebels, ­whether or not it was true, that w ­ ill put a stop to the non-
sense stories [paparruchas] that they tirelessly sow,” one official attested.78
A number of “the guiltiest and the most compromised” stayed around the
center-­island region, “uselessly pursued” by the Spanish troops, another
general lamented.79 Some of t­hose freed from jail in the February distur-
bances in Santiago w ­ ere reported to be robbing residents that spring—­
committing “all sorts of robberies, from jewelry to ­cattle”—­and at least one
murder.80 The criminals themselves encouraged the families to remain in
the highlands, “out of the fear that they w ­ ill be persecuted and jailed,” the
governor lamented.81
Santiago authorities, frustrated, dispatched a group of sixty the next
month to disperse or capture t­ hese alleged criminals, as well as to patrol the
province for “bums, drunks, scandalous ­women, pickpockets,” and other
undesirable individuals.82 Haitian officers at Fort Liberté promised coopera-

154 | Chapter 5
tion. This banditry was the “true source of alarm” in the region, authorities
concluded, although they si­mul­ta­neously acknowledged that area residents
­were sheltering some of the suspects. Rebel leaders, meanwhile, had gone
farther than many of the families likely did, spending months of hiding in
Cap-­Haïtien and other Haitian towns, where military officers offered them
supplies, and at least one officer accompanied them to start the fighting
again.83 Chasing them, without any specific leads, the Spanish governor
resolved to station troops at the northern border and in Cap-­Haïtien.84 Still,
conditions ­were so unpredictable along the north-­coast border that subse-
quent reports arrived via Puerto Plata and only t­ here, despite Monte Cristi’s
more central location.85 Two power­ful officers, Buceta and Hungria, traversed
the north of the island, leaving troops in Dajabón. Aided by collaborating
Haitian authorities, they speculated about the whereabouts of Gregorio Lu-
perón and other rebels. North-­coast towns grew hostile; unnamed individu-
als ambushed a man named Jeronime, who had been serving as a translator
for the visiting Spanish envoy, and shot him in his home.86 By any index,
revolutionary energy was intensifying.

They ­Will Brand Us with an Iron!

When fighting fi­nally exploded again in August 1863, the w ­ hole northwest
was already alight with insurrection rumors. The Cibao governor knew of
the Grito de Capotillo weeks before it happened, and he described, prob­ably
accurately, that a thousand Haitian guns w ­ ere distributed among residents
in the northwest in preparation. Area residents apparently hoped for even
87

more help. As one official reported, “Around h ­ ere the very hot gossip . . . ​that
is agitating the families living ­here . . . ​is that on Monday, a fleet of twelve
American steamships carry­ing war supplies and American and Haitian
troops ­will arrive. Your Excellency: every­one says that this information has
come from reliable sources, via letters from Haitian residents [of Monte
Cristi].”88
As the fighting started, Governor Rivero declared a state of siege again,
Puerto Rican authorities quickly sent another battalion of troops, and the
steamship Lealtad mounted a partial naval blockade of Cap-­Haïtien. However,
a number of northern towns w ­ ere quickly enveloped. Guayubín burned this
time, causing the brutal death of vari­ous townspeople. E ­ very day the num-
ber of rebels in the hills grew, and the fighting again reached Santiago.
On 6 September 1863, the rebels set the richest town in the entire territory
ablaze. A terrible fire raged through the streets. The Spanish troops began

You Promised to Die of Hunger | 155

a rapid retreat ­toward Puerto Plata. An observer of the blaze in Santiago
wrote, astounded, “By nightfall, ­there was already nothing left but rubble
and ashes.”89
At last, Puerto Plata exploded into fighting. Facing five hundred Span-
ish troops and more reserves, and more arrived to the fort from Santiago,
town residents, despite their anticolonial commitments and alarm over
slavery, had been slow to erupt. Officials knew almost a week in advance
of the impending disorder, and a small volunteer militia of town residents,
foreigners, resident Spanish merchants, and Dominicans added to the
standing forces.90 Known troublemakers had been arrested, although one of
them, Gregorio Luperón, managed to make a dramatic jail break. The rebels
fought with no uniforms, some with no shoes, using weapons stolen from
the Spanish or ferried across the border from Haiti. They sal­vaged a cannon
by diving in a nearby shipwreck.91 The rebels raided government buildings,
stole most of the letters and documents therein, and trashed the remaining
offices. Hundreds and hundreds took up arms as the Dominican flag was
raised over the governor’s residence.92 ­After the arrival of reinforcements
from Santiago de Cuba and Puerto Rico, and ­after two days of heavy fight-
ing, Spanish forces arrested dozens. Dominican general José Hungria him-
self oversaw the destruction of rebel trenches in a part of the town called
Cafemba. He had been dispatched by a high-­ranking Spanish general, with
the admonition that residents of the town ­were the “most insolent and ­those
who think they are invincible.”93
Describing why they fought, one Puerto Plata rebel spoke of the fear that
the Spanish intended to “brand them with an iron, to enslave them and
shackle them with iron collars that restricted their head movement, to which
a light would be attached to undertake their ­labors.”94 In light of the collars
imposed on men and ­women laboring in work­house gangs in Jamaica, ­these
explicit details proved well-­founded.95 The mayor of Puerto Plata called on
the help of the Alcalde Pedáneo and “all honorable ­people” to counteract the
slavery propaganda. “The malcontents . . . ​are just enriching themselves
from the disorder as the country becomes poorer and destroys itself,” he
pleaded.96 Spanish authorities worried that “the tall tales would excite their
spirits and make Dominicans fight to the death.”97 Alarming rumors in the
surrounding countryside of Puerto Plata reported that the Spanish ­were kill-
ing every­one and burning every­thing in their path. The families of the town
­were fleeing not only to the countryside but to nearby islands as a result, the
mayor reported.98 On 4 October, Puerto Plata burned as Santiago had done.
For three days, the fire raged, burning twelve hundred h­ ouses to the ground.

156 | Chapter 5
Homeless families scattered to the countryside or to the fort, held by the
Spanish.99 Spanish officers wrote in awe of the rebels’ commitment.100
Townspeople joined the roving small guerrilla bands that traveled from
town to town, disrupting Spanish administration where they could. It was
often ­women who spread the news of coming insurrection; they traveled
from h ­ ouse to ­house and on the roads at the edge of towns, calling on their
neighbors to flee to the countryside, often just hours before the fighting
began. Likewise, w ­ omen spread other information that one side or the
other had already won, and when it was safe to return. Still ­others warned
­those fleeing along one route to take another, as t­ here ­were Spanish soldiers
poised to ambush. Sometimes individuals ignored these warnings (and
­were subsequently apprehended).101 ­Those groups on the move also relied
on their knowledge of the surrounding countryside for tactical advantage,
often heading off the Spanish at rivers where they might seek to ­water their
­horses. Reported a Spanish official with frustration, “The movement counts
on leaders who know the terrain perfectly. And in such a mountainous coun-
try, too, one can only conclude that the immediate presence of a much larger
number of troops can paralyze the pro­gress of the revolution.“102 With lim-
ited evidence, it seems like ­these slavery warnings might sometimes have
traveled as documents with the rebels from place to place. Cayetano Ve-
lázquez, the leader in the first, tiny Neiba uprising, was the only one in the
group of townspeople who knew how to read.103
Beyond slavery warning letters, documents threatened and intimidated in
other ways. When rebels arrived in towns, their first target was often the mu-
nicipal building, where they would destroy Spanish rec­ords, and sometimes
set the building alight. This action was a symbolic and concrete mea­sure to
destroy colonial authority, leaving officials scrambling to reestablish criminal
cases and other paperwork.104 “Given that the fire in Santiago has reduced
it completely to ashes, it is presumable that the criminal cases, papers, and
other documents of the cir­cuit court have been destroyed,” officials noted.105
In Puerto Plata, rebels did the same, annihilating not only the files but even
the furniture of the governor’s offices and the town council.106 So well known
was this tactic of archive destruction that the queen issued a royal order com-
manding their reestablishment in reconquered municipalities in January
1864.107 Other rebel tactics had more symbolic significance; someone killed
the much-­hated Brigadier Buceta’s ­horse, for example.108 Often, someone
lowered the Spanish flag and cut it to pieces. In Guayubín, rebels confis-
cated an image of the Virgin Mary from the town church and paraded it about,
“with the fanatic idea it might help them,” the Spanish witnesses critically

You Promised to Die of Hunger | 157

observed.109 In the early 1863 Santiago uprising, too, someone took a Virgin
of the Rosary and carried it through the streets.110
Within two months rebellion spread well to the east. In Hato Mayor,
rebels proclaimed the restoration of the Dominican Republic at four in the
morning on 2 October, without so much as a drop of blood spilled. Residents
­were convinced that the Spanish had chains and stocks sitting off the coast
at the ready, and that defeat might mean the Spanish would enslave them
for life.111 They asked for volunteer reinforcements to arrive as military aid,
“as friends and good Dominicans.” The rebels’ reclamation of Hato Mayor
lasted barely five days, but fighting raged elsewhere.112 Authorities wrote
to the capital reporting heavy losses. Dominican guerrilla groups cut off
Brigadier Buceta so completely from the rest of the Spanish forces—­having
retreated from Dajabon to somewhere deeper into Haiti—­that the other
Spanish commanders could only speculate about his whereabouts for nearly
two weeks, and he barely escaped with his life. The valley town of Moca fell,
trapping eighty Spanish troops inside the fort. La Vega soon followed, with
rebel ranks ­there swelling as high as two thousand. In Santiago, outside of
the reserves, anyone who had a weapon of any kind—­even a machete—­had
only ­until noon the same day to turn it in at the fort, in exchange for a re-
ceipt.113 Spanish authorities opened military courts in Santiago and in the
capital.
Rural Dominican camps filled with Spanish captives, collaborators, and
escaped prisoners. Editors of the Boletín Oficial proudly printed the names
of forty Spaniards who had defected to rebel Dominican citizenship, e­ ither
freely or ­after arriving at camp as prisoners of war.114 One Spanish soldier
reported that in his five-­month captivity, he was verbally mistreated but paid
the same wage as ­every other rebel soldier, in exchange for trench digging
and other noncombat tasks.115 The rebels also did not abuse the nearly five
hundred other Spanish captives, he noted, although conditions did not bode
well for the injured. A remarkable letter in Cantonese survives in the Cuban
archive describing how some entered camp:

The three of us walked along . . . [​ ­until] we met a wu kwai officer. We w­ ere

glad to meet him [and] he was happy. . . . ​[The second] camp has Chinese
­people as well, and the three of us are very good h ­ ere. You guys do not
have to worry about us, now the wu kwai have 16,000 ­people. They eat a lot
of pork and beef h­ ere. Now, we are writing you this letter to tell you that
if someone comes near this area, come in the daytime and do not come
at night! Please hold a green leaf stick so the wu kwai officers w­ ill know.116

158 | Chapter 5
Not every­one integrated into the camps peacefully. Some of the escaped
prisoners ­were themselves quite violent men. Chinese laborer Macsimo Se-
gundo, jailed for murder in Havana and subsequently transferred to Samaná,
repeatedly assaulted other prisoners. In the Dominican camp, he refused to
work, and some wanted to kill him. ­Under the cover of night, he fled back
to the Spanish to turn himself in. Authorities remitted him back to prison in
Samaná briefly, but then dispatched him to Puerto Plata to work on the fort.117
­Others continued to flee the Spanish. Another Chinese prisoner, Roberto,
critically injured a Spanish prison guard in his escape to the Dominican lines.
(Along with Segundo, he accounted for a total of four cases of laborer convicts
fleeing in just a few weeks’ time.)118
Santo Domingo was the stronghold of the administration. In the spring,
the governor confidently announced that residents condemned rebellions
with “reprobation and disgust,” and he publicized the establishment of a
volunteer militia in the capital composed “of good Spaniards from both
hemi­spheres.”119 However, small acts of insubordination proliferated. One
low-­ranking Dominican officer, drunk, began insulting Spanish soldiers,
as nearby townspeople leaving Good Friday ser­vices flocked to witness the
disturbance. The priest tried to disperse the crowd. “This blind po­liti­cal pas-
sion of some, more or less drunks and disturbers of the peace in any time,
[has transformed into] ranting against the Spanish and their government,”
an official warned.120 Someone stole all the decrees that had been affixed to
signs in the public square, leaving only the two closest to the guard post un-
touched.121 Some of the early spring rebels had been brought to the capital
city to work on chain gangs; although ­there is no rec­ord of their reception,
the group was likely a startling sight.122 By late spring, the Spanish w­ ere so
on guard that soldiers w ­ ere ordered to walk around with weapons loaded
and swords tightly adjusted.123 It was a long, hot summer in the capital; the
prices of many food staples ­rose by 300 ­percent.124
Fighting reached near the outskirts of the city, as Dominican general
Pedro Florentino faced off with Spanish general José de la Gándara. An ar-
ticle in La Razón urged calm:

Gossip. ­There is no lack of it in the city, but it is absolutely rampant in

the countryside. . . . ​Do not be fearful, our peasants, show yourselves
to be deaf to the tall tales of ­those apostles of gossipry [chismografía], and
come to the city without fear to sell your fruits and vegetables. Every­thing
is calm ­here. No one is being detained, nor are they seizing anyone’s
packs, and men, w ­ omen, and ­children enter the City daily, buy, sell, and

You Promised to Die of Hunger | 159

Fig. 5.1 ​Letter, in Cantonese, from a man who escaped a Spanish prison on the island
(prob­ably Samaná). He describes the meat-­heavy rations, black officers, and welcoming
conditions of the Dominican camp.
 speculate, and go back to their homes calm and satisfied. Come, come
without fear, ­because no one is impeding your entry or exit.125

In areas of traditional black settlement around the capital and the center-­
island south, Spanish troops met determined, defiant re­sis­tance and tales of
­great heroism. Word around the old sugar plantations and southern maroon
communities held that Restoration fighter General José Melenciano, from
Haina, “lado de los Naranjos,” had a resguardo that prevented him from being
killed by bullets.126 Melenciano took his men into the Cibao region. His
group was one of the few that traveled in this direction.127 “[The division of
race] is nowhere more prevalent than in the Santo Domingo Province,” the
Spanish governor reported, confidentially, “in the jurisdictions of San Cris-
tóbal and Ozama, where the old sugar mills w ­ ere on the Island and where
the African race has the largest population. ­Those who ­were enslaved are
still alive, even if el­derly. Their c­ hildren who knew their parents as slaves
have black ­children of their own, and they cannot but look at the pres­ent day
with horror.”128 Many around Azua and Baní burned sugar plantations, took
their animals, and headed into the mountains.129
Men outside the capital mobilized in brazen proximity to authorities.
Spanish soldiers reported “large groups of blacks” gathering at the city walls,
armed with machetes.130 Spanish authorities suspected one black Dominican
man, a resident of the old extramuro community of San Carlos, of being “Hai-
tian” for reasons of his dress and skin color. It seems he had donned his
uniform from the Unification period. “A suspicious man, a black . . . w ​ ith
a Haitian-­looking hat,” Spanish officials recorded of the sixty-­year-­old
Francisco de los Dolores.131 Interrogated about where he had gotten his uni-
form, he insisted that it was from when he was a soldier in the time of the re-
public, but neither his age, his marriage, nor his “very good Spanish” could
free him of Spanish suspicion.
As 1863 closed in a whirlwind of fighting, loyalists to Spain blamed pro-
pagandists, agitators, Haiti, and anyone they could for spreading slavery
rumors. The authors of the branding rumor on the north coast had been
“voices against whites and the Spanish,” an official concluded.132 In one
instance—­several years into the occupation—­a young Baní man corrobo-
rated stories that claimed rebels w ­ ere reading letters about slavery to the
public. “They read it to most of the p ­ eople in town, that the whites w­ ere
­going to enslave the blacks, and seeing that most ­people in town ­were leav-
ing, I left, too,” he reported.133 Officials of all statures attempted to squelch
the rumor. A colony-­wide decree read: “Unauthorized men, false interpreters

You Promised to Die of Hunger | 161

of public opinion . . . h ​ ave transformed the rich and fertile comarcas of this
island into a theater of horrible crimes. . . . ​Dominicans, listen to the voice
that is not trying to deceive you, the one that is most interested in prosper-
ity for this beautiful land: ­those who tell you that it is pos­si­ble to reestablish
slavery ­here are knowingly lying, once the Queen declared it abolished once
and for all in this Province.”134 “The war has taken on an aspect of race, leaving
aside po­liti­cal discontent or nationality,” the governor wrote, “and t­ hose in
Seibo and ­those in the Cibao have formed a common defensive mass.”135
Men and w ­ omen, young and old, felt this way. “The rebellion is of the black
man against the white man,” he concluded.136 “The ­people of Puerto Plata
are very e­ ager to fight, even though they have few munitions and are receiv-
ing even fewer,” one foreign resident confirmed. “They wrap themselves in
the idea that if the Spanish beat them, they ­will make them slaves.”137

Forced to Fight against Your B

­ rothers
Spanish authorities scrambled to c­ ounter the guerrilla offensives. Brigadier
Buceta, humiliated, described a fantastical—­and prob­ably apocryphal—­
account in which he claimed he had thrown gold coins at approaching Do-
minicans to distract them (or at least purchase his escape).138 Disorder in
the northern valleys, the portal for tobacco commerce, deeply affected the
Cibao. Merchants and growers alike suffered from the lost profits, despite
a four-­month debt reprieve. Authorities scrambled for prison ­labor to
rebuild and improve area roads.139 In Puerto Plata itself, all governing was
para­lyzed—­surviving documents had been sequestered to the fort—­but the
town was largely empty, anyway.140 A Dominican general, José Hungria, as-
saulted insurgent encampments, leaving piles of corpses of his countrymen
in his wake.141
Spanish authorities and loyal Dominicans argued that the fighting sprang
from factionalism or banditry. Some rebel officers w
­ ere former Buenaventura
Báez loyalists, and Santana heartily encouraged this interpretation.142 Báez
himself was actually in Spain (and had come to support the annexation),
but pro-­Spanish pamphlets excoriated him just the same.143 Governor Rivero
referred extensively to internecine party competition of the in­de­pen­dence
period.144 “Disgraced generals, sold to Haiti and ­later bribed by Báez, . . . ​
wanted to create discord,” Dominican official Manuel de Jesús Galván con-
curred, disapprovingly.145 In simultaneous aspersion, authorities called the
movement anarchic and argued that rebels w ­ ere merely following their urges
for personal gain, excess, and disorder. A Razón editorial challenged: “The
146

162 | Chapter 5
monster of rebellion has reared its head, and we ask it anxiously: what is your
goal? What do you want? What princi­ples do you proclaim! Ay! Too soon
we have the reply. . . . ​the goals and princi­ples of the rebels who infest the
Cibao can be reduced to this horrible formula: killing and destruction.”147
Rebels w ­ ere “without cause or motive,” the governor concluded. “In their
vandal acts and impotent rage, they have burned the town of Guayubín . . . ​
and they have killed unarmed and injured men . . . h ​ umanity and civiliza-
tion condemn it.” He appealed to the public, “­These criminals—­can they be
called your ­brothers? No, ­because you are ­simple and honorable and could
not be associated with arsonists and assassins. . . . Y ​ ou desire good for the
country,” he argued, concluding, “and the rebels only want to exterminate
all prosperity.”148 Another loyalist urged gratitude: “Remember how afflicted
we ­were when we sought the help of the Queen and of Spain.” Of the queen’s
­pardons in the spring, the writer chided, “The ink has not even dried on
the generous amnesty decrees.”149 Santana called for “brotherhood” with
peninsular soldiers and called “bravery and loyalty . . . ​always our only cur-
rency.”150 He urged, “Soldiers, sons of Dominican soil, you who have always
heard my voice . . . ​you ­will not waver in following me!”151 “Dominicans:
when someone passes by your homes and tries to fool you, treat him like an
­enemy,” the governor implored.152
The loyalist press of the capital scrambled to scold insurrection, encour-
age order and obedience, and sanction male responsibility. Imaginative edi-
torials lavished praise on loyalist acts. An editorial in Razón praised “some
gravely injured veterans” who offered their only mount, a “skinny ­horse
or burro,” to an ailing ­woman on the road from Santiago to Puerto Plata.
Their masculine-­heroism-­cum-­selflessness did not stop ­there; the veterans
had defended a number of other w ­ omen and even carried their infants, the
writer recounted. A nameless soldier (“who died before we could know his
name”) carried a six-­month-­old all the way to the northern coast, the colum-
nist continued. “It is comforting, in the presence of the extreme crimes that
have been and are continuing to be committed in the Cibao, to contemplate
the contrast that such a spectacle makes with the noble and humanitarian
conduct of the defenders of order . . . ,​ confident in their magnanimity,” he
concluded.153 “­Women and c­ hildren have fallen at the mercy of the sacrile-
gious bullets of the rebels,” another journalist proclaimed, scandalized. One
poor child was shot in the arm; another “­woman had an infant to her breast,
and was killed exercising one of the most sanctified tasks of nature!”154
“Mass murders, the destruction of entire towns by fire, plundering of fields,

You Promised to Die of Hunger | 163

unjust imprisonment, and all acts of vio­lence [tropelias] against all types of
property, have deprived w ­ omen, ­children, and the el­derly of sustenance and
reduced them to indigence, making it impossible to live if they do not seek
help from the government,” the governor announced in a public decree.155
Spanish entreaties to the rebels w
­ ere similarly gendered. In Puerto Plata’s
diaspora, ­women kept families together and fed. Of the Dominicans who
sought refuge in the fort in the following months, almost all the families
­were headed by w ­ omen. Just ten adult men joined the 253 families gathered
­there.156 Loyalist Dominican Antonio Alfau made a plea to a rebel general,
citing his own “gentlemanly” instincts, the mothering impulses of the
Spanish queen, and the familial bonds that supposedly tied the island to its
former metropole:

You are still in time to save yourselves, your beloved country, your w ­ omen
and ­children, who you have in the montes and who ­will very soon die of
hunger and misery if you do not take the loyal hand I am extending to
you. Spain is not an e­ nemy of ours. . . . S​ he is our most tender m ­ other,
who sacrifices for our happiness. . . . r​ emember the Queen is the grand­
daughter of Isabel the Catholic, who gave us the religion we profess, who
gave us our language, our gentle laws, who made us every­thing that we
are. . . . ​Remember the unhappy ­women and c­ hildren who you have in
misery, forgotten by God; ­here they ­will be given food to eat and every­
thing they need. . . . ​[But if you reject us] . . . ​expect nothing.157

To underscore his points, Alfau had his missive delivered by a w ­ oman.

La Razón and government edicts announced pro-­Spanish victories and
bravery as they excoriated rebel cowardice. “I rush to put t­hese reports in
your hands, for the satisfaction of all the loyal inhabitants of this Spanish
Province,” the notes often concluded, and Rivero preferred to sign off as
“Your Captain General.”158 Government decrees ­were inane in their detail,
announcing even the smallest spoils of war. One account of a victory reported
that forces “made the insurrectionists flee in all directions, leaving us one
ox and one pack h ­ orse, complete with supplies.”159 A number of Domini-
cans received official recognition from the Crown for their efforts. “For your
loyal and noble conduct, I give you thanks in the name of the Queen, her
government, and with all my heart,” Rivero’s decree read. He reminded the
Dominicans of the queen’s “untiring generosity . . . a​ s the ­Mother of all
Spaniards”; as for the Spanish nation itself, it was a “­brother.” He reiterated
promises of peace and profit from the beginning of his tenure and urged
Dominicans to “gain a love of work, the source of all public wealth.” Jus-

164 | Chapter 5
tice would be swift but effective for the rebel leaders, he promised. “The
rebellion ­will be defeated and punished. . . . ​Stay tranquil and loyal,” Rivero
appealed.160 He wrote empathetically: “I am sorry for what has happened:
authorities can never look at blood nor tears with indifference, but when
they have a duty to carry out, they do so, even at the price of their emotions.
This is the sad mission that social good demands of me, and I w ­ ill fulfill it in the
least painful way pos­si­ble.”161
Loyalist Dominicans included prominent island-­born generals fighting
alongside Spanish troops: José Hungria, Antonio Alfau, Eusebio Puello,
Juan Suero, and Santana himself, among o ­ thers. The Crown awarded Hun-
gria the ­Great Cross of Isabel as recognition for his military feats; Santana
had been similarly showered with laurels. Authorities published General
Antonio Abad Alfau’s victories in national bulletins. “Long live the Prince of
Asturias! Long live the Queen!” he exhorted.162 Valuing fealty and military
discipline, loyalist officers w
­ ere some of the staunchest Spanish bulwarks,
and they resented the defection of other Dominican officers particularly.
General Juan Suero bristled that General Gregorio de Lora had lied to his
face about fidelity to Spain only the night before an attack (and was given
weapons); Lora became an instrumental rebel in the Puerto Plata August
movement. “I consider officers and leaders of the Reserves, who are receiv-
ing a salary ­either active or passive, to be defaulting on a sacred obliga-
tion,” Suero penned indignantly.163 Dominican officers’ classification status
remained a public debate. A general in the reserves took it upon himself
to forward to the governor a list of former officers who, for “unknown rea-
sons,” had been classified as passive and thus denied military ser­vice. The
men, mostly from Azua and the capital, felt that they had been needlessly
“stuck with the useless men,” and thus deprived of the means to buy basic
goods. The petition asked for a restoration of their status and full benefits,
in exchange for recognition of the “ser­vices they have offered and their
faithfulness in such precarious times,” the general explained. The petition
was left unresolved.164
Pockets of loyalism to Spain, particularly in the south, buoyed the capi-
tal. Azua seemed wholly tranquil. The all-­Dominican, eight-­member mu-
nicipal government of Azua condemned the rebels; “We come to deplore
the scandalous and criminal acts that have just taken place in some parts
of the Cibao, raising once again rebellion and abusing the generous ­pardon
of our August and generous Queen,” they accused. The period of the repub-
lic was “nineteen years of continual strug­gle, ever obstructing prosperity
and order,” they added.165 The governor alleged that “all of Baní” was loyal,

You Promised to Die of Hunger | 165

and that ­those who had fled “are back tranquilly in their ­houses, u ­ nder the
protection of the brave Army.”166 Even in the Cibao, wealthier loyalists, es-
pecially merchants, stood their ground. Some prominent families offered
buildings for military use. Provincial governors or­ga­nized militia of volun-
teers to add to the Spanish ranks, even arranging nominal pay; La Vega man-
aged to raise seventy volunteers, for example.167 The municipal government
of La Vega criticized area rebels as “lazy, perverse, and undeserving of the
title of citizen” who had “suggested such disloyal ideas” to loyal and obedi-
ent inhabitants.168 In early 1864, Santiago itself was briefly in the power of
loyalists again.169 Businesses ran at something approximating normalcy; a
few prominent Dominican merchants, like Don Juan Francisco García, ­were
helping the Spanish extensively. It was his conviction that all the merchants
wanted the Spanish government back, as did many of the residents of nearby
Moca, he maintained. The governor was quick to publicly thank town coun-
cils for “loyal and patriotic” sentiments. In the capital, Josefa A. Perdomo
dedicated an elegy to Rivero, expressing gratitude for his “constant wish . . . ​
to return to us peace and prosperity.” Josefa A. Del Monte replied to Per-
domo, calling her lazy and ambitious. “[Queen] Isabel is waiting for you in
her palace,” the second poet chided.170
A new Spanish official, Carlos de Vargas, replaced Rivero as governor ­after
just more than a year. Loyal observers ­were optimistic about his reception,
despite the very compromised military situation. “­There appears to be a bet-
ter feeling since the arrival of the pres­ent Captain General, who appears so
far to be an honorable and just ruler,” the U.S. commercial agent reported.171
In a confidential letter, the captain general expressed his grave concerns
to the Overseas Ministry. “It is difficult for you to imagine, Excellent Sir,
how far this extremely critical and dangerous situation can carry on,” Var-
gas confided, praising Santana and La Gándara for fighting bravely. “I must
inspire confidence in the country . . . a​ s the first step of pacification,” he
wrote, “and . . . ​the show of adherence and cooperation from many influ-
ential men of the country . . . m ​ ake me think I can achieve it.” Meanwhile,
though, the governors of Cuba and Puerto Rico “cannot afford to send even
one more soldier,” he lamented.172 The incoming governor addressed the
Provincial Reserves and Spanish forces together: “A few rebels have put this
Antille, worthy of a better fate, into a terrible state. . . . ​They have relied on
arson, robbery, assassination and horrific destruction to regain a freedom
they have already been guaranteed.” Protect “the peaceful and honest man,
and help him immediately return to his home,” he urged the troops.173 About
seventy soldiers fighting with Santana received special recognition for a

166 | Chapter 5
particularly brutal 29 September fight at Arroyo Bermejo, and the governor
promised publicly that order would soon return everywhere.
Strained resources, poor infrastructure, the demands of war, and suc-
cessful guerrilla blockades crippled the administration. Public works every­
where ­were in “total paralysis.”174 Azuan authorities reported they had
“absolutely no funds,” no resources to care for the prisoners, ­little security,
and no way to continue ­trials.175 Soon, food was scarce and the town was
totally empty. Rebels in and around the town burned farms, moved the live-
stock, and blocked supply lines. Only small amounts of food arrived by boat
from the capital.176 Government documents went unsigned for months.
When towns became “empty and depopulated,” authorities left some mu-
nicipal posts unfilled, simply to save money.177 Absenteeism was a prob­lem
even where government functioned. Interim regulations created sign-in
logs for administrators to prove their attendance, and leaves became strictly
unpaid. Troubled officials acknowledged the new restrictions but com-
plained, in light of food scarcity and fighting, “It endangers ­those who are
truly suffering.”178 Military officials filled empty civilian posts, sometimes
poorly. When an infantry col­o­nel became provisional governor of Samaná
in the late summer of 1863—as other authorities left for the fighting in
Santiago—he played fast and loose with his authority. To defend the pen-
insula, he selected the hundred or so “Eu­ro­pean” (presumably Spanish)
convicts and gave them guns. Chaos ensued. The convicts menaced the
residents, made racist threats, robbed stores, and caused many families to
flee.179 The interim governor’s apparent failure to properly punish the trans-
gressors frustrated residents further. He spent his nights sleeping on a ship
off the coast, diffident and unaccountable. “I ­can’t say this was the one and
only cause of the uprising in Samaná, but I cannot think of another one to
report,” a reservist observed.180
­Women in loyalist towns navigated increased tensions. As in other Ca­
rib­bean towns, laundry work forged noisy, public, feminine spaces where
­women’s ­labor mono­poly earned them bargaining power with municipal of-
ficials, but where the public nature of their tasks could also make them targets
of discursive and physical vio­lence.181 Laundry w ­ omen found themselves
before Santo Domingo’s military tribunal. Sometimes, they instigated the
inquest. In one case in the capital, two w ­ omen (émigrées from Santiago)
turned on a man, Manuel Guerrero, alleging that he had called the Spanish
“whores,” that he “had a pistol to shoot them all,” and that he was part of a
suspicious meeting. Guerrero—­a bricklayer, just twenty years old, and of
marginal means—­retorted that he had only been detained ­because of the ill

You Promised to Die of Hunger | 167

­ ill the two w
w ­ omen had for him. He had been attending wake, not a suspi-
cious meeting, he protested, and he proceeded to name a number of p ­ eople
who had also been in attendance. Five washerwomen, divided in their ac-
counts, testified at Guerrero’s trial. Two reported that Guerrero yelled abu-
sive remarks at them for attending a dance with Spanish officers, hosted at
another ­woman’s ­house. One of the ­women bragged that she had reported
“the black” the next day to the same Spanish officers, for having “insulted
her and spoken poorly of the Spanish.” Authorities sentenced Guerrero to
one month in jail, but he languished for nearly two ­until he was freed.182
Other capital city ­women faced death threats for relations with Spanish
men.183 In the opening fighting of Santiago, rebel men shouted to a small
group of ­women who had remained with the Spanish, “­We’re g ­ oing to chop
off your and the other four whores’ heads”; another w ­ oman was murdered
for her supposed treason of cohabiting with a Spaniard.184
Throughout the east, rebels engaged in the delicate politics of solidarity,
secrecy, and trust as they tried to recruit their friends and neighbors. Letters
suggested that verbal communication was best. “Let’s meet so that I can tell
you certain very impor­tant, secret ­things,” one officer urged another.185 Even
discussions ­were not necessarily safe. In Bayaguana, authorities jailed re-
servist soldier José de la Cruz on suspicion of convincing his fellow soldiers
to join the revolution and flee to the mountains “to meet up with the Cibae-
ños.” One witness, Teodisio Contreras, divulged the entire conversation he
had with his fellow soldier, whom he knew as Pepe. In the street at the center
of town, de la Cruz had spoken to Contreras frankly, “Man, I am g ­ oing to tell
you something, and I think as a friend you w ­ on’t give me up. And even if you
do and they kill me, tomorrow ­there ­will be another person, who ­will kill
you. I am ­going to join up to­night . . . ​come with me, or if you ­don’t want to
go, ­don’t go, and when we arrive, I ­won’t shoot you.” De la Cruz had carefully
thought about his tangled allegiances; he reassured another soldier again
that “he would not harm Dominicans, just the Spanish,” even if that man
deci­ded to remain loyal to the colonial forces. Unfortunately for de la Cruz,
Contreras left for his barracks and told his sergeant immediately. Officials
declared an embargo on de la Cruz’s goods, but five months l­ater annulled
it—he had no possessions to embargo.186 Other appeals employed similarly
intimate terms. “Countryman—­Brother and Friend,” another writer began.
“This letter d
­ oesn’t seek to say anything except to say we hope that you enjoy
the same feelings, and that as a result of this communication you ­will raise
the Dominican flag. . . . Here
​­ it is reigning with high enthusiasm. Long
Live Religion, Liberty, the Dominican Republic, and Perfect Union!”187 “In

168 | Chapter 5
all of the Cibao, the Dominican flag is flying,” the writer reported. The letter
bore a handwritten letterhead ambitiously announcing the return of in­de­
pen­dence: “The Dominican Republic—­God, Country, and Liberty.”
Fighting threatened to tear communities apart, but rebels w ­ ere initially
optimistic and conciliatory. In some of the early fighting in Puerto Plata,
rebel commanders gave explicit ­orders not to shoot Dominicans fighting
alongside Spanish troops, for example. Spanish authorities spread stories
that the rebels w ­ ere shooting loyal Dominican families, although the rumor
never held much traction.188 In Hato Mayor, a rebel letter from 1863 read
encouragingly, “We have come h ­ ere like b
­ rothers, and it is a revolution of
princi­ple for which we need nothing more than unity and fraternity among
Dominicans.” No one wanted “even a drop of blood to be spread . . . ​vivan
todos los dominicanos,” the letter announced reassuringly.189 A rebel general
entreated Dominicans in the reserves, “Let us not engage in a fratricidal
war of hate.” He continued, “I know you come forced to fight against your
­brothers; put down your arms or come join the ranks of liberty.”190 “Domini-
cans! . . . ​do not let yourself be seduced by the vile interests with which they
try to buy your ser­vices, to make you brandish arms against your b ­ rothers
and your homeland,” another pleaded.191 “Leave the lines who are assas-
sinating your ­brothers,” another urged a prominent rebel general.192 “The
friendship you have always shown me . . . ​and Christian obedience . . . ​
[and the memory] of your noble fighting in Santiago in 1852 oblige me to
write this note,” one general publicly addressed General Antonio Alfau. His
tone was deferential. “Even though I am not worthy of your attention, listen
to what I am telling you, for no child wants bad ­things for his ­father,” he
urged. “But no m ­ atter what, I am a republican, and I can do nothing less
than fulfill my duties as a citizen,” he continued. “Santo Domingo’s c­ hildren
do not want to fight with you nor General Santana. . . . W ​ e do not want war
without ­fathers . . . ​but if you do, we ­will fight to the last bullet.”193 A reserv-
ist soldier in an early b­ attle replied to such sentiments, “Every­one in Cibao
should die for being traitors.”194
As chaos swept to each town—­even if it did not remain in the hands of
the rebels—­municipal governments’ prob­lems multiplied exponentially. In
accordance with the governor’s o ­ rders, all officials and prisoners from Azua
evacuated to the capital city in mid-­October, for example. Three months
­later (December), they returned, but officials from more northern cities
(including La Vega) fled subsequently to the safety of the capital. Samaná,
previously peaceful, was almost totally deserted by early December. As 1863
wound to a close, Spanish troops clung to the southern towns, with their

You Promised to Die of Hunger | 169

eyes on the rebellious Cibao. Despite heavy fighting in nearby Llamasá,
the capital remained a Spanish stronghold. Governor Vargas continued the
practice of publishing victories, although his tone wavered slightly; the
narrative strayed from “quick and shameful retreats” of rebels to admit-
ting “sustained fighting.” He continued to thank ­those loyal to the “cause
of order,” promising medals and praising loyalist bravery. Privately, he de-
scribed a more complex situation. “Many of color join our ranks, especially
from Azua and Seybo, but they stay just fifteen or twenty days, and then they
leave to or­ga­nize parties of bandits,” he decried. ­Those groups troubled local
residents, he claimed, “who [themselves] are gathered and armed to care for
their plots and land and cannot be called enemies of ours, but neither can
their loyalty be counted on.”195 Even in southern towns, flight caused the
line between resident and rebel to be indistinguishable. “The Spaniards
are making no pro­gress what­ever,” one man observed. “Wherever they go,
the ­people get out of their sight.”196
Puerto Plata, strategically vital, exemplified the worst entrenchment of
the conflict. As fighting cut off north-­south communication, news from
Santiago and Puerto Plata could reach the capital only by boat, and vice
versa.197 As Spanish forces dug in, their control did not extend much beyond
the fort. Spanish troops “enthusiastically destroyed ­enemy trenches,” Puerto
Plata’s mayor reported, but they could not sleep outside. Within the walls,
soldiers celebrated Queen’s Day, “as far as was pos­si­ble, with good morale
and monarchical sentiment,” a commander reported; he also reported spo-
radic exchanges of gunfire.198 With just a short cease-­fire at Christmas, the
siege and sporadic confrontations continued. Unlike in some other mu-
nicipalities, officials deci­ded that evacuating the port officials to Santo Do-
mingo would be “embarrassing,” and only the mayor made the trip. B ­ attles
continued at bayonet point around the ruins of the church. Periodic rumors
of large numbers of rebels arriving from the west bolstered rebel morale, but
Spanish troops dug in their heels to cries of “Long live the queen!”
The fighting swept up ­whole families, willingly or other­wise. Some tes-
tified to military commissions that they had been held against their w ­ ill.
One man who had left Puerto Plata’s limits to find food on his farm was
captured for two weeks, he claimed, and he suffered constant death threats
and only barely escaped. Rebels took his clothing and other possessions,
he lamented.199 Area rebels gathered forces using “threats and terror,”
Puerto Plata officials accused.200 Concerned parents accused disgruntled
reservists of attempting to “seduce” their sons. The rebels drafted ­whole
towns. In San Cristóbal, a handwritten decree from “the Junta of this town,

170 | Chapter 5
in the name of the Dominican Republic” announced that all ­those aged
sixteen to sixty ­were to take up arms for defense of the country, to report for
duty within forty-­eight hours.201 Both Spanish and Dominican authorities
pressured low-­level alcaldes pedaneos to help recruit townspeople.202 Rebels
warned the local authorities to help the Dominican cause or “be subject to
the same penalties [as traitors].”203 A number of prominent loyalist families
in the Cibao had to flee. Some traveled with the Spanish forces or fled to be
with the rebels for protection. Remaining in town was physically danger-
ous but also presented the possibility of sedition charges.204 Exiled men
pleaded for the right to return, invoking the amnesties of early spring. “All
are peaceful and honorable men . . . w ​ ho want to live quietly in their homes
with their families,” one letter pleaded.205 Some testified that some of their
­family—­brothers, godfathers, and so on—­had been caught up with the reb-
els, causing families to lose contact.206 Given the scattered nature of the
fighting, Spanish troops could not stay long in any one place, and ­people
worried that “the grave scenes would repeat,” especially pillage, as they left.
Rebels grabbed what guns and munitions that remained, and then moved
on themselves. Sometimes they seized the animals of locals suspected of
aiding the Spanish, like one man suspected of ferrying w ­ ater to the Spanish
holed up in a fort. 207

Given the fires that overtook many towns, often ­there was l­ ittle to which
­people could return. Puerto Plata had burned nearly to the ground in October
1863. For the fire and for the pillaging that followed, the Spanish blamed the
rebels, the rebels blamed the Spanish, and merchants and families simply
faced destitution.208 Small groups of Dominican vigilantes harassed Span-
ish troops who descended from the fort to protect property, Puerto Plata’s
mayor reported, chagrined. B ­ ecause he believed t­ here ­were many more reb-
els just outside the town, t­ here was l­ ittle to be done.209 Baní burned that fall,
too, sixty-­eight buildings in all, including many of the impor­tant stores in
the town. Only heavy rains saved some h ­ ouses. The U.S. commercial agent
observed, “No ­matter where the Spaniards go . . . ​, when the Dominicans
see that they are not able to hold a place, they prefer to lay it in ashes, rather
than suffer the Spaniards to take possession and hold it.”210 Small towns
like Guayubín ­were just a collection of huts, basically defenseless, and even
the Spanish admitted that the arriving rebels ­were kind and “humanitarian”
in the early spring.211 As the town was swept into rebellion again, however,
a number of citizens died in the fires. When Spanish general La Gándara
arrived in Barahona in early 1864, he found it burned and abandoned. A
rebel writer lamented, “Fire, the devastation of our towns, wives without

You Promised to Die of Hunger | 171

husbands, ­children without their parents, the loss of all of our livelihood,
and fi­nally misery—­these are the fruits we have won.”212

“Santo Domingo ­Don’t Want Whites”: Trenches Deepen

Many Dominicans remained away from their homes, and the Spanish could
neither defeat the rebels nor return to everyday administration. Authorities
offered a second round of po­liti­cal amnesty (for all but the accused “ring-
leaders”) in August, and another as the new governor, Carlos de Vargas, took
power. They bristled at what they saw as the hubris of the popu­lar Domini-
can reply: few took it, few returned to their homes, and many continued
to travel with the guerrilla bands that now traversed most of the country.213
Prisoners freed by the rebels or during the chaos that swept through ­were in
something of a predicament: they ­were unsure ­whether they could return
to their homes. B ­ ecause the destruction of court rec­ords had erased their
­legal status, former prisoners preferred the countryside, rebel lines, or even
flight to foreign countries over the prospect of retrial by the Spanish. And,
as one official complained, “They can hide themselves for eternity.” Given
­these “anomalous circumstances,” multiple capital city authorities argued
that a tabula rasa of sorts ­ought to be established—­not a published amnesty,
per se, but rather the policy of reopening court cases only for ­those who
newly committed themselves to the rebel cause.214 Authorities condemned
prominent rebels to death in absentia, so their exile was more certain. “All
the reflections, deference, and benefits are totally useless with idiot ­people
who are without education or civilization who have lived for de­cades in the
woods, with only the wildest of occupations,” Governor Carlos de Vargas
fumed in a confidential letter.215
As the guerrilla opposition spread everywhere, the discipline of Spanish
soldiers faltered. Newly arriving soldiers described Dominican rebels non-
chalantly as “the e­ nemy”: “Long live Spain! Long live the Queen! . . . T ​o
the bayonets!”216 Among the exhausted ground troops, however, the most
common infractions came to be insubordination, obscenity, drunken sol-
diers leaving their posts, dereliction in prisoner surveillance, theft, fighting,
dressing as a civilian, and outright desertion.217 Murder cases occasionally
gripped the military courts; a December 1863 Puerto Plata murder case, in-
volving two soldiers from the Isabel II regiment, caused official stir as far as
Havana.218 A fight between a Spanish soldier and a Dominican cart driver in
the capital proved fatal for the latter, but authorities exculpated the soldier on
the grounds of self-­defense.219 One soldier, so frightened of his sentence for
having shot a local man, fled the military hospital, only to be apprehended

172 | Chapter 5
the following day.220 Both robbery and murder seem to have increased as the
fighting ground on; soldiers stood accused of stealing and reselling provi-
sions, assaults on each other, and robberies against Dominican citizens.221 A
few of the cases in Puerto Plata and Azua involved massive theft, of the sort
that might only be effected in a chaotic port town; 500 ­bottles of wine, 9,732
rations of galletas, 49,551 rations of coffee, and so on.222 In one instance, a
­whole trunk of money went missing, in the amount of 9,000 pesos.223
Discipline of the Provincial Reserves also suffered, leaving Spanish au-
thorities exasperated and suspicious. High-­profile defection of Dominican
generals put Spanish nerves on edge; among the rank and file, absentee-
ism was just as destructive, if more inscrutable. A considerable number de-
serted in the early months—in one instance, nearly five hundred p ­ eople.224
As 1863 wore on, ­trials for soldiers who had left the lines to return to their
homes—­for sojourns of varying lengths—­increased. Often, it was unclear
­whether lax military discipline, f­ amily obligations, or rebel affiliation was
to blame, and the soldiers ­were frustratingly negligent in the eyes of the
military authorities. Deserters—in time of war, no less—­faced extraordi-
narily strict sentences, even capital punishment. One reserves soldier, fac-
ing eight years, was only g ­ oing to see his f­ amily, taking them a squash, “as
he had done during times of the republic,” his defense observed.225 Towns-
people came to the defense of soldiers.226 Some claimed they had sought
and gained verbal permission for leave.227 ­Others claimed abduction by the
rebels, a defense that could not easily be disproven. The Spanish commis-
sions saw no easy resolution.228 Even officers faced lengthy jail terms.229
Some tried petitioning for release. San Carlos resident Estanislao Dusablon,
a young married carpenter, entreated the governor to release him to return
to his profession in order to be able tend to his ­family, “suffering from the
hardest misery.” “My poor f­ amily,” he repeated.230 Authorities w ­ ere exceed-
ingly suspicious of t­hose who came and left repeatedly, “all while wearing
the Spanish sash.” “The Provisional militia are d ­ oing no other ser­vice than
informing the guerrillas,” one confidential report concluded bitterly, but
Spanish officers could do ­little to prevent them.231 A Dominican reserves
lieutenant captured one spy, Daniel Rosario, as he absconded with a mule
en route to tell rebels about the state of Spanish camps. The two strug­gled
so violently that Rosario ­later died from his injuries.232
Despite public decrees that pleaded for peace, Spanish hostility and
vio­lence grew. Consul complaints left a chilling rec­ord, as the French con-
sul and the British consul intervened repeatedly in Puerto Plata and other
towns. One shooting prompted the Jamaican governor to intervene. “If

You Promised to Die of Hunger | 173

t­hese details are true . . . ​it amounts to premeditated assassination . . . ​
please investigate,” he urged, but the query led nowhere.233 Spanish soldiers
arrested Saint Vincent–­born William Henry Abbot, a master carpenter and
­father of three small ­children, in his own ­house in Puerto Plata for unspeci-
fied reasons in the midst of fighting. Accusing Abbot of complicity with the
rebels, a group of soldiers dragged him to the beach near the local Methodist
church—­all protestations of his British citizenship in vain—­and murdered
him without so much as a trial. In fact, Spanish soldiers forced two British
day laborers to bury his body.234 Americans like Peter Vanderhurst tried and
failed to seek British protection in Samaná.235 Dominicans, with no pretense
to such recourse, confronted rising aggression.
Authorities increased surveillance as far as they could. They suspected,
but could not prove, the gun pipeline from Haiti across the northwest val-
ley.236 U.S. steamships in Cap-­Haïtien’s ample port also raised suspicion.237
Governor Rivero declared the entire island—­including Haiti—to be block-
aded. All printed material would be “scrupulously examined,” all passengers
considered suspicious, all ­those carry­ing weapons considered enemies. The
governor asked for aid from the Cuban navy to survey the northern coast of
the island, from Cap-­Haïtien (Guarico) to Monte Cristi, and to sail its cir-
cumference where pos­si­ble. Authorities sent news of the blockade to Saint
Thomas, Jamaica, and other neighboring islands.238 The governor declared
that all ­those on ships aiding the rebels would be treated as pirates. Domini-
can citizens who owned gunpowder w ­ ere ordered to remit it to area officials;
arms restrictions varied from town to town. A colony-­wide decree, citing
“public hygiene” prob­lems, announced the relocation of some prisoners to
the peninsula and proclaimed that spies would be shot on sight. “They do
not have the same rights [as prisoners of war do],” he announced.239
Spanish authorities focused their scrutiny on traditionally black commu-
nities like San Carlos and Los Mina. Officials appointed spies “of absolute
trust” to investigate rumors of ferment outside of capital city walls.240 In
more frequent and more hostile patrols, Spanish watchmen pursued every­
one, including priests.241 Spanish soldiers perceived danger in h ­ ouses where
­people of color frequently gathered, reported them to the military com-
mission, and often engaged in outright conflict with town residents, par-
ticularly young men. In one incident, two young men w ­ ere detained for two
weeks simply for having left their neighborhood and returned.242 The fight-
ing itself seemed to make the soldiers more paranoid, more racist, and less
likely to hide ­either of t­ hese inclinations with the mantle of civility that had
framed the annexation proj­ect. In San Carlos once again, Spanish soldiers

174 | Chapter 5
claimed they w
­ ere chasing some “sospechosos” at one in the morning. One
of the gunshots ended up penetrating a hut and injuring a sleeping child.243
Spanish soldiers blamed black subjects even for their own desertions; “I was
kidnapped for the night by two black men with a knife and taken to Los
Mina,” one Spanish soldier claimed.244 One soldier stationed in neighboring
Puerto Rico mused acerbically:

Los negros dominicanos

no quieren a los españoles,
y vienen a Puerto Rico
sin camisa y sin calzones

Papá come gato,

Santo Domingo no quiere blanco
Papá come perro,
en Santo Domingo no hay más que negros245

[The black Dominicans

­don’t want the Spanish,
and they come to Puerto Rico
shirtless and pantless

Papa eats cats,

Santo Domingo ­don’t want whites
Papa eats dogs,
in Santo Domingo ­there are only blacks]

Tensions ­were high in the capital; a young man from Samaná took out his
pistol and aimed it at a watchman’s chest. It was unloaded, but a judge con-
victed the nineteen-­year-­old nonetheless.246 Other young men, similarly,
­were detained and released with increasing frequency.
Nicolás Guzmán, a volunteer drummer in the Baní regiment, demonstrated
how growing tensions over Spanish racism dovetailed with the slavery rumors,
even in a loyalist town. Guzmán had been drinking with other reservists in
a store when a paisano officer—­unclear if Spanish or Dominican—­entered.
Guzmán offered him a drink, which the man refused on the basis of his “not
being the same color” as the young drummer. “I said I drink the same as
blacks, whites, and mulatos,” Guzmán recounted, testifying he left immedi-
ately. The officer told a dif­fer­ent story, reporting that Guzmán threatened
him: “If you d
­ on’t drink this, I’ll pour it on you.” The officer admitted his own
attitude was belligerent, saying, “I replied, the only way you’ll be able to

You Promised to Die of Hunger | 175

pour it on me is if you behead me first.” A third man separated them. In a
temporary evacuation of Baní subsequently, Guzmán fled for a week with the
rebels. Defending himself in court, he offered a very deliberate incarnation
of the slavery rumor: a group of rebels had arrived in Baní from Maniel—­
that is, the historic maroon community—­reading a letter about impending
enslavement. They had read the letter to a gathering of most of Baní’s resi-
dents. “The whites ­were ­going to enslave the blacks,” he repeated, “and
seeing as most of the town was fleeing, I went with them.” Other accounts
reported his exit was not so naive. Guzmán allegedly shouted to fleeing resi-
dents that he would shoot them en route if they joined the Spanish, who w ­ ere
“sin verguenzas,” that he would continue shooting, even if it w ­ ere on his knees.
“Sin verguenzas españoles blancos,” another witness quoted. The military com-
mission ordered him summarily deported.247
In the context of increased tension over Spanish racism, re­sis­tance became
more entrenched. Insurgents fought in extraordinarily spartan conditions.
Writer Pedro Bonó observed of one group, “Barely anyone had uniforms. . . . ​
The drummer was in a ­woman’s shirt and no pants. . . . ​Many ­others w ­ ere
shirtless. . . . ​All ­were barefoot . . . ​no ­saddles, just plantain leaves covered
with goat leather . . . ​[and they] ­were mostly armed with machetes and only
a few guns.”248 ­Fathers petitioned for their sons who had been deported,
as sixty-­year-­old Pablo Santana did for his twenty-­three-­year-­old son, Pablo
Santana de los Reyes, languishing in the Morro of Havana. The group of
men who had been with young Pablo—of fifty of them, only ten had guns—­
could not possibly be considered guilty, his f­ather pleaded.249 Speculation
followed ­those who had been deported. They ­were working in chain gangs,
perhaps on plantations in Havana, individuals warned.250 Slavery stories
proliferated further. One reservist sergeant—­indigent, despite his rank,
and claiming to have lost his common-­law wife to the rebels—­passed on
an elaborate and alarming warning. He claimed that Spanish promises ­were
not to be believed, that the Spanish planned to burn the towns and enslave
the ­people by embarking them onto ships. They had already taken the resi-
dents of Azua and Santo Domingo, he allegedly claimed. He died in jail.251
A civilian, Ramón Díaz, excused his initial participation with a guerrilla
group as involuntary (he joined ­because of threats, he alleged, and a Spanish
council was inclined to agree with him), but he also admitted to becoming
convinced subsequently that the Spanish “planned to ship anyone they cap-
tured to Havana, to enslave them and make them do agricultural work.” The
very looseness of the guerrilla ranks precipitated Díaz’s capture; reservists

176 | Chapter 5
caught him as he returned to his home in search of clothes, plantains, and
­water.252
Members of a Dominican Provisional Government, newly founded in
Santiago, denied the Spanish accusation that they w ­ ere using slavery as an
official recruiting tactic. At the same time, they warned of slavery’s salience
among the ­people:

We have never tried to fool the pueblo saying that the Spaniards would
have them made slaves and sell them, like they do t­ oday to t­ hose desgra-
ciados who they go looking for on the coast of Africa. . . . B ​ ut what could
stop Spain from establishing in Cuba or its other colonies all the prisons
that it felt like, and send all of the inhabitants of the Dominican Republic
­there, if that’s what they felt like ­doing? . . . ​All Dominicans should under­
stand, then, that the Spanish government ­will not literally sell them as
they do in Cuba and Puerto Rico to true slaves; but except for the name,
the condition ­will be worse.253

It was ­these fears that lent incontrovertible urgency to the fighting. And so
government members warned the queen, “The fight, Señora, between the
Dominican ­people and Your Majesty’s army would be totally useless for
Spain; ­because believe it, Your Majesty, we could all perish, and the w ­ hole
country could end up destroyed by war and the burning of the towns and
cities, but Spanish authorities governing us again, never. . . . ​They clearly
show that the Dominican prefers homelessness with all of its horrors, for
himself, his wife and ­children, and even death, more than, Señora, depend-
ing on ­those who oppress him, insult him, and assassinate him without
trial.”254 Inexorably, the re­sis­tance deepened.

You Promised to Die of Hunger | 177

six

The Lava Spread Everywhere

RURAL REVOLUTION, THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT, AND HAITI

The year 1864 dawned with the defeat of Pedro Santana and all his men, in
fierce fighting in the north. Santana retreated home to the eastern province
of Seybo with two thousand followers, trying to quell an insurgency that
had started ­there, too. He died that fall, disillusioned and frustrated.1 In a
massive military escalation, Spanish authorities brought in almost twenty
thousand new troops to crush the rebellion, three thousand soldiers for the
capital alone.2 In comparison, only a few hundred Dominicans guarded San-
tiago, where the new Provisional Government operated. Rebels dispersed
everywhere in campaigns and guerrilla ­battles. “Dominican society was
sleeping on the crater of a volcano,” poet (and Restoration fighter) Manuel
Rodríguez Objío wrote. “The volcano opened its im­mense mouth,” he de-
scribed, “its flame lit up the beautiful country’s sky, and its lava spread
everywhere.” The destruction was shocking. “Whole cities w ­ ere entombed,”
he observed; “mountains of ash ­rose everywhere.” 3

As the massive mobilization swept the territory, poor country residents

and laborers entered the fight decisively and in ­great numbers. Although
documentation on prominent rural men is lacking (compared with the more
extensive paper trail of wealthy figures in towns), historians suggest that
many wealthy cattlemen progressed from indifference, to lending money to
the rebel cause, to trying to benefit from it.4 Like wealthier citizens in town,
they worried about the popu­lar nature of the war. “We feared that the masses
[muchedumbre] ­didn’t have anyone to moderate them,” one admitted.5 Span-
ish officials sought to exploit ­these fears, and regional sentiment, with ­little
success. The movement was simply too popu­lar. “I was seeking to exploit
the antipathy that has always existed between t­ hose in the South and t­ hose
in the North,” Governor Vargas reported, but opposition was far too strong.6
Loyalist observers commented extensively on the popu­lar nature of the
war. It was “a headless rebellion . . . ​a horrible hurricane . . . a​ crazy revo-
lution,” one priest remarked, in fear and awe.7 Tobacco production dropped
precipitously, an unavoidable blow to rebel revenue. Violent campaigns
spread everywhere. Relentlessly, however, the rebellion continued to grow.
Two major po­liti­cal tendencies emerged in the Provisional Government,
established during the first fall of fighting. The first was a studiously raceless
republican nationalism, authored by prominent figures, primarily wealthy
men from the Cibao, who had been part of the reform movements of the late
republic. Like Mexican opponents to French occupation at the same time,
they refuted the annexation in no uncertain terms, heartily exhorted repub-
licanism, condemned Spain’s tyranny, and praised in­de­pen­dent American
states.8 Their discourse was at once anticolonial and civilizationist. In defense
against the accusation of “banditry,” prominent generals assured their audi-
ences they ­were “Christian and civilized.”9 In defense against the accusa-
tion of “race war” (murmured on the island, shouted in Madrid periodicals),
spokespeople responded with anticolonial missives to Spain that remained
deafeningly ­silent on racism and slavery.10 In t­ hese tracts, they wrote freely
of Spanish “arrogance” and disdain—­“as if we w ­ ere serfs, or the indigenous
conquered in the era of Columbus,” contrived one—­but they rarely con-
demned Spain’s plantation pres­ent.11 To t­ hese officials, the appropriate frame
of vindication, the respectable anticolonial discourse, was nationalism. In
one of Santiago writer Pedro Francisco Bonó’s stories, an insurgent exclaims,
“­Every day I want to fight more and finish kicking out t­hose whites”—­but
government members did not echo him.12
Leaders who w ­ ere much closer to the guerrilla movements—­idealistic,
active, and violent men—­emerged, too, embodying the radicalization of the
strug­gle. General Gregorio Luperón, just twenty-­four years old, made a me-
teoric, brilliant rise as a military commander from ­humble origins in Puerto
Plata. He was among the most radical of nationalists and idealists, who,
like Francisco del Rosario Sánchez, already dead for his efforts, had begun
organ­izing when the occupation was only a wild rumor. Each revolutionary
general had his own plans, command, and supply lines, leading groups of
insurgents.13 ­Others also quickly ascended to military leadership, including
figures like Gaspar Polanco, who ­rose to be head of the provisional national
army—­“an informal mambí troop,” such as it was.14 Fissures between prom-
inent men and t­ hese popu­lar leaders grew u ­ ntil, mid-­fighting, they reached

The Lava Spread Everywhere | 179

fever pitch. In a coup meant to save the revolution, General Polanco ordered
the execution of the president, a prominent landowner. Observers w ­ ere pos-
itively scandalized; Polanco was unrepentant. Claiming the presidency on a
wave of popu­lar support, he initiated a more revolutionary government in
­every sense. Idealists who had served the previous administration found a
new voice, too. Polanco’s ministers reached farther, flooding western Puerto
Rico with pamphlets as well.15 “Citizen Presidents” ruled on both sides of
the island.16
At the height of the fighting and revolutionary tumult, Haitian authorities
continued in a bind between overwhelming popu­lar support in Haiti for the
anticolonial rebellion and the threat of Spanish might. Any overt collabora-
tion would ally the Haitian state with a poorly armed faction of an unequal
and potentially fatal fight, and Spanish warships remained docked in strik-
ing distance. Furthermore, challenges to Geffrard’s hold on power compro-
mised his ability to respond. The president’s opponents called on popu­lar
opposition to his neutrality, sometimes opportunistically, to condemn him,
and prominent regional politicians plotted opposition movements with
growing frequency. Meanwhile, Haitian citizens in port cities and center-­
island towns defied all authority to collaborate with the Restoration war.
Material and moral collaboration across the island was extensive, “frank and
resolved,” and hostile observers knew it.17 “We cannot understand how the
Spanish government can believe for one moment that the Haitian ­people
could stay in­def­initely indifferent to an issue that, as they accurately per-
ceive, interests them as much as Dominicans,” one rebel announced.18 The
northern coast, in par­tic­u­lar, bubbled with collaborative activity, with boats
hopping from Cap-­Haïtien, to Monte Cristi, to Puerto Plata, to Turks and
Caicos Islands, Saint Thomas, and other nearby sites.
Collaboration accelerated greatly with the demands (and radicalization)
of the anti-­Spanish fighting, which was unlike any military mobilization in
recent memory. Urgency, opportunism, and po­liti­cal strife, on both sides of
the island, multiplied rebel plans. Some anti-­Geffrard conspirators called
for the north of Haiti to ally with the rebel east. The Provisional Government
called for a s­ imple treaty of alliance, l­ ater a treaty of federation. Many other
rebels, short on resources, looked to Haiti for help in any way pos­si­ble. “We
protest the abuses of the Spanish government . . . ​, impeding Haitian citi-
zens from taking part in the Dominican cause, which is their own cause,” a
Dominican author chided.19 They sent private letters describing Dominican
prisoners in shackles.20 Loyalists and Spanish called Dominican guerrilla
fighters manigüeros, a reference to their strategic flight to rough and unculti-

180 | Chapter 6
vated land. Rebels called the Spanish cacharros (pot carriers), mocking them
for how heavi­ly they traveled.21 Manigüeros ­were winning the war. In collabo-
ration on the north coast and in newly radical ele­ments of the Provisional
Government, the egalitarian policies, antiracist patriotism, and solidarity
forged in strug­gle grew to be something very difficult to control. A
­ fter more
power­ful men wrested power back from Polanco and his revolutionaries,
they obliquely referred to a broader “regularization” of the war effort.22 A
full-­blown “reactionary clan” began to coalesce by late 1864, in opposition
to the ascendant radical leadership.23 ­These power­ful men, already looking
ahead to what they thought might be the end of the war, sought a familiar
old network of patronage and hierarchy, in the figure of Buenaventura Báez.
Meanwhile, however, popu­lar collaborations and connections to Haiti only
grew. The language of a heroic nationalism united them. Three years ­after
Geffrard had resoundingly condemned Spanish occupation, a southern Do-
minican man carried a copy of his 1861 protest in his pocket as he fought.24

A “Regenerated” Republic
A group of rebel po­liti­cal leaders founded the Provisional Government at
the center of Dominican liberal nationalist politics, the Cibao valley. “We
have no doubt that our ­brothers in the Cibao ­will be the first to embrace
the cause of regeneration,” a writer had predicted in 1861, and residents of
the surrounding towns saw entering the fight as “joining up with the Cibae-
ños.”25 Many of the prominent rebel leaders had experience in political move-
ments of recent years and economic ties to the United States, ­Eng­land, and
other sites.26 Two wealthy Santiago w ­ omen lent their h ­ ouses to the early
meetings: first, Doña Antonia Batista; next, Madame García. García, born
in Haiti, was famous for the most extravagant masked balls in the Cibao val-
ley.27 Some had entered the annexation loyal to Spain, optimistic about party
peace and economic pro­gress. Their disillusionment was rapid, however. Al-
most all the members of the Santiago colonial municipal government, the
same who had butted heads with Brigadier Buceta, ­were definitively impli-
cated as rebels before the end of the year. ­Others switched ranks from Span-
ish to the newly reformed ad hoc government in­de­pen­dently. Although a
number of prominent Santiagueros cast themselves as fearful witnesses to
early popu­lar opposition, all of the witnesses in the March military t­ rials in
Santiago ­were able to carefully restate the rebel goals, months before the
Provisional Government ever drafted its inaugural document. “They said
they came in the name of the p ­ eople . . . t​ o reconquer the rights of f­ ree men
and throw off foreign domination once and for all,” one witness ad-­libbed.28

The Lava Spread Everywhere | 181

As the government formed in late summer 1863, news traveled fast. Suspects
in the Puerto Plata t­ rials of August 1863 already knew that a letter had been
sent to the queen asking for the return of the republic, prob­ably before the
letter even crossed the Atlantic.29
Military leaders called on a new history of the “extinguished” First Re-
public to redeem the territory. Their rhe­toric was steeped in tales of heroism
and treason. Rebel leaders and ­others recast 1844—­once tentatively called
“Separation”—as “In­de­pen­dence,” and the previous republic achieved in-
creasingly glorious, even mythic, proportions. “Dominicans! The homeland
of the 27th of February, the country of sacrifices, calls you to her aid!”
exhorted one general; many echoed his exact phrasing.30 A number of the
impor­tant Liberation Army leaders ­were veterans of older campaigns. Trini-
tario veteran Ramón Mella called to other 1844 veterans explic­itly. “To my
co-­citizens. The Republic has called you: to arms! . . . I​ am a soldier of the
February 27th Column, you know me, and I am h ­ ere to call a few of my own,”
he began, continuing explic­itly: “Sandoval, Lloveres, Sosa, Maldonado, Juan
Suero, Valenas, Marcos Evangelista, . . . d ​ o not forget that the Republic that
gave you the fame and glory that your compañeros have for you.” Spain had
already martyred many, Mella reminded veterans, invoking Sánchez but also
many earlier military officers killed by Santana during the republic: “[All
who have died], rise from the other side of the tomb, crying ‘Revenge!’ ‘Re-
venge!’ Dominicans! Listen to the patriotic laments of so many martyrs for
liberty! . . . ​The patria is demanding revenge!”31 Mella reminded his au-
dience of Santana’s 1845 murder of the w ­ oman who might have sewn the
first Dominican flag: “And you, my friends of Santo Domingo, do not forget
that Santana was the murderer of Trinidad Sánchez!” Other generals also in-
voked a heroic past of the republic. “Long Live the Dominican Republic . . . ​
on Year 17 of the country,” another general reminded his audience.32
The reinvention of a national community required a wiping clean of old
caudillo loyalties. The fighting dismantled Santana’s and Báez’s patronage
ties significantly. Báez, in Eu­rope, was absent during the height of the fight-
ing. Santana’s network of support catastrophically disintegrated: he could
not dole out the military titles and patronage as he had done prior to Span-
ish arrival; then the rebellion undermined him; fi­nally, he resigned in dis-
grace from the Spanish administration completely. His death a short time
­later furthered the fragmentation of his former supporters and swelled the
Restoration ranks further.33 Certainly, anti-­Santana sentiment was manifest
in the rebel ranks; “Abajo España! Abajo el Gran Pendejo!” was a common

