Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation 2014045741, 9781138784994, 9781138785007, 9781315768052

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BLACKS, MULATTOS, AND THE DOMINICAN NATION

Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation is the first English translation of the classic text Los negros, los mulatos y la nación dominicana by esteemed Dominican scholar Franklin J. Franco. Published in 1969, this book was the first systematic work on the role of Afro-descendants in Dominican society. Franco’s work, a foundational text for Dominican ethnic studies, constituted a paradigm shift, breaking with the distortions of traditional histories that focused on the colonial elite to place Afro-descendants, slavery, and race relations at the center of Dominican history. This translation includes a new introduction by Silvio Torres-Saillant (Syracuse University) which contextualizes Franco’s work, explaining the milieu in which he was writing, and bringing the historiography of race, slavery, and the Dominican Republic up to the present. Making this pioneering work accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time, this is a must-have for anyone interested in the lasting effects of African slavery on the Dominican population and Caribbean societies. Franklin J. Franco (1936–2013) was a Dominican historian, professor, and politician. He was forced to leave the Dominican Republic in 1957 because of his opposition to the Trujillo dictatorship, and lived in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Cuba, the US, and Mexico. After the assassination of Trujillo, he returned to the Dominican Republic in 1962, and joined the faculty of the Institute of Social Sciences and Planning. He died June 15, 2013.

Classic Knowledge in Dominican Studies

The CUNY Dominican Studies Institute and Routledge present a new series devoted to the publication of classic Dominican books, made available in English for the very first time. Classic Knowledge in Dominican Studies publishes books written by senior, highly recognized Dominican authors who have unquestionably marked the history of knowledge in the Dominican Republic, as well as in Latin America and the Caribbean. Each book is introduced and contextualized by a historian currently working in the field, to bring the historiography of the subject up to date and introduce the text. In promoting the translation and publication of well-known Dominican authors and their classic texts, Routledge and the CUNY DSI aim to effectively contribute to the dissemination of these must-read works within the wider community of scholars on Latin America and the Caribbean.

Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation Franklin J. Franco

BLACKS, MULATTOS, AND THE DOMINICAN NATION

Franklin J. Franco Translated by Patricia Mason

First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 And by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis Originally published in Spanish as Los negros, los mulatos y la nación dominicana, © Franklin J. Franco, 1969. The right of Franklin J. Franco to be identified as author of the original version of this work has been asserted by him/her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Franco, Franklin J. [Negros, los mulatos y la Nación Dominicana. English] Blacks, mulattos, and the Dominican nation / Franklin J. Franco ; translated by Patricia Mason. pages cm. — (Classic knowledge in Dominican studies) Originally published in 1969 in Spanish as Los negros, los mulatos y la Nación Dominicana. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Blacks—Dominican Republic—History. 2. Slavery—Dominican Republic. 3. Dominican Republic—Race relations. I. Title. F1941.N4F713 2015 305.89607293—dc23 2014045741 ISBN: 978-1-138-78499-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-78500-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-76805-2 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

Series Editor’s Introduction A Dominican Classic of Caribbean Thought: Introduction to Franklin Franco’s Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation – Silvio Torres-Saillant

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1

Prologue by Juan I. Jimenes Grullón

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1

The Black Population

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The Black Population and the National Consciousness

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3

The Constitution of 1801

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The Other Face of the Reconquest

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“Foolish Spain” and “Rebellious Africa”

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Complete Unity and National Unity

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Notes Bibliography Index

103 109 115

SERIES EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

To the Dominican people: those in the past who gave their lives to create a better society of their own; those in the present who take on the responsibility of that struggle; those in the future who will ensure that the legacy of the Dominican people remains. Ramona Hernández, Director, CUNY Dominican Studies Institute & Professor of Sociology, The City College of New York

The Classic Knowledge in Dominican Studies series introduces the English-language reader to canonical works written by Dominican scholars that illuminate, with the advantage of the insider’s point of view, some of the main complexities and nuances which have shaped Dominican society. These are texts that first appeared decades ago but whose ideas have transcended the passing of time, have continued to be reprinted (some practically without interruption since their first publication), and have remained must-read references for scholars and students interested in the study of Dominican society. The selected texts also shed light on how Dominican society has evolved in its relationships to neighboring countries in the region, as well as in relation to colonial and imperialist transactions in the world; and with respect to its own quest to ensure its existence, to shape and command its own destiny. The series puts into readers’ hands books written by senior, highly recognized Dominican authors who have unquestionably marked the history of knowledge in the Dominican Republic and, consequently, in the Latin American and Caribbean regions. The texts included in the series may have been translated into various languages before, but never, until now, into English. English-language readers have been deprived of important sources of knowledge about key aspects of the history and culture of Latin America. This divide

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constituted an obstacle in the transmission of knowledge in a world that professes a desire for eliminating barriers among people who are increasingly interconnecting, whether through their own volition or pushed by forces and hands beyond their control. In promoting the translation and publication of these writings, the CUNY DSI aims to effectively contribute to narrowing the existing gap in the world of ideas and between societies that are intrinsically connected since the day Spain and England crossed the Atlantic Sea and conquered the lands and peoples they encountered on their path.

Acknowledgments As the Editor of the series, I am completely in debt to the late Professor Franklin Franco for trusting me with his work. He passed away just a few weeks after Dr. Patricia Mason had been selected to translate his Los Negros, los mulatos y la nacion dominicana. I am equally indebted to Angela Franco, Professor Franco’s compañera, who diligently worked to bring this project to fruition despite having her heart broken by the premature death of the love of her life. Dr. Mason has done an outstanding job. Her mastery of both the English and Spanish languages and her deep knowledge and understanding of Latin American history are evident in the present rendering of Franco’s book. Of course, Daniel Shapiro, a prolific writer and an established translator himself, worked closely with Dr. Mason in his capacity as Director of Translations, a project specifically created for the Classic Knowledge in Dominican Studies series. Daniel brought passion, conviction, and a high sense of commitment to this project and for this I will be eternally grateful to him. Jaiana Casanova, a lawyer trained in intellectual property rights, provided invaluable assistance when I first began to seek out the best publishing houses and write the proposal for the series. Dr. Silvio Torres Saillant, a first-rate scholar, shared a long friendship with Professor Franco. With his intimate and comprehensive knowledge of Franco’s writings, he was, without a doubt, the right person to write the introduction. Of course, our gratitude also goes to Kimberly Guinta, senior editor at Routledge, for taking a chance and signing the very first series in Dominican Studies. Her vision has opened a whole new path for future generations of scholars.

Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation As discrimination based on the perceived color of people’s skin continues to afflict contemporary civilization, the work chosen to initiate the multidisciplinary Classic Knowledge in Dominican Studies series is acutely relevant, offering critical perspectives that are accessible to a general readership, but render justice to the complexity of the Dominican people’s genesis and struggles.

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Series Editor’s Introduction

The launch of the series is marked by an event of surpassing significance, destined to have powerful reverberations in the further development of various disciplines including History, Ethnic Studies, Black Studies, Latino Studies, Latin American Studies, and Dominican Studies, in the United States and around the world: the release of Patricia Mason’s translation of Franklin J. Franco Pichardo’s Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation. The clarity and sobriety of the analysis put forth in Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation can provide a necessary tonic against the corrosive harm perpetuated by distortions that dominated the discourse of Dominican historiography a half-century ago and continue to materialize, fed by particular interests and ignorance. Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation is also a concrete manifestation of the relevance of race and race relations in the Dominican consciousness; it is also a testament of the agency of the Dominican people to bring their blackness to the forefront in the historical development of who they are as a people. Franco’s recontextualization of Dominican history within the broader narrative of colonialism has represented a paradigm shift in the history of knowledge about the Dominican people since it was originally published in 1969. Making the book’s content and methodology accessible to the broadest possible audience, including both scholars and the wider public, will not only expand the field of knowledge about Dominicans, but will also create the possibility for more meaningful and productive conversations about race and race relations as they have evolved in the context of the Dominican Republic and been portrayed in the narratives that explain these concerns. We can confidently expect the publication of this translation to set a precedent, opening wide the doors for new works of an equally transformative nature.

A DOMINICAN CLASSIC OF CARIBBEAN THOUGHT Introduction to Franklin Franco’s Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation Silvio Torres-Saillant, Syracuse University

I. A Classic Dominican Text with Caribbean Kinship A classic work of literary, cultural, or intellectual history by definition needs no updating. Such a book exists self-sufficiently in its own chronology independent of ours. We do not value it because of what it teaches us now but because of how it transformed the knowledge available to its time and its audience. Its relation to us now has little to do with the data or perspectives we might use to understand the world we live in. Its enduring value lies not in its currency but in the undying resonance of its precedent. We do not go, for instance, to the Histories of Herodotus looking for the right information or the proper interpretation about the ancient world that the sage from Halicarnassus set out to account for twenty-five centuries ago. We can easily satisfy that need by simply going to sources closer to our present state of knowledge that will more efficiently instruct us on the subject. We keep going back to that ancient Greek classic in search of something else: nourishment to our intellectual imagination as we marvel about the magnitude of its undertaking and muse about how we would take on a comparable project today. We also sense the extent of our own indebtedness to the precedent it set, finding it hard to fathom what the narration of history would have looked like today had we not had models such as the work of Herodotus to follow or transform. A classic if ever there was one, Los negros, los mulatos y la nación dominicana (1969), a seminal study of race relations and the colonial legacy in the Dominican Republic by the feisty social science scholar and intellectual Franklin J. Franco Pichardo (1936–2013), now becomes available for the first time to the Englishspeaking reader. A remarkable translation by Patricia Mason as far as the content no less than the form, Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation renders with precision the data, argument, and point of view of the original text while faithfully capturing the agility of Franco’s prose: the short paragraphs, straightforward

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syntax, and widely accessible lexicon even when narrating complicated aspects of the political economy of maltreatment in the colonial history of Santo Domingo and the rest of the hemisphere. Encountering it now in English four and a half decades after its initial publication in Spanish, we cannot think of updating Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation as if we felt the author had left gaps in the scholarly treatment of his subject. In fact, any lacunae we might chance upon as we read the book now paradoxically point to our indebtedness to it. The questions we might perceive as unanswered or not fully addressed may in fact stem from the expansion of our knowledge in the field made possible in large measure precisely by Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation. Fewer than two hundred pages long in the original edition and going through several reprints in the first year of its publication, the book had a discernible impact on a Dominican readership that until then had not experienced Franco’s type of vigorous and committed intervention in the public sphere by a member of the academic community working outside the agenda of the state. Franco burst into the discursive arena as a voice that took sides with the Dominican people—understood as a complex, diverse formation of ethno-racial and class components—against the official narrative of the nation as a homogeneous whole prevalent until then. The official narrative insistently depicted the country’s population by means of a portrait that phenotypically and socially excluded the majority of Dominicans. Since his scholarly advocacy had the inclusion of the entire population into the story of the nation as one of its ultimate goals, the language and the overall style of his writings had to remain accessible to all literate readers, hence the agility of his prose, the short length of his sentences, brief paragraphs, and the choice of vocabulary. Correspondingly, Franco’s text was received with much acclaim by the country’s readers, including a significant portion of young students and members of the general public. The book placed Franco at the forefront of a new generation of committed scholars who did not limit the uses of their erudition and talent exclusively to adding conceptual flourishes within the horizons of their disciplines. Rather, in addition to complying with the rigorous demands of their fields of study, they emphasized the necessary role of scholars in helping to liberate the population from their alienating education. Dominican students until then had learned about their past through a dogma that made them ideological allies of the logic of exclusion bequeathed by the colonial order. As a result, entire generations of citizens would echo ideas of nation and cultural heritage that clearly excluded or maligned them. Their education had condemned the majority of Dominicans to conceptual self-annulation. Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation came to join a family of texts published from the 1920s to the 1970s that we now recognize as central to Caribbean intellectual history insofar as they have had an ideologically emancipating impact on the peoples of the Antillean region. Ainsi parla l’Oncle (1928), by social scientist Jean Price-Mars (1876–1969), excavated the cultural legacy of the enslaved Africans brought to colonial Saint Domingue and urged the Haitian