182 | Chapter 6
refrain. One poet suggested a sea change in popu­lar sentiment, long in de-
velopment, away from loyalties to the disgraced caudillo,

Your ­children, your dear ­children,

who used to worship you,
who adored you fervently
you must see them celebrating your ruin34

The Provisional Government, which personified cross-­party loyalties, de-

clared the death penalty for Santana in September 1863. A ­ fter his a­ ctual
death from illness a year ­later, a number of epitaphs excoriated him, includ-
ing the following:

­ ere lies a ­great idiot

H
despotic like no other
he did not understand his fate
and he died like a pig
without having done anything good.35

The spokesmen of the Provisional Government responded to Spanish accu-

sations (and real vestiges) of party factionalism. Their public overtures, ac-
cordingly, ­were insistently nonpartisan. “We are b ­ rothers,” Cabral reminded
his audience in 1861, continuing, “Our arms are open to receive you . . . ​
dominicanos all, ­union, strength, enthusiasm and confidence, and I
promise you that the Country ­will be freed.36 “Co-­citizens, a cordial welcome
to all Dominicans, what­ever your convictions have been, and in good faith,
come take your place in the glorious lines of the patria,” a government writer
announced, invitingly.37
Some leaders’ treatises appealed explic­itly to an egalitarian nationalism.
Of all the grievous ele­ments of the occupation, “social differences, caused by,
among other ­things, the importations of titles from Spain,” w ­ ere the most odi-
ous, Luperón wrote, concluding, “It is a thousand times more worthwhile to
die than to be slaves.”38 ­Others concurred. “In Spain t­ here are distinctions
of class and trade, that is to say, in­equality is consecrated,” an anonymous
pamphlet writer observed critically.39 In their proclamations, the refrain
was often that of the former republic—­“God, Country and Liberty”—­but
­others deepened its social implications. “Homeland, honor, and humanity,”
Ramón Mella exhorted, for example.40 “death or liberty,” announced
one general; “Liberty, In­de­pen­dence, Union,” and “Liberty—­In­de­pen­dence—­
the heroic Dominican ­people!” concluded ­others.41 Explic­itly more radical

The Lava Spread Everywhere | 183

was Gregorio Luperón’s version, scrawled in boldface: “in­de­pen­dence,
equality, and liberty,” he insisted forcefully during Polanco’s admin-
istration.42 “­Free by nature, f­ ree by institutions, f­ ree, ultimately, through
the conscience of our dignity—­there is no h ­ uman power that can sully it,”
Luperón concluded.43 “­free, we ­were born ­free, and we have broken f­ree
from Spanish oppression,” a poet proclaimed. “If yesterday we w ­ ere slaves
by means of treachery, ­today the popu­lar opinion damning ­those traitors
makes them instead the slaves, as we cry, restoration!”44 The call to arms
was universal. “All Dominicans are Soldiers of the Patria. . . . C ​ onsidering
that in Dominican society, t­ here are no privileged classes, every­one with-
out exception should wear war fatigues,” the Provisional Government an-
nounced, and from age fifteen to sixty, all ­were expected to fight.45

Italy, Poland, Santo Domingo! . . . ​The Sublime Trilogy

of Modern In­de­pen­dence!
As Spanish general José de la Gándara, veteran of ser­vice on two continents,
took the mantle of Spanish governor of Santo Domingo in 1864, he located
the Spanish proj­ect firmly on the side of reason and civilization. Address-
ing his subjects with a combination of severity and strained optimism, he
assured his listeners that Santo Domingo continued to be an “impor­tant
province of the monarchy.” Rule of law would continue to apply, for “legality
is an ele­ment of pro­gress and civilization that Spanish nationality promises
you,” the general maintained, “[along with] power­ful resources.” The rebels
­were outside of the law, reason, and civilization itself, he reasoned. To ­those
who had taken up arms, the general directed a chiding message. “You have
guns in your hands, but no reason in your conscience; . . . Y ​ ou raise a flag
that has no name, that does not protect any ele­ment of liberty, peace, and
civilization,” he accused. “I have the duty to pacify this territory . . . ​and I
expect to see it crowned with the success,” he warned.46 He had ample provi-
sions, it seemed, to deliver on his threats; a royal order of April 1864 autho-
rized the governor to use “any means in his power” to defeat the Dominican
insurrection.47
Provisional Government authors countered de la Gándara’s claims of legal-
ity and civilizing logic point by point, even as they largely accepted his prem-
ises. Nationalist, “civilized” language ruled their discourse, and they directed
missives widely. In the context of British, French, and U.S. acquiescence to
the reoccupation, Dominican re­sis­tance demanded not just armed strug­gle
locally but a hemispheric defense of their right to self-­determination. Repre-
sentatives of the Provisional Government sought international attention and

184 | Chapter 6
condemnation, if not aid. They dedicated the in­de­pen­dence declaration to
“God, the w ­ hole world, and the throne of Spain.” Signatories announced
the global import of the fight succinctly: “You have given us the mission of
proving to the World, that a weak p ­ eople cannot have their voice silenced by
a large and noble Nation, if they are not afraid to fight for justice.” “We are
guided by humanitarian princi­ples, like the rest of civilized Nations,” a dec-
laration insisted. Ulises Espaillat, serving on the Provisional Government’s
Foreign Relations Commission, circulated their protests to the govern-
ments of ­Eng­land, France, and the United States, “to make manifest to the
civilized world the illegal proceedings and sinister and torturous methods
[of ] Spain.”48 Rebels invoked the Monroe Doctrine, prodding the war-­torn
United States to respond, even if only rhetorically. “[Annexation] obviously
violates the Monroe Doctrine,” a Boletín Oficial editorial implored.49
Provisional Government authors made pointed parallels between their
strug­gles for national determination and t­ hose of central and southern Eu­
rope. From the safety of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Dominican author Félix
María del Monte wrote a poem calling the republic an “American Poland,”
a “tropical siren” who would redeem herself in strug­gle.50 “Italy, Poland,
Santo Domingo! H ­ ere I have the sublime trilogy of modern in­de­pen­dence!”
proclaimed the Boletín Oficial.51 Poets wrote elegies to Risorgimento leader
Giussepe Garibaldi in par­tic­ul­ar, for his actions in Uruguay as well as the
Italian peninsula. Ireland and Hungary, too, presented timely comparisons.52
They w ­ ere only reiterating what Geffrard had said two years before. His early
protest questioned: “Haitians . . . c​ ould you consent [to annexation], in the
nineteenth ­century, when Italy, Hungary, and Poland successfully regain their
liberty and in­de­pen­dence, oppressed by less terrible servitude than Spain?”
“History and posterity w ­ ill applaud our heroism and civilized nations w ­ ill
avenge our defeat and our patriotism,” Geffrard had asserted. The advances
of the nineteenth ­century rendered ­these claims irrevocable, Dominican au-
thors now argued. “Liberty! . . . ​Who in the nineteenth ­century dares to ask
what it is? No one; b ­ ecause . . . ​that orphaned and lonely word . . . i​s the
bravest expression of the world’s ­future,” an editorial exulted.53
Rebels vaunted Haiti’s and the Dominican Republic’s decades-­ long
achievements of in­de­pen­dence. Despite invoking glorious in­de­pen­dence
in 1844, they dated Dominican experimentation with democracy to the be-
ginning of unification with Haiti in 1822, as they chided the queen: “This
­people enjoyed forty years of po­liti­cal and civil liberty ­under republican rule,
tolerance in religious m­ atters, and innumerable other advantages, not least
among them a National Congress and the participation in public affairs that

The Lava Spread Everywhere | 185

democracy necessarily brings with it, a poor fit with monarchical and even
colonial regimes.”54 A power­ful revolution made Haiti ­free, and the Brit-
ish islands w ­ ere now “calmly on the path of betterment and pro­gress” ­after
emancipation, an author argued in the Boletín Oficial. Haiti’s achievements
in just sixty-­three years ­were remarkable, the writer asserted. “Thanks to the
demo­cratic system, Haiti has achieved the same level of civilization as exists
in ­sister Republics,” he concluded.55 “Who, then, should win in this strug­gle?
Spain, that is, the Monarchy . . . o ​ r Santo Domingo, the democracy . . . ? . . . ​
­Will the cause of humanity and civilization win?”56 It was the colonizing
Spaniards who ­were uncivilized. Santana might have been a “scandal to civi-
lization” for his collusion, but it was Spain’s Liberal Union government that
held the most spectacular blame; it had failed to admit its “embarrassing
and willful misconduct . . . i​ n a proj­ect as barbarous as it is ridicu­lous.”57 The
Dominican Republic, just like its neighbor, deserved autonomy. Annexation
“of a ­free ­people to the most despotic and backward Nation of the globe”
was disastrous, the authors concluded.58 Spain has brought “misery and ca-
lamities of its own poor administration; their Government . . . ​has made
the country move backward,” the in­de­pen­dence declaration accused. An-
nexation amounted to “tyranny against right, in short, barbarism against
civilization.”59 It was a proj­ect “as barbarous as it is ridicu­lous,” echoed an-
other.60 Poets called Spain a “prideful sultan,” a barbarous “tyrant” spilling
the blood of “noble Américans.” “Wild despotism w ­ ill never, never be able
to relax . . . ​on heroic ground,” the author warned.61
In official addresses, Provisional Government decrees ­were fairly quiet
about connecting Spain’s slaveholding to Spanish misrule on Dominican
soil. Cuba could not remain ­under “a government from another ­century
much longer,” one decree announced vaguely.62 A handful ­were direct in
using abolitionist declarations as condemnation. “Dominicans: the day
has arrived in which Spain, the only country that insists on keeping slaves,
should lose her colonies in the Antilles. . . . A ​ mer­i­ca should belong to it-
self,” General Ramón Mella argued. Letter writers to the Boletín Oficial
63

talked about local prejudice, however. “I’ll take advantage of the moment
to lift a ­great weight from my conscience,” a man wrote from the capital, “as
every­thing they write ­here is a big lie; every­thing they say about treating us
well is completely the opposite.” He spoke of relentless, repeated reminders
from Spanish officials about how, in Spanish territories, “­there cannot be
black Generals and black col­o­nels” and openly speculated about the threats
to Dominican individuals in other Spanish possessions. “The only t­ hing left
to do to disrespect us more is to spit in our face,” he concluded. He urged his

186 | Chapter 6
compatriots in Santiago not to believe news of Spanish reinforcements, of
the distrust and misery in the capital, and of the strength of the re­sis­tance.
“Tell all them [in the Cibao] to stay strong,” he wrote, “­because this cannot
last long . . . ​reconquer this country again, that’s just ­music, not even all of
Spain can do it.”64

No, We Do Not Want Your Lights

Sometimes, leaders went beyond republican critiques to grapple with and
articulate alternative models of civilization. “Prove to the world that you are
part of the indomitable and guerrilla ­peoples who live civilization through
customs, words, and its idea,” Francisco del Rosario Sánchez began, “but
who prefer liberty to all the advantages of rights.” The advantages of formal
rights ­were nothing but “golden chains,” he concluded.65 In the develop-
mentalist furor that surrounded the island, some authors also articulated
a complicated riposte to Spanish promises. Spanish authorities promised
industry, commercialization, and pro­gress. “We want this unlucky country
to prosper,” the first Spanish governor had proclaimed.66 Dominican writers
responded to their plans with distrust. While many in their ranks might have
wished for greater capital and infrastructure—­such hopes had been, ­after
all, at the root of loyalist sentiment among a number of merchants in the
Cibao and Puerto Plata—­they ­were suspicious of Spanish-­led schemes. “You
want to exploit our coal, the silver and gold that is said to abound,” accused
an opposition pamphlet in 1861. The writer continued, “Our agriculture is
not ruined. It’s true that it is paltry; but that is a result of the number of
inhabitants who can dedicate themselves to it. . . . Y​ ou come to rid of us of
property to which we have a perfect right.”67 Dominican loyalist Manuel de Jesús
Galván retorted:

Well, fine: what does the author want? That the rock carbon and the iron
remain permanently in their veins and beds, that is to say, hidden and
denied to civilization? That’s as much as can be deduced from his verbal
mess. Or does he want Santo Domingo to remain as it is, with its paltry
agriculture, its virgin forests, its coal deposits, without civilization ever
using ­those ele­ments of well-­being and pro­gress? Is that to say he wants
the Dominican ­people to remain immobilized in disgrace . . . ​limited
to stasis, passive in the midst of richness and in view of the progressive
march of civilization!68

Democracy, not development, was the core princi­ple of civilization, his op-
ponent argued. “We think it better that the small amount be split among

The Lava Spread Everywhere | 187

all of our farmers than for two or three of yours to monopolize every­one’s
work,” the Treason pamphlet offered testily. Moreover, the author rejected
rapacious development; advancement was not worth the cost. And so the
pamphlet concluded forcefully: “Spain is mistaken in her conviction, pur-
portedly magnanimous, of the mission to bring to our soil all of the ele­ments
of civilization, judging it in a complete state of barbarism, in exchange for
domination. Dominicans can tell her: No, we do not want your lights, ­because
we prefer to live in the utmost degree of backwardness, to falling, ­little by
­little, shining, into the most degrading servitude.”69 ­Later government mis-
sives compared the nonexploitation of Dominican resources with feminine
modesty, calling the territory a “respectable matron of the American world.”
Despite being small, “we nonetheless appear big in the eyes of the universe,”
the author insisted. 70 Rebel authors mocked loyalists’ willful claims to mo-
nopolize civilization and reason. “We rarely read La Razón, ­unless ­there’s
nothing to do and ­we’re in a bad mood,” Boletín writers teased.71

Mass Mobilization, Alliances, and Social Mobility

Government members commented on the vast difference between the fight-
ing and all previous po­liti­cal mobilizations. The liberal movement of 1858
had represented “the revolution of a few, dragging the masses along with
them,” one author wrote in the Boletín Oficial. The new mobilization was far
more popu­lar. “In the current revolution, it was the masses who r­ ose up,
dragging with them every­one ­else,” he observed; “in this one, the educated
have put themselves in ser­vice of the masses.”72 As they entered towns, rebel
groups sought a pronouncement of loyalty from residents. “Thousands and
thousands” signed the Act of In­de­pen­dence.73 “The authorities and vecinos of
this town and its surroundings are gathered . . . t​ o pronounce it in ­f avor
of the Holy Cause of In­de­pen­dence, unanimously agreeing to raise the glo-
rious Dominican flag,’ ” San José de Ocoa’s statement read, and nearly two
hundred signatures followed.74
For all the efforts of the Santiago-­based Provisional Government, the dis-
persed anti-­Spanish fighters had to be largely self-­reliant. Although some-
times gathered in large numbers, rebels tended to fight in smaller guerrilla
groups of several hundred or fewer, gathering provisions and materiel as
they could. Dispersed amid difficult conditions, they relied both on their
ties to rural families and on their own knowledge of the countryside for
food. Rebels often ate the c­ attle and pigs that roamed f­ ree. Plantains, corn,
and some meats ­were purchased when funds permitted, and nonperishables
arrived from Haiti. “­Every soldier of ours was a montero,” Bonó wrote approv-

188 | Chapter 6
ingly.75 Munitions ­were a constant prob­lem, and most of the guns ­were sto-
len from Spanish soldiers. Anywhere from seven hundred to three thousand
rebels ­were involved in the Puerto Plata rebellion of August 1863, for exam-
ple, but many reportedly had just five bullets each.76 O ­ thers reported that as
many as one in four had only blanks, while the remaining men had only two
or three bullets each, rationed from Santiago. Clothing, too, was in constant
shortage. In order to maintain what standing forces did exist, soldiers of the
Liberation Army ­were to receive sixty papeletas.
In the chaos of mobilization, men ­rose to leadership ranks in the army
and Provisional Government on an unpre­ce­dented scale. Officers’ ranks
drew from a wider swath of social classes as a result. “The War of Restoration
was an event of profoundly popu­lar roots; its leaders just as its soldiers ­were
­people from the entrails of the pueblo,” Bosch writes.77 In previous de­cades,
caudillos had mobilized dependents for military operations, largely through
patronage ties and the promises of military spoils. In the war against the
Spanish, the dynamics ­were much more diverse. Prowess and organ­izing
capabilities ruled. Some emerged from local notoriety to something more
closely resembling prestige. Prior loyalties did not stain capable command-
ers; a number of military officials and administrators, only the year prior,
had been loyal to (and even fighting for) the Spanish. A number of men who
became national figures r­ ose from ­humble origins. Gaspar Polanco, a ­cattle
man from Guayubín, was illiterate, but he was a “capable military chief . . . ​
and brave.” Anyway, the disorder of pitched fighting and guerrilla mobili-
zations secured such trajectories. “On top of this, ­there was no one who
could have given [Polanco] the position, nor was ­there anyone who could
have denied him it,” Bosch surmises.78 Within months, Polanco became
the nominal head of the army, a formal title for an informal network of
combatants.79
Some leaders, capitalizing on the extralegal spaces of the center-­island
region, w ­ ere brutal opportunists and violent men. Juan Rondón, for exam-
ple, was a ­career ­cattle rustler; authorities reported that he had accompanied
his f­ ather on thievery missions on both sides of the border from a very young
age.80 In adulthood, he was at times brutally violent. Allegedly he murdered
a pregnant ­woman from the west and sliced out her unborn baby as she died.
The sensational crime was discussed throughout the center-­island region.
Rondón first clashed with Spanish authorities in March 1863 when, as a passive
col­o­nel, he came u ­ nder suspicion of spreading alarming rumors about the
meaning of the announced “state of siege” on the island. His defense was
agile. Claiming to be the peón of a ­woman named Merced Marunga in Las

The Lava Spread Everywhere | 189

Matas, he had applied for a license to leave Higuey and return to the center
of the island, instead stopping at some point in the capital; all his travels, he
argued, ­were as an innocent dependent. Short of evidence, the commission
freed him.81 Rondón was captured in March 1864 and brought to Port-­au-­
Prince ­under strict vigilance of the area commander. “Men like that cannot
possibly be considered émigrés in Haiti or any other civilized country,” Manuel
Álvarez observed.82 Other caudillo leaders like “El Chivo” w ­ ere nothing but
“vulgar criminals and assassins,” Spanish authorities accused.83 Haitian offi-
cials, too, ­were weary of the unrest, accusing Dominican border “criminals”
of po­liti­cal troublemaking.84 Other individuals simply had untrustworthy
allegiances, scheming to put themselves or friends in power. Ramón Mella
was so disgusted with one general that he retreated from the center of the
island back to Cibao to regroup.85
At times leaders’ cruel tactics and misconduct ­were so extreme that other
guerrilla leaders felt compelled to intercede against, even murder, promi-
nent transgressors. General Pedro Florentino, long established in the center
of the island (San Juan de la Maguana), committed considerable atrocities
in his southwestern campaigns. He murdered twenty-­three ­people in Las
Matas, evidently to take their possessions. “In the small valley near the moun-
tain, the ground was still bloody, and the hair of the victims was still caught
up in the underbrush,” a horrified Spanish official alleged, noting that the
bodies, left unburied, had been torn apart by wild dogs.86 The total number
of local murders allegedly committed by Florentino and his accomplices—­
most by machete—­was 125, with most of the bodies discarded in the moun-
tains in the same way. A number of Dominican men detained by the Spanish
testified that Florentino had “forced” them to travel with his ranks; one even
claimed that the general had shot his ­father.87 Florentino allegedly turned
over the son of a prominent Dominican general to his ­brother-­in-­law, Juan
“el Ciego,” who marched the captive man to a cemetery and split his head
with a machete.88 Florentino openly gave permission for looting as a way
of appeasing his band of soldiers, but his authoritarian grip tightened si­
mul­ta­neously.89 Harsh punishment of desertion was “of absolute necessity
to save the Patria,” he concluded severely. He ordered executions and autho-
rized other officials to do the same.90 Eventually, Florentino—­“rapacious,
bloodthirsty, cowardly and inept”—­was apprehended and killed by the
very rebel leaders he claimed to represent, including the infamous Juan
Rondón.91 Similar conflicts bubbled up elsewhere among abusive leaders
and their rivals.

190 | Chapter 6
 The trajectory of one of the most famous Restoration fighters, Gregorio
Luperón—­who would influence politics u ­ ntil just years before his death
at the end of the century, even as he repeatedly refused the presidency—­
exemplified the political mobility that military prowess afforded brilliant
strategists and leaders. Luperón, the son of a modest fruit seller (he took
a version of her French-­Haitian name, Duperrón, and was not recognized
by his ­father), learned woodworking and a bit of En­glish from his artisan
master during his childhood in Puerto Plata.92 The international itinerary
of his older ­brother exemplified the extensive regional ties of Puerto Plata:
José Gabriel Luperón fought for the Union in the U.S. Civil War, attaining
the rank of captain.93 ­After some scrapes with authorities and immediately
opposing Spanish annexation, the younger Gregorio fled from Puerto Plata
to Cap-­Haïtien to New York, subsequently leaving for Mexico and Jamaica
before returning to Dominican soil ­under an assumed identity. Sometime
in the summer of 1862, he arrived amid the hotbed of conspirators south of
Monte Cristi, in Sabaneta; during the next few years, he became a close per-
sonal friend and ally of Puerto Rican abolitionist and in­de­pen­dentista Ramón
Emeterio Betances, firebrand liberal priest ­Father Fernando Antonio Mer-
iño, and other itinerant, anticolonial gadflies. With veteran general Lucas
Evangelista de Peña, Luperón fought at Sabaneta in the first rebellions of the
spring of 1863, earning himself a death sentence from the Spanish in absen-
tia; he was also, crucially, at the Grito de Capotillo that summer.
Luperón’s heroics at the B ­ attle of Santiago catapulted him to military
prominence—he was, by his own admission, “guerrillero improvisado”—­
and he led hundreds in some of the most impor­tant ­battles of the Restoration
fighting. ­After Capotillo, he headed south to face Santana himself at Arroyo
Bermejo ­later that same month.94 His newfound prowess—­and the incred-
ible risks he engaged—­might have overwhelmed him briefly; his biographers
detail a moment where he almost walked intentionally into Spanish fire.95
Luperón was literate, but “as any son of a pueblo whose parents did not have
the means to pay for school,” Bosch notes.96 He consistently refused admin-
istrative posts that w
­ ere offered to him. Ricardo Curiel served as Luperón’s
secretary during the war, and memoirs of the fighting would ­later be written
by fellow Restorationist and friend, poet Manuel Rodríguez Objío. So sudden
was Luperón’s rise to prominence that in the first few months he would be
looked upon with suspicion both by established political-­military figures and
by the new Provisional Government; he was even jailed for a short time. By
early 1864, however, his authority was difficult to contest. Among the most

The Lava Spread Everywhere | 191

idealistic of the politico-­military leaders of the period, he would also go on to
be one of the most influential for de­cades following, even as the depths of his
anticolonial views often took him to the wrong side of the law.

Robes­pierre of a New Kind

The first president of the Provisional Government, José Salcedo, was a prom-
inent and capable figure. Salcedo, born to Dominican parents in Madrid,
enjoyed a profitable income in the north coast as a wood seller and land-
owner, with a number of dependents living on his land. P ­ eople respected his
stature.97 He was also an avowed conservative Báez supporter, having even
conspired against the liberal Revolution of 1857. In the first year of annexa-
tion, Spanish authorities tried Salcedo for the murder of a dependent man
on his property. W ­ hether the prosecution was motivated by his opposition
to the regime or ­whether the trial galvanized his opposition, fighting had
already begun upon his release. Salcedo arrived with men to the Septem-
ber fighting in Santiago, as the town was already u ­ nder siege. Promptly, he
assumed the presidency of the Provisional Government, less than a month
old, to the irritation of some leaders. The rank and file in Santiago, too, saw
it as a usurpation.98 Over the next year, Salcedo continued to campaign as he
governed. In August, he dismissed his ministry and ruled with only his per-
sonal secretary.99 He resented Luperón and hoped to replace him with a pli-
ant and wealthy general, a man educated in E ­ ng­land and with merchant ties
as far as Louisiana.100 A number of unconfirmed rumors swirled around Sal-
cedo and his small coterie: the first, that he was too conciliatory with Span-
ish brigadier Buceta, who attempted secret negotiations to recoup Santiago;
the second, that he and his power­ful allies ­were maneuvering to bring Báez
back to the country; the third, that he was prepared to accept conditions
for withdrawal that would leave Spain with control over Samaná or another
north coast port. As Spanish forces regained the south, Salcedo seemed too
conciliatory, calling for a return to smaller campaigns. He traveled back to
Santiago to defend a friend who was suspected of pro-­Báez plotting. In the
capital city, Spanish authorities publicly celebrated Salcedo’s cooperation
over prisoner exchange. Suspicions mounted.101
Revolutionary figures moved to oust Salcedo. Writing as “A soldier of
Capotillo” in October 1864, Luperón urged popu­lar vigilance of all former
strongmen and their annexationist collaborators. “­Those men comprised a
po­liti­cal party that we can call traitors, and since Dominican In­de­pen­dence,
since 27 February 1844, they have worked for the ruin of their country,” he
accused, “­those men sold their hearts and consciences to ­every nationality

192 | Chapter 6
but their own.” Báez was as corrupt as Santana, Luperón added stonily. “Be-
ware, liberating soldiers of In­de­pen­dence, beware!” he warned, “Do not have
compassion for traitors and traffickers of our freedom! Beware! Beware!
Beware!”102 Supported by other military figures, General Gaspar Polanco—­
who had been fighting since the siege of Santiago—­assumed the presi-
dential post. He ordered Salcedo’s expulsion. Before the ousted president
might even be disembarked, however, Polanco ordered him shot. Other
generals, Salcedo’s allies, and even some of Polanco’s allies reacted with
umbrage and shock. The most radical period of Restoration fighting was
about to begin.103
The radicalism of Gaspar Polanco’s administration was immediately ob-
vious, from policy to the language of everyday governance. ­Under Polanco’s
brief tenure, “Excelencia, Señoría,” and other titles ­were abolished.104 Lead-
ers addressed their fellow fighters occasionally as “los pueblos,” sometimes
as “compatriotas,” more often still as “Dominicans,” but with increasing
frequency as “conciudadanos” (co-­citizens or fellow citizens). So elevated
was the language of citizenship that writers called the president “President
Citizen Gaspar Polanco,” the ministers became “Minister Citizen Rafael
Leyba,” and so on.105 Not every­thing was a revolutionary purge; Polanco
kept on Salcedo’s vice president, Ulises Espaillat, as an amenable, ­adept,
and idealistic writer and administrator. In fact, he valued civil administra-
tion. Polanco and his ministers passed a decree to fund primary school in
all the communes and mount a campaign for universal vaccination.106 “De-
mocracy is the guiding light of the world,” Espaillat wrote. “Equality of rank
and rights, popu­lar government, power exercised by the masses, abnega-
tion, generosity, and heroism”—­these ­were the reforms that the revolution
sought.107 Writers filled the pages of the government bulletin with praise for
the French revolution, excoriation of monarchy, and an expansion of demo­
cratic practice to include the populace. “American society is by nature and
necessity plebeian,” one observed.108 Unnamed authors penned odes to
hard work.109 Polanco did not draft any of ­those missives himself, of course,
but sincere rebels who admired him and eagerly collaborated surrounded
him. He and his allies committed to win the war and to revolutionize politics
at the same time. Already prominent figures ­were wondering aloud which
region might claim the seat of government a­ fter fighting ended. Polanco and
his administrators urged them to focus on unity instead.110 He redoubled
military efforts. Rodríguez Objío called him “Robes­pierre of a new kind.”111
The tone of Provisional Government writings directed to Spanish au-
thorities and Dominican loyalists became irreverent. From Puerto Rico and

The Lava Spread Everywhere | 193

from Spain, journalists and authorities rained invective on the Polanco ad-
ministration. One Spanish po­liti­cal cartoonist satirized all the rebels in an
­imagined pidgin Spanish-­Kreyòl.112 Figures around Polanco responded with
absolute defiance. Spanish authorities called Ulises Espaillat an “impenitent
revolutionary.”113 Someone penned a comic opera mocking a prominent
pro-­Spanish priest:

Stop lying, dear ­Father, and stop wielding that ancient pen . . . ​
You prove that the Spanish despot has lost.
When your ancientness offers me peace with startling quickness if I
­accept chains . . . ​
Our olive branch is our cannon.
Make the Ogre of Castille understand . . . ​
Your letter made me double over with laughter . . . ​
If your pride and brutality think they can dominate my country . . . ​
You are the one who is being played with.

“Stop playing games already,” the author taunted loyalists repeatedly, and the
fighting continued.114
In the months before Polanco’s rise, military standoffs reached a criti-
cal juncture. Dominican rebels could mount long sieges of the Spanish, but
they ­could not defeat them, and supplies of munitions waned.115 Spanish
authorities ordered seizures of rebel goods, but the pace of seizures slowed
when ­there ­were few possessions left to take.116 The governor proved totally
intractable on Spanish confiscation of pack animals, even though local offi-
cials tried to explain to him that the seizures ­were “the most onerous public
ser­vice in the land.”117 “It must be noted that this poverty cannot be so g
­ reat
as supposed,” he observed, in a haughty non sequitur, “given that many
jobs . . . ​are vacant.”118 The Provisional Government enacted identical mea­
sures, decreeing that any soldier deserting—­for example, seeking refuge in
Haiti—­would face confiscation of his possessions.119 All manner of food—­
salted meat, flour, vegetables, yucca, yam (ñame), even plantains—­continued
to be difficult to find in many towns, as boat seizures halted trade from Saint
Thomas. High prices kept many “emaciated and weakened by hunger,”
a U.S. observer reported gravely.120 Dominican merchants suffered greatly,
cut off from the interior.121 Prisons and makeshift detentions brimmed with
detainees in terrible conditions, as authorities converted vari­ous buildings
to hold the captives.122 Even daily meals w ­ ere improbable for prisoners with-
out ­family nearby. From the first fall of fighting, prisoners begged for an au-
dience with an official who might see to it that their basic ­water and sanitary

194 | Chapter 6
needs be met, as well as grant them access to a small vegetable garden.123
Rebel prisoners ­were made to do all sorts of menial tasks while detained by
the Spanish. Four fled at the riverbanks where they had been sent to clean
the chamber pots, for example.124 ­Others had to do hard ­labor while in
shackles and chains.125 Improbably, investors continued to send agricultural
indenture schemes and other plans to authorities, impervious to the violent
and hungry stalemate.126
In power by the early fall of 1864, Polanco pushed forward. He began with
a campaign of volunteers on an impossible, symbolic mission to attack the
entrenched Spanish troops in Puerto Plata. He ordered the creation of re-
gional councils to detect pro-­Spanish conspiracy.127 Aware that inflation was
hurting poorer urban citizens and desperately seeking funds, Polanco created
a state tobacco mono­poly, ordered “forced loans” from prominent citizens,
seized goods of ­those who had defected to Spanish lines, and tried to promote
cotton near Dajabón.128 To Spanish authorities, Polanco’s tone was unyield-
ing. “We are not afraid of your threats,” he warned. “­Today all Dominicans
are on the front lines for our country, and nothing you say can offend me.
We are not afraid of your artillery nor all of your army, we have taken up arms
to throw off your yoke, and we ­will defend ourselves to the death.”129 He or-
dered campaigns everywhere. Center-­island fighting raged, and campaigns
reached all the way east to Higüey. Polanco ordered t­ hose who had returned
to their homes in the Cibao back out to fight. The call was immediately suc-
cessful; more than two thousand men remobilized.130 Spanish authorities
also dug in. “A homicidal drama” already sixteen months long, Polanco’s
ministers lamented, was spilling “a precious blood, the blood of an unlucky
and innocent ­people . . . ​resolved to bury themselves in the ruins and ashes
piling up around them” before giving up their freedom.131 Soon, the admin-
istration turned to Haiti for help.

A Word to the Dominicans, a Word to the Haitians

As the fighting first recommenced, the Geffrard administration had l­ittle
choice but to demonstrate cooperation with the Spanish. Santana tried to
forbid all communication with Haiti entirely; military and civil authorities
­were instructed to use extreme vigilance.132 The Moniteur Haitïen announced
that Dominican refugees from the border area should be marched to Port-­
au-­Prince. “Haitian authorities have shown themselves to be completely di-
vorced from the movement . . . ​and desirous of order,” Spanish authorities
noted with satisfaction.133 A smattering of firings followed. Geffrard’s offi-
cials dismissed Cap-­Haïtien’s governor for allowing rebels to gather ­there.

The Lava Spread Everywhere | 195

Further east on the north coast, another commanding general was fired a­ fter
he received a prominent Dominican rebel. The new commander at Fort Lib-
erté in Ouanaminthe, General Philanthrope Noël, received explicit instruc-
tions not to let anyone cross from the Dominican side without a passport
signed by the Spanish governor himself, and he promised to inform Spanish
authorities about the suspected whereabouts of prominent insurgent lead-
ers.134 Madrid officials noted with approval that Geffrard passed on confi-
dential tips that former Dominican minister Felipe Alfau was conspiring in
Paris, “as proof of his affection for Spain and her Government and of his
good intentions thereto.”135 When Francisco Bonó, member of the Provi-
sional Government, had visited Port-­au-­Prince, officials observed a “strict
neutrality,” ordering him to leave immediately.136
President Geffrard stuck closely to realpolitik, but ­there ­were also clear
limits to his cooperation with Spain. When the Spaniards tried to land a ves-
sel in Manzanillo Bay, individuals from the garrison ­there ordered them to
depart. The rebuffed Spanish commander, disgruntled, sent a courier all the
way to Port-­au-­Prince to ask President Geffrard directly for the right to land
troops on Haiti’s northern coast, forty miles west of the Dominican border.
President Geffrard starkly rejected the officer’s demand, announcing that
he “could not permit one soldier to land on Haytian territory.” The Spanish
troops ­were forced to land near the trenches of the embattled town of Puerto
Plata instead.137 Rumors circulated that Geffrard was quietly formulating
his own anti-­Spanish schemes. Some alleged that he sought a protectorate
for the east, administered by a trinational oversight federation of France,
­Eng­land, and Spain. The British consul had rejected it, reports claimed,
leaving Geffrard in the uncomfortable position of continued collaboration.
“I am trying and ­will try to avoid provoking any reason for complaint from
the Spanish government,” he reportedly explained.138
Semicovert Dominican-­Haitian military alliances, meanwhile, could not
be stanched. Haitian border officials and Dominican rebels who had gath-
ered in the center-­island area collaborated often. General José Maria Ca-
bral was frequently in Las Caobas recruiting rebels of all flags.139 Pop­u­lar
organ­izing was obviously gaining strength. In Puerto Plata, an individual
named Filormé brought letters from Haiti, spreading word of help that was
to come.140 Domingo Ramírez had a number of rumored allies and friends
in his hometown of Neiba, including high officials of relative standing, like
General Pedro Nolasco. He counted on local help and even U.S. aid, accord-
ing to vari­ous sources. Letter writers seeking the alliance of Haitian bor-
der officials ­were friendly, affectionate, and insistent. “Dear General and

196 | Chapter 6
friend,” one Dominican letter began, at the very outset of the fighting. “Con-
sidering our position ­today, with ten dead, ­because of the revolution that we
have been planning . . . a​ nd the promise that you made to our dear General,
Don Fernando Valerio (rip), I find myself in the necessity of seeking your
help, for protection by the army u ­ nder your command, so that we can shake
off and throw out from our land the Spanish standard and its armies. . . . ​
Please remember our friend,” the anonymous writer urged.141 In a related
discussion over jurisdiction and territory, the mingling expatriate groups,
center-­island residents, and rebels reached an agreement about some of
the center-­island towns, like Hinche, which had grown to be socially Hai-
tian over the years. The new jurisdictions w ­ ere to be respected, the parties
agreed, in any foregoing collaboration. Rebels and local Haitian officers
­were supportive of ­these agreements.142
In center-­island regions, collaboration with the rebellion grew relent-
lessly. Pop­ul­ ar Haitian collaboration intensified ­after abolition in the United
States, the Spanish consul claimed; Spain was now the only imperial slave
power that threatened encroachment. Along the border, officials became
openly recalcitrant to extradite Dominican rebel leaders and remit them to
the Spanish, since the rebels themselves ­were simply too popu­lar among the
Haitian families living t­ here.143 Eastern rebels must have received the news
eagerly. One Dominican loyalist general tried to mobilize the elite anti-­
Haitian fears of previous decades—­warning that “8000 Haitians ­were ready
to disembark” in the east as an invasion—­but his tale evidently held so ­little
salience among Dominican audiences that the rumor, for all its popular-
ity in the 1850s, was never repeated again.144 Rather, the west was a refuge
that many used. In a conciliatory mea­sure, the Spanish had to concede and
extend amnesty to ­those residents who chose to remain in Haiti, trying to
entice them to return. ­Cattle trade through San Juan, to Hincha, to Port-­au-­
Prince continued steadily. Hincha was not well watched at all, Spanish
authorities fretted.145
To the north, meanwhile, citizens of Cap-­Haïtien only increased their
support for the Dominican rebels. News of their brazen aid arrived second­
hand—­from a Canary Island resident in La Vega, from Tortuga via Puerto
Plata, from observers in the Turks and Caicos, from rumors on the ground in
northern Haiti—­but it reached Spanish authorities all the same. In Cap, fam-
ilies offered Dominican rebel exiles housing and protection. Whole groups
of Dominican exiles—­not just prominent military figures but also groups
primarily of w ­ omen and ­children—­arrived, often via other islands, and more
convoys ­were expected.146 Living in Cap-­Haïtien ­were allies of ­po­liti­cal and

The Lava Spread Everywhere | 197

military prominence like M. Macajauc, Laguerre Bart, Alexandre Pouget,
and General Sylvain Salnave, all of whom ­were close allies with Dominican
general Santiago Rodríguez or other­wise offered direct assistance at dif­fer­
ent junctures. A Saint Thomas man who regularly traveled between Monte
Cristi and Cap, Huberto Marzán, sewed the flag that flew in the early b ­ attles
of 1863. Reports from Haiti claimed that North American ships entered
147

and left Cap-­Haïtien daily, secretly disembarking weapons for the opposi-
tion.148 One Dominican living in Cap-­Haïtien allegedly had amassed fifteen
thousand locally manufactured bullets and was storing some within city
limits and some in nearby Limonade.149 Northern coast sea traffic can only
be speculated. A small boat caught off the coast of Puerto Plata carried
wheat, rice, ­rifles, lead, and a Haitian flag.150 Whole steamships sometimes
arrived, too.151 “Credible sources” suggested that north coast authorities
allowed private American ships to dock with weapons and speculated the aid
“could not have gone unnoticed” by the American government, e­ ither.152
Nameless runners ferried messages back and forth from Cap-­Haïtien, and
even neighboring islands, to Santiago.
Trade, and aid, in supplies and weapons flourished in the interior and on
the coast. Many Dominicans who had been living in Haiti for years ferried
gunpowder back through Neiba and Barahona.153 Commanders openly sent
missions in search of weapons. “Seek them from Haitian lines, but always
mindful of the Country,” one exhorted.154 A supply line thrived at the center
of the island; Haitian ­women sold soap, mackerel, codfish, flour, salt, and
other supplies at Monte Cristi, Guayubín, and Hinche, receiving coffee and
tobacco in barter.155 Every­one knew of the Hinche trade, which was infa-
mous.156 Runners picked up supplies from the frontier and amassed them
in Santiago. Mella allegedly gathered and sold ten thousand serones of to-
bacco to Haiti in exchange for war matériel in late 1863.157 Alfredo Deetjen,
born in Cap in 1824, was an impor­t ant merchant and politician in Santiago
de los Caballeros at the moment of annexation, and he immediately sup-
ported the creation of the Provisional Government. At the end of the year,
he headed back to Cap to negotiate for more munitions. He then traveled to
Port-­au-­Prince in search of a printing press that could spread the Domini-
can Provisional Government’s missives. L ­ ater, ad hoc officials in Santiago
used the press to print money.158 The Provisional Government announced
that the Haitian gourde would circulate in 1864; Spanish sources reported
that they sought a loan from Geffrard of 1.5 million gourdes, to be distrib-
uted evenly in the north, Cibao, and the south, payable at 6 ­percent annual
interest.159

198 | Chapter 6
 President Geffrard’s stance of studied neutrality, in the face of over-
whelming popu­lar support and Spanish threats, nearly brought his down-
fall. Spanish authorities observed the disorder with satisfaction, claiming
that the president, Minister Philippeau, and other Geffrard allies feared the
Dominican rebel movements as much as the Spanish did. Domestic po­liti­cal
opponents blended blatant personal ambition with criticism of Geffrard’s
approach. Soulouque wrote letters from Jamaica excoriating him, as did
other po­liti­cal exiles.160 Prominent families rallied opposition movements
in the south in 1862, in Artibonite the next year, and the north coast through
much of 1864. One of the po­liti­cal aspirants, Sylvain Salnave, claimed com-
mon cause with the Dominican rebel fight. As Geffrard’s personal guard
pursued him, he fled into Dominican territory and then Saint Thomas.161
Making a national tour in the spring of 1864, residents in Saint Marc and Go-
naïves received the president coldly. “Upon his arrival, doors w ­ ere closed, no
residents came out to see him, and none of the prominent families attended
the dance that was held in his honor,” an observer alleged. The ­family of
executed general Aimé Legros was particularly upset. Other recent reforms
exacerbated the mood. As the report continued, “The rude mea­sures that
Authorities have taken to execute the ban of vodou dancing has contributed
to the discontent.”162 In the capital, citizens simply m ­ atter-­of-­factly defied
Geffrard’s prohibitions. Dominicans came into town with large herds—­sixty
head of ­cattle, pairs of yoked oxen, and so on—to trade for flour and other
nonperishables. They made their sales and ­were on their way once more,
back to Dominican territory.163
As Dominican emissaries lobbied hard for a formal alliance, they empha-
sized popu­lar support, made appeals to Haiti’s internationalist leanings,
and warned that a prolonged strug­gle could result in the absorption of Haiti.
Spanish occupation “endangers true Haitian in­de­pen­dence,” one govern-
ment spokesperson argued, and he warned that a protracted strug­gle would
endanger Haitian sovereignty. Months before Polanco’s administration, in
a rare moment of discussing race and racism directly in the Boletín Oficial,
the author made an appeal to Haiti’s antiracist platform. “Haiti, more than
anyone, must fight to solve the impor­tant prob­lem of the equality of races,”
he began, “Haiti [is] so close to Cuba that it can, with just a small effort,
hear the cries [ayes] and laments of a numerous portion of humanity that
moans u ­ nder the weight of the chains of slavery.” The author praised Haiti, a
”­people so rightly proud of their own glory.” Si­mul­ta­neously, he warned that
Dominican and Cuban in­de­pen­dence w ­ ere vital, or that Haiti would become
“the slave of Spain.” He suggested a common po­liti­cal platform, arguing for

The Lava Spread Everywhere | 199

a treaty of “alliance, peace, commerce, friendship and borders, by which the
po­liti­cal ­future would be assured for all the inhabitants of both parts of the
island of Haiti, forever.”164
As months passed, the Dominican Provisional Government stepped up
its diplomatic efforts directly to the Haitian ­people. Another author in the
Boletín Oficial, prob­ably Espaillat, wrote “A Word to Dominicans, a Word to
Haitians”:

A curious fact, proven by experience, is that the ­people always march

ahead of their Governments. . . . There
​­ is not one Dominican who since
the first days of the revolution ­hasn’t asked himself a thousand times a
day, why the Haitians do not come to help us, given that we do not have
enough arms and munitions. . . . ​And Haitians ask themselves all the
time why Dominicans do not call on them. . . . ​What can possibly ex-
plain this extraordinary and unforeseen reason why? It is precisely the
Haitian and Dominican Governments, ­because ­there is no other way to
explain such a ridicu­lous fact. How can two p ­ eoples composed of the
same race, the same po­liti­cal interests, ruled by republican institutions,
and who have lived together as good friends, look at each other with in-
difference when one of them is in danger? Is not the downfall of one the
downfall of another? Is the danger of this one not the danger of that? In
a word, if the Dominican p ­ eople fall, does that not precipitate the fall
of the Haitian Republic? The Haitian p ­ eople understand that as well as
we do. It seems to us that it is past time that both Governments under-
stand . . . ​and unite to end foreign domination on the island of Haiti.165

“We profess the same po­liti­cal princi­ples,” another author insisted. “The
ele­ments that compose the Dominican ­people are identical to ­those that
compose the Haitian ­people,” he continued. The writer urged all Domini-
can men, from fifteen to sixty, to vote in the authorization of an island-­wide
alliance.166
Espaillat emphasized the popularity of the anticolonial fight and the
solidarity—­political and racial—­that existed between Haitians and Domini-
cans. Support for the rebellion, he argued, amounted to a “universal sym-
pathy” that the state could not possibly ignore. He continued: “­These
truths are too clear. They are within the grasp that even the most ­humble
of Haitian society, without needing explanation. . . . ​Now think: ask any
citizen of Haiti, any one at all, if the Government should help the Domini-
cans, and they ­will not hesitate to answer affirmatively. Is it that their logic

200 | Chapter 6
has more common sense than the reasoning of a man of State?” His tone
was frustrated, exasperated even. “What do you hope to see?” he queried,
continuing, “It is a glorious strug­gle, how long w ­ ill you remain indifferent?”
“Your Excellency’s co-­citizens are not bothering to hide their sympathies,”
he reiterated. “Your neutrality is against healthy politics, natu­ral rights, even
common sense . . . ​It is false, illogical and absurd,” he pleaded.167 “You w ­ ill
excuse me when I confirm that Your Excellency’s Government has caused
this revolution, given that, if it did not, it should have,” he wrote, argu-
ing that the fighting was “a necessity not only for the redemption of the
­Dominican p ­ eople, but for the rest of the Spanish colonies, and especially
for the ­future of Haiti. . . . Y ​ our Excellency’s co-­citizens are not bothering to
hide their sympathies to a cause that has come to be, in a manner of saying,
the most natu­ral bond that could possibly exist.” Haitians and Dominicans
­were “united together by the tightest friendship between two neighboring
­peoples, who for common po­liti­cal and racial reasons, have been born to be
­brothers,” he concluded.168
By the summer of 1864, members of the Provisional Government pro-
posed an outright federation. Their letter to President Geffrard that June
reiterated the suggestion of a treaty of goodwill, and it included a plan for
po­liti­cal integration of the two states. Writing to the “good patriots” of the
west, the rebels announced: “Even though the Dominican p ­ eople have al-
ways been very protective of their In­de­pen­dence and their autonomy, and they
remain so ­today, we do not fear establishing, starting now, the basis for a
treaty of Federation. We are convinced that the precious gift of our sacred
natu­ral rights as ­free and in­de­pen­dent ­people, rather than be ill-­treated, w
­ ill
be secured, for now and for the ­future. For her part, Haiti should see the
step as a means to protect her po­liti­cal existence, against any ­future com-
promise.”169 Members of Santiago’s Provisional Government personally
escorted the missive to Port-­au-­Prince.
This very same revolutionary energy—­and some of the very same
actors—­sparked a rebellious movement in the north of the island. North
coast federation plans ­were nothing new—­they circulated in 1843, for
example—­but they had never gained much traction. As early as spring 1863,
rumors flew that the same north coast Haitian allies who ­were supporting
the Capotillo fight ­were also hoping to expel Geffrard at the same time,
seeking “revolution in both countries.”170 Haitian authorities complained
that Dominican agents in Cap-­Haïtien ­were “sowing discord and spreading
insults about President Geffrard, accusing him of españolismo and suggesting

The Lava Spread Everywhere | 201

the benefits to the p
­ eople of the North if they ­were to separate and unite with
Santo Domingo.”171 Dominican rebels planned to collaborate with General
Ogé Longuefosse. The conspiracy “was very far along, and Dominican in-
surrectionists ­were mixed up in it,” the Spanish consul reported from Port-­
au-­Prince. The consul summarized their common objective succinctly: “to
make Geffrard fall, separate out the north [of Haiti] again, and unite it with
the . . . ​Dominican insurrection.”172 General Longuefosse mobilized with
three hundred men. Haitian authorities pursued him with a steamship and
infantry.173 Dominican captain Pablo Isidor was captured and arrested with
Longuefosse ­after an attempt on the life of Geffrard’s secretary of state and
minister of war, General Philippeau. The National Guard managed to crush
the budding conspiracy, but stemming ongoing opposition proved more dif-
ficult. Philippeau had two thousand men on high alert, and as many as four
thousand ­were on call. Despite t­hese tensions, the popularity in Haiti for
collaboration with the Dominicans continued to grow.174
News of this revolutionary scheme almost certainly influenced Haitian
officials’ response to Dominican Provisional Government entreaties. Gef-
frard’s minister of foreign affairs, Auguste Elie, firmly rejected treaty and
federation plans, expelling the Dominican emissaries. “This response that
you are receiving is more of a general statement than personal communica-
tion,” he told them, disdainfully. “I w­ ill not mention or even try to verify if
the names of your signatories, . . . ​you are mere inhabitants of the Spanish
province, absent of any title.”175 “You understand very well, sirs, that I do
not recognize in you, collectively nor individually, any po­liti­cal rank or legiti-
mate authority, and that we cannot accept any proposition of yours of this or
any other sort,” he continued.

According to you, the two ­peoples occupy two territories that in another
time ­were just one State. Well, which b ­ rother separated from which? Ac-
cording to you, the two ­peoples are of one same race, that is also true,
but which ­brother has looked down on the other? According to you, both
­peoples are motivated by sentiments of love of liberty and in­de­pen­dence,
also true, but which of the two has forfeited them? According to you, they
profess the same po­liti­cal princi­ples, this is also true, but which of the
two has trod on them? They have, you say, the same social ideas, the same
customs, the same character—­look at History. Is it true, as you claim, that
our interests now and in the ­future are identical? That is also false. The
Dominican ­people are asking Spain again for their in­de­pen­dence, and
the Haitian ­people have nothing to ask.

202 | Chapter 6
He went on:

Is it true, as you claim, that Haiti w­ ill secure her po­liti­cal f­ uture through
the consolidation of this alliance, lending a hand to the Dominican insur-
rection? No, a thousand times no. That is also an error! Haiti is, t­ oday, a
republican government freely governed by a wise, educated, and popu-
larly elected Leader. It has never blossomed more and it does not seek
anything more than to develop this nascent prosperity through order and
tranquility, respecting the rights of other nations and ready to defend its
own. The Government of President Geffrard seeks nothing other than to
consolidate Haiti’s po­liti­cal existence. . . . ​­There is no one in Haiti who
does not continue to feel sympathy for the Dominican p ­ eople, no one
who does not admire their courage and lament their misfortunes. The
Government of Haiti shares ­those popu­lar sentiments, but it cannot for-
get the duties it must perform and the sacred interests it must protect.

“In light of the current state of friendly relations between the Government of
Her Majesty the Queen of Spain and the Republic of Haiti, relations whose
preservation is necessary for the tranquility of this country, the Haitian Gov-
ernment cannot recognize any other legitimate authority in the east than
that of Her Majesty,” the minister wrote. Plainly, “You are trying to drag
us into the danger in which you find yourselves, and that has always been
a bad way to escape danger.” Rather, the Haitian government would con-
tinue “strict neutrality . . . m
​ oderate and impartial conduct,” the rejection
letter concluded. Furthermore, Elie copied the entire exchange to the Span-
ish consul in Port-­au-­Prince, the ministry of war in Madrid, the governor of
Cuba, and the governor of Santo Domingo. “He turns his back more ­every
day, continuing in his neutrality policy that so disgusts the ungrateful Do-
minicans,” a Spanish dispatch claimed gleefully.176
Despite Elie’s pronouncement, Geffrard slowly increased his diplomatic
involvement in the conflict. General de la Gándara met with him several
times. ­After a long meeting outside of Port-­au-­Prince late in 1864, both par-
ties agreed Haitian mediation was necessary. “His most ardent desire is that
we abandon Santo Domingo, and he w ­ ill help us in e­ very way . . . ​to find
an acceptable solution,” de la Gándara observed.177 Geffrard dispatched two
emissaries to Dominican territory to discuss prisoner exchange and other
terms of negotiated withdrawal. His public instructions to them ­were frank
and conciliatory, and he lamented the bloodletting. “I would call this par-
ricide,” he remarked.178 The two delegates embarked on a familiar cross-­
island itinerary: travel by small boat to a town on the northern coast, then

The Lava Spread Everywhere | 203

overland travel to Dajabón. A Dominican general traveled from Santiago to
receive them with a short note, in French, greeting the “citizen” emissar-
ies. Col­o­nel Ernest Roumain marveled at his welcome. “Impossible to tell
you the friendly reception that was made for us,” he wrote. “Our entry into
Dajabón was practically an ovation.”179 Young men of Santiago or­ga­nized a
ball for them on their arrival, he continued, which took place “practically
­under Spanish bullets.”180 Santiago, he noted sadly, was “a heap of ruins and
rubble.”181
In war-­torn Santiago, Polanco’s officials met with the Haitian diplomatic
envoy for nearly a month. The idealism of the revolutionary Dominican ad-
ministration was on full display. During a dinner one eve­ning, Dominican
officials delivered a number of toasts: to the heroes of the Haitian Revolution,
to President Geffrard, and to achieving peace. One official toasted to “social
and po­liti­cal solidarity” that ­ought to reign between Dominican Republic
and Haiti. Another brought up hemispheric b ­ attles over emancipation. “It
is an affront to humanity that the abominable institution of civil slavery still
subsists,” exhorted a general, commenting on the U.S. Civil War. “I toast,
therefore, to the absolute freedom of man in all the universe, and that Amer-
ican democracy totally uproots slavery from its breast.” A priest toasted, in
French, for demo­cratic governments. A civilian toasted to the Haitian and
Dominican flags “casting friendly shadows on each other, that their friend-
ship be strong enough to defend their rights from all foreign powers who
sought to uproot them.”182 Time passed as the del­e­ga­tion sent letters back to
Port-­au-­Prince and awaited reply. Dominican authorities wanted to remove
noxious Spanish terms from the negotiations and to modify the language
of their appeal to the Crown; Geffrard, toeing de la Gándara’s line, insisted
on the original language and terms of the Spanish proposal.183 In Santiago,
delegates grew close as weeks passed, signing off on affectionate letters, “à
vous de cœur, votre ami de cœur.”184 At the end of the del­e­ga­tion, Domini-
can officials refused many of de la Gándara’s and Geffrard’s proposals, but
they praised the president for his efforts “for the cause of humanity,” and
negotiations about prisoner exchange began in earnest.185

Revolutionary Fever
In retrospect, many combatants considered December 1864 to be the end of
the war and the beginning of an extensive diplomatic pro­cess of Spanish extri-
cation. ­There was no revelry. “The country was half-­dead, had exhausted its
resources, only revolutionary fever sustained it,” Rodríguez Objío wrote.186
“Traitorous plants are blooming,” Luperón warned Restoration soldiers,

204 | Chapter 6
balefully, in late winter.187 Polanco’s administration lasted only ninety-­eight
days. His power­ful opponents, who included landowners and prominent
urban families of the Cibao, sought to take back the po­liti­cal scene from
the first moments he took power. In late January 1865, they mobilized, e­ ager
for the demo­cratic phase of the fighting to end. An armed group arrested
­every member of Polanco’s government and put them in shackles. “No per-
sonal interest, no unworthy motive has dictated our conduct,” the usurp-
ing leaders promised the public.188 Before even naming a president, the
group modified or abrogated almost e­ very Polanco statute. They pursued
Polanco supporters returning from Spanish prisons.189 They scattered his
ministers to dif­fer­ent corners of the territory. Espaillat they sent all the way
to Samaná.190 They reinstated the 1858 Moca Constitution for a time, eas-
ily drafting a new one within the month. They tried Polanco for Salcedo’s
murder before an Executive Commission, found him guilty, and sentenced
him to death. A new president, Pedro Antonio Pimentel, pursued Polanco’s
supporters as well. He called Polanco and his ilk, common men who had
gained power, “engrandecidos.”191 Out­going missives returned to a repub-
lican script. It is a revolution “purely of princi­ples and not of race, as some
have tried to claim,” a new high cabinet member ­later insisted. Furthermore,
in the wake of radicalism, he observed, “the regularization of the war was a
necessity everywhere.”192
As 1865 dawned, however, the energy of alliances, optimism, and po­liti­
cal ferment ­was high. The Haitian emissary, Captain Roumain, could not re-
frain from marveling at the sentiment of every­one he encountered between
the Cibao capital and the center of the island. “We are truly stunned by it,”
he effused. “­These sirs, whose town offers even a more wrenching portrayal
of the calamities which have desolated them, do not content themselves
with lodging us and feeding us at their own expense, but they overwhelm
us ­every day with obliging offers of all kinds.” Reflecting on his experience,
he promised, “We ­will keep the memory of the kind attention of which we
have been the object for a long time.”193 Meanwhile, extraofficial collabora-
tions burgeoned, too. So intense ­were the military schemes on the northern
coast that some observers suspected another rebel federation might form.
Observers reported new conspiracies. A Spanish report from Monte Cristi
in the first month of 1865 warned that “the prolongation of the war is begin-
ning to give the result that Dominicans and Haitians seek to unite and form
an in­de­pen­dent Republic.”194 Meanwhile, dramatically, Polanco escaped his
captors and headed north, where the ferment was. In a small town on the
northern coast, about a third of the way from Puerto Plata ­toward Haiti, he

The Lava Spread Everywhere | 205

raised a special banner that depicted the Haitian and Dominican flags, in-
tertwined. Apparently the flag was in use as far south as Moca.195 The new
Santiago administration pursued him immediately. “Residents of Santiago:
the rebellion caused by the naive General Gaspar Polanco has been happily
crushed,” new officials insisted. “Calm your spirits and return to your labo-
rious life.”196 But repression was not so easy. Polanco slipped into the west,
and the fighting continued.

206 | Chapter 6
seven

Nothing Remains Anymore

THE LAST DAYS OF SPANISH RULE

Writing from New York, Alejandro Ángulo Guridi—­born in Puerto Rico,

raised in the Dominican Republic, professionally trained in Cuba—­published
an open letter about Spanish defeats on Dominican soil. Even Spanish sol-
diers who had been seasoned in the Ca­rib­bean w ­ ere succumbing to guer-
rilla warfare and tropical diseases, ­dying in ­great numbers. Spain was clearly
losing. “Cubans! Cubans!” Guridi exclaimed. “What do you do? What do
you think?”1 Guridi traveled to Washington, DC, lobbying for in­de­pen­
dence. He moved on to New York, where he met up with a vibrant group of
Latin American activists. The famous Cuban author Cirilo Villaverde edited
Guridi’s opposition pamphlet, Santo Domingo and Spain.2 Three more itiner-
ant stops took him to the Turks and Caicos, Saint Thomas, and Venezuela
before he returned to Dominican territory. Guridi worked in tandem with
Provisional Government ministers, who threw their efforts into making re-
gional allies si­mul­ta­neously. Old networks percolated with new energy. In
Curaçao, exiles and allies formed a Dominican revolutionary club, defiantly
flying the republican flag.3 A wealthy Curaçao merchant was so implicated in
arms sales that the Provisional Government named him an official agent; he
took to addressing his notes “Citizen” and signing them “God and Liberty.”4
“­Brothers in South Amer­i­ca: Come fight in Santo Domingo and you w ­ ill be
fighting for the liberty of a b
­ rother p
­ eople and for your own,” a government
writer exhorted. “Come, Come, . . . t​ o defeat the already decrepit Spanish
power, and shout with delirious enthusiasm: ¡Long live Amer­i­ca and the re-
publics that ­people it!”5
 As the anticolonial fighting raged, Spanish authorities tried to maintain
day-­to-­day government functioning and to restrict the local circulation of
news about the war. In a rare mention of regional opposition, a writer at
La Razón called Jamaicans’ 1861 anti-­Spanish petition “the machinations of
clowns,” but other­wise, the pro-­occupation journals maintained a studious
silence.6 Cuban and Puerto Rican periodicals did the same, only mention-
ing boat movements and the barest of other details. To stanch local trading
ties, authorities blockaded the northern Dominican coast with twenty-­t wo
Spanish ships. The captains of small crafts from Saint Thomas, Turks and
Caicos, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Curaçao, and other sites, however, simply
eluded them.7 In addition to this bustling contraband trade, h ­ uman witnesses
to the conflict arrived steadily to Spanish docks at San Juan, Santiago de Cuba,
and Havana. Injured soldiers, arriving for treatment, described the rebels’
guerrilla victories, the crumbling occupation, and the growth of the revolt.
Beginning in the ­battles of late 1864, Cuban and Puerto Rican soldiers joined
Spanish regiments, and Dominican reserve corps merged with them. Span-
ish, Cuban, and Puerto Rican deserters joined Dominican rebels, too, in jails
as far away as Cádiz and Ceuta.
News crisscrossed the Atlantic as well. Spain’s press was fractious and
strident. Progressive Madrid journalists w ­ ere acerbic critics of the war, espe-
cially as the fighting utterly exploded annexation’s voluntary premise. Journals
like La Discusión arrived in Ca­rib­bean ports, to the chagrin of local officials.
From Santo Domingo, the captain general prohibited the paper’s circula-
tion, but La Discusión reached Santiago de los Caballeros all the same.8 Pro-
visional Government journalists reprinted key articles.9 In Cuba, the only
Spanish periodical to be admitted was a trade circular, Comercio de Cádiz.10
The Cuban governor, desperate, banned discussion of abolition in Cuba
in June 1862, and Spanish officials tried to enact the same ban in Spain the
next fall.11 Empire-­wide censorship continued through the summer of 1865,
even ­after the last Spanish soldier left Dominican soil.12 Foreign observers
sent news, too. Many consular agents from Hanover, Hamburg, Prus­sia, the
United States, and Austria who had been in Puerto Plata took refuge in the
Turks and Caicos Islands, where they continued to send accounts; Santo
Domingo–­based U.S. observers like William Cazneau and William Jaeger
reported on Spanish defeats with unrepentant glee from the relative safety
of the capital city, and newspapers in New York, Boston, Chicago, and other
sites reprinted their accounts eagerly.13 Critical voices from Cuba reached a
Washington, DC, newspaper, for example, in a report that complained that

208 | Chapter 7
Cuba’s colonial defenses w ­ ere being “weakened to sustain a war whose re-
sults could be summarized as defeat.”14
Quickly, Spanish debate over withdrawal focused as much on the dangerous
example of Ca­rib­bean defeat as on cost or logistics. The original champions
of annexation ­were gone. Serrano, the Cuban governor who was Santana’s
coauthor, left Cuba in late 1862; in Spain, O’Donnell’s administration fell the
following spring. For a short time, wealthy loyalists from Cuba and Puerto
Rico offered goods and funds to help quell the rebellion, but as the fight
continued, a “general disgust” grew in Havana and other sites.15 Meanwhile,
every­one, of all po­liti­cal orientations, civil and military, on the islands and
across the Atlantic, commented on the example and significance of guerrilla
warfare. Spanish military figures and politicians suggested crushing the
Dominican rebels with a massive display of force. “A shameful withdrawal?”
a Spanish official in Cuba asked contemptuously in 1864. “What a beautiful
and useful lesson that would be for the blacks and mulatos of Puerto Rico
and Cuba.”16 ­Others w ­ ere more apocalyptic about an impending race war,
predicting the collapse of Spanish empire and the white race if Spain admit-
ted defeat.17 But the pro­gress of the fighting was undeniable. In late January
1865, the Crown initiated steps to withdrawal.
At the end of a whirlwind of fighting, and in a devastated landscape, Do-
minicans defeated Spain’s massive mobilization without any formal alliances.
Major imperial powers largely failed them. Lincoln expressed sympathy, but
his government remained neutral. French officials kept totally s­ ilent. Britain
fi­nally recognized Dominicans as belligerents when the fighting was almost
over.18 Politicians from a number of South American republics, critically
eying Eu­ro­pean intervention in Mexico, French intervention in the U.S.
Civil War, and annexationists in Guatemala and Ec­ua­dor, expressed support
for the Dominican rebels.19 The only enduring alliances, however, ­were the
ones Dominican rebels forged, unofficially and often secretly, with their Ca­
rib­bean neighbors. Networks of trade, exile, finance, and friendship grew
tighter. Meanwhile, in­de­pen­dentistas in Cuba and Puerto Rico, busily organ­izing,
watched Spain fight, and lose. Forty-­one thousand Spanish soldiers, joined
by twenty thousand more Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican reserve sol-
diers, could not crush the popu­lar re­sis­tance.20 In Santiago de Cuba, a poet
praised the victorious Dominicans and predicted the f­ uture of his own island:

Glory and honor to the American world,

the holy idea of liberty triumphs,

Nothing Remains Anymore | 209

 . . . ​raised and victorious
the noble Dominican flag waves . . . ​
Hispaniola was the cradle of [Spain’s] empire,
and ­today it is the tomb.21

Our Cry of IN­DE­PEN­DENCE! Regional and International Responses

Peruvian authorities condemned the annexation from its first days. Already
embroiled in a conflict with Spain (known variously as the “Chincha Islands
War,” the “Spanish-­Peruvian War,” and the “Spanish-­Chilean War”), Peruvian
officials looked upon the Dominican cession with par­tic­ul­ar disapproval.
They sent a circular around to other governments, condemning the act as
“an attack on demo­cratic institutions and continental security”; Nicaragua,
Bolivia, Colombia, Argentina, and Venezuela all expressed support.22 “A com-
mon peril for Amer­i­ca,” the annexation was “neither f­ree, nor ­legal, nor in
accordance with the Rights of ­Peoples, nor the practice of Nations, nor the
spirit of the c­ entury,” the Peruvian chancellor argued. He warned Venezuela of
a pos­si­ble military expedition from Cuba as well and demanded “an alliance
to reject the reconquest.”23 Peru, Venezuela, and New Grenada recognized the
Dominican Republic via confidential agent in July 1864; the Peruvian consul
even offered to help procure arms from Curaçao to Cap-­Haïtien.24 As conflict
continued off the Peruvian coast, the Peruvian president was forced out of
office in November 1865, primarily for having failed to take a stronger stand
against the Spanish. One Peruvian, Fruto Fuentes, participated in the fierce
fighting of Puerto Plata in 1863.25
Venezuelans, long po­liti­cally linked to Santo Domingo, w ­ ere divided by
their own civil war. Nevertheless, representatives of the Dominican Provi-
sional Government ­were in regular contact with Venezuelan arms dealers,
buying at least five thousand guns and other supplies from Coro in the sum-
mer of 1864. Caracas and other coastal cities hosted a significant and high-­
profile exile population, who wrote back to Dominican papers that they ­were
­eager to return.26 Juan Pablo Duarte, in exile since the 1840s, allegedly sought
guns and supplies from the Venezuelan government, to be facilitated by the
commercial ­houses of Curaçao.27 Manuel Rodríguez Objío shuttled back and
forth from Santiago de los Caballeros to Caracas in 1863–64.28 “Our ­brothers
fight for the holy cause of in­de­pen­dence. . . . [​ We] have common cause with
­those who want to sustain the integrity of the world of Columbus,” a Venezu-
elan federalist paper praised in early 1864. “Continuous, heroic, the Domini-
can patriots,” the editorial began, noting, “­There, too, t­ here are ­those who
know how to love liberty.” The author urged Venezuelan heads of state to

210 | Chapter 7
 send an emissary at once to Spain. “It is upon the Venezuelan Government to
give this step of americanismo, of diligent and forthcoming friendliness,” the
paper reiterated, “in honor of the holy ashes of Bolívar.” Perhaps Venezuelan
mediation would help, the author supposed. “We are the closest to Spain
and to Santo Domingo,” he urged.29
Venezuela’s own conflicts interrupted state-­level diplomacy, but individ-
uals continued to directly lobby, advocate, and even take up arms, with the
Dominicans. It was a Venezuelan man, Manuel Ponce de León, who penned
the Acta de Independencia on behalf of the fledgling Provisional Govern-
ment; a Venezuelan general, Candelario Oquendo, became an impor­tant
rebel leader.30 Other individual Venezuelan soldiers participated in the fight-
ing from its first days.31 Capital city officials, suspicious, ordered all arriving
from Venezuela without a passport to have someone vouch for them (a fianza).
A small number of well-­connected opponents in Madrid, such as conserva-
tive Venezuelan writer Pedro José Rojas, lobbied in Dominican ­favor. Other
prominent Venezuelans lobbied hard for Dominican in­de­pen­dence through
the national press and in Washington; the Provisional Government thanked
them officially via the Peruvian agent in Saint Thomas. “Send the titles . . . ​
with some sentences that praise their americanismo . . . ​as thanks,” the agent
suggested.32
Residents of nearby British islands w ­ ere even closer to the conflict.
The Turks and Caicos Islands ­were reception sites for refugees and well-­
documented gun entrepôts.33 The press openly favored the rebellion. Editors
at the Royal Standard and Gazette of the Turks and Caicos Islands republished the
rebel Provisional Government’s protest letter to the queen and reported
optimistically on Dominican gains. In the Parish Church of Saint Thomas,
­Grand Turk, congregants heard a sermon on the fight and took up a collec-
tion “in aid of ­those poor distressed Dominicans” who w ­ ere living t­ here.34
Meanwhile, the gun trade was steady. A pair of cannons reached the rebels in
Puerto Plata in 1863, followed by “war equipment, food, and supplies of all
kinds.”35 British-­registered ships like the Elisa, which ran the Turks–­northern
coast route, ­were ­under constant Spanish suspicion. In t­hose instances in
which the Spanish managed to intercept the ample microtrade between the
two areas (Monte Cristi equally as implicated as Puerto Plata), the ships’
crews alternately abandoned ship or fought back. ­Those unlucky enough to
be jailed appealed to the British consulate for recourse. “It is obvious that
one of the main ­causes of the war’s duration is precisely the continuous
sending of aid, or­ga­nized in Nassau and the Turks Islands above all e­ lse,”
Spanish officials wrote, asking the British government to use “all direct or

Nothing Remains Anymore | 211

indirect means . . . t​ o impede, or at least limit, the brazen and practically
public sending of aid.”36 The Spanish admitted that local ship crews had been
thrown into crowded cells with Dominican prisoners of war, an unpleasant
and likely radicalizing experience.37 Despite official condemnation—­the
British consul categorized the Dominican insurgents as rebellious Spanish
subjects, and the Nassau governor agreed to forcibly return rebels—­local
support continued.38
For reasons of pre­ce­dent, security, and cost, Cuba’s new governor, Do-
mingo Dulce, came to detest the annexation. He was pessimistic about the
gravity of the rebellion, and he balked at the request to send five more battal-
ions from Cuba in September 1863. “Even, by some luck, if order is reestab-
lished,” he argued, in the first weeks of fighting, “­will it be the last attempt
by the Dominicans to reestablish their autonomy? It is practically obvious
that it ­will not.” “The annexation was not the work of the nation: it was that
of a party who dominated by terror, and who, worried for its ­future, negoti-
ated for its own advantage,” he wrote with lucid skepticism, continuing, “The
­people did not want nor pine to be governed by its old metropolis: and at
­every instance that has arisen to demonstrate as such, they have done so as
ostentatiously as pos­si­ble.” The queen’s “maternal benevolence . . . ​has bet-
tered its miserable situation at the cost of Cuba,” he allowed, but he doubted
that Dominican territory, with its tiny economy and minimal infrastructure,
could become profitable. And of the difficulty of the fighting, the governor
was decidedly pessimistic. The guerrilla movements ­were “­every day more
power­ful,” he noted, and their logistical advantages w ­ ere “obvious.” The
most dangerous aspect of the uprising, however, was the pre­ce­dent it set:
“­These repeated rebellions, even when defeated and punished, establish a
fatal example in [Cuba], where the spirit of in­de­pen­dence began a while ago
and remains robust,” Dulce warned. He worried about the security of Cuba
as it sent away its regiments. He suggested a show of force, “reducing the
rebellious subjects to obedience, renouncing dominion of the territory of
Santo Domingo, and re-­establishing in it the same government . . . o ​ ffering
it a protectorate,” he argued.39 Upon hearing of the revolution’s increasingly
critical state, he reiterated his suggestion for abandonment. “A revolution
that is not immediately crushed is a terrible example in the Antilles,” he
insisted.40
Despite the Cuban governor’s position, administrative, financial, and
military ties to Cuba and Puerto Rico made connections to Santo Domingo
inevitable and constant. The Spanish consul asked for U.S. cooperation
in restricting boat travel that might triangulate between Cuba, the United

212 | Chapter 7
States, and Santo Domingo, noting, “It is extremely impor­tant that ­there be no
contraband, illicit traffic, nor communication between the ports of Havana and the rebels
against this Government.” ­There is no evidence that U.S. officials cooperated.41
Steamship mail ser­vice, private British boats, and other vessels connected
the islands. Spanish authorities wanted to build a telegraph cable between
Port-­au-­Prince and eastern Cuba ­after the fighting started, without immedi-
ate result. Still, island-­to-­island communication proceeded regularly enough,
and it had the attention of neighboring publics. Havana’s Gaceta Oficial neces-
sarily reported the naval blockade of Santo Domingo, for example, ­because
it was patrolled by Cuban ships. Even as Spanish-­Cuban periodicals like
El Redactor de Santiago de Cuba sought to put the most positive pos­si­ble spin on
the fighting—­“the roots [of the rebellion] are being destroyed in el Cibao,” it
reported hopefully—­their point-­by-­point coverage of the b ­ attles themselves
represented raw material for more rebellious interpretations.42 In Guantá-
namo, authorities accused a Spanish merchant of holding meetings with
­free and enslaved p ­ eople of color to read newspapers about the unfolding
events in neighboring Santo Domingo. He exaggerated Spanish losses, of-
ficials accused indignantly.43
Soldiers and officials traveled, too. Santiago de Cuba was a key port of em-
barkation. Injured soldiers brought word of the fighting in person. Yellow fever
massively hurt Spanish ranks, sending thousands to Cuba for treatment. Sev-
eral thousand passed through eastern Cuban hospitals during the fighting, and
more w ­ ere sent to other sites.44 Santiago authorities used a cannon captured
from the Dominicans as a trophy of war in the atrium of the main cathedral
of the town. More than fifteen hundred soldiers ­were pres­ent to witness its
dedication on 6 June 1864, as it was paraded through the street in a military
pro­cession accompanied with fireworks. A new danza entitled “El Cañón” cel-
ebrated the event.45 More Antilles-­based Spanish soldiers embarked than ever
before; fourteen thousand troops from the Ejército de Cuba left for Santo
Domingo in the beginning of 1864. L ­ ater that year, Spanish officials both
solicited volunteers from Cuba and Puerto Rico and merged the Spanish and
reserve regiments. Nonmilitary Spanish officials moved back and forth be-
tween the islands, too, asking for multiple-­month sojourns in their former
stations of Puerto Rico and Cuba to reestablish their failing health.46
No neighboring official wanted to receive the Dominican deportees,
whose provenance ranged from wealthy merchants to illiterate day laborers.
The Puerto Rican governor wrote, not a l­ ittle perturbed, that he had received
a group of thirty-­five men thought to be leaders of the Dominican insurrec-
tion. He immediately put them into isolation. “I have ordered them to be

Nothing Remains Anymore | 213

put in the basement of the Morro C ­ astle, where they ­will be unable to commu-
nicate with the rest of the fort,” he wrote anxiously.47 Prison correspondence
emanating from the lower floors of the San Juan fortress was censored care-
fully, for both “obscene words and [secret messages] from the gang of ban-
dits,” the governor reported.48 ­These men ­had been arrested in a roundup in
the early hours of the morning in the Dominican capital, days before. Many
of them w ­ ere released into Puerto Rican towns but kept u ­ nder high vigilance.
They ­were supposed to report to authorities once a day. As the fighting con-
49

tinued, the groups of arrestees got larger. More than 150 men arrived in Vi-
eques; hundreds passed through Havana as a way station before being sent
on to the peninsula. Even when the accused did not stay in Havana, their ar-
rival at the docks provoked commentary and gossip.50 Among their ranks w ­ ere
a few Spanish men as well, such as sailor Léon Mate, sent back to Havana for
his complicity in the Puerto Plata uprisings of August 1863 (the bulk of Span-
ish infractors, soldiers, remained within their ranks in Santo Domingo).51 Like
the Puerto Rican authorities, officials in Havana w ­ ere uneasy about both the
spectacle presented by and the pos­si­ble communication from the insurgents.
The Cuban governor suggested that deportees be sent not to the peninsula
but to Ceuta.52 Although t­here is no evidence that the transfer occurred on
a large scale, at least a few w
­ ere transferred to north Africa, and their subse-
quent supplication for some sort of daily support left an archival trail.53
Dominican families pleaded for their exiled members, and the deport-
ees themselves entreated for mercy. From Puerto Rico, Havana, and Cádiz,
petitions combined plaintive (and outraged) descriptions of the conditions
of incarceration, the impossible cost of daily sustenance, and the pain of
separation from their lives on the island. Some w ­ ere prominent men, mer-
chants from Puerto Plata and the like; paterfamilias supplicated for the right to
return to their numerous ­children and grandchildren. ­Other prisoners ­were
younger laborers who enlisted the help of literate men to plead their case.
Juan Francisco Cuello and Domingo de Leon entreated, ­after five months of
being locked in “tight, terrible” cells in San Juan, that they be given a chance
to prove their faithfulness to Spain. They and ­others urged that neighbors
could attest to the fidelity of their conduct. “We have never had the most
remote idea against the peace and tranquility of our country . . . [​ and] are
faithful to our M­ other Country,” one prisoner entreated.54 From Cádiz, one
man wrote of how he had been surprised in his home in the much-­surveilled
extramuro community of San Carlos, near the capital, precipitating a night-
marish chain of events. Escorted in shackles away from his home, into a

214 | Chapter 7
ship, and to a cell in Havana, he was then summarily moved again, across the
Atlantic. From his cell in southern Spain, he begged for clemency, some aid
in the means of subsistence, and most dearly, freedom. He requested a pass-
port “for any of the Antilles,” to bring him closer to his numerous ­family.
Authorities denied his “inopportune” request; he repeated his entreaties in
subsequent months.55 M ­ others pleaded on behalf of their adult ­children. “It
would be a ­grand and worthy act of Your motherly soul, to ­free the ­father of a
­family, ­today reduced to misery,” one petitioned the queen pointedly.56
The guilt or innocence of deportees—­even if loyalty w ­ ere any sort of sta-
ble index in the fast-­changing climes of the raging conflict—­was inscrutable
at best. Such was the case of Ildefonso Mella, who found himself jailed in
Havana ­after an arrest outside of Puerto Plata. Mella had merely traveled to
the eastern outskirts of the town with his d ­ aughter for fresh air, his s­ ister and
­mother insisted, but damning witnesses ­were just as intransigent. Authori-
ties acceded to his f­ amily’s entreaties, and Mella was permitted to board a
ship back to Hispaniola.57 A number of prisoners made similarly compelling
cases. One local government official wrote that his imprisonment in Cádiz
was “some mistaken mea­sure, or perhaps a victim of malintentioned persons.”
He explained, “The w ­ hole neighborhood can attest . . . t​ o my constant adhe-
sion and re­spect for the throne of Your Majesty.” Furthermore, he had been
close friends with Santana. “Your Majesty, ­pardon this benign old man,” he
concluded.58 The Spanish w ­ ere wrong about Ildefonso Mella, it turns out,
and prob­ably many ­others. Mella went on to be mayor of Puerto Plata long
­after the Spanish ­were gone, and his rebel loyalties proved as unshakable as
his irreverence to conservative authorities in the capital city. In subsequent
years, the governor of Cuba would write outraged complaints about Mayor
Mella’s “open sympathies for Cuban [in­de­pen­dence] conspirators,” to the
defiance even of other Dominican officials.59
In Puerto Rico secret sites of anticolonial organ­izing grew. In Mayagüez,
“a true antillanista cenacle” formed.60 If Spanish surveillance meant that few
guns could traffic through t­ here, rebels still could. ­Father Fernando Antonio
Meriño—a ­high church official, subsequently canonized as “the F­ ather of
Dominican oratory”—­found himself summarily exiled to Puerto Rico for his
staunch (and openly defiant) opposition of Santana. He hastily made his way
to the port city, found other rebels t­ here, and wrote to ­others constantly.61
From Mayagüez on the Noche de los Muertos, he gave a dramatic sermon in
the town cemetery, reporting he had seen the shadows of Hidalgo and Mo-
relos (priests who had led anti-Spanish fighting in Mexico). Trinitario José

Nothing Remains Anymore | 215

María de Serra lived in Mayagüez, as did Félix Delmonte, former minister of
war. Delmonte was so influential in “leading po­liti­cal opinion astray” that he
was exiled again several years ­later.62 Both Delmonte and Meriño met often
with Ramón Emeterio Betances, whose peripatetic activism during the years
of Dominican fighting ­was matched only by his clandestine abolitionist and
in­de­pen­dentista organ­izing in eastern Puerto Rico itself. Betances met Lu-
perón and José María Cabral while in exile in Saint Thomas and spent at least
some of the fighting in Santo Domingo and Caracas. Moving on, he lobbied
for recognition of the Provisional Government in Paris and London.63 Much
of his organ­izing was in secret. Years ­after the fighting, Dominican jour-
nalists thanked Betances “for all the generous ser­vices he privately lent the
Republic in moments of the War of Restoration.”64
Organizers in Cuba also arranged secret aid. Private boats from Cuba
seem to have arrived at Samaná, instead of the commercial docks of Puerto
Plata and Monte Cristi. Spanish authorities seized one such ship, carry­ing
an inventory billed to a resident of Matanzas, for having gone off of its char-
ter.65 Dominican Carlos Pulien, working in Samaná’s Spanish administra-
tion, was caught receiving multiple dozens of letters from Cuba that had no
apparent commercial content whatsoever.66 José Ysnaga, born in Cuba but a
longtime resident in Venezuela, was “a fan of mixing himself up in po­liti­cal
questions and a drunk,” the authorities wrote, when they expelled him.67
In New York, prominent Dominicans mingled with Cuban exiles; Cuban
nationalist Juan Manuel Macías penned the 1865 pamphlet “Las Colonias
Españolas y la República Dominicana” for the Sociedad Democrática de los
Amigos de América, founded just the year before. The society called annexa-
tion “a bloody farce” and exulted, “No Dominican doubts the happy success
in restoring f­ ree institutions.”68 Some ships sailed from New York u ­ nder the
rebel Dominican flag, authorized by a letter of marque from the Provisional
Government. Rumors from as far as Paris linked Havana, Matanzas, New
York, and Boston.69 The Provisional Government observed and supported
­these covert networks. Ministers published a decree encouraging generals to
purchase weapons and tighten political bonds in nearby islands.70
Vari­ous communities in the United States covertly or­ga­nized in f­avor
of the effort, and they connected it directly with po­liti­cal strug­gles of their
own. Dominican emissary Dr. Francisco Basora made secret appeals to the
Chilean mission in New York, although it is not clear if they bore fruit.71 New
York’s Spanish-­language newspapers began to appear in Puerto Rican ports.
The authors heartily supported the Dominican rebels, Spanish authorities
noted grimly.72 Spanish authorities suspected it was Cuban exiles—­and, per-

216 | Chapter 7
haps more improbably, U.S. filibusters—­who ­were outfitting ships in Bos-
ton. Spain seized one U.S.-­registered boat with seven hundred guns, two
hundred barrels of gunpowder, rice, rum, and other supplies.73 Mostly, they
speculated wildly about the amount and provenance of aid coming from the
north that potentially eluded the blockade dragnet. The Spanish consul in
Washington, DC, even suspected that unnamed allies ­were preparing a boat
in Halifax, Nova Scotia.74 Boston’s vice-­consul had slightly more specific
information—­even the names of two British and two American ships—­but
no one could easily intercept the boats: they ­were directed to Cap-­Haïtien.75
American citizens in Dominican territory tried to lobby for U.S. opposition,
but to no avail.76 English-­language papers covered the conflict regularly. It
was Puerto Rican and Cuban activists and exiles, however, who had immedi-
ate plans.
When Spain called for military volunteers from both islands in 1864, anti-­
Spanish sentiments in Puerto Rico flared. “A Regiment of Volunteers has been
forcibly taken to assassinate their ­brothers in Santo Domingo,” Betances de-
cried in a pamphlet. “Let us not be their instruments; and if they take us by force, as
has been the case with ­others, let us go to the lines of our b­ rothers of Santo Domingo,”
he urged. Betances invoked an indigenous history of anti-­Spanish re­sis­
tance. “The jíbaros of Puerto Rico, sons de Agüeibana el Bravo, have not lost our
pride,” he wrote, “and [we] know how to prove to our tyrants, as the brave
Dominicans are ­doing, that we . . . will​­ not suffer abuse with impunity.”77 He
claimed that some Puerto Rican volunteers ­were deserting in Dominican
territory. “Some of them have dispersed and gone into hiding in the mon-
tes,” he described, “and some have even hung themselves before agreeing to
go to kill and rob our b ­ rothers.” Furthermore, Dominicans w ­ ere receiving
­these Puerto Rican deserter allies “with open arms and shower[ing them]
with blessings,” he claimed. Another pamphlet from 1864—­the grammar
and syntax of which suggest a dif­fer­ent author who was not Betances—­also
called for immediate action in Puerto Rico:

Let us not sleep: the occasion is magnificent: t­ here are no soldiers

on the island, and even if ­there ­were the war of santo domingo
should have shown us that one Gíbaro with a machete in his hand is
worth one hundred spaniards. rise, puerto ricans!
. . . ​our cry of in­de­pen­dence ­will be heard and supported by
friends of liberty; and t­ here w­ ill be no lack of aid in arms and weap-
ons to drown in the dust the despots of cuba, puerto rico, and
santo domingo!78

Nothing Remains Anymore | 217

May the Devil Take Me If I See Resolution to This
As 1865 dawned, Dominicans challenged Spanish authority everywhere.
Even with the basic necessities of daily life lacking, citizens became confi-
dent that victory was near. Caricatures circulated freely, and the Provisional
Government celebrated the festivities of 27 February, albeit with a ban on
costumes.79 Where the Spanish remained, tension was constant. One loyal
reserves captain, drinking u ­ ntil dawn in the Azua encampment, suddenly
turned on his superior officer at some unknown provocation, calling him and
the rest of the Spanish officers present “unos pendejos.”80 A civilian man
named Marcos allegedly lashed out at a Spanish soldier, also while drunk,
brandishing a knife and proclaiming that “all Spaniards are robbers, pigs,
traitors, and that the [guerrillas] ­were with him.” “He said the Spanish w ­ ere
all cunning and that all they knew how to do was steal,” another Span-
ish witness confirmed.81 Thirty-­three-­year-­old ­music professor Sebastian
Morcelo admitted responding “Dominicano libre!” to a watchman’s call of
“Who’s ­there?” “I meant to say Spain,” he deadpanned. His b ­ rother called
­after him as he was being arrested, “­Don’t worry! T ­ here are plenty of us to
save you!” The commission condemned Morcelo, who was not armed, to
serve one month in jail for a ­simple “lack of judgment.”82 ­Others shared
his conviction. Socorro Sánchez—­a single, twenty-­six-­year-­old, literate
businesswoman in the capital—­sent a letter in the care of a young bread
seller to San Cristóbal seeking provisions. The content of her letter was not
revolutionary, but it was irreverent in its assurance. “You [should] help me,
even if it is just for the good friendship you had with your compadre Francisco
Sánchez,” she wrote. “I am his ­sister, and I live with his ­widow, we work
together,” she explained, “Given that the war w ­ ill very soon be over, send me
good sugar . . . ​wax, dried cowhide, and tobacco leaves.” She appealed to a
male cousin as well. For the communiqués, she spent late spring and early
summer of 1865 in jail, as did her young messenger.83
Meanwhile, Spanish soldiers suffered greatly from a lack of supplies and
illness. Without bread or salt, many of the Spanish troops on campaign sub-
sisted on chunks of meat.84 “The Spanish soldiers could be seen wandering
around like squalid ghosts, supporting themselves with walking sticks and
moving laboriously,” a Spanish commander reflected. Where men could be
dispatched to sleep, comforts w ­ ere exceedingly few. Even in occupied towns,
soldiers “are mostly lodged in huts in horrible condition, at grave risk to
the health of the soldier and the discipline of the corps,” the governor com-
plained, but no funding for new barracks was forthcoming.85 Endless fall

218 | Chapter 7
rains in late 1864 dampened spirits and supplies. The trea­sury official asked
for thousands of pesos to fix roads around the capital, where rain and heavy
transit had made the roads nearly impossible, even for individuals; word ar-
rived three months l­ ater that his request was denied u ­ ntil the colony’s status
was clear.86 Overland, the marching was “excruciating,” the governor related
to the peninsula. “The rough roads, or rather paths, of this island have no
resources of any kind, [troops] having to cross rivers with ­water up to one’s
waist,” he continued.87 The Dominican reservists w ­ ere perhaps even more
poorly provisioned. “They marched mostly barefoot, with their pants rolled
up to their knees,” one Spanish general wrote in his memoirs, and “­others
­were so sick it made the camp look like a hospital.”88
Unluckily for ­those who might have found themselves in serious need
of medical attention, the makeshift hospitals ­were no place to recuperate.
Hospitals ­were most often “nothing more than a barrack hut made from
tree branches and sticks, ­under which refuge the sick rested, laid out on the
ground,” a Spanish commander observed.89 Sickness compounded the mis-
ery. Yellow fever fatalities w­ ere high even in the summer before the fight-
ing.90 A mystery illness flooded hospitals in the fall of 1863; although it was
mild, the governor estimated he had better send some of the sick soldiers to
Cuba for treatment.91 The U.S. agent observed that poor drainage in the cap-
ital city made it “at times a perfect graveyard.”92 The cleanliness of smaller
towns would have brought l­ ittle comfort to soldiers laboring and injured t­ here;
it was in the interior that scarcity was the worst. Medicine was hard to come
by and expensive; improvised hospitals lacked staff, even sheets to cover the
improvised bedding. “Hospital is a magic and terrible word that the soldiers
instinctively reject,” one report summarized, “One can well imagine the
morale of the average soldier . . . ​, especially ­those recently arrived from
Spain, a country with [modern supplies] . . . ​a disconsolate portrait. . . . ​
Overcome with pain, they can only announce their impending end, mouth-
ing constantly, ‘I’m ­dying.’ ”93 Typhoid fever “ran through all the housing
and left barely a soldier useful” in Samaná; the hospital had burned, but
staff ­were without the means to bleach instruments for use again, authori-
ties remarked gravely. An anonymous complaint from a soldier protested
that most in the military hospital did not have nearly enough to eat.94 Only
in larger towns did some Spanish troops receive limited aid from charitable
loyal Dominicans, “without which they would have perished in the hospi-
tal,” one soldier reported.95 ­Others could not have been so lucky.
More Spanish troops deserted, even though soldiers faced harsh pun-
ishment. Desertion during war­time carried the threat of shooting by firing

Nothing Remains Anymore | 219

squad. One young Spanish soldier from Cartagena (serving in the Regimento
de la Habana), absent for a month, pleaded that he had only left to find food,
that he had been reduced to sleeping in abandoned huts, and that his con-
sorting with Dominicans had been only out of necessity. Officials evidently
took pity on the man, but he faced a de­cade in prison.96 ­Those who had for-
merly been stationed in Cuba and Puerto Rico fled the most.97 The Second
Cuban Crown Regiment was not to be separated from the First Crown Regi-
ment, the governor wrote, and they should be sent back to Cuba for reasons
of discipline.98 According to rebel pamphlets, Cuban and Puerto Rican vol-
unteer regiments deserted at an astronomical rate.99 Officials proposed that
1845-­era Cuban penalties be brought against deserters. In Monte Cristi, the
military commission surveyed the troops, asking them if they had witnessed
­others expressing ­great dissatisfaction with ser­vice, speaking with or being
friends with the “­enemy,” facing punishment, or simply pining for their fami-
lies.100 Every­thing dampened morale. Occasionally, a deserter sent back an
infuriating letter to his fellow soldiers, sometimes anonymously, sometimes
directly. One deserter, who asserted, “The Captain knows my name very
well,” wrote, “A few months ago I was in your ranks, submitted to Buceta’s
despotism in Samaná. . . . ​Dominicans are just and virtuous. Every­thing I
say to you is true, and I say it with my hand over my heart. [The Dominicans]
­don’t need us; they have enough ­people, they are just trying to save us from
torment. Countrymen, flee t­hose proud and unnatural Commanders who
are just trying to reduce us to ashes.” He called select Dominican loyalists
“scum.”101 Editors at the Boletín Oficial gleefully republished a letter from an-
other Spanish soldier, insults and all:

I am taking advantage of the short break we have to write and give you
news of this famous campaign, which is nothing like the one we did in
Morocco. Well, this mess is capable of irritating even a saint. One minute
we go ­there, the next we come back. . . . ​May the Devil take me if I see
the resolution to this. ­These damn indios are always out of sight; as soon
as you see them one place they dis­appear, and just when we think t­ hey’re
defeated, they show up shooting. . . . A ​ nd ­they’re not bad shots. In fact
it appears that the damn [­people] have spent their ­whole life hunting,
well when they aim, Jesus, the only t­ hing one can do is cross oneself. . . . ​
And that with not all of them armed. . . . W ​ hat w­ ill happen, then, the
day that ­these cunning dev­ils get good precision weapons? . . . ​When
­will we be able to pacify such a vast country, cut off on all sides by moun-
tains and narrow paths; populated by a damn riffraff [canalla] who live

220 | Chapter 7
 just as easily in the montes as in a palace; who know the territory like you
know your bedroom, while we cannot completely trust any who pres­
ent themselves as friends. . . . ​And that would be nothing, if we had
better superior officers, what cowards! What rogues! They are soldiers
for a theater.102

Another soldier was even more succinct in his frustration:

Me c . . . ​, c . . . ,​ en Colón,
en Cortés y el los Pizarros . . . ​
en los Estados Unidos
y en el seno Mexicano . . . ​
por uno y otros oceanos.103

[I s—­, s— on Columbus,
on Cortés and on the Pizarros . . . ​
on the United States
and the interior of Mexico . . . ​
on this ocean and that one.]

By the spring of 1865, many troops must have felt aimless. In the capital, “some
individuals who claimed to be officers of the King’s Regiment” drunkenly
broke down the doors of a number of single ­women’s residences, to the chas-
tisement of authorities the next day. Four ­women brought a collective case
against them, and they won.104

The Last Days of Spanish Rule

Facing the rebellion, Madrid authorities issued policy changes month by
month. In the spring of 1864, the Crown had demanded victory at any price,
and de la Gándara himself hoped for thirty thousand more troops. By fall,
both the queen and the general had become convinced of the futility of the
fighting. Madrid authorities authorized evacuation from all of Seybo and
froze any new embarkation of troops. De la Gándara was relieved at the
new o ­ rders, which permitted an orderly Spanish retreat. “It ­frees us from
expenses and embarrassment, and saves the sad remains of our most virtu-
ous Division from complete ruin, now resting in the relatively healthy dis-
tricts of Azua and Baní,” he confessed.105 All the while, however, some in
Madrid forcefully argued for the continued strategic and economic value
of the colony.106 “The island of Santo Domingo is ours . . . h ​ as been ever
since it opened its eyes to civilization,” argued one author. He character-
ized the rebellion as “a handful of bandits followed by some thousands of

Nothing Remains Anymore | 221

a strange race,” and concluded more decisive military action would save
the endeavor. “Colonization demands ­great sacrifices,” he insisted.107
Manuel Buceta—­perhaps the most hated military figure of the Cibao—­also
argued for continuing the hostilities.108 The conservative, inveterate rac-
ist Marques de Lema gave an impassioned speech to the Senate that was
quickly reprinted in pamphlet form. Point by point, he attempted to refute
the pro-­abandonment arguments about Dominican fidelity, cost, and futil-
ity. Nearly 40 million pesos had been spent decorating the Puerta del Sol in
Madrid; “a small amount of this” could have pacified Santo Domingo, he
claimed. Without sufficient resources to suffocate “the African insurrection,”
Spain’s honor had been compromised, he argued.109 News of ­these debates
reached President Geffrard even before the Spanish governor in Dominican
soil; some suspected, prob­ably correctly, that he rushed the news of Spanish
division to the Dominican side.110 As of 19 January, the decision to abandon
Santo Domingo was irrevocable.
In a final review for the Crown of the social and po­liti­cal conflicts of an-
nexation, Spain’s ministers did not shy away from frank discussion of Span-
ish racism and slavery. “Since emancipation, Santo Domingo has held as an
unbreakable canon the most complete equality not only of race and condi-
tion but also social, civil and po­liti­cal order,” the ministers remarked. “So
the negro and the moreno put on the sash of General, dress in the most distin-
guished uniform, flaunt the most prized insignia and decoration, and take
part in the governance and administration of the island,” they continued,
“while the wretched of their race groan in servitude in the other Antilles,
fourteen and sixteen leguas away.” They ­were sober in their assessment of the
impact of the failure of the proj­ect on Cuba and Puerto Rico: “The slaves of
Cuba and Puerto Rico must see day in and day out their b ­ rothers in so dif­
fer­ent a condition; can it be believed for one second that this spectacle, this
living provocation, would not produce dismal results in our other Antilles?”
They repeated the islands’ proximity again and again. “An Antille fourteen
and sixteen leguas distant from the ­others could not govern itself with a dif­
fer­ent regimen from the o ­ thers, and they in turn could not use the one Santo
Domingo desired, without grave danger to their respective interests; the
prob­lem was unsolvable,” they concluded fi­nally.111 ­There was nothing left
to do other than to admit failure.
The ministers’ withdrawal recommendation of January 1865 and the Do-
minican diplomatic response w ­ ere emphatically principled and calm. The
reincorporation had been an “act of laudable patriotism,” the Spanish min-
isters asserted, and so its end o­ ught “to reflect the intentions that brought it

222 | Chapter 7
about.” With mea­sured tone, they recapped an unwavering official narrative
of the proj­ect’s brief trajectory: peninsular authorities had seen potential an-
nexation as onerous, even as they sought to tighten ties with Spanish Amer­
i­ca; they accepted annexation only as a benevolent mea­sure, and contingent
on Dominican consent “not as a breach of rights, but as part of their poli-
tics,” spontaneous and voluntary. Once undertaken, the proj­ect had failed
­because po­liti­cally, socially, and religiously, the former republic was too dif­
fer­ent from the neighboring Spanish proj­ects. What remained was an ex-
traordinarily costly proj­ect of conquest and military occupation, “not a case
of quelling a rebellion but of conquering a territory.” As such, continued oc-
cupation would be fruitless and costly. Spain had spent 13.5 million pesos in
four years, more than 70 ­percent of that from Cuba’s coffers, about 10 ­percent
from Puerto Rico, and the remaining 20 ­percent from the peninsula. “So
much blood spilled and so much trea­sury wasted,” the letter lamented. The
next step, the ministers concluded, o ­ ught to be withdrawal.112 Dominican
emissaries, for their part, w ­ ere relentlessly civil. Peace w
­ ill be achieved “as
Spain is an educated nation, [and] Santo Domingo is an extremely generous
pueblo,” one official offered.113 “Think, Queen, where ­there w ­ ere flourish-
ing cities, now t­here are just piles of ruins and ashes,” another wrote. He
described a bloody scene and an exhausted ­people. “Blood has been ­running
this way and that for sixteen months . . . t​he blood of a pueblo rudely
treated, resigned to all types of sacrifices, resolved to bury itself u ­ nder the
mounting ruins and ashes around them,” he observed gravely, “before ceas-
ing to be ­free and in­de­pen­dent.” Despite the “homicidal drama,” however,
he insisted that ­there was no rancor, concluding, “Between this p ­ eople and
the Spanish nation, t­ here can exist neither animosity nor hate . . . there ​­ is
no fault on ­either side.” 114

For an awkward interim, Spanish officials in Dominican territory at-

tempted to continue quotidian governance, with limited success. Prominent
officials left steadily; the archbishop found war­time not at all to his liking,
requesting evacuation as early as fall 1863.115 Azua, still ­under Spanish
control, had burned, but t­ here ­were just sixty-­five pesos in the trea­sury to
resume affairs.116 The government of the eastern province of Seybo retreated
to the capital in February, four months a­ fter Madrid first authorized it. The
evacuating officials managed to bring with them the court paperwork but
not the prisoners. “Given the absolute lack of a secure jail, and the absolute
lack of resources, [the prisoners] went around the City procuring their sus-
tenance, some w ­ ere armed and added to the provincial reserves,” a report
confessed. It continued, “At the moment of retreat t­here was neither the

Nothing Remains Anymore | 223

time nor the means to gather them up and bring them along.” Once in the
capital, the officials tried to continue with judicial paperwork, borrowing
the escribano from La Vega, but l­ awyers ­were also lacking.117 Also in the capi-
tal, the Gaceta de Santo Domingo was eerily ­silent on the conflict. The paper,
which stuck to official announcements and was always less garrulous than
its polemic counterpart, La Razón, barely mentioned the fighting at all in the
early months of 1865, except to note honors given to some, and the freeing
of Spanish and reservists from the Dominican camp in April.118 It remained
doggedly on message about proj­ects of industry, however. In January, the
paper began a multipart series on tobacco; l­ater that month, the back page
ran an ad for reprints of the famous Dominican developmentalist text La idea
de valor en Santo Domingo (never mind that it had called for more slave impor-
tation as a central tenet).119 The capital city administration was totally para­
lyzed by late spring. The governor reported a number of the government’s
scribes had passed to the rebels.120 More and more prisoners and exiles ­were
permitted to return. One man asking to return was a high-­ranking general in
the Dominican army, “or so he calls himself,” Cádiz officials noted. A royal
order from 10 April 1865 decreed that “he, like every­one,” could return to the
island.121
Evacuation preparations proceeded fairly smoothly. Prisoner exchanges
­were general and inclusive. Many Spanish prisoners of war ­were fi­nally freed
in late spring, some ­after a captivity of nearly two years.122 President Geffrard
continued to mediate, urging compassionate treatment of the Dominican re-
servists who had left Spanish ranks for reasons of necessity. They should be
allowed to return to Spanish ser­vice if they so desired, he lobbied kindly.123
The evacuation order promised “help and support” for Provincial Reserves
“who had loyally and bravely supported [the Spanish] cause,” but decom-
missioning loomed.124 Spanish officials in the capital began ordering the
recall of weapons from individuals in the Provincial Reserves in mid-­May,
although, true to his word, General de la Gándara oversaw the payment of
Azua and Baní reservists to the very day of departure.125 Dominican w ­ omen
came ­under intense scrutiny as Spanish officials perceived the discipline
of their troops faltering further. Authorities blamed Dominican w ­ omen
who ­were “the enemies of Spain” for using “seduction” to “demoralize” the
troops. Twenty-­three soldiers had dis­appeared just from the town square of
the capital in January and early February alone; w ­ omen, particularly t­ hose
living near the quarters, w­ ere the primary witnesses called to trial, and sev-
eral found themselves in jail.126 One w ­ oman in Azua, Petronila Núñez, was

224 | Chapter 7
very nearly executed for her perceived influence in causing a soldier to desert.
An Azua man, Honorio de los Santos, received no such p ­ ardon. “I cannot
hide that it affects me greatly such severe punishments . . . ​but I must re-
press it with all the rigor of the law,” the governor wrote.127 The Gaceta Oficial
announced De los Santos’s execution in the capital.128 Displaced Domini-
cans, meanwhile, asked the administration for help. Josefa Roman, an émi-
grée from Puerto Plata, wrote to the governor on behalf of one Guillermo
Vives, former administrator of customs, also living in the capital. The ostensi-
bly formerly wealthy man “has lost all of his goods . . . i​ s indigent,” Roman
entreated for her colleague. His and many other indemnity petitions likely
went unfilled, lost in the spiraling costs and chaos of conflict and the juridical
limbo of slow steps made to evacuate.129
A small civilian diaspora left for Puerto Rico and Cuba. Some, like Juan
Caballero from Cádiz, deci­ded to move to Port-­au-­Prince permanently dur-
ing the fighting.130 A number of Spanish colonists, especially w ­ idows, ap-
plied for return passage to Spain. Many ­others requested transfer to Cuba
and Puerto Rico. Some took big families, leaving immediately.131 Among
the applicants, one evacuee to Puerto Rico made a remarkable claim on the
Spanish state: her freedom. In her own petition, Victoria Medina, born in
Aguadilla, described how she had arrived in Santo Domingo and been kept
covertly enslaved to a man named Nicolas Danbon. In her own hand, Medina
described the details of her case. By May 1865, Danbon had left the capital,
Medina explained, and she wanted to secure proof of her f­ ree status. Me-
dina petitioned for a carta de libertad, so that she could return to Aguadilla with
her ­family. Spanish authorities ruled her petition null, but they also acknowl-
edged her freedom. They concluded “extraofficially” that Danbon had already
granted Medina’s freedom in the neighboring island, and secondly, as she
was also asserting, “the mere fact of coming to [Santo Domingo] made her
cease to be a slave.”132
Departing authorities debated about Dominican émigrés. In early spring
de la Gándara described the “delicate and grave question” of émigrés of
color. He planned to encourage most officials and their families to ­settle
in Curaçao and Saint Thomas. “I ­will inspire them with confidence in the
good faith of the Government, that they w ­ ill be paid their pensions regu-
larly through the consuls, and persuading them of the benefit of living
where their race is more respected, and from where they can most easily
return to Santo Domingo,” he wrote to the neighboring governors. “­Those
islands must remain incommunicado with Cuba and Puerto Rico,” he warned.

Nothing Remains Anymore | 225

If it proved too impolitic to order the nonwhite officials to ­these locations—­
“the white families can choose their destination,” he asserted—­and they
chose Cuba, the general recommended they be directed to eastern areas
like Baracoa, where some recent colonization proj­ects had occurred.133 Sev-
eral months l­ater, his restrictions for Cuba tightened further. In a private
communication to a commander in Baní, he advised that loyalist Domini-
can colonial officials seeking reassignment outside of the island should be
steered by color: to Cuba, only white Dominicans, “and even then, one must
be circumspect whom ­will be permitted”; men of color w ­ ere to be ushered to
Puerto Rico, Curaçao, Saint Thomas, the Canaries, the Balearic islands (off
the coast of Cataluña), Spanish outposts in Africa and Asia, or the peninsula
itself, he ordered.134 The Cuban governor did not want to receive anyone at
all. He wanted the ministry to send all Dominicans to the Canary Islands,
Africa, or the Philippines.135
When it was time to load the ships in early June, evacuation proceed-
ings ­were orderly and without incident. Most troops embarked from San
José de Ocoa (Maniel), Azua, and Baní. About thirty-­three hundred tons of
goods and supplies, seven thousand large packages (bultos), needed evacu-
ation from the capital alone; four more ships’ worth of cargo, or almost the
same amount, awaited on the northern coast.136 Some loyalist Dominicans
requested transfer to Cuba well before fighting ended, even though they had
never served in the Spanish state at all. Such was the case of wealthy Ramón
Paredes, who wrote that he had not served militarily as he “had never been
inclined to military life.” His loyalty to Spain had cost him his bakery, his
­house, his b ­ rother, and several nieces, “just for the fact that he had always
been satisfied with [Spanish] good government,” he wrote sorrowfully.137 A
number of w ­ omen expressed a desire to follow the Spanish troops to Cuba
as well.138 Before evacuations had even become widespread, some sneaked
onto supply ships as stowaways; a few ­were caught “by chance,” but a num-
ber of ­others prob­ably escaped.139 Of the poor ­people from southern towns
who attempted to follow the soldiers, even to the point of trying to board
the ships, de la Gándara was less empathetic. “I gave o ­ rders that absolutely
prohibit the embarking of any person of that class,” he observed.140 Already
in Cuba, the departed governor expressed real affection and sentiment for
the reservist troops he had left b ­ ehind in Azua and Baní, three days earlier.
Worried about reprisals, the general took the unusual step of leaving them
arms, confident that the queen would also accede to the “sincere recogni-
tion of . . . t​ heir worthiness and distinction.”141 A popu­lar rhyme was more
sardonic about their fate:

226 | Chapter 7
 Se fueron los españoles,
¡cosa buena nunca dura!
Y quedaron los azuanos
Recogiendo la basura.142

[The Spanish left

¡nothing good ever lasts!
And the Azuans stayed ­behind
Picking up the trash.]

Santiago Was . . . ​Nothing Remains Anymore

Everywhere, ­there was devastation. Fighting “floods the city with blood
and swells the land with cadavers,” a newspaper lamented, in the fall ­after
the Spanish left.143 The injured, widowed, and homeless numbered in the
thousands. In towns across the territory, bad news broke excruciatingly
slowly. Some prisoners never made the return trip from Jerez to Santo Do-
mingo, as w ­ idows like María de Jésus Gantreau sorrowfully learned. Her
husband had died in custody nearly seven months earlier.144 Elsewhere, the
toll of fire alone was incredible: in the south, ­little but the capital was safe.
Azua burned in 1863 (along with Baní).145 Azua had burned again in early
1865, reducing seventy h ­ ouses to ashes, “among them the most prominent
of the population,” an official observed. For residents not involved in the
fighting, it amounted to a “terrible accident. . . . ​Azua has always shown
unequivocal proof of her unwavering faithfulness,” de la Gándara had writ-
ten empathetically at the time.146 Each new sweep through the towns had
brought pillaging, too, as rebels gathered both supplies and personal
goods.147 San Cristóbal passed back and forth between rebel and Spanish
control, suffering the ravages of fighting on multiple occasions. Life in the
Cibao, the source of nearly 65 ­percent of the country’s exports, had been
totally upended. Tobacco fields w ­ ere fallow, towns burned nearly to ashes,
countless ­were homeless, and even more ­were wounded. A Spanish observer
described the approaching flames as Santiago burned for the first time as a
“whirlwind of fire,” vis­i­ble from a ­great distance in “the rich and populous
capital.” The man described “a horrible bonfire . . . [​ that] was devouring al-
most its entirety.” The first fire to rip through Puerto Plata had lasted three
­whole days; it had been “an implacable war of blood and fire,” an aghast wit-
ness recorded.148 In Samaná, schools, churches, and missionary h ­ ouses had
burned.149 “Santiago was . . . ​nothing remains anymore,” mourned Rodrí-
guez Objío of the ashes of his city in November 1864.150 “Light ashes cover

Nothing Remains Anymore | 227

all of the homes where opulence lived; and an occasional breeze . . . ​mocks
the mundane insanity,” he marveled, in horror.
Javier Ángulo Guridi grappled with the devastation in his 1866 novel,
La campana del higo, ostensibly set on the eve of another in­de­pen­dence, the
year 1842. An earthquake had devastated the landscape of the Cibao. Guridi
described an apocalyptic rural landscape, “an indescribable scene in which
nature seems to lose its equilibrium and threatens to commit massive
hom­i­cide . . . e​ ven the survivors cannot cry enough tears to commiserate
the absolute ruin.”151 The ­people, in their sober virtue, tried to show “they
­were all a ­family, not even arguing, not even a complaint or gripe among any
of their infinite members,” he wrote. Celestial instability had made them
fearful, he explained, and they sought to avoid anything that might “cast
a shadow on the tranquil sky.”152 Higo tells no happy tale; it is a vengeance
tragedy, in which an innocent ­daughter, Florinda, has been assaulted. Her
­father becomes so obsessed with revenge that he cannot cultivate his field.
“You are still not satisfied!” he cries wildly at his unseen e­ nemy. “The hyena
comes back ­after devouring its victim, to drink the very last drop of blood
spilled on the field!”153 The text ends with Florinda’s real paramour in exile,
“far from his ­family and his patria.” He longs to return to Dominican soil, a
“country as unhappy as it was worthy of a better fate.”154
Slowly, however, life began again. A man in the capital city christened
his new barbershop The Hills (La Manigua), in proud reference to manigüe-
ros, the rural fighters. He promised that the youth of the capital would find
“complete satisfaction” in his ser­vices.155 On the streets of Puerto Plata, one
man spotted his old burro, lost during the fighting, and he took it back.156
Nearly six months ­after the last Spanish soldier embarked, townspeople ­were
fi­nally starting to return home. “We welcome back all our lost ­brothers,” a
journalist observed, softly.157 O
­ thers started a new life away from the island.
Máximo Gómez left in anonymity. Born in Baní, he was one of the loyal Do-
minican reservists whom Spanish authorities scattered throughout rural
eastern Cuba ­after evacuating from Dominican soil. When in­de­pen­dence
and antislavery fighting began in Cuba in 1868, however, Gómez resolved to
fight for liberation. He captured Venta del Pino in just two weeks. Another
Dominican man helped f­ ree Bayamo.158 “Every­thing I did in Cuba, as a fer-
vent and h ­ umble soldier of liberty,” Gómez l­ ater wrote, “I did it in the name
of the Dominican ­people, whose eyes ­were fixed on me.”159

228 | Chapter 7
Epilogue
BETWEEN FEAR AND HOPE

In a lucid editorial, published in the fall ­after the last Spanish soldier left, a
writer for the Puerto Plata newspaper La Regeneración proposed a lofty plan
to unite Haiti and the Dominican Republic, “born and rooted in the same
soil.” He called for the tightest relationship between the two republics since
the Boyer administration. “In­de­pen­dence and freedom for both p ­ eoples
are irrevocable,” he wrote, discussing a new military alliance. “God has
separated son from ­father, ­brother from ­brother, pueblo from other pueblo.
But . . . ​can we not form an offensive and defensive alliance to conserve the
integrity of our common territory, to avoid what just happened to us?” The
alliance would bring security, he argued, observing, “The foreign [power]
would not be able to tell which hand struck it.” He suggested that the po-
litical federation include a pragmatic economic ele­ment of trade and barter
for mutual benefit, “generous commerce treaties” of ­free trade within the
island for a variety of products. Fi­nally, the collaboration should extend to
deepened diplomatic relationships and, most radically, to dual citizenship.
“Can we not make the ties that must unite us tighter,” he argued, “to declare
that ­those born in the territory of the island be citizens of both in­de­pen­dent
states?” Peace, profit, and external security would result, he promised. “Let
us love each other as ­brothers,” he urged. “We ­will wave one flag with ­these
words: Union, fraternity . . .” Working together, he concluded, “[we can]
build between us an epoch in which man is truly a ­brother to fellow man.”1
In towns throughout the territory, idealists emerging from the Restora-
tion struggle supported a range of ambitious po­liti­cal reforms. They echoed
wish lists from previous de­cades: rule of law, reduction and regularization of
the army, amortization of paper money, and responsible national credit.2 As
an antidote both to the authoritarian po­liti­cal culture of previous regimes and
the recent vio­lence, abrogation of the death penalty was an easy target.3 Au-
thors of the November 1865 Constitution, drafted in Moca, aimed for all ­these
objectives. In addition to three branches of central government, the constitu-
tion recognized municipal power, represented by local delegates throughout
the territory. Perhaps its most radical clause—­one that would last through
numerous constitutional changes, all the way ­until 2004—­was the provision
of jus soli, or birthright, citizenship. The jus soli provision represented part
of an ambitious redefinition of the nation. Anticipating po­liti­cal rivalry, re-
formers proposed a single-­party system. “The Republic is starting a new life
and needs to be regenerated by new ideas that new men determine,” one writer
eagerly urged. “We dream together.”4
Dominican anticolonial activists threw themselves into regional organ­
izing, in familiar foreign ports and on Dominican soil. Puerto Plata emerged as
a strategic and ideological center. Freemasons returned to organ­izing openly
within months of the end of the fighting; “meeting again with frequency and
enthusiasm,” they founded a lodge with a singularly ambitious title: the Cradle
of América.5 Much closer than New York for Cuban and Puerto Rican activists,
Puerto Plata was also out of reach of the Dominican capital. Enthusiastic Cuban
émigrés arrived in the town in such numbers that its population almost tripled
in size.6 A
­ fter in­de­pen­dence fighting began in Cuba, Puerto Platan journalists
openly ridiculed the idea of neutrality and called on the Dominican state to
protect anti-­Spanish revolutionaries from Cuba, in the interests of a sovereign
Ca­rib­be­an.7 The town was full of inveterate anticolonial activists, who spoke of
Ca­rib­bean unity in affective and military vocabulary equally.8 The opening lines
of a Regeneración editorial offered solidarity and optimism, “When oppressed
­peoples throw off the heavy and disgusting hand of despotism and awake from
their lethargy . . . t​ hey discover in the distant horizon the outline of t­ hese fiery
letters: we are all ­brothers, made by the Almighty, from the same mass, from a soul made in
his image: we are to love and help each other mutually, live united at all times, and we ­will
be strong, we ­will be ­free, and we ­will be happy.” Revolution was a “new existence . . . ​
working between fear and hope,” the writer began.9
Meanwhile, Spanish authority was collapsing. In an effort to mediate
the rising in­de­pen­dentista sentiment in the wake of their embarrassing de-
feat, Madrid authorities enacted stopgap measures—­the promise of greater
repre­sen­ta­tion in both islands, the return of the whip in Puerto Rico—­with
­little success.10 Island elites called for identical rights as Spaniards, but they
also wanted more autonomy, not greater integration.11 Abolitionist lobby-

230 | Epilogue
ing grew stronger, too. “We reformists . . . w ​ ant a single and identical Spain on
both sides of the ocean without dictators, without monopolies, and without
slaves,” the leader of Spanish Abolitionist Society announced in 1865.12 From
New York, the Revolutionary Puerto Rican Committee called on Puerto Ri-
cans to follow the Dominican example immediately.13 “Every­thing that has
happened in [Santo Domingo], and the reasons for which it has happened,
are identical to what produced rebellion in the rest of Hispanic Amer­i­ca,
and the same that might, not too long from now, cause uprising in Cuba and
Puerto Rico,” an observer had predicted during the fighting.14 He was right.
Just more than three years a­ fter the last troops retreated in defeat from Santo
Domingo’s southern coast, rebellions flared in both neighboring islands.
In the interior town of Lares, far from the locus of Dominican activism in
Puerto Rico’s western towns, rebels raised a flag for abolition and in­de­pen­
dence modeled precisely on Dominican colors. Troops managed to crush
the mobilization, but authorities conceded a path to gradual abolition at
last.15 Cuba exploded into a de­cade of war. Dominicans w ­ ere everywhere in
Cuba’s rebel ranks; a few w ­ ere loyalists, too. Authorities invoked the spec-
16

ter of race war endlessly, and wealthy citizens warned each other about “the
fate of Haiti and Santo Domingo.”17 French occupation in Mexico collapsed,
as rebels ­there exulted in their own revolutionary republicanism.18 Spanish
liberals and military figures fought with, and against, each other. The queen
fled the country. Everywhere ­there was ferment.
Following the Restoration fighting, however, old hierarchical po­liti­cal
networks returned to the devastated landscape like a flood. In the ashes of
Santiago, the Cibao-­based government did not last six months. First, south-
ern politicians challenged it, and then, ­after a series of intrigues, Buenaven-
tura Báez returned. His clique relied on armed supporters, an exhausted
country, and a ritual of legitimation in the capital city press. Allies at El Monitor
announced his return gingerly; he was returning, but not as president, they
claimed. As his networks solidified, editors published statements from towns
across the territory with prominent citizens announcing their fidelity to the
returning figure.19 Generals signed: former president Pimentel, who had un-
seated Polanco’s radical administration, wealthy rancher General Santiago
Rodríguez, a Restoration hero, and o ­ thers like him. Revolutionary words
lost their meaning. Redubbed “­Great Citizen,” Báez assumed power as
a man without rival.20 Isolated protests occurred in towns across the coun-
try, but armed partisans of Báez praised him as the “Angel of Peace.”21
Military authority grew to be more predominant than ever—­even t­ hose who
had served the Spanish invoked their rank and prestige—­but these networks

Between Fear and Hope | 231

Fig. E.1 ​The Flag of Lares, modeled ­after the Dominican flag, first flew in October 1868.
Calle Sol, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Photo by Tito Román Rivera, December 2015.

­ ere intensely regional and fractured. Soldiers had local loyalties, and high-­
w
ranking officers made a multitude of claims.22 “­Those who w ­ ere decorated
with the rich crosses of Carlos III, Isabel 2 . . . ;​ ­today are called citizens
instead of Sirs,” one journalist observed with disgust.23
Social contests surrounding the island w ­ ere intense. Colombian politi-
cians explic­itly attacked emancipation, and they moved to restrict suffrage.24
In the wake of protests in the fall of 1865, known by authorities as the Morant
Bay Rebellion, the Jamaican governor’s forces killed, arrested, and burned
homes indiscriminately. Then, in mea­sures precisely opposite to policy in
Canada and Australia, legislators dismantled Jamaica’s self-­rule. In Bar-

232 | Epilogue
bados, some felt that real freedom might be “put off for another time,” or
perhaps across the Atlantic, and a small number of Barbadians and ­others
chose to migrate to Liberia.25 Some left the island to indenture proj­ects
elsewhere, as intra-­Caribbean migration increased.26 As fighting began in
Cuba’s Oriente, exiles desperately made their way to Jamaica and Haiti to
regroup.27 On Hispaniola, the same colonial diplomats stuck around, del-
eteriously, immune to metropolitan po­liti­cal transitions. They maintained
the same enduring hostility ­toward the island’s residents that they always
had.28 Britain bombarded Cap-­Haïtien in 1865. Eu­ro­pean financiers offered
loans on equally interventionist terms. Their competitors ­were back, and
stronger than ever: U.S. politicians emerged from Civil War disunion with
their eyes trained, once more, on the Ca­rib­bean. As the importance of naval
steam power became increasingly clear, they joined other powers that hoped
for coercive territorial cessions of strategic ports and peninsulas.29
Aggressive foreign interest loomed over the Dominican Republic again.
“The country suffers a terrible monetary crisis,” a journalist observed with
foreboding. Eagerly awaiting collaborators, foreign industrialists and mer-
chant ­houses stood at the ready to make deals with unscrupulous heads of
state.30 “Country sellers [vendepatrias] still want to have their way with this
­people,” critics remarked, in alarm.31 In 1869, Báez very nearly managed
to annex the Dominican Republic to the United States, galvanizing a new
round of radical anticolonial activism on the island and in diaspora. His fi-
nancial imperatives ­were clear: customs, coal mines, state lands, even the
guano deposits offshore had been mortgaged, paper money printed and
devalued multiple times.32 Báez enjoyed support from prominent collabora-
tors, many of whom had opposed Spanish annexation only years before.33
The old annexationist arguments of hispanismo and anti-­Haitianism could
not serve him; his own collaboration with the incumbent Haitian president,
Sylvain Salnave, was simply too close. Only po­liti­cal ambition and economic
imperatives remained. Although the annexation mea­sure fell well short of
the two-­thirds majority it needed in the U.S. Senate, Báez’s opponents, and
the public, ­were incensed and fearful.
Unlike in previous de­cades, however, Báez’s most radical opponents
­were already armed, and they mobilized new alliances quickly. For the next
six years, the Dominican Republic faced almost constant po­liti­cal unrest.34
The U.S. threat reinvigorated activism for a defensive Ca­rib­bean alliance,
and it threw prominent opponents into unrelenting military campaigns.
Luperón and his allies hoped for a federation of the four states across the
three islands: Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico.35 His

Between Fear and Hope | 233

close friend Manuel Rodríguez Objío traveled to New York to help or­ga­nize
supplies; Betances joined him ­there, with ambitious proposals of his own.
Betances saw the embattled republic at the center of an ambitious plan of
“Antillean Nationality” and hoped for a Ca­rib­bean parliament with its seat
in Santo Domingo. From Haiti, where he took up residence, he urged col-
laboration, and he met with the British prime minister and ­others to rally
support.36 Luperón remained in constant motion back and forth from Saint
Thomas, ­Grand Turk, Jamaica, and the northern coast, allied with a leader
of liberal po­liti­cal opposition in Haiti, Jean-­Nicolas Nissage-­Saget, to seek
the simultaneous ouster of both of the island’s presidents. Nissage-­Saget—­
like Luperón himself, “profoundly anti-­yankee”—­authorized Luperón to
impress Haitian soldiers into his anti-­imperial efforts and allowed him to
or­ga­nize freely along the border. They fought relentlessly against the cession
of coaling stations on both sides of the island.37 “The w ­ hole republic is in a
state of insurrection,” observers wrote in concern. 38

Given the unrelenting imperial climate—­foreign sugar cap­i­tal­ists ar-

rived within the decade—­these actors’ consistent, unrelenting anticolonial-
ism was simultaneously a radical and stable philosophy. Their opposition
to large-­scale outside intervention, furthermore, reflected the sentiment of
most of the island’s residents. The interests of cottage industry producers
coincided with ­these activists’ steadfast aversion to aggressive foreign capi-
tal. “Each Dominican is a soldier and a hero,” one antiannexationist wrote
hopefully.39 As citizens returned to their homes, many dis­appeared, once
again, from historical rec­ord. ­Others remained mobilized, in the highlands
of the Baoruco mountains, in the Cibao valley, and other sites, to fight in
united bands opposing U.S. annexation.40 From ­Grand Turk, a journalist
marveled at the scene in Puerto Plata. “ ‘Liberty’ and ‘we have beaten the
whites,’ t­ hese words are heard day and night,” he wrote. “They despise all
governments and consider themselves eminently power­ful to whip them
all.”41 Despite limited means, ordinary citizens offered revolutionary soli-
darity. Officials and town residents sent a vessel to neighbors in G ­ rand Turk,
­after a hurricane, offering a ship full of aid, proposing tariff reductions, and
sending well-­wishes to “fellow beings in distress and want.”42 “Dominicans
and Haitians, we are all ­brothers, ­brothers in origin, ­brothers in the days of
trial,” a rebel official in southern Haiti effused.43
Domestically, rebel efforts stood on shifting sand. Regional military loy-
alties, po­liti­cal patronage, and economic necessity frustrated stability in the
capital. Each administration hoped for “a small loan, from a trusted lender,”
but inflation and terms w ­ ere desperately unfavorable.44 Po­liti­cal opponents

234 | Epilogue
considered armed mobilizations the only recourse. Rodríguez Objío, inde-
fatigable friend and ally of other Restoration fighters, and poet, biographer,
and historian of the Restoration fight, lost his life opposing Báez’s annexation
plan. Domingo Ramírez, the general who had bedev­iled Santana with his
reunification schemes, never returned to Dominican soil. He lived the rest of
his days in Haiti, receiving and welcoming fellow travelers but never return-
ing to another ­battle.45 Years of po­liti­cal turmoil weighed on politicians of
­every po­liti­cal orientation. One famous old annexationist, Tomas Bobadilla,
had been born a Spanish citizen. ­After de­cades of collaboration at the high-
est ranks in many administrations, he changed his mind in l­ ater years, ­after
his own son defiantly opposed foreign occupation. Out of ­favor, he spent the
last year of his life in Cap-­Haïtien.46 Poet Salomé Ureña wrote verses lament-
ing the “lakes of blood” spilled in her country as coups proliferated.47 Still,
fighting continued.

Even as it could no longer sustain annexationist logic, conservative anti-­

Haitian rhetoric emerged in Dominican politics once more. Summoned in
the ser­vice of power seekers, of the “Civilized,” of the cynical, ­those who
invoked anti-­Haitian discourse used it for facile patriotism where po­liti­
cal unity flagged. The narrative reemerged among the reactionaries who
strug­gled adamantly to regain power in 1864; they accused Gaspar Polanco
of being “pro-­Haitian,” and they clearly understood it as a slander.48 Writ-
ers for El Tiempo, which served as Báez’s primary mouthpiece in the capital,
distorted stories to meet their needs, pillorying the Haitian president u ­ ntil
he was the caudillo’s ally, for example. As ever, journalists and authorities
spoke obliquely about popu­lar Dominican-­Haitian collaboration on domes-
tic soil, dismissing all of the popu­lar opposition to U.S. territorial cessions
as the machinations of peasant rebels (cacos) who had no platform.49 Pri-
vately to U.S. officials, Báez’s aides added additional commentary, claim-
ing the anticolonial opposition hoped “the African race [­will] dominate the
island.50
Thus diverged two histories—­and two f­utures—­for the republic. As La
Regeneración wrote one history, El Tiempo wrote another. Where the journalists
from the first hoped for dual citizenship born out of the collaboration of
1863–65, writers in the latter remembered Haitian collaboration of the previous
period as nothing but venal self-­interest. Where the first sought to foster
markets in the center of the island, the second saw contraband. “The Gov-
ernment w ­ ill take it upon itself to dictate energetic mea­sures to repress this

Between Fear and Hope | 235

abuse, and it is strange that local authorities have not taken steps to prevent
this prob­lem,” El Tiempo complained.51 Luperón was “a conspirator . . . ​per-
verse and antinational,” a writer accused, with “something mysterious and
contrary to the true Dominican spirit.” Of the rebels’ desperate collaborative
efforts to save the country from U.S. annexation, the journalist concluded,
“The Puerto Plata movement is nothing other than an attempt to destroy na-
tional in­de­pen­dence in f­ avor of the Haitians.“52 In Puerto Plata, meanwhile,
La Regeneración’s writers pleaded for a dif­f er­ent interpretation. “It is past time
to close the disastrous period of our conflicts and begin a new era of peace
and ­union,” one urged. Hope and pessimism intermingled: “The po­liti­cal
generation who bring with them ideas, passions, hate and rancor is disap-
pearing. . . . ​[­After] a foreign power’s interference, a bloody revolution,
a total victory, frequent bonds between the two p ­ eoples long separated, a
community of ideas in the strug­gle, a unity of aspirations, signs of friend-
ship, help and compassion amid the t­rials, must we revive old hates that
should be extinguished, never to be reborn?”53 Or­ga­ni­za­tion and outrage
continued in the town, in the center of the island, and all across the territory.
“For how long w ­ ill parties toy with the destiny of pueblos?” another asked,
demanding, “When ­will ­these wicked idols fall from their pedestals?”54

236 | Epilogue
Notes

Abbreviations

agi Archivo General de Indias (Spain)

agn-­rd Archivo General de la Nación–­República Dominicana
ahn Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid
amae Archivo del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Madrid
anc Archivo Nacional de Cuba
Anexión Fondo Anexión
ap Asuntos Políticos
bagn Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación
bne Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid
bnjm Biblioteca Nacional José Martí (Cuba)
ch Colección Herrera
Clío 
Revista Clío, Órgano de la Academia Dominicana de la Historia
co Colonial Office
Copiador Índice General de Libros Copiadores de la Sección rree,
agn-­rd
Cuba Papeles de Cuba
fo Foreign Office
nara National Archives (U.S.)
rree Relaciones Exteriores
SD Santo Domingo
s/f sin fecha
shm Servicio Histórico Militar, Madrid
tna The National Archives, Kew (U.K.)
Introduction

1. Vicioso, El freno hatero, 144; Mella, Los espejos de Duarte, 198. Some Dominican
scholars refer to the period of Unification (1822–44) as “occupation” (e.g.,
Núñez Grullón, Evolución constitucional dominicana, 17). More recent studies
limit “occupation” to the first weeks of unification between the two ter-
ritories during which—­despite obvious support from citizens in a number of
Dominican towns and a pacific reception of the transition generally—­a large
number of Haitian troops ­were pres­ent to realize the change in flag (Lora
Hugi, Transición, 47).
2. Mella, Los espejos de Duarte, 197–98.
3. Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 236. Spanish troops occupied San
Lorenzo de los Mina and built new guard posts in Pajarito (Villa Duarte) and
San Carlos.
4. José Francisco Pichardo, “A la palma de la libertad: Indignamente derribada
en la noche del 9 de mayo de 1864,” in Rodríguez Demorizi, Santana y los
poetas, 342 (emphasis in original).
5. “Hispaniola” comes from the moniker that Columbus gave the island, “La
Española.” The etymology of “Quisqueya,” reportedly an Arawak word
for “­mother of all lands,” is more controversial, first reported by Italian
historian Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, who had never traveled to the island;
some emphasize that its popularity is a result of an aversion to using “Haiti”
(San Miguel, Crónicas de un embrujo, 76). Haiti or Ayiti, conversely, was widely
recorded as an Arawak name for the island meaning “mountainous land.”
Furthermore, it had a vibrant place in the nineteenth-­century island po­liti­
cal lexicon ­after its deliberate adoption by statemakers in the west in 1804
(Geggus, “Naming of Haiti”). Dominican in­de­pen­dentists of late 1821 hoped
to create “Spanish Haiti” in the east; the ­whole island was Haiti for a time,
from 1822 to 1844. ­After Dominican separation, Dominican use of “Haiti” to
refer to the ­whole island subsided, but rebels revived it during anti-­Spanish
fighting. Poet Manuel Rodríguez Objío pointedly gestured to a breadth of in-
vocations, imagining, “Your former inhabitants, in patriotic cry, sometimes
they called it Quisquella, sometimes they called it Haiti” (qtd. in Vicioso, El
freno hatero, 291–92). I ­will use “Hispaniola,” as it is the most commonly used
name for the island in En­glish. Although it lends par­tic­u­lar credence to the
imperial rec­ord, invoking that aggression is perhaps appropriate to recount
the events that tran­spired. Where its interlocutors invoked it, I ­will also use
“Haiti.”
6. Mintz, Ca­rib­bean Transformations, 132–33; Casimir, La culture opprimée;
González, De esclavos a campesinos; González, “War on Sugar.” Bayly, Imperial
Meridian, interprets the early 1800s as an accelerating imperial transition,
rather than a lull.