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population to embrace it as their legitimate heritage irrespective of the insistence of the upper classes and the learned elites in concealing it in order to showcase the legacy of their beloved France instead. The political essay We, Slaves of Surinam (1934) by anti-colonialist intellectual Anton de Kom (1898–1945) confronted the racialized narratives of the Surinamese past as taught in the schools, which had typically represented the deeds of Dutch warriors fighting against the armies of competing empires as sources of national pride while discrediting the legacy of human rights, freedom, and justice bequeathed by the black maroons who fought the Dutch colonial regime that had reduced them to captivity and social death on the plantation. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939), the famous epic by the towering Martinican poet Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), affirmed in evocative verse the human dignity and the cultural worth of the African legacy in the Francophone Caribbean against the grain of predominant Eurocentric assumptions in the region. Similarly, the psychiatrist and anti-colonialist thinker Frantz Fanon (1925–1961), Césaire’s compatriot, committed to print his piercing meditation Black Skin, White Masks (1952), a critical exploration of the material conditions and forces of oppression responsible for inculcating in the Africandescended population a complex of inferiority vis-à-vis their more empowered white counterparts. The epoch-making essay The Pleasures of Exile (1960), by the renowned Barbadian novelist George Lamming, compellingly examined the relationship between knowledge and liberation in the Caribbean, assigning a comparable role to the armed insurrection led by Toussaint Louverture and the intellectual work of Trinidadian thinker C. L. R. James, whose oeuvre sought to restore the humanity long denied to the non-white populations that had fueled the economies of Caribbean societies. Within that genealogy of texts, Franco’s Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation found its place when it appeared in 1969, and several kindred works would follow into the 1970s with publications such as Caliban: Notes Toward A Discussion of Culture in Our America (1974), Roberto Fernández Retamar’s much-cited essay that inf luentially argued for re-centering the legacies of resistance owed to the victims of colonial oppression as the formative core of the cultures of the Americas. Similarly, Miguel Barnet’s Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (1977), an evocative reconstruction of the life of centenarian black Cuban Esteban Montejo, showed the incessant struggle of the downtrodden to assert their human dignity as Montejo passed from the stage of disempowering slavery, to survival in the wild as a fugitive from the plantation, to political agency as a revolutionary soldier in the war for Cuban independence. Overall, these works and the larger family of which they form part provided tools of conceptual empowerment to Caribbean communities that had for centuries been coerced into denying themselves, tools that they could now use to interrupt their self-negation. The writers and thinkers in question put their knowledge to the service of a redemptive agenda, thereby evincing the role that socio-historical, cultural, and political analyses could play in advancing the cause of justice. They acted on the conviction that liberation required an effort

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to dismantle the opprobrious legacy of mental colonization that had afflicted the peoples of the Americas. They believed that to begin to aspire to societies governed by the principle of human decency and respect for the citizenry irrespective of difference, the marginalized subsections of the region’s population had to salvage their spiritual values, dispel confusing and often degrading versions of their ancestry, and recognize the significance of their own contributions to building the societies in which they lived. Their writings seemed predicated on the belief that in order for those groups occupying the margins of the social system to build emancipatory projects and have a chance at a promissory future they needed to rehabilitate the memory of their past, to gain cognitive access to a moment prior to the dehumanization and vilification perpetrated against them by the engineers of the colonial transaction.

II. Official Dominicanness, Violence, and the Campus Stronghold While Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation occupied a unique place in Dominican scholarship, it did not occur in isolation. Just as Franco formed part of a cadre of Caribbean intellectuals committed to putting their academic training to the service of justice and inclusion, he also belonged to a Dominican generation of men and women of letters, social scientists, artists, and journalists who began to come into their own as thinkers with a social consciousness toward the end of the thirty-year long dictatorship (1930–1961) of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (1891–1961). The dictator, a rural security guard who grew into a murderous, depraved, and kleptomaniacal military leader, achieved ascendancy through his service in the National Guard, the militia created by Washington during the US occupation of the Dominican Republic in 1916–1924. Trujillo’s dictatorship became famous for its implacable violence toward any sort of dissidence, rampant use of torture chambers, appropriation of the country’s wealth by the tyrant or his cronies, and genocide of Haitian immigrant workers plus Dominicans of Haitian parents, among many other forms of malevolence. But the dictatorship also invested itself in establishing a creed of Dominicanness that encompassed a definition of the country’s culture and ancestry as well as a way of remembering the past. During the three decades of its ominous existence, the dictatorship financed the careers of lesser intellects such as Manuel Arturo Peña Batlle (1902–1954), Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi (1906–1986), and Joaquín Balaguer (1907–2002), who functioned as scribes of the regime devoted to promoting an idea of nation completely indebted to the cultural logic of the colonial order, which represented the Spanish conquistadors as the model of humanity for everyone to follow. Recognizable for their conceptually unsophisticated formulations and unfounded claims, these scribes advanced a creed of national identity devoid of African-descended elements. They posited whiteness as the racial attribute of the country’s citizens, Catholicism as their religion, and European heritage as the basis of their culture no matter how stridently the phenotype,

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cultural practices, and diverse forms of worship of the population clashed with the official dogma of Dominican nationality. The death of the perverse tyrant in 1961 produced an interlude of hope that gained ascendancy in 1962 with the election of the democratic president Juan Bosch, an anti-Trujillo thinker who had resisted the dictatorship from his exile. Seven months later, the right wing of the military, rear guard of the dictatorship, staged a coup d’état that put an end to the constitutionally elected government. Then, in April 1965 a popular uprising led by armed civilians and a liberal faction of the military took to the streets to demand a return to the democratic order. The popular will did not have its way as its foes received reinforcements from the US Marines, whose mighty troops invaded the country to take sides with the coup leaders against the advocates of democracy and the constitutional order. Finally, with the support of the United States and the right-wing Dominican armed forces, in addition to business leaders as well as the upper echelons of the Catholic Church, the crafty Joaquín Balaguer, former scribe of and fervent believer in the state of affairs maintained by the dictatorship, installed himself in power as president of the republic. The sinuous scribe would sustain himself in power time and again by means of electoral fraud, political violence, and the use of public funds to buy allies. The ascent of Balaguer dealt a fell blow to the viability of hope for Dominicans who had yearned for an end to the horrors of the Trujillo regime. With Balaguer, the ethos and practices of the dictatorship resumed their predominance in Dominican society now under the legitimizing guise of a nominal representative democracy. This seemed particularly ominous in light of Balaguer’s role as a spokesperson of the former regime’s alienating cultural discourse. The unfortunate outcome triggered much soul searching among the liberal and progressive intelligentsia, many of whose members had lived and studied abroad as political exiles during the Trujillo era. However, non-trujillista Dominican thinkers now had a resource which they had lacked before, for now the public university, the University of Santo Domingo, had become a forum from which they could speak with a measure of freedom. In 1961, shortly after the death of the tyrant, progressive students, faculty, and staff successfully lobbied to secure the university’s autonomy vis-à-vis the state as reflected in the institution’s new name: Autonomous University of Santo Domingo. The immediate measures taken by the professoriate and the student body to assert their autonomy included the expulsion of the crafty Balaguer from the faculty of the law school along with several other professors who had records of complicity with the murderous dictatorship and identification with the distorting creed of Dominicanness promoted by the regime. The public university thus established itself as an independent ground and a focus of intellectual resistance to the cultural and historical disinformation espoused by the scribes of the state. As a result, the Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, known by its acronym as la UASD, frequently found itself in conflict with the government. The antagonistic rapport with the regime, especially during the first twelve years of the Balaguer administration (1966–1978), often brought police and military

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violence to the hollow halls of the university, with troops treading the school grounds and occasionally shooting students to death on their own campus. But, dangerous as it was, that acrimonious rapport with the violent and conservative forces of the state clarified the context and provided a framework for orienting the production of knowledge and scholarship in general. Scholars, researchers, educators, and intellectuals affiliated with the institution came to see themselves justifiably as a stronghold of the critical consciousness of the society. Franco stood out among his peers for his passionate leaning in favor of an approach to the study of the past that aspired to shed light on the structure of social relations and to enable social action in the present. This predilection became clear with his first book which literally brought the storyline to the moment of the author’s writing. Entitled República Dominicana: clases, crisis y comandos (1966), a volume that earned the author Cuba’s Casa de las Américas Essay Prize, examined the historical forces that had led to the April 1965 popular uprising and the ensuing US invasion then taking place even as Franco wrote the book. The study, which appeared also in Italian translation as Santo Domingo (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1966), goes from the colonial period, to the 1916 US invasion of the country, to the rise of the Trujillo regime, to the short-lived government of Bosch, to the reactionary coup d’état in 1963, to the popular uprising of April 1965 and the US invasion that ensued, paving the way for the ascent to power of the Trujillo-lackey Balaguer, who assumed the presidency in 1966, the year of the book’s publication. Here Franco outlines the historical background and the geopolitical frame within which the Dominican crisis could make sense, evincing a tendency to look for the larger international context of apparently local national events, a feature shared by several of his peers who worked under the influence of the new “science of history” associated with the teachings of historical materialism advanced by Karl Marx (1818– 1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895). The year after his award-winning debut book, Franco published a slim volume entitled La aportación de los negros (Santo Domingo: Editonac, 1967), subsequently reissued in various formats, including as an article in the scholarly journal Estudios Sociales (12.3 [1968]: 34–364], which would form the basis for Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation. These early texts exhibited the animated engagement of Dominican scholars at the time in looking for the best way to undertake “a new interpretation of our history,” aware, as most progressive scholars were, that traditional historiography had severely distorted the understanding of the country’s past (Franco 1968: 347). Franco spoke overtly of the manipulation (“manipuleo”) of historical data by the learned elites in previous generations, which in his view had resulted in the reticence of many Dominicans to acknowledge their African origins, preferring instead to legitimize themselves racially by invoking Spanish ancestors (347).

III. Nascent Ethnic Studies: Impact at Home and Abroad With these early interventions, leading in 1969 to Los negros, los mulatos y la nación dominicana, Franco created ethnic studies in the Dominican academy. Before

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his precedent the study of the experience of African-descended Dominicans had seemed inconceivable. Indeed, when he first made known to colleagues his interest in Afro-Dominicans as a unit of study, many in the disciplines of history and sociology responded with utter “incredulity” as to the end that such a project could serve or how it could in any way shed light on a better understanding of the country’s history (Franco 2004: 497; Torres-Saillant 2011: 144). Blackness had previously enjoyed a measure of legitimacy in the country’s scholarly discourse primarily as a factor of national folklore, a decorative cultural trait, or a local expression of the negrismo that emerged as a popular theme in the literatures of the Hispanic Caribbean from the 1930s onward. For instance, the great poet Manuel del Cabral (1907–1999) had published his slim volume of verse 12 poemas negros (Santo Domingo: Tipografía Fémina, 1935) and his colleague Tomás Hernández Franco (1904–1952) had studied the phenomenon of negrismo in his essay Apuntes sobre poesía popular y poesía negra en las Antillas (San Salvador: Ateneo de El Salvador, 1942). During the early 1970s, following the ethno-racial exploration inaugurated by Franco, the theme of blackness would become more frequent in the study of literature and culture. Witness articles such as those by Carlos Fernández Rocha, “El refranero negro dominicano: apuntes para el blasón popular negro en la República Dominicana” (Eme Eme 3.18 [(1972]: 53–620); Héctor Incháustegui Cabral, “La poesía de tema negro en Santo Domingo” (Eme Eme 5 [1973]: 3–23); and Bruno Rosario Candelier, “Los valores negros en la poesía dominicana” (Eme Eme 15 [1974]: 29–66). But any discernible presence of African-descended persons as a factor of social reality in the country or as a legitimate component of the Dominican nation, with a recognition of the marginalization of the black experience in the discourse of the country’s heritage, only begins to emerge after Franco’s work brought the subject into visibility for his peers in the academy and for the general public. Sociologist Ramona Hernández, the head of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute at the City College of New York, has usefully noted the proliferation of publications on the subject after Franco’s text. In the Dominican Republic no less than 41 books have tackled the subject of blackness, ethnic identity, or race relations between 1970 and 2014. By the same token, in the United States during the same period 45 books have appeared that deal with African origins and the race question in Dominican society. Franco’s influence in fueling this bibliographic output at home and abroad may be gathered from the high frequency of references to his oeuvre, and especially to Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation, by most subsequent authors (Hernández 2014). Without aiming for exhaustive coverage, glossing the aforementioned bibliographic growth may prove useful to give readers of the English version of Franco’s classic text an idea of its impact on the production of knowledge in its field. The earliest books most closely related to Franco’s subject tackled race relations indirectly through their inherent critique of the assumptions of the official discourse on the presumed fractious nature of Haitian–Dominican relations from the very beginning. Emilio Cordero Michel, in La revolución haitiana y Santo