238 | notes to introduction

 7. Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 160.
8. Narratives of conflict with Haiti had multiple uses. As in Argentina, Para-
guay, and Brazil, willful print propagandists hoped to foment popu­lar mo-
bilization and national allegiance, in addition to making appeals to outside
powers si­mul­ta­neously (Huner, “Toikove Ñane Retã!”).
9. Plaza, “God and Federation,” 140.
10. In the case of Nicaragua, for example, see Gobat, Confronting the American
Dream; Wolfe, Everyday Nation-­State; in Mexico, see, e.g., Paní, El segundo impe-
rio; Ibsen, Maximilian, Mexico, and the Invention of Empire.
11. Tomich, Through the Prism of Slavery; Giusti-­Cordero, “Beyond Sugar Revolu-
tions,” 58–83; ­Cromwell, “More Than Slaves and Sugar,” 770–83.
12. Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror; Schneider, Occupation of Havana.
13. González, De esclavos a campesinos; Moya Pons, Historia colonial de Santo
Domingo.
14. Dubois and Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Ca­rib­be­an, 36; Ferrer, Freedom’s
Mirror; Cordero Michel, La revolucion haitiana y Santo Domingo; Nessler, Island-­
Wide Strug­gle for Freedom; Yingling, “Colonialism Unraveling”; Madiou, Histoire
d’Haïti.
15. Nessler, “ ‘The Shame of the Nation.’ ”
16. Adelman, “Age of Imperial Revolution,” 336.
17. Sánchez Ramírez, Diario de la Reconquista.
18. Paredes Vera, “La Constitución de 1812,” 110; Lora Hugi, “El sonido de la
libertad,” 127; Eller, “ ‘All Would Be Equal in the Effort,’ ” 128, 132.
19. Pierrot and McIntosh, “Henry/Nehri.”
20. Dajabón, Monte Cristi, Santiago de los Caballeros, Las Caobas, Las Matas
de Farfán, San Juan, Neiba, Azua, La Vega, Bánica, Hincha, and the northern
port city of Puerto Plata all issued proclamations in support of the pending
unification (Lora Hugi, Transición, 46–49; Paredes Vera, “La Constitución de
1812,” 136; Janvier, Haïti et ses visiteurs, 601). In fact residents raised the Hai-
tian flag in Monte Cristi, Dajabón, and Beler in November 1821, two weeks
before the Colombian one was (briefly) raised in the south (Mackenzie, Notes
on Haiti, 235).
21. Alemar, Escritos, 185. As a successor to Pétion, Boyer was a known entity to
po­liti­cal observers in the Dominican capital. Fledgling periodical El Duende
looked admiringly on Boyer’s leadership skills (El Duende, no. 1, 15 April 1821,
1; no. 8, 3 June 1821, 1).
22. Lora Hugi, Transición, 46.
23. Lora Hugi, Transición, 73.
24. McGraw, Work of Recognition, 6–7.
25. Francisco Brenes qtd. in Castro Ventura, Duarte en la proa, 48.
26. Lora Hugi, Transición, 46; Jimenes Grullón, La Républica Dominicana, 132.
Tobacco production nearly qua­dru­pled in the Cibao, although farming

notes to introduction | 239

 technology remained fairly primitive; wood exports increased significantly
as well (Betances, “Agrarian Transformation,” 61). Con­temporary observers
attested that the east-­to-­west ­cattle trade increased and that commerce
from Cap, Gonaïves, Saint Marc, Port-­au-­Prince, and Jacmel spread to some
centers of the east (“American Intrigues in St. Domingo, II,” The Anti-­slavery
Reporter 7, no. 2 [1859]: 29–31).
27. Scott, “Public Rights and Private Commerce.”
28. Ferrer, “Haiti, ­Free Soil, and Antislavery.”
29. Harris, “Summer on the Borders,” 152.
30. Lockward, Documentos, 222.
31. See, among many ­others, Pompée-­Valentin baron de Vastey, Colonial System
Unveiled; Bissette, Réfutation du livre de M. V. Schoelcher; Bongie, Friends and
Enemies; Nicholls, “Work of Combat”; Daut, “ ‘Alpha and Omega’ of Haitian
Lit­er­a­ture.”
32. Prominent Dominican po­liti­cal figures explic­itly condemned 1830s Spanish
missions to reclaim the territory and dubbed Boyer “an angel of peace”; o ­ thers
penned poetry in praise of Boyer’s regime (Cassá, Personajes dominicanos, 167; de
Granda, “Un caso de planeamiento lingüístico frustrado,” 209). Many pro-­
Boyer texts may have ­later been destroyed (Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 181).
33. Puig Ortíz, Emigración; Hidalgo, “From North Amer­i­ca to Hispaniola”;
Hoetink, “Americans in Samaná”; Fleszar, “ ‘My Laborers in Haiti Are Not
Slaves’ ”; Fanning, Ca­rib­bean Crossing.
34. Qtd. in Sheller, “Army of Sufferers,” 43–44.
35. Lockward, La Constitución Haitiano-­Dominicana.
36. “La ­union constituye la fuerza,” El Dominicano, no. 1, 29 June 1855, 1; “La
Historia de El Duende,” El Progreso, no. 17, 12 June 1853, 6.
37. Pani, El segundo imperio, 104; Soto, La conspiración monárquica en México 1845–6;
Andrés, “Colonial Crisis and Spanish Diplomacy,” 328.
38. Índice General de Libros Copiadores de la Sección rree, agn-­rd (hereafter
cited as Copiador), 13 June 1848.
39. A small sampling of the flourishing scholarship on the immediate impact
of the Haitian Revolution includes James, Black Jacobins; Scott, “Common
Wind”; Trouillot, Silencing the Past; Geggus, The Impact of the Haitian Revolu-
tion; Dubois, A Colony of Citizens; Garraway, Tree of Liberty; Ferrer, Freedom’s
Mirror; Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War; White, Encounter-
ing Revolution; Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis.
40. Spieler, “­Legal Structure of Colonial Rule during the French Revolution.”
41. Brown, Reaper’s Garden; Schmidt-­Nowara, Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition. Planters
wrote of the necessity of slavery: “For proof, look to Jamaica, San Domingo,
Hayti” (“Negro Slavery,” Southern Cultivator 20, nos. 5–6 [May–­June 1862]: 110.
42. Lightfoot, Troubling Freedom; Besson, Martha Brae’s Two Histories.
43. Paton, “Revisiting No Bond but the Law.”

240 | notes to introduction

44. Among the very rich body of works, see ­these texts: Williams, Capitalism and
Slavery; Holt, “ ‘Empire over the Mind’ ” and Prob­lem of Freedom; Hall, Civilising
Subjects; Rugemer, Prob­lem of Emancipation; Newton, ­Children of Africa; Kazan-
jian, Brink of Freedom.
45. Hall, “Nation Within and Without.”
46. Lambert, Mastering the Niger; for similar discourses about Liberia, see Kazan-
jian, Brink of Freedom.
47. Breen, St. Lucia, 240–59.
48. See, for example, Hall, Civilising Subjects; Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings.
49. Peabody, “France’s Two Emancipations,” 34.
50. Holt, Prob­lem of Freedom.
51. Karp, “The World the Slaveholders Craved,” 418. Pro-­slavery voices praised
the new cotton proj­ects using indentured ­labor in Guiana, Trinidad, and
other sites (Elliott, Cotton Is King, 144).
52. De Barros, Reproducing the British Ca­rib­be­an, 28; Hall, Civilising Subjects, 22, 48;
Rugemer, Prob­lem of Emancipation, 263.
53. Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror; Tomich, “Wealth of Empire,” 5–6.
54. Martínez-­Fernández, Torn between Empires, 17–18.
55. Figueroa, Sugar, Slavery, and Freedom, 167; Picó, Al filo del poder, 52.
56. Laviña, “Puerto Rico,” 103.
57. Figueroa, Sugar, Slavery, and Freedom, 36.
58. Reid-­Vazquez, Year of the Lash; Finch, Rethinking Slave Rebellion.
59. Corwin, Spain and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, 153; see also Schmidt-­
Nowara, Empire and Anti-­slavery.
60. Philadelphia, “Friends’ Intelligencer,” no. 13, 13 September 1856, 408.
61. Puerto Rican governor Rafael Aristegui to Spanish minister of state, 15 No-
vember 1844, qtd. in Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 80; Ruffin, Diary
of Edmund Ruffin, 291.
62. Candler, Brief Notices of Hayti, 121; Rugemer; Prob­lem of Emancipation.
63. Putnam, “Ideología racial, práctica social y estado liberal en Costa Rica”;
Bassi, An Aqueous Territory. Mainland Ca­rib­bean areas—­coastal Venezuela
and Colombia, for example—­further erased Ca­rib­bean regional connections
in ­favor of a continental Latin American identification (Gómez, “Entwining
the Revolutions”).
64. Gobat, “Invention of Latin Amer­i­ca,” 1363.
65. Harris, “Summer on the Borders.”
66. Dewey and Boyer, Correspondence Relative to the Emigration to Hayti, 11.
67. B. F. Rojas, “A los dominicanos,” 11 June 1865, qtd. in Rodríguez Demorizi,
Actos y doctrina, 394.
68. Henríquez Ureña, Pa­norama histórico de la literatura dominicana, 69. On the dura-
bility of ­these narratives, see, for example, Torres-­Saillant, “Blackness and
Meaning in Studying Hispaniola.”

notes to introduction | 241

69. Wolfe, Everyday Nation-­State, 171–72.
70. “Exclusivism . . . ​isolated from humanity,” Dominican president Báez
inveighed in 1850 (Lockward, Documentos, 133). For a contextualizing of
­these isolation narratives in a slightly earlier period, see Gaffield, Haitian
Connections.
71. Out of direct imperial interests and an irrepressible urge to excoriate Haiti,
outside travelers and ­eager capital city elites argued for flagrant contrasts
on the island along multiple tacks: that ­there was no racism in the republic,
that Dominicans ­were white-­identifying, and that good Dominican patriots
hated Haiti (Candelario, Black ­behind the Ears, chap. 1; Martínez-­Fernández,
Torn between Empires, 41–42; Eller, “Awful Pirates and Hordes of Jackals”).
Their preoccupation continued unabated for de­cades. One author pleaded
that the United States remain neutral in any island conflict, for example, but
only ­because the story of “130,000 white Dominicans” was a “pious fraud”
(Clark, Remarks upon United States Intervention in Hayti).
72. “Al Público,” El Dominicano, no. 1, 19 September 1845, 1.
73. This lit­er­a­ture often separates the annexationism of the small group in
power (e.g., Álvarez López, Dominación colonial, 11, 33; Betances, “Social
Classes,” 23) from another undercurrent in the Cibao valley, less systemati-
cally discussed (e.g., Marte, Correspondencia, 63), or even from pro-­U.S. an-
nexation sentiment in the far eastern province of Higüey (Mayes, The Mulatto
Republic, 18). It also tends to exaggerate the differences between politicians
of the south and the Cibao, discussed more in chapter 1 (Landolfi, Evolución
cultural dominicana).
74. Larson, ­Trials of Nation Making, 6.
75. Rojas, Cuba Mexicana.
76. Martínez-­Fernández, “Caudillos,” 574; Escolano Giménez, La rivaldad interna-
cional, 68.
77. Dhormoys, Une visite chez Soulouque, 147.
78. Brown, “Global History of Latin Amer­i­ca”; Sartorius, Ever Faithful; Schmidt-­
Nowara, “La España ultramarina”; Thomson, Birth of Modern Politics in Spain;
Morillo-­Alicea, “ ‘Aquel laberinto de oficinas.’ ”
79. Hall, “Nation Within and Without,” 181; Peabody, “France’s Two Emancipa-
tions,” 31.
80. Stasiulis and Yuval-­Davis, Unsettling Settler Socie­ties, 275; Razack, Race, Space
and the Law, 55.
81. E.g., Colombia’s 1863 Rionegro Constitution (Andrés, “Colonial Crisis,”
335).
82. Escolano Giménez, “La organización de la provincia de Santo Domingo,”
340; Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 372.
83. Dorsey, “Seamy Sides of Abolition.”
84. Cooper, Colonialism in Question; Dubois, Avengers.

242 | notes to introduction

 85. McGuinness, “Searching for ‘Latin Amer­i­ca,’ ” 102; Luis-­Brown, Waves of
Decolonization, 247; Gobat, “Invention of Latin Amer­i­ca,” 1346.
86. Sanders, Vanguard of the Atlantic World, 4; Thomson, “Garibaldi and the
Legacy of the Revolutions of 1848”; Peyrou, “Harmonic Utopia of Spanish
Republicanism.”
87. Coviello, Intimacy in Amer­ic­ a, 4.
88. McGuinness, “Searching for ‘Latin Amer­i­ca,’ ” 101.
89. Smith, Freedom’s Frontier.
90. May, “Lobbyists for Commercial Empire,” 408.
91. Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 65; Hauch, “The Dominican Republic
and Its Foreign Relations,” 98.
92. R. Edwardes to Lord J. Russell, Madrid, 22 April 1861, agn-­rd: Anexión
de/000933, Expte. 6, p. 17.
93. Fontecha Pedraza and González Calleja, Una cuestión de honor, 5, 9, 51; Álvarez
Junco, “Spanish National Identity,” 321.
94. Schomburgk, “Peninsula and Bay of Samaná,” 283.
95. Eusebio Soler to Gob. Superior Civil, SD, 4 July 1864, agn-­rd: Anexión 16,
Expte. 1, doc. 3.
96. Qtd. in Welles, Naboth’s Vineyard, 224.
97. Eusebio Soler to Gob. Superior Civil, SD, 4 July 1864, agn-­rd: Anexión 16,
Expte. 1, doc. 3.
98. Francisco Serrano to Min. de Guerra, Havana, 6 September 1861, ahn:
Ultramar 3532, Expte. 2, doc 2.
99. Hispaniola, Hayti, 87.
100. Harris, “Summer on the Borders,” 80.
101. Qtd. in “Nouvelles étrangères,” Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 27, 8 June 1861, 3.
102. González, “Ideologia del progreso y campesinado,” 34; González, “La figura
social del montero,” 79.
103. Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba; Lasso, Myths of Harmony; McGraw, Work of Recognition;
Grandin, “Liberal Traditions in the Amer­i­cas.”
104. Min. de rree to Cornelio G. Holff, RD Agente Comercial in NYC, Copiador,
4 March 1860.
105. Fr. Consul to Min. de rree, Copiador, 4 February 1861.
106. Rodríguez Demorizi, Relaciones dominicoespañolas, 352; Marte, Correspondencia,
42.
107. Marte, “La oralidad sobre el pasado insular,” 7.
108. Escolano Giménez, “La insurrección dominicana,” 73. Ranches make noto-
riously difficult historiographical subjects, authors observe (Giusti-­Cordero,
“Beyond Sugar Revolutions,” 67). Considering the issues of evidence about
black ranching socie­ties throughout the Atlantic World, see Sluyter, Black
Ranching Frontiers.
109. Cross-­Beras, Sociedad y desarrollo en la República dominicana, 54.

notes to introduction | 243

110. Turits, Foundations of Despotism.
111. González, De esclavos a campesinos.
112. Rodríguez Demorizi, Papeles de Pedro F. Bonó, 192.
113. Putnam, “To Study the Fragments/Whole,” 619.
114. Vinson, “African (Black) Diaspora History, Latin American History.”
115. ­There has been a profusion of valuable monographs about the Restoration
War within this paradigm that focus, instead, on other aspects of the annex-
ation and rebellion. One scholar writes that ­there was “no discrimination”
during the First Republic (Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 102); ­others
disregard elite racism more obliquely, in the tendency to mystify annex-
ationist tendencies as “backward,” rather than interrogating the common
goals (of indenture, of profit, or of self-­preservation versus a rural major-
ity) that an impor­tant sector of Dominican annexationists had in common
with elites throughout the Ca­rib­bean (for an overview, see Febres-­Cordero
Carrillo, “La anexión,” chap. 2). Scholars tend to mention the importance
of fears of reenslavement to the rebels without further contextualization
outside of the immediate antagonism of the occupation (i.e., the regional
context or long-­term domestic discussions of emancipation and racism). At
dif­f er­ent moments, authors have used the nationalist frame, furthermore,
specifically as a vehicle of liberation. Professor, intellectual, and revolution-
ary Juan Bosch published his classic study of the popu­lar rebellion, with an
essay about U.S. intervention wreaking havoc on the territory, one hundred
years l­ ater. “To reach the category of hero, men and ­women do not need to
be letrados; what they need is the capacity to create acts,” he urges, pointedly
(Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración, 125).
116. Mimi Sheller refers to this as a “peasant demo­cratic ideology” (Democracy
­after Slavery, 5).
117. On the concept of articulation of solidarities in the African diaspora, see
Patterson and Kelley, “Unfinished Migrations.”
118. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs.
119. Carlos Helm to Francisco Serrano, 5 March 1862, anc: ap 53, Expte. 16.
120. Luperón, Notas autobiográficas, 99; Ayuso, Historia pendiente, 9, 94.
121. Abreu Cardet and Sintes Gómez, El alzamiento de Neiba, 29.
122. Qtd. in Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 77.
123. Marte, Correspondencia, 90.
124. On discussions of warnings of reenslavement in other contexts, see, e.g.,
Hahn, “ ‘Extravagant Expectations’ of Freedom.”
125. Jimenes Grullón, Sociologia política dominicana, 131.
126. Finch, Rethinking Slave Rebellion, 171.
127. De la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 201–2; Rodríguez Demo-
rizi, Del vocabulario dominicano, 20. The Haitian president, Fabre Nicholas
Geffrard, predicted the strug­gle. “Dominicans and Haitians are the two
most indomitable ­peoples of the new world, and . . . ​the most resolute,”

244 | notes to introduction

 he warned the Spanish. “Call Dominicans . . . ​, and ask each one what
they have done for their country (Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 12, 23 February
1861, 3).
128. Martínez, Diccionario, 514.
129. Sanders, Vanguard of the Atlantic World, 26; Smith, Roots of Conservatism, 79.
130. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 375.
131. Boletín Oficial, 18 December 1864, qtd. in Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doc-
trina, 249.
132. Fusté, “Pos­si­ble Republics,” 3.
133. Bermúdez de Castro y O’Lawlor, Cuestión de Santo Domingo, 39, 47–49.
134. Adelman, “Iberian Passages,” 59.
135. Amid a valuable body of works that consider how Ca­rib­bean activists con-
fronted constant tension between the insistent “racelessness” of republican
national proj­ects and the immediate menace of racism at home and abroad,
see Fusté, “Pos­si­ble Republics”; Stephens, Black Empire; Reyes-­Santos, Our
Ca­rib­bean Kin; Mayes, The Mulatto Republic; Scott, “Public Rights”; Ferrer,
Insurgent Cuba.
136. Johnson, Fear of French Negroes, 2; Reyes-­Santos, Our Ca­rib­bean Kin, 8; Chaar-­
Pérez, “ ‘Revolution of Love.’ ”
137. Sheller, Citizenship, 102.
138. He continued, wryly: “In the ­great Confederation ­there ­will be the French
of Guadeloupe and Martinique, whom I ­don’t know; the Haitians, whom I
know too well; the Cubans, whom I am getting to know, as I am seeing them
in the work of destruction, which they ­will most prob­ably continue ­after
emancipation; the En­glish of Jamaica and the rest of the British isles; and
us. . . . ​Superb ele­ments, of course, to construct a mixed society that ­ought
to serve as a barrier to the aspirations and invasions of the Anglo-­Saxon
raza!” (Espaillat y Quiñones, Escritos, 269).
139. Hepburn, Haiti as It Is, 11.
140. Kachun, “ ‘Our Platform Is as Broad as Humanity,’ ” 2; Hepburn, Haiti as It Is,
16.
141. Gómez, “Entwining the Revolutions.”
142. Rodríguez Objío, Gregorio Luperón e historia de la Restauración, 2:192; Haitian
heads of state engaged in similar “salvation diplomacy” (Adam, Une crise
haïtienne 1867–1869, 42).
143. Dubois, Haiti, 169.
144. Mella, Los espejos de Duarte. Duarte was in exile ­after the first six months of
Separation. He wrote mournfully of the ­battles that raged from exile in near-­
total anonymity (Castro Ventura, Duarte en la proa de historia, 252).
145. Mella, Los espejos de Duarte, 34, 38, 54.
146. Hagemann and Rendall, “Introduction,” 28. On archetypes of Dominican
­women in the nineteenth ­century, see Lora Hugi, “Las mujeres anónimas,”
84.

notes to introduction | 245

147. Mella, Los espejos de Duarte, 301.
148. Rodríguez de Tió, Mi libro de Cuba, vii.
149. Among works that consider the nineteenth ­century specifically, see Cordero
Michel, La revolución haitiana; Hernández Flores, Luperón, héroe y alma; Torres-­
Saillant, “Tribulations of Blackness”; Mayes, The Mulatto Republic; Nessler, An
Island-­Wide Strug­gle for Freedom; Martínez, “Not a Cockfight”; Franco, “Reman-
entes ideológicos.”
150. Torres-­Saillant, “Tribulations of Blackness,” 132.
151. “Convulsiones de los pueblos,” La Regeneración, no. 2, 3 September 1865, 3.

1. Life by Steam

1. “Haiti,” El Dominicano, no. 21, 5 September 1846, 81.

2. “Continuación,” El Dominicano, no. 7, 13 November 1845, 17–18.
3. “Clamor Público,” El Dominicano, no. 21, 5 September 1846, 83.
4. Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 1:164.
5. Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 2:12, 17.
6. Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 1:59; ­these caudillo-­led troops or
party militias ­were known elsewhere as montoneras (Holden, Armies without
Nations, 38).
7. Aluma-­Cazorla, “Caudillo as the Post-­bandit.”
8. Pérez Memén, El Pensamiento dominicano, 25; Campillo Pérez, Historia electoral
dominicana; Franks, “Transforming Property,” 90.
9. Salvatore, Wandering Paysanos, 1, 398.
10. To propose to cross the island by land, “­people seemed to think a man must
­either be crazy, or that he expected to derive some mysterious benefit from
such a trip,” one traveler remarked in 1870 (Hazard, Santo Domingo, Past and
Pres­ent, 274).
11. François-­Xavier Guerra qtd. in Knöbl, “State Building in Western Eu­rope and
the Amer­i­cas,” 72.
12. Marte, “La oralidad sobre el pasado insular,” 41.
13. Marte, “La oralidad sobre el pasado insular,” 34. “Spaniards” was also
commonly used in Haiti at the popu­lar level; Emperor Soulouque often
simply referred to “the eastern part” (Pablo de Urrutia to Cap. Gen. of Cuba,
6 November 1858, anc: ap 224, Expte. 13). Other scholars emphasize that
leaders invoked terms of po­liti­cal consensus (“copatriots,” con-­patriotas)
precisely ­because the idea of territorial unity was so weak (Mella, Los espejos
de Duarte, 216).
14. Vicioso, El freno hatero, 333.
15. Lora Hugi, Transición, 130; San Miguel, Los campesinos del Cibao, 44.
16. ­After 1824, only state documents ­were in French, and French secretaries
(greffiers) appeared only in the Dominican capital (de Granda, “Un caso de
planeamiento lingüístico frustrado,” 193, 199–201, 203; Lora Hugi, Transición,

246 | NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

 48–49). In nearly all of the “Sentencias Penales de la Época Haitiana,”
republished in the Dominican National Archive’s Boletin General de la Nacion,
nos. 79–87 (1953–55), the cases are conducted in Spanish; the only excep-
tions are defendants with French/Haitian surnames.
17. Vicioso, El freno hatero, 139. He was also a prolific poet in ­favor of Boyer’s re-
gime; e.g., de Granda, “Un caso de planeamiento lingüístico frustrado,” 209.
18. Pablo Alí’s 31st Regiment, known as the “Batallón de los Morenos,” was
composed of “two Black companies that existed . . . ​before the emancipa-
tion of 1822.” Boyer created the 32nd Regiment for the newly manumitted
­after 1822, and it was composed of “Africans and youth from the town”
(Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 95; Mella, Los espejos de Duarte, 200–201). ­There was
another specifically black regiment in San Cristóbal (Mella, Los espejos de
Duarte, 199).
19. Porter, Diario de una misión secreta, 28.
20. Lora Hugi, Transición, 46; Jimenes Grullón, La Répública Dominicana, 132.
Tobacco production nearly qua­dru­pled in the Cibao, although farming
technology remained fairly primitive; wood exports increased significantly
as well (Betances, “Agrarian Transformation,” 61). Con­temporary observ-
ers attested that the east-­to-­west ­cattle trade increased and that commerce
from Cap, Gonaïves, Saint Marc, Port-­au-­Prince, and Jacmel spread to some
centers of the east (“American Intrigues in St. Domingo, II.,” The Anti-­slavery
Reporter 7, no. 2 [1859]: 29–31).
21. Traditional narratives stress the impact of Boyer’s 1826 Rural Code, arguing
it had widespread, onerous effects (Moya Pons, “The Land Question in Haiti
and Santo Domingo”). Again, Lora Hugi’s study of Higüey is instructive. In
Higüey, months passed before new officials ­were sworn in, and Boyer never
traveled to the province. Lora Hugi demonstrates that authorities did not en-
force vagrancy codes, travel passes ­were few, and communal land practices
continued without interruption (Lora Hugi, Transición, 55–56, 73, 128, 130, 143).
In one collection of dozens of cases from the capital, just one vagrancy
prosecution emerges, in the aggravating instance of a robbery (“Causa contra
Pedro Manuel,” bagn, no. 83 [1954], 402–4).
22. Schoelcher, Abolition de l’esclavage.
23. The indemnity provoked immediate domestic and international compli-
cations. By decree in April 1826, each commune was to furnish 3 million
gourdes, an amount soon reduced by a third. Higüey’s special commission,
not convened ­until the following summer, gathered just several hundred
pesos in voluntary donations; it is not immediately evident how much more
was levied through taxes or tariffs. Citizens ­were exempted from individual
taxation in 1828 (although it seems this was reinstated in 1829). Numerous
adjustments highlight the pragmatic, po­liti­cal, and economic impossibility
of paying such a sum (Lora Hugi, Transición, 122–24).

notes to chapter 1 | 247

24. “Reflecciones Políticas sobre la cuestión de Haiti,” El Dominicano, no. 4, 1 No-
vember 1845, 13. In the west, one traveler noted in 1837 that guards often
overstepped their daily authority. A “dangerous military spirit” that was
antidemo­cratic and a “fearful engine of any government” prevailed (Brown,
History and Pres­ent Condition of St. Domingo, 2:268).
25. “Reflecciones Políticas sobre la cuestión de Haiti,” El Dominicano, no. 4, 1 No-
vember 1845, 14.
26. Nouel, “El terremoto de 1842,” 99–100.
27. Illás, “El terremoto del 7 de mayo,” 67.
28. Hispaniola, Hayti, 24.
29. Hispaniola, Hayti, 30.
30. Fiallo Billini, “La construcción antillanista,” n.p.
31. Espinal Hernández, “Familiaridad y consanguinidad.” The group had
disbanded before Separation was even realized (Guerrero, “El Pensamiento
conservador,” 114).
32. Pedro Bonó qtd. in Castro Ventura, Duarte en la proa, 47).
33. They drafted the Praslin Manifesto, named for the property of Charles Hé-
rard ouside of Les Cayes (Sheller, “Army of Sufferers,” 42).
34. Qtd. in Rodríguez Demorizi, Invasiones haitianas, 302.
35. “Informe del General Charles Hérard ainé,” in Rodríguez Demorizi, Invasio-
nes haitianas, 285. Fifteen delegates from Puerto Plata and other towns of the
east ­were in attendance (Lockward, La Constitución Haitiano-­Dominicana, 17;
Rodríguez Demorizi, Invasiones haitianas, 286). Large landowning repre-
sentatives, like ­future Dominican caudillo president Buenaventura Báez,
lobbied hard about the limitations of landowning and citizenship; historian
Franklin Franco Pichardo observes that he was preoccupying himself with
the concerns of about 5 ­percent of the east’s elite, former slave ­owners who
had extensive property, and that the debate was therefore necessarily a
“delicate issue” (El pensamiento dominicano, 97; on property and citizenship,
see also Venator Santiago, “Race, Nation-­Building and ­Legal Transcultura-
tion”). Other scholars argue that discontent was more widespread, and that
“Boyer’s repression generally and the marginalization of the east” ensured
the popularity of Separation (Venator Santiago, “Race, the East, and Haitian
Revolutionary Ideology,” 112).
36. Sheller, “Army of Sufferers,” 42.
37. John Baur claims that Soulouque sought their alliance in years subsequent
but was unable to satisfy the demands of “sixty arpents of land each . . . a​ nd
town-­houses for their officers” (Baur, “Faustin Soulouque,” 136).
38. Courlander, Trea­sury of Afro-­American Folklore, 47.
39. “Continuación . . . ,” El Dominicano, no. 7, 13 November 1845, 17.
40. “Haiti,” El Dominicano, no. 2, 8 October 1845, 2. He was “the most ridicu­
lous, the most despotic, the most barbarous” of all of the leaders, the paper
complained.

248 | notes to chapter 1

41. Welles, Naboth’s Vineyard, 68.
42. Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 2:83.
43. Vicioso, El freno hatero, 136.
44. Mella, Los espejos de Duarte, 185. For Dominicans fighting on the Unification
side, see Santana’s speculative letter to that effect, qtd. in Welles, Naboth’s
Vineyard, 68–69.
45. Copiador, 1 January 1845; Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 55.
46. The French consul, André-­Nicolas Levasseur, reported that a small group of
Haitian politicians appealed to him at exactly the same time (Brière, Haïti et
la France, 292–94).
47. Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 74, 100.
48. Guerra Sosa, “Familias Haitianas al Servicio de Nuestra Independencia”;
Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 161–62.
49. Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 99, 103.
50. Despite apocryphal (and widely variant) estimates of the number of men in-
volved in ­these and other encounters, Haitian forces, gathered by conscrip-
tion, ­were in decline and had been for some years (Candler, Brief Notices of
Hayti, 93; Bird, Black Man, 187, 284; Cap. Cayetano Pilon to the Queen, Puerto
Rico, 4 February 1845, amae: Política Exterior: rd 2373, Expte. s/n.; on vary-
ing estimates, compare, e.g., Rodríguez Demorizi, Guerra dominico-­haitiana,
22, and Robles-­Muñoz, Paz en Santo Domingo, 66). Roads across the island
­were often impassable for carriages and, ­after a rain, impassable even on
foot, much less by groups of forces traveling long distances who may have
been feeding themselves (Brown, History and Pres­ent Condition of St. Domingo,
2:266; Raybaud, Soulouque et son empire, 274, 308; Baur, “Faustin Soulouque,”
142). Dominican reports ­were frank about the exceedingly small numbers
of individuals involved in most incidents (even as they exaggerated tales
of heroism and cowardice). Even Santana’s famous 19 March 1844 b ­ attle at
Azua involved just “a handful of patriots,” El Dominicano acknowledged (no.
11, 28 November 1846, 43).
51. Courlander, Trea­sury of Afro-­American Folklore, 47.
52. For more on the Haitian exile community in Jamaica, see Smith, Liberty,
Fraternity, Exile.
53. Mella, Los espejos de Duarte, 58.
54. Mella, Los espejos de Duarte, 153.
55. Franco Pichardo, “Remanentes ideológicos,” 83. The traveling emissary was
Dr. José María Caminero, born in Santiago de Cuba, who had served as an
interpreter and a politician during Unification (Martínez, Diccionario, 98;
Lockward, Documentos, xliv; Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 238).
56. Franco Pichardo, “Remanentes ideológicos,” 83.
57. Caminero attempted negotiations with the United States for a commercial
treaty that also sought to attract white immigrants to the island (Sang Ben,
La Política Exterior Dominicana, 1844–1961, 37).

notes to chapter 1 | 249

58. Franco Pichardo, “Remanentes ideológicos,” 85; Mella, Los espejos de Duarte,
191–92.
59. Mella, Los espejos de Duarte, 152.
60. Franklin Franco, Los negros, 161; Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 99.
61. Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 114, 116, 135, 138.
62. Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 142, 145.
63. Vega Boyrie, “La ­labor legislativa,” 206.
64. Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 2:39.
65. Lizardo, Cultura Africana en Santo Domingo, 68.
66. Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 2:15, 21, 28.
67. “Comunicado,” El Dominicano, no. 12, 15 February 1846, 46. Lieutenant
Col­o­nel Simon had sailed to Saint Thomas in order to defect, but he was
­later captured at Puerto Plata and condemned to die by a special military
commission.
68. Garrido, Los Puello, 87, 93.
69. Lockward, La Constitución Haitiano-­Dominicana, 16.
70. Lora Hugi, “Las mujeres anónimas,” 90; Martínez-­Fernández, “The Sword
and the Crucifix,” 74. The prominent men involved in Separation seemed to
have taken the ­matter of ­women’s ­legal recognition, recently afforded across
the island, as a direct affront, a point of agreement they shared with town
Catholic officials (who ­were fully one-­fourth of the Separation manifesto’s
signatories). Upon his divorce from his wife, Guadalupe Heredia, José María
Caminero became enraged that Haitian authorities ­were “partial” to her in
the settlement proceedings (Lockward, Documentos, xliv). Subsequent Do-
minican administrations targeted civil marriages on four separate occasions
(Lockward, Documentos, xliv, 135; Martínez-­Fernández, “The Sword and the
Crucifix,” 76, 79, 82).
71. Hoetink, Dominican ­People, 89.
72. F. M. Delmonte, “Canto de un Desterrado,” El Dominicano, no. 1, 19 Septem-
ber 1845, 4.
73. Mariano Álvarez to Secretario de Estado, Havana, 12 November 1860, agi:
Cuba 2266, Pieza 2, doc. s/n). Santana’s party was “simply a gigantic group
of ‘friends’ of the caudillo,” historian Campillo Pérez observes (Historia
electoral dominicana, 47); Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 108.
74. El Dominicano, no. 21, 5 September 1846, 82; El Dominicano, no. 14,
18 March 1846, 55.
75. Martínez-­Fernández, “The Sword and the Crucifix,” 73. Portes’s tyranni-
cal inclinations extended to the persecution of Protestants on the island.
He ordered that only Catholics should be able to use church bells, pursued
critical missionaries, and opposed a treaty with the British that would
establish religious tolerance. The British consul in Santo Domingo, Robert
Schomburgk, called Portes “a Vicar General, a Jesuit, and [a] blind bigot”
(Martínez-­Fernández, “The Sword and the Crucifix,” 73).

250 | notes to chapter 1

76. Conde de [Spiculot?] to Ramón María Narváez, Secretario de Estado y del
Despacho de la Guerra, Puerto Rico, 18 January 1845, shm: Ultramar 5646,
Expte. s/n.
77. “Haiti,” El Dominicano, no. 2, 8 October 1845, 6.
78. “Soneta: La Batalla de Beler: Dedicado a los heróicos habitantes del Cibao,”
El Dominicano, no. 7, 13 November 1845, 28.
79. “Discurso de Presbitero Sr. Andres Rosón,” El Dominicano, no. 9, 1 January
1846, 33.
80. “Al Público,” El Dominicano, no. 1, 19 September 1845, 1.
81. “Al Público,” El Dominicano, no. 1, 19 September 1845, 1; “Mas Sobre Haiti,” El
Dominicano, no. 5, 13 November 1845, 19.
82. Rodríguez Demorizi, Guerra dominico-­haitiana, 16, 18.
83. Even the vitriolic El Dominicano quieted down about its neighbor by late
spring 1846, filling its pages instead with questions of financial reform,
agriculture, and politics. Observing that po­liti­cal disturbances ­were con-
stant, they mocked the neighboring government as “moribund” (El Domini-
cano, no. 3, 28 October 1845, 9; El Dominicano, no. 15, 11 April 1846, 57).
84. El Dominicano, no. 11, 28 January 1846, 42.
85. A. Monfleury, “De l’industrie en Haïti: Réponse a M. Ed. Paul,” L’Opinion
Nationale, nos. 10 and 11, 15 March 1862, 1; Nicholls, Economic Dependence and
Po­liti­cal Autonomy, 11. Boyer himself may have pondered abrogating Article
7, which prevented foreign land owner­ship, despite popu­lar opposition
(Sheller, “Army of Sufferers,” 38).
86. Blanco Díaz, Alejandro Ángulo Guridi, 2:12; Pani, “Ciudadanos precarios.”
87. Britannicus (Heneken), Dominican Republic and the Emperor Soulouque, 26;
Porter, Diario de una misión secreta, 19. ­These restrictions ­were despite the fact
that Báez and ­others had pushed for nationalization reform since the late
Unification period (Hauch, “The Dominican Republic and Its Foreign Rela-
tions,” 41).
88. Moya Pons, Manual de historia dominicana, 363.
89. They left them at 1838 levels, to be paid half in Spanish pesos fuertes, half in
Dominican paper money (Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 151, 212).
90. Martínez-­Fernández, Torn between Empires, 93.
91. Mariano Álvarez, “Memoria: Santo Domingo o la República Dominicana,”
SD, 20 April 1860, ahn: Ultramar 2775, Expte. 16.
92. Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración, 15.
93. La Razón, no. 7, 15 June 1862, 1.
94. Mella, Los espejos de Duarte, 177; Martínez-­Fernández, “The Sword and the
Crucifix.”
95. Martínez-­Fernández, “The Sword and the Crucifix,” 73; Welles, Naboth’s
Vineyard, 234.
96. Dhormoys, Une visite chez Soulouque, 72, 112.
97. On Báez’s hair, see Rodríguez Demorizi, Del vocabulario dominicano, 197.

notes to chapter 1 | 251

 98. Juan Pablo Duarte’s most famous poem expresses this desire explic­itly
(Rodríguez Demorizi, Santana y los poetas, 331–32), although scholars argue
convincingly that he may have written it during the Restoration War (Mella,
Los espejos de Duarte, 145).
99. Vallejo, Las madres de la patria, 75.
100. Fabens, Montgomery (pseudonym), and Kimball, In the Tropics, 17, 101,
181. E.g., the Alfau’s property holding (Martínez, Diccionario, 24; Bosch, La
Guerra de la Restauración, 28).
101. Wipfler, “The Catholic Church and the State,” 193.
102. Martínez-­Fernández, Torn between Empires, 216.
103. Porter, Diario de una misión secreta, 27.
104. Penson, Reseña histórico-­crítica, 272.
105. McGraw, Work of Recognition, 9, 10; Rodríguez Demorizi, Del vocabulario do-
minicano, 197.
106. Torrente, Política ultramarina, 290.
107. Rodríguez Demorizi, Del vocabulario dominicano, 95, 177; Kinsbruner, Not of
Pure Blood, 32.
108. El Dominicano, no. 14, 6 October 1855, 55. Determining the date of another
vitriolic snippet, directed against a black ­woman, is difficult (Rodríguez
Demorizi, Del vocabulario dominicano, 201).
109. “Poesia: Canción Dominicana,” El Dominicano, no. 11, 28 January 1846, 44.
110. “Al Público,” El Dominicano, no. 1, 19 September 1845, 1. Debates of the Span-
ish matriculation scheme provoked ample refutation of imprecise usage
of “Spanish” within the Dominican press (“La Matrícula Española,” La
República, no. 1, 19 August 1856, 1–2).
111. López Morillo, Memorias sobre la segunda reincorporación de Santo Domingo, 259.
112. Advertisement of Monsieur Perrot, El Oasis, no. 12, 16 September 1855, 48.
113. “Costumbres,” El Oasis, no. 1, 26 November 1854, 3.
114. Matibag, Haitian-­Dominican Counterpoint, 117.
115. Rodríguez Silva, Silencing Race.
116. Authors issued a fifteen-­point colonization plan the following year (“Inmi-
gración,” El Dominicano, no. 7, 13 November 1845, 26; El Dominicano, no. 19,
24 July 1846, 74).
117. Copiador, 13 October 1848, 3 April 1860, 4 February 1861.
118. Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 2:161.
119. Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 238.
120. Antonio Alfau to Serrano, 21 July 1860, agi: Cuba 2266, Pieza 1, doc. s/n.
121. Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 122.
122. Marte, Correspondencia, 42, 89. ­These terms are in use from the beginning of
the nineteenth ­century (García, Compendio, 1:313).
123. France was an enduring, favored partner. Petitioners also made entreaties to
Spain and authorities in its Ca­rib­bean possessions in 1843, 1844, 1845, 1846,

252 | notes to chapter 1

 1848, 1850, 1851, a yearlong mission to Madrid in 1853–54, 1857, 1858, and all
of 1859–60 (Torrente, Política ultramarina, 310).
124. “Don Cameleón,” El Dominicano, no. 16, 2 May 1846, 62; Marte, “La oralidad
sobre el pasado insular,” 2, 5, 7.
125. A. J. Bautista Romane, “Fragmentos,” El Oasis, no. 19, 4 November 1855, 75.
“Mañesa is a nickname we use for our neighbors of the east,” the author
explained ­after an asterisk to his public. The editor of El Dominicano, the
first paper ­after Separation, ran a regular column, “Po­liti­cal Reflections on
the Haitian Question,” in which the journal would mention or parody, and
then didactically refute, articles from the Haitian press (e.g., “Al Público,”
El Dominicano, no. 1, 19 September 1845, 1; El Dominicano, no. 5, 13 November
1845, 19).
126. El Dominicano, 1845–46.
127. “The Nineteenth ­Century,” El Oasis, no. 19, 8 April 1855, 75.
128. On class analyses of anti-­Haitianism, see, e.g., Cordero Michel, La revolución
haitiana, 141; Matibag, Haitian-­Dominican Counterpoint, 18; Franco Pichardo,
Sobre racismo y antihaitianismo; Mayes, Mulatto Republic; Sagás, Race and Politics.
129. “Continua el articulo sobre la Inmigración,” El Dominicano, no. 6, 27 Novem-
ber 1845, 23; “Amor al Trabajo,” El Dominicano, no. 23, 8 December 1855, 91;
“La Obedencia pasiva del soldado,” El Porvenir, no. 4, 29 October 1854, 3.
130. Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 19.
131. Franks, “Transforming Property,” 54.
132. “Inmigración,” El Dominicano, no. 14, 6 October 1855, 53–54.
133. Le Moniteur Haïtien, nos. 26–27, 12 June 1858, 2.
134. Ismenes, “Cuatro preguntas a Ingenuo,” El Oasis, no. 6, 31 December 1854,
24; Ingenuo, “Al Amigo Ismenes,” El Oasis, no. 7, 7 January 1855, 28; Em-
manuel (Galván), “Quejas de la Tumba contra el Merengue,” El Oasis, no. 8,
14 January 1855, 30.
135. “Costumbres,” El Oasis, no. 1, 26 November 1854, 3–4.
136. I.e., a wanga or ouanga, which Boyer had also banned in the west (“Haitiana-­
parla,” El Dominicano, no. 25, 22 December 1855; “Variedades,” El Dominicano,
no. 26, 29 December 1855, 99–100, 103; Ramsey, Spirits and the Law, 58).
137. Moya Pons, Dominican Republic, 185.
138. Porter, Diario de una misión secreta, 25–26.
139. Moya Pons, Dominican Republic, 186.
140. Keim, San Domingo, 25–27.
141. Rodríguez Demorizi, Del vocabulario dominicano, 36; also The Royal Standard,
1 September 1866, clipping in tna: co 301/44/269, n.p.
142. Johnson, Fear of French Negroes, 71–73.
143. The poem vividly describes righting racist injustices: “Algún día llegará / que
la tortilla se vuelva, / que los negros coman pan / y los blancos coman mi-
erda” (Rodríguez Demorizi, Del vocabulario dominicano, 17). Another popu­lar

notes to chapter 1 | 253

 poem pointedly responded to prejudice, “Being black is not shameful, the
church wears black on [Maundy] Thursday and Holy Friday . . . ​on its sacred
altar, and to rise up to heaven, we are all of us equal” (Rodríguez Demorizi,
Del vocabulario dominicano, 179).
144. Lora Hugi, Transición, 96; Porter, Diario de una misión secreta, 22; Consul Hood
to Lord J. Russell, SD, 21 April 1861, agn-­rd: Anexión de/000933, Expte. 10,
p. 28.
145. Guerrero Cano, Disciplina y laxitud, 68.
146. Lockward, Documentos, 222.
147. Gage, “The Market W ­ oman of San Domingo,” 717.
148. Porter, Diario de una misión secreta, 219.
149. St. John, Hayti, 85; Lora Hugi, “Las mujeres anónimas,” 106.
150. Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 231.
151. Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 229.
152. Logan, Diplomatic Relations, 281.
153. El Telégrafo Constitucional, no. 2, 12 April 1821, 12; o
­ thers reached the eastern
province of Higüey by small craft, like twenty-­year-­old Viviana Morales and
her infant ­daughter (Certificación de Declaración, 13 April 1837, agn-­rd:
Archivo Real de Higüey 1700123 Leg. 18 Azul, Expte. 96; I am grateful to
Andrew Walker for this source).
154. Consul Hood to Lord J. Russell, SD, 21 April 1861, agn-­rd: Anexión
de/000933, Expte. 10, p. 28.
155. Juan Fello to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, 7 December 1842, anc: ap 137, Expte. 13.
156. Suárez Díaz, El Antillano, 28.
157. “Criminal contra el coronel de las Reservas Provinciales D. Juan
Rondón . . . ,” April 1863, agn-­rd: ch Tomo 11 (agi: Cuba 1014B). San
Carlos also had a large Canary Islander population.
158. López Morillo, Memorias sobre la segunda reincorporación de Santo Domingo, 221.
159. López Morillo, Memorias sobre la segunda reincorporación de Santo Domingo, 221.
160. De la Rosa Garabito, San Cristobal en la historia dominicana, 12; Moya Pons,
Dominican Republic, 185.
161. Tejeda Ortíz, “El cimarronaje,” 281.
162. Porter, Diario de una misión secreta, 74.
163. Porter, Diario de una misión secreta, 109.
164. Brown, History and Pres­ent Condition of St. Domingo, 2:286; Lockward, Documen-
tos, 62–63; Porter, Diario de una misión secreta, 205. On the eagerness of foreign
sources to echo ­these pronouncements, ­either to instantiate their claims
of whiteness for the ­whole Dominican territory or to parody Dominicans’
thinking about identity, see Eller, “Awful Pirates and Hordes of Jackals.”
165. Moya Pons, Dominican Republic, 186–87; Landolfi, Evolución cultural domini-
cana, 69.
166. González, “Bonó, un crítico del liberalismo,” 473.
167. Baud, “Patrons, Peasants, and Tobacco,” 220–21.

254 | notes to chapter 1

168. Vicioso, El freno hatero, 234, 236.
169. Johnson, Fear of French Negroes, 83–90; Raymundo González, “The ‘­People
Eater,’ ” in Roorda, Derby, and González, Dominican Republic Reader, 102–8.
170. Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 157, 13. Ships left “daily” in earlier de­
cades (Montulé, A Voyage to North Amer­i­ca, and the West Indies, 24).
171. “Las Provincias del Cibao,” La Regeneración, no. 5, 24 September 1865, 1.
172. Harry Hoetink suggests that Masonic ­brothers referred to each other as
“frercitos” (an amalgamation of French frère and the Spanish diminutive
suffix—­ito), suggesting the influence of ­either Haitian or French sources on
Dominican Masonic practices (Dominican ­People, 170).
173. Scholars have traditionally drawn a stark contrast between “liberal Cibao”
and the traditional, “semi-­feudal south” (Landolfi, Evolución cultural domini-
cana, 54). Several observations temper this dichotomy, however. The first
is that many southern commentators desired the very same reforms—­
financial reform, agricultural development, fiscal reform, “a pro-­business
constitution,” and so on—as they, too, ­were shut out of power (El Orden,
no. 6, 18 February 1854). The second is simply the observation that many of
the Cibao elites, prob­ably an “ample majority,” ­were themselves markedly
conservative (Jimenes Grullón, Sociologia política dominicana, 138).
174. Abreu Cardet and Álvarez-­López, Guerras de liberación, 22.
175. Hoetink, Dominican ­People, 175. Some elites supported land enclosure, but
they did so in mea­sured tones that reflected their relatively isolated position
(Vicioso, El freno hatero, 234, 236); see Franks, “Transforming Property,”
55–56, for titling and survey practices.
176. Main, Tobacco Colony, 38.
177. Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 2:104; Rodríguez Demorizi, Del vocabu-
lario dominicano, 154; Hazard, Santo Domingo, Past and Pres­ent, 186.
178. Hazard, Santo Domingo, Past and Pres­ent, 181.
179. “Puerto de Plata Estado del movimiento marítimo . . . ,” Gaceta de Santo
Domingo, no. 54, 30 January 1862, 3.
180. GB Consul a Min. of Foreign Affairs, 1 October 1860, agn-­rd: rree 14,
Expte. 7.12.
181. See, e.g., “Estado nominativo de los individuos llegados a este puerto desde
el 1 de Octubre 1851 hasta el 1 de Julio de 1852,” Puerto Plata, July 1852, agn-
­rd: rree A441, Expte. 7; Puig Ortíz, Emigración de libertos, 25–26; Hazard,
Santo Domingo, Past and Pres­ent, 175, 181, 201. One report suggests that African
American mi­grants arrived first in the 1820s, followed by mi­grants from the
British Ca­rib­bean in the next de­cade (Meriño, “Expte. reservado para tratar
de la aplicación . . . ,” 26 September 1862, anc: ap 53, Expte. 20).
182. Faye, “Commodore Aury”; Grégory Pierrot, personal communication,
29 April 2016.
183. Harris, “Summer on the Borders,” 89; Rodríguez Demorizi, Samaná, 333;
Vega, Breve historia de Samaná, 28.

notes to chapter 1 | 255

184. Moya Pons, Dominican Republic, 187; Herrera R., Montecristi entre campeche y
bananos, 36.
185. Theresa Smith to Cap. Gen., 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión 12, Expte. 56, doc. s/n.
186. Enrique Llansó y Oriol to Cap. Gen., Samaná, 4 Nov. 1864, agn-­rd: ch
Leg. 24, Expte. 212, p. 26 (originally 36).
187. Hidalgo, “From North Amer­i­ca to Hispaniola,” 146; Fanning, Ca­rib­bean Cross-
ing, 85.
188. Keim, San Domingo, 110.
189. Tejeda Ortíz, Cultura y folklore de Samaná, 75.
190. Tejeda Ortíz, Cultura y folklore de Samaná, 76. See also Davis, “La historia de
los inmigrantes afro-­americanos.”
191. “Santo Domingo, Feb. 20: Seizure of a Portuguese Slaver by the Dominican
Republic,” Frederick Douglass’s Paper, 22 April 1853, 1.
192. “Who Would Like to Do Some Good in Hayti?,” Christian Advocate and Journal
29, no. 23 (8 June 1854): 91.
193. Pierrot, “The Samaná Affair.”
194. Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 62; Lockward, Documentos, 59.
195. Keim, San Domingo, 119.
196. “Proceso contra varios individuos acusados de complicidad en la sub-
levación que tubo lugar en Puerto Plata,” September 1863, agn-­rd: ch
Leg. 24 (agi: Cuba 1014A), Expte. 211.
197. Lockward, Documentos, 233.
198. Mariano Álvarez, “Memoria: Santo Domingo o la República Dominicana,”
SD, 20 April 1860, ahn: Ultramar 2775, Expte. 16.
199. Martínez-­Fernández, Torn between Empires, 90. Some con­temporary estimates
suggest about 260,000 in the territory (Ministers to the Queen, January 1865,
ahn: Ultramar 2775, Expte. 17).
200. Felipe Rivero to Min. de la Guerra y Ultramar, SD, 19 June 1862, ahn: Ultra-
mar 3525, Expte. 15. Pedro Francisco Bonó would comment, de­cades ­later:
“­Those around town are paths; ­those in the savanna are ­cattle-­trails. . . . ​
­Every old Dominican who finds himself obligated to make a journey spends
the eve­ning before agitated as if it ­were one preceding a ­battle” (qtd. in
Hoetink, Dominican ­People, 47).
201. Rubén Silié, “The Hato and the Conuco: The Emergence of Creole Culture,”
in Vega and Castillo Pichardo, Dominican Cultures, 140.
202. Gaspar, Bondsmen and Rebels.
203. Hall, History of Race in Muslim West Africa, 22.
204. Mamdani, Define and Rule.
205. González, “Ideología del progreso y campesinado,” 34. On incipient l­ abor
divisions in the wood industry, see Abreu Cardet and Álvarez-­López, Guerras
de liberación, 19.
206. Vicioso, El freno hatero, 236.
207. Abreu Cardet and Álvarez-­López, Guerras de liberación, 19–21.

256 | notes to chapter 1

208. Landolfi, Evolución cultural dominicana, 55.
209. Harris, “Summer on the Borders,” 93; Vallejo, Las madres de la Patria, 48;
González, “Ideologia del progreso y campesinado,” 30–31. For similar
constructs in Haitian rural life, see N’Zengou-­Tayo, “ ‘Famn Se Poto Mitan,’ ”
121–22.
210. Franks, “Transforming Property,” 57.
211. González, “Ideología del progreso y campesinado”; San Miguel, Los
Campesinos del Cibao; Cassá, Historia social y económica; Franks, “Transforming
Property”; Turits, Foundations of Despotism, chap. 1.
212. Hoetink asserts that metal-­tipped plows ­were not introduced to the Cibao
valley ­until 1898; peasants worked with wooden tools called coas (Dominican
P
­ eople, 5).
213. Figueroa, Sugar, Slavery and Freedom, 171.
214. De la Fuente, ­Children of Facundo, 191.
215. De la Fuente, ­Children of Facundo, 31, 123.
216. Smith, The Oracle and the Curse; Reuben Zahler, Ambitious Rebels.
217. Blanco Díaz, Alejandro Ángulo Guridi, 1:24, 131; ­others concurred (Marte, Cor-
respondencia, 95).
218. Rodríguez, “Encroachment of Creole Culture,” 116.
219. Declaración del testigo paisano Fermín Vázquez, in “Sumaria Instruido con-
tra el paisano Manuel de Arias acusado de Sospechoso,” SD, July 1864, agi:
Cuba 1012A, “Sumarias,” 5v.
220. Marte, “La oralidad sobre el pasado insular,” 21; Rodríguez Demorizi, Del
vocabulario dominicano, 17, 36, 70.
221. De la Rosa Garabito, San Cristobal en la historia dominicana, 12.
222. On reciprocity norms elsewhere in the rural greater Ca­rib­bean, see, e.g.,
Williams, Stains on My Name.
223. ­Macleod, “Narratives of Belonging and Identity,” 97–114. This model would
be similar to recognition of the original founder (prenmye mèt bitayson) of a
lakou in the west (Ramsey, Spirits and the Law, 68).
224. Larrazábal Blanco, Los negros y la esclavitud, 170. On semi-­anthropomorphized
beings and shapeshifting in Dominican wooded spaces of the center island,
see Derby, “Male Heroism.”
225. Excerpt of El Grito de la Frontera, spring 1857, in Sáez, Documentos inéditos de
Fernando A. de Meriño, 70.
226. Moya Pons, “Las ocho fronteras de Haití y la República Dominicana,”
441–46; García Tamayo, “Cultura campesina en la frontera norte.”
227. José Malo de Molina to Cap. Gen. Francisco Serrano, 4 September 1861
(15 July 1861), ahn: Ultramar 3532, Expte. 1, doc. 2, pp. 17, 39, 43 (hereafter
cited as Malo de Molina to Serrano, “Memoria”).
228. Fabens, Montgomery, and Kimball, In the Tropics, 162.
229. José Núñez de Cáceres to Secretario de Estado, SD, 18 February 1811, agi:
Audiencia de SD 1016, Expte. s/n.

notes to chapter 1 | 257

230. Francisco Serrano, Informe de la visita a SD, SD, 5 September 1861, in Rodrí-
guez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 245.
231. Malo de Molina to Serrano, “Memoria,” 17; Pérez Memén, El Pensamiento
Dominicano, 31.
232. Lockward, Documentos, 214; Keim, San Domingo, 223.
233. Rodríguez Demorizi, Cuentos de política criolla, 36.
234. Martínez-­Fernández, Torn between Empires, 93; Franks, “Transforming
Property,” 103. A young secret agent reported to Puerto Rican authorities
that soldiers never saw pay, as public funds ­were “the vomit of thousands of
paper bills” (Conde de [Spiculot] to Ramón María Narváez, Sec’y de Estado
y del Despacho de la Guerra, Puerto Rico, 18 January 1845, shm: Ultramar
5646, Expte. 4, “Asuntos: Operaciones de Campaña . . . ​1843–1857”).
235. Franks, “Transforming Property,” 90; Rodríguez Demorizi, Del vocabulario
dominicano, 20, 40.
236. Porter, Diario de una misión secreta, 15.
237. Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 232; Torrente, Política ultramarina, 294;
Neici Zeller, personal communication, 19 August 2015.
238. Michez to Director General del Ramo de la Guerra, Seybo, 16 July 1861,
agn-­rd: Coleccion Herrera Leg. 21, Expte. 174, 17.
239. Hoetink refers to the salience of military status in community prestige as a
“heroic ideology” (Dominican ­People, 166).
240. Samet, Willing Obedience; “La obedencia pasiva del soldado,” El Porvenir, no. 4,
29 October 1854, 3.
241. “Varias reflexiones sobre cual debe ser el espiritu publico para salvar la situ-
ación que atravesemos,” El Porvenir, no. 2, 15 October 1854, 1.
242. El Eco del Pueblo, no. 18, 23 November 1856, 1.
243. Martínez-­Fernández, “The Sword and the Crucifix,” 70.
244. Robin Derby, personal communication, 11 August 2015.
245. Díaz-­Stevens, “Saving Grace,” 60–78.
246. The Cofradía del Espiritu Santo in the San Juan valley is another example
(Robin Derby, personal communication, 11 August 2015).
247. “Romerias a Higüey,” El Oasis, no. 18, 28 October 1855, 70–71.
248. Paton, No Bond but the Law, 184.
249. Nessler, “ ‘The Shame of the Nation,’ ” 5–28.
250. Janvier, Haïti et ses visiteurs, 603.
251. Throughout the colonial period and unification, some Haitian faithful trav-
eled all the way to Higüey for the annual Altagracia pilgrimage (Ramsey,
Spirits and the Law, 6–7; Franklin, Pres­ent State of Hayti, 297–98; Rey, “­Toward
an Ethnohistory”). In western vodou, or Ginen, Erzulie Freda of the rada
pantheon is identified with Altagracia; in Santo Domingo she is sometimes
identified with Ezili Aíla (Alaíla) (Deive, Vodú, 227).
252. Austerlitz, Merengue, 25.
253. Guerrero Cano, Disciplina y laxitud, 67.

258 | notes to chapter 1

254. “Bando,” in Colección de leyes, 150.
255. Vásquez de Díaz, Antiguallas de Neyba, 116; Ubiñas Renville, Historias y leyendas
afro-­dominicanas, 91; Brendan Thornton, personal communication, 4 July
2015.
256. Larrazábal Blanco, Los negros y la esclavitud, 190.
257. Derby, “Haitians, Magic, and Money,” 520.
258. Krug, “Healing Politics and the Politics of Healing.”
259. Besson, Martha Brae’s Two Histories, 257; Davis, “Afro-­Dominican Religious
Brotherhoods.”
260. Vásquez de Díaz, Antiguallas de Neyba, 322.
261. Martínez, “Not a Cockfight,” 92; Vásquez de Díaz, Antiguallas de Neyba, 153.
262. José del Carmen Rodríguez to Cap. Gen., Santiago, 21 January 1863, agn-­rd:
Anexión 12, Expte. 56, doc. s/n.
263. Gob. Militar de Santiago to José Hungria, Santiago, 7 November 1862,
agn-­rd: Anexión 12, Expte. 56, doc. s/n. Other passport applicants
­were vague about their motives, citing only “personal reasons” (asuntos
particulares).
264. José María Sánchez to Cap. Gen., s/f, prob­ably 1862–63, agi: Cuba 1025A,
Expte. “Declaraciones recibidas,” doc. s/n.
265. Anna María LaPlace to Cap. Gen., Puerto Plata, 15 January 1863, agn-­rd:
Anexión 12, Expte. 56, doc. s/n.
266. E.g., Madame Beazley and Madame Gustave Ducastro (Le Moniteur Haïtien,
no. 14, 9 March 1861, 1; Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 15, 16 March 1861, 1).
267. Théodat, Haïti et la République Dominicaine, 217.
268. Referring to French national Mme. Rosette in Yuna (Copiador,
7 March 1848); for statistics on wood selling in this period, which peaked in
the 1830s, see Abreu Cardet and Álvarez-­López, Guerras de liberación, 17–19.
269. Raybaud, Soulouque et son empire, 277; Copiador, 6 May 1857.
270. José María Sánchez to Cap. Gen., s/f, prob­ably 1862–63, agi: Cuba 1025A,
Expte. “Declaraciones recibidas,” doc. s/n. El Dominicano complained of
foreign interests in Hincha, writing, “Who ­doesn’t know that [almost all]
of this industry is foreign, covered with the name of some Haitian?” (no. 8,
24 November 1845, 29).
271. On the “contradictory axes” of identity construction and the idea of “copres-
ence” in center-­island regions in ­later de­cades, see Derby, “Haitians, Magic,
and Money,” 490, 495.
272. Vásquez de Díaz, Antiguallas de Neyba, 321–26.
273. Moya Pons, Dominican Republic, 185. Lauren Derby observes that the preva-
lence of ­these west-­going networks—­and relative lack of infrastructure con-
necting the region to the Dominican capital—­endured into the twentieth
­century (“Haitians, Magic, and Money,” 488–526).
274. Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 2:22.
275. El Eco del Pueblo, no. 26, 1 February 1857, 101.

notes to chapter 1 | 259

276. Other witnesses, including Spanish authorities, supported ­these claims
(Philantrope Noël to Brig. Buceta, Dajabon, 15 August 1863, ahn: Ultramar
3525, Expte. 99, Anexo 6; López Morillo, Memorias sobre la segunda reincorpo-
ración de Santo Domingo, 82).
277. Copiador, 26 July 1850.
278. Hernández Flores, Luperón, héroe y alma, 97.
279. Crawford, “Politics of Belonging to a Ca­rib­bean Borderland.”
280. Hernández Flores, Luperón, héroe y alma, 96.
281. “Formally recognizing the in­de­pen­dence of Santo Domingo . . . i​ s not nec-
essary, and besides, it is con­ve­nient to reserve the weapon of recognition,”
one diplomat cynically observed (qtd. in Martínez-­Fernández, “Caudillos,”
576). A number of recent works have ably described the strong-­arm diplomacy
of foreign powers ­toward the nations of the island in this period, as well as
the rabidly annexationist efforts of many Dominican elites (Febres-­Cordero
Carrillo, “La anexión”; Martínez-­Fernández, “Caudillos”; Robles-­Muñoz, Paz
en Santo Domingo; Álvarez López, Dominacion colonial y guerra popu­lar).
282. F. W. Chesson, “American Intrigues in Santo Domingo,” 15 December 1858,
The Anti-­slavery Reporter 7, no. 3 (1859): 7–8.
283. Lockward, Documentos, xix.
284. Copiador, 21 January 1856. The government’s arrest and imprisonment
of U.S. agent Edward Roolt was far from the first incident of exasperation
at U.S. officials’ be­hav­ior: Francisco Harrison was remonstrated in 1847,
Abner Burbank in 1847 and 1848, Jonathan Elliot in 1848, suspected spy
Cherí Brocard in 1850, Jacob Pereira in 1856, Elliot again in 1857, an unnamed
vice-­agent in 1859, and so on.
285. Moya Pons, Dominican Republic, 190; Hauch, “The Dominican Republic and Its
Foreign Relations,” 59.
286. Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 2:198; Tansill, The United States and Santo
Domingo, 131.
287. Baur, “Faustin Soulouque,” 135.
288. Lockward, Documentos, 144.
289. “[The Moniteur Haïtien] and other Haitian periodicals treat us like a handful
of rebels who need to be subjugated again,” a journalist observed (El Domini-
cano, no. 27, 5 January 1856, 105).
290. Garrido, Los Puello, 85.
291. Soulouque, “Carta dirigida a los habitantes del este,” Port-­au-­Prince, 24 No-
vember 1848, in Rodríguez Demorizi, La Marina de Guerra dominicana, 75.
292. A. J. Bautista Romane, “Fragmentos,” El Oasis, no. 19, 4 November 1855, 75.
293. As with the Separation campaigns, traditional accounts exaggerate the size
of ­these encounters, and the absence of surviving newspapers from 1849 to
1850 makes rectification difficult. Several years ­later, just five pro-­Santana
officers and their supporters easily took the town, for example, despite Azua
being a traditional opposition stronghold (Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración,

260 | notes to chapter 1

 44–45). A Dominican minister ­later dismissed Soulouque’s mobilizations as
“piratic and impotent” (Núñez de Arce, Santo Domingo, 48).
294. Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 2:370; “The feeling of the ­great mass of
the Haytian ­people ­towards the Spaniards of their own island, is perfectly
friendly,” an En­glish man observed from Haiti, noting that Soulouque had to
mobilize in secret (Bird, Black Man, 294, 308).
295. Hauch, “The Dominican Republic and Its Foreign Relations,” 87; Torrente,
Política ultramarina, 316.
296. Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 2:40; Copiador, 9 June 1852.
297. Lockward, Documentos, 144.
298. The Dominican foreign minister wrote to the consuls of Britain and France
and the U.S. commercial agent about a “pack” (pelotón) of Haitian soldiers,
for example, or about incidents involving a single individual (Copiador,
26 July 1850, 5 February 1855). Mostly Dominican reports involved c­ attle
theft in the center of the island. However, it seems that Dominican soldiers
(or perhaps ­simple residents) shared responsibility. Occasionally, officials
admitted that “stray” Dominican soldiers had wandered into Haitian terri-
tory and taken ­cattle, and sometimes Dominican officers admitted guilt, too
(Copiador, 25 August 1852, 19 August 1853, 26 April 1854, 13 November 1855).
Nevertheless, Dominican ministers stayed firmly on-­narrative. The foreign
minister complained to the British consulate that the injury of one indi-
vidual was a “new aggression” that proved “the eternal predisposition of the
­enemy,” Haiti (11 December 1851). Meanwhile, the French authorities, par-
ticularly, never stopped provoking the Haitian and Dominican heads of state
in the name of “mediation,” goading Dominican officials about i­ magined
threats well into periods of indiscutible peace (French consul to For. Min.,
21 November 1860, agn-­rd: rree 14, Expte. 6, doc. 23).
299. El Oasis, no. 6, 5 August 1855, 23; El Oasis, no. 10, 2 September 1855, 37.
300. “Manifiesto de Santana contra Báez,” El Progreso, no. 20, 10 July 1853; El Eco
del Pueblo, no. 7, 7 September 1856, 25; El Eco del Pueblo, no. 20, 7 December
1856, 77.
301. “En que país vivimos!!,” El Progreso, no. 17, 12 June 1853, 1.
302. La Acusación, no. 1, 12 November 1856, 1; Martínez Paulino, Publicaciones
periódicas dominicanas, 27.
303. “Mi vecino Don Cameleón,” El Dominicano, no. 17, 27 May 1846, 48.
304. “Las conspiraciones vistas de un lado,” El Oasis, no. 7, 12 August 1855, 26.
305. “La Pueri-­Cracia,” El Oasis, no. 23, 2 December 1855, 89–92.
306. French consul to Cap. Gens. of Puerto Rico and Cuba, 14 September 1852,
anc: ap 47, Expte. 15.
307. French consul to Cap. Gens. of Puerto Rico and Cuba, 14 September 1852,
anc: ap 47, Expte. 15.
308. Cap. Gen. of Cuba to Cap. Gen. of Puerto Rico, 25 October 1852, anc: ap 47,
Expte. 15, 78.

notes to chapter 1 | 261

309. Min. de rree to J. B. Camoin, 29 January 1853, agn-­rd: rree A441
[7/008374], Expte. 8.
310. “The Dominican Republic—­The ­Grand Plot,” National Era, 2 November 1854,
1.
311. May, “ ‘Plenipotentiary in Petticoats,’ ” 27.
312. Juan Abril to D. José de la Concha, Cap. Gen. of Cuba, SD, 25 November
1854, agi: Cuba 984C.
313. A Spanish observer commented snidely that he assumed a Dominican ship
sailing to Baltimore to conduct treaty organ­izations with “a mulatto owner
and a black crew” had been detained and its crew arrested (Juan Abril to
Don Leopoldo Augusto de Cueto, Ministro de smc en Washington, 23 July
1854, amae: Política Exterior: rd 2374, Expte. s/n). Apparently the French
consul was so opposed to the treaty (for the Samaná concessions it pre-
sented, not for stipulations of racism) that he managed to have pro-­treaty El
Porvenir shuttered (Martínez-­Fernández, Torn between Empires, 45).
314. William Cazneau, “Remitido,” El Porvenir, no. 3, 22 October 1854, 3. Domini-
can officials republished his claims.
315. “Our Failure in the Dominican ­Matter,” New York Times, 24 January 1855, 4.
316. Juan Abril to Cap. Gen. of Puerto Rico, SD, 6 November 1854, agi: Cuba
984C, Expte. s/n; Juan Abril to Cap. Gen. of Puerto Rico, SD, 28 November
1854, agi: Cuba 984C, Expte. s/n.
317. Hauch, “The Dominican Republic and Its Foreign Relations,” 124; Dubois,
Avengers, 147.
318. Baur, “Faustin Soulouque,” 154.
319. El Oasis, no. 33, 17 February 1856, 131.
320. Moya Pons, Dominican Republic, 198.
321. Rodríguez Demorizi, Guerra dominico-­haitiana, 23.
322. El Dominicano, no. 27, 5 January 1856, 105. For descriptions of the failed
1855–56 campaign, see, e.g., Bird, Black Man, 294; El Oasis, no. 31, 27 January
1856, 123–24.
323. El Oasis, no. 33, 17 February 1856, 131.
324. Baur, “Faustin Soulouque,” 154. The expeditionary groups ­were poorly sup-
plied, and Soulouque also often used conscription as po­liti­cal punishment
for towns that opposed him (142). French Consul Maxime Raybaud—­the
very same who provoked Soulouque on numerous occasions—­concurred,
admitting ­under a pseudonym that the conflicts ­were “profoundly disagree-
able to nineteen-­t wentieths of Haitians (Raybaud, Soulouque et son empire,
190).
325. El Oasis, no. 29, 13 January 1856, 115; “Vade Retro,” El Dominicano, no. 24,
15 December 1855, 24.
326. Dubois, Haiti, 150.
327. “Los filibusteros,” El Eco del Pueblo, no. 1, 27 July 1856, 3; “Revista exterior,”
El Eco del Pueblo, no. 27, 8 February 1857, 105; “Exterieur,” Le Moniteur Haïtien,

262 | notes to chapter 1

 no. 5, 8 January 1859, 4; “Nouvelles étrangères,” Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 47,
27 October 1860, 4; “Nouvelles étrangères,” Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 27, 8 June
1861, 3.
328. Hauch, “The Dominican Republic and Its Foreign Relations,” 124, 128–30;
Manning, Diplomatic Correspondence, 175.
329. “Programa Gubernativa,” El Eco del Pueblo, no. 2, 3 August 1856, 7.
330. Eduardo San Justo to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, SD, 7 March 1855, agi: Cuba
984C.
331. Félix María del Monte, “El General Antonio Duvergé o las víctimas del once
de abril,” qtd. in Rodríguez Demorizi, Santana y los poetas, 115.
332. Martínez-­Fernández, “The Sword and the Crucifix,” 77.
333. Qtd. in Rodríguez Demorizi, Santana y los poetas, 155.
334. El Oasis, no. 46, 18 May 1856, 183.
335. Martínez-­Fernández, Torn between Empires, 93.
336. Pérez Memén, El Pensamiento Dominicano, 325.
337. “Otro Pirata,” El Dominicano, no. 33, 16 February 1856, 131.
338. Consul Martin Hood to Minister Delmonte, SD, 24 April 1858, agn-­rd:
rree 11, Expte. 6, doc. 7.
339. To worsen ­matters, fake pesos occasionally arrived from New York and
Boston (Copiador, 12 February 1855; agn-­rd: rree 12, Expte. 19.3, 15
June 1859).
340. “La Tirania Comercial,” El Eco del Pueblo, no. 30, 15 March 1857, 118.
341. “revolucion! conspiracion!,” El Eco del Pueblo, no. 36, 10 May 1857, 141.
342. Núñez Grullón, Evolución constitucional dominicana, 34–37.
343. Franks, “Transforming Property,” 97; Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración, 28.
344. Báez, Decreto, 6 November 1857, anc: ap 50, Expte. 22; Copiador, 21 De-
cember 1857.
345. “Extrait d’une lettre de Sto.-­Domingo du 1er. mai,” Le Moniteur Haïtien, nos.
26–27, 12 June 1858, 2.
346. Buenaventura Báez, 12 June 1858, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 4, doc. 2.
347. Landolfi, Evolución cultural dominicana, 87. Báez sought help from Spanish
authorities in Puerto Rico on the pretext that rebellion against him was
“pro-­American” and annexationist (Martínez-­Fernández, “Caudillos,” 586).
348. “Mania de la epoca,” El Dominicano, no. 1, 29 June 1855, 3.
349. “Matrícula de Segovia II,” La República, no. 4, 30 September 1856, 2.
350. “Matricula Española,” El Eco del Pueblo, no. 2, 3 August 1856, 6–7.
351. “Matricula Española,” El Eco del Pueblo, no. 1, 27 July 1856, 2.
352. Arminio, “Espiritu de la Epoca,” El Oasis, no. 7, 7 January 1855, 27–28.
353. Nisidas, “Epigram,” El Dominicano, no. 8, 25 August 1855, 31. Manola means
“gal from Madrid.”
354. Copiador, 5 May 1857; Copiador, 25–26 October 1857 and December 1857;
Jonathan Elliot to Felix María Delmonte, 25 October 1857, agn-­rd:
Leg. 7/008370, Expte. 22, doc. 9.

notes to chapter 1 | 263

355. M. McIntosh, Flag Officer, Commander-­in-­Chief, Home Squadron to Presi-
dent Buenaventura Báez, U.S. Flag Ship “Colorado” off SD City, 1 June 1858,
agn-­rd: Leg. 11 (7/008371), Expte. 2, p. 7.
356. Moya Pons, Dominican Republic, 201–2. In April 1858 a crew from Baltimore,
including fifty enslaved men, landed and tried to claim Navaza Island.
357. Lockward, Documentos, 339.
358. “Colonia Agrícola,” El Eco del Pueblo, no. 23, 11 January 1857, 91.
359. Traité entre la République Dominicaine et B. Bullot, 30 April 1857, agn-­rd:
rree A441, Expte. 11, p. 9; Copiador, 26 October 1857.
360. Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 8, 30 January 1858, 1. At any rate, the eastern repub-
lic was in the midst of being wracked by a regional civil war; the Moniteur
concluded, with satisfaction, “Civil war is in a way the normal state [for]
­Dominicans, and nothing indicates that ­these ­matters w ­ ill conclude
­anytime soon.”
361. Lockward, Documentos, 348.
362. Min. rree to Ministro Alfau, Copiador, 21 August 1860.
363. Mariano Álvarez to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, 20 June 1860, agi: Cuba 2261, Pieza 1.
364. Lockward, Documentos, 349; Ministro de Guerra y Ultramar to Ministerio de
Marina, 24 August 1860, ahn: Ultramar 3526, Expte. 1, pp. 9–10.
365. Moya Pons, Dominican Republic, 198; agn-­rd: rree 12 (7/008375), Exptes. 2, 5.
366. Moya Pons, Dominican Republic, 199.
367. Lockward, Documentos, 324–25.
368. Copiador, 9 March 1857, 1 June 1860.
369. Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración, 45.
370. Vicioso, El freno hatero, 260.
371. Vicioso, El freno hatero, 267.
372. Copiador, 5 December 1860.
373. Pablo de Urrutia to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, Port-­au-­Prince, 6 November 1858,
anc: ap 224, Expte. 13; St. John, Hayti, 97.
374. González Tablas, Historia de la dominación, 41 (emphasis in original); beyond
the support of high-­profile generals like Sánchez, prisoner lists in the capital
(e.g., Le Moniteur Haïtien, nos. 39–40, 9 September 1858, 1) substantiate his
observation.
375. Pablo de Urrutia to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, Port-­au-­Prince, 10 January 1859, anc:
ap 224, Expte. 13; Copiador, 22 January 1859; St. John, Hayti, 97.
376. Le Moniteur Haïtien, nos. 6–7, 22 January 1859, 3.
377. Mariano Álvarez to Cap. Gen. of SD, Port-­au-­Prince, 9 May 1862, shm
Leg. 5645, Expte. “Sobre operaciones militares in Santo Domingo . . . ,”
doc. s/n.
378. “Discours prononcé par le Comité central des Gonaïves de l’anniversaire de
l’independance de 1er. janvier 1859,” Le Moniteur Haïtien, nos. 6–7, 22 January
1859, 3 (emphasis in original).
379. Le Moniteur Haïtien, nos. 39–40, 9 September 1858, 1–2.

264 | notes to chapter 1

380. Copiador, 22 January 1861. Dominican officials sought help in his surveil-
lance (Felipe Alfau to Min. de rree, Madrid, 20 February 1861, agn: rree
14/15/16 (7/008378), Expte. 6, doc. 5.
381. Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 12, 23 February 1861, 3.
382. Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 12, 23 February 1861, 3.
383. Ministro de rree a los Cónsules de Inglaterra y Francia, 23 June 1860, agn:
rree 14, Expte. 2, pp. 6–10v; Moya Pons, Dominican Republic, 201.
384. S. Chedev­ille au Ministre des relations étrangères, 2 May 1853, agn: rree
6–7, Expte. 7; Copiador, 19 August 1853.
385. Without the full foreign relations log, much of the communication about
events on the border remains lost. The British authorities asked to send
emissaries to the “revolutionary encampment of Alejandro Gregor,” for
example, but no further information is recorded (Copiador, 27 September
1857). Evidently Ramírez had been given an official position in the Haitian
army in the month prior and was receiving instructions from Alcantara (M.
Hood to Min. de rree, SD, 24 June 1860, agn-­rd: rree 14/15/16 (7/008378),
Expte. 1, p. 22. Alcantara had sworn allegiance to the west at least since 1850
(Rodríguez Demorizi, Correspondencia, 2:350).
386. “Orden del día del General de División Domingo Ramírez,” Given in the
General Barracks of Cercado, 12 June 18[60], agn: rree 14/15/16 (7/008378),
Expte. 1, p. 1.
387. Ministro de rree a los Cónsules de Inglaterra y Francia, 23 June 1860,
agn-­rd: rree 14, Expte. 2. The document cites several Dominican officials
(Alcantara, Ramírez, the commander of las Caobas) and only one Haitian
officer, Col­o­nel Joseph Chateau. Nevertheless, the Dominican minister
demanded 400,000 pesos fuertes.
388. M. Lavastida, “Memoria que dirige el Ministro de Guerra y Marina a S.E.
el Presidente de la República,” 27 February 1861, agn-­rd: Leg. de/1371
(1861–1913), Expte. s/n. Evidently Ramírez was totally defeated, although
many took refuge in Haiti (Abram Coën to Min. de rree, Curaçao, 11 Julio
1860, agn-­rd: rree 14/15/16 [7/008378], Leg. 15, Expte. 2, p. 19).
389. Min. de Marina to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, 24 August 1860, ahn: Ultra-
mar 3526, Expte. 1.
390. Copiador, 14 September 1860.
391. Martínez-­Fernández, “Caudillos,” 571.

2. Soon It ­Will Be Mexico’s Turn

1. Manuel de Cruzat to Felipe Ribero (passed on to the Queen), SD, 15 August
1862, anc: Audiencia de la Habana Leg. 245, Expte. 2; Consul Hood to Rus-
sel, 21 March 1861, agn-­rd: Anexión de/0093, Expte. 1, p. 1. The flag was
lowered the following day and not raised again for some time.
2. Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 157.
3. Pani, “Dreaming of a Mexican Empire.”

notes to chapter 2 | 265

 4. Pani, “Dreaming of a Mexican Empire,” 28.
5. In Ec­ua­dor, for example, President José María Urvina Viterí offered territo-
rial cessions to pay for British debt in 1854; five years l­ ater, Gabriel García
Moreno hoped for a French protectorate not only to secure Ec­ua­dor’s bor-
ders from partition by Colombia and Peru but also to forestall U.S. aggres-
sion. In 1861, a new plan to establish a monarchy in Ec­ua­dor with French
help (and some territorial cessions) also never materialized, in part b ­ ecause
Napoleon III was already involved in Mexico (Pineo, Ec­ua­dor and the United
States, 42; Lauderbaugh, History of Ec­ua­dor, 57).
6. “What then is the citizen-­king? . . . ​That is what we want, what all Brazilians
want: a strong monarch who curbs the ambitions of the discontented and
suppresses the fanat­i­cism of the masses,” Brazilian chroniclers proclaimed
(Barman, Citizen Emperor, ix). Emperor Soulouque, too, sought the “esteem
and sympathy of civilized ­peoples” through “empire . . . ​as the signal of
rebirth and order” (“proclamation. Faustin Ier, Empereur d’Haïti, au
peuple et à l’armée,” Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 5, 8 January 1859, 1). Opponents
of Napoleon III accused him of soulouquerie even as they praised Dom Pedro II
(Dubois, Haiti, 146; Barman, Citizen Emperor, 160).
7. Burdiel, “The Queen, the W ­ oman, and the ­Middle Class.”
8. “Astounding Intelligence,” New York Times, 30 March 1861, 1; “Spanish De-
signs on the American Continent,” Chicago Tribune, 3 April 1861, 1.
9. Spain’s 1812 constitution proposed the transformation of the American
colonies into representative provinces, albeit with unequal repre­sen­ta­tion.
Even though it excluded men of African ancestry from citizenship, Cuban
planters had opposed it, associating constitutionalism with abolitionism.
Implementation stalled, anyway, as in­de­pen­dence vitiated the empire. In
1837, Ca­rib­bean representatives ­were expelled from Madrid’s Cortes alto-
gether. The overseas territories ­were ruled in a state of exception for the next
several de­cades, despite the promise of “special laws” to bring the colonies
back ­under constitutional rule (Fradera, “Why W ­ ere Spain’s Special Overseas
Laws Never Enacted?,” 338, 348; Marquese and Parron, “Atlantic Consti-
tutionalism,” 184; Fradera, “Reading Imperial Transitions,” 57; Schmidt-­
Nowara, Empire and Anti-­slavery, 25).
10. Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 152.
11. Centeno, “Critical Debates,” 154.
12. Morillo-­Alicea, “Uncharted Landscapes of ‘Latin Amer­i­ca,’ ” 31.
13. Powelson, “Nineteenth-­Century Latin American Imperialism,” 827–43.
14. McGuinness, “Searching for ‘Latin Amer­i­ca’ ”; Gobat, “Invention of Latin
Amer­i­ca.”
15. Álvarez Junco, “Spanish National Identity,” 321; Febres-­Cordillo Carrillo, “La
anexión,” 101; Malamud, Ruptura y reconciliación, 2.
16. Delutis-­Eichenberger, “National Consciousness and Shared Americanism,”
10.

266 | notes to chapter 2

17. Schmidt-­Nowara, Empire and Anti-­slavery, 105; Schmidt-­Nowara, Conquest of
History, 34–42.
18. Mariano Álvarez to Francisco Serrano, SD, 20 July 1860, agi: Cuba 2266,
Pieza 1.
19. La Epoca, 11 July 1860, qtd. in Fontecha Pedraza and González Calleja, Una
cuestión de honor, 45 (hereafter cited as Cuestión).
20. Cubano-­Iguina, “Visions of Empire,” 89.
21. Cuestión, 20.
22. May, Slavery, Race, and Conquest in the Tropics.
23. Martínez-­Fernández, Torn between Empires, 22–23.
24. L. A. de Cueto to 1r Secretary of State, Washington, DC, 25 October 1851,
amae: Política Exterior: rd 2374, Expte. s/n.
25. Qtd. in “La América,” El Eco del Pueblo, no. 35, 3 May 1857, 137.
26. Puerto Rican governor Rafael Aristegui to Spanish Minister of State, 15 No-
vember 1844, qtd. in Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 80–81.
27. Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 92, 93; Cap. Gen. of Puerto Rico to
Secretary of State and Despacho de la Guerra, Puerto Rico, 20 April 1843,
shm: Ultramar 5646, Expte. 4, “Operaciones de campaña.”
28. Febres-­Cordillo Carrillo, “La anexión,” 109.
29. On the African-­British plot, see Juan de la Peruela to Ministro de la Guerra,
Puerto Rico, 5 November 1849, shm: Ultramar 5639, Expte. “Esclavitud/
Esclavos 1849–1862.” On a supposed gathering force of forty thousand, see
Fernando de Norzagaray to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, 23 August 1852, anc: ap 47,
Expte. 15, p. 2.
30. Febres-­Cordillo Carrillo, “La anexión,” 115, 118.
31. Febres-­Cordillo Carrillo, “La anexión,” 137.
32. Sartorius, “My Vassals.”
33. Schmidt-­Nowara, Conquest of History, 23, 27.
34. Febres-­Cordillo Carrillo, “La anexión,” 125; Álvarez López, Dominación colo-
nial y guerra popu­lar, 9.
35. Felipe Fernández de Castro to Ministro de Ultramar, Madrid, 3 October 1822,
agi: Audiencia de SD 970, Expte. s/n.; Felipe Fernández de Castro to Minis-
tro de Ultramar, 26 November 1824, agi: Estado Leg. 4, Expte. 7; Real Orden
of 24 August 1829, anc: ap 34, Expte. 16.
36. Felipe Fernández de Castro to Intendente General de Cuba, 10 February
1830, anc: ap 120, Expte. 124. For mention of the plans for continuing nego-
tiations, see anc: ap 34, Expte. 39; Leg. 36, Expte. 7.
37. Torrente, Política ultramarina, 311; Cuestión, 24.
38. Cuba, 1843: agn-­rd: “Misión en Cuba 1.” Puerto Rico, 1845: Cayetano Pilón
to the Queen, amae: Política Exterior: rd 2373, Expte. s/n, doc. s/n. Puerto
Rico, 1846: Febres-­Cordillo Carrillo, “La anexión,” 102–3.
39. Fernando de Norzagaray to Gov. of Cuba, Puerto Rico, 14 September 1852,
anc: ap 47, Expte. 15. Another report claimed that as many as five thousand

notes to chapter 2 | 267

 armed volunteers from Kentucky and Georgia ­were attempting to enter the
republic ­under the pretext of fighting Emperor Soulouque, and that they
would then quickly turn their attentions to Cuba (Expte. of the Secretary of
State, 25 September 1852, amae: Política Exterior: rd 2373, doc. s/n).
40. Expte. of the Secretary of State, 10 November 1852, amae: Política Exterior:
rd 2373, doc. s/n.
41. J. M. Pando to Cap. Gen. of la Habana, Curaçao, 17 November 1850, anc: ap
44, Expte. 15, doc 1.
42. Expte. of the Secretary of State, 6 Dic. 1852, amae: Política Exterior: rd 2373.
43. Mariano Torrente, “Segunda memoria sobre el Imperio de Haití,” Havana,
14 January 1853, amae: Política Exterior: Haití 2523, Expte. 1, p. 49.
44. J. M. Pando to Cap. Gen. of la Habana, Curaçao, 17 November 1850, anc:
ap 44, Expte. 15, doc. 1; J. M. Pando to Cap. Gen. of la Habana, Curaçao,
6 December 1850, anc: ap 44, Expte. 15, doc. 6.
45. J. M. Pando to Capitan General de la Habana, Curaçao, 17 November 1850,
anc: ap 44, Expte. 15, doc. 1.
46. Min. de State to Consul gral. de España en Haiti, Madrid, 1 November 1855,
agi: Cuba, Expte. “que comprende las instrucciones dadas al Cónsul de SM
en Haití, por el Gobierno Supremo . . . ,” doc. s/n.
47. Her nom de plume was Cora Montgomery. Eyal, Young Amer­i­ca Movement, 159;
May, “Lobbyists for Commercial Empire,” 383–90.
48. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood, 225; Caughfield, True ­Women and Westward
Expansion, 132.
49. Febres-­Cordillo Carrillo, “La anexión,” 123.
50. Eduardo San Just to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, SD, 7 March 1855, agi: Cuba 984C,
Expte. s/n (last in box), doc. s/n.
51. Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 170.
52. Eduardo San Just to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, SD, 7 March 1855, agi: Cuba 984C,
Expte. s/n (emphasis in original).
53. Copiador, 7 May 1855.
54. Manuel Cruzat to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, Port-­au-­Prince, 20 August 1855, agi:
Cuba 984C, Expte. “que comprende las instrucciones dadas al Cónsul de SM
en Haití, por el Gobierno Supremo . . . ,” doc. s/n.
55. Manuel Cruzat to L. Dufrène, Port-­au-­Prince, 13 August 1855, agi: Cuba
984C, Expte. “que comprende las instrucciones dadas al Cónsul de SM en
Haití, por el Gobierno Supremo . . . ,” doc. s/n.
56. “Qui moun ça, sacré foutu blanc qui veut pas saluer mon palais!” Manuel
Cruzat to L. Dufrène, Port-­au-­Prince, 13 August 1855, agi: Cuba 984C, Expte.
“que comprende las instrucciones dadas al Cónsul de SM en Haití . . . ,”
doc. s/n.
57. Manuel Cruzat to [unclear], August 1855, amae: Política Exterior: Haiti 2523,
Expte. 4.

268 | notes to chapter 2

58. Joaquin Francisco Pacheco to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, Madrid, 18 November
1854, Expte. “que comprende las instrucciones dadas al Cónsul de SM en
Haití . . . ,” doc. s/n; Juan de Zabala to Eugenio Villevaleix (Haitian commis-
sioner in Paris), Madrid, 4 October 1855, agi: Cuba 984C, Expte. “que com-
prende las instrucciones dadas al Cónsul de SM en Haití, por el Gobierno
Supremo . . . ,” doc. s/n.
59. Martínez-­Fernández, Torn between Empires, 56.
60. Sp. Foreign Minister to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, Paris, 16 September 1859, anc:
ap 51, Expte. 9.
61. Vicioso, El freno hatero, 250.
62. “La República y el Sr. Segovia,” La República, no. 4, 30 September 1856, 3.
63. Francisco Serrano to Santiago governor Carlos de Vargas, Havana, 10 April
1859, anc: ap 224, Expte. 14.
64. Cap. Gen. of Cuba to Ministro de Estado, Havana, 12 May 1859, amae:
Política Exterior: Haiti 2523, Expte. 1; Spanish Consul Pablo de Urrutia to
Minister of Foreign Relations of Haiti, Port-­au-­Prince, 25 April 1859, amae:
Política Exterior: Haiti 2523, Expte. s/n.
65. Mariano Álvarez, “Memoria: Santo Domingo o la República Dominicana,”
20 April 1860, ahn: Ultramar 2275, Expte. 16 and 3526, Expte. 2.
66. Mariano Álvarez, “Memoria: Santo Domingo o la República Dominicana,”
20 April 1860, ahn: Ultramar 2275, Expte. 16.
67. Mariano Álvarez to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, 20 July 1860, agi: Cuba 2266, Pieza 1.
68. Mariano Álvarez to Secretary of State, 12 November 1860, agi: Cuba 2266,
Pieza 2.
69. Ministro de Guerra y Ultramar to Ministerio de Marina, 24 August 1860,
Passing on the Comandante General del Aposterdo de la Havana’s 10 July
report, ahn: Ultramar 3526, Expte. 1, pp. 25–26.
70. Qtd. in Núñez de Arce, Santo Domingo, 55.
71. Hernández Flores, Pedro Santana, 18.
72. Hernández Flores, Pedro Santana, 26.
73. Abreu Cardet and Álvarez-­López, 9; Marte, Correspondencia, 63.
74. “The Dominican Republic—­The ­Grand Plot,” National Era, 2 November 1854,
1 (emphasis in original).
75. Vicioso, El freno hatero, 267.
76. Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 11, 19 February 1859, 1.
77. Pablo de Urrutia to Gob. Cap. Gen. of Cuba, Port-­au-­Prince, 10 July 1860,
agi: Cuba 2266, Pieza 1.
78. Pedro Santana to the Queen, SD, 18 March 1861, agn-­rd: Anexión
de/000933, Expte. 14, p. 62.
79. Ministro de Guerra y Ultramar to Ministerio de Marina, 24 August 1860,
Passing on the Comandante General del Aposterdo de la Havana’s 10 July
report, ahn: Ultramar 3526, Expte. 1, pp. 9–10.

notes to chapter 2 | 269

 80. Mariano Álvarez, “Memoria: Santo Domingo o la República Dominicana,”
20 April 1860, ahn: Ultramar 2775 Expte. 16. Incidentally, U.S. boosterism
that year returned to ­these same convictions. Dominicans ­were “Spaniards,
Spanish creoles, and some Africans and ­people of color,” one insisted (Court-
ney, Gold Fields of Santo Domingo, 132 [emphasis in original]).
81. Martínez-­Fernández, Torn between Empires, 211; Álvarez to Min. de Guerra y
Ultramar, 24 August 1860, ahn: Ultramar 3526, Expte. 1.
82. Mariano Álvarez to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar and Cap. Gen. of Cuba,
24 August 1860, ahn: Ultramar 3526, Expte. 1. He admitted that he had been
lobbied that very day by Vice President Alfau, who had “explic­itly mani-
fested” that version of events.
83. Mariano Álvarez, “Memoria: Santo Domingo o la República Dominicana,”
20 April 1860, ahn: Ultramar 2275, Expte. 16 and 3526, Expte. 2.
84. Mariano Álvarez to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, 20 and 21 July 1860, agi: Cuba 2266,
Pieza 1.
85. Ministro de Guerra y Ultramar to Ministerio de Marina, 24 August 1860,
Passing on the Comandante General del Aposterdo de la Havana’s 10 July
report, ahn: Ultramar 3526, Expte. 1, pp. 9–10.
86. Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 191.
87. Memoria of Antonio Peláez y Campomanes to Gob. Serrano, Havana,
8 November 1860, ahn: Ultramar 3526, Expte. 2, doc. 2 (hereafter cited as
Memoria of Antonio Peláez y Campomanes).
88. Memoria of Antonio Peláez y Campomanes.
89. Memoria of Antonio Peláez y Campomanes.
90. In fact, due to Santo Domingo’s relatively capital-­and sugar-­poor nature, its
plantations relied on island-­born slaves much more than did its profitable
neighbor.
91. Memoria of Antonio Peláez y Campomanes.
92. Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 200.
93. Eduardo San Justo to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, SD, 7 March 1855, agi: Cuba
984C.
94. Mariano Álvarez to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, 9 August 1860, agi: Cuba 2266,
Pieza 1.
95. Mariano Álvarez to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar and Cap. Gen. of Cuba,
24 August 1860, ahn: Ultramar 3526, Expte. 1.
96. Min. de Marina to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, 24 August 1860, ahn: Ultra-
mar 3526, Expte. 1.
97. Pedro Santana, 18 March 1861, agi: Cuba 2266, Pieza 2, doc. s/n
98. Schmidt-­Nowara, Empire and Anti-­slavery, 26–27.
99. Hostos, La Peregrinación; Alonso, “Fiction,” 149.
100. Álvarez Junco, “Spanish National Identity,” 320.
101. De Bona, Cuba, Santo Domingo y Puerto-­Rico, 5.
102. Corwin, Spain and the Abolition of Slavery in Cuba, 132.

270 | notes to chapter 2

103. Francisco Serrano to the Ministro de Guerra y Ultramar, 6 September 1861,
ahn: Ultramar 3532, Expte. 2, doc. 2 (herafter cited as Serrano, Resultado de
viaje), 28.
104. Serrano, Resultado de viaje, 31.
105. Serrano, Resultado de viaje, 29.
106. Torrente, Política ultramarina.
107. Torrente, Política ultramarina, 162; Schmidt-­Nowara, Conquest of History, 219.
108. Torrente, Política ultramarina, 144 (emphasis added).
109. “We should be sensitive to the illustrious Dominican general Mella” (who
conducted a five-­month Eu­ro­pean mission seeking annexation in 1854), Tor-
rente urges (Política ultramarina, 344).
110. Torrente, Política ultramarina, 342.
111. Torrente, Política ultramarina, 345.
112. Dorsey, “Seamy Sides of Abolition,” 112, 114. Planters and the enslaved and
their families protested cabotage vigorously, but their attempts to seek l­ egal
redress ­were almost never successful (Dorsey, “Seamy Sides of Abolition,”
109, 116). Indenture proj­ects ­were proposed on the island through the 1860s
but never realized (Schmidt-­Nowara, Empire and Anti-­slavery, 42).
113. Picó, Libertad y servidumbre.
114. Martínez-­Fernández, Torn between Empires, 111; Santiago-­Valles, “ ‘Forcing
Them to Work,’ ” 123–68.
115. Reid-­Vazquez, Year of the Lash, 146.
116. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba, 29. Just at the moment of annexation, Brit-
ish authorities tried to restrict the indenture trade to Cuba (López, Chinese
Cubans, 24).
117. Torrente, Política ultramarina, 144, 148, 170. He proposed forty thousand be
contracted immediately (237). For his critique of the slave trade, see esp.
pp. 274–76.
118. Torrente, Política ultramarina, 336–37.
119. Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 189.
120. Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 186.
121. Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 193.
122. Collected in Núñez de Arce, Santo Domingo, 76–106.
123. Núñez de Arce, Santo Domingo, 104.
124. Joaquin María del Monte to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, Puerto Rico,
27 March 1861, ahn: Ultramar 5485, Expte. 1, doc. 1.
125. Raphael Echagüe to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, Mayagüez, 1 April 1861,
ahn: Ultramar 5485, Expte. 1, doc. 2.
126. Serrano to Min. de Estado, Reservado, 26 March 1861, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 24,
Expte. 198, p. 11.
127. José Malo de Molina to Cap. Gen. Francisco Serrano, 4 September 1861
(15 July 1861), ahn: Ultramar 3532, Expte. 1, doc. 2 (hereafter cited as Malo
de Molina to Serrano, “Memoria”).

notes to chapter 2 | 271

128. Malo de Molina to Serrano, “Memoria,” 70–71.
129. Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 180.
130. Malo de Molina to Serrano, “Memoria,” 17–18.
131. Ferrer de Couto, Reincorporación de Santo Domingo a España, 30.
132. Royal Order, Reservada, 5 April 1859, anc: ap 224, Expte. 6, doc. s/n.
133. Malo de Molina to Serrano, “Memoria,” 18.
134. Emphasis in original. “¿Es dable establecer, por ejemplo, una legislación
personal que admite la pena de azotes para una raza, la ley que la escluye de
toda participación en los negocios públicos, las que suponen con todas sus
consecuencias, en un país de cuyo diccionario social se ha borrado la palabra
servidumbre, y en el que hay una nivelación perfecta y absoluta entre sus
naturales, sea el que quiera su origen?” (Serrano, Resultado de viaje, 12).
135. Serrano, Resultado de viaje, 10–11.
136. Malo de Molina to Serrano, “Memoria,” 23, 25.
137. Serrano, Resultado de viaje, 14.
138. Serrano, Resultado de viaje, 17–18.
139. Serrano, Resultado de viaje, 32.
140. Serrano, Resultado de viaje, 33.
141. Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 200–201.
142. The Cuban government considered an abortive, small-­scale resettlement
scheme to serve ­labor “contracts” in Bioko not long thereafter, but Cuban
planters pressured the state to ban emigration and retain the individuals for
sugar harvest (Sundiata, From Slaving to Neoslavery, 52–53). In the absence of
any significant Spanish population, Spanish missionaries hoped that con-
version would bring local fidelity to Spain (Castillo-­Rodríguez, “The First
Missionary Linguistics in Fernando Po,” 84). Epigraph to this section qtd. in
Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 245.
143. In the latter port, see, e.g., “The Growing Insolence of Spain,” New York
Times, 8 November 1861, 4.
144. Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 188.
145. Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 192.
146. Qtd. in Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 111.
147. Qtd. in Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 111.
148. Qtd. in Cuestión, 23.
149. Cuestión, 41.
150. Cuestión, 65, 66.
151. El Contemporáneo, 20 April 1861, qtd. in Cuestión, 65–66. La América echoed
their concern; “the lack of explanations and insufficient time . . . d ​ o not
permit us ­either to assess what to do or to ensure a safe outcome,” they fret-
ted (La América, 24 May 1861, qtd. in Cuestión, 65).
152. Cuestión, 69.
153. Cuestión, 69.

272 | notes to chapter 2

154. La España, 17 April 1861, qtd. in Cuestión, 69–70. “If Mexico or any other of the
regiones desprendidas of what was Spain, came to offer themselves in the same
terms that Santo Domingo did, I think all the thinking men would thank
them for their offer but would not accept; we would be desgraciados, if for
sterile pride and vanity we sacrificed our real ­future without having learned
anything from days gone by,” one editorial argued (La España, 7 July 1861,
qtd. in Cuestión, 75). El Contemporáneo accused the O’Donnell government of
working secretly with annexation agents in the Dominican Republic and of
fostering Spanish immigration ­there.
155. El Clamor Público, 23 May 1861, qtd. in Cuestión, 74.
156. El Clamor Público, 10 May 1861, qtd. in Cuestión, 73.
157. La Discusión, 20 April 1861, qtd. in Cuestión, 70.
158. La Época, 24 April 1861, qtd. in Cuestión, 78.
159. La Época, 24 April 1861, qtd. in Cuestión, 80.
160. Correspondiente de España, 22 April 1861, qtd. in Cuestión, 80.
161. La Discusión, 21 April 1861, qtd. in Cuestión, 78.
162. La Discusión, 23 May 1861, qtd. in Cuestión, 80–81.
163. La Discusión, 23 May 1861, qtd. in Cuestión, 85; La Discusión, 17 May 1861, qtd. in
Cuestión, 86.
164. Las Novedades, 18 April 1861, qtd. in Cuestión, 86.
165. Cuestión, 87.
166. La España, 15 August 1861, qtd. in Cuestión, 88.
167. El Contemporáneo, 27 April 1861, qtd. in Núñez de Arce, Santo Domingo, 20.
168. El Contemporáneo, 14 April 1861, qtd. in Núñez de Arce, Santo Domingo, 72.
169. Cuestión, 67.
170. El Contemporáneo, 14 April 1861, qtd. in Cuestión, 72; El Contemporáneo, 18 April
1861, qtd. in Cuestión, 57.
171. Cuestión, 58.
172. La América, 8 May 1861, qtd. in Cuestión, 79.
173. The “War of Africa” was Spain’s brief military campaign in the northern tip
of Morocco in 1859–60. ­Under the pretext of skirmishes near Ceuta, a Span-
ish holding since the days of al-­Andalus, the Spanish Crown declared war
against Morocco in October 1859. Heading up Spanish forces of more than
thirty-­five thousand was Prime Minister Leopoldo O’Donnell himself. A ­ fter
some to-­and-­fro, Spanish troops won a victory at Tétouan, also just across
the Gibraltar Strait, about twenty miles down the coast from Ceuta. Peace
negotiations won Spain some 20 million piastres in indemnity, an enlarge-
ment of Ceuta’s borders as a Spanish enclave, and negotiations for another
territorial cession, which secured Spanish holdings in nearby Melilla. Most
significantly, the campaign piqued imperialist discourse on the national
stage. O’Donnell was awarded the title of “Duke of Tetuan” for his exploits.
174. Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 146.

notes to chapter 2 | 273

175. Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 146.
176. El Pensamiento Español, 20 May 1861, qtd. in Cuestión, 55.
177. Francisco J. Sarmientos y Quiñoes to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, 5 December 1859,
anc: ap 224, Expte. 20, n.p.
178. Martín de Arredondo y Oléa to Cáp. Gen. of Cuba, Havana, 24 February
1860, anc: ap 53, Expte. 1.
179. Juntas, Barcelona, Imprenta de F. Sánchez, 1860, agi: Cuba 970B, Expte.
248, doc. s/n.
180. Qtd. in Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 155.
181. “España y el siglo XIX,” La Razón, no. 13, 1 July 1861, 1. A contradanza entitled
“La expedición de Marruecos” celebrated Spain’s North African imperial
exploits (Manuel, “Cuba: From Contradanza to Danzón,” 73).
182. Min. de Guerra y Ultramar to Min. de Estado, 22 May 1861, ahn: Ultramar
5485, Expte. 2, doc. 1. It seems Serrano first wrote on 26 March.
183. Min. de Estado (sub-­secretario) to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, Palacio,
22 May 1861, ahn: Ultramar 5485, Expte. 2, doc. 1, p. 3.
184. Min. de Estado (sub-­secretario) to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, Palacio,
22 May 1861, ahn: Ultramar 5485, Expte. 2, doc. 1, p. 3.
185. Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 147–48.
186. Cuestión, 90, 92, 96.
187. ahn: Ultramar 3532, Expte. 3, 7 October 1861.
188. Min. de Estado (sub-­secretario) to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, Palacio,
22 May 1861, ahn: Ultramar 5485, Expte. 2, doc. 1.
189. Pedro Santana to Capitán General de Cuba, Francisco Serrano, 6 August
1861, ahn: Ultramar 3532, Expte. 2, doc. 3.
190. Santana to Serrano, Resultado de viaje, 2.
191. Eduardo A. Colmenares to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, SD, 8 January 1862,
ahn: Ultramar 3532, Expte. 8, doc. 2.
192. De Bona, Cuba, Santo Domingo y Puerto-­Rico, 2.
193. De Bona, Cuba, Santo Domingo y Puerto-­Rico, 2.
194. De Bona, Cuba, Santo Domingo y Puerto-­Rico, 3.
195. De Bona, Cuba Santo Domingo y Puerto-­Rico, 42.
196. De Bona, Cuba, Santo Domingo y Puerto-­Rico, 41.
197. De Bona, Cuba, Santo Domingo y Puerto-­Rico, 41.
198. Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 12, 23 February 1861, 3.
199. Qtd. in Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 12, 23 February 1861, 4.
200. Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 20, 20 April 1861, 2–3.
201. Qtd. in Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 25, 25 May 1861, 3–4.
202. “Questions de l’Est,” Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 22, 4 May 1861, 3–4.
203. La Correspondencia, Madrid, 20 April 1861, in Rodríguez Demorizi, Anteceden-
tes, 154.
204. Qtd. in “Nouvelles étrangères,” Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 27, 8 June 1861, 3.
205. “The Revival of Spain,” Quarterly Review 3 (1862): 147–75, 172.

274 | notes to chapter 2

206. Qtd. in Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 25, 25 May 1861, 4.
207. [Mariano Álvarez] to Min. de Estado, 19 March 1861, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 24,
Expte. 198, p. 4.
208. Fabens, Facts about Santo Domingo, 30–31.
209. Consul Hood to Lord J. Russell, SD, 21 March 1861, agn-­rd: Anexión
de/000933, Expte. 1, p. 1.
210. Marte, Correspondencia, 72.
211. Consul Hood to Lord J. Russell, SD, 21 April 1861, agn-­rd: Anexión
de/000933, Expte. 9, p. 27; Consul Hood to Lord J. Russell, SD, 21 April 1861,
agn-­rd Anexión de/000933, Expte. 10, p. 28.
212. Hauch, “Attitudes of Foreign Governments,” 256.
213. Hauch, “Attitudes of Foreign Governments,” 256.
214. Informa a S.E. sobre el estado de la Unión, Mariano Álvarez to Cap. Gen. of
Cuba, New York, 5 April 1861, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 24, Expte. 198, pp. 51–52.
215. For example, “Spanish Filibustering in Santo Domingo,” Chicago Tribune,
30 March 1861, 1; “Astounding Intelligence: Aggressive Designs of Spain in
the West Indies,” New York Times, 30 March 1861, 1.
216. Qtd. in Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 31, 6 July 1861, 2–4. The Moniteur reported that
on 11 April the Boston legislature passed a resolution against annexation (Le
Moniteur Haïtien, no. 25, 25 May 1861, 4).
217. “Rehabilitation of Spain,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1862, 360.
218. “Rehabilitation of Spain,” 362–63.
219. Consul Thomas Hood to Lord J. Russell, SD, 21 April 1861, agn-­rd:
de/000933 (“Papeles relativos a la Anexión de la parte oriental”), Expte. s/n.
220. Lord Russell to R. Edwardes, Foreign Office, 7 July 1861, agn-­rd:
de/000933, s/n.
221. Lord J. Russell to R. Edwardes, Foreign Office, 14 May 1861, agn-­rd:
de/000933, s/n.
222. Lord Russell to R. Edwardes, Foreign Office, 14 May 1861, agn-­rd: Anexión
de/000933, Expte. 11, pp. 30–31.
223. “Revival of Spain,” 158, 170.
224. “Revival of Spain,” 170. “The military enterprise recently undertaken by
Spain against Morocco is understood to have been forced upon the Govern-
ment by public opinion. . . . ​We must, however, state our opinion that the
harsh and onerous terms she imposed upon a brave but unmilitary e­ nemy
­were unworthy of her generosity; and the desire evinced to acquire addi-
tional territory in Morocco is as much opposed to her true interests as it
is inconsistent with the declarations made before the commencement of
the war.”
225. “Revival of Spain,” 172. The article echoes the assertion that a plebiscite was
taken (173).
226. “Revival of Spain,” 174.
227. “Revival of Spain,” 171.

notes to chapter 2 | 275

228. Gaceta de la Habana, 30 March 1861, shm: Ultramar 5645, Expte. s/n.
229. José Lemery to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, Manila, 19 July 1861, ahn: Ultra-
mar 5185, Expte. 24.
230. Borges, “Competencia y Anexión,” 53.
231. Martínez-­Fernández, Torn between Empires, 220.
232. La Discusión, 10 April 1861, qtd. in Núñez de Arce, Santo Domingo, 151.

3. Destined to Occupy This Island

1. Rubalcava qtd. in Colección de leyes, 101.

2. De la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 200.
3. Director del Archivo General de Indias to Ministro de Ultramar, Sevilla,
9 April 1862, ahn: Ultramar 5485, Expte. 26, doc. 2. They also requested
that pre-1821 documents that had been sent to Cuba be returned to Santo
Domingo (24 November 1861, ahn: Ultramar 3537, Expte. 7), while Santana
sent on copies of some of the extinguished republic’s treaties to Spain (San-
tana to Min. de Guerra, 2 January 1862, ahn: Ultramar 3531, Expte. 14).
4. Comandante de armas interino de Barahona Angel Féliz to Cap. Gen. of SD,
Barahona, 29 April 1861, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 21, Expte. 173, pp. 23–24.
5. Minuta de Real Orden (reservada), from Min. de la Guerra y Ultramar to
Teniente General D. Felipe Rivero, 19 June 1862, ahn: Ultramar 3525,
Expte. 14.
6. Adriano López Morillo, Memorias sobre la segunda reincorporación de Santo Do-
mingo a España, vol. 1 (Santo Domingo: Editora Corripio, 1983), excerpted in
Cordero Michel, La ciudad de Santo Domingo, 255.
7. Ministro de Ultramar to Primera Secretaria de Estado, Madrid, 2 December
1863, ahn: Ultramar 3525, doc. 109.
8. Francisco Serrano, Informe de la visita a SD, SD, 5 September 1861, in
Rodríguez-­Demorizi, Antecedentes, 245.
9. Cruzat to Felipe Rivero, SD, 15 August 1862, anc: Audiencia de la Habana
245, Expte. 2.
10. Barry, “Hegemony on a Shoestring.”
11. Serrano to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, Havana, 5 September 1861, ahn:
Ultramar 5485, Expte. 16, doc. 1, p. 4.
12. Beckert, Empire of Cotton. In the first half of the nineteenth ­century, Eu­ro­
pean markets ­were a “global cotton-­growing countryside . . . ​grown by slave
­labor” (226).
13. The doubling of the price of raw cotton from 1848 to 1857 had driven
Manchester merchants to look to new supplies and become somewhat
less enamored with laissez-­faire dicta generally. Joint-­stock companies to
fund cotton in other parts of the empire sprang up. Ventures in West Africa
included a failed cotton proj­ect in Senegal in earlier de­cades, an uptick of
intervention in Dahomey and southwestern Nigeria, and other proj­ects of

276 | notes to chapter 2

 so-­called legitimate commerce, as missionaries and imperial adventurers
bedecked their ventures with a cloying humanitarian veneer. Small-­scale
production of cotton in West Africa dated to antiquity, but the tide of impe-
rial imports impeded proto-­industrialization; by 1850, British merchants
flooded West African markets with thirty times more finished cotton goods
than in previous de­cades (Ratcliffe, “Cotton Imperialism,” 87, 91; Inikori,
“En­glish versus Indian Cotton Textiles,” 89; Hopkins, Economic History of West
Africa, 128, 137–38).
14. In Jamaica, the British Cotton Com­pany, Jamaica Cotton Com­pany, Claren-
don Com­pany, Manchioneal Com­pany, and Kingston Cotton Com­pany all
“speedily formed” (Watts, Cotton Supply Association, 94). None ­were success-
ful. In Cuba, see Watts, Cotton Supply Association, 93.
15. F. Jn. Joseph, Secretary of State of Interior and Agriculture, “Rapport,” Le
Moniteur Haïtien, no. 37, 18 July 1860, 1–4.
16. Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 10, 9 February 1861, 3.
17. Geffrard, “Circulaire aux généraux commandant les arrondissements de la
Republique,” Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 12, 23 February 1861, 1; Geffrard, “Ar-
rêté,” Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 13, 3 March 1860, 1.
18. St. John, Hayti, 367.
19. Watts, Cotton Supply Association, 96. The British Cotton Supply Association
collaborated with the Union government to disseminate seeds and machin-
ery to the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Palestine, and other locations (Calhoun,
“Seeds of Destruction”).
20. Ratcliffe, “Cotton Imperialism,” 87.
21. Kale, Fragments of Empire, 1; López, Chinese Cubans, 22; David Northrup,
“Indentured Indians in the French Antilles”; Renault, Libération d’esclaves et
nouvelle servitude. My thanks to Kate Marsh for her clarification of French Ca­
rib­bean statistics.
22. Marsh, “ ‘Rights of the Individual,’ ” 225.
23. Works include Schuler, “Alas, Alas Kongo”; Rodney, History of the Guyanese
Working P ­ eople; Jung, Coolies and Cane; López, Chinese Cubans.
24. Jung, Coolies and Cane, 17. They ­were, on some plantations, “treated no better
and even worse than negro slaves,” the U.S. consul reported from Havana in
1855 (22).
25. Internal markets of crops like ginger, arrowroot, and banana grew incre-
mentally alongside older cash crops, as did emancipated communities’
consumption and standard of living (Thompson, Haunting Past, 122).
26. In 1863, nearly three thousand Barbadians left the island as indentured la-
borers to multiple sites; in an attempt to prevent ­future migrations, planters
opposed po­liti­cal federation with the other British Islands in the next de­cade
(Brown, “Experiments in Indenture,” 44; Levy, Emancipation, Sugar, and Feder-
alism). On the case of Antigua, see Lightfoot, Troubling Freedom.

notes to chapter 3 | 277

27. F. Jn. Joseph, Secretary of State of Interior and Agriculture, “Rapport,” Le
Moniteur Haïtien, no. 37, 18 July 1860, 1–4. Specifically, they ­were to ­settle in a
number of regions where land was not already subdivided into small plots.
28. Geffrard gave Redpath $20,000 to open an emigration bureau in Boston; it
was decked with “mahogany splendor,” prob­ably from the island itself (Al-
exander, “ ‘Black Republic,’ ” 70–75). See also Dixon, African Amer­ic­ a and Haiti.
29. Alexander, “ ‘Black Republic,’ ” 75.
30. Cap­i­t al­ist Bernard Kock, who had been leasing Ile-­à-­Vache, sought fifty
dollars per person for up to fifty thousand émigrés. Privately, the Haitian
minister in Washington, DC, was instructed to avoid any such massive-­
scale migration, although he need not have worried. Smallpox, mismanage-
ment, and corruption crippled, then ended, the proj­ect (Logan, Diplomatic
Relations, 308–10).
31. Geffrard, “Circulaire aux généraux commandant les arrondissements de la
Republique,” Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 12, 23 February 1861, 1. He exhorted that
rural Haitians increase domestic food staple production si­mul­ta­neously, to
­free the country from a reliance on imports.
32. Nicholls, Economic Dependence and Po­liti­cal Autonomy, 15; A. Monfleury, “Fabri-
cation du Sucre,” L’Opinion Nationale, no. 6, 8 February 1862, 1.
33. See map 3.1. Clarifications are as follows. Costa Rica and Nicaragua: Rob-
inson, “Chinese of Central Amer­i­ca,” 107, 113. Panama: Meagher, The Coolie
Trade, 272. Although abolition legislation was passed in Colombia in 1851,
the legislation took effect in early 1852; the concierto system of apprenticeship
was abolished si­mul­ta­neously (Jason McGraw, personal communication,
7 November 2015). Trinidad and Tobago: Roberts and Byrne, “Summary
Statistics on Indenture,” 127. The earliest contract schemes u ­ nder British rule
date to 1806 (Allen, “Slaves, Convicts, Abolitionism,” 6). Jamaica: Roberts
and Byrne, “Summary Statistics on Indenture,” 127; Schuler, “Alas, Alas
Kongo”; Anderson, “The Diaspora of Sierra Leone’s Liberated Africans,”
117–18. British Guiana: Roberts and Byrne, “Summary Statistics on Inden-
ture,” 127. Some regional mi­grants arrived without contracts (pre-1846 and
in 1864) (Richardson, “Freedom and Migration”; Brown, “Experiments in
Indenture,” 48). Barbados was a site of indenture emigration briefly (Brown,
“Experiments in Indenture,” 44). Saint Vincent, Grenada, Dominica, and
British Honduras: Roberts and Byrne, “Summary Statistics on Indenture,”
127; Robinson, “Chinese of Central Amer­i­ca,” 108. Antigua: the long dates
reflect Madeiran migration more than smaller numbers from other places,
which occurred in the early 1860s (Brown, “Experiments in Indenture,”
42; Roberts and Byrne, “Summary Statistics on Indenture,” 127; Robinson,
“Chinese of Central Amer­i­ca,” 108; Lightfoot, Troubling Freedom, 172). Saint
Kitts: 1860–65 is the period of Indian indentured migration (Vertovek, “In-
dian Indentured Migration,” 59); Madeira Island and African migration may
have been longer (Roberts and Byrne, “Summary Statistics on Indenture,”

278 | notes to chapter 3

 127). The Turks and Caicos: dates refer to changes in the salt rights system
­after emancipation that resulted in the predominance of truck system pay-
ments and bonded debt ­labor through the early twentieth ­century (Laws of
the Turks and Caicos Islands [London: Saunders, Otley and Co., 1862], 85–86,
415–16, 438; [Link] accessed
June 2015). Saint Croix, indenture and ­Labour Act restrictions: Roopnarine,
“The First and Only Crossing”; Roopnarine, “Comparative Analy­sis of Two
Failed Indenture Experiences,” 207. Martinique and Guadeloupe: Marsh,
“ ‘Rights of the Individual.’ ” Saint Lucia, Guyane: Vertovek, “Indian Inden-
tured Migration to the Ca­rib­bean,” 59. Suriname: the 1931 date refers to the
end of penal sanction (Hoefte, “­Labour in the Ca­rib­bean,” 259, 262; Hoefte,
personal communication, 3 January 2016). Puerto Rico: dates refer to libreta
controls; indenture proj­ects ­were popu­lar proposals in the 1860s but never
materialized (Schmidt-­Nowara, Empire and Anti-­slavery, 38; Figueroa, Sugar,
Slavery and Freedom, 166–69). Brazil: the vari­ous dates refer to fragmented
indenture schemes targeting liberated African and Chinese individuals
(Mamigonian, “To Be a Liberated African in Brazil”). In 1855, Bahian sugar
planters sent an emissary to China; one boatload of laborers arrived in
1855 (Meagher, Coolie Trade, 146, 266). In 1883, short-­lived renewed Chinese
indenture plans fizzled (Meagher, Coolie Trade, 269). United States: end
dates refer to the end of the convict lease system in Alabama and may well
be extended forward (for more on convict ­labor, see LeFlouria, Chained in
Silence. Mexico: the 1870 date refers to debt ­labor in Yucatán, although ­there
is considerable debate as to ­whether this constituted indenture (Levy, The
Making of a Market, 48). Peru: Meagher, Coolie Trade, 40. Ec­ua­dor: Townsend,
“In Search of Liberty,” and Camilla Townsend, personal communication,
3 January 2016. Haiti’s dates refer to the proj­ects of caporalisme agraire of the
earliest days of in­de­pen­dence as well as King Henri Christophe’s militarized
­labor control in his northern kingdom, but they do not extend to subsequent
rural codes, as land distribution and flight from plantations w ­ ere extensive
(see, e.g., Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier, 68; González, War on Sugar).
34. May, “Lobbyists for Commercial Empire,” 406.
35. Felipe Rivero to Min. de la Guerra y Ultramar, SD, 2 February 1863, ahn:
Ultramar 3542, Expte. 1, Doc. 4.
36. Minuta de Real Orden (reservada), from Min. de la Guerra y Ultramar to
Teniente Gral D. Felipe Rivero, 19 June 1862, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 14.
37. Paton, No Bond but the Law, 149.
38. Le Moniteur Haïtien, nos. 26–27, 12 June 1858, 2. Police ­were to verify the travel
pass (permis de route) of any individual in the interior (Le Moniteur Haïtien, no.
24, 21 May 1859, 2).
39. Geffrard, “Haïtiens!,” Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 11, 19 February 1859, 1.
40. Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 83.
41. Breen, St. Lucia, 306; Schmidt-­Nowara, Empire and Anti-­slavery, 33, 42.

notes to chapter 3 | 279

42. Dalby, “ ‘Such a Mass of Disgusting and Revolting Cases’ ”; Fryar, “Moral
Politics of Cholera.”
43. Ramsey, Spirits and the Law, 83–90.
44. “Le secretaire d’Etat au département de l’interieur et de l’agriculture, aux
inspecteurs et sous-­inspecteurs de culture de la République,” Le Moniteur
Haïtien, no. 27, 11 June 1859, 6.
45. Geffrard, “Adresse au peuple et à l’armée,” Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 25, 20 May
1865, 1.
46. Serrano to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, Havana, 16 August 1861, ahn: Ultra-
mar 5485, Expte. 14, doc. 1, p. 4. “­Every day they are happier to be part of the
big Spanish ­family,” he reported.
47. “Industria,” El Dominicano, no. 1, 29 June 1855, 4; El Oasis, no. 2, 4 December
1854, 5.
48. Juan B. Zafra to Santana, 17 November 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión 11 (de/1800),
Expte. 21. Land privatization support: “Artículo Primero,” El Dominicano, no.
11, 15 September 1855, 41; “División de propriedad,” El Dominicano, no. 13,
29 September 1855, 49.
49. Eduardo Alonso y Colmenares (Regente de la ra de SD) to Min. de Guerra y
Ultramar, SD, 8 January 1862, ahn: Ultramar 3532, Expte. 8, doc. 2.
50. Manuel de Jesús Galván to Cap. Gen., 20 January 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión 11
(de/1800), Expte. 40, doc. 2.
51. Pedro Valverde to Gob. Sup. Civil, 8 Feb 1864, agn-­rd: Anexión 26, Expte. 23.
52. Gob. Sup. Civil, to Pedro Valverde, 5 September 1863, agn-­rd: Anexión 23
(000149), Expte. 11.
53. Mariano Álvarez, “Memoria: Santo Domingo o la República Dominicana,”
SD, 20 April 1860, ahn: Ultramar 2775, Expte. 16, p. 4.
54. De la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 238.
55. Fontecha Pedraza and González Calleja, Una cuestión de honor, 75, 87.
56. Noel Henriquez to the Queen, London, 9 November 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión
25, Expte. 10.
57. Les intérêts français et européens à Santo Domingo (Paris: E. Dentu, 1861).
58. Consul Hood to Lord J. Russell, SD, 8 April 1861, agn-­rd: Anexión
de/000933, Expte. 5, p. 16; Consul Hood to Lord J. Russell, SD, 21 April 1861,
agn-­rd: Anexión de/000933, Expte. 9, p. 27.
59. The bud­get of the colonial state in Cuba and Puerto Rico “ballooned . . . ​
to pay a bloated bureaucratic corps” from 1840 to 1860. Cuban and Puerto
Rican taxes ­were high—in Cuba, as much as four times what the average
peninsular resident paid (Martínez-­Fernández, Torn between Empires, 62).
60. Qtd. in Martínez-­Fernández, Torn between Empires, 61.
61. Martínez-­Fernández, Torn between Empires, 63.
62. Eduardo Alonso y Colmenares to Min. de Ultramar, SD, 16 February 1862,
ahn: Ultramar 3545, Expte. 1, doc. 12.

280 | notes to chapter 3

63. José Malo de Molina to Cap. Gen. Francisco Serrano, 4 September 1861
(15 July 1861), ahn: Ultramar 3532, Expte. 1, doc. 2 (hereafter cited as Malo
de Molina to Serrano, “Memoria”), p. 15. Interestingly, he suggests that the
Dominican government might have chosen to continue with the French
codes ­after separation from Haiti in 1844 ­because they ­were timorous of
Spanish reoccupation and slavery (14), although just one page ­later, he sug-
gests that the very reason for annexation was that the populace was e­ ager to
introduce the Spanish code in 1861.
64. Serrano, Resultado de viaje, 5.
65. Malo de Molina to Serrano, “Memoria,” 17.
66. Real Orden of 7 October 1861, ahn: Ultramar 3531, Expte. 24.
67. Real Orden of 6 October 1861, ahn: Ultramar 3532, Expte. 3; Gaceta de Santo
Domingo, no. 92, 12 June 1862, 1; Alonso y Colmenares to Gob. Sub. Civil, SD,
14 June 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión 8, Expte. 29.
68. Expte. sobre organización y regimen municipals, 1 September 1861–14 No-
vember 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3535, Expte. 3.
69. “Organización y planta de los gobiernos, comandancias militares y de
armas de la Isla de Santo Domingo,” Ministro de Guerra, 26 June 1862, ahn:
Ultramar 3527, Expte. 51, doc. 9. ­These ­were the five extant provinces (Santo
Domingo, Santiago, Azua, la Vega, Seibo) and a new one, the commercial
coast of Puerto Plata.
70. Felipe Rivero to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, 6 July 1862, ahn: Ultramar 2785,
Expte. 8, doc. 1.
71. Ministerio de Estado to Serrano, 24 April 1861, in Núñez de Arce, Santo
Domingo, 56–60.
72. Malo de Molina to Serrano, “Memoria,” 64; Serrano, Resultado de viaje,
51–56.
73. Other founding members included José María Morilia, a ­lawyer (Spanish,
practicing in Havana), and Ramón de la Torre Trassierra (ex-­mayor in Philip-
pines). Real Orden of 6 October 1861, in Gaceta del Notoriado Español (Madrid:
Imprenta de D. Ramón Campuzano, 1861), 3:637.
74. Serrano to Min. de Guerra, Havana, 1 September 1861, ahn: Ultramar 3526,
Expte. 3; Álvarez López, Dominación colonial y guerra, 78.
75. Malo de Molina to Serrano, “Memoria,” 17, 45–47, 50; ahn: Ultramar Anexo
3 (3532.1 Expte. 1, doc. 5); Santana to Min. de Guerra, 7 July 1862, ahn: Ul-
tramar 3540, Expte. 19. The mayor of Santo Domingo, making an estimated
$20 a month at the time of annexation ($240 yearly) would have made $3,500
annually, according to his plan, for example.
76. Malo de Molina to Serrano, “Memoria,” 51.
77. Pedro Ricart Torres to el Comisario (Joaquín Manuel de Alba), SD, 20 No-
vember 1861, qtd. in Lugo Lovatón, “La junta económica annexionista de
1861,” n.p.

notes to chapter 3 | 281

 78. Joaquín Manuel de Alba. Convocatoria del Comisario Regio Don Manuel
Joaquín de Alba, SD, 19 November 1861, qtd. in Lugo Lovatón. “La junta
económica anexionista de 1861,” 111.
79. Ramón Blanco to Brig. Peláez (and to Cap. Gen. of Cuba), SD, April 1861,
agi: Cuba 1006B, in agn-­rd: ch Leg. 21, Expte. 172, 1 May 1861, p. 19.
80. Mariano Álvarez, “Memoria: Santo Domingo o la República Dominicana,”
SD, 20 April 1860, ahn: Ultramar 2775, Expte. 16, p. 4.
81. Ramón Blanco to Brig. Peláez (and to Cap. Gen. of Cuba), SD, April 1861,
agi: Cuba 1006B, in agn-­rd: ch Leg. 21, Expte. 172, 1 May 1861, p. 20.
82. Expte. del Gobierno Político, 1 September 1861, agn-­rd: Anexión 1
(de/1378), Expte. s/n (old #46).
83. Dhormys, Une visite chez Soulouque, 90.
84. Landolfi, Evolución cultural dominicana, 93.
85. Santana to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, 15 June 1862, agi: Cuba 1018 (libro),
p. 108.
86. Anónimo to Gob. Militar de SD Antonio Peláez, s/f (passed on to Santana,
21 October 1861), agi: Cuba 945, Expte. 24 (Anónimos), doc. s/n.
87. Felipe Rivero to Gob. Militar de Samaná, Reservado, SD, 10 September 1862,
agn-­rd: ch Leg. 21 (1702432), Expte. 169, p. 36.
88. Welles, Naboth’s Vineyard, 229.
89. For discussion of ­these militia, see Reid, “Protesting Ser­vice”; Sartorius,
“My Vassals.”
90. De la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 232.
91. Antonio Peláez to Cap. Gen., 19 August 1861, agi: Cuba 953, Expte. “Deser-
tores de 1861–3.”
92. De la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 101.
93. De la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 233.
94. Serrano to Min. de Guerra, Havana, 25 July 1861, shm: Ultramar 5645, Expte.
“Asuntos operaciónes de campaña,” doc. s/n.
95. Serrano to Brigadier Don Antonio Peláez Campomanes, SD, 5 August 1861,
agi: Cuba 1006B, in agn-­rd: ch Leg. 21, Expte. 172, p. 3.
96. “Sumaria instruida contra Enrique Padilla,” Azua, 12 November 1861, agi:
Cuba 1013B, pp. 4–8.
97. Coronel Comandante de Armas Angel Féliz to Governador Político y Militar
de la provincia de Azua, 2 September 1861, agi: Cuba 1022A, in agn-­rd: ch
Leg. 21, Expte. 173, p. 6.
98. Libro Gral de Actas de las Sesiones celebradas por la Junta de Clasificacion
de los Señores Generales Gefes y Oficiales del antiguo Ejercito Dominicano,
19 September 1861, agi: Cuba 1018, libro 16, p. 1.
99. Álvarez López, Dominación colonial y guerra, 83.
100. Registro de Espedientes para la Clasificación de Generales Gefes y oficiales
del antiguo ejercito dominicano, Fall–­Spring 1861–1862, agi: Cuba 1017,
libro 15.