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Domingo (Santo Domingo: Editorial Nacional, 1968) and Frank Moya Pons, in La dominación haitiana: 1822–1844 (Santiago: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, 1971), invited a reconsideration of the traditional rendition of the unification of the island of Hispaniola first in 1801 under Saint-Domingue General Toussaint Louverture and then in 1822 under Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer. Cordero Michel and Moya Pons put forth compelling data accompanied by persuasive analyses that challenged the official story which had represented both instances of the unification of the island as an unqualifed “yoke” (“yugo”) for the inhabitants of the Spanish-speaking population to the east. Lil Despradel’s seminal essay, “Etapas del antihaitianismo en la República Dominicana: el papel de los historiadores” (Pólitica y sociología en Haití y la República Dominicana. Ed. Gérard PierreCharles. México, D. F.: Editora Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1974, 83–108), made explicit the role of historians in devising accounts of the country’s past with the discernible aim of fomenting anti-Haitian interpretations. Pedro Mir in Tres leyendas de colores (Santo Domingo: Editora Nacional, 1969), Frank Moya Pons in La Española en el siglo XVI, 1493–1520 (Santiago: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, 1971) and Hugo Tolentino Dipp in Raza e historia en Santo Domingo: Los orígenes del prejuicio racial en América (Santo Domingo: Editora de la Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, 1974) established Hispaniola, the inaugural site of the colonial transaction, as the birthplace of the logic of maltreatment and dehumanization of the ethnic other as a factor of economic development for the Christian West. They trace to the events of Santo Domingo the emergence of the racist ideology that would dominate much of modern history for the following five centuries. Similarly, Walter Cordero’s “El tema negro y la discriminación racial en la República Dominicana” (Ciencia 2.2 [1975]: 151–162) looked at contemporary expressions of the racism that the colonial transaction created. Beginning with Vodú y magia en Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo: Museo del Hombre Dominicano, 1975) and continuing with El indio, el negro y la vida tradicional dominicana (Santo Domingo: Museo del Hombre Dominicano, 1978), the literary artist and historian Carlos Esteban Deive would produce over ten volumes devoted to the examination of Afro-Dominicans in the land from the slavery period to the contemporary moment. The folklorist Fradique Lizardo (1930–1997) spent much of his adult life exploring the indigenous and African roots of folk and popular cultures in the Dominican Republic, with volumes such as Danzas y bailes folkloricos dominicanos (Santo Domingo: Editora Taller, 1974) and Cultura africana en Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo: Editora Taller, 1979) standing out among his most memorable written contributions. The late June C. Rosenberg’s El Gagá: religión y sociedad de un culto dominicano, un estudio comparativo (Santo Domingo: Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, 1979) pioneered the study of a cultural form born of the interaction of Haitian and Dominican folk practices in the border regions. With Cultura y folklore de Samaná (Santo Domingo: Lotería Nacional, 1984) and much of his subsequent written work, the sociologist and folklorist Dagoberto Tejeda Ortiz has contributed not only important knowledge of non-European

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sources for Dominican heritage but has also examined region-specific folk expressions, pointing to the internal diversity of the country’s complex culture. The ethnomusicologist Martha Ellen Davis’s La otra ciencia: el vodú dominicano como religión y medicina populares (Santo Domingo: Editora Universitaria, 1987) explored the role of Dominican vodou as a site of alternative epistemologies. Celsa Albert Batista, the author of studies such as Mujer y esclavitud en Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo: Centro Dominicano de Estudios de la Educación, 1990) and Los africanos y nuestra isla (Santo Domingo: Centro Dominicano de Estudios de la Educación, 1989), contributed a missing critical angle by focusing on the particular impact that slavery and racial exclusion had on their female victims, bringing the intersection of race and gender to bear on the discussion of the plight of the oppressed captive population. Josefina Zaiter’s La identidad social y nacional en la República Dominicana: un análisis psico-social (Madrid: Editorial de la Universidad Complutense, 1992) examines the ways in which issues connected to the perception of devalued ancestry can lead to problematic identity locations with possible debilitating effects on the mental health of the citizenry. By the 1980s the focus on race relations that Franco inaugurated as an important aspect of Dominican society had become a recurring theme among scholars at home. A parallel development was taking place abroad. The slim volume La construcción de raza y nación en la República Dominicana (Santo Domingo: Editora Universitaria, 1987) by the Dutch political scientists Meinert Fennema and Troetje Loewenthal, who subsequently reissued their text in English as The Construction of Race and Nation in the Dominican Republic (Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam, 1992), showed the dominant trend to stress the Negrophobia of the elites and the complicity of the state in sponsoring exclusionary paradigms of national identity. During the 1990s the subject received sustained attention in such works as La isla imaginada: Historia, identidad y utopía en La Española (San Juan and Santo Domingo: Editorial Isla Negra and Ediciones Librería La Trinitaria, 1997; reissued in English as The Imagined Island: History, Identity, and Utopia in Hispaniola, trans. Jane Ramírez, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2005), by the Puerto Rican historian Pedro L. San Miguel; Coloring the Nation: Race and Ethnicity in the Dominican Republic (Oxford and Boulder, Colorado: Signal Book Limited/Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001) by British geographer David Howard; and Reconstructing Racial Identity and the African Past in the Dominican Republic (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009) by the US anthropologist Kimberly Eison Simmons. The 1990s also marks the incursion of the Dominican diaspora—namely, academics of Dominican ancestry affiliated with universities in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere—into the field of race and ethnicity in the ancestral homeland. Silvio Torres-Saillant ushered in the entrance of diaspora scholars with such chapters as “The Dominican Republic” (No Longer Invisible: Afro-Latin Americans Today. Ed. Miles Litvinoff. London: Minority Rights Group, 1995, 109–38) and “Dominican Literature and Its Criticism: Anatomy of a Troubled Identity” (A History of Literature in the Caribbean. Vol. 1. Ed. A. James Arnold. Amsterdam

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and Philadelphia: Benjamins Publishers, 1994, 49–64). Those texts exposed the Negrophobia of the scribes of the Dominican state without obliterating the story of self-assertiveness that one can also find in the country’s African-descended population. They focused instead on the disparity between the official discourse of national identity and the effort of Afro-Dominicans to affirm their human dignity in light of the outlandish claims of the conservative intelligentsia, urging students of race relations and national identity in Dominican society to widen their analytical lens so as to encompass the actions of the people. Other works by the diasporic cohort of scholars include Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic (Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2000) by the political scientist Ernesto Sagás and the engaging critical work by the Toronto-based literary scholar Néstor R. Rodríguez, especially La isla y su envés: representaciones de lo nacional en el ensayo dominicano contemporáneo (San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 2003), and Escritura de desencuentro en la República Dominicana (México, D. F.: Siglo Veintiúno, 2005), the latter reissued in English as Divergent Dictions: Contemporary Dominican Literature (trans. Kerstin Oloff. Coconut Creek, FL: Caribbbean Studies Press, 2011). The Colombia-based literary and cultural studies scholar Elissa L. Lister has authored the bilingual collection of essays Le conflit haïtiano-dominicain dans la littérature caribéenne/El conflicto domínico-haitiano en la literatura caribeña (Collection Bohio. Pétion-Ville: C3 Editions, 2013), which focuses on how the literary artists from the two nations of Hispaniola, their respective diasporas, and from Puerto Rico have tackled the question of racial othering and the difficult coexistence between Haitians and Dominicans. The sociologist Ginetta E. B. Candelario offered a complex interpretation of racial self-esteem in Black behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museum to Beauty Shops (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007). The linguist Juan R. Valdez privileged the question of race in his Tracing Dominican Identity: The Writings of Pedro Henríquez Ureña (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), an evocative look at the oeuvre of the eminent Dominican literary scholar and philologist. The literary scholars Danny Méndez in Narratives of Migration and Displacement in Dominican Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), Ramón Antonio Victoriano-Martínez in Rayanos y dominicanyorks: la dominicanidad en el siglo XXI (Série Nuevo Siglo. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamerica, 2014), and Lorgia García-Peña in Archiving Contradictions: Bodies, Nation, and the Narration of Dominicanidad (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015) examine racial identity vis-à-vis official discourses on Dominicanness from a perspective that encompasses literature and culture in the homeland as well as their counterparts in the diaspora. In The Mulatto Nation: Class, Race, and Dominican National Identity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014) the historian April J. Mayes has undertaken an intricate reading of racial meaning in Dominican society that considers a kind of creolization stemming from the rapport of local elites with wealthy foreign whites and stresses the need to establish exactly how people on the ground have understood racial terms and their implications at specific historical moments and in distinct geographical settings.

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IV. The Unseen Black and the Colonial Imagination Prior to the publication in 1969 of Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation, the historical scholarship in the Dominican Republic afforded teachers and students only two books that engaged the black experience in the country. One, written by the exiled political scientist Pedro Andrés Pérez Cabral (1910-1981) under the title La comunidad mulata: El caso sociopolítico de la República Dominicana (Caracas: Gráfica Americana, 1967), had the effect of undermining the possibility of studying people of African descent as an ethnically differentiated segment of the population given its stress on the pervasive fusion of the racial components that went into the formation of the Dominican people. Pérez Cabral categorically construed Dominicans as the only fully mulatto community in the world (Pérez Cabral 1967: 19). The focus on the fusion of the African element into the Dominican person points to an apparently dissolved blackness whose surviving traces one could mitigate. The nervousness of the light-skinned creole elites over their hidden blackness gave the folk poet Juan Antonio Alix (1833–1918) the punch line for his humorous 1883 poem “El negro tras de la oreja” (“The Black Behind the Ears”), in which the speaker taunted middle-class compatriots self-assured of their whiteness with the unsettling reminder of “the black” they carried “behind the ears” (Alix 1969: 28–30). But, as Franco’s Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation plainly shows, Afro-Dominicans did not dissolve nor relegate themselves to a hideaway spot behind the ears of a light-skinned mulatto population. In fact, their slavery had only come to an end in Spanish-speaking Santo Domingo with the abolition proclaimed by the government of Jean-Pierre Boyer upon the unification of the island in 1822, only eleven years before the birth of the poet Alix. The other book that treated the subject of Dominican blackness prior to Franco’s, Los negros y la esclavitud en Santo Domingo (1967), written by the genealogist and historian Carlos Larrazabal Blanco (1894–1989), simply offered a dispassionate, taxonomic rendition of slavery on the island without reference to the enduring legacies of the peculiar institution as reflected in the structure of social relations in the present. A typical account of slave insurrections or other acts of resistance undertaken by the enslaved population against their captors figured in Larrazabal Blanco’s history as instances of the “crimes” committed by the captives against colonial masters rather than as part of the epic struggle for freedom spearheaded by Afro-Dominicans. With a little less loyalty to the slave masters, the historian might have presented the rebels as political ancestors whose inestimable precedent the advocates of democratic inclusion in Dominican society and throughout the hemisphere could draw from even today (Larrazabal Blanco 1998: 95). Conversely, when narrating the retaliation of the colonial authorities against the rebels, Larrazabal Blanco refrained from passing judgment on the violence of the masters irrespective of its gruesome brutality. He makes no value judgment, for instance, when narrating the actions of colonial lieutenant governor José Núñez de Cáceres, who in August 1812 captured without resistance the leaders of a disclosed conspiracy of black insurgents and proceeded to make

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an example of them by hanging them, disemboweling them, and frying their entrails in tar (489). Reviewing Larrazabal Blanco’s book in 1969, the Colombian linguist Germán de Granda of Instituto Caro y Cuervo decried its dearth of reflection on “the incorporation of blacks in Dominican society and its ensuing difficulties” (Granda 1969: 117). Dominican historiography for long overlooked the 300 years during which people of African descent lived under abject slavery. Nor did scholars consider the implications of that history for the nature of Dominican social relations in the republican period. School books dealing with the country’s past made only passing reference to the enslaved population, and when recounting the periodic uprisings of the captives, they invariably characterized them as “disruptions of public order” in the life of the community, thereby representing the enslaved masses as external to the population that contemporary Dominicans could regard as ancestors (Utrera 1995: 281). The discursive practice of tracing the origins of Dominican nationality (ethno-racially, politically, and morally) to the European settlers who destroyed indigenous societies and subjected imported Africandescended workers to disempowering servitude began in the eighteenth century. The foundational essay La idea del valor de la Isla Española (1785), by the Creole mulatto priest Antonio Sánchez Valverde (1729–1790), ushered in the rationale of the narrative tradition. The logic of the colonial narrative expanded with the four-volume work Historia de Santo Domingo (1853 Vol. 1) by the lawyer Antonio del Monte y Tejada (1783–1861). A member of the Creole elite of the colony, Del Monte y Tejada had moved to Cuba in 1801, the year when the black General Toussaint Louverture effectuated the unification of the island. In unifying Santo Domingo with Saint Domingue, Toussaint, operating as a French officer, sought to materialize the terms of the 1795 Treaty of Basel, whereby Spain had ceded to France its colonial claim over the Spanish-speaking portion of the island of Hispaniola. The Sánchez Valverde-Del Monte y Tejada narrative tradition became solidly codified in the Compendio de la historia de Santo Domingo, a national history published in four volumes between 1867 and 1906 by the writer and government functionary José Gabriel García (1834–1910). By the first decade of the twentieth century the affirmation of the slave master as the only eligible ancestor for the Dominican population had become categorical in the hands of vulgarizers such as Bernardo Pichardo (1877–1924), a government functionary whose Resumen de historia patria (1922) simply recast in textbook format with melodramatic flair the narrative inaugurated and codified by his predecessors. Characteristically, in recounting a slave insurrection that took place in 1802 in Santo Domingo, Pichardo aligns himself emotionally and ideologically with the prowess of the colonial officer who crushed the rebels, attributing their defeat, in his words, to “don Juan Barón, heir to the legendary valor of the Castilian race which, through times and harsh hindrances, we Dominicans, their descendants, preserve with pride” (Pichardo 1969: 64). Curiously, his representation of Barón as paragon of Dominicanness could not proceed without a measure of conceptual depravity insofar as it construes Dominicanness as consonant with oppression