282 | notes to chapter 3

101. De la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 235.
102. Pedro Santana, “Relación nominal de los Generales y Gefes del Ejercito
Dominicano que al acto de la incorporación de SD a la Monarquía Española
ejercían los cargos de Gobernadores y Comandantes de armas . . . ,” SD,
20 December 1861, shm Ultramar 5645, Expte. “Asunto operaciones de cam-
paña . . . ,” doc. s/n.
103. Santana to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, 8 August 1861, agi: Cuba 2267, Expte. “Sobre
la iglesia Dominicana.”
104. Catholic instruction and rites posed potential costs and unwanted influ-
ence. Rather than pay for a Christian burial for enslaved men and w ­ omen,
sugar plantation ­owners found loopholes that permitted their own cemeter-
ies; rather than church instruction for their slaves, o­ wners managed to be
named officially responsible for local religious instruction, through legisla-
tion like the Good Government Laws of 1842.
105. Demoticus Philalethes, Yankee Travels through the Island of Cuba (New York,
1856), qtd. in Brandon, Santeria from Africa to the New World, 63.
106. Eduardo Alonso y Colmenares to Min. de Ultramar, SD, 16 February 1862,
ahn: Ultramar 3545, Expte. 1, doc. 12. Vacant: Montecristi, Bonao, los
Alcarrizos, San Lorenzo de los Mina, las Matas de Farfán. Only Puerto Plata,
Santiago, and San Cristobal had their own authorities.
107. Sáez, Documentos inéditos de Fernando A. de Meriño, 80.
108. De la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 223; Guerrero Cano, Disci-
plina y laxitud, 59–60; Martínez-­Fernández, “The Sword and the Crucifix,”
83, 85.
109. Guridi, La campana del higo.
110. Sáez, Documentos inéditos de Fernando A. de Meriño, 100.
111. Martínez-­Fernández, Torn between Empires, 215; Vicioso, El freno hatero, 282.
112. Lavastida to Cap. Gen., 20 July 1861, ahn: Ultramar 3531, Expte. 36.
113. De la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 258.
114. Keim, San Domingo, 145, 155.
115. Keim, San Domingo, 224.
116. De la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 229.
117. De la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 230.
118. Martínez-­Fernández, “The Sword and the Crucifix,” 83.
119. Meriño, “Expte. reservado para tratar de la aplicación . . . ,” 26 September
1862, anc: ap 53, Expte. 20.
120. Hidalgo, “From North Amer­i­ca to Hispaniola,” 161.
121. Meriño, “Expte. reservado para tratar de la aplicación . . . ,” 26 September
1862, anc: ap 53, Expte. 20.
122. Meriño, “Expte. reservado para tratar de la aplicación . . . ,” 26 September
1862, anc: ap 53, Expte. 20.
123. Felipe Rivero to Regente de la Real Audiencia, 6 October 1862, anc: ap 53,
Expte. 20.

notes to chapter 3 | 283

124. Leopoldo O’Donnell to Rivero, 21 December 1882, agn-­rd: Anexión 4
(de/1383), Expte. 11; Alcalde de Puerto Plata to Regente de la ra de SD,
31 March 1863, anc: ap 53, 20.
125. Colección de leyes; Martínez-­Fernández, “The Sword and the Crucifix,” 83.
126. De la Gándara, Anexión y guerra, 224.
127. E.g., ahn: Ultramar 3529, Exptes. 12–20.
128. Expte. sobre arreglo y dotación del clero, 30 April 1862, ahn: Ultramar 3545,
Expte. 1, doc. 19. A few did not want to leave their Santiago de Cuba posts
(doc. 20).
129. E.g., Juan Bautista Zafra to Gob. Superior Civil, 24 December 1861, agn-­rd:
Anexión 11 (de/1800), Expte. 15. At no time did ­these documents mention
the skin color of ­either party (though their titles suggest they ­were promi-
nent citizens).
130. Martínez-­Fernández, “The Sword and the Crucifix,” 82. He approved of
“spontaneous” marriages occurring at the behest of arriving priests in rural
areas (Estracto—­Informando sobre las cuestiones que abraza la ro de 10 de
Noviembre de 1864,” de la Gándara to Min. de Guerra, 9 January 1865, anc:
ap 225, Expte. 2, doc. s/n).
131. La Razón, no. 7, 15 June 1862, 1.
132. Colección de leyes, 134–36.
133. Teniente Gobernador de Neyba to Cura Párroco de Neyba, 28 April 1863,
agn-­rd: Anexión 27, Expte. 18, p. 2v.
134. Mariano Álvarez, “Memoria: Santo Domingo o la República Dominicana,”
SD, 20 April 1860, ahn: Ultramar 2775, Expte. 16, p. 4.
135. Serrano, Informe de la visita a SD, 245.
136. Memoria of Antonio Peláez y Campomanes to Gob. Serrano, Havana, 8 No-
vember 1860, ahn: Ultramar 3526, Expte. 2, doc. 2.
137. Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración, 84.
138. The customs rules ­were changed to Puerto Rican (from Cuban) standards,
for example (Manuel de Alba to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, 9 January 1862,
ahn: Ultramar 3528.7; approved by royal order, 12 March 1862). While
trea­sury oversight was delegated to Cuban officials, it was determined that
merchants could pay in installments, as per Puerto Rican guidelines, for
example (ahn: Ultramar 3528.6, 8). Taxes: Comisario Regio de Hacienda
to Min. de Ultramar, 19 February 1862, ahn: Ultramar 3528, Expte. 30. The
popu­lar Cuban lottery was introduced as an additional revenue mea­sure
(Superintendente Delegado de Hacienda de SD to Serrano, 16 October 1861,
ahn: Ultramar 3528, Expte. 2).
139. Cap. Gen. of Puerto Rico to Min. de Ultramar, 12 June 1861, ahn: Ultramar
1128, Expte. 30.
140. Serrano to Santana, SD, 8 August 1861, ahn: Ultramar 3527, Expte. 4,
doc. 3.
141. ahn: Ultramar online 1128:45.

284 | notes to chapter 3

142. Santana to Min. de Guerra, 28 November 1861, agi: Cuba 1018 (libro), p. 3;
“Secretaria del Gobierno,” Gaceta de Santo Domingo, no. 50, 4 January 1862, 1.
143. “De Oficio,” Gaceta de Santo Domingo, no. 51, 11 January 1862, 1.
144. Expte. 119 de la Junta Superior de Medecina, Cirujía y Farmacia, 18 February
1863–1864, agn-­rd: Anexión 29, Expte. 37; Gaceta de Santo Domingo, no. 56,
6 February 1862, 1.
145. Min. de Guerra to Joaquín Mauel del Alba, Madrid, 7 October 1861, ahn:
Ultramar 3527, Expte. 57.
146. ahn: Ultramar 3529, Exptes. 13, 14, 15, June–­October 1861. Pensions: e.g.,
ahn: Ultramar 1122, Exptes. 37–38.
147. Mariano Álvarez to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, 20 July 1861, agi: Cuba 2266,
Pieza 1, n.p.
148. Secretaria de Estado to Min. de Guera y Ultramar, 4 April 1862, ahn: Ultra-
mar 3540, Expte. 16.
149. Minuta de Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, 5 October 1861, ahn: Ultramar 3540,
Expte. 5; Minuta de Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, 29 October 1861, ahn: Ultra-
mar 3540, doc. 10; Felipe Rivero to Min. de Ultramar, 4 February 1863, ahn:
Ultramar 3540, Expte. 8; Cap. Gen. of SD to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar,
21 December 1862, ahn: Ultramar 3531, Expte. 28.
150. Gob. Superior Civil to Min. de Guerra, SD, 30 January 1862, agn-­rd: An-
exión 11 (de/1800), Expte. 34; ahn: Ultramar online 79, Expte. 23; Manuel
del J. Galván (Expte. del Gob. Sup. Civil), SD, 19 August 1862, agn-­rd: An-
exión 11 (de/1800), Expte. 37; Noel Henriques to Min. de Ultramar, 29 Sep-
tember 1861, ahn: Ultramar 3540, Expte. 4.
151. Manuel de Jésus Galván to Gob. Superior Civil, 14 December 1861, agn-­rd:
Anexión 1 (de/1378), Expte. 31.
152. Pedro Valverde to Gob. Superior Civil, 13 October 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión
26 (de/000152), Expte. 15. A wealthy Venezuelan immigrant initiated the
Dominican Republic’s rum industry in 1852 (Edwin Rafael Espinal Hernán-
dez, “Los apellidos del ron: Bérmudez,” Hoy [Sección Sabatina: Cápsulas
Genealógicas], 29 August 2009, [Link] ww​.­idg​.­org​.­do​/­capsulas​/a­ gosto2009​
/­agosto200929​.­htm, accessed 18 September 2009). For further discussion of
rum, see Chez Checo, El ron en la historia Dominicana.
153. E.g., Pedro Santana to Sr. Intendente Gral. de Ejercito y Hacienda, SD,
23 August 1861, ahn: Ultramar 6160, Expte. 26; Ministerio de Guerra y
Ultramar to Comisario Regio de SD, 7 October 1861, ahn: Ultramar 2785,
Expte. 16.
154. Real Decreto de 12 Octubre de 1862, Anexión 26 (de/000152), Expte. 13.
155. Expediente . . . ​del Cédula de privilegio a Don Juan A. Cohen, September–­
October 1861, agn-­rd: Anexión 1 (de/1378), Expte. 16; Expte. del Gobierno
Superior Civil, 13 May 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión 10, Expte. 41. Vari­ous govern-
ment inquests about cotton continued (e.g., Gob. de SD to Min. de Ultra-
mar, May 1862–­September 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3542, Expte. 1, docs. 1–8).

notes to chapter 3 | 285

156. Jose Rocas to Comisario Regio, 15 April 1861, agn-­rd: Anexión 24 (000150),
Expte. 13.
157. Real Orden of 27 September 1863, 22 February 1864, in agn-­rd: Anexión 26,
Expte. 23.
158. Don Francisco de Olazarra to Cáp. Gen. of SD, 11 January 1862, agn-­rd:
Anexión 11 (de/1800), Expte. 40.
159. From Felipe Rivero to Min. de la Guerra y Ultramar, SD, 19 June 1862, ahn:
Ultramar 3525, Expte. 15.
160. Don Francisco de Olazarra to Cáp. General de SD, 11 January 1862, agn-­rd:
Anexión 11 (de/1800), Expte. 40.
161. [R. Caymare] to Ministro de Ultramar, 30 January 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión 4
(de/1383), Expte. 20, doc. 1. The proposal, like many ­others of its kind, dem-
onstrated a total unwillingness to acknowledge the other state of the island,
referring instead to the “island of Santo Domingo,” “bringing prosperity to
the island,” and so forth.
162. Eusebio Soler to Gob. Superior Civil, SD, 4 July 1864, agn-­rd: Anexión 16,
Expte. 1, doc. 3.
163. Felipe Rivero to Min. de la Guerra y Ultramar, SD, 19 June 1862, ahn: Ultra-
mar 3525, Expte. 15.
164. Cuba had a “Junta de Población Blanca” since 1817, although the numbers
­were somewhat small in the 1850s and 1860s. Dirección de Armamentos del
Ministerio de Marina to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, San Ildefonso, 19 Sep-
tember 1861, ahn: Ultramar 3526, Expte. 4; Serrano to Min. de Guerra,
Havana, 7 October 1861, ahn: Ultramar 3625, Expte. 6.
165. Manuel de Cruzat to Felipe Rivero (passed on to the Queen), SD, 15 August
1862, anc: Audiencia de la Habana Leg. 245, Expte. 2.
166. Min. de Guerra y Ultramar to Santana, Madrid, 1 August 1861, ahn: Ultra-
mar 5485, Expte. 11.
167. William Cazneau and Joseph Fabens to Ministro de Ultramar, 2 January
1863, agn-­rd: Anexión 4 (de/1383), Expte. 20, doc. 2. See also ahn:
Ultramar 3531, Expte. 42, doc. 2 (a copy); Martínez-­Fernández, Torn between
Empires, 217.
168. E.g., Luís Ramírez to Min. de Guerra, Madrid, 6 July 1861, ahn: Ultramar
3527, Expte. 3.
169. From Felipe Rivero to Min. de la Guerra y Ultramar, SD, 19 June 1862, ahn:
Ultramar 3525, Expte. 15.
170. Pedro Valverde to Gob. Sup. Civil, 28 August 1863, agn-­rd: Anexión 23
(000149), Expte. 11.
171. “Bando de Policia y Gobernación,” in Colección de leyes, 150.
172. Pedro Valverde to Gob. Sup. Civil, 28 August 1863, agn-­rd: Anexión 23
(000149), Expte. 11.
173. Gob Sup. Civil to Pedro Valverde, 5 September 1863, agn-­rd: Anexión 23
(000149), Expte. 11.

286 | notes to chapter 3

174. Pedro Santana, Bando de 29 de Agosto de 1861, agi: Cuba 948, “Bandos,”
doc. s/n. The low-­level local administrators called alcaldes pedáneos ­were
responsible for supplying the information to their superiors. The edict bor-
rowed directly from such strict legislation as Puerto Rico’s 1849 “Bando de
Policía y Buen Gobierno,” which restricted travel, nighttime activities, and
other security mea­sures (Martínez-­Fernández, Torn between Empires, 66).
175. Real Audiencia to the Queen, SD, 8 January 1862, ahn: Ultramar 3532,
Expte. 10.
176. “Bando de Policia y Gobernación,” in Colección de leyes, 149; Lizardo, Cultura
Africana en Santo Domingo, 69.
177. “Bando de Policia y Gobernación,” in Colección de leyes, 161.
178. “Bando de Policia y Gobernación,” in Colección de leyes, 150.
179. Expte. “Relativo a las examenes que deben de sufrir las mugeres . . . ,”
24 June 1864, agn-­rd: Anexión 29, Expte. 2.
180. “Bando de Policia y Gobernación,” in Colección de leyes, 147.
181. Benito Cuadron to Gob. Político de SD, 22 April 1863, and José Leyba to Gob.
Político de SD, 26 June 1863, agn-­rd: Anexión 28, Expte. 6. Each was armed
with a pistol, a light, and a whistle. Authorities instructed them to listen for
insults against authority (Colección de leyes, 163–65).
182. Santana to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, 15 June 1862, agi: Cuba 1018, p. 108.
183. Eduardo Alonso y Colmenares to Cap. Gen., SD, 10 January 1862, agn-­rd:
Anexión 1 (de/1378), Expte. 12.
184. Santana to Superintendente Gral. de Ejército y Real Hacienda, 10 December
1861, ahn: Ultramar 2785, Expte. 24, Doc. 3. A soldier from the Crown Regi-
ment, serving a ten-­year sentence in Santiago de los Caballeros and without
any ­family to send food, was among the prisoners so poor that Santana
feared he would die of hunger, despite his begging for money during street
cleaning.
185. Comisaria Regia de SD Joaquin M de Alba, to Min. de la Guerra y Ultramar,
12 July 1862, ahn: Ultramar 2785, Expte. 4.
186. Santana to Min. de Guerra, 30 April 1862, ahn: Ultramar 3531, Expte. 33;
Real Orden of 19 August 1862, agi: Cuba 974A.
187. Joaquín Manuel del Alba to Min. de Guerra, 10 March 1862, ahn: Ultramar
2784, Expte. 42; “Expte promovido por el Regentde de la ra relativo a la
mala alimentación que se da a los presos de la Real Carcel de esta Capital,”
Fall 1864, agn-­rd: Anexión 27, Expte. 9.
188. Consul Hood to Cap. Gen. Felipe Rivero, 7 October 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión
4 (de/1383), Expte. 26.
189. Serrano to Min. de Guerra, 25 July 1861, agn-­rd: Colección Herrera Leg. 21,
Expte. 169, p. 20; Min. de Guerra to Cap. Gen. of SD, ahn: Ultramar 3527,
Expte. 15.
190. Expte. de Ministro de Guerra, 17 October 1861, ahn: Ultramar 3626, Expte.
11, doc. 11.

notes to chapter 3 | 287

191. Expediente formado para la plaza de Ministro de Justicia de Santo Domingo,
August 1861–26 February 1863, anc: ap 53, Expte. 15.
192. Min. de Guerra to Santana, 6 March 1862, ahn: Ultramar 3626, Expte. 11,
doc. 13.
193. Santana to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, 5 February 1862, agi: Cuba 1018,
p. 36.
194. Santana to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, 5 February 1862, agi: Cuba 1018, p. 35.
195. “Sumaria Instruida en averiguación de la fuga del confinado José Poce Cam-
boy,” October 1862, agi: Cuba 1012B; José Hungria to Cap. Gen., 5 Septem-
ber 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión 28, Expte. 9.
196. Pedro Valverde to Gob. Sup. Civil, 8 January 1863, agn-­rd: Anexión 26,
Expte. 33; Pedro Valverde to Gob. Sup. Civil. 28 January 1864, agn-­rd: Anex-
ión 29, Expte. 16.
197. Cap. Gen. of Puerto Rico to Min. de Guerra, Puerto Rico, 13 November 1863,
ahn: Ultramar 3626, Expte. 11, doc. 16.
198. The Gaceta republished Eduardo Alonso Colmenares’s opening speech at the
inauguration of the Real Audiencia de Santo Domingo, for example (Gaceta,
no. 50, 4 January 1862, 1, shm: Ultramar 5645, Expte. s/n); state imprenta:
Expte. del Gobierno Superior Civil, 9 January 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión 4
(de/1383), Expte. 22.
199. This began with Gaceta, no. 92, 12 June 1862, and continued through the end
of the year (1863 has been lost).
200. Expte. del Gob. Sup. Civil sobre La Razón, 1861–64, agn-­rd: Anexión 1
(de/1378), Expte. 8a.
201. “La Situación pasada y el presente IV,” La Razón, no. 6, 6 June 1861, 1.
202. “No Oficial,” Gaceta de Santo Domingo, no. 77, 21 April 1862, 3.
203. José Hungria to Cap. Gen., 30 July 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión 28, Expte. 4.
204. Manuel de Jésus Garcia to Gob. Sup. Civil, 14 June 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión 11
(de/1800), Expte. 2.
205. La Razón, no. 19, 22 July 1861, 2–3; “España y el siglo XIX,” La Razón, no. 13,
1 July 1861, 1.
206. José Mompou, “Presente y porvenir de Haiti,” La Razón, no. 9, 17 June 1861, 1.
207. Mompou, “Presente y porvenir de Haiti,” 1.
208. “La Situación pasada y el presente IV,” La Razón, no. 6, 6 June 1861, 1.
209. Hauch, “Attitudes of Foreign Governments,” 251. Although this statement
was reported second­hand by the British consul—­who might, perhaps, have
had reason to stir up abolitionist anx­i­eties—it was reportedly said by none
other than Manuel Cruzat, the famously racist and difficult former ambassa-
dor to Haiti who had almost brought the country to the brink of diplomatic
disaster ­there in the 1850s.
210. Regente de la audiencia, Don Eduardo Alonso y Colmenares to Min. de
Guerra y Ultramar, s/f (spring 1862), ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 13, doc. 4.

288 | notes to chapter 3

211. El Télegrafo Constitucional, no. 2, 12 April 1821; Lora Hugi, Transición, 127;
Asaka, “ ‘Our Brethren in the West Indies’ ”; Kerr-­Ritchie, Freedom’s Seekers.
212. Real Orden of 24 June 1861 (reservado), ahn: Ultramar 5485, Expte. 6.
213. Pedro Santana to Min. de Guerra, 18 February 1862, shm: Ultramar 5639,
Expte. “Esclavitud/Esclavos 1849–1862,” doc. s/n.
214. Lower-­ranking officers often brought their families, even when embarking
from as far away as Madrid. Min. de Guerra to Min. de Ultramar, 30 January
1862, agn-­rd: Anexión 8, Expte. 23.
215. Regente de la audiencia, Don Eduardo Alonso y Colmenares to Min. de
Guerra y Ultramar, s/f (spring 1862), ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 13, doc. 4.
216. Regente de la audiencia, Don Eduardo Alonso y Colmenares to Min. de
Guerra y Ultramar, s/f (spring 1862), ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 13, doc. 3.
217. Pedro Santana to Min. de Guerra, 18 February 1862, shm Ultramar 5639,
Expte. “Esclavitud/Esclavos 1849–1862,” doc. s/n.
218. The Valverdes w ­ ere a prominent ­family in Santo Domingo. Valverde had
continued in the position since the republic; he is referred to in other Span-
ish documents as a “persona de buenas circunstancias” and was on the list
of prominent men to be rewarded with gracias and cruces ­after the annexation
(Serrano to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, Havana, 1 September 1861, ahn:
Ultramar 3526, Expte. 3, doc. 2; Serrano to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, 7 Oc-
tober 1861, ahn: Ultramar 3526, Expte. 10, doc. 5).
219. Gob. Sup. Civil to Pedro Valverde, SD, 19 February 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión 11
(de/1800), Expte. 27, doc. 1.
220. Gob. Superior Civil de Puerto Rico to Cap. Gen. of SD, 27 November 1862,
agn-­rd: Anexión 27, Expte. 25.
221. Molina to Serrano, Memoria, 63–65.
222. Serrano, Informe de la visita, 245.
223. From Felipe Rivero to Min. de la Guerra y Ultramar, SD, 19 June 1862, ahn:
Ultramar 3525, Expte. 15.

4. The Haitians or the Whites?

1. News reached the Dominican capital within days (Copiador, 22 January

1861).
2. José Mompou, La Razón, no. 14, 4 July 1861, 1.
3. José de Villar to Ministerio de Ultramar, SD, 13 October 1864, ahn: Ultramar
3526 Expte. 17, doc. 10.
4. La Razón, no. 39, 25 January 1863, 1.
5. De la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 238.
6. D. Claudio Morales to the Queen, SD, 22 December 1864, ahn: Ultramar
3543, Expte. 26. ­These documents are few, but they demonstrate how some
urban Dominican families, prob­ably among the more prominent (given that
both parents ­were formally married), embraced Spanish marriage policy.

notes to chapter 4 | 289

 7. La Razón, no. 34, 21 December 1862, 3.
8. Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 176.
9. Even in the capital, the ceremony had started two hours late, and the flag
was removed for a time a­ fter flying just one day (Consul Hood to Lord J. Rus-
sell, SD, 21 March 1861, agn-­rd: Anexión de/000933, Expte. 1, p. 1).
10. Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración, 53; García, Compendio, 1:376. ­There was also
open opposition in the small town of San Pedro de Macorís.
11. Finke, “Puerto Plata en la Gesta Restauradora,” 118, 120.
12. Marte, Correspondencia, 72; Finke “Puerto Plata en la Gesta Restauradora,”
121.
13. Finke, “Puerto Plata en la Gesta Restauradora,” 123.
14. López Morillo, Memorias sobre la segunda reincorporación, 222.
15. Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 60.
16. Tejeda Ortíz, Cultura y folklore, 79; Finke, “Puerto Plata en la Gesta Restaura-
dora,” 122.
17. Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración, 197; de la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo
Domingo, 285.
18. Marte, Correspondencia, 192.
19. Vallejo, Las madres de la Patria, 58; Marte, “La oralidad sobre el pasado insu-
lar,” 61.
20. Marte, Correspondencia, 193.
21. Qtd. in Matibag, Haitian-­Dominican Counterpoint, 111.
22. Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 18, 6 April 1861, 5.
23. Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 19, 13 April 1861, 3.
24. “Brochure Dominicaine contre Santana,” Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 27, 8 June
1861, 1–2. The author was prob­ably Manuel María Gautier.
25. Santana to Min. de Guerra, SD, 5 March 1862, shm: Ultramar 5645, Expte.
“Asuntos operaciónes de campaña,” doc. s/n.
26. Qtd. in Álvarez López, Dominación colonial y guerra popu­lar, 60.
27. V.F., “Quelques mots d’une patriote sur la question de l’Est d’Haïti,” Le
Moniteur Haïtien, no. 27, 8 June 1861, 2–3.
28. Hernández Flores, Luperón, héroe y alma, 101.
29. Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 160. Cabral’s words reached the
­New York Times, possibly through the advocacy of Alejandro Ángulo
Guridi (“­Will Spain Be Able to Retain Dominica?,” New York Times, 3
June 1861, 4).
30. Written in the margin of Rubalcalva to Brig. Peláez (and to Cap. Gen. of
Cuba), SD, April 1861, agi: Cuba 1006B, in agn-­rd: ch Leg. 21, Expte. 172,
1 May 1861, p. 24; Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 212.
31. Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 191; Álvarez López, Dominación colonial y
guerra popu­lar, 67. All of the executed ­were Dominican except for an Ameri-
can, William Morris, longtime resident of the Dominican capital (Marte,
Correspondencia, 90). Santana’s parody of military justice and horrific execu-

290 | notes to chapter 4

 tion amounted to “a disgusting and indefensible tyranny,” de la Gándara
wrote (Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 205).
32. Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 198.
33. Spanish senator Ríos Rosas called the event a “barbarous catastrophe of
extermination . . . ​a deplorable start to the Spanish Government in Santo
Domingo (Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 213). “A horrible event [that]
produced a deep and terrible sensation throughout the country,” a Madrid
paper lamented (Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 223).
34. “The rebels had widespread support in the towns, settlements, and outposts
of the frontier regions; many of the inhabitants ­there joined the expedi-
tionaries,” Luis Álvarez López writes. “The majority of government troops
also supported the rebels and joined their lines” (Dominación colonial y guerra
popu­lar, 65). Consuls reported that center-­island residents called on Haiti in
early March and openly supported Geffrard (Marte, Correspondencia, 63; Jo-
quín Rubalcaba to Brig. Peláez, 1 May 1861, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 21, Expte. 172,
p. 23). Some of the Haitian soldiers may have been from Geffrard’s guard
of tirailleurs (Lespinasse, Price-­Mars, and Gutiérrez, Haïti et la restauration de
l’indépendance dominicaine, 34–35).
35. Marte, Correspondencia, 90; Álvarez López, Dominación colonial y guerra popu­lar, 57.
36. Expte. promovida por la Señora Ramona Recio,” Neyba, 15 August 1861,
agn-­rd: Anexión 1 (de/1378), Expte. 18.
37. General Eusebio Puello to [Cap. Gen.], San Juan (Las Matas), 12 June 1861,
agi: Cuba 1025A, Expte. “Declaraciones recibidas,” n.p.
38. M. Álvarez to Cap. Gen. of SD, Port-­au-­Prince, 16 April 1862, anc: ap 224,
Expte. 30, doc. s/n (see Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 208).
39. Lespinasse, Price-­Mars, and Gutiérrez, Haïti et la restauration de l’indépendance
dominicaine, 34–35.
40. Eusebio Puello to Cap. Gen. Azua, 2 January 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión
(de/1381) 2, Expte. 1.2, doc. 1. ­Others, like Altagracia Douval, Col­o­nel
Gabino Simonó (or Simoneau), and Major José Pierre, likewise bore proto-
typically Spanish given names and French or Haitian surnames. Both men
­were with Sánchez and Cabral in spring 1861, and Simoneau was executed
alongside Sánchez that July (Hernández Flores, Luperón, héroe y alma, 102;
Lugo Lovatón, “Tomás Bobadilla Briones,” 303).
41. “Nota de los individuos y familias que han salido de la parte de Haiti y se en-
cuentran en sus hogares y establecimientos” and “Relación de los individuos
procedentes de Haytí que pertenecieron a los pueblos de las Matas Cercado
y Sabana Mula y se marcharon en esta última invasión de 1861,” 11 October
1861, agn-­rd: Anexión (de/1381) 2, Expte. 1, doc. s/n.
42. Jose Hungria to Cap. Gen. Santiago, 3 May 1862, and reply Cap. Gen. to
Hungria, 23 May 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión (de/1381) 2, Expte. 1.2, docs. s/n.
He may well have been long established in the country, actually, as with the
Beliards of Puerto Plata (Puig Ortíz, Emigración de libertos, 74).

notes to chapter 4 | 291

43. Real Orden minuta, Ministro de Guerra y Ultramar to Min. de Estado, Ma-
drid, 12 July 1861, ahn: Ultramar, Expte. 8, doc. 2.
44. “Huyeron los haitianos!,” La Razón, no. 10, 20 June 1861, 1.
45. José Mompou, “A El Eco Hispano-­Americano,” La Razón, no. 11, 23 June 1861, 1.
46. José Mompou, “¡Admite disculpa la agresión haitiana!,” La Razón, no. 13,
1 July 1861, 2.
47. La Razón, no. 13, 1 July 1861, 2. This story was republished in Madrid papers.
See Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 221.
48. Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 176, 218.
49. “Huyeron los haitianos!,” La Razón, no. 10, 20 June 1861, 1.
50. Manuel de Jésus Galván, “Francia y Haiti,” La Razón, no. 14, 4 July 1861, 1.
51. Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 192–93.
52. Santana, “dominicanos,” La Razón, no. 10, 20 June 1861, 4; and La Razón,
no. 12, 27 June 1861, 1.
53. Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 213; Hernández Flores, Luperón, alma
y héroe, 101.
54. Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 215. Documents do in fact substantiate
that the Spanish military intended to attack Port-­au-­Prince’s defenses “to do
as much damage as pos­si­ble,” before potentially ­doing the same in Jacmel
and Cap-­Haïtien (de la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 212).
55. Joseph Lewis to Seward, Port-­au-­Prince, 15 July 1861, nara Reg. 84, Vol. 30,
1849–60, n.p.
56. Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 220. The consuls urged Spanish au-
thorities not to attack, arguing that fatal riots would ensue; Spanish authori-
ties agreed that it amounted to attacking a defenseless town.
57. Real Orden of 12 September 1861, ahn: Ultramar 5485, Expte. 15. That sum
may have been reduced (St. John, Hayti, 105), although evidence is contradic-
tory. The Haitian government completed payment by March of the next year
(Expte. de Secretario del Estado, Madrid, 24 March 1862, ahn: Ultramar
3527, Expte. 35.)
58. Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 212.
59. Joseph Lewis to Seward, Port-­au-­Prince, 15 July 1861, nara Reg. 84, Vol. 30,
1849–60, n.p.
60. Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 34, 27 July 1861, 2; Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 35, 3 August
1861, 2.
61. Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 47, 26 October 1861, 1.
62. Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 51, 23 November 1861, 1.
63. M. Álvarez to Cap. Gen. of SD, Port-­au-­Prince, 2 March 1862, anc: ap 224,
Expte. 30, doc. s/n; Fabré Geffrard, “Loi,” Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 11, 15 Feb-
ruary 1862, 1.
64. Marte, Correspondencia, 95.
65. Qtd. in Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 258.

292 | notes to chapter 4

66. Qtd. in Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 258.
67. Santana to Sp. Consul in Haiti, 18 April 1862, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 21, Expte.
175, p. 64.
68. Serrano to Min. de Guerra, Reservada, 6 September 1861, ahn: Ultramar
3525, Expte. 1.
69. Santana to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, 8 August 1861, agi: Cuba 2267, Expte. “Sobre
la iglesia Dominicana.”
70. Serrano to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, 6 November 1861, agi: Cuba 2267,
Expte. “Sobre la iglesia Dominicana.”
71. Regente de la audiencia, Don Eduardo Alonso y Colmenares to Min. de
Guerra y Ultramar, Reservada, 5 March 1862, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 13,
docs. 1 and 2 (26 May 1862).
72. Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración, 175.
73. Minuta de ro de Min. de Guerra y Ultramar to Gob. Santana, Madrid, 7 Oc-
tober 1861, ahn: Ultramar 5485, Expte. 20.
74. De la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 142.
75. Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 276.
76. Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 261.
77. Álvarez López, Dominación colonial y guerra popu­lar, 89.
78. From Felipe Rivero to Min. de la Guerra y Ultramar, SD, 19 June 1862, ahn:
Ultramar 3525, Expte. 15.
79. José Malo de Molina to Cap. Gen. Francisco Serrano, 4 September 1861
(15 July 1861), ahn: Ultramar 3532, Expte. 1, doc. 2, pp. 56–57.
80. Exptes. sobre Don Benito Alejandro Pérez et al., January–­May 1862, ahn:
Ultramar 3529, Expte. 20, docs. 1–8. Some of Santana’s appointments to
municipal posts ­were vetoed ­because the candidate was not qualified as a
letrado.
81. March–­August 1862, ahn: Ultramar 3529, Expte. 42–48.
82. Álvarez López, Dominación colonial y guerra popu­lar, 86 (he suggests that this
pro­cess sped up further still a­ fter 1863, to the point that it “seems to have
affected the most enthusiastic collaborators of Santana in the annexation
pro­cess”); Colección de leyes, 184.
83. Rather than name Ricart y Torres to the Tribunal de Cuentas, the accounts
­were passed on to Cuba (Manuel del Alba to Min. de Guerra, 30 August 1861,
ahn: Ultramar 3528, Expte. 6).
84. Escolano Giménez, “La organización de la provincia de Santo Domingo,”
346, 348.
85. Delayed payment frustrated many. O ­ thers asked for additional funds
to feed their families (e.g., Michez to Director General del Ramo de la
Guerra, Seybo, 16 July 1861, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 21, Expte. 174; Secretario de
la Junta Municipal de la Vega, 6 October 1862, agn: Anexión 11 [de/1800],
Expte. 24).

notes to chapter 4 | 293

 86. “Contra los paisanos Juan Isidro Rodríguez . . . ,” 1863, agn-­rd: ch
Leg. 24, Expte. 2025, pp. 15, 79.
87. Comisario Regio to Min. de Guerra, 1861–63, ahn: Ultramar 3527, Expte. 44;
3528, Expte. 15; 2785, Expte. 1; 2785, Expte. 2.
88. Real Orden de Min. de Ultramar, Madrid, 29 October 1861, ahn: Ultramar
3526, Expte. 7.
89. Expte. de Real Audiencia de SD, 30 April 1862, ahn: Ultramar 3542,
Expte. 4.
90. Joaquín María de Alba to Cap. Gen., SD, 28 November 1861, agn-­rd: Anex-
ión 2 (de/1381), Expte. 19, doc. 1.
91. Manuel del Alba to Min. de Ultramar, 2 June 1862, ahn: Ultramar 2785,
Expte. 20.
92. Manuel del Alba to Don Augusto Ulloa, 20 April 1862, ahn: Ultramar 3543,
Expte. 27.
93. Colmenares to Cap. Gen., 25 April 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión 37, Expte. 25.
94. Min. de Guerra to Santana, 16 August 1862, ahn: Ultramar 3531,
Expte. 21.
95. From Felipe Rivero to Min. de la Guerra y Ultramar, SD, 19 June 1862, ahn:
Ultramar 3525, Expte. 15; Manuel Maria Reyes to Cap. Gen., 16 September
1862, Anexión 37 (000163), Expte. 15.
96. Expediente formado para la plaza de Ministro de Justicia de Santo Domingo,
August 1861–26 February 1863, anc: ap 53, Expte. 15.
97. Colmenares to Min. de Guerra, 9 September 1862, ahn: Ultramar 3533,
Expte. 2.
98. Colmenares to the Queen, SD, 16 May 1862, ahn: Ultramar 3533, Expte. 5.
99. J. Obijo to Cap. Gen. of Santo Domingo, Azua, 20 August 1861, agi: Cuba
852, Expte. “Cuarteles,” doc. s/n.
100. Serrano to Min. de Guerra, Havana, 25 July 1861, shm: Ultramar 5645, Expte.
“Asuntos operaciónes de campaña,” doc. s/n.
101. Serrano to Min. de Guerra, 27 July 1861, ahn: Ultramar 3531, Expte.
43; Pedro Valverde to Gob. Sup. Civil, 9 May 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión 2
(de/1381), Expte. 11, doc. s/n; 11 February 1861, agn-­rd: rree 14/15/16,
Expte. 6, doc. 4.
102. Expediente de la Real Audiencia de SD, SD, 17 November 1862, anc: Audi-
encia de la Habana Leg. 245, Expte. 2; Comisario Regio to Min. de Guerra,
31 May 1862, ahn: Ultramar 3531, Expte. 44.
103. Felipe Rivero to Min. de la Guerra y Ultramar, SD, 19 June 1862, ahn: Ultra-
mar 3525, Expte. 15.
104. Febres-­Cordero Carrillo, “La anexión,” 232.
105. Junta Classificadora (Blas. De Castro) to Cap. Gen., SD, 9 December 1861,
agn-­rd: Anexión 2 (de/1381), Expte. 10.2, doc. s/n.
106. Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración, 68.
107. Álvarez López, Dominación colonial y guerra popu­lar, 90.

294 | notes to chapter 4

108. Pedro Santana to Min. de Guerra, SD, 29 April 1862, shm: Ultramar 5656,
Expte. 2. “In my opinion this is nothing other than a pretext for opportun-
ists and opponents of the current Government to disturb the peace and
achieve purely personal gains,” Santana wrote dismissively.
109. “Reasons for the current uprising” [anonymous, s/f, prob­ably late 1863–64],
ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 128.
110. Consul Hood to Lord J. Russell, SD, 21 April 1861, agn-­rd: Anexión
de/000933, Expte. 9, p. 27.
111. From Felipe Rivero to Min. de la Guerra y Ultramar, SD, 9 June 1863, ahn:
Ultramar 3540, Expte. 9; Rivero to O’Donnell, 16 December 1862, agn-­rd:
Anexión 4, Expte. 9.
112. Felipe Rivero to Superintendencia de Cuba, 18 August 1862, ahn: Ultramar
3528, Expte. 18.
113. Real Orden of 5 October 1861, Min. de la Guerra y Ultramar, ahn: Ultramar
3531, Expte. 27.
114. From Felipe Rivero to Min. de la Guerra y Ultramar, SD, 19 June 1862, ahn:
Ultramar 3525, Expte. 15.
115. U.S. commercial agent William Jaeger estimated that his 50 ­percent pay was
still $6,000 a year.
116. Manuel del Alba to don Augusto Ulloa, 20 April 1862, ahn: Ultramar 3543,
Expte. 27.
117. “Dominicanos!,” Gaceta de Santo Domingo, no. 102, 21 July 1862, 3.
118. Spending grew from 174,832 pesos in the first summer of occupation to
527,026 just two years ­later (Contaduría General de Hacienda, Cuaderno de
la recaudación e inversión general de fondos, July 1861 and July 1863, bne,
Mss 12813, n.p.). As soon as sustained fighting began, expenditures bal-
looned to nearly 4,500,000 pesos in 1864 (Martínez Fernández, Torn between
Empires, 214).
119. Álvarez López, Dominación colonial y guerra popu­lar, 92.
120. Martínez Fernández, Torn between Empires, 62.
121. ­These low-­level officials ­were instructed to maintain order, arrest any
troublemakers and remit them to alcaldes ordinarios, prevent games and
cockfighting, impede liquor sales, enforce licenses to sell animals, prevent
entry without a passport, enforce cleanliness, and so forth (Victoriano Gar-
cía Paredes to Gob. Político de Azua, SD, 11 February 1863, agi: Cuba 1025A,
Expte. “Instrucciones a los Alcaldes Pedáneos,” doc. s/n).
122. Blanco Díaz, Alejandro Ángulo Guridi, 1:11.
123. Alejandro Ángulo Guridi to Cap. Gen., Santiago, 17 July 1863, agn-­rd: ch
Tomo 15, p. 69.
124. Even Santana had his own qualms about abusive Buceta, reporting that he
was “inconsiderate and violent.” Writing to the Spanish Ministry of War, the
Dominican general minced no words: “The outrages committed by him . . . ​
[make] him a tyrant in ­every sense of the word, provoking the honorable

notes to chapter 4 | 295

 inhabitants of the Cibao, accustomed to liberal treatment, with insults
unworthy of his station. What Buceta has done in the Santiago province has
no pre­ce­dent in the history of Christian pueblos” (Pedro Santana to Min. de
Guerra, 10 October 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 10).
125. Antonio Castillo y Miguel de los Santos to Gob. Sup. Civil, Guerra, 14 Janu-
ary 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión 2 (de/1381), Expte. 9, docs. s/n.
126. E.g., Miguel de los Santos to Gob. Sup. Civil, Guerra, 15 January 1862, agn-
­rd: Anexión 2 (de/1381), Expte. 9, doc. s/n.
127. Miguel de los Santos to Gob. Sup. Civil, Guerra, 29 January 1862, agn-­rd:
Anexión 2 (de/1381), Expte. 9, doc. s/n.
128. Passports generated a tremendous amount of paperwork. See, e.g., agn-­rd:
Anexión 33, Expte. 37; Antonio Peláez to Gob. Sup. Civil, 12 October 1861,
agn-­rd: Anexión 1 (de/1378), Expte. 27.
129. Santana to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, SD, 6 February 1862, ahn: Ultramar
5485, Expte. 24; [no sig.] to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, SD, 21 October 1861, agn-­rd:
Anexión (de/1381) 2, Expte. 1, doc. s/n; Pedro Santana to Gob. Sup. Civil,
8 October 1861, agn-­rd: Anexión 2 (de/1381), Expte. 1, doc. s/n.
130. Ana Maduro to Cap. Gen., 11 Oct 1864, agn-­rd: Anexión 30, Expte. 5,
doc. s/n.
131. “Nota de los individuos y familias que han salido de la parte de Haiti y se en-
cuentran en sus hogares y establecimientos” and “Relación de los individuos
procedentes de Haytí que pertenecieron a los pueblos de las Matas Cercado
y Sabana Mula y se marcharon en esta última invasión de 1861,” 11 October
1861, agn-­rd: Anexión 2 (de/1381), Expte. 1, doc. s/n.
132. “Reasons for the current uprising” [anonymous, s/f, prob­ably late 1863–64],
ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 128.
133. “Sumaria en averiguación de ciertos hechos que denuncia el coman-
dante militar de San Cristóbal . . . ,” 15 February 1863, agi: Cuba 950B,
“Causas.”
134. Juan Crisostomo de Rojas to Cap. Gen., 3 June 1863, agn-­rd: Anexión 28,
Expte. 1, doc. 2.
135. “Estracto—­Informando sobre las cuestiones que abraza la ro de 10 de
Noviembre de 1864,” de la Gándara to Min. de Guerra, 9 January 1865, anc:
ap 225, Expte. 2, doc. s/n.
136. Antonio Subirá to Cap. Gen., SD, 20 July 1863, agn-­rd: Anexión 18, Expte.
17; Colección de leyes.
137. Apolinario de Castro to Real Audiencia de SD, 13 May 1863, agn-­rd: Anex-
ión 29, Expte. 41.
138. [Unsigned] to Cap. Gen., 13 March 1863, agn-­rd: Anexión 11 (de/1800),
Expte. 44.
139. Memoria informativa de las razones que ha tenido la Sección de Gobierno para alterar,
modificar y aun suprimir algunas de las disposiciones del anterior Bando de Policía y

296 | notes to chapter 4

 Gobernación, y para establecer una que otra nueva prescripción, SD, 13 July 1864,
ahn: Ultramar 3526, Expte. 17, doc. 3.
140. Augusto Ulloa to Cap. Gen., 2 June 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión 4, Expte. 14.
141. “Expte. reservado para tratar de la aplicación . . . ,” 8 April 1863, anc: ap 53,
Expte. 20.
142. Welles, Naboth’s Vineyard, 242.
143. Martin J. Hood to Peter Vanderhurst, SD, 5 April 1863, in “Espediente
instruido en averiguación de las circunstancias que concurren en el paysano
Pedro Richardson Vanderhorst, procedente del campo enemigo,” Samaná,
April 1864, agi: Cuba 1011A, 20.
144. Juan Zafra to Gob. Sup. Civil, September 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión 8,
Expte. 37.
145. Juan B. Zafra to Cap. Gen., 3 November 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión 17, Expte. 4.
146. Welles, Naboth’s Vineyard, 241.
147. “Estracto—­Informando sobre las cuestiones que abraza la ro de 10 de
Noviembre de 1864,” de la Gándara to Min. de Guerra, 9 January 1865, anc:
ap 225, Expte. 2, doc. s/n.
148. Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración, 80.
149. Teniente Gobernador de Neyba to Cura Párroco de Neyba, 28 April 1863,
agn-­rd: Anexión 27, Expte. 18, p. 2v.
150. José Barrosela to Teniente Gobernador de Neyba, s/f, agn-­rd: Anexión 27,
Expte. 18.
151. Juan B. Zafra to Cap. Gen., 4 July 1863, agn-­rd: Anexión 17, Expte. 16.
152. The priest in Sabaneta even convinced the local municipal government to
collect the fees for him, as he found the task too unpleasant. “Contra los
paisanos Juan Isidro Rodríguez . . . ,” 1863, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 24, Expte. 205,
p. 14. He eventually fled ([Unclear] to Cap. Gen., SD, 7 April 1863, agn-­rd:
Anexión 18, Expte. 9).
153. “Estracto—­Informando sobre las cuestiones que abraza la ro de 10 de
Noviembre de 1864,” de la Gándara to Min. de Guerra, 9 January 1865, anc:
ap 225, Expte. 2, doc. s/n; de la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 258.
154. Sáez, Documentos inéditos de Fernando A. de Meriño. 28. Meriñ­o’s name is some-
times recorded as Fernando Arturo de Meriño (for discussion, see Mella, Los
espejos de Duarte, 233).
155. Paton, No Bond but the Law, 6.
156. Abreu Cardet and Sintes Gómez, El alzamiento de Neiba, 17.
157. Expte. “Relativo a las examenes que deben de sufrir las mugeres . . . ,”
24 June 1864, agn-­rd: Anexión 29, Expte. 2.
158. Memoria informativa de las razones que ha tenido la Sección de Gobierno para alterar,
modificar y aun suprimir algunas de las disposiciones del anterior Bando de Policía y
Gobernación, y para establecer una que otra nueva prescripción, SD, 13 July 1864,
ahn: Ultramar 3526, Expte. 17, doc. 3.

notes to chapter 4 | 297

159. François, “Laundering Identities in the Amer­i­cas.”
160. Declaración de Josefa Debra, “Relación nominal de los desertores que han
tenido los Cuerpos de la guarnición de esta Plaza [SD] . . . ,” SD, 23 Feb-
ruary 1865, agi: Cuba 1015A, “Sumarias,” 35. Josepha had been raised from
an early age by one Madame Richard in Puerto Plata, perhaps a member
of one of the families who had moved from Haiti during the Unification
period.
161. Declaración de Guadaloupe Rodríguez, “Relación nominal de los desertores
que han tenido los Cuerpos de la guarnición de esta Plaza [SD] . . . ,” SD,
23 February 1865, agi: Cuba 1015A, “Sumarias,” 31.
162. De la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 200.
163. Makeshift hospital from a borrowed ­house: Ramón Blanco to Brig. Peláez and
Cap. Gen. of Cuba, SD, 1 May 1861, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 21, Expte. 172, p. 19.
164. Marte, Correspondencia, 192.
165. “Testimonio de la Sumaria en aberiguación de si en algunas reuniones . . . ​
hubo indisciplina,” Case 256, May 1863, agi: Cuba 1015A, “Sumarias.”
166. Pedro Valverde to Gob. Superior Civil, 22 March 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión 33,
Expte. 36.
167. Causa formada a 7 individuos de los Batallones de San Marcial, Vitoria y Tar-
ragona por encontrarse merodeando en los afueras de esta Ciudad, October
1863, agi: Cuba 950B, “Causas.”
168. “Copía testimoniada del Testimonio de la Causa instruida contra los Sub-
tenientes D. Pedro Obanos y Alcalde, y D. Pedro García Maquina y varios
individuos de la clan de tropa y carabineros de Hacienda pública . . . 1​ 8 de
Agosto de 1862,” Plaza de la Havana, 1867, agi: Cuba 1015A.
169. José E. Rocas to Cap. Gen., La Vega, 5 April 1863, agi: Cuba 950B, “Causas.”
170. José P. Mayo to Cap. Gen., SD, 11 June 1863, agi: Cuba 950B, “Causas.”
171. “Sumaria Instruida en aberiguacion de unos golpes inferidos al niño (Pedro)
de Doña Dolores Bernal de Valberde . . . ,” SD, May 1864, agi: Cuba 1011B.
172. “Testimonio sacado de la causa seguida Contra el Soldado de la 3º Compa-
ñía del Batallón Infantería de San Marcial José Puga Martínez . . . ,” June
1863, agi: Cuba 1012A, “Sumarias.”
173. Expte. sobre Don. Tomas Botello, Manuel del Jésus Galván, SD, 3 November
1862, agn-­rd: Anexión 11 (de/1800), Expte. 38.
174. “Contra el soldado de la Compañía de Cazadores del Batallón de San Mar-
cial José Birrete,” SD, October 1864, agi: Cuba 1011B.
175. “Testimonio Contra el Soldado de la 5ª compañía José Cabrera y López
acusado por haber pegado un tiro con un Cachorrillo del que resultó muerto
el paisano Don Manuel Meta . . . ,” SD, August 1863, agi: Cuba 1012A,
“Sumarias.”
176. “Sumaria instruida contra los paisanos del Batallón de Voluntarios de esta
Plaza Manuel Martínez y Enrique Iglesias . . . ,” November 1863, agi: Cuba
950B, “Causas.”

298 | notes to chapter 4

177. Ramón Blanco to Brig. Peláez and Cap. Gen. of Cuba, SD, 1 May 1861, agn-
­rd: ch Leg. 21, Expte. 172, pp. 6–7. Large and well-­constructed buildings
existed—­constructed “in the time of Spanish domination,” the officer
noted—­but they had gone without repair and been burned during vari­
ous sieges ­until they ­were mostly “fallen, dismantled, and converted into a
mountain of rubble” (18).
178. Marcos Adon to Antonio Alfau, 19 February 1864, agi: Cuba 952, Expte. 98,
“Correspondencia,” doc. s/n.
179. “Reasons for the current uprising” [anonymous, s/f, prob­ably late 1863–64],
ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 128.
180. It is unclear ­whether Evangelista was declassified ­because of limited literacy
or not; he did manage to sign his court papers. His signature was shaky; “M”
and “E” ­were the clearest letters, perhaps studied.
181. “Sumaria del General Don Marcos Evangelista acusado de haber proferido
palabras suversivas . . . ,” March 1863, agi: Cuba 1011A. Also in agn-­rd: ch
Leg. 21, Expte. 174.
182. “Relación Nominal de los Señores Gefes y Oficiales de las reservas pro-
vinciales en situación pasiva . . . ,” in “Proceso Contra varios individuos
de complicidad en la sublevación que tubo lugar en Puerto Plata en 27 de
Agosto ultimo,” 1863, ahn: Ultramar 881ª, 1ª Pieza.
183. Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración, 76.
184. De la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 238.
185. “Sumaria formada . . . ​en averiguación de la conducta de . . . ​Don Pedro
Obanos,” Case 265, agi: Cuba 1015A, “Sumarias,” 21.
186. Mariano Álvarez to Primera Secretaria de Estado (I), Port-­au-­Prince,
25 March 1862, shm: Ultramar 5645, Expte. “Asuntos operaciónes de cam-
paña,” doc. s/n.
187. Mariano Álvarez to Cap. Gen. of SD (II), Port-­au-­Prince, 8 April 1862, shm:
Ultramar 5645, Expte. “Asuntos operaciónes de campaña,” doc. s/n.
188. Mariano Álvarez to Primera Secretaria de Estado (II), Port-­au-­Prince,
25 March 1862, shm: Ultramar 5645, Expte. “Asuntos operaciónes de cam-
paña,” doc. s/n.
189. Unable to assimilate the fact of the Haitian in­de­pen­dence, he suggested
that a 1795 treaty offered Spain “the right by which the white race can assert
possession of the west side of Hispaniola” as well. “And with such pre­ce­
dent, who can dissent against the reclamation that I have just proposed?” he
demanded (Mariano Álvarez to Primera Secretaria de Estado [II], Port-­au-­
Prince, 25 March 1862, shm: Ultramar 5645, Expte. “Asuntos operaciónes de
campaña,” doc. s/n).
190. Milans del Bosch to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, Port-­au-­Prince, 24 June 1863, agi:
Cuba 984C, Expte. “Sobre la sublevación de SD en 1863,” doc. s/n.
191. M. Álvarez to Cap. Gen. of SD, Port-­au-­Prince, 16 April 1862, anc: ap 224,
Expte. 30, doc. s/n; M. Álvarez to Cap. Gen. of SD, Port-­au-­Prince, 9 May

notes to chapter 4 | 299

 1862, shm: Ultramar 5645, “Expte sobre operaciones militares en SD sobre
la frontera . . . ,” doc. s/n.
192. Geffrard, “Proclamation,” Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 9, 1 February 1862, 1.
193. Mariano Álvarez to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, 22 January 1863, agi: Cuba 984C,
Expte. “Sobre la sublevación de SD en 1863,” doc. s/n.
194. Mariano Álvarez to Cap. Gen. of SD, 24 April 1862, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 21,
Expte. 175, 26.
195. M. Álvarez to Cap. Gen. of SD, Port-­au-­Prince, 2 March 1862, anc: ap 224,
Expte. 30, doc. s/n.
196. Bonneau, Haïti.
197. Felipe Rivero to Min. de Guerra, 4 February 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3534, Expte. 9.
198. Santana to Min. de Guerra, SD, 5 March 1862, shm: Ultramar 5645, Expte.
“Asuntos operaciónes de campaña,” doc. s/n.
199. Milans del Bosch to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, Port-­au-­Prince, 19 June 1863, agi:
Cuba 984C, Expte. “Sobre la sublevación de SD en 1863,” doc. s/n.
200. Felipe Rivero to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, 14 December 1862, agi: Cuba
1018 (libro).
201. Marte, Correspondencia, 210–12.
202. Comandante de armas Angel Feliz to Gob. interino de Azua, San Juan,
28 September 1861, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 21, Expte. 173, p. 5; Bobadilla to
Comandante de Armas Angel Feliz, Barahona, 25 December 1861, agn-­rd:
ch Leg. 21, Expte. 173, p. 9. Other officials worried that a certain Ponsin
Rondon was in Las Matas, causing considerable disorder (Santiago Suero
to Gob. Militar de Azua, San Juan, 28 December 1861, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 21,
Expte. 173, p. 4).
203. Teniente Gob. de Guayabin, Santiago [unclear] to Cap. Gen. of SD, 20 Octo-
ber 1861, agn-­rd: Anexión 1 (de/1378), Expte. 6.
204. F. Sosa to Santana, 14 June 1861, agi: Cuba 984C, Expte. “promovido a con-
secuencia de la invasión . . . ​por los Haitianos.”
205. De la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 273.
206. Hernández Flores, Luperón, alma y héroe, 106.
207. M. Álvarez to Cap. Gen. of SD, Port-­au-­Prince, 16 April 1862, anc: ap 224,
Expte. 30, doc. s/n. (see Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 208).
208. “Sumaria instruida en averiguación del tráfico y comunicaciones que con los
haitianos tuvieron los paisanos Pedro Curro, Venancio Gil, Soten Sambra,
Manuel Sanjuanaro, José Ramírez, Norverto Cueva, José Sánchez y José
Ignacio,” October 1862, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 24, Expte. 202 (agi: 1013B).

5. You Promised to Die of Hunger

1. Abreu Cardet and Sintes Gómez, El alzamiento de Neiba, 46.

2. Abreu Cardet and Sintes Gómez, El alzamiento de Neiba, 28; “Sumaria Contra
Don Nicolás de Mesa, SubT de las milicias provinciales, los paysanos

300 | notes to chapter 4

 Manuel Chiquito, Cayetano Velázquez . . . ,” Neiba, February 1863, agi:
Cuba 1011B, p. 99.
3. Abreu Cardet and Sintes Gómez, Los alzamientos de Guayubín, 31. Earlier on
in February, a man in Guayubín could not contain his disdain for Spanish
soldiers in the town. When one greeted him as a “countryman” (paisano),
he replied, “Countryman of yours? . . . ​within five days you’ll see what’s
coming for you” (Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración, 86).
4. Abreu Cardet and Sintes Gómez, Los alzamientos de Guayubín, 37.
5. Abreu Cardet and Sintes Gómez, Los alzamientos de Guayubín, 8; Monción, “De
capotillo a Santiago,” 13.
6. Manuel Buceta to Felipe Ribero, Santiago, 8 August 1863, ahn: Ultramar
3525, Expte. 27, doc. 2; Felipe Ribero to Min. de Ultramar, 18 August 1863,
ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 26, doc. 2.
7. Gil, Origenes y proyecciones de la revolución restauradora, 82.
8. Hernández Flores, Luperón, 56, 68.
9. Pérez Dionisio, “Santiago de Cuba y la Guerra de la Restauración,” 113.
10. De la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 290, 344, 347.
11. “Contra los paisanos Juan Isidro Rodríguez . . . ,” 1863, agn-­rd: ch
Leg. 24, Expte. 2025, pp. 15, 79.
12. “Reasons for the current uprising” [anonymous, s/f, prob­ably late 1863–64],
ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 128.
13. Qtd. in Comisión Permanente de Efemérides Patrias, Proclamas (hereafter
cited as Proclamas), 18.
14. “Sumaria [sobre Hato Mayor] . . . ,” October 1863, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 21
(agi: Cuba 1014A), Expte. 176, 7.
15. Real Orden of 26 February 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 17.
16. White, Speaking with Vampires, 82.
17. Abreu Cardet and Sintes Gómez, El alzamiento de Neiba, 29.
18. Vallejo, Las madres de la Patria, 47; Abreu Cardet and Sintes Gómez, El alza-
miento de Neiba, 19.
19. Hahn, “ ‘Extravagant Expectations’ of Freedom,” 128.
20. Finke, “Puerto Plata en la Gesta Restauradora,” 126.
21. Finch, “Insurgency at the Crossroads,” 143. Historians have gestured to
Dominican ­women’s roles as “ignored heroes” of the fighting (Jimenes Grul-
lón, Sociologia política dominicana, 141).
22. Camp, “ ‘I Could Not Stay T ­ here,’ ” 3; Camp, Closer to Freedom, chap. 5.
23. Mallon, Peasant and Nation, 78.
24. Martínez, Diccionario, 237.
25. De la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 238.
26. Blanco Díaz, Alejandro Ángulo Guridi, 2:201.
27. “Reasons for the current uprising” [anonymous, s/f, prob­ably late winter
1863–64], ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 128.

notes to chapter 5 | 301

28. “Ya se fueron los blancos / de Yamasá, ¡ay palisa! / Ya se fueron los espa-
ñoles / con su banderita en popa.” A “cantar de la época,” anonymous, in
Rodríguez Demorizi, Poesía popu­lar dominicana, 89.
29. Hauch, “The Dominican Republic and Its Foreign Relations,” 163.
30. Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 187.
31. Santana, “dominicanos,” La Razón, no. 10, 20 June 1861, 4; La Razón, no. 12,
27 June 1861, 1.
32. Ministro de Estado (Tomas de Ligués) to Ministro de Guerra y Ultramar,
Palacio, 28 June 1861, ahn: Ultramar, Expte. 8, doc. 1.
33. Santiago Pichardo, “Al Pueblo,” Santiago, 20 June 1861, shm: Ultramar 5645,
Expte. “Asuntos operaciónes de campaña,” doc. s/n. Santana was “the indefati-
gable caudillo of our holy cause,” he concluded. He admonished, “Our cause
is just, God protects it, and if it ­were necessary, the neighboring islands of
Cuba and Puerto Rico would give us abundant reinforcements of all kinds.”
34. [No sig.] to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, SD, 21 October 1861, agn-­rd: Anexión
(de/1381) 2, Expte. 1, doc. s/n.
35. Gaceta de Santo Domingo, no. 110, 14 August 1862, 1.
36. Domingo Lasala to “Gefe de la frontera haitiana,” Neyba, 18 September
1861, agn-­rd: Anexión (de/1381) 2, Expte. 1, doc. s/n; Gob. de Azua to [un-
clear], 16 December 1861, agn-­rd: Anexión (de/1381) 2, Expte. 1, doc. s/n;
Santana to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, SD, 6 February 1862, ahn: Ultramar
5485, Expte. 24.
37. For example, Eusebio Puello to Cap. Gen., Azua, 20 February 1862, agn-­rd:
Anexión (de/1381) 2, Expte. 1.2, doc. s/n.
38. Santana to Min. de Ultramar, 19 February 1862, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 21, Expte.
175, p. 1.
39. Eduardo Alonso Colmenares to Min. de Guerra, 21 January 1862, ahn:
Ultramar 3532, Expte. 12. Other individuals—­like British sailor Jaime Barret,
suspected of a murder of another British subject—­also languished without
trial. British Consul Martin J. Hood to Cap. Gen. Felipe Ribero, SD, 7 Octo-
ber 1862, agn-­rd: Anexión 4 (de/1383), Expte. 26, doc. 1.
40. Felipe Ribero to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, 9 December 1862, agi: Cuba
1018 (libro).
41. Felipe Ribero to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, 9 December 1862, agi: Cuba
1018 (libro).
42. Felipe Ribero to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, 14 December 1862, agi: Cuba
1018 (libro).
43. “Le ­Grand Meeting,” Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 26, 1 June 1861, 1–4.
44. Jung, Coolies and Cane, 74; Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 12, 23 February 1861, 2–3;
Hauch, “Attitudes of Foreign Governments,” 267.
45. Pedro Santana to Min. de Guerra, 5 March 1862, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 21, Expte.
175, p. 11.

302 | notes to chapter 5

46. Marte, Correspondencia, 196.
47. Copiador, 14 September 1860; Felipe Ribero to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar,
14 December 1862, agi: Cuba 1018 (libro).
48. Joaquín de Rubalcalva, Comandancia Gral. de Marina, to Gob. Sup. Civil.,
15 February 1863, anc: ap 225, Expte. 1.
49. Pedro Santana to Min. de Guerra, 18 February 1862, shm: Ultramar 5639,
Expte. “Esclavitud/Esclavos 1849–1862,” doc. s/n.
50. Bando, Achilles Michel, 25 February 1863, agn-­rd: ch Tomo 19 (agi: Cuba
1004B), p. 27.
51. Bando, 28 February 1863, agi: Cuba 984C.
52. “Proceso instruido contra Don Ramón Almonte, Don Isidro Jimenez, Don
Manuel Tejada, Don Manuel de Jesus Vargas (presente), Don Juan Antonio
Alis, . . . ​y Don Domingo Curiel, Oficiales de las reservas de esta isla . . . ,”
Santiago de los Caballeros, March–­May 1863, agn-­rd: ch Tomo 11 (agi:
Cuba 1015A), 75.
53. “Contra los paisanos Juan Isidro Rodríguez . . . ,” 1863, agn-­rd: ch
Leg. 24, Expte. 205, p. 103.
54. “Proceso Instruida contra D. Álvaro Fernández, D. José Vidal Pichardo,
D. Juan de la Cruz Ureña, D. José Cepeda, D. Ambrosio de la Cruz . . . ,”
Santiago, March 1863, agi: Cuba 1014A.
55. Ribero to Min. de Guerra, 26 April 1863, agi: Cuba 1018.
56. Ribero to Min. de Guerra, 16 March 1863, agi: Cuba 1018.
57. Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 132.
58. Declaración de D. Rafael Leandro García in “Proceso Contra varios individ-
uos de complicidad en la sublevación que tubo lugar en Puerto Plata en 27 de
Agosto ultimo,” 1863, ahn: Ultramar 881ª, 1ª Pieza, 87.
59. Real Audiencia de SD to Min. de Ultramar (copia), Madrid, 20 October 1863,
ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 30.
60. Ribero to Min. de Guerra, 19 March 1863, agi: Cuba 1018.
61. Abreu Cardet and Sintes Gómez, Los alzamientos de Guayubín, 42.
62. Achilles Michel to Cap. Gen., Santiago, 2 March 1863, agn-­rd: ch Tomo 19
(agi: Cuba 1004B), p. 7.
63. Don Diego Crespo was a day laborer, for example, but he had been educated
at some point and was able to sign his testimony clearly (“Causa formada
en aberiguación de los hechos que han tenido lugar en la insurrección de
Guayubín . . . ​el día 22 de Febrero,” March 1863, agi: Cuba 1011A, Expte.
s/n, p. 107).
64. As was the case for Pablo Rodríguez in “Proceso instruido contra el paisano
José de la Cruz . . . ,” November 1863, agi: Cuba 1011A.
65. “Causa formada en aberiguación de los hechos que han tenido lugar en la
insurrección de Guayubín . . . ​el día 22 de Febrero,” March 1863, agi: Cuba
1011A, Expte. s/n, 7v, 11.

notes to chapter 5 | 303

66. “Sumaria instruido contra el paisano Manuel de Arias . . . ,” SD, July 1864,
agi: Cuba, 1012A, “Sumarias,” 32v.
67. “Sumaria contra el paisano D. Miguel Valverde, acusado de haber salido de
esta plaza para unirse a los insurrectos, SD, 9 September 1864, agi: Cuba
1011A (emphasis added). During his exile in Puerto Rico, interrogators of
the rebellious priest Fernando Antonio Meriño ­were “visibly upset” at his in-
terrogation for similar reasons, and they insisted that neither his speech nor
his countenance was Dominican. “Even though [they] did not verbalize it, it
is pos­si­ble they thought that a white, well-­dressed man who spoke Span-
ish well could not be Dominican,” one author concludes (Sáez, Documentos
inéditos de Fernando A. de Meriño, 28).
68. Granted in May, it reached the Cibao in late June. It extended to ­those who
had been involved not only in the events of the spring but also in prior
republican-­era discord if the applicant swore loyalty to Her Highness within
six months’ time (Real Orden of 27 May 1863, anc: ap 53, Expte. 25, doc. 1).
Governor Rivero urged the public—­excluding any ringleaders and members
of the Provincial Reserves—­not to worry they would be judged as rebels,
and he promised amnesty for ­those returning to their homes within fifteen
days (Felipe Ribero, “Dominicanos,” SD, 29 May 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3525,
Expte. 91).
69. Felipe Ribero, “Dominicanos,” SD, 29 May 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3525,
Expte. 91.
70. Martin Hood to Cap. Gen., 22 May 1863, agn-­rd: Anexión 19, Expte. 8, doc.
2; Marte, Correspondencia, 247.
71. Ribero to Min. de Guerra, 17 March 1863, agi: Cuba 1018.
72. Administrador de Rentas al Gob. Gral, 3 March 1863, ahn: Ultramar 6159,
Expte. 41.
73. Ribero to Min. de Ultramar, 20 April 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 24.
74. Felipe Ribero to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, 20 April 1863, agi: Cuba 1018
(libro).
75. Ribero to Min. de Ultramar, 20 April 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 24.
76. Felipe Ribero to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, 20 April 1863, agi: Cuba 1018
(libro).
77. Min. de Estado to Felipe Ribero, 12 June 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3525,
Expte. 25.
78. Achilles Michel to Cap. Gen., 1 March 1863, agn-­rd: ch Tomo 19, 1004B,
p. 22.
79. De la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 291.
80. Ribero to Min. de Guerra, 20 May 1863, agi: Cuba 1018; Felipe Ribero to
Min. de Estado, 10 June 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 25.
81. Felipe Ribero to Min. de Estado, 10 June 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3525,
Expte. 25.
82. Buceta to Cap. Gen., 12 July 1863, agi: Cuba 963, Expte. 198, doc. s/n.