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and inimical to freedom, thus perverting the very thing that he purports to glorify. The historical Barón assisted Napoleon’s invading forces in their effort to take hold of Santo Domingo in 1802, aiding and abetting the return of slavery to the Spanish-speaking side of the island, which had enjoyed abolition since the year before when Toussaint effectuated the unification. Barón frustrated the resistance of the slaves who had risen against the colonial system, thus facilitating the renewed captivity of blacks in Santo Domingo. If one considers that the majority of historical Dominicans—as distinct from the fictional ones imagined by the traditional historiography—trace their origins to the black captives rather than to the colonial masters, Barón will have to figure among the foes of the Dominican people rather than the heroic progenitor that Pichardo’s narrative set out to concoct. That a text such as Pichardo’s Resumen should reign supreme in the classroom for several generations could only attest to the ongoing investment of the Dominican state in waging psychological warfare against its population, its frenetic desire to attend to the people that their definition of nation imagined rather than the one that actually existed (Torres-Saillant 2011: 106–107). During the Trujillo regime an official ordinance issued on October 30, 1942 renewed the status of Pichardo’s rendition of the Dominican past as an official textbook for use in the classroom, and in 1969, under Balaguer, a new edition appeared, updated and “corrected” by the scribe of the dictatorship Rodríguez Demorizi. The appeal of Pichardo’s book to the guardians of Dominicanness during Trujillo’s tyranny seems reasonable. In embracing a book that favors oppressive slave-masters over slaves who fought to dismantle the colonial system, Trujillo’s scribes, whose job consisted primarily in safeguarding the continuity of the regime, did their best to preserve the dictatorship’s own oppressive model. Trujillo’s intelligentsia, irrespective of the ancestry or phenotype of each individual writer, must have realized that identification with the downtrodden, as they looked back on the slavery regime in the colonial period, would have aligned them conceptually with the masses of the Dominican people who bore on their shoulders the violence and the depredation of the dictatorship. They might thereby show insufficient loyalty to the regime that financed their scholarship, their social prestige, and their significance. They therefore affirmed their allegiance to their government by siding with the ruling elites of the past. Their contempt for the oppressed masses shows up most evocatively in Rodríguez Demorizi’s footnote to a passage in Sánchez Valverde’s La idea del valor de la isla de Santo Domingo. Already well into the second half of the twentieth century, Trujillo already dead, the scribe of the dictatorship, still under the ideological grip of the regime as a servant of Balaguer, put his cards on the table politically when he commiserated with the plight of colonial slave-masters. Slave owners, in his view, suffered the indignity of a captive population that abused the privileges extended to them by their generous overseers. Rodríguez Demorizi reports with sadness that “slaves enjoyed an excessive number of days when they could detach themselves from their labor,” thereby harming “the advancement of the island” (Sánchez Valverde 1988: 249n). Official Dominican narratives of the

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country’s past remained secure in the hired hands of publicists and literati, the majority bearing law degrees, who kept their loyalty to the idea of the colonial past as an era of glory for the Dominican people. They rejoiced in the notion that the Christian faith and Western civilization had first entered the hemisphere through the island of Santo Domingo, a source of presumed national pride captured in the title of the volume La República Dominicana: Origen y destino del pueblo Cristiano más antiguo de América [Dominican Republic: Origin and Destiny of the Oldest Christian Nation in the Americas] (1957), by the writer and government functionary-turned historian Ramón Marrero Aristy (1913–1959). They similarly cherished the thought that Christopher Columbus had loved La Isla Española more fervently than any other of the territories that he “discovered” in the course of his four voyages, and they invested much archival research and forceful argumentation in establishing that the remains of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea lay in the Cathedral of Santo Domingo. Therein lay the reputation enjoyed by man of letters Emiliano Tejera (1841–1923), the author of an 1878 monograph in which he claims to have authenticated a skeleton found in the old colonial church as matching the profile of the Genoese adventurer who led the way for the conquest and colonization of the Americas. A second edition of Tejera’s monograph, Los restos de Colón en Santo Domingo y Los dos restos de Cristóbal Colón appeared in 1926 under the auspices of the Columbian National Board (Junta Nacional Colombina), an organization dedicated to the mission of “publishing works that contribute to honoring the memory of Don Cristóbal Colón” (Tejera 1986: vii). When a fourth edition of the monograph appeared in 1986, as the Dominican Republic geared itself up for the 1992 quincentennary of the arrival of Columbus on the land, the introduction by Pedro Troncoso Sánchez (1904–1989), a member of the Trujillo intelligentsia, still found it acceptable to urge Dominican society “to assert the glory that belongs to it for having been the land of the hemisphere most closely linked to the life of the ingenious Discoverer and for how it was in this country that European culture first installed itself in the New World” (Troncoso Sánchez 1986: ix). With a historiography militantly committed to avowing the European settler as the natural ancestor of the Dominican population, narratives of the country’s past tended either to omit or dulcify the story of the domination and dehumanization endured by the aboriginal people of Hispaniola as well as the enslaved African-descended work force imported to the colony from 1502 onwards. The dearth of reference to the presence of blacks in the colonial period eventually begot a way of remembering a colonial past devoid of blacks, even though the labor of the captive African-descended population built Dominican society and produced the material well-being that the ruling elites enjoyed. Witness the candid rationale of the white Creole José Núñez de Cáceres, a member of the colonial elite who in 1821 spearheaded a short-lived declaration of independence against Spain, for not considering the abolition of slavery as part of his independence platform. Basically, he said he could not in good conscience commit

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to promulgating an emancipation law that would harm his people. Writing in 1864, the journalist and government functionary Alejandro Angulo Guridi (1823–1906) recalls the context thus: “There were even those who would advise Núñez de Cáceres to free the slaves, arguing that they themselves would help defend the sovereignty of all while at the same time removing the true cause of the antipathy shown by Boyer and his people. But, the good patriot answered that he would not allow his hand, by the stroke of a pen, to reduce his compatriots to the most frightful poverty” (Angulo Guridi 1955: 402). In this justification, the “good patriot” revealed two things: 1) even at the beginning of the third decade of the nineteenth century the Santo Domingo elites depended on their slaves for their material well-being; and 2) the colonial leadership did not regard the captive population, the ancestors of the majority of Dominicans today, as part of their people. Like Núñez de Cáceres, statesmen and intellectuals following the birth of the republic as a sovereign nation preserved their reticence to see the Dominican people anywhere else than in the ruling élite and the highest echelons of the colonial social structure when looking at the past. The reticence to see blacks in colonial Santo Domingo affected even the perception of otherwise enlightened thinkers such as the renowned humanist Pedro Henríquez Ureña, himself a mulatto, who simply did not recognize the overwhelming presence of people of African descent in his country of birth. In a 1940 monograph on the Spanish language in Santo Domingo, whose “African influence” he terms “very scarce,” the esteemed philologist categorically affirmed that: “Until 1916 the black population did not predominate in Santo Domingo, not even the mixture of blacks and whites” (Henríquez Ureña 1982: 130, 134). He argued that the country only appeared “Africanized” to foreigners through a confusion with “the contiguous Haiti,” and highlighted it as “significant” that until 1880 “Dominican literature and culture in general” rested in the hands of creoles of European origin or mixed with “Indian blood,” citing a long list of the salient names, including both the Ureña and the Henríquez families (134). The distinguished scholar circumscribed blackness in the Dominican Republic to foreign influences, hence his uneasiness about the “serious invasion of braceros” from Haiti and the Anglophone West Indies, which was “rapidly blackening the country” (133). The idea of the country’s unfortunate “blackening” as a result of extraneous incursions recurred after the death of Trujillo in history books such as one that, published originally in 1966 and reissued frequently since then, received official approval as a text for use in the high school classroom. The author, a musician named Jacinto Gimbernard (1931–) who took a break from his notes and scales to write history, produced a book whose storyline merely reproduced the conventional narrative of the nation. Gimbernard remained faithful to the structure and the value system contained in Bernardo Pichardo’s fictional tale of the Dominican past. In recalling the “misfortunes” endured by Dominicans during the 22 years of unification with Haiti, he stresses President Boyer’s opprobrious “eagerness to blacken the Dominican population and thus destroy the culture which it

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had proudly displayed” (Gimbernard 1971: 235). Gimbernard, perpetrating what today we would recognize as massive child abuse against the self-esteem of predominantly dark-skinned students who would have to use his book, presented blackness as tantamount to the destruction of Dominican culture. He spread negrophobia nationally not only with sanction but also with reward from the State given the guaranteed sale of his offensive textbook. One can only speculate on the predicament of black and mulatto students, who lacked an appropriate counter-discourse to protect themselves from the epistemic violence perpetrated against them by an official textbook that viciously diminished their humanity.

V. The Enduring Value of Franco’s Legacy We cannot point with any certainty to when or how an individual’s political consciousness is born. But Franco’s unpublished memoir and the testimony of his family, especially his wife Angela Soto and his daughter Ana Carolina Franco, during a conversation in their home in Santo Domingo on Saturday October 4, 2014, would suggest that the author of Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation possessed the kind of sensibility that would have made it virtually impossible for him not to react to the psychological violence endured by Dominican children in the classroom when he first entered the public school setting. Apart from being a man of his time and a member of a generation imbued with democratic aspirations that suffered the indignity of living under the stifling surveillance of a totalitarian regime, Franco also had a particular disposition and a personal history that may have contributed to the outlook we find in his work. The only child of a woman of humble means who had had scarce access to formal education, he understood his mother’s precarious location in society on account of her class and gender in an elitist and blatantly patriarchal environment. Perhaps naïve about the class divide, his mother fell for a man of higher social rank. Unaware that he had no intention of forming a family with her, she became pregnant by him, and he soon disappeared from the scene. The young Franklin did not see much of his father throughout his life, except for a time when his mother, undergoing a period of scarce means that made it hard to make ends meet, sent him off to live temporarily with his father. Franklin arrived as a virtual boarder in the house where his father lived with a wife and his other children. Living as an illegitimate child in the house of his progenitor, which placed him in a marginal position vis-à-vis other members of the household, he missed his mother desperately until he ran away, never harboring any doubt that his mother was his real parent and closing ranks of solidarity and love with her rather than with his father. Given the choice between loving a father who wielded power that he could abuse in unequal relations and a mother who was vulnerable to abuse, the young Franklin chose the latter and never looked back. The conditions of his birth and early upbringing may have given the young Franklin Franco his first political education. The classroom, one can glean from

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the first pages of his unpublished memoirs, could have served as another milestone in his political awakening. In school he found an asphyxiating environment that reproduced in the classroom the rigidity of life under Trujillo outside, where the individual could not afford to display initiative, critical awareness or independence of thought. Franklin must have intuited a critique of the school system before he had the language and the knowledge to formulate his views articulately. He ran away from the first school he attended. Throughout most of his schooling—from intermediate to high school to the university—he prevailed upon his teachers to let him work as an independent study student, responsible for designing his own learning. Situating himself invariably in contradistinction to structures of oppression, Franco committed himself throughout his academic career to advancing the critique of power, exposing its logic, and advocating for its victims. Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation came out of the impetus to contribute to redressing the outrageous wrongs done by the intellectual elites to the victims of the colonial transaction. A social scientist who spent his adult life invested in the effort to advance the cause of genuine democracy on behalf of his compatriots, while espousing an internationalist outlook, Franco embodied his worldview whether he was resisting the Trujillo dictatorship, protesting the US invasion of his country, participating in party politics, extending a hand in solidarity to young colleagues from the diaspora at a time when many of his peers looked at the émigré community with outright disdain, or writing a scholarly page. During a homage to Franco on the first anniversary of his death, Hernández spoke of the unforgettable legacy of people like the author of Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation: “they cannot be forgotten because their trajectories teach our young that it is possible to be honest, that it’s worth it to defend the rights of others, that it is important to believe that Dominican society can promise a better future for all its people” (Hernández 2014). A native of the city of Santiago, Franco lived his formative years in San Francisco de Macorís, before heading out to the capital city of Santo Domingo on his own to pursue his education. As he grew older and his political opposition to the abominable dictatorship became difficult to manage safely, he went into exile, living in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Cuba, the United States, and Mexico between 1957 and 1962. Then, attracted by the interlude of hope brought about by the short-lived democratic government of Juan Bosch, he returned to his country to take a teaching post at Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Planificación. Aligned first with the radical left, Franco ran for public office on the ballot of the Unión Patriótica Antiimperialista, a legally recognized political organization created from within the Dominican Workers Party (PTD) to participate in the 1978 presidential elections. With the continued waning of options for the left, Franco leaned toward the Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD), a liberal organization led at the time by José Francisco Peña Gómez (1937–1998), an Afro-Dominican of Haitian parents who would go down in twentieth-century history as the politician with the most massive popular appeal in the country. He pursued his political interests

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while advancing an uninterrupted teaching career at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, where he became Director of Scientific Research (Gutiérrez 2002: 70). Simultaneously, he continued tirelessly to conduct research and write copiously on various aspects of the country’s past, including Trujillismo: génesis y rehabilitación (Santo Domingo: Editora Cultural Dominicana, 1971) and Duarte y la independencia nacional (Santo Domingo: Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo, 1976), the former an inquiry into the circumstances that made the rise and continued influence of the demonic dictator possible in Dominican society and the latter a humanized profile of the founding father of the Dominican nation. Consistent with his interest in public education, Franco conceived and edited the very first all-inclusive reference compendium of knowledge about Dominican society. Published originally in 1978, the eight-volume Enciclopedia Dominicana (1978) drew on the erudition and expertise of a team of over thirty scholars, and it was in its fourth edition by the time of Franco’s death. He wrote a study of proclaimed cultural values in the country, Santo Domingo: cultura, política e ideología (Santo Domingo: Editora Nacional, 1979); a historical account of Dominican political ideas, Historia de las ideas políticas en República Dominicana (Santo Domingo: Editora Nacional, 1981); and a history of the neighboring country, Haití: de Dessalines a nuestros días (Santo Domingo: Editora Nacional, 1988). With the two-volume Historia del pueblo dominicano (Santo Domingo: Instituto del Libro, 1992) he attempted a comprehensive history of the Dominican people, while aiming at a chronicle of Dominican society through the perspective of economics and finance in his Historia económica y financiera de la República Dominicana, 1884–1962: introducción a su estudio (Santo Domingo: Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, 1996). Franco tells the story of the dictatorship in Era de Trujillo (Santo Domingo: Fundación Cultural Dominicana, 1992) and compiles his newspaper articles on race and other concerns in Sobre racismo y antihaitianismo y otros ensayos (Santo Domingo: Imprenta Librería Vidal, 1997) as well as in Ensayos profanos: Sobre racismo, pesimismo e izquierdismo (Santo Domingo: Sociedad Editorial Dominicana, 2001). He covers some 160 years of Santo Domingo’s intellectual history in El pensamiento Dominicano, 1780–1940: contribución a su estudio (Santo Domingo: Editora Universitaria–UASD, 2001), and most recently he published an ambitious social history of the national population, La población dominicana: razas, clases, mestizaje y migraciones (Santo Domingo: Editoria Universitaria, 2012). Apart from these books, Franco wrote widely on the political ideas of the Dominican military leaders who fought on the democratic side during the Dominican civil war of April 1965, on the Dominican Communist Party, on the Dominican left and the country’s future, on the murder of the Mirabal sisters, and on the history of the public university, among other national subjects. On the wider regional and global sphere, his writings include an analysis of the administration of US President Ronald Reagan, a meditation on the roots of socialist thought in the Western hemisphere, an examination of the lessons of the Nicaraguan revolution, and a speculation on the future of Israel and Palestine.

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Franco consistently attended to the issues of concern to his time and place with an enlightened awareness of their intricate connection to those of other times and other places, hence his attention to trends in US foreign policy, political developments in the rest of Latin America, and events in the Middle East. A true humanist, he worried about the future of the whole species, and he engaged the wrongs of the present no less than those of the past. In April 2002, when the Dominican Republic’s Ministry of Culture awarded the prize for the Best Book of the Year to a badly written and poorly argued volume that teemed with Negrophobia, antiHaitian harangues, and acerbic indictment of Dominicans in the United States, Franco stepped up to the plate, leading a national debate about the contemptible choice by Minister of Culture Tony Raful and the jury charged with the selection. The book’s author, an Afro-Dominican man named Manuel Núñez, owes his visibility on the public sphere to the ardent rhetoric he deploys to condemn the Haitian presence in Dominican society and promote an idea of national identity borrowed from the scribes of the Trujillo dictatorship generations back. The text that won him the 2002 book prize, El ocaso de la nación dominicana, had already earned him the annual Essay Prize in 1990 when its first edition appeared, Joaquín Balaguer then in power, and a panel of jurors had deemed it proper to reward an author whose words faithfully echoed the ideology of the president. Franco narrated the details of his involvement with the book-prize affair in a text that concludes with a sort of battle cry: “The struggle against racism in Dominican cultural discourse will continue until it is finally crushed!” (Franco 2011: 27). It would take hardly any effort of the imagination to suppose that Franco would have raised his voice with equal indignation in response to ruling 168-13 by the Constitutional Court that in September 2013 denationalized hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian ancestry, reducing them to a state of vulnerability that recalls the victims of the denationalization laws in Nazi Germany during the 1930s and Idi Amin’s Uganda during the 1970s. But death surprised him just a couple of months before the baneful court ruling became public. But no speculation is needed to claim that those opposing unjust laws that target ethnically differentiated segments of the Dominican population today enjoy the benefit of the conceptual, political, and moral resources contained in the legacy that Franco bequeathed to people of good will in Dominican society, the rest of the hemisphere, and elsewhere. He believed in having a reliable knowledge of the past, an understanding of the factors that mediate social relations across history, as a way to advance the struggle for justice and equality into the future. He placed special emphasis on the indomitability of the human spirit which has caused people from time immemorial to resist the structures of oppression, hence his coverage of insurrections, slave rebellions, and revolutions. Thus, Blacks, Mulattos, and the Dominican Nation fittingly concludes by highlighting the decisive role that blacks and mulattos—the “rebels of Monte Grande”—played in getting the first government of the nascent Dominican Republic in 1844 to commit in writing to a definitive abolition of slavery and to disavow any trace of racial

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hierarchy in the new sovereignty. The book’s closing words articulate a chilling reminder that equality is not something that gets achieved in writing—no matter how inclusive the letter of the law might be. The rebels of Monte Grande put an end to “official inequality,” but they would still have to contend with “unofficial inequality” as do we and will the generations after ours. As a scholar and a citizen of his country and the world, Franco left behind for our benefit an invaluable corpus of transformative writings enhanced by a personal commitment to civic engagement that he upheld throughout the years of his productive and venerable existence.

Bibliography Alix, Juan Antonio. Décimas. Colección Estudios. Santo Domingo: Librería Dominicana, 1969. Angulo Guridi, Alejandro. “Examen crítico de la anexión de Santo Domingo a España.” Antecedentes de la anexión a España. Ed. Emilio Rodriguez Demorizi. Ciudad Trujillo: Editora Montalvo, 1955, 375–413. Franco Pichardo, Franklin. “Entre lo homogéneo y lo heterogéneo.” Desde la orilla: hacia una nacionalidad sin desalojos. Ed. Silvio Torres-Saillant, Ramona Hernández, and Blas R. Jiménez. Santo Domingo: Ediciones Librería La Trinitaria and Editora Manatí, 2004, 497–498. ——. “Prólogo.” El tigueraje intelectual. By Silvio Torres-Saillant. 2d. ed. Santo Domingo: Editora Mediabyte, S. R. L., 2011, 21–27. Gimbernard, Jacinto. Historia de Santo Domingo. 3ra. ed. Santo Domingo: Sarda, 1971. Granda, Germán de. “Reseña de Libros.” Thesaurus 24.1 (1969): 16–18. Gutiérrez, Franklin. 33 historiadores dominicanos. Santo Domingo: Ediciones Libraría La Trinitaria, 2002. Henríquez Ureña, Pedro. El Español en Santo Domingo. 4th. ed. Santo Domingo: Editora Taller, 1982. Hernández, Ramona. Raza y Negritud en la Obra de Franklin Franco: Conference. Fundación Global Democracia y Desarrollo, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. June 3, 2014 Larrazabal Blanco, Carlos. Los negros y la esclavitud en Santo Domingo. 2nd Ed. Santo Domingo: Ediciones La Trinitaria, 1998. Pérez Cabral, Pedro Andrés. La comunidad mulata: El caso sociopolítico de la República Dominicana. Caracas: Gráfica Americana, 1967. Pichardo, Bernardo. Resumen de historia patria. 5ta. Ed. Colección Pensamiento Dominicano. Santo Domingo: Editora del Caribe, 1969. Rodriguez Demorizi, Emilio, ed. Ensayos. By Antonio Sánchez Valverde. Santo Domingo: Ediciones de la Fundacion Corripio, 1988. Tejera, Emiliano. Los restos de Colón en Santo Domingo y Los dos restos de Cristóbal Colón. 4th ed. Santo Domingo: Sociedad Dominicana de Bibliófilos, Inc., 1986. Torres-Saillant, Silvio. El tigueraje intelectual. 2nd ed. Santo Domingo: Editora Mediabyte, 2011. Troncoso Sánchez, Pedro. “Introducción a la cuarta edición.” In Tejera ix–xiv. Utrera, Fr. Cipriano de. 1927. Santo Domingo: Dilucidaciones históricas. Santo Domingo: Secretaría de Estado de Educación, Bellas Artes y Cultos, 1995.

PROLOGUE

The appearance of this book—where Franklyn J. Franco once again displays his scientific rigor, his solid background in sociology, his gifts as a researcher, his interpretive skills, and his passion for humankind—is a celebration of truth and a valuable contribution to our new, scientific historiography.1 There is no question that the great merit of this work of historiography lies in its Marxist perspective. As the French philosopher L. Althusser correctly notes, Marx “gave human beings the basic principles of a scientific theory; he allowed them to understand and know the laws of this vast new continent of history. These fundamental principles of the science of history have traditionally been referred to as historical materialism.”2 The above-mentioned approach isn’t found in the works of our traditional historiography, if it can even be called that. All of the books on our country’s history that fall under this heading offer only straight narrative. It is very rare to find any exploration of the causes behind the facts in their pages, and when we do, we see that the analysis is one-sided and incorrect. Besides that, these works focus on the political superstructure with its emphasis on the people at the top. The working class—the true creators of history—make no appearance and, as a result, there is a marginalization of socio-economic factors. They therefore are constructs that are incompatible with the scientific spirit that reflect the colonialist mindset of yesterday and today’s privileged social classes. Naturally, these works could not remain silent about slavery. But they say nothing about the evolution of the slaves, their demographic importance, and their importance as a factor in progress as soon as they finally achieved their freedom. There also is no analysis at all of the class structure during different time periods and, as a result, there is no analysis of the development of class struggle. Given this biased view of history, it makes sense that events are often distorted.

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Prologue

Franklyn J. Franco confronts this distortion and sets things straight. He investigates the economic basis of the different events and reveals its close relationship with the superstructures that were produced. Even though others had already taken on this task,3 this book represents a significant enhancement as it takes a stand against what might be called “the white legend of slavery.” It has been the policy of our past historians to maintain that the slaves among us were always treated leniently by their owners. Without mentioning that black slavery was legal in Spain throughout the sixteenth century,4 they give high praise to the Crown for ending slavery for the indigenous peoples, forgetting that if our native peoples were human beings, so also were, and are, African blacks. Franco’s research destroys this “white legend.” He goes further, showing that as the economy gained new momentum in the eighteenth century—the result of increased trade with the French in the western part of the island and the emergence of a balance among the numbers of whites, freed mulattos, and black slaves—all collaboration broke down and the slaves returned to their absolutely subhuman existence of the sixteenth century. The book doesn’t say this explicitly; nevertheless, it is obvious from the facts, e.g. the outbreak of black uprisings on the “properties of Spaniards” living close to the capital as soon as they received news of the slave rebellion in the French part of the island, and the warm welcome the slaves gave Toussaint Louverture when his armies invaded the Spanish side. The book also emphasizes that slavery was sanctioned by the Catholic Church. This, in fact, wasn’t new.5 We know that the Crown allowed members of the clergy to bring a certain number of slaves as possessions to the New World.6 But our traditional historiography has maintained an almost complete silence about this until now. What is clear is that this position frequently turned into a defense of this blight on society by such distinguished members of the clergy as Sánchez Valverde. If all these clarifications and explanations have tremendous value, so too do the opinions, based on information from the period, that Franco offers on the evolution of the class structure of society and society’s economic fluctuations. Although we question the important role that he sometimes seems to attribute to the feudal phenomenon—which had very distinctive characteristics in all Spanish America7—he emphasizes how those economic systems which followed one another in Western Europe as soon as private property and the class division of society appeared, were simultaneously present here from colonization to the birth of nationhood. This point, which is of extraordinary interest, has recently been explored in studies that highlight how Spanish America—which, following colonization, functioned as an extension of developing European capitalism—offered a variant form of that economic system. Even so, for historical reasons our case offered special features within this variant and the author rightly emphasizes these.