304 | notes to chapter 5

 83. Monción, “De capotillo a Santiago,” 14, 26.
84. Ribero to Min. de Guerra, 2 June 1863, agi: Cuba 1018.
85. Segundo Días Herrera to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, 25 August 1863, anc: ap 53,
Expte. 28, doc. s/n.
86. Mariano Álvarez, s/f [June 1863], ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 95, Copia 2.
87. Manuel Buceta to Felipe Ribero, Santiago, 8 August 1863, ahn: Ultramar
3525, Expte. 27, doc. 2; Felipe Ribero to Min. de Ultramar, 18 August 1863,
ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 26, doc. 2.
88. Pedro Ezequiel Guerrero to Manuel Buceta, Monte Cristi, 8 August 1863,
ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 27, doc. 3.
89. Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 155.
90. “Proceso Contra varios individuos de complicidad en la sublevación que
tubo lugar en Puerto Plata en 27 de Agosto ultimo,” 1863, ahn: Ultramar
881ª, 1ª Pieza, 9. The atmosphere was so alarming by late July that when
the Havana port commander arrived by steamship with more than six hun-
dred men, he boarded another ship to travel to Santo Domingo immediately,
in order to inform the governor of the extremity of the situation (Segundo
Días Herrera to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, 25 August 1863, anc: ap 53, Expte. 28,
doc. s/n).
91. Finke, “Puerto Plata en la Gesta Restauradora,” 134.
92. “Proceso Contra varios individuos de complicidad en la sublevación que
tubo lugar en Puerto Plata en 27 de Agosto ultimo,” 1863, ahn: Ultramar
881ª, 1ª Pieza, 4.
93. Martínez, Diccionario, 237.
94. Declaración de D. Rafael Leandro García in “Proceso Contra varios individ-
uos de complicidad en la sublevación que tubo lugar en Puerto Plata en 27 de
Agosto ultimo,” 1863, ahn: Ultramar 881ª, 1ª Pieza, 89.
95. Paton, No Bond but the Law, 43.
96. José Porrua Valdivia, Circular, Puerto Plata, 31 August 1863, anc: ap 54,
Expte. 3, doc. s/n.
97. Declaración de D. Rafael Leandro García in “Proceso Contra varios individ-
uos de complicidad en la sublevación que tubo lugar en Puerto Plata en 27 de
Agosto ultimo,” 1863, ahn: Ultramar 881ª, 1ª Pieza, 89.
98. José Porrua Valdivia to Regente de Real Audiencia, Puerto Plata, 2 Septem-
ber 1863, anc: ap 54, Expte. 3, doc. s/n.
99. Finke, “Puerto Plata en la Gesta Restauradora,” 135–36. It was the second
major fire in four months. More than forty buildings, including the custom­
house, burned to the ground in July.
100. Finke, “Puerto Plata en la Gesta Restauradora,” 139.
101. Declaración de D. Rafael Leandro García in “Proceso Contra varios individ-
uos de complicidad en la sublevación que tubo lugar en Puerto Plata en 27 de
Agosto ultimo,” 1863, ahn: Ultramar 881ª, 1ª Pieza, 126.
102. [Sin firma] to Cap. Gen., 23 August 1863, agn-­rd: ch Tomo 15, p. 79.

notes to chapter 5 | 305

103. Abreu Cardet and Sintes Gómez, El alzamiento de Neiba, 25.
104. Min. de Ultramar to Gob. Superior Civil, 11 January 1864, agn-­rd: Anexión
25, Expte. 7, doc. 3.
105. Román de la Torre to Min. de Ultramar, 8 October 1863, ahn: Ultramar
3533, Expte. 1, doc. 7.
106. Finke, “Puerto Plata en la Gesta Restauradora,” 127.
107. Cáp. Gen. José de Villar to Min. de Ultramar, SD, 1 September 1864, ahn:
Ultramar 3533, Expte. 1, doc. 24.
108. [Sin firma] to Alejandro Guridi, Santiago, 4 August 1863, agn-­rd: ch Tomo
15, p. 49.
109. “Causa formada en aberiguación de los hechos que han tenido lugar en la
insurrección de Guayubín . . . ​el día 22 de Febrero,” March 1863, agi: Cuba
1011A, Expte. s/n.
110. “Causa formada en aberiguación de los hechos que han tenido lugar en la
insurrección de Guayubín . . . ​el día 22 de Febrero,” March 1863, agi: Cuba
1011A, Expte. s/n, 6.
111. “Sumaria [sobre Hato Mayor] . . . ,” October 1863, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 21
(agi: Cuba 1014A), Expte. 176, pp. 8, 89.
112. “Sumaria [sobre Hato Mayor] . . . ,” October 1863, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 21
(agi: Cuba 1014A), Expte. 176, p. 8. The rebels raised the very same flag that
had been lowered on the day of annexation. The flag had been on display in
the church, intertwined with the Spanish one for a time, and l­ ater stored by
reserve officers. Evidently the rebels had located and confiscated it to raise it
again, and tried to find the Spanish one in order to burn it, but it was saved
by the wife of a reservist.
113. [Sin firma], Santiago, 31 August 1863, agn-­rd: ch Tomo 15, p. 145.
114. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 152.
115. Testimonio de Francisco Mosqueton, 7 February 1864, agn-­rd: ch Tomo
15, p. 186.
116. Translated by Kak Lam Yip and Lan Jo Wu, who translate “Wu kwai officer”
as “black officer.” Ah Yeung and Ah Sung to Ah Kun, Wong Yi, and Ah Bong,
September or October 1864, anc: ap 226, Expte. 9, doc. s/n.
117. “Causa Contra el penado asiático Macsimo Segundo por el delito de fu-
garse . . . ,” Puerto Plata, February 1864, agi: Cuba 1012A, “Sumarias.”
118. “Sumaria instruida contra el asiático penado ‘Roberto,’ ” 4 May 1864, agi:
Cuba 950B, “Causas.”
119. Bando, 2 March 1863, agi: Cuba 984C; Rivero to Min. de Guerra,
8 March 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 21.
120. “Proceso Formado contra el SubT de las rp de esta Isla Don Hilarion Puello,
con motivo del desorden originado por el, en el pueblo del Cotuy,” Santiago,
April 1863, agi: Cuba 1011B, Expte. s/n.
121. Mariano Cappa to Cap. Gen., SD, 25 August 1863, agi: Cuba 950B,
“Causas.”

306 | notes to chapter 5

122. Hauch, “The Dominican Republic and Its Foreign Relations,” 161.
123. Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 59.
124. Hauch, “The Dominican Republic and Its Foreign Relations,” 162.
125. “Chismes,” La Razón, no. 72, 19 September 1863, 4.
126. Ubiñas Renville, Historias y leyendas afro-­dominicanas, 91. Los Naranjos was a
settlement of maroon families who moved ­there from the Neiba settlement,
at the end of the 1700s (Lora Hugi, “El sonido de la libertad,” 111; Yingling,
“Maroons of Santo Domingo,” 25).
127. Martínez, Diccionario, 311.
128. Carlos de Vargas to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, Reservado, SD, 23 December
1863, shm: Ultramar 5655, Expte. 2º Periodo Ministerio del General Ler-
sundi, doc. s/n.
129. W. Jaeger to W. H. Seward, 10 January 1864, agn-­rd: “Correspondencia del
Agente Comercial de los eeuu No. 43-52,” 4.
130. “Sumaria Instruida contra el paisano moreno Manuel Guerrero y Guerrero
acusado de sedicioso,” SD, August 1864, agi: Cuba 1014A.
131. “Sumaria en averiguación de los motivos que hubo para prender al moreno
paisano Francisco de los Dolores . . . ,” SD, September 1863, agi: Cuba
1012A, “Sumarias,” 1v.
132. Declaración de D. Rafael Leandro García in “Proceso Contra varios individ-
uos de complicidad en la sublevación que tubo lugar en Puerto Plata en 27 de
Agosto ultimo,” 1863, ahn: Ultramar 881ª, 1ª Pieza, 89.
133. Sumaria de Nicolas Guzman, March 1864, agi: Cuba 1011A.
134. Carlos de Vargas, “Dominicanos!,” 23 October 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3525,
Expte. 33, doc. 2.
135. Carlos de Vargas to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, Reservado, SD, 23 December
1863, shm: Ultramar 5655, Expte. 2º Periodo Ministerio del General Ler-
sundi, doc. s/n.
136. Carlos de Vargas to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, Reservado, SD, 23 December
1863, shm: Ultramar 5655, Expte. 2º Periodo Ministerio del General Lersundi,
doc. s/n.
137. Juan Suero to Cap. Gen. of SD, Puerto Plata, 24 December 1863, agn-­rd: ch
Tomo 15, p. 240.
138. Archambault, Historia de la Restauración, 77. Governor Rivero planned to
dismiss Buceta to Havana; both his military tactics and his be­hav­ior as
governor of Santiago had been “dubious,” the governor told Madrid officials,
hinting strongly at abuses to authority (Min. de Guerra to Cap. Gen. of SD,
Madrid, 26 November 1863, agi: Cuba 923B, doc . s/n de Expte. “Buceta de
Villar, D. Manuel”). Although the order was annulled before Buceta ever
received it, the sanctioned officer was absolutely indignant at the prospect of
censure, calling the resolution “exceptionally offensive” (Manuel Buceta to
Cap. Gen., 2 October 1863, agi: Cuba 923B, Expte. “Buceta de Villar,
D. Manuel,” doc. s/n).

notes to chapter 5 | 307

139. [Sin firma] to Alejandro Guridi, Santiago, 4 August 1863, agn-­rd: ch Tomo
15, p. 49; José Porrua to Regente de ra, 6 October 1863, anc: ap 54, Expte.
3, doc. s/n.
140. José Porrua Valdivia, Puerto Plata, 30 August 1863, anc: ap 54, Expte. 3,
doc. s/n.
141. Martínez, Diccionario, 237.
142. A few witnesses in early revolts reported hearing cries of “Viva Báez, Viva la
República, Muera España.” Álvarez López, Dominación colonial y guerra popu­lar,
55–56. Felipe Ribero to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, 9 December 1862, agi:
Cuba 1018; Ministro de Estado (Tomas de Ligués) to Ministro de Guerra y
Ultramar, Palacio, 28 June 1861, ahn: Ultramar, Expte. 8, doc. 1. Governor
Serrano of Cuba had arrived in Santo Domingo determined to declare total
amnesty, but he faithfully passed on Santana’s “semiofficial” letter seeking
to ban the Báez ­family, General José María Cabral, and a handful of ­others,
even as he continued to suggest total clemency (Serrano to Min. de Guerra,
Reservada, 6 September 1861, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 1). Santana seems
to have remained fairly vigilant about not letting in individual po­liti­cal oppo-
nents; he denied their entry on a case-­by-­case basis (Santana to Sp. Consul
in Haiti, 18 April 1862, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 21, Expte. 175, p. 64). Santana’s suc-
cessor confirmed the ban on former po­liti­cal opponents, ordering Spanish
authorities in Saint Thomas not to issue passports to General Ramón Mella
or any other prominent po­liti­cal refugee (Felipe Ribero to Min. de Guerra,
2 October 1862, ahn: Ultramar 3535, Expte. 2).
143. “Báez gained power, not through the sympathies of the ­people whom he
tyrannized and dilapidated, but rather through intrigue and treachery;
Santana has always occupied the Presidency based on [legitimate means].”
Báez is corrupt, “immoral, cynical and destructive,” argued Galván, the response
pamphlet’s author. Báez was wealthy and profited from discord, while Pedro
Santana was the worthy po­liti­cal hero—­akin to Cincinnati, Napoleon, and
George Washington—­who lived in poverty, he continued (Galván, “El Gen-
eral don Pedro Santana,” 3, 12).
144. Bando, 16 March 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 22, doc. 3.
145. Galván, “El General don Pedro Santana,” 25.
146. Conclusion Fiscal, “Causa formada en aberiguación de los hechos . . . d ​e
Guayubín . . . ​el día 22 de Febrero,” March 1863, agi: Cuba 1011A, Expte.
s/n, p. 224.
147. Editorial, La Razón, no. 70, 3 September 1863, 1 (emphasis in original).
148. Felipe Ribero, “Dominicanos!,” SD, 24 August 1863, anc: ap 54, Expte. 2.
149. Manuel Urbano Sánchez to Cap. Gen., La Vega, 3 September 1863, anc: ap
54, Expte. 3, doc. s/n.
150. Pedro Santana, “soldados!,” Monte Plata, 17 September 1863, agi: Cuba
947B, Expte. 332.

308 | notes to chapter 5

151. Pedro Santana, “soldados!,” Monte Plata, 17 September 1863, agi: Cuba
947B, Expte. 332.
152. Bando, 16 March 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 22, doc 3.
153. “Rasgos de generosidad,”La Razón, no. 73, 26 September 1863, 4.
154. “La Insurrección,” La Razón, no. 72, 19 September 1863, 4.
155. Carlos de Vargas, Bando, 19 March 1864, agi: Cuba 948C.
156. “Padrón que se forma de todas las cabezas de familia . . . ,” 26 October
1863, agn-­rd: ch Tomo 15, p. 181.
157. Antonio Alfau to Marcos Adon, 16 February 1864, agi: Cuba 952, Expte. 98,
“Correspondencia,” doc. s/n.
158. Felipe Ribero, Bando, 30 September 1863, agi: Cuba 984C, “Bandos.”
159. Carlos de Vargas, “Habitantes de SD,” 23 January 1864, agi: Cuba 948,
“Bandos.”
160. Felipe Ribero, “Dominicanos!,” SD, 24 August 1863, anc: ap 54, Expte. 2.
161. Bando, 16 March 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 22, doc. 3.
162. “Habitantes de SD,” 25 January 1864, agi: Cuba 948, “Bandos.”
163. “Proceso Contra varios individuos de complicidad en la sublevación que
tubo lugar en Puerto Plata en 27 de Agosto ultimo,” 1863, ahn: Ultramar
881ª, 1ª Pieza, 2.
164. Nicolas Pérez to Cap. Gen., 27 November 1863, agi: Cuba 1001B, “Exptes. en
suspenso,” doc. s/n.
165. Ayuntamiento del Comun de Azua to Cap. Gen., 3 September 1863, anc: ap
54, Expte. 2, doc. s/n.
166. Carlos de Vargas, “Habitantes,” 20 November 1863, agi: Cuba 948,
“Bandos.”
167. José Roca to Cap. Gen., La Vega, 20 August 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte.
27, doc. 7; José Roca to Cap. Gen., La Vega, 19 August 1863, anc: ap 54,
Expte. 2.
168. Proclama del Ayuntamiento de la Vega, 27 August 1863, agi: Cuba 947B,
Expte. 332.
169. Testimonio de Francisco Mosqueton, 7 February 1864, agn-­rd: ch Tomo
15, 186.
170. “Afectuosa y sentida composición poética que dedica al es Don Carlos de
Vargas . . .” and “Contestación a la sentida composición . . . ,” in Rodríguez
Demorizi, Santana y los poetas, 317–20.
171. Wm. G. N. Jaeger to William Seward, 25 November 1863, agn-­rd: Libro US
Agente Comercial.
172. Carlos de Vargas to Min. de Ultramar, Reservado, 24 October 1863, ahn:
Ultramar 3525, Expte. 149, doc. 1.
173. Carlos de Vargas, “soldados!,” 23 October 1863, agi: Cuba 947B, Expte. 332.
174. Alejandro Ricart to Cap. Gen., 26 January 1864, agn-­rd: Anexión 29, Expte.
15, doc. 6.

notes to chapter 5 | 309

175. De la Gándara to Cap. Gen., Azua, 15 December 1863, agi: Cuba 950B,
Expte. 77, “Causas,” doc. s/n.
176. W. Jaeger to W. H. Seward, 10 January 1864, agn-­rd: “Correspondencia del
Agente Comercial de los eeuu No. 43-52,” 4.
177. [Unclear] to Cap. Gen., 5 July 1865, agn-­rd: Anexión 32, Expte. 5 (2006).
178. “Reglamenta interina para el régimen de las oficinas administrativas de la
Provincia de la parte Española de SD,” José de Villar, 22 October 1864, ahn:
Ultramar 6160, Expte. 17, doc. 2; Carlos Borrajo to Sr. Admor. de Rentas de
Azua, 3 February 1863, ahn: Ultramar 6160, Expte. 17, doc. 4.
179. Declaracion de Teniente Coronel de las Reservas D. Luís Bernal, in “De la
sumaria instruida en averiguación de la conducta observada por el Coronel
de Infantería D. Bruno Ganoso y Quesada,” SD, March 1864, agi: Cuba,
1012A, “Sumarias,” 27.
180. Declaración de Luís Bernal; Declaración de Federico Quisch, in “De la
sumaria instruida en averiguación de la conducta observada por el Coronel
de Infantería D. Bruno Ganoso y Quesada,” SD, March 1864, agi: Cuba,
1012A, “Sumarias,” 27v, 28v. Samaná’s authorities moved several times
subsequently, first to a healthier spot on the peninsula and ­later integrating
their judiciary with Seibo entirely.
181. Matos Rodríguez, “Street Vendors, Pedlars, Shop-­Owners and Domestics,”
187–88.
182. “Sumaria Instruida contra el paisano moreno Manuel Guerrero y Guerrero
acusado de sedicioso,” SD, August 1864, agi: Cuba 1014A.
183. Hauch, “The Dominican Republic and Its Foreign Relations,” 163.
184. “Proceso instruido contra Don Ramón Almonte, [et al.] . . . ,” Santiago de
los Caballeros, March–­May 1863, agn-­rd: ch Tomo 11 (agi: Cuba 1015A),
12; murder of Juana: “Proceso contra varios individuos acusados de com-
plicidad en la sublevación que tubo lugar en Puerto Plata,” September 1863,
agn-­rd: ch Leg. 24 (agi: Cuba 1014A), Expte. 211.
185. From Lucas Peña, General en Gefe de las Fronteras, to General de División,
Don Antonio Batista, “Causa formada en aberiguación de los hechos que
han tenido lugar en la insurrección de Guayubín . . . ,” March 1863, agi:
Cuba 1011A, Expte. s/n, 38.
186. “Proceso instruido contra el paisano José de la Cruz acusado de seducción al
enemigo, a los soldados del país,” November 1863, agi: Cuba 1011A.
187. “Proceso instruido contra Lorenzo Munoz como complicado en la a­ ctual
rebolucion por conductor de correspondencia enemiga,” SD, September
1863–­January 1865, agi: Cuba 1012B.
188. Expte. de Tribunal Supremo de Justicia, 19 September 1863, ahn: Ultramar
3525, Expte. 31, doc. 2.
189. “Sumaria [sobre Hato Mayor] . . . ,” October 1863, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 21
(agi: Cuba 1014A), Expte. 176, 40–42 (but 41 missing).

310 | notes to chapter 5

190. General José María Cabral, “dominicanos!,” Las Caobas, 6 April 1861, agi:
Cuba 984C, Expte. “promovido a consecuencia de la invasión de la frontera
de SD por los Haitianos,” doc. s/n.
191. Proclamas, 62.
192. Ramón Mella, “Dominicanos,” 16 January 1864, agi: Cuba 973B, Expte.
“306: Parlamentos,” doc. s/n.
193. Ramon Mella and Marcos E. Adon to Gral. Antonio Alfau, s/f (February
1864), agi: Cuba 952, Expte. 98, “Correspondencia,” doc. s/n.
194. “Sumaria [sobre Hato Mayor] . . . ,” October 1863, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 21
(agi: Cuba 1014A), Expte. 176, 62.
195. Carlos de Vargas to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, Reservado, SD, 23 December
1863, shm: Ultramar 5655, Expte. 2º Periodo Ministerio del General Ler-
sundi, doc. s/n.
196. W. Jaeger to W. H. Seward, 10 January 1864, agn-­rd: “Correspondencia del
Agente Comercial de los eeuu No. 43-52,” 4.
197. Expte. de Tribunal Supremo de Justicia, 19 September 1863, ahn: Ultramar
3525, Expte. 31, doc. 2.
198. Jose Porrúa to Regente de ra de SD, 21 November 1863, anc: ap 54, 3,
doc. s/n.
199. Declaración de D. Rafael Leandro García in “Proceso Contra varios individ-
uos de complicidad en la sublevación que tubo lugar en Puerto Plata en 27 de
Agosto ultimo,” 1863, ahn: Ultramar 881ª, 1ª Pieza, 87.
200. [Sin firma] to Jose Roca, 27 August 1863, agn-­rd: ch Tomo 15, p. 151.
201. Bando, San Cristobal, 14 October 1863, agi: Cuba 1003B, Expte. “Documen-
tos cojidos al enemigo y referentes a sus movimientos,” doc. s/n.
202. Alcalde Pedáneo Pedro Quintin of Santiago, and D. Juan Lafit, ap of Puerto
Plata, ­were actually suspected of being princi­pal insurgents in the fall of
1863, for example.
203. Bando, San Cristobal, 14 October 1863, agi: Cuba 1003B, Expte. “Documen-
tos cojidos al enemigo y referentes a sus movimientos,” doc. s/n. Just four
days ­later, the town fell back to the Spanish.
204. E.g., “Sumaria Instruida contra el paisano Alpolinar Megia acusado de sos-
pechoso . . . ,” Bayaguana, 7 October 1863, agi: Cuba 1014A.
205. Don Rafael Garrido, Apolinario Megias et al. to Min. de Ultramar, 27 April
1864, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 136.
206. “Sumaria Instruida contra el paisano moreno Manuel Guerrero y Guerrero
acusado de sedicioso,” SD, August 1864, agi: Cuba 1014A.
207. “Proceso contra varios individuos acusados de complicidad en la sub-
levación que tubo lugar en Puerto Plata,” September 1863, agn-­rd: ch
Leg. 24 (agi: Cuba 1014A), Expte. 211.
208. Officially, foreign merchants blamed the Spanish for the October 1863 fires
in Puerto Plata. Their immediate reclamations—­for more than 100,000

notes to chapter 5 | 311

 pesos—­continued well ­after Spanish evacuation (1896!). They may simply
have been trying to fin­ger a wealthier culprit; Dominican historians suggest
that General Gaspar Polanco explic­itly ordered arson to reproduce San-
tiago’s calamitous disruption (Finke, “Puerto Plata en la Gesta Restaura-
dora,” 135). Spanish officers admitted the fires followed the wake of Spanish
troops and asserted that they had attempted to extinguish them. The
wooden constructions ­were simply too quickly reduced to ashes, however
(En averiguación de si el incendio de Puerto Plata [SD] en Octubre de 1863
fue prendido por las tropas españolas o por los dominicanos, Havana, 1896,
agi: Ultramar 881ª, Expte. s/n).
209. Jose Porrúa to Regente de la ra de SD, 6 October 1863, anc: ap 54, Expte. 3,
doc. s/n.
210. William Jaeger, 4 December 1863, agn-­rd: Libro de Correspondencia del
Agente Comercial de los eeuu.
211. Abreu Cardet and Sintes Gómez, Los alzamientos de Guayubín, 35.
212. Proclamas, 19.
213. “Some of ­those pardoned have returned to this City. ­Others have left Porto
Rico (where they ­were imprisoned) and gone to St. Thomas and Curaçao,
refusing to return while the Spaniards have possession of this island. The
majority of ­those who returned are closing their business and intend to
leave, if the Spaniards remain,” the U.S. commercial agent wrote (Wm. G. N.
Jaeger to William Seward, 25 November 1863, agn-­rd: Libro US Agente
Comercial).
214. Cáp. Gen. José de Villar to Min. de Ultramar, SD, 1 September 1864, ahn:
Ultramar 3533, Expte. 1, doc. 24.
215. Carlos de Vargas to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, Reservado, SD, 23 December
1863, shm: Ultramar 5655, Expte. 2º Periodo Ministerio del General Ler-
sundi, doc. s/n.
216. Otero y Pimentel, Reflejos de la vida militar, 232.
217. E.g. of a robbery case (Puerto Plata): José de la Gándara to Cap. Gen.,
Puerto Plata, 30 September 1863, agi: Cuba 950B, “Causas.” E.g. of a small
group of soldiers written up for delinquency (Samaná): Felipe Ribero to
Comisario Regio de la Real Audiencia, 15 January 1863, agn-­rd: Anex-
ión 18, Expte. 25. E.g. of a soldier judged guilty of robbery and assault
within his own barracks (for which he was sentenced to one month in
jail): “Instruido contra el Cabo 2º de la 2ª Compañía del Batallón Caza-
dores de Bailen No 1º Rafael Quintana . . . ,” SD, 1863, agi: Cuba 1012A,
“Sumarias.” One soldier, a laborer from the Canary Islands, even shouted
“Nueva España!”—an oblique parallel, perhaps, to conquistador efforts in
sixteenth-­century Mexico and the campaign in which he found himself—he
faced trial for it but was mostly exonerated for drunkenness (“Instruida
contra el paisano [español] José Linares y Fernández acusado de haber
dado voces de Nueva España,” 10 May 1865, agi: Cuba 1014A, Expte. s/n).

312 | notes to chapter 5

 A sample month of the early fighting, November 1863: twenty-­one Span-
ish soldiers w
­ ere arrested (one for murder of a Dominican man, two for
suspected murder, seven for desertion, two for insubordination, three
unknown, one for drunkenness, three for robbery, two for riñas with pai-
sanos). That same month, fourteen “paisanos” (Dominican troops) w ­ ere
arrested, two as prisoners of war; one for carry­ing ­enemy communication;
two for sospechoso, seven for deserting Santana’s ranks, one for an argument
with his superior (“Relación de los presos y arrestados . . . ,” SD, 4 Novem-
ber 1863, agi: Cuba 950B, “Causas”).
218. Causas contra dos soldados del Batallón de Isabel 2ª, Francisco Miñarro y
Francisco Mesa, por el asesinato del paisano D. Lorenzo Barrera, December
1863, agi: Cuba 950B, “Causas.”
219. “Sumaria En averiguación de los motibos que ocasionó la muerte del Car-
retero Benito Barreto . . . ,” SD, June 1864, agi: Cuba 1011B.
220. “Sumaria En averiguación de la fuga del soldado del Batallón Cazadores de
Bailen José Cabrera de los Calabozos del Hospital Militar . . . ,” SD, October
1864, agi: Cuba 1011B.
221. Libro 3, “Gral. de SD / Estado Mayor / Registro Gral. de Causas, da principio
desde 1º de Nov 1864 Libro 3º,” agi: Cuba 1017.
222. E.g., Carlos Gutíerrez to Cap. Gen., Puerto Plata, 7 April 1864; Eusebio
Puello to Cap. Gen., Azua, 31 October 1864; Domingo Dulce to Cap. Gen.,
29 March 1865, agi: Cuba 950B.
223. “De la causa instruida en averiguación del autor o autores del robo de una
maleta en Guasa . . . ,” November 1864, agi: Cuba 1015A, “Sumarias.”
224. Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración, 156, 164.
225. “Sumaria instruida contra el soldado de las Reservas Juan del Rosario,”
March 1864, agi: Cuba 953b, Expte. 125, “Desertores de 1864–65, Desertores
en Reservas Provinciales,” doc. s/n.
226. When Spanish general José Maria Pérez sent out a soldier in search of a
reservist who had deserted to gather plantains, for example, angry towns-
people came to the soldier’s defense. Five men—­laborers and farmers
all—­were arrested for their alleged threats to the general and held on trial as
prisoners of war (“Proceso instruido contra los paisanos Miguel Rodríguez,
Tomas Hidalgo, Juan Culinario y Santiago de la Concepción aprehendidos
con las armas en la mano y Julio Marti acusado de insubordinación y seduc-
ción, para atentar a la vida del General de las reservas D. José Maria Pérez,”
January 1864, agi: Cuba 1011A).
227. “Sumaria instruida en averiguación de la deserción al enemigo de soldado
de las reservas Pedro Alcántara (a) Elías,” SD, 1864, agi: Cuba 1011A.
228. Proceso instruido contra Saturnino Castillo, acusado de deserción y com-
plicado en la revolución, SD, January 1864, agi: Cuba, 1011A. He could not
possibly have presented himself to authorities sooner ­because the rebels had
stolen his clothing, he reported.

notes to chapter 5 | 313

229. “Proceso instruido al Cáp. Don José Agustín Henríquez por habandono que
hizo de la guardia de Pajarito,” SD, October 1864, agi: Cuba, 1012A, “Suma-
rias,” 55.
230. Estanislao Dusablon to Cap. Gen. of SD, San Carlos, 14 July 1864, agi: Cuba
995B, Expte. s/n. Sometimes ­mothers interceded for their sons to petition
for release from military ser­vice, as Candelaria Brunel did, to call them back
to support their numerous ­family (Candelaria Brunel to Cap. Gen., San
Carlos, 5 August 1864, agi: Cuba 995B, Expte. s/n).
231. Carlos de Vargas to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, Reservado, SD, 23 December
1863, shm: Ultramar 5655, Expte. 2º Periodo Ministerio del General Ler-
sundi, doc. s/n.
232. “Sumaria Instruida con motivo de la aprehension el espia de los enemigos
Daniel Rosario, el dia 14 del mes de Junio de 1864 en el Arroyo del Carre-
ton . . . ,” June 1864, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 24 (agi: Cuba 1039B), Expte. 214.
233. Gov. Eyre to Cap. Gen. of SD, 18 May 1864, ahn: Ultramar 3525, 124; Gov.
Eyre to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, 18 May 1864, anc: ap 225:4.
234. Jose de Villar to Gob. Superior Civil, 10 December 1864, agn-­rd: Anexión
27, Expte. 15; Gov. Eyre to Cap. Gen. of SD, 18 May 1864, ahn: Ultramar
3525, 124; Gov. Eyre to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, 18 May 1864, anc: ap 225:4.
235. Martin J. Hood to Peter Vanderhurst, SD, 5 April 1863, in Espediente in-
struido en averiguación de las circunstancias que concurren en el paysano
Pedro Richardson Vanderhorst, procedente del campo enemigo, Samaná,
April 1864, agi: Cuba 1011A, 20.
236. Manuel Buceta to Felipe Ribero, Santiago, 8 August 1863, ahn: Ultramar
3525, Expte. 27, doc. 2; Felipe Ribero to Min. de Ultramar, 18 August 1863,
ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 26, doc. 2.
237. Segundo Diaz to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, Reservado, 28 September 1863, anc: ap
53, Expte. 28, doc. s/n. For more discussion of U.S. aid, see Espinal Hernán-
dez, “Geopolítica y armamentos en la Guerra Restauradora.”
238. Felipe Ribero, Bando, 5 October 1863, anc: ap 53, Expte. 28, doc. s/n.
239. Carlos de Vargas, Bando, 27 January 1864, agi: Cuba 948C, “Bandos.”
240. Ribero to Min. de Guerra, SD, 22 August 1863, agn-­rd: ch Tomo 15,
p. 82.
241. Spanish officials extensively pursued one priest from Los Mina, D. José
Páez, suspected of having fled with the rebels, for example. Leaving Los
Mina, they looked for him “at a place called Mandingo,” but no one t­ here
admitted to knowing his whereabouts. They interviewed Maria de los Reyes
Rosario, an older ­woman who washed his clothes, but she also refused to
give information to the authorities. Although Paéz was never caught, Span-
ish authorities embargoed all his worldly goods in absentia (“Sumaria In-
struida en averiguación del paradero del Párroco del pueblo de San Lorenzo
de las Minas D. José Páez,” SD, April 1864, agi: Cuba 1011A).

314 | notes to chapter 5

242. “Proceso instruido contra los paisanos Pedro Hernández y Buenaventura
Ureña acusados de haber tratado de atravesar la guardia abanzada sobre el
Camino de Santa Cruz,” August 1864, agi: Cuba 1011A.
243. “Causa inferida a un niño en San Carlos por uno de los disparos hechos
por los centinelas . . . ,” San Carlos, 31 March 1864, agi: Cuba 950B,
“Causas.”
244. “Sumaria en haberiguacion de los motivos que ocasionó la desaparición
del soldado de la 2ª Compañía del 2º Batallón de Vitoria Sebastián Moreno
Beltran . . . ,” 20 March 1865, agi: Cuba 1012B.
245. Frustratingly, the exact source of this poem is not given, although it was
evidently written from a pro-­Spanish perspective from Puerto Rico. Qtd. in
Rodríguez Demorizi, Santana y los poetas, 325.
246. “Sumario En averiguación de los motivos que tuvo el sumariado Pablo Ham-
burgo . . . ,” SD, June 1864, agi: Cuba 1011B.
247. “Sumaria Instruida contra el voluntario del Batallón de Baní Nicolás S.
Guzmán acusado de delitos . . . ​y por falta de respecto al Comandante de as
reservas D. José Joaquín Sánchez,” SD, March 1864, agi: Cuba 1011A.
248. Qtd. in Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración, 10.
249. Pablo Santana to Cap. Gen., SD, 17 December 1863, agi: Cuba 953B, Expte.
112, “Deportados,” doc. s/n.
250. W. Jaeger to W. H. Seward, 18 December 1863, agn-­rd: “Correspondencia
del Agente Comercial de los eeuu No. 43-52,” 49.
251. “Sumaria Instruida contra el Cabo 2º de las reservas de Baní, José Maria Ger-
man . . . ,” SD, July 1864, agi: Cuba, 1012A, “Sumarias.”
252. “Sumaria Instruida contra el faccioso Ramón Díaz,” Azua, June 1864, agi:
Cuba 1011A. He received a reduced judgment of two months in prison from a
Spanish judge who, perhaps charitably, agreed he was not a rebel.
253. Alerta a los dominicanos, Boletín Oficial, no. 9, 14 June 1864, in Rodríguez
Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 129.
254. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 43.

6. The Lava Spread Everywhere

1. Marte, Correspondencia, 254; Hauch, “The Dominican Republic and Its Foreign
Relations,” 169.
2. Hauch, “The Dominican Republic and Its Foreign Relations,” 163.
3. Rodriguez Objío (spring 1864) qtd. in Vicioso, El freno hatero, 335.
4. Gil, Origenes y proyecciones de la revolución restauradora, 80. In a passage of Pedro
Francisco Bonó’s unfinished novel En el cantón de Bermejo (1863), a wealthy
Cibaeño offers ­cattle to the rural rebels; he is thanked “in the name of the
nation” (Vicioso, El freno hatero, 322).
5. “Proceso Instruido contra el Ayuntamiento,” Santiago, February 1863, agi:
Cuba 1011A, Expte. s/n.

notes to chapter 6 | 315

 6. Carlos de Vargas to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, Reservado, SD, 23 December
1863, shm: Ultramar 5655, Expte. 2º Periodo Ministerio del General Ler-
sundi, doc. s/n.
7. Qtd. in Vicioso, El freno hatero, 277.
8. Sanders, Vanguard of the Atlantic World, 6.
9. Ramón Mella, “Dominicanos!,” 16 January 1864, agi: Cuba 973B, Expte. 306,
“Parlamentos,” doc. s/n.
10. On Madrid journalists’ coverage of the conflict as it escalated, see Castro
Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora.
11. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 100. One other missive makes a tepid,
vague mention of “mixed races” in Santo Domingo, but the allusion is also
understood to be about the island’s deep colonial past, ostensibly indig-
enous (Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 228).
12. Rodríguez Demorizi, Papeles de Pedro F. Bonó, 120.
13. Cassá, Personajes dominicanos, 1:357.
14. Cassá, Personajes dominicanos, 1:354.
15. Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 408.
16. E.g., Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 8, 29 January 1859, 2.
17. Min. de Ultramar to Secretario de Estado, Palacio, 22 February 1864, ahn:
Ultramar 3525, Expte. 114; Abreu Cardet and Álvarez-­López, Guerras de liber-
ación, 127.
18. “Examen de la Anexión. Posición de Haití,” Boletín Oficial, no. 2, 20 January
1864, qtd. in Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 86.
19. “A los dominicanos y al mundo entero,” in Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y
doctrina, 93.
20. Lespinasse, Price-­Mars, and Gutiérrez, Haïti et la restauration de l’indépendance
dominicaine, 117.
21. Deive, Diccionario de dominicanismos, 46.
22. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 375.
23. Hernández Flores, Luperón, héroe y alma, 72.
24. Carrying the pamphlet was a forty-­three-­year-­old French merchant named
Victor George, resident in Baní. The proclamation from President Geffrard
was evidently from the very first weeks of annexation. George claimed, prob­
ably apocryphally, that he had merely copied it for someone who “­couldn’t
write well in French,” and that he had ignored its content (“Sumario
Instruido contra el paisano D. Víctor George acusado de habersele ocupado
en su poder una proclama subversiva,” November 1864, agi: Cuba 1011A,
Expte. s/n).
25. Gran Traición de Santana, qtd. in Galván, “El General don Pedro San-
tana,” 24.
26. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 331.
27. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 6; Espinal Estévez and Jiménez, Santiago
de los Caballeros, 101.

316 | notes to chapter 6

28. Proceso Instruido contra el Ayuntamiento . . . ​sobre los acontecimientos
que tubieron lugar . . . ​en la noche del 21 de febrero último, Santiago, Feb-
ruary 1863, agi: Cuba 1011A, Expte. s/n, 197.
29. Extrato de la causa contra Federico Scheffenberg in “Proceso instruido
contra varios individuos acusados de formar parte del Gobierno rebolucio-
nario,” October 1863, agi: Cuba 881ª, 2ª Pieza.
30. Qtd. in Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 70.
31. Ramón Mella, “Dominicanos,” 16 January 1864, agi: Cuba 973B, Expte. 306,
“Parlamentos,” doc. s/n.
32. General José María Cabral, “dominicanos!,” Las Caobas, 6 April 1861, agi:
Cuba 984C, Expte. “promovido a consecuencia de la invasión de la frontera
de SD por los Haitianos,” doc. s/n.
33. Hernández Flores, Luperón, héroe y alma, 64.
34. Rodríguez Demorizi, Santana y los poetas, 340.
35. “Epitafio de Santana: Aquí yace un gran pollino / despótico cual nin-
guno / que no entendió su destino / y murió como un cochino, / no habiendo
hecho bien alguno,” in Rodríguez Demorizi, Santana y los poetas, 341.
36. Cabral, “dominicanos!,” Las Caobas, 6 April 1861, agi: Cuba 984C, Expte.
“promovido a consecuencia de la invasión de la frontera de SD por los Hai-
tianos,” doc. s/n.
37. Qtd. in Comisión Permanente de Efemérides Patrias, Proclamas (hereafter
cited as Proclamas), 62.
38. Luperón qtd. in Proclamas, 89.
39. Opposition pamphlet qtd. in Galván, “El General don Pedro Santana,” 18.
40. Ramón Mella, “Dominicanos!,” 16 January 1864, agi: Cuba 973B, Expte. 306,
“Parlamentos,” doc. s/n.
41. Proclamas, 68; Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 184.
42. Proclamas, 87.
43. Luperón qtd. in Proclamas, 88.
44. “Epistle, in response to the letter written by Priest Juan de Jesús Ayala y Gar-
cía,” remitted by Coronel Gob. Militar Interino to Cáp. Gen., SD, 25 Novem-
ber 1864, agi: Cuba 965A, Expte. 213, “Impresos,” doc. s/n.
45. Proclamas, 55.
46. Alocución, José de la Gándara, 1 April 1864, anc: ap 54, Expte. 11.
47. Real Orden of 11 April 1864, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 47.
48. Ulises Espaillat to Primo de Rivera, 15 February 1864, agi: Cuba 973B, Expte.
306, “Parlamentos,” doc. s/n. Opponents sought international audience
from the outset. The firebrand 1861 pamphlet “Santana’s ­Great Treason”
circulated first in Eu­rope; it was intercepted in the customs of the capital
city (Galván, “El General don Pedro Santana,” 3).
49. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 84.
50. “To my homeland annexed to Spain,” qtd. in Vicioso, El freno hatero, 219.
51. Boletín Oficial, 1864, qtd. in Vicioso, El freno hatero, 220.

notes to chapter 6 | 317

52. Rodríguez Objío, Poesías coleccionadas, 55, 74.
53. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 246.
54. Letter to the queen, 1863, qtd. in Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 40.
55. “Situación de Haití. La libertad de Cuba,” Boletín Oficial, no. 3, 24 January
1864, in Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 87.
56. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 88.
57. Proclamas, 59 (emphasis added).
58. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 98.
59. “A los Dominicanos y al Mundo entero” (Comisión encargada del Despacho
de rree), 28 January 1864, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 120, doc. 3.
60. Proclamas, 59.
61. Rodríguez Objío, “Guerra,” 255.
62. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 88.
63. Ramón Mella, “Dominicanos,” 16 January 1864, agi: Cuba 973B, Expte. 306,
“Parlamentos,” doc. s/n.
64. Carta de Santo Domingo, Boletín Oficial, no. 11, 2 July 1864, in Rodríguez
Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 146.
65. 20 January 1861, qtd. in Vicioso, El freno hatero, 251. See the ­whole text in
Luperón, Notas autobiográficas, 1:55–57.
66. Felipe Ribero, “Dominicanos!,” SD, 24 August 1863, anc: ap 54, Expte. 2.
67. Qtd. in Galván, “El General don Pedro Santana,” 18 (emphasis in original).
68. Galván, “El General don Pedro Santana,” 19.
69. “We ­don’t understand such a line of argument,” the response pamphlet an-
nounced (Gran Traición de Santana, qtd. in Galván, “El General don Pedro
Santana,” 17).
70. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 223.
71. “Contra La Razón,” Boletín Oficial, no. 10, 18 June 1864, qtd. in Rodríguez
Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 133.
72. Boletín Oficial, no. 1, 10 January 1864, in Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 77.
73. Gil, Origenes y proyecciones de la revolución restauradora, 78.
74. Pedro Antonio Casimiro to Gral. Antonio Salcedo, 15 October 1863, agi:
Cuba 1003B, Expte. “documentos cojidos . . . ,” doc. s/n.
75. Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración, 160.
76. “Proceso Contra varios individuos de complicidad en la sublevación que
tubo lugar en Puerto Plata en 27 de Agosto ultimo,” 1863, ahn: Ultramar
881ª, 1ª Pieza, 9.
77. Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración, 170.
78. Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración, 145.
79. Cassá, Personajes dominicanos, 1:354.
80. Daringly, he had even stolen a prized black ­horse from former emperor
Soulouque in the contested region of Hinche, for which he had become
somewhat infamous.

318 | notes to chapter 6

81. “Criminal contra el coronel de las Reservas Provinciales D. Juan
Rondón . . . ,” April 1863, agn-­rd: ch Tomo 11 (agi: Cuba 1014B).
82. Mariano Álvarez to Secretario del Estado y rree, Port-­au-­Prince,
25 March 1864, agi: Cuba 984C, Expte. “relativo a la Guerra de SD / 7
Marzo / Año de 1864,” doc. s/n.
83. De la Gándara, Anexión y guerra de Santo Domingo, 348, 373. By August 1863, de
la Gándara reports, “it was a mystery to no one that the vagrants [merodead-
ores] of the frontier ­were ­going to convert themselves from one moment to
the next into a revolutionary army” (301).
84. Philantrope Noël to Brig. Buceta, Dajabon, 15 August 1863, ahn: Ultramar
3525, Expte. 99, Anexo 6.
85. Mariano Álvarez to Secretario del Estado y rree, Port-­au-­Prince,
25 March 1864, agi: Cuba 984C, Expte. “relativo a la Guerra de SD / 7
Marzo / Año de 1864,” doc. s/n.
86. Mariano Álvarez to Secretario del Estado y rree, Port-­au-­Prince,
25 March 1864, agi: Cuba 984C, Expte. “relativo a la Guerra de SD / 7
Marzo / Año de 1864,” doc. s/n. His accomplices ­were his ­brother Cheché,
Manuel Santana, his son-­in-­law Clemente Guzmán, and Marcoté.
87. “Sumaria Instruida contra el faccioso Ramón Díaz,” Azua, June 1864, agi:
Cuba 1011A.
88. Mariano Álvarez to Cap. Gen., Port-­au-­Prince, 6 April 1864, agi: Cuba 984C,
Expte. “relativo a la Guerra de SD / 7 Marzo / Año de 1864,” doc. s/n.
89. In Azua, for example, where he had about five hundred men, he complained
that another rebel commander confiscated pillaged goods from troops.
They “should be returned to ­those who had rightfully earned it” (i.e., the
soldiers), he argued (Pedro Florentino to Gral. Comandante de Armas
de Neyba, Azua, 20 October 1863, agi: Cuba 1003B, Expte. “documentos
cojidos . . . ,” doc. s/n). He heartily disagreed with General Angel Féliz’s
delegating alcaldes pédaneos to confiscate “what­ever ­little ­thing [bobería]
they managed to grab” through looting. “It does not seem just to me to take
away from the poor wretches the tiny pillages they committed,” he in-
sisted (Pedro Florentino to Gral. Comandante de Armas de Neyba, Azua,
23 October 1863, agi: Cuba 1003B, Expte. “documentos cojidos . . . ,”
doc. s/n).
90. Pedro Florentino to Gral. Comandante de Armas de Neyba, Azua, 23 Octo-
ber 1863, agi: Cuba 1003B, Expte. “documentos cojidos . . . ,” doc. s/n.
91. Hernández Flores, Luperón, héroe y alma, 46.
92. Martínez, Gregorio Luperón, 5.
93. Torres-­Saillant, “Before the Diaspora,” 258.
94. Gil, Origenes y proyecciones de la revolución restauradora, 80.
95. Martínez, Gregorio Luperón, 12.
96. Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración, 126.

notes to chapter 6 | 319

 97. Martínez, Diccionario, 445. ­There is some dispute about w ­ hether his parents
­were Spanish, or ­whether he was born in Baracoa, Cuba, or even Monte
Cristi (Rodríguez Demorizi, Próceres de la Restauración, 306).
98. According to Luperón, they made a “noise of disgust” (Castro Ventura, La
Guerra Restauradora, 215). He wrote, “The belief that most of the ­people who
­were around Salcedo ­were españolizados and Spanish spies was proverbial in
the countryside, and the president was aware of it, but he ­didn’t worry about
it” (263).
99. Rodríguez Demorizi, Próceres de la Restauración, 307.
100. Hernández Flores, Luperón, héroe y alma, 71.
101. Álvarez López, Cinco ensayos, 82; Proclamas, 75; Cassá, Personajes dominicanos,
1:363–64.
102. “Un soldado de Capotillo, al Ejercito Libertador,” Santiago, October 1864,
qtd. in Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 180.
103. President Salcedo was definitely in negotiations with General de la Gándara,
who tried to intercede for him, prob­ably only throwing his allegiances more
into question (Cassá, Personajes dominicanos, 1:364).
104. Jimenes Grullón, Sociologia política dominicana, 130.
105. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 211.
106. Álvarez López, Cinco ensayos, 79.
107. “Democracia,” Boletín Oficial, 23, Santiago de los Caballeros, 26 February
1865, shm: Ultramar 5657, Expte. “Prisioneros 1865.”
108. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 215.
109. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 258.
110. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 231.
111. Rodríguez Objío, Gregorio Luperón e historia de la Restauración, 1:69.
112. Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 342, 347. The cartoon was published
about a month ­after Polanco’s administration fell.
113. Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 16.
114. “Epistle, in response to the letter written by Priest Juan de Jesús Ayala y
García,” Remitted by Coronel Gob. Militar Interino to Cáp. Gen., SD, 25 No-
vember 1864, agi: Cuba 965A, Expte. 213, “Impresos,” doc. s/n (emphasis in
original).
115. Cassá, Personajes dominicanos, 1:362.
116. Carlos de Vargas, Bando, 19 March 1864, agi Cuba 948C; “Sumaria Instru-
ida en averiguación del paradero del Párroco del pueblo de San Lorenzo
de las Minas D. José Páez,” SD, April 1864, agi: Cuba 1011A; Cap. Gen.
to Ministro de Ultramar, 18 August 1864, agn-­rd: Anexión 34 (de/160),
Expte. 1.
117. Memoria informativa de las razones que ha tenido la Sección de Gobierno para alterar,
modificar y aun suprimir algunas de las disposiciones del anterior Bando de Policía y
Gobernación, y para establecer una que otra nueva prescripción, SD, 13 July 1864,
ahn: Ultramar 3526, Expte. 17, doc. 3.

320 | notes to chapter 6

118. José de Villar to Ministerio de Ultramar, SD, 13 October 1864, ahn: Ultramar
3526, Expte. 17, doc. 10.
119. Decreto destituyendo a todo militar que abandone las filas de la Revolu-
ción, 6 November 1864, in Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 217.
120. W. Jaeger to W. H. Seward, 10 January 1864, agn-­rd: “Correspondencia del
Agente Comercial de los eeuu No. 43-52,” 4; Gob. Interino to Gob. Sup.
Civil, 31 October 1864, agn-­rd: Anexión 34, Expte. 5, doc. 3.
121. “Varios comerciantes” to Cap. Gen., SD, 31 December 1864, agn-­rd: Anex-
ión 32, Expte. 13 (*2006). The government had insisted that ­those defaulting
would face full fines (Cap. Gen. to José Méndez de Arcaya, 13 December
1864, ahn: Ultramar 3536, Expte. 26).
122. De la Gándara to Min. de Ultramar, 2 April 1864, ahn: Ultramar 3542,
Expte. 12.
123. S. Vicioso et al. to Gob. de Puerto Plata, 15 November 1863, agn-­rd: ch
Tomo 15, p. 175.
124. Eusebio Puello to Cap. Gen. Azua, 19 January 1863, agi: Cuba 950B,
“Causas.”
125. Lespinasse, Price-­Mars, and Gutiérrez, Haïti et la restauration de l’indépendance
dominicaine, 117.
126. Eusebio Soler to Gob. Superior Civil, SD, 4 July 1864, agn-­rd: Anexión 16,
Expte. 1, doc. 3.
127. Álvarez López, Cinco ensayos, 78.
128. Álvarez López, Cinco ensayos, 78–79; Rodríguez Objío, Gregorio Luperón e historia
de la Restauración, 1:223.
129. Gaspar Polanco to Primo de Rivera, Puerto Plata, 8 February 1864, agi: Cuba
973B, Expte. 306, “Parlamentos,” doc. s/n.
130. Cassá, Personajes dominicanos, 1:369; Álvarez López, Cinco ensayos, 77; Ro-
dríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 246; Rodríguez Objío, Gregorio Luperón e
historia de la Restauración, 1:252.
131. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 256.
132. Orden General de Pedro Santana, 15 March 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3525,
Expte. 8.
133. Secretario de Estado to Min. de Ultramar, Madrid, 2 October 1863, ahn:
Ultramar 3525, Expte. 99.
134. General Simon Sam received Lucas Peña. Peña’s letters to Sam suggest a
certain intimacy—he suggested that Sam would “be infinitely happy” at the
news of fighting, and asked for five hundred guns. However, Ouanaminthe
and Dajabón ­were quickly changing. The Spanish had ignored Dajabón ­until
the fighting of February, but they quickly moved troops back ­there. ­Under
pressure, Sam passed on news of his meeting to President Geffrard (evi-
dently not expecting decommission to result). Mariano Álvarez to Cap. Gen.
of Cuba, 7 March 1863, agi: Cuba 984C, Expte. “Sobre la sublevación de SD
en 1863,” doc. s/n. As for Peña, unfazed, he took refuge somewhere in Haiti

notes to chapter 6 | 321

 for the summer, returning for the fighting of August (Martínez, Diccionario,
375).
135. Primera Secretario de Estado to Min. de Ultramar, Reservado, 19 September
1863, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 97.
136. Federico Granados to Cap. Gen. of SD, Port-­au-­Prince, 18 July 1864, anc: ap
226, Expte. 7, doc. s/n.
137. Wm. G. N. Jaeger to William Seward, 25 November 1863, agn-­rd: Libro US
Agente Comercial.
138. Tomas de Ligués Baudaje to Min. de Ultramar, 3 November 1863, ahn:
Ultramar 3534, Expte. 26.
139. Federico Granados to Cap. Gen. of SD, Port-­au-­Prince, 18 July 1864, anc: ap
226, Expte. 7, doc. s/n.
140. Pedro Ezequiel Guerrero to Manuel Buceta, Monte Cristi, 8 August 1863,
ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 27, doc. 3.
141. Unsigned letter, marked “Comandancia en Gefe del Cuartel de Guayubín,”
in “Causa formada en aberiguación de los hechos que han tenido lugar en la
insurrección de Guayubín . . . ​el día 22 de Febrero,” March 1863, agi: Cuba
1011A, Expte. s/n, p. 35.
142. “Sumaria instruida en averiguación del tráfico y comunicaciones que
con los haitianos tuvieron los paisanos Pedro Curro, Venancio Gil, Soten
Sambra, Manuel Sanjuanaro, José Ramírez, Norverto Cueva, José Sánchez
y José Ignacio,” October 1862, agn-­rd: ch Leg. 24, Expte. 202 (agi: Cuba
1013B), 5.
143. M. Álvarez to Secretario de Estado, Port-­au-­Prince, 6 February 1864, amae:
Tratados 439; Rodríguez Demorizi, Antecedentes, 190.
144. Antonio Alfau to Marcos Adon, 16 February 1864, agi: Cuba 952, Expte. 98,
“Correspondencia,” doc. s/n.
145. Mariano Álvarez to Min. de rree, Port-­au-­Prince, 3 June 1864, ahn: Ultra-
mar 3525, Expte. 125, doc. 3.
146. Sec. de Estado to Min. de Ultramar, 4 January 1864, ahn: Ultramar 3525,
Expte. 111, doc. 2.
147. Hernández Flores, Luperón, héroe y alma, 106–7; Martínez, Diccionario, 303.
148. Manuel Buceta to Cap. Gen., 10 August 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 27,
doc. 4.
149. Ylont L. H. Blot to President Geffrard, 12 August 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3525,
Expte. 102, doc. 2.
150. Primo de Rivera to Cap. Gen., 29 December 1863, agn-­rd: ch Tomo 15,
p. 15.
151. Carlos de Vargas to Cónsul de smc en Haití, SD, 26 March 1864, ahn: Ultra-
mar 3525, Expte. 125, doc. 2.
152. Ministro Plenipotenciario de sm en Washington to Cap. Gen. of Cuba,
Reservado, 29 September 1863, anc: ap 53, Expte. 28, doc. s/n.
153. Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 229.

322 | notes to chapter 6

154. Pedro Florentino to Comandante de Armas de Neyba, Azua, s/f (1863), agi:
Cuba 1003B, Expte. “Documentos cojidos al enemigo y referentes a sus mov-
imientos,” doc. s/n.
155. Juan Suero to Cap. Gen. of SD, Puerto Plata, 24 December 1863, agn-­rd: ch
Tomo 15, p. 240.
156. Carlos de Vargas to Cónsul de smc en Haití, SD, 26 March 1864, ahn: Ultra-
mar 3525, Expte. 125, doc. 2.
157. Academia Dominicana de la Historia, Homenaje a Mella, 19. Each serón,
or woven basket to transport tobacco, carried about 100 pounds (Rich-
ard Hacker, The Ultimate Cigar Book, 4th ed. [New York: Skyhorse, 2015],
glossary).
158. Hernández Flores, Luperón, héroe y alma, 102; Castro Ventura, La Guerra Res-
tauradora, 228; Espinal Estévez and Jiménez, Santiago, 97; Juan Suero to Cap.
Gen. of SD, Puerto Plata, 24 December 1863, agn-­rd: ch Tomo 15, p. 240.
159. [Sin firma] to Mr. Adolphe Grimard, 1864, agn-­rd: rree 14/15/16
(7/008378), Expte. 2, p. 19.
160. Smith, Liberty, Fraternity, Exile, 110–11.
161. Smith, Liberty, Fraternity, Exile, 113–14.
162. Mariano Álvarez to Sec. de Estado, 8 April 1864, agi: Cuba 984C, Expte.
“relativo a la Guerra de SD / 7 Marzo / Año de 1864,” doc. s/n.
163. Mariano Álvarez to Min. de rree, Port-­au-­Prince, 3 June 1864, ahn: Ultra-
mar 3525, Expte. 125, doc. 3.
164. “Examen de la Anexión,” Boletín Oficial, no. 2, 20 January 1864, qtd. in Rodrí-
guez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 88.
165. “Una palabra a los dominicanos,” Santiago, 8 June 1864, qtd. in Rodríguez
Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 125.
166. “Proyecto de tratado con Haiti,” Santiago, (June?) 1864, qtd. in Rodríguez
Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 126–27.
167. Ulises Espaillat to Min. de rree de Haiti, Santiago, 30 January 1864, ahn:
Ultramar 3525, Expte. 120, doc. 2.
168. Ulises Espaillat to Min. de rree de Haiti, Santiago, 30 January 1864, ahn:
Ultramar 3525, Expte. 120, doc. 2.
169. Qtd. in Auguste Elie al Gobierno Provisional, July 1864, agi: Cuba 984C,
Expte. “relativo a la Guerra de SD / 7 Marzo / Año de 1864,” doc. s/n.
170. Felipe Ribero to Min. de Ultramar, 18 August 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3525,
Expte. 26, doc. 2; Pedro Ezequiel Guerrero to Manuel Buceta, Monte Cristi,
8 August 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 27, doc. 3.
171. Federico Granados to Cap. Gen. of SD, Port-­au-­Prince, 18 July 1864, anc: ap
226, Expte. 7, doc. s/n.
172. Segundo Diaz to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, Havana, 16 August 1864, agi: Cuba
984C, Expte. “relativo a la Guerra de SD / 7 Marzo / Año de 1864,” doc. s/n.
173. Fede Granados to Cap. Gen. of SD, Port-­au-­Prince, 23 June 1864, ahn: Ultra-
mar 3525, Expte. 127, doc. 2.

notes to chapter 6 | 323

174. Segundo Diaz to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, Havana, 16 August 1864, agi: Cuba
984C, Expte. “relativo a la Guerra de SD / 7 Marzo / Año de 1864,” doc. s/n.
175. Auguste Elie al Gobierno Provisional, July 1864, agi: Cuba 984C, Expte.
“relativo a la Guerra de SD / 7 Marzo / Año de 1864,” doc. s/n.
176. 1r Secretario de Estado to Min. de Ultramar, 20 March 1864, ahn: Ultramar
3525, Expte. 120, doc. 1.
177. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 197.
178. Lespinasse, Price-­Mars, and Gutiérrez, Haïti et la restauration de l’indépendance
dominicaine, 41.
179. Lespinasse, Price-­Mars, and Gutiérrez, Haïti et la restauration de l’indépendance
dominicaine, 55.
180. Lespinasse, Price-­Mars, and Gutiérrez, Haïti et la restauration de l’indépendance
dominicaine, 61.
181. Lespinasse, Price-­Mars, and Gutiérrez, Haïti et la restauration de l’indépendance
dominicaine, 70.
182. Boletín Oficial, no. 17, 26 November 1864, qtd. in Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y
doctrina, 212.
183. Lespinasse, Price-­Mars, and Gutiérrez, Haïti et la restauration de l’indépendance
dominicaine, 85–95.
184. Lespinasse, Price-­Mars, and Gutiérrez, Haïti et la restauration de l’indépendance
dominicaine, 100, 107.
185. Lespinasse, Price-­Mars, and Gutiérrez, Haïti et la restauration de l’indépendance
dominicaine, 111, 114.
186. Rodríguez Objío, Gregorio Luperón e historia de la Restauración, 1:259.
187. Hernández Flores, Luperón, héroe y alma, 82.
188. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 276.
189. Jimenes Grullón, Sociologia política dominicana, 140.
190. Rodríguez Objío, Gregorio Luperón e historia de la Restauración, 1:246, 268, 279;
Cassá, Personajes dominicanos, 1:367, 371; Álvarez López, Cinco ensayos, 91.
191. Jimenes Grullón, Sociologia política dominicana, 132; Castro Ventura, La Guerra
Restauradora, 369.
192. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 375.
193. Lespinasse, Price-­Mars, and Gutiérrez, Haïti et la restauration de l’indépendance
dominicaine, 72.
194. Cordero Michel, “Gregorio Luperón y Haiti,” 502.
195. Cassá, Personajes dominicanos, 1:373.
196. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 400.

7. Nothing Remains Anymore

1. Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 390.

2. Blanco Díaz, Alejandro Ángulo Guridi, 1:35.
3. Expte. de Min. de Ultramar, August 1864, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 143.

324 | notes to chapter 6

 4. Jesurum to “Citizen Minister of Foreign Relations, Curaçao, 9 January 1866,
agn-­rd: rree 14/15/16 (7/008378), Expte. 7.
5. Gil, Origenes y proyecciones de la revolución restauradora, 81.
6. La Razón, no. 12, 27 June 1861, 2.
7. Abreu Cardet and Álvarez-­López, Guerras de liberación, 127, 129.
8. Villar to Min. de Ultramar, 15 September 1864, ahn: Ultramar 3542, Expte. 17.
9. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 238.
10. Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 391.
11. Abreu Cardet y Álvarez-­López, Guerras de liberación, 230.
12. Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 397.
13. Min. de Ultramar to Sec. de Estado, 26 January 1864, ahn: Ultramar 3525,
Expte. 141.
14. Expte. Ministro de Ultramar, April 1864, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 119
(emphasis in original).
15. Cap. Gen. of Puerto Rico to Min. de Ultramar, September–­October 1863,
ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 51, docs. 1–5; Rafael Hernández de Alba et al.
to Cap. Gen. of SD; Gob. Civil de Dep. Oriental de Cuba to Cap. Gen. of SD,
25 and 31 May 1864, anc: ap 54, Exptes. 12 and 13; Castro Ventura, La Guerra
Restauradora, 195, 202, 383.
16. Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 402.
17. “Throw the Dominicans into the arms of the negroes, contributing pow-
erfully to the fact that very soon . . . ​the Eu­ro­pean race, the white race,
the Spanish race ­will be destroyed,” Senator Ulloa inveighed hysterically
(Yuengling, Highlights in the Debates, 9).
18. Rodríguez Objío, Gregorio Luperón e historia de la Restauración, 1:259–60.
19. Frazer, “Role of the Lima Congress,” 321.
20. Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 160.
21. Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 403.
22. Fontecha Pedraza and González Calleja, Una cuestión de honor, 62.
23. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 232.
24. M. Valverde to Máximo Grullon, 1 July 1864, agn-­rd: rree 14/15/16
(7/008378), Expte. 2.
25. Finke, “Puerto Plata en la Gesta Restauradora,” 127.
26. La Regeneración, no. 4, 17 September 1865, 2.
27. Carlos de Vargas to Min. de Ultramar, 8 March 1864, ahn: Ultramar 3525,
Expte. 46. Po­liti­cal opposition frustrated his more ambitious diplomatic ef-
forts (Rodríguez Objío, Gregorio Luperón e historia de la Restauración, 1:259–60).
28. Pensón, Reseña histórico-­crítica, 257.
29. El Federalista, Diario de la Tarde, Caracas, 21 January 1864, in Min. de Ultramar
to Secretario de Estado, Palacio, 27 February 1864, ahn: Ultramar 3525,
Expte. 116, doc. 3.
30. Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración, 139; Proclamas, 63.

notes to chapter 7 | 325

31. Finke, “Puerto Plata en la Gesta Restauradora,” 141.
32. M. Valverde to Máximo Grullon, Caracas, 23 August 1864, agn-­rd: rree
14/15/16 (7/008378), Expte. 2 (labeled Expte. 4).
33. The petition left Jamaica by late May and reached London about a month
­later. Le Moniteur Haïtien, no. 34, 27 July 1861, 2.
34. Carlos de Vargas to Min. de Ultramar, 10 December 1863, ahn: Ultramar
3525, Expte. 38. The Gazette dramatized the conflict further: “No one can
safely venture a mile beyond the City without hearing the sharp whiz of a
­rifle ball uncomfortably close to his head—to say nothing worse” (“Santo
Domingo,” Royal Standard and Gazette of the Turks and Caicos Islands, 7 November
1863, 2).
35. [Sin firma] to Regente de ra de SD, 24 December 1863, anc: ap 54, Expte.
3, doc. s/n; José de la Gándara to Cap. Gen. of Jaimaica (cc to Cap. Gen. of
Cuba), 5 June 1864, anc: ap 226, Expte. 4, doc. s/n.
36. Min. de Estado to Min. de Ultramar, Madrid, 9 August 1864, ahn: Ultramar
3525, Expte. 121.
37. El General 2º en Gefe del Ejercito y Gob. Sup. Civil to Governor Eyre, SD,
29 May 1864, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 124, doc. 3.
38. Gov. Eyre to Cap. Gen. of SD, 18 May 1864, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 124.
39. Domingo Dulce to Min. de Ultramar, 14 September 1863, ahn: Ultramar
3525, Expte. 75.
40. Domingo Dulce to Min. de Ultramar, 30 September 1863, ahn: Ultramar
3525, Expte. 77.
41. Ministro Plenipotenciario de sm en Washington to Cap. Gen. of Cuba,
19 October 1863, anc: ap 53, Expte. 28, doc. s/n (emphasis in original).
42. “Santo Domingo,” El Redactor de Santiago de Cuba, 10 June 1864, anc: ap 295,
Expte. 26. El Tiempo in Havana also claimed that the Spanish ­were winning
(Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 393).
43. Criminal de oficio contra Don Buenaventura Anglada, natu­ral de Cata-
luña . . . ​para averiguar su modo de juzgar los sucesos políticos de StoDgo,
17 November 1863, anc: ap 54, 5.
44. Pérez Dionisio, “Santiago de Cuba y la Guerra de la Restauración de Santo
Domingo,” 116.
45. Pérez Dionisio, “Santiago de Cuba y la Guerra de la Restauración de Santo
Domingo,” 114–16.
46. Eugenio López Bustamente to Cap. Gen., SD, 17 June 1862, agn-­rd: Anex-
ión 2 (de/1381), Expte. 18, doc. s/n.
47. Feliz Maria de Messina to Cap. Gen. of SD, 27 September 1863, agi: Cuba
953B, Expte. 112, “Deportados,” doc. s/n.
48. Cap. Gen. of Puerto Rico to Id. de Cuba, 5 October 1863, anc: ap 54, Expte.
2, doc. s/n.
49. Rodríguez Demorizi, Blanco, and Durán, Apuntes de Rosa Duarte, 26.