Prologue

23

On the basis of his solid knowledge of Marxism, he also emphasizes the presence and evolution of a middle-class since the colonial period. This is certainly an exciting topic which anti-Marxists have recently analyzed in different ways; we believe that many of these analyses are completely incorrect. Since it is based on more data sources, perhaps this is the work to resolve the issue. The book also offers a rigorous scientific study of the social and politicoeconomic implications of Toussaint Louverture’s invasion. With regard to the Ferrand regime, it shows its retrogressive outcome, and, at the same time, the return to the most abhorrent forms of slavery that it meant for our slaves, who had been freed by Louverture, a situation that continued under subsequent Spanish rule. Incidentally, the causes and expressions of this point are explored in depth by the author in light of the antithesis of “Foolish Spain” (España boba) and “Rebellious Africa” (Africa rebelde). The study emphasizes the latent black slave insurgency and the brutal repression of the uprising that was masterminded among people of color by “José Leocadio, Pedro de Seda, Pedro Rodríguez, and many other free blacks and slaves,” who were responding to their desire for “the freedom of their race, and”—as a contemporary witness states—“union with the Republic of Haiti.” There is, however, one omission with regard to this period. Perhaps because of his desire for the work to be focused on slavery, the author doesn’t mention the failed “Italian Revolution,” a grassroots conspiracy that was the forerunner of Independence. But setting aside this omission, it is very important that in openly taking on the traditional chauvinistic position—which is based on viewing the Spanish element as the almost exclusive factor in our culture—Franco raises and explores the various manifestations of the proposal for union with Haiti mentioned above. He emphasizes that it was quite widespread among the slaves and many free men of the middle class. Traditional historiography has kept silent about this, yet in the author’s opinion, it gained such momentum that it was one of the factors that led to Núñez de Cáceres’ independence movement, whose victory meant the preservation of “slavery and racial inequality, together with feudal privileges.” Another very important issue that traditional historiography has kept silent about and which is emphasized in the book is the emergence of the notion of federalism as one form for the proposed union to take. Had this actually come about, our history, as well as Haiti’s would have been vastly different. We don’t like making predictions, but have to say that federalism, within a socialist framework, will be the future reality for the island. Everything we have said above conveys the book’s originality and importance. However, it is the final chapter that offers the most originality and the greatest sociological depth. Divided into several parts, it is a detailed study of the political, and, especially, the socio-economic characteristics of the regime imposed on us by the Haitian president, Boyer. With great objectivity Franklyn J. Franco presents the revolutionary measures enacted by that regime, while also

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Prologue

showing their downside. He stresses that the fundamental characteristic of these measures was their anti-colonialism and that they led to the definitive abolition of slavery and racial and social integration. He underscores how anti-colonialism led Boyer to target the Catholic hierarchy by confiscating their property, and to legalize the closing of the university. In addition, as few of his predecessors have done, he shows the consequences of the downside of these measures, which prepared the way for the growth of pro-independence sentiments in our country. In short, the scientific objectivity shown by this study of a period so rich in all kinds of contradictions is such that anyone who hopes to tackle this fertile topic in the future will have to turn to it as a basis and guide. It is here, especially, that the author reaches the highest standards in his interpretation of the dialectical development of history. The book also shows laudable research. Just by the number of citations— there are more than a hundred—readers can’t fail to realize this. Adding to this everything that has been said above, readers will readily appreciate that what they have before them is a substantial, far-reaching essay that marks a milestone in the critical and urgent task of correcting and re-assessing our history. We aren’t saying that the essay is lacking in polemical statements, but in our opinion, there are very few of them. Typically, as the reading proceeds—a reading that encourages reflection—you find yourself forced to accept the many successful interpretations. It cannot be overemphasized that these are the product of a rigorous cultural education, the use of Marxist methodology, and a keen intelligence placed at the service of truth and real humanism. It also cannot be overemphasized that a work like this provides encouragement to young scholars for in full awareness that the present cannot be correctly interpreted without a thorough knowledge of its roots, by following the Cartesian method and breaking the influence of constant, alienating labor, it has called into question what traditional historiography has written about these roots that are buried deep in the past. Juan I. Jimenes Grullón

1 THE BLACK POPULATION

In September 1501, don Nicolás de Ovando was named Governor of Hispaniola, the Indies, and Tierra Firme by the Catholic Monarchs, and among the general instructions they gave him, “he was ordered not to allow Jews, or Moors, or new converts to go to, or to be in, the Indies, but that he should permit the introduction of black slaves, provided they had been born under Christian power.”1 This is the earliest surviving information about black slaves in Santo Domingo. We can say that this is the moment when the colonization of Hispaniola truly gets underway, and after this point, the discovery, conquest, and colonization of the new territories. Slavery as a kind of socially organized labor had, however, already been tried out on the indigenous population, not just in the disguised form of Roldán’s repartimientos, but also openly. The indigenous people’s low level of cultural development, their inability to adapt physically and mentally to the harsh slave labor system, and, as a consequence, their heroic resistance against the brutal conquest, all resulted in their immediate replacement, given the urgent need for a workforce. And so on the basis of the Portuguese experience in Europe, the numbers of black slaves who were brought in greatly increased after 1501.2 In contrast to the self-determination enjoyed by the first expeditions of the Discovery, the Crown quickly moved to centralize everything related to the running of the newly discovered lands under its own control. A complete administrative apparatus, the Casa de Contratación in Seville, was set up for this purpose. “Everyone who wanted to set sail was required to have a permit to leave the Peninsula and settle in the recently discovered lands. A license was also required to carry merchandise and items of all kinds, thus creating a record of everything headed for the Indies.”3 Such a provision, i.e. such a license, was also necessary to transport black slaves to fill the pressing need for manpower in mining and agriculture. Alongside the license, smuggling was another important source of supply.

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The Black Population

At first, the overwhelming number of men in the settlements led to a major problem, which was later resolved by historical development itself. Thus already by 1506, “a significant number of the new settlers had formed unions with Indian women, with the most highly prized women going to the nobles.”4 However, the rapid extinction of the indigenous population because of the mass suicides and the inhuman slave labor system—only sixty thousand Indians remained on the island in 1507—together with the absence of white women, forced the colonists to replace indigenous women with black women. By the end of the sixteenth century, so many children had been born to Spanish fathers and black slave mothers that the Crown ordered, “because we are informed that some of the soldiers of this fortress [i.e. the fortress of Havana] have fathered children with some of our slaves, and they want to buy the children and set them free, if the children whom these soldiers have fathered with our slaves are to be sold, you shall give preference to their fathers who want to buy them for that purpose.”5 Although this Royal Ordinance refers specifically to soldiers at the fortress of Havana, nothing leads us to believe that similar situations, with the same explanation, weren’t occurring in Santo Domingo. Initially the black slaves were mainly used in mining. At this time, gold smelting was done four times a year in Hispaniola: twice in the city of Buena Ventura for the old and new mines in San Cristóbal, and twice in Concepción for the mines in the Cibao, and the others, which were closer to the aforementioned town of La Vega. For the first of these two cities, each smelting represented an inflow of 110,000 or 120,000 marks. The smelting done at Concepción de la Vega, on the other hand, typically brought in 125,000 or 130,000 or, sometimes, 140,000 marks; as a result, the value of the gold extracted every year on the island added up to 460,000 marks. So on the basis of the rumors spreading around Spain that you could make a sizeable fortune in a very short time in that colony with no risk, provided you were on good terms with the governor-general, so many people scrambled to share in the wealth that there weren’t enough boats available.6 The rapid exhaustion of Hispaniola’s gold mines due to intense exploitation and the poor gold deposits, plus the depletion of the indigenous population (by 1511, there were just fourteen thousand Indians left7) provided the impetus for the development of agriculture in the colony—principally the cultivation of sugarcane, which was then considered on a par with gold because of its high cash value—and for the importation of black slaves. Rulings from the Crown stressed that the blacks sent to Hispaniola should be from Guinea, because in Spain, Wolofs and Berbers had led real rebellions against their enslavement and their actions were essentially blamed on the influence of the Moorish (Islamic) religion. By contrast, Guineans “were considered to lack any religion, and if they did have anything of the kind, it was just ridiculous superstitions that they didn’t practice after they were brought to America.”8 Despite these detailed instructions, the experience of black slavery in

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Santo Domingo began inauspiciously. Ovando himself soon wrote to the Crown asking that the shipments of black slaves be halted, “because they ran away, joined up with the Indians, taught them bad habits, and could never be caught.” As a result, and because the instructions given to Ovando weren’t followed, in 1506 the Crown ordered by royal decree that all Berber slaves and new converts be expelled from the island and, says Saco, “no rebellious black slaves, or any who had been raised with Moors,9 were to be allowed to go there. The term ‘black slave’ does not refer to them all indiscriminately, just to those who had not been born under Christian power, as had been ordered.”10 The depletion of the mines on the one hand, and the fertile soil and the adaptation of sugarcane to the climate on the other, pushed the Crown to promote its cultivation. Special provisions were passed to boost its production and, as a consequence, for black slaves to be imported for that purpose. Yet it was always emphasized that “no rebellious black slaves, or any who had been raised with Moors,” were to go to Hispaniola. In a very short space of time sugarcane cultivation flourished dramatically. Fernández de Oviedo says on this subject: Sugar is one of the most profitable kinds of farming there could be in any province or kingdom in the world, and on this island there is so much of it and it is so good, and given the short time they have been doing it here, it is only right (though the fertility of the soil, and the ready accessibility of water, and the availability of the great stands of wood for the huge fires that burn constantly are so suitable for this kind of business) that the person who showed how it was done and who first set it up should be given so many gifts and rewards.11 The cultivation of sugarcane increased greatly after the industrial testing done by Gonzalo de Velosa who, “at his own cost and with huge expense, according to what he had and with a lot of his own work, brought sugar masters to this island and built a trapiche.”12 Based on a contemporary list, in 1520 there were already twenty-four ingenios and four trapiches producing sugar in Hispaniola, which were distributed as follows: INGENIOS AND TRAPICHES IN HISPANIOLA13 –1520–

Ingenios 1 1 1 1 1

Trapiches

Location

Owner

Rio Nigua La Vega Rio Nigua Rio Nigua Rio Nigua

Gonzalo de Velosa Pedro de Atienza Esteban de Pasamonte Francisco Tostado Diego Caballero [de la Rosa] (Continued)

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The Black Population

Ingenios

Trapiches

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

Location

Owner

Rio Nigua Rio Nigua Rio Nigua Haina Haina Nizao Nizao Nizao Ocoa Azua Azua San Juan Cazuy Sanate, Higüey Puerto Plata Puerto Plata Bonao Árbol Gordo, Santo Domingo Quiabón, Santo Domingo

Joan de Ampies Luis Colón Antonio Serrano Lic. Vásquez de Mella Cristóbal de Tapia Miguel de Pasamonte Alonso de Ávila Lope de Bardecia Licenciado Zuazo Diego Caballero [de la Rosa] Fernando Gorjón Pedro de Badilla Joan de Villoria Joan de Villoria Vázquez de Ayllón Diego de Morales Sons of Miguel Jover Cristóbal Lebrón Melchor de Castro and Hernando de Carvajal Alonso de Peralta Martín García Francisco de Barrionuevo Joan de Aguilar

Azua Azua Puerto Plata Puerto Plata

We should emphasize that the majority of the owners of the ingenios and trapiches shown in this table were officials of the Crown. Yet according to Las Casas, the number of ingenios was even higher: in 1518 there were some forty ingenios on Hispaniola, “some driven by water and others by horses.” He also says that each water-powered ingenio required eighty or more slaves and each trapiche needed from thirty to forty. About the labor system in operation in the ingenios and trapiches, Las Casas says, In the old days, before there were ingenios, we on this island used to believe that if they didn’t hang a black man, he never died, since we had never seen a black man die from an illness, because, just like the orange tree, black people truly found their place here, and it is more like home to them than their own Guinea. But after they put them in the sugar mills, as a result of

The Black Population

29

the great torments they suffered and the brews of cane syrup [they make] and drink, they encountered death and disease, and as a result many of them die every day.14 The slave mode of production was the base on which the colonial economy was organized. By its nature, this was not the usual form of slavery; this was slavery based on a new and more rational return on labor—and this is what its timid hints of capitalism rest on—the use of black slaves as direct instruments in the production process. Human beings were thus simultaneously the labor force, the machinery, and the merchandise in the same process. A black slave was worth what he yielded. What are obviously rough estimates put the black population at this time at around twenty thousand. Indians carried out the inhuman slave labor in the mines and sugar mills with the blacks. When the indigenous population of the island had been exterminated, Indians were imported from the nearby islands and the mainland. A Royal Ordinance issued in Seville in July 1511 permitted Indians to be brought to Hispaniola, “from islands where there is no gold,” and in December of the same year there was a further ruling that “Carib Indians may be enslaved.”15 The enactment of the Laws of Burgos in 1513 brought about significant changes in the treatment of the indigenous population, which produced an immediate differentiation between Indians and blacks in the work sphere. Above all else, the differentiation was brought about by the tremendous physical stamina of the black slaves in their work in mining and agriculture, given that “the work of one black was more useful than that of four Indians.” This strengthened the policy of the disguised forms of slavery represented by the repartimiento and the encomienda, in contrast to the open enslavement of the blacks. The colonial economy flourished so dramatically on the basis of this social organization of labor that by 1518 “there were two cities and sixteen towns in Hispaniola. The cities were [Santo Domingo], not the first one founded in 1494 by Columbus’s brother, don Bartolomé Colón, but the one relocated by Nicolás de Ovando in 1502, and Concepción de la Vega, which was built by the aforementioned Columbus. The towns were: Bonao, Puerto Plata, Buenaventura, Santa María del Puerto de la Yaguana, Monte Cristo, Vera Paz, Salvatierra de Sabana, San Juan de la Maguana, Villanueva de Yaquimo, Azua, Santiago de los Caballeros, Cotuy, Lares de Guaba, Puerto Real, Ceibo and Salvaleón de Higüey.”16 There were so many more blacks than whites at this time that it began to raise fears. In letters to the island’s Treasurer, Miguel de Pasamonte, dated April 4, 1514, the King himself says, “Let female slaves be provided who, by marrying the slaves who are there, might give them fewer ideas about rebelling, and as few (male) slaves as possible will go there.” He goes on to say, “You say that they approve of black slaves there, and that it would be in their interest to have more at this time; but not if they are males, because it seems there are a lot of them and it could bring problems.”17

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The Black Population

Given the brutal forms of exploitation used by the Spanish settlers, the rebellion of the black slaves wasn’t long in coming. Before too long, “in December 1522, the first black slave uprising broke out. Twenty slaves, most of them Wolof speakers, ran away from the sugar mill of the Governor, Admiral Diego Colón. They joined up with a similar number who were waiting for them in a certain place and, after killing some Spaniards who were off-guard in the countryside, they went back to the town of Azua.”18 Then the hunt for them was organized. Among those involved were not only members of the regular Spanish militia, but also “volunteers from Santo Domingo and another nearby region.” After a few days, it became known that the blacks had reached a cattle ranch owned by Melchor de Castro nine leagues from the capital, and were waiting for the opportunity to attack again. The fugitives were surrounded, attacked, and defeated. And “remaining on the field, the Admiral [Diego Colón] had them search with such diligence for the blacks who had escaped from the battle and who were held to blame, that in five or six days all of them were caught, and he ordered that justice be done with them, and they were left scattered at intervals along that road on many gallows.”19 This rebellion was a wake-up call and it can be said that that is what started the breakdown of the rigid, slavery-based Spanish system. From this point on, escapes, whether by individuals or groups, took a more dangerous course every day. There were even attempts now to completely cut off all relations between blacks and Indians, because the blacks were teaching the Indians “bad habits.” The situation in Hispaniola at this time shows evidence of a clear relaxation in owner/slave relations. To stem the constant escapes and rebellions of the blacks, and so that they would work with “good will,” in 1526 the plan was conceived of marrying them off and freeing them along with their wives and any children they had, after they had served for a set period of time and, in addition to that, had given their owners twenty gold marks. The plan was not approved, however. Soon, the discovery of new territories potentially richer in mines and other resources undermined the base of the remarkable growth that Hispaniola had achieved in just a few years. Spanish adventurers preferred their dreams of Darién to the harsh reality of work on Hispaniola. Hence, a systematic population exodus began, which by the end of the century was assuming catastrophic proportions. This was why in 1527 some “leading residents” presented the King with a repopulation plan. Among its chief measures it proposed that each of them be allowed to bring one hundred black men and one hundred black women to Hispaniola. Such requests, if not all, were fulfilled in part through the special “gifts and land grants for those who formed new settlements on the island of Hispaniola,” granted in Toledo in 1529. But regarding the blacks who were needed, those who were not obtained with licenses were brought in as contraband. There was a huge and pressing need for a slave workforce. At the same time, escapes and uprisings were increasing, even giving rise to the use of the new adjective, cimarrón (maroon, runaway slave) on the island. The gravity of the situation was

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such that it caused concern not only to the highest colonial authorities, but even to the monarchy. In a report from the Real Audiencia to the Emperor dated July 23, 1546, the basic reasons behind the breakdown in owner–slave relations are explicitly stated. The report says in part, “because of the habit the blacks have of rebelling, the residents only dared give orders to their slaves very gently.”20 What is more, just a year earlier, in 1545, the landowning colonists had gone so far as to make an offer to the black slaves “to let them live in peace and even send them priests or friars to teach them the Christian religion, provided they not disturb the white population.” This offer was made to the countless bands of runaway slaves who were ravaging the island. In that same year, the judicial authorities and the Cabildo in Santo Domingo “complained about this to Spain. They even estimated the number of runaway slaves to be as high as seven thousand.”21 The situation was so difficult because of the uprisings that Spaniards didn’t dare to go out alone, “but only [together] in groups of fifteen or twenty.”22 Some years earlier, the uprising of the cacique Enriquillo had gained the support of a significant number of blacks, and when he signed the peace agreement under conditions that were unfavorable for the slaves, they abandoned him and continued their rebellion in the Bahoruco mountains. The same Audiencia report cited above estimates their number at between two and three hundred. Their behavior is self-explanatory, since Enriquillo not only returned runaway blacks and Indians to their owners, but he even said “when the Christians informed him that some blacks were rebelling, he would have them captured, and if necessary, he would go and do it himself, and he would send captains to capture these blacks, and bring them in fetters to the Christians to whom they belonged.” At the same time, he asked that “they be assessed the amount that each black and each Indian who ran away from the Christians was given for his work.”23 The runaway slave problem was taking such a turn that the colonial authorities were obliged to create a whole military apparatus specifically to hunt down blacks. This is the assertion of the historian Oviedo: “In our Hispaniola there are many insurgent blacks who have rebelled against serving the Christians, so to punish them, as well as to secure those who remain on the estates of the settlers, some squadrons of Spaniards go searching for the rebels.”24 Amid the upheavals that were unleashed, leaders emerged to head and lead the struggle. In San Juan de la Maguana, the forces were led by Diego de Guzmán, who took refuge in the Bahoruco region after attacking a sugar mill. He was hunted down and died fighting heroically. In the central Cibao, Diego de Ocampo emerged in the 1530s and was pursued relentlessly for more than ten years: A squadron attacked him when he was at La Vega, and fleeing from there, he went to San Juan de la Maguana, causing damage to two sugar mills and taking about hundred blacks from there and from Azua. They went to the Bahoruco region and from there they returned to San Juan; they burned the purging houses of the sugar mills and caused other damage.

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The Black Population

The Admiral-Governor [i.e. Diego Colón] set out with a hundred and fifty men on foot and horseback to defeat them but he made peace with them and returned to the city. They didn’t fulfill a single condition; they returned to San Juan and Azua, burned sugar mills, abducted black men and women, and killed three mestizos. Squadrons were sent out again which killed many of them and captured others, who were either exiled, or hanged, burned, and shot with arrows, or they had their feet cut off.25 Another significant uprising that occurred in those years was led by Lemba, a black slave who led a valiant band of at least 140 runaway slaves. He kept the southern part of the island in a state of fear for more than fifteen years. The lack of strong organization and the inability to communicate orally or in writing— because even in the same sugar mill there would be slaves from four or five different tribes—naturally prevented these important anti-slavery rebellions from developing. As a result, despite the fact that they were able to withstand the assaults of the Spanish colonialist forces for a long time, these insurmountable difficulties paralyzed the movement and in the end the rebels confined themselves to just remaining in the island’s forests, with the occasional sporadic raid. Uprisings, escapes, individual protests in the forced labor centers and in the course of daily activities, these forced the slave-owning colonists to enact a complete legal system for the specific purpose of regulating owner–slave relations. This was the origin of the Slave Codes (Ordenanzas para el Sosiego y Seguridad de los Esclavos Negros), the first of which was issued in 1528. Further ordinances were enacted in 1535, 1542, and 1544; there was new legislation in 1768 and, finally, the Código Negro Carolino, was enacted in 1789. In our view, the content of the initial Ordinances of 1528 clearly shows the serious tensions in owner–slave relations. The first Ordinance established the penalty for runaway slaves and stated: All slaves, both black and white, who run away from their masters or owners’ service and go off to the mountains, are required to return to said service within fifteen days, and if they are brought back against their will after this period of time has passed, they are to be given a hundred lashes and they will have an iron collar put on them that weighs twenty pounds, and they will wear it for a year; the second time, if they are gone for twenty days, they will have a foot cut off; and the third time, if they are gone for fifteen days, they will be put to death, which sentence shall not be carried out on those who return voluntarily.26 The second Ordinance dealt with the same offense but in regard to the “bozal” slaves; these were understood to be “[slaves] who had come to the island from Cape Verde or Guinea less than a year previously.” The main difference lay in

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the number of days that the fugitive had to present himself before the judicial authorities. As we see: For male and female bozal slaves, the first period of fifteen days mentioned in the previous Ordinance shall be fifty, unless they have a ladino captain upon whose counsel they have undertaken this rebellious act. And if they are captured after the fifty days have passed, they are to be given a hundred lashes; and the second and third times, the sentence established in the Ordinance shall be carried out on them.27 The third Ordinance was aimed at preventing the occurrence of the crime of any emotional attachment being formed which, should it emerge in the sphere of work and daily life, might prevent an escape from being reported. It stated: The overseers or ranch managers who were responsible for the said slaves must report their escape to the party designated to receive this information, or to the Ordinary Justice of the nearest location, within eight days after the aforementioned fifteen days have passed, under penalty of four gold pesos each time they fail to do so, to be applied to the location which shall be mentioned.28 The eighth Ordinance was a general prohibition against the use of weapons and, when the type of work performed warranted their use, it specified what kind: None of these blacks shall carry an offensive weapon made of iron or wood, or any other type, when in town or while travelling with or without his owner, unless the slave is a skilled worker like a butcher, or a cattle skinner, or a mule driver. He may carry a knife measuring a hand’s length to do his job, as well as the tools for working and for practicing his trade, under penalty of losing them. And the first time, he will pay two gold pesos, and if he fails to do so, he will be given a hundred lashes at the whipping-post; the second time, he will have irons weighing twenty pounds put on and he will wear them for a year and he will have a hand and a foot cut off. These skilled slaves shall not carry these tools on Sundays or feast days.29 The tenth Ordinance regulated the possibility of a compassion being shown by someone in response to the justice meted out by the slave-holding regime: Penalties for those who remove the slaves’ irons and release them from prison. No one except the slaves’ owner may remove their irons or release them from prison. The penalty for a Spaniard is half a gold mark for the chest and to be under obligation to the owner; and if he doesn’t pay, he

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is to be given a hundred lashes. If he is a slave, he will have a foot cut off the first time, and the second time he will die. And they will be required to pay for the damage done by the slaves whose irons they removed or whom they freed, and also for their crimes, as if they had committed them themselves.30 The eleventh Ordinance authorized any white to apprehend any slave “suspected of having escaped.” Furthermore, as well as making it legal for the slave owner to execute justice on the slave, it specifies the main instruments of torture for carrying it out: “Slave owners shall have stocks and chains. Wherever there are four slaves, their owner shall be required to have stocks and chains within the time frame established by the Visitador.” Besides regulating the interactions between owners and slaves, these laws also affected the few slaves who had gained their freedom, either by purchasing it or through special services. The ninth Ordinance in Folio 49b from 1545 states, “Do not feed or shelter blacks; inside the city and its boundaries no black man or woman shall give food to any black men or women, or shelter them in his house, or hide them outside it, under penalty of a hundred lashes the first time, and the second time, having two irons put on both feet.” Another Ordinance, recorded as Number 2 in Folio 58, establishes “the times when blacks must return to their homes and when they can sell in the squares and streets. Black women shall return to their homes when the Ave Maria is rung and they cannot go out to sell until the dawn bell, and they can be in the squares and streets until the aforementioned Ave Maria prayer, and no longer. Under penalty of fifty lashes tied to the whipping-post, and a penalty of one tomín for the loyal person who carries this out. Let it be so proclaimed.” Based on the particular kind of work they performed, slaves can be divided among the following occupations, which are ranked in order of importance: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Slaves who worked in factories and mines Agricultural slaves (mainly involved in planting and cutting cane) Slaves who worked with livestock Domestic slaves Artisans Hired slaves