326 | notes to chapter 7

50. [No author] to Cap. Gen., 1 November 1864, agi: Cuba 953, Expte. 112,
“Deportados,” doc. s/n; Comandante Militar de Higüey [Deogracia Linares]
to Cáp. Gen., 21 November 1864, agi: Cuba 852, Expte. 97, doc. s/n.
51. “Proceso . . . ​de los individuos que tomaron parte en la Rebelión de Puerto
Plata,” September 1863, agi: Ultramar 881, 1ª Pieza.
52. Min. de Guerra to Min. de Ultramar, 21 January 1864, ahn: Ultramar 3542,
Expte. 24, doc. 26.
53. Min. de Guerra to Min. de Ultramar, 9 August 1864, ahn: Ultramar 3525,
Expte. 73; Min. de Guerra to Min. de Ultramar, 22 February 1864, ahn:
Ultramar 3536, Expte. 16.
54. J. F. Cuello and Domingo de León to Cap. Gen. of SD, Real Cárcel de Puerto
Rico, 16 March 1864, agi: Cuba 953, Expte. 112, “Deportados,” doc. s/n.
55. José Antonio Pina to Min. de Ultramar, 18 April 1864, ahn: Ultramar 3525,
Expte. 135.
56. Francisca del Castillo to the Queen, 29 March 1864, ahn: Ultramar 3525,
Expte. 134, doc. 4.
57. Domingo Dulce to Cap. Gen. of SD, 29 December 1863, agi: Cuba 953B,
Expte. 112, “Deportados,” doc. s/n.
58. Apolinario Megia to Min. de Ultramar, 12 February 1864, ahn: Ultramar
3525, Expte. 132.
59. Cap. Gen. of Cuba to Min. de Estado, 30 November 1874, agi: Cuba 2266,
Expte. 1874.
60. Ojeda Reyes and Estrade, Pasión por la libertad, 33.
61. Santana had even offered him the archbishopric in exchange for his be-
nevolent regard for annexation, but Meriño absolutely could not be moved
(Vicioso, El Freno hatero, 269).
62. Suárez Díaz, El Antillano, 50.
63. Abreu Cardet and Álvarez-­López, Guerras de liberación, 129.
64. Suárez Díaz, El Antillano, 92.
65. El General 2º en Gefe del Ejercito y Gob Sup Civil to Governor Eyre, SD,
29 May 1864, ahn: Ultramar 3525, Expte. 124, doc. 3.
66. [Sin firma] to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, s/f [1864], agi: Cuba 984C, Expte. 1864.
67. Manuel del Galván to Gob. Sup. Civil, 29 November 1864, agn-­rd: Anexión
25, Expte. 3.
68. Juan Manuel Maciás, Publicaciones de la Sociedad Demócrata de los Amigos de
América (New York, December 1864), 8, 54.
69. Domingo Dulce to Min. de Ultramar, 28 November 1863, ahn: Ultramar
3525, Expte. 81.
70. Decree, 8 August 1864, agn-­rd: rree 14/15/16 (7/008378), Expte. 2, doc 1.
71. Abreu Cardet and Álvarez-­López, Guerras de liberación, 129.
72. Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 406.
73. Abreu Cardet and Álvarez-­López, Guerras de liberación, 127, 129.

notes to chapter 7 | 327

74. Gabriel Tassara to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, 4 April 1864, agi: Cuba 984C, Expte.
“relativo a la Guerra de SD / 7 Marzo / Año de 1864,” doc. s/n.
75. Gabriel Tassara to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, 22 October 1864, agi: Cuba 984C,
Expte. “relativo a la Guerra de SD / 7 Marzo / Año de 1864,” doc. s/n.
76. William Clark, living in Santiago, for example, had an audience with Seward
himself (Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 181).
77. “Abajo los Españoles!,” 1864, in Suárez Díaz, El Antillano, 60 (emphasis in
original). The Puerto Rican governor banned circulation of an eponymous
poem praising the rebel cacique exactly ten years prior (Schmidt-­Nowara,
Conquest of History, 128).
78. Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 407.
79. “Sección de SD” to [no address], Havana, 29 July 1865, agi: Cuba 950B,
Expte. 77, doc. s/n; Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 286.
80. “Sumaria Contra el Cáp. de las Reservas Don Arquímedes,” Azua, February
1865, agi: Cuba 1013A.
81. “Sumaria instruida contra el paisano Marcos de Jesús . . . ,” SD, May 1865,
agi: Cuba 1013A, p. 4.
82. “Sumaria Instruida contra el paisano Sebastián Morcelo . . . ,” 27 April 1865,
agi: Cuba 1014A, Expte. 169.
83. “Sumaria Instruida contra el paisano José Ruiz y Doña Socorro Sán-
chez . . . ,” April 1865, agi: Cuba 1014A (also in agn-­rd: ch Tomo 11).
84. Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración, 166, 156; González Tablas qtd. in Bosch, La
Guerra de la Restauración, 158.
85. Ribero to Min. de Guerra, 2 April 1863, agi: Cuba 1018.
86. De Villar to Min. de Guerra, 4 November 1864, ahn: Ultramar 3546,
Expte. 17.
87. Cap. Gen. to Min. de Ultramar, 19 August 1863, agi: Cuba 1018 (libro), n.p.
88. González Tablas, Historia de la dominación, 121.
89. Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración, 158.
90. Sheina, Latin Amer­i­ca’s Wars, 348.
91. Carlos de Vargas to Min. de Ultramar, 16 November 1863, ahn: Ultramar
3525, Expte. 36.
92. W. Jaeger to W. H. Seward, 10 January 1864, agn-­rd: “Correspondencia del
Agente Comercial de los eeuu No. 43-52,” 4.
93. Enrique Llansó y Oriol to [Cap. Gen.], Samaná, 4 November 1864, agn-­rd:
ch Leg. 24, Expte. 212, pp. 32–33 (originally 42–43).
94. Anonymous to Cap. Gen., Hospital de la Plaza de Armas, 26 October 1863,
agi: Cuba 945, Expte. 24, “Anónimos.”
95. “Declaración del Teniente del Batallón de San Quintín Don Miguel
Muzas y Franco,” 2 May 1865, in “Sumaria formada . . . ​en averiguación de
la conducta de . . . ​Don Pedro Obanos,” no. 265, agi: Cuba 1015A, “Suma-
rias,” 12v.

328 | notes to chapter 7

 96. “Instruido contra el soldado de la 1ª Compañía de 1er Batallón del
Regimiento de la Habana Damián Soto Martínez . . . ,” December 1863, agi:
Cuba 1011B.
97. Santana to Gral. de Fort Liberté, 10 December 1861, agi: Cuba 953, Expte.
“Desertores de 1861–3”; agi: Cuba 1017, Libro 3, “Gral. de SD / Estado
Mayor / Registro Gral. de Causas, da principio desde 1º de Nov 1864 Libro 3º.”
98. Felipe Ribero to Min. de Guerra y Ultramar, 20 April 1863, agi: Cuba 1018
(libro).
99. “Abajo los Españoles!,” 1864, in Suárez Díaz, El Antillano, 60.
100. “Información: Instruida en averiguación de las causas que hayan podido dar
origen a deserciones . . . ,” December 1864, agi: Cuba 1015A, “Sumarias.”
101. Roque Quintana to Soldiers of the Fort of Puerto Plata, 14 January 1864,
agn-­rd: ch Tomo 15, pp. 198–99.
102. “Carta de un soldado español,” Boletín Oficial, no. 11, 2 July 1864, in Rodrí-
guez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 144.
103. Nicolás Estévanez, no title, in Rodríguez Demorizi, Santana y los poetas, 325.
104. “Sumaria en averiguación del escándalo habido en varias casas de esta
ciudad, de una a dos de la madrugada del día 2 de Marzo . . . ,” March 1865,
agi Cuba 1013A, Expte. s/n.
105. De la Gándara to Min. de Guerra, 8 January 1865, anc: ap 227, Expte. 6.
106. Cayetano Martín y Oñate, España y Santo Domingo: Observaciones de ­simple y
racional criterio acerca de lo que interesa a la nación española (Toledo: Imprenta de
Severiano López Fando, 1864).
107. Joaquín Muzquiz y Callejas, Una idea sobre la cuestión de Santo Domingo (Madrid:
Imprenta Dubrull, 1864), 5, 24.
108. Martínez-­Fernández, Torn between Empires, 221.
109. Bermúdez de Castro y O’Lawlor, Cuestión de Santo Domingo, 7, 14, 26, 33, 41
(emphasis in original).
110. Bermúdez de Castro y O’Lawlor, Cuestión de Santo Domingo, 33.
111. Ministers to the Queen, January 1865, ahn: Ultramar 2775, Expte. 17.
112. Ministers to the Queen, January 1865, ahn: Ultramar 2775, Expte. 17.
113. B. F. Rojas, “A los dominicanos,” 11 June 1865, in Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos
y doctrina, 394.
114. “Exposición dirigida por el Gobierno Provisorio a smc,” 3 January 1865, in
Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 255–56.
115. Monzón to Cap. Gen. of SD, 7 October 1863, ahn: Ultramar 3538, Expte. 10;
Blas Esparolini to Cap. Gen. of SD, 26 February 1864, ahn: Ultramar 3540,
Expte. 13.
116. De la Gándara to Min. de Ultramar, 27 March 1865, ahn: Ultramar 3526,
Expte. 18.
117. Antonio Corro to Min. de Ultramar, Madrid, 28 February 1865, ahn: Ultra-
mar 3533, Expte. 1, doc. 27.

notes to chapter 7 | 329

118. “Compatriotas,” Gaceta de Santo Domingo, no. 385, 27 April 1865, 1.
119. Gaceta de Santo Domingo, no. 360, 26 January 1865, 4.
120. De la Gándara to Min. de Ultramar, SD, 20 May 1865, ahn: Ultramar 3525,
Expte. 151.
121. Expte. sobre León Güilamo. Min. de Ultramar, April 1865, ahn: Ultramar
3525, Expte. 133.
122. Cap. Gen. to President Geffrard, 21 January 1865, anc: ap 227, 1; “Relación
nominal clasificada por clases y Cuerpos de los individuos de este Egercito
que siendo prisioneros de guerra en Santo Domingo han sido rescatados,”
Domingo Dulce to Min. de la Guerra, Havana, 8 January 1866, shm: Ultra-
mar 5657, Expte. “Prisioneros 1866,” doc. s/n. This partial list included 383
troops, 17 officers, and 1 commander.
123. Geffrard to Coronel Francisco Van Halen, Port-­au-­Prince, 21 January 1865,
anc: ap 227, Expte. 1, doc. s/n.
124. Royal Order of 19 January 1865, anc: ap 227, Expte. 8, doc. s/n.
125. Cap. Gen. to Gob. Superior Civil, 18 May 1865, agn-­rd: Anexión 33, Expte.
16; de la Gándara to Min. de Guerra, 8 June 1865, anc: ap 227, Expte. 6.
126. “Relación nominal de los desertores que han tenido los Cuerpos de la
guarnición de esta Plaza [SD] . . . ,” SD, 23 February 1865, agi: Cuba 1015A,
“Sumarias”; agn-­rd: Anexion 30, Expte. 27; Min. de Ultramar to Min. de
Guerra, Madrid, 6 July 1865, ahn: Ultramar 3545, Expte. 13.
127. Cap. Gen. Orden General, 23 May 1865, agi: Cuba 953, Expte. 125, “Deser-
tores de 1864–65, Desertores en Reservas Provinciales,” doc. s/n.
128. “De Oficio,” Gaceta de Santo Domingo, no. 392, 25 May 1865, 1.
129. Josefa Roman to Cap. Gen., SD, 7 February 1865, agn-­rd: Anexión 35,
Expte. 3. ­Women continued to make claims on the Spanish state, for pen-
sions of their deceased sons and husbands and for their own missing effects
(e.g., “Sumaria Instriuida en averiguación que abrasa una solicitud promov-
ida por Doña Carlota de Sosa . . . ,” January 1865, agi: Cuba 1012B; Juana
Valeria to Gob. Sup. Civil, 17 May 1865, agn-­rd: Anexión 33, Expte. 9).
130. Juan Caballero to Gob. Político de Azua, 26 September 1864, agn-­rd: Anex-
ión 30, Expte. 5, doc. s/n.
131. E.g., Angel Rodriguez to Cap. Gen., agn-­rd: Anexión 40, Expte. 18,
doc. 14.
132. “Expte sobre individuos que han sido esclavos en Puerto Rico y piden
documentos que acrediten el derecho que les asiste para ser libres al
regresar a aquella isla,” May 1865, agn-­rd: Anexión 31 (de/157), Expte. 29
(formerly 21).
133. De la Gándara to Cap. Gen. of Cuba and Puerto Rico, Reservado, 27 Febru-
ary 1865, anc: ap 227, Expte. 8. “Your Excellencies understand the prob­
lems that the presence and dispersal of [Dominicans] could bring to both
islands,” he wrote. “The men of this country, born in liberty, accustomed
to the enjoyment of po­liti­cal and civil rights . . . ​­will bring their habits and

330 | notes to chapter 7

 their haughty condition to possessions where ­there is slavery, serving as a
pernicious example to slaves and libertos of their own race ­there. The white
inhabitants of ­those islands, accustomed to look on the dominated race
with disdain, cannot grant any consideration to black and mulato Domini-
cans, no ­matter that they have rank and civil and military posts; whereas
­these men, for their part, ­will not want to submit their standing to a situa-
tion that would make them extremely violent and intolerable, the cause of
conflict . . . ​and disturbance of public order.”
134. Cap. Gen. to Brig. Comandante Gral. de la Columna de Baní, Reservado,
SD, 22 May 1865, anc: ap 227, Expte. 6, doc. s/n.
135. Dulce to Min. de Ultramar, 4 April 1865, ahn: Ultramar 3534, Expte. 34,
doc. 14.
136. “Estado que manifiesta los efectos del Estado que ecsisten en los diversos
puntos de esta Isla ocupados por las tropas con expresión de su peso,” s/f
(spring 1865), anc: ap 227, Expte. 4.
137. Ramón Paredes to Cap. Gen., 1864, agn-­rd: Anexión 33, Expte. 10.
138. Declaración de Josefa Debra, “Relación nominal de los desertores que han
tenido los Cuerpos de la guarnición de esta Plaza [SD] . . . ,” SD, 23 Febru-
ary 1865, agi: Cuba 1015A, “Sumarias,” 35v.
139. Sumaria de Cándido Sándara, 18 March 1865, agn-­rd: Anexión 35,
Expte. 14.
140. De la Gándara to Min. de Guerra, 8 June 1865, anc: ap 227, Expte. 6.
141. De la Gándara to Min. de Guerra, 8 June 1865, anc: ap 227, Expte. 6.
142. No title, in Rodríguez Demorizi, Santana y los poetas, 361.
143. “Convulsiones de los pueblos II,” La Regeneración, no. 3, 10 September
1865, 4.
144. Cap. Gen. to Min. de Ultramar, 21 July 1865, ahn: Ultramar 3546, Expte. 20.
145. William Jaeger, 4 December 1863, agn-­rd: Libro de Correspondencia del
Agente Comercial de los eeuu.
146. De la Gándara to Min. de Ultramar, 27 March 1865, ahn: Ultramar 3526,
Expte. 18.
147. For example, Pedro Florentino to Gral. Comandante de Armas de Neyba,
Azua, 22 October 1863, agi: Cuba 1003B, Expte. “documentos cojidos . . . ,”
doc. s/n.
148. Bosch, La Guerra de la Restauración, 128.
149. Tejeda Ortíz, Cultura y folklore de Samaná, 73.
150. “Santiago. Oda,” 1864, in Rodríguez Objío, Poesías coleccionadas, 35.
151. Guridi, La campana del higo, 14.
152. Guridi, La campana del higo, 15.
153. Guridi, La campana del higo, 25.
154. Guridi, La campana del higo, 72.
155. El Monitor, 5 September 1865, 4; Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 358.
156. Correspondencia, La Regeneración, no. 5, 24 September 1865, 4.

notes to chapter 7 | 331

157. La Regeneración, no. 4, 17 September 1865, 1.
158. Garrido, Los Puello, 193.
159. Rodríguez Demorizi, Papeles dominicanos de Máximo Gómez, 3.

Epilogue

1. La Regeneración, no. 3, 10 September 1865, 1–2.

2. “Hacienda Pública,” La Regeneración, no. 2, 3 September 1865, 2.
3. A.S.V. “Pena de Muerte,” La Regeneración, no. 5, 24 September 1865, 2.
4. “Las Provincias del Cibao,” La Regeneración, no. 5, 24 September 1865, 1.
5. “Logia,” La Regeneración, no. 6, 6 October 1865, 3.
6. Leonardo Díaz Jáquez, “Puerto Plata y los censos de 1871, 1875 y 1879,” in
Areíto, Sección sabatina del diario Hoy, 1 September 2007, [Link] ww​.­idg​.­org​.­do​
/­capsulas​/­septiembre2007​/s­ eptiembre20071​.­htm.
7. French Consul en SD to Cap. Gen. of Cuba, 17 July 1874, agi: Cuba 2266,
Expte. 1874.
8. See, e.g., Chaar-­Pérez, “ ‘Revolution of Love.’ ”
9. “Convulsiones de los pueblos,” La Regeneración, no. 2, 3 September 1865, 2
(emphasis added).
10. Suárez Díaz, El Antillano, 66, 102.
11. Schmidt-­Nowara, Empire and Anti-­slavery, 116; Schmidt-­Nowara, Conquest of
History, 26.
12. Schmidt-­Nowara, Empire and Anti-­slavery, 1.
13. Castro Ventura, La Guerra Restauradora, 413.
14. Memorando a los Gobiernos de Inglaterra, Francia, E.U.A. y las Repúblicas
Hispano-­Americanas (12 February 1864), qtd. in Fiallo Billini, “La construc-
ción antillanista,” n.p.
15. Cubano-­Iguina, “Freedom in the Making.”
16. Sartorius, Ever Faithful, 101.
17. Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba, 48, 59.
18. Sanders, Vanguard of the Atlantic World, 4.
19. El Monitor, no. 13, 31 October 1865, 2.
20. Moya Pons, Dominican Republic, 226.
21. El Monitor, no. 12, 24 October 1865, 1; Jesurum to Ciudadano Ministro de
Relaciones Exteriores, Curaçao, 9 January 1866, agn-­rd: rree 14/15/16
(7/008378), Expte. 7, doc. 1; Nelson, “Crisis of Liberalism,” 24.
22. Franks, “Transforming Property,” 95, 103–4.
23. “They work and conspire in elections, making themselves candidates and
withdrawing scandalously, making themselves military officers b ­ ecause
they did this or that in the ser­vice of someone, using indecorous means to
­favor someone who is not worthy, someone who was so much of a coward he
was a spy for the Cacharros. . . . ​By devil, where ­will you stop?” he continued
(“Costumbres,” La Regeneración, no. 3, 10 September 1865, 4).
24. McGraw, “From a Mulato Ca­rib­bean to a Black Pacific,” n.p.

332 | notes to chapter 7

25. Banton, “ ‘More Auspicious Shores’ ”; Banton, “Spatial Shifts and Genera-
tional Advancement,” n.p.
26. Brown, “Experiments in Indenture,” 44.
27. Hulme, Cuba’s Wild East, 266–67; Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba, 81; Smith, Liberty,
Fraternity, Exile.
28. Mariano Álvarez remained so vitriolic that even Spenser St. John found him
“severe.” Both predicted the end of in­de­pen­dence for the island in the 1880s
(St. John, Hayti, vii).
29. Martínez-­Fernández, “Caudillos,” 592.
30. La Regeneración, no. 6, 6 October 1865, 4.
31. “Costumbres,” La Regeneración, no. 3, 10 September 1865, 4.
32. Moya Pons, Dominican Republic, 228.
33. Vicioso, El freno hatero, 281.
34. Sang Ben, “Contradicciones en el liberalismo dominicano,” 248.
35. Qtd. in Ojeda Reyes and Estrade, Pasión por la libertad, 33.
36. Rodríguez Objío, Gregorio Luperón e historia de la Restauración, 2:162; Ojeda
Reyes and Estrade, Pasion por la libertad, 37, 192.
37. Cordero Michel, “Gregorio Luperón y Haiti,” 504; Welles, Naboth’s Vineyard,
402; Sang Ben, Buenaventura Báez, 104. General José María Cabral, strate-
gically allied with Luperón once again, occupied much of San Juan de la
Maguana with as many as three thousand men, many among them Haitian
citizens (Lundias and Lundahl, Peasants and Religion, 432).
38. David Leon to Lord Stanley, 8 January 1868, tna: fo 23/57, n.p.
39. Qtd. in Vicioso, El freno hatero, 326.
40. Cassá, Personajes dominicanos, 1:398; Sang Ben, Buenaventura Báez, 104; Gail-
lard, Le cacoisme bourgeois, 45.
41. Royal Standard, September 1, 1866, clipping in tna: co 301/44/269, n.p.
42. Luperón to President Moir, Puerto Plata, 6 October 1866, tna: co
301/44/269, n.p.
43. Septimus Rameau, 1 September 1869, qtd. in Rodríguez Objío, Gregorio
Luperón e historia de la Restauración, 1:371.
44. “Hacienda Pública,” La Regeneración, no. 2, 3 September 1865, 2.
45. Martínez, Diccionario, 414.
46. Cassá, Personajes dominicanos, 1:182.
47. Qtd. in Vallejo, Las madres de la patria, 127; on Salomé’s po­liti­cal engagement,
see Zeller, Discursos y espacios femeninos, and Ramírez, At the Navel of the Amer­i­cas.
48. Rodríguez Demorizi, Actos y doctrina, 401–2.
49. Gaillard, Le cacoisme bourgeois, 45; Cassá, Personajes dominicanos, 1:396, 429.
50. Candelario, Black ­behind the Ears, 51.
51. “Fronteras del Sur,” El Tiempo, no. 4, 28 January 1866, 2.
52. El Tiempo, no. 3, 21 January 1866, 1–2.
53. La Regeneración, no. 3, 10 September 1865, 1.
54. Rodríguez Objío, qtd. in Vicioso, El freno hatero, 338.

notes to epilogue | 333

This page intentionally left blank
Bibliography

Archives and Newspapers

CUBA

Archivo Nacional de Cuba (anc)

Asuntos Políticos (ap)
Diario de la Habana
Gaceta de la Habana
El Redactor de Santiago
Biblioteca Nacional José Martí (bnjm)

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

Archivo General de la Nación–­República Dominicana (agn-­rd)

Archivo Real de Bayaguana
Archivo Real de Higüey
Ayuntamiento de Santiago
Colección Garcia
Colección Herrera (ch)
Fondo Anexión (Anexión)
Memoria de Guerra y Marina
Relaciones Exteriores (rree)
La Acusación
Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación (bagn)
El Dominicano
El Eco del Pueblo
Gaceta de Santo Domingo
El Monitor
El Oasis
El Orden
El Porvenir
El Progreso
 La Razón
La Regeneración
La Républica
Revista Clío, Órgano de la Academia Dominicana de la Historia (Clío)
El Tiempo
Some of the agn-­rd collections w ­ ere being reor­ga­nized during this research period;
Fondo Anexión’s legajo numbers changed from 2006 to 2008 to 2010, for example.
The bulk of the numbers cited ­here refer to the most recent 2008 and 2010 numer-
ations; wherever pos­si­ble, changes are recorded in the corresponding citation.

HAITI

Simityè Jakmèl (Cimitière de Jacmel)

La Feuille de Commerce
Le Moniteur Haïtien
L’Opinion Nationale
La République

S PA I N

Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid (ahn)

Ultramar
Gaceta de Madrid
Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid (bne)
Servicio Histórico Militar, Madrid (shm)
Ultramar
Archivo del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Madrid (amae)
Política Exterior, Haití
Política Exterior, Santo Domingo
Tratados
Archivo General de Indias (agi)
Audiencia de Santo Domingo
Papeles de Cuba (Cuba)

UNITED KINGDOM

The National Archives, Kew (tna)

Colonial Office (co)
301 Turks and Caicos
Foreign Office (fo)
23 Dominican Republic
35 Haiti

U N I T E D S TAT E S

National Archives (nara)

Schomburg Library

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Index

Abbot, William Henry, 174 Alfau, Felipe, 55, 68–69, 196

abolitionism: annexation and, 72–76; alliances: Ca­rib­bean region initia-
antislavery socie­ties, in Separation tives for, 233–36; Dominican in­de­
era, 36; cabotage and, 271n112; in pen­dence movement and, 207–8;
Ca­rib­bean, 8–11; constitutional imple- Haitian-­Dominican military alliances,
mentation of, 266n9; “freedmen of the 196–204; mass mobilization and social
Palm” and, 1; indentured ­labor and, mobility of, 188–92
90–91, 278n33, 288n209; postin­de­ Alonso y Colmenares, Eduardo, 124–25
pen­dence growth of, 230–36; Spanish Álvarez, Luis, 63
Empire in Ca­rib­bean and, 62–67; Álvarez, Mariano, 66–70, 74, 140–43, 190,
unification of Hispaniola and, 23–24 299n180, 333n28
Act of In­de­pen­dence (Acta de Indepen- amnesty for rebels, during War of Resto-
dencia), 188–92, 211 ration, 152, 304n68
Africa: cotton production in, 276n13; Ángulo de Guridi, Francisco Javier, 112,
Spanish settlements in, 76–77, 228
272n142 animal impressment, Spanish policy of,
African Americans: emigration to Haiti 132–33, 194
by, 10, 14, 35, 39–40, 90; perceptions annexation: discipline and leisure fol-
of Santo Domingo from, 10–11 lowing, 108–11; Dominican re­sis­tance
African Battalion, 5–6, 28 to, 144–77; elite embrace of, 11–14,
African Methodist church, in Dominican 54–56, 261n281; erosion of Spanish
Republic, 39–40 support for, 123–29; establishment in
Afro-­Dominican organ­izations, 35–40 Dominican Republic of, 11–14, 54–56,
agriculture: Dominican annexation and, 59–60, 261n281; immigration and
92–94; expansion in postannexation indenture following, 106–8; imposi-
period, 103–6, 277n26; postannexation tion of Spanish civil code following,
immigration and indenture for, 106–8; 94–97; international reception of,
rural identity and politics and, 41–48, 83–86; ­labor policies and, 87–91,
239n28, 247n20, 255n173 103–6; military structure following,
Alba, Joaquín Manuel del, 104 87–94, 97–101; opposition to, 117–43;
Alcantara, Valentín, 57, 265n385 press establishment following, 111–13;
Alfau, Antonio Abad, 55, 68–69, 164–65 religious reform following, 101–3;
annexation (continued) Barbados, 232–33
Separation era and ideology of, 54–56, Bart, Laguerre, 198
260n281; slavery and, 71–76, 146–77; Basora, Francisco, 216
Spanish reaction to, 76–82 Basora, Santiago, 28
“Another Pirate” (anon.), 53 Batista, Doña Antonia, 181–84
anticolonialism: Dominican in­de­pen­ benevolence narrative, imperialism in
dence and growth of, 215–17, 230–36; Ca­rib­bean and, 12–14
Haitian or­ga­ni­za­tion in Dominican Betances, Ramón Emeterio, 36, 191,
Republic of, 117; in Separation-­era 216–17, 234
Dominican Republic, 40; War of biembienes (maroon ­people), 43
­Restoration and, 17–18 black Dominicans: rebellion against an-
anti-­emancipation narrative: annex- nexation and, 161; in regiments during
ationism and, 71–76; Ca­rib­bean Separation era, 23, 28–31, 35–40; reli-
in­de­pen­dence movement and, 8–11; in gious brotherhoods of, 44–45; in rural
Separation era, 32–40 settlements, 36–37; Spanish military
antigaming laws, passage of, 109–11 focus on during War of Restoration,
anti-­Haitianism: Dominican annexation 174–77
and, 12–14, 60, 67–71, 117, 240n71; in Bobadilla, Tomas, 235
Dominican press, 112–13, 121–23; of Boletín Oficial, 158, 186, 188, 199–200,
early Dominican elites, 10–11, 25–31; 220–21
narratives of, 239n8; opposition to Bolivia, support for Dominican in­de­pen­
annexation and, 122–23, 140–43; in dence by, 210
postin­de­pen­dence era, 235–36; in Bona, Félix de, 80
Separation era, 33–40, 261n298 Bonó, Pedro Francisco, 37–38, 176, 179,
“Antillean Nationality” proposal, 234 188–89, 196, 315n4
antislavery socie­ties, in Separation era, Bosch, Juan, 189, 191, 244n115
36 Boyer, Jean-­Pierre: collapse of regime of,
Argentina, Paraguayan border conflict 7, 21, 24–25; Dominican support for, 5,
with, 3 239n21, 240n32; invitation to African
Argudín (Senator), 9 Americans from, 10, 35, 39–40; land
Asia, Spanish intervention in, 76 rights and, 251n85; Rural Code of,
Asian ­labor: in Cuba, 72–73; in Domini- 247n21; terrenos comuneros rights and,
can Republic, 158–59 42; Tree of Liberty planting and, 1,
Atlantic Monthly, 84–85 19–20; unification of Hispaniola and,
Ayiti, 2 23
Brazil, Paraguayan border conflict with, 3
Báez, Buenaventura: annexation and, British empire: abolitionism and, 8–9;
53–54, 162; anti-­Haitianism and, 142; annexationism and, 11–14; cotton
postin­de­pen­dence return of, 231–35; production and, 87–90, 276n13;
Provisional Government and, 192–93; Dominican annexation and, 85–86,
“regeneration” narrative and, 182–84; 105; filibuster efforts opposed by,
re­sis­tance to annexation and, 181, 65; indentured ­labor in colonies of,
308nn142–43; rural politics and, 44; 88–94, 277n26; in­de­pen­dence of
in Separation era, 21–22, 26, 31, 33, 38, Dominican Republic and, 209, 211–12,
42, 51; Spanish influence and, 49 233; intervention during Separation
bagaje system, 132–33 era of, 22–23; recognition of Domini-

370 | Index
 can Republic by, 49; Separation-­era class divisions, during Separation era,
opposition to, 33, 40; U.S. cotton 27–31, 34–40
production and, 62, 87–88 Classification Committee, Spanish mili-
Brotherhood of Saint Antoine, 45 tary establishment of, 100, 128–29
Buceta, Manuel, 130, 155, 162, 181, 192, Clayton-­Bulwer treaty, 62
222, 295n124, 307n138 Cofradía of San Juan Bautista, 35
Buchanan, James, 84 Colombia: Atlantic identity of, 10; sup-
port for Dominican in­de­pen­dence in,
Caballero, Juan, 225 210, 232
Cabral, José Maria, 120–23, 149, 183–84, colonialism: annexationism and, 11–16;
196, 216, 308n142, 333n37 Dominican Republic and influence
call-­and-­response ­music, 45 of, 16; filibuster operations and, 40,
Caminero, José María, 250n70 50–51; geopolitics in Spanish empire
Camp, Stephanie, 148 and, 61–67; influence in Separation
Cap-­Haïtien: British attack on, 233; era of, 22–23; Latin American in­de­
commercial ties in, 38–39, 46; ­family pen­dence proj­ects and, 3; postin­de­
ties in, 155; naval blockade of, 155–56; pen­dence indenture and unfree ­labor
po­liti­cal alliances in, 22, 180, 197–202; and, 9–11
U.S. steamships in, 174, 217 Comercio de Cádiz, 208
capital proj­ects, in postannexation Do- Confederate ships, presence in Ca­rib­
minican Republic, 104–6, 278n30 bean ports of, 141, 150
Cappa, Mariano, 125 conscription, rural re­sis­tance to, 44,
Cap separatism, 27 249n50, 262n324
Ca­rib­bean region: alliance initiatives “Conspiracies, Seen from One Side,
in, 233–36; annexationism in, 11–14; The,” 50
colonial empires in, 3–4; Dominican Contreras, José, 149
in­de­pen­dence supported in, 209; Contreras, Teodisio, 168
indentured ­labor in, 89–94; in­de­pen­ Correspondiente de España newspaper, 78
dence movements in, 8–12, 62–67, Costa Rica, Atlantic identity of, 10
231–36; Spanish empire in, 61–67 Cotton Association of Manchester, 106
Carmen Rodríguez, José del, 46 cotton production, 62, 87–90, 106,
Catholic Church: in Dominican Repub- 276n13
lic, 67–68, 95; opposition to an- Cristo, Moreno del, 124
nexation and, 134–36; postannexation Crónica de Ambos Mundos newspaper, 74–75
disarray of, 101–3, 283n104 Cruzat, Manuel, 65–66, 85–86, 122, 125,
caudillo lit­er­a­ture, rural identity and 288n209
politics in, 42–48 Cuba: annexationism in, 12–14, 71;
Cazneau, Jane Storm, 51–52, 55, 64–65, 67 colonial government in, 60–67, 77–79,
Cazneau, William, 51–52, 65, 67, 107–8, 94–97, 280n59; Dominican annexation
208 and, 16–17, 33, 59, 64–76, 86–87, 94–97,
Chicago Tribune, 84 112–13, 130–36, 153–61; exiled Domini-
Chile, Spanish conflict with, 77 cans in, 32, 214, 225–28; fugitive slaves
Chincha Islands dispute, 77, 210 in Santo Domingo from, 35, 91–94,
Civil War (U.S.), 83–85, 88–89, 191, 204; 113–16; in­de­pen­dence movement in,
Spanish support of Confederacy in, 230–36; in­de­pen­dence of Dominican
134 Republic and, 207–9, 212–17, 220–21,

Index | 371
Cuba (continued) by, 29–31; regional and international
223; religious practices in, 101; Santa- support for in­de­pen­dence in, 211–17;
na’s relations with, 123–29; slavery and rural rebellion in, 15–18; in Separation
indenture in, 9–11, 72–76; “Spanish- era, 7–11, 21–58; soldiers in postan-
ness” ideology in, 60; trade expansion nexation period in, 97–100; Spanish
and, 103–6; U.S. threat to, 62; War of identity in, 69–71; Spanish influence
Africa participation by, 80–81 in, 12–14, 64–67; War of Restoration
Cuello, Juan Francisco, 214 in, 16–18, 144–48, 244n115. See also an-
Curaçao, 207–8 nexation; in­de­pen­dence movements;
Curiel, Pedro, 125 Santo Domingo
Curiel, Ricardo, 191 drumming practices, 45
Duarte, Juan Pablo, 19, 27–28, 210,
Danbon, Nicolas, 225 245n144, 252n98
death penalty, Dominican abolition of, Dulce, Domingo, 212
230 Dusablon, Estanislao, 173
“Decree of Police and Governance,” 111
de la Cruz, José, 168 economic conditions: bud­get expansion
de la Gándara, José, 136, 159–61, 171–72, in Dominican Republic and, 129–36; in
184–86, 203–4, 221, 224–27, 330n133 postannexation period, 103–6, 125–29;
de Leon, Domingo, 214 during Separation era, 7, 21–22, 30–31,
Delmonte, Félix María, 185–87, 216 34–40, 48–54, 56–58; Spanish empire
Del Monte, Manuel Joaquín, 23, 67 in Ca­rib­bean and, 61–67; during War
de los Santos, Honorio, 225 of Restoration, 192–95
de los Santos, Miguel, 131–32 Ec­ua­dor, territorial cessions by, 266n5
democ­ratization, Dominican discourse “El Chivo” (caudillo leader), 190
on, 185–87 El Clamor Público newspaper, 78
Desgrotte, Etienne, 25 El Contemporáneo newspaper, 77–79
Dessalines, Jean-­Jacques, 2 El Dominicano newspaper, 30–32, 50,
Díaz, Modesto, 133 251n83, 253n125
Díaz, Ramón, 176–77 Elie, Auguste, 202–3
Dolores, Francisco de los, 161 elites of Dominican Republic: annexa-
Dominican Republic: anti-­Haitian tion and, 11–14, 54–56, 93–94, 117–18,
campaign in, 10–11; collaborative 260n281; anti-­Haitianism of, 33–40;
revolution with Haiti, 56–58, 150–77, Cuban ties with, 32; disillusionment
180–81; democ­ratization in, 185–87; with annexation and, 181–84; in­de­pen­
devastation following in­de­pen­dence dence and, 5–6; loyalty to Spain dur-
in, 227–28; Haitian population in, 23, ing War of Restoration and, 162–72;
27–31; Haitian Revolution and, 4–6; narrative of War of Restoration by,
historical timeline for, ix–­xi; mar- 19–20, 244n115; po­liti­cal power in
ginalization of rural population in, Separation era of, 21–22, 31–40; race
14–18; opposition to annexation in, and class discourse of, 14–18, 27–28;
117–43; in postin­de­pen­dence period, in rural settlements, 37–38; during
229–36; Provisional Government of, Separation era, 7–8, 21–22, 27–31; slav-
17–18; Puerto Rican alliance with, ery practiced by, 2–4, 114–16; Spanish
5; rebellion against annexation in, military forces and, 136–40; Spanish-
144–77; reform constitution ­adopted ness embraced by, 12–14, 32–40; War

372 | Index
 of Africa supported by, 80–82; white ­free-­soil ideology: annexationist dis-
supremacist and imperial pressures course and, 12–13; anti-­emancipation
on, 10–11 discourse and, 33–40
Elliot, Jonathan, 55
El Museo de Ambas Américas, 61 Gaceta de la Habana, 86
El Oasis newspaper, 49, 52, 66 Gaceta de Santo Domingo, 100, 111, 224
El Redactor de Santiago de Cuba, 212 Gaceta Oficial, 103, 213, 225
El Tiempo, 235 Galván, Manuel de Jesús, 93, 112, 162,
emancipation movements: in­de­pen­ 187–88
dence of Dominican Republic and, Gantreau, María de Jésus, 227
222–28; Separation opposition to, García, Don Juan Francisco, 166
33–40; War of Restoration and, 18, García, Madame, 181–84
146–48, 204 García Moreno, Gabriel, 266n5
Enriquez, Julieta, 115 García Paredes, Victoriano, 125
Espaillat, Ulises, 185, 200–201, 205 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 7, 185–87
ethnic identity, in Dominican Separation Gaspar, David Barry, 41
era, 22 Geffrard, Cora, 141
Evangelista, Marcos, 139 Geffrard, Fabre Nicholas, 244n127,
278n28; anticolonialism of, 56–57,
Fabens, Joseph, 84 83, 86; cotton production in Haiti
federalism, in Dominican Republic, 3 and, 88; Dominican annexation and,
Feliz, Manuel (“Cabulla”), 142–43 67–68, 92–94, 113, 316n24; inden-
Feliz, Manuel (“Quiri), 142–43 tured l­ abor and, 90; in­de­pen­dence of
Fernández de Castro, Felipe, 66, 125 Dominican Republic and, 222, 224;
Fernando Po (Bioko), 76–77, 272n142 nationalist discourse and, 185–87;
filibuster aggression: in Dominican opposition to annexation and, 117,
Republic, 50–52, 64–67; in Haiti, 66; 119–23, 180–81; slavery rumors and,
in Nicaragua, 62; by United States, 150; Spanish presence in Haiti and,
216–17 141–43; War of Restoration and,
Finch, Aisha, 147–48 195–204
Flag of Lares (Puerto Rico), 230–32 General Overseas Directorate (Dirección
Florentino, Pedro, 140, 159–61, 190 General de Ultramar), 61
France: annexation in Dominican Re- geopolitics, Spanish Ca­rib­bean empire
public and, 12–14, 67–71; Ec­ua­dorean and, 61–67
monarchy in, 266n5; filibuster efforts George, Victor, 316n24
opposed by, 65; Haitian indemnity Gleaner newspaper, 83
payments to, 2, 6–7, 23, 40; in­de­pen­ Gómez, Máximo, 228
dence of Dominican Republic and, González, Raymundo, 14
209; influence in Separation era of, government structure: Dominican
22–23, 26–27, 32–33, 36, 40, 48–52, annexation and, 94–97; in postan-
55–56, 246n16, 252n123; Mexican nexation period, 108–11; rural identity
intervention by, 59–60; reaction to and politics and, 43–44; in Separation
Dominican annexation in, 83 era, 21–22; during War of Restoration,
“freedmen of the Palm,” 1 192–95; War of Restoration and threat
Freemasons: in Dominican Republic, to, 166–72
102–3; in postin­de­pen­dence period, 230 Gran Colombia, 5

Index | 373
Grito de Capotillo (Cry of Capotillo), Histoire d’Haïti (Madiou), 33
145, 155, 191 Hungria, José, 152, 155–56, 162, 165
Guerrero, Manuel, 167–68
Guridi, Alejandro, 42, 130–31, 207 immigration policies: African and Asian
Guzmán, Nicolás, 175–76 mi­grant ­labor and, 72–73; in postan-
nexation period, 106–8
Haiti: annexation in Dominican Repub- indemnity debt to France, burden of, 2,
lic and, 12–14, 67–71; civil division in, 6–7, 23, 27, 247n23
21–22; collaboration with Dominicans indenture: assimilation and, 72–76;
in, 56–58, 83–86, 153–77, 180–81, cabotage and, 271n112; Ca­rib­bean
195–204; cotton production in, 88; in­de­pen­dence and growth of, 9; in
democ­ratization in, 185–87; Do- Cuba, 271n116; expansion in Ca­rib­
minican anti-­Haitianism and, 21–22; bean of, 87–94; in postannexation
Dominican ­family ties in, 46–48, period, 106–8
121–23, 132–33; earthquake of 1842 in, in­de­pen­dence movements: in Ca­rib­
24; elites in, 30–31; etymology of, bean region, 62–67, 231–36; co­ali­tion
238n5; historical timeline for, ix–­xi; for Dominican in­de­pen­dence, 207–9;
opposition to annexation in, 117–43; end of Spanish rule in Dominican Re-
privileging of black citizenship in, public and, 221–28; growing strength
11–14; Provisional Government and, in Dominican Republic of, 218–21;
17–18, 195–204; religious practices international and regional response to
in, 45–46; re­sis­tance to annexation Dominican in­de­pen­dence, 210–17
and, 144–48, 180–81; revolutionary in­equality, in Spanish Ca­rib­bean ter-
movement in, 200–204; in Separation ritories, 62–67
era, 7–11, 26–31; Spanish presence in, inter-­Caribbean migration, 18
140–43, 292n54; War of Restoration investment, in postannexation Domini-
supported in, 17–18, 196–204 can Republic, 104–6
Haitian-­Dominican Constitution, draft- Isabella II (Queen of Spain), 59–60, 77
ing of, 25 Isidor, Pablo, 202
Haitian National Guard, 44
Haitian Revolution, 2, 4–5; Ca­rib­bean Jaeger, William, 208
in­de­pen­dence movements and, 8–11; Jamaica: in­de­pen­dence movement in,
rural identity and politics and, 42–43; 208, 232; reaction to Dominican
transformation of ­labor in, 88–89; War annexation in, 83
of Restoration and influence of, 17–18 Jean-­Joseph, François, 90
Heneken, Teodoro, 38 Jiménez, Blas C., 132
Hispaniola: colonial division of, 1–4; Jiménez, Nicasio, 46
competing co­ali­tions on, 18–20; judicial system, rural identity and poli-
emancipation movements in, 18; tics and, 43–44
etymology of, 238n5; settlement map
of, 6–7; Spanish occupation of, 63–67; Kock, Bernard, 278n30
towns and rural settlements, ca. 1830,
7; unification of, 23–25, 28–31; U.S. La América, 80
interests in, 63–67 L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-­Orléans, 83
Hispano-­American confederation pro- ­labor: Dominican annexation and
posal, 66, 82, 245n138 changes in, 72–76, 86–87, 103–6,

374 | Index
 108–11; morality linked to control of, Longuefosse, Ogé, 202
92–94, 108–11; in rural Dominican López, Narcisco, 51, 62, 65
Republic, 15; Separation-­era migra- Lora, Gregorio, 140, 165
tion agreements for, 55–56. See also Lora, Jacinto de, 139–40
indenture; mi­grant ­labor; slavery Los Mina: as ­free black town, 36, 174–75;
La campana del higo (Ángulo de Guridi), Spanish presence in, 174, 314n241
228 Louverture, Toussaint, 4–5
La Discusión, 78–79, 208 Luperón, Gregorio, 156, 179, 184, 191–93,
La Época, 78 204–5, 216, 233–36, 320n98, 333n37
La España, 78–79 Luperón, José Gabriel, 191
La idea de valor en Santo Domingo, 224
Landais, M., 141 Macajauc, M., 198
land rights: in postannexation period, Macías, Juan Manuel, 216
104–6, 107–8; rural identities and Madiou, Thomas, 33
politics and, 41–48, 248n35, 251n85, mail system in Santo Domingo, 95–96, 126
251n87, 255n175 Malo de Molina, José, 74–76, 95–96,
LaPlace, Anna María, 46 104–5, 114–16, 281n63
La Razón, 112, 121–22, 142, 159–64; anti- Marcy, William, 65
slavery rhe­toric in, 149; Dominican in­ maroon Dominicans, rural settlements
de­pen­dence movement and, 208, 224 of, 36–37
La Regeneración, 229 martial law, imposition in Dominican
La Revista Española de Ambos Mundos, 61 Republic of, 150–51
“Las Colonias Españolas y la República Martínez, Manuel, 138–40
Dominicana” (Macías), 216 Marzán, Huberto, 198
Las Novedades, 79 mass mobilization, for Dominican in­de­
Latin Amer­ic­ a: geopolitics in Spanish pen­dence, 188–92
empire and, 61–67; in­de­pen­dence of Mateo, Segundo, 121
Dominican Republic and, 209–10 matriarchal core, in rural society, 45
Lavastida, Miguel, 101, 125 Medicine Committee, postannexation
­legal structure: Dominican annexation formation of, 109–11
and, 94–97, 104–6, 124–29, 281n63, Medina, Victoria, 225
295n121; nationalist discourse and, Mella, Ildefonso, 215
184–85; opposition to annexation and Mella, Pablo, 27
burden of, 132–36 Mella, Ramón, 26, 182, 186–87, 190, 198,
legend of Don Melchor, 43 308n142
Legros, Aimé, 199 merengue, anti-­Haitian rhe­toric about, 34
leisure activity, postannexation regula- Meriño, Fernando Arturo de (Arch-
tion of, 108–11 bishop), 67–68, 135, 191, 215–16,
Lema, Marques de, 222 303n67, 327n61
Le Moniteur Haïtien, 83–86, 120, 123, 195, Merriman, Alexander, 153
231, 264n360 Mexican-­American War. See War of U.S.
Liberal Union Party (Spain), 61, 186 Intervention
Lima Congress of 1847, 61 Mexico: annexationism and, 11–14;
limpieza de sangre documents, 118, 289n6 French intervention in, 59–60, 231;
Lincoln, Abraham, 84, 209 imperial intervention in, 12; territorial
literary culture in Dominican Republic, 38 losses to United States by, 13–14

Index | 375
mi­grant ­labor: in postannexation period, 181–85; “regeneration” narrative and,
106–8, 278n30; Separation-­era de- 182–84
mand for, 32–40, 55–56 Neiba, 48, 121–22, 142–44, 147, 157, 196,
military forces: annexation and arrival of 198, 307n126
Spanish forces, 94–97; black Do- New Grenada, 210
minicans in, 23, 28–31, 35–40, 247n18; New York Times, 84
Ca­rib­bean colonies’ requests for, Nicaragua: armed conspiracies in, 12;
62–67; evacuation from in­de­pen­dent Clayton-­Bulwer treaty and, 62; support
Dominican Republic, 222–28; Haitian-­ for Dominican in­de­pen­dence by, 210
Dominican military alliances, 196–97; Nissage-­Saget, Jean-­Nicolas, 234
hardships during in­de­pen­dence strug­ Noël, Philanthrope, 196
gle of, 218–21; in­de­pen­dence move- Nolasco, Pedro, 196–97
ment and, 213–21; opposition to an- North Haiti–­Dominican u ­ nion, proposal
nexation and, 117–18, 120–24, 132–40; for, 27
in postannexation period, 97–100, “Noticias Nacionales,” newspaper publi-
136–40; rural politics and, 44–48, cation of, 112
248n24, 249n50, 258n234, 260n293, Núñez, Petronila, 224–25
261n298; vio­lence and criminality of, Núñez de Cáceres, José, 69–71
150–55, 172–73, 189–92, 319n89; War of
Restoration mobilization of, 188–92 O’Donnell, Leopoldo, 61, 76–79, 85, 209,
Militia of Color, 97 273n173
miscegenation, Spanish colonial policies Oquendo, Candelario, 211
concerning, 61 Overseas Ministry (Ministerio de Ultra-
Moca Constitution, 205, 230 mar), 61
Monroe Doctrine: annexation of, 84; Ovidio, Rudolfo, 46
Dominican Provisional Government
and, 185–87 Padilla, Enrique, 99–100
Monte Cristi: commercial trade in, 39, 104, Páez, José, 314n241
198, 211, 216; Cuban presence in, 174; palos de muerte, 45
earthquake in, 24; migration into, 39; re- papabocó ritual experts, 45
bellion in, 144–45, 155, 180, 191, 205, 220 papalúa ritual experts, 45
Monzón, Bienvenido, 103 Paraguay, border conflicts with Brazil
morality: ­labor control and, 92–94, and Argentina, 3
108–11; postannexation religious passports, in postannexation Dominican
reform and, 101–3 Republic, 132
Morant Bay Rebellion (Jamaica), 232 Paton, Diana, 8
Morcelo, Sebastian, 218 Peláez y Campomanes, Antonio, 69–70
Morning Journal, 83 Peña, Lucas Evangelista de, 191,
Morris, William, 290n31 321n134
multilingualism: rural identity and Peralta y Rodríguez, Federico, 24–25
politics and, 43, 48; in Separation-­era Pérez, José Maria, 313n226
Dominican Republic, 40 Peru: Spanish conflict with, 77; support
for Dominican in­de­pen­dence by, 210
Napoleon III, 76, 266n6 Philippines, Spanish influence in, 60
nationalist rhe­toric: annexationism and, Pichardo, Franklin Franco, 248n35
12–15; Provisional Government and, Pierce, Franklin, 62

376 | Index
Pierre, José, 291n40 Provincial Reserves, 138–40, 151; estab-
Pierrot, Jean-­Louis Michel, 29–30 lishment of, 100; rebellion against
Pimentel, Pedro Antonio, 205, 231 annexation and, 173, 179
Pine and Palm (Redpath), 84 Provisional Government: growing
Pineda, Pedro, 131–32 strength of, 218–21; Haitian support
Polanco, Gaspar, 140, 179–80, 184, 189, for, 195–204; in­de­pen­dence coalition-­
193–95, 199, 204–6, 235, 311n208 building by, 207–8; international
Política ultramarina (Overseas Politics, recognition sought for, 216–17; leader-
1854) (Torrente), 71–72 ship strug­gles within, 192–95; mass
politics: Dominican annexation and, mobilization by, 188–92; nationalist
94–97; instability during Separation discourse and, 184–87; “regeneration”
era, 48–54; mass mobilization for narrative of, 181–84; Venezuelan links
in­de­pen­dence, 188–92; in postin­ with, 210–11; War of Restoration and,
de­pen­dence period, 229–36; rural 146–48, 155, 177, 179–81
identity and, 41–48; town politics and public health provisions, postannexation
geography and, 31–40 formation of, 109–11
Polk, James, 62 Puello, Eusebio, 165
Ponce de Léon, Manuel, 211 Puello, Gabino, 29
Ponthieux, Alcius, 25 Puello, José Joaquín, 28–29, 49
Port-­au-­Prince: communication in, 213; Puerto Plata: antislavery sympathies in,
constitutional convention in, 24–25, 40, 58, 150; Catholic Church in, 101;
29; Cuban exiles in, 66; Dominicans commercial activity in, 38–39, 105–6,
in, 26, 117, 132, 225; earthquake in, 24; 180, 187, 216, 281n69; cosmopolitan-
martial law in, 123; newspapers in, 30, ism of, 39; government structure in,
47, 83, 119, 150, 198; po­liti­cal alliances 126, 130, 153–54, 162, 165, 208, 215,
in, 3, 50, 196; rebellion in, 56; slavery 283n106; as ideological center, 230;
issues in, 120; Spanish presence in, mi­grants in, 39–40, 46, 94, 136; po­
121–22, 140–42, 190, 203, 292n54; trade liti­cal alliances in, 24, 40–41, 54, 118,
activity in, 6, 48, 197 191, 198, 239n20, 248n35; Protestant
Portes, Thomas de, 29, 250n75 population in, 102; rebellion in, 128,
Pouget, Alexandre, 198 139–40, 145, 151, 156–62, 169–74, 189,
press coverage of Dominican Repub- 210–14, 236; Spanish presence in, 55,
lic: in­de­pen­dence from Spain and, 64, 97, 133–34, 155, 195–96, 226–27,
208–9, 213; opposition to annexation 311n208; ­women leaders in, 164
in, 119–23, 162–72; postannexation Puerto Rico: alliance with Domini-
establishment of Dominican news- cans, 5, 33, 112; annexationism in, 9,
papers, 111–13; in postin­de­pen­dence 12–14, 71; colonial government in,
period, 229–36; Spanish coverage of 94, 280n59, 287n174; Dominican an-
annexation, 77–82, 84–86, 272n151, nexation and, 59, 73–76, 94–97, 104–6,
273n154 125, 155–61; exiled Dominicans in,
Prim, Juan, 63 225; fugitive slaves in Santo Domingo
prison system, postannexation expan- from, 35–36, 113–16; in­de­pen­dence of
sion of, 110–11, 287n184 Dominican Republic supported by,
Protestantism: opposition to annexation 208–9, 212–17, 220–21, 238, 328n77;
and oppression of, 133–36; postannex- postin­de­pen­dence Dominican Repub-
ation religious reform and, 102–3 lic and, 230–36; slave ­labor in,

Index | 377
Puerto Rico (continued) Rivero, Felipe, 129, 148, 150–51, 153, 155,
9–11, 72; Spanish influence in, 60, 62, 162, 164–66, 174
69–70, 79; U.S. sugar industry in, 62 Rivière-­Hérard, Charles, 26–27, 29
Pulien, Carlos, 216 Rodríguez, Santiago, 198, 231
Rodríguez Objío, Manuel, 1, 144, 178,
Quisqueya, 1–2, 238n5 191–92, 204–5, 210, 227–28, 233–36,
238n5
racism: annexationist discourse and, Rojas, Pedro José, 211
11–14; Ca­rib­bean in­de­pen­dence move- Roman, Josefa, 225
ment resurgence of, 8–11; Dominican Rondón, Juan, 189–90
annexation and role of, 67–71, 150–52; Roolt, Edward, 260n284
Dominican in­de­pen­dence and, 209, Roumain, Ernest, 204, 205
222–28; in Dominican military struc- Royal Standard and Gazette of the Turks and
ture, 100, 150–55; elites of Dominican Caicos Islands, 211
Republic and, 117–18; geography and, Rubalcaba, Joaquín, 122
31–40; immigration and indenture Rural Code (Dominican Republic),
linked to, 107–8; politics of Separation 92–93, 274n21
era and, 31–40; rural identities and rural Dominican Republic: annexation
politics and, 41–48; during Separation impact on, 91–94; elite marginaliza-
era, 27–31; Spanish empire in Ca­rib­ tion of, 14–18, 34–40; identities and
bean and, 61–67 politics in, 41–48, 255n173; po­liti­cal
Ramírez y Parmantier, Domingo, 57–58, consensus in, 14–16; rebellion against
121–22, 196, 235, 265n385 annexation and, 16–18, 178–79; dur-
ranching, by Dominicans of color, 41 ing Separation era, 22–23, 26–31;
Raybaud, Maxime, 52 sugar slavery and black settlement
raza hispana, 12, 61–62, 82, 97 in, 36–40
Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo,
95–97, 125–27, 288n198 Saint-­Domingue: French colony of, 2,
Recio, Ramona, 121 4–5; fugitive slaves in, 113–16
Redpath, James, 84, 278n28 Saint Martin (Soualiga), 4
regeneration of Dominican Republic, saint veneration, in rural communities,
elites’ embrace of, 181–84 45–46
religious brotherhoods, 34, 44–45 Salcedo, José, 192–93, 205, 320n98
religious practices: opposition to an- Salnave, Sylvain, 198–99, 233
nexation and oppression of, 133–36, Sam, Simon, 321n134
297n152; postannexation reform of, Samaná: colonial ambitions in, 48–51;
101–3, 129, 283n104; rural identity and commercial activity in, 67, 79, 128–29;
politics and, 44–46 filibuster organ­izing in, 64–65;
republican universalism, elite Domini- French presence in, 13, 26–27, 40, 50;
cans’ embrace of, 32–40 government structure in, 126–27, 167;
revolution, during Separation era, mi­grants to, 39–40, 55, 174; prisoners
48–54 in, 108–11, 159; Protestants in, 133–34;
Revolutionary Puerto Rican Committee, rebellion in, 227–28; slavery in, 141;
231 Spanish presence in, 97–106, 118,
Ricart y Torres, Pedro, 96–97, 125 169–70, 192, 216, 219–20; U.S. pres-
Risorgimento (Italy), 185 ence in, 51–52, 79, 84

378 | Index
San Carlos, as black settlement, 36, 161, 136–40; opposition to annexation in,
174–75, 214 159–61; racial in­equality in, 35; Real
Sánchez, Francisco del Rosario, 56–58, Audiencia of, 95–97; rural identities
117, 120–22, 149, 179, 187–88, 290n31, and politics in, 41–48; Separation-­era
291n40 economy and politics in, 21–22, 24–31;
Sánchez, José Maria, 46 Spanish abandonment of, 222–28; in
Sánchez, Socorro, 218 Unification era, 23–25, 28–31, 63. See
San Just, Eduardo, 65 also annexation
Santana, Pedro, 176; annexation and, Santo Domingo and España (Guridi), 131,
59–60, 67–71, 73, 77–78, 81–86, 207
104; antigaming bill signed by, 109; Segovia, Antonio Maria, 66
anti-­Haitianism of, 141–42; Catholic Segundo, Macsimo, 159
Church and, 67–68, 215, 327n61; death self-­determination, Dominican re­sis­
penalty called for, 183; defeat of, tance and, 184–85
178–81, 209; executions and injustice Separation era: geography, racism, and
of, 120, 290n31, 291n33; immigration politics during, 31–40; governmen-
and indenture policies of, 107–8; land tal power strug­gles in, 7–8, 21–22;
rights and, 42; military forces ­under, po­liti­cal reform movements and,
44, 96, 139–40; opposition to an- 23–31; provocation, instability, and
nexation and, 117, 119–23, 128–29, 215; revolution in, 48–54; “regeneration”
“regeneration” narrative concerning, narrative about, 181–84; unrest and
182–84; religious reforms of, 101–3, annexation during, 54–56
215, 327n61; rural politics and, 38; Serra, José María de, 215–16
Separation-­era power strug­gle and, Serrano, Francisco: Cuban trade prac-
21–22, 26–30, 52–58; Spanish view of, tices and, 66–67; Dominican annexa-
49–50, 65–66, 77–82, 123–29, 165; War tion and, 59, 73–78; ­labor policies and,
of Restoration and, 148, 308n142 103–4; opposition to annexation and,
Santana de los Reyes, Pablo, 176 124, 139, 308n142; postannexation
“Santana’s ­Great Treason,” 317n48 government structure and, 95–96; re-
Santiago de Cuba, 32, 103–5, 156, 208–9, tirement of, 129, 209; Spanish identity
213, 249n55 embraced by, 69, 71
Santiago de los Caballeros, xii; destruc- Seward, William E., 84
tion of, 145, 156, 204, 231; economic Sierra Leone, 8
and trade development in, 37–38, 46; Simoneau, Gabino, 291n40
government structure in, 177, 181, slavery: annexation and, 71–76, 85–86,
189; rebellion in, 53, 142, 145, 150–58, 113–16; cabotage and, 271n112; Ca­rib­
168–69, 191–92, 210; regional conflict bean emancipation dates, 90–92; in
and, 3, 198–202, 204, 231; Spanish Ca­rib­bean territories, 62–67, 90–92;
presence in, 73, 96–97, 130–31 in early Dominican Republic, 16–17;
Santo Domingo: fugitive slaves in, emancipation ­after Haitian Revolu-
113–16; Haitian ­family ties in, tion, 5–6; Haiti as refuge from, 5–7;
46–48; Haitian Revolution and, 1, in postin­de­pen­dence Ca­rib­bean coun-
4–5; Haitians in, 5–7; immigration tries, 8–11; self-­emancipation from,
and indenture in, 72–73, 106–8; Latin 113–16; Separation-­era opposition to,
American perceptions of, 10–11; 33–40; War of Restoration and fear of,
military forces during annexation in, 18, 146–48, 177

Index | 379
social mobility, mobilization for in­de­ Suero, Juan, 140, 148, 165
pen­dence and, 188–92 sugar plantations: slavery on, 2, 36–40;
Sociedad Democrática de los Amigos de U.S.-­Spanish colonial rivalry and, 62
América, 216
Society of the Rights of Man and Citizen, Tassara, Gabriel, 84
24–25 taxation: expansion of, 129–36; in post-
Soto, María Lucas, 114 annexation period, 103–6
Soulouque, Faustin, 49–50, 52, 56, terrenos comuneros rights, 42
62, 65–67, 248n37, 262n324, 266n6, tobacco production: annexation politics
267n39, 318n80 and, 93; colonialism and, 53; govern-
Spain: annexation of Dominican Republic ment support of, 23; in postannex-
by, 1–4, 11–14, 54–56, 59, 67–71, 87–97, ation Dominican Republic, 106;
117–19, 129–36; anticolonialism in colo- rural Dominican Republic and, 22,
nies of, 230–36; Antillean geopolitics 38–39, 42
and empire of, 61–67; antislavery de- Torrente, Mariano, 71–72
crees from, 114–16; Ca­rib­bean annex- trade practices: annexation in Ca­rib­bean
ationism and, 71–76; colonial policies and, 66–67; cross-­border trade, 47–48;
in Latin Amer­ic­ a and, 186–87, 266n9; Haitian-­Dominican trade during War
Dominican nationalist discourse and, of Restoration, 197–99; in postannex-
185–87; end of Dominican rule by, ation period, 104–6; in Separation-­era
221–28; exiled Dominicans in, 214–15; Dominican Republic, 39–40; Spanish
fines imposed on Dominicans by, blockade of Dominican coast and, 208
131–32; forced ­labor in Ca­rib­bean colo- Treaty of Aranjuez, 47–48, 51, 262n313
nies of, 9–11; Haitian relations with, Tree of Liberty, 1, 5
117–19, 140–42, 195–204; immigration Trinitarios society, 24–26, 29, 182, 215–16
and indenture policies of, 107–8; im­ Turkes and Caicos Islands, support for
perialist ambitions of, 76–82; indemnity Dominican in­de­pen­dence in, 211–12
demands of, 140–43; in­de­pen­dence
of Dominican Republic from, 207–28; Unification period in Hispaniola, 23–25,
military forces in Dominican Re- 28–31, 238n1; racist order during, 35;
public from, 97–100, 136–40, 218–21; suppression in Dominican history of,
opposition to annexation in, 122–29, 68–69
146–77; press coverage of annexation Unión Liberal, 77
in, 77–82, 84–86, 272n151, 273n154; United States: Ca­rib­bean in­de­pen­dence
pro-­Confederate sentiments in, 134; movements and, 9–11; Dominican
Separation era and influence of, 22–23, annexation and, 67, 83–85, 88–94;
32–40, 48–49, 54–56, 252n123; U.S. Dominican opposition to, 55–56;
support of Dominican in­de­pen­dence expansion in Ca­rib­bean of, 11–14, 60,
and, 216–17; Venezuelan links with, 211; 71; filibuster operations in Domini-
War of Restoration and defeat of, 17–18, can Republic, 50–53; in­de­pen­dence
146–77 of Dominican Republic and, 208–9,
Spanish Abolitionist Society, 231 212–13, 216–17; intervention during
“Spanish Haitians,” 5, 121, 238n5 Separation era of, 22–23, 40, 48–51;
Spanish identity: Cuban embrace of, 60; postin­de­pen­dence Dominican Repub-
Dominican elites’ embrace of, 12–14, lic and, 233–36; reaction to Dominican
32–40, 69–71, 112–13 annexation in, 83–84; Spanish empire

380 | Index
 in Ca­rib­bean and, 13–14, 61–67; War of mobilization for, 188–92; nationalist
Restoration supported by, 198. See also discourse during, 184–87; origins of,
Confederate ships 144–48; Provisional Government and,
Ureña, Salomé, 235 181–84, 192–95
Uruguay, Garibaldi in, 185 War of U.S. Intervention, 62
White, Luise, 146–48
Valverde, Pedro, 93–94, 108, 114–16, 125, white hierarchy: annexation of Do-
289n218 minican Republic and, 67–71, 117–18;
Vanderhurst, Peter, 174 postannexation immigration and
Vargas, Carlos de, 166–67, 170–71, 179–81 indenture and, 107–8; in rural settle-
Velázquez, Cayetano, 144, 157 ments, 37–38; Separation-­era politics
Venezuela: civil war in, 3–4, 112, 210; and, 31–40
Dominican annexation and, 105; sup- ­women: Dominican in­de­pen­dence and
port for Dominican in­de­pen­dence in, role of, 218, 224–25, 330n129; eman-
210–11 cipation movements and, 147–48;
vernacular citizenship, history of, 5 opposition to annexation from,
Villaverde, Cirilo, 207 135–36, 137–40, 157–61; postannex-
Virgin Mary, rural veneration of, 45 ation religious reform and targeting
Virgin of Altagracia, 45, 258n251 of, 101–3; Provisional Government
Vives, Guillerma, 225 and, 181–84; status in Separation era
of, 250n70; War of Restoration and,
Walker, William, 65 162–64, 167–68
War in Africa (Souvestre), 111 “Word to Dominicans, a Word to Haitians,
War of Africa, 76–82, 84, 273n173 A,” 200
War of Restoration, 16–18, 244n115; com- World as It ­Will Be in Year 3000, The
peting co­ali­tions in aftermath of, 18– (Souvestre), 111
20; end of, 204–6; Haitian-­Dominican
collaboration during, 195–204; mass Ysnaga, José, 216

Index | 381
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