And lastly there was another group: a small number of slaves assigned by their owners to sell certain services that were essential to urban life. We therefore find slaves who worked in the cities selling water, stone, wood, and things that “a slave carries on his back.” An Ordinance regulating this particular kind of slave states, “No black man or woman may sell anything except water, [stone], wood … and this profession of merchant is reserved for free men. If they make anything with their own hands, like bridles, ropes, juzes, zuyucanes or other such

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things, no one except their own masters may buy them.” The next ordinance was even more explicit: “No one may trade with slaves, or [buy from them], or sell them as much as a pin, except their owners; this is so that they don’t find out that there is any master better than their own.”31 However, the need for these services forced the authorities to organize the black vendors in a permanent fashion. Hence one ordinance stated, “in order to supply the city with herbs, water, wood, and charcoal, for the first of these, let them pick the blacks of those individuals whom the city will name, and they may not be involved in other activities, and their bundles are to be of the size given, and they are to sell them in the square. Those named to sell wood will do it in the same place, and they may not be involved in other activities.”32 It appears that the rape of black and Indian women was widespread, committed not just by their owners, but by the Spanish population in general. This has to be what led to the ruling in Ordinance 68, Folio 24, of 1544, which states: No one may take a female slave or an Indian woman out of her owner’s house for a day or a night. Do not force them to have sexual relations. Do not prevent them from performing household duties for their owners. Anyone who has a female slave or an Indian woman out of her master’s house for a whole day or a night shall be given a hundred lashes if he is a person of low condition, and if he is a maestre, or someone of higher status, he shall pay twenty gold pesos, to be shared as in the previous Ordinance. And if he takes her by force, by day or night, in order to have his way with her, he will be punished with the lawful penalty for those who rape women. And if they detain them while they are performing household duties for their owners, they shall pay three gold pesos, to be split equally between the judge and the accuser.33

II Paradoxically, despite the flow of the European population to the mainland, the colonial economy showed spectacular growth from 1530 until the middle of the century. The development of the sugar mills was matched by considerable development in cattle, pig, and horse-raising. The numbers clearly show this. In 1542 the island exported 110,000 arrobas of sugar to Spain.34 In the same year, Seville received no fewer than 50,000 hides from Santo Domingo. Oviedo states that “animals weren’t killed for their meat, because there was no one to eat it, but just for their hides.”35 At the same time, compared with the white population, which was shrinking by the day, the island’s black population was experiencing tremendous growth, due to imports (both purchased and smuggled) and births. Alvaro de Castro, the Archdeacon of Santo Domingo, “who had once walked over the whole island, and four or five times through many parts of it, visiting churches, Indians, and Spaniards, was asked about this specifically, and on March 26, 1542

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he responded that he believed there were more than twenty-five or thirty thousand blacks, while there were not even twelve hundred white residents.”36 As the imports of black slaves increased, the numerical imbalance between them and the white Spaniards was growing, and this, in turn, triggered the breakdown in the slave relations of production on all levels, including their legal expression in the sphere of property. Regarding this, Archdeacon Álvaro de Castro’s report states that: In his opinion there were more than two or three thousand rebel blacks hiding out in Cape St. Nicolás, the Ciguayos, the Samaná Peninsula, and Cape Higüey. And he continues: these days they are involved in so much commerce and trade of such value and shrewdness, which is why so many famous robberies are carried out in all the farms in the countryside, so no matter how much of a newcomer he is, there is no black on this island who doesn’t already know for a fact that every day he has to steal a little or a lot. Some do it to pay the hiring fee of one tomín they have agreed to give their owners every day, others give it to black women, others for clothes and shoes, night and day they are robbing and stealing everything in the countryside, including gold to melt down. They conceal these thefts by means of two or three hundred black women they call “ganadoras,” who go about this city to earn money like I’ve said … and to pay their hiring fee every day, or every month, or by the year, they go off and roam the whole island and take the things they have stolen and sell them and they bring back whatever they make and hide it in the interior. And the blacks, at least the ones in this city, are so decked-out in gold and fine clothing, and so full of their own importance, that, in my opinion, they are freer than we are. I have told the Audiencia this many times so they can rectify it, because if the blacks want to rebel openly, a hundred of them are enough to take the island, and twenty thousand Spaniards are not enough up against them, as big and bountiful as the island is, and they are so fierce and so skillful at slipping through the mountains.37 And alluding to the reasons for the decline in mining in Hispaniola, the Notary for Mines, Melchor de Castro, told the Emperor, “For their safety, most residents still try to make their home in this city [Santo Domingo—FJF], so leaving the interior of the country deserted, especially the bishopric of La Concepción, where the mines of the Cibao are located. The island is big and full of cattle, wild boar, and other means of subsistence, and so the black rebels have security and food. The country is in a lot of trouble and if God doesn’t remedy it …”38

Related Social Groups Other social groups, closely linked by blood ties and with essentially the same status as the exploited black slaves, were gaining considerable importance in the

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colony by virtue of their numbers. In order of importance, according to the social hierarchies of the period, we find above the black slaves: a) b) c) d) e)

Freedmen and freedwomen (blacks and mulattos) Mestizos (offspring of an Indian and a white) Tercerón [terceroon] (offspring of a mulatto and a white) Cuarterón [quadroon] (offspring of a terceroon and a white) Grifos (offspring of an Indian and a black)

Although, in principle, this scale takes certain racial connections to rank on the social scale, what it essentially shows are certain class relations. In other words, the social value of an individual was higher based on the absence of blood ties linking him or her with black slaves. Regardless of his actual economic status, a white Spaniard would achieve a higher social position than any of the groups mentioned above. This state of affairs was sanctioned in the colonial legal system. A royal decree signed in Valladolid on April 29, 1549, categorically stipulated that “no mulatto or mestizo, or any man who is not legitimate, may hold Indians or hold any royal or public position.”39 However, out of all the groups mentioned above, it was the “freed blacks” who had the lowest status. Particular ordinances regulated their slightest movement. Furthermore, their status as freedmen can be gauged by the Royal Decree of San Lorenzo, which “ordered that to facilitate the collection of taxes from freed blacks and mulattos, it was advisable to require them to live close to a known master.”40 Such, then, was the situation at the bottom of the social pyramid in our colonial society, and at the top, on the same level of importance, were the slaveowning feudal aristocracy and the colonial officials, the Catholic hierarchy, which had close ties to the Monarchy and owned ranches and sugar mills, and also slave importers and exporters; further down were the artisans, farmers, and lower-ranking workers, including all the soldiers of fortune. And it should be mentioned that this group also included a significant core of criminals of the worst kind who had been expelled from Spain, and who had been coming to Hispaniola since the early days of the Conquest by virtue of a Carta de Justicia (Charter of Justice) dated June 22, 1497 which stated in part: that any and all males … who up to the day of publication of our letter have committed any homicide and injury and any other crime of whatever nature or kind it might be, except for heresy and lèse-majesté, or crimes against the state, or treason … shall go to Hispaniola to serve in person, and they shall do whatever the Admiral tells them and orders them to do on our behalf. Those who receive the death penalty (and serve) for two years, and those who receive some other major punishment apart from the death penalty, even the loss of limbs, (and serve) for one year shall be pardoned for any crimes and offenses of whatever manner, kind, and gravity they be.

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Henceforward, they cannot be accused of these crimes … nor can any sentences that have or may be given against them be executed against them or their possessions, which sentences we with our Charter hereby revoke and declare null and void, once the aforesaid service has been completed … And we restore to the said criminals their good name and the status they had prior to their having done or committed the said offences.41 Although we have mentioned farmers, we should add that they must always have been few in number, since in a 1521 report by Antonio Henríquez Pimentel, apparently addressed to the Governor of the Council, Cardinal de Tortosa, which recommends measures for improving the economic situation, he gives his views on the behavior of the Spaniards who came to the island in that capacity, “I believe that when they reach Santo Domingo they will do what other farmers have done whom your Majesty had the favor to send to that island. For they all flee that label and that type of work, and they do not want to be farmers, but gentlemen instead.”42

III The demise of Hispaniola’s economic boom can be said to have begun in the second half of the sixteenth century. The first indication was the population drain to the mainland, which accelerated when English, French, and Dutch pirates and privateers appeared on our coasts. They began by harassing and plundering Spanish ships and ended up by making incursions into our territory. The intensive trade that the population of the principal coastal cities—with the exception of Santo Domingo—maintained with these pirates and privateers behind the back of the Spanish Crown should also be included. Production continued to rely on sugarcane and cattle. An account sent to King Felipe II of the situation on the island between 1557 and 1564 by the licenciado Echagoian, an oidor of the Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo, estimates the number of breeding cows at 400,000, with 50,000 sheep. Regarding the situation of sugar, he states, This city as far as [the aforementioned town of] Yayguana, has more than thirty sugar mills and some of them are trapiches, where the grindingwheel is not powered by water, but by horses. Two of these sugar mills that belong to Melchor de Torres, a gentleman of this city, have more than 900 blacks, and others have 200, and some 300, and there are some with 150 blacks. The workers in these sugar mills and estates we have mentioned are black, because only the overseer and the manager are Spanish, along with some of the sugar-masters; the other trades, blacksmithing and carpentry, and the like, they teach these blacks so that they know how to do them. [He continues,] The blacks on the farms and in the sugar mills, [and] the ones who are in the city working and serving their masters, who must

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number twenty thousand altogether, subsist on cassava. This is made from a root that they pile up in heaps, and when this root has grown big and plump in the heap, they grate it and rinse the gratings, and with the mold they have for this purpose, they make a very big, lightly toasted cake.43 Already by this time—1570—few traces of the indigenous population remained. López de Velazco mentions only “two towns of up to fifty Indians.”44 And Sánchez Valverde, for his part, states, “The very few Indians who were left, along with some blacks who were brought in, maintained the sugar refineries, the ginger, indigo, achiote, and cañafistula [plantations], and a little cotton and tobacco. Some brazilwood was still being cut. There had been no significant drop-off in production as compared with the decades of the thirties, forties and fifties.”45 On this subject, the previously mentioned author states: Father José Acosta was an eyewitness to the fact that the 1587 fleet brought 48 quintales of cañafistula, 50 of sarsaparilla, and 134 quintales of brazilwood to Spain from Santo Domingo, and as for sugar, he says it carried 898 cases, each weighing 8 arrobas. The prodigious increase in livestock continued to furnish important lines of trade, and, according to Acosta, the most profitable of these were hides, with 35,444 arrobas being shipped from Hispaniola in this fleet. This trade with Europe [we claim he meant our island’s trade with Spain—FJF] came to an end, since with barely enough to supply Mexico, it was only once every three years that a Spanish ship would be seen in those ports. Foreign nations, especially the Dutch, took advantage of this lull. They smuggled their goods in and took our products out, and in this way the colony kept going in some fashion until the beginning of the last century.46 As the “audacity” of the French, English and Dutch caused mounting panic, the connections in the slave relations of production continued to break down, with the inevitable effect of reducing the social distance between owners and slaves and, hence, between blacks and whites. In addition, the white population was diminishing significantly; it has been shown that there were four thousand fewer whites in 1574 than in 1570.47 The incursions of the pirates and privateers began in 1586. Given the few whites able to defend the island, Drake’s presence off our coast struck terror in the hearts of the slave-holding Spanish population. Because of their reduced numbers, they were forced into an alliance with the blacks, and fearing that Drake would win them over to his side, the authorities even went so far as to grant freedom to those blacks who volunteered to fight the English. And they went even further by making a special appeal to the Maniel maroons in this connection.48 In 1586, the city Cabildo sent the Procurador, the licenciado Diego de Leguizamón, to Court to explain to the king that no blame should be attached to the

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vecinos for having given aid to the enemy (this is in reference to Drake’s raids). The instructions they gave him included the following: “[We] beg Your Majesty to pardon and free the rebellious blacks in the Bahoruco region under the terms whereby you pardoned and freed the rebel blacks in Panama, and that you order this Real Audiencia to give them a place where they can settle.”49 Despite the colonial authorities’ constant, unflagging struggle against the raids by privateers and pirates and the increase in smuggling (“rescate,” as it was called then), Santo Domingo soon ended up as an island encircled by the economic laws of emerging European capitalism and, as a result, the clandestine trade between settlers and “heretics” grew to an extent that alarmed the representatives of the Spanish feudal monarchy. This situation was undermining the foundations upon which the colony’s rigid political and economic organization rested. In November 1598, Baltazar de Castro, the chancery notary, a resident of the city of Santo Domingo, royal standard bearer (alférez mayor) and a Regidor of the city, wrote two interesting “Reports on a Plan to Find a Solution to the Smuggling Problem in Hispaniola” (Memoriales del arbitrio para el remedio de los rescates en la Isla Española), whose content lends strong support to what we have said above. In the first part, the author tells us about the earlier situation in Santo Domingo and, among other things, he states that, “though not a twentieth part of it was populated or cultivated, the wealth and abundance of this island reached such a point that, just from the port of Santo Domingo alone, more than a million [ducat’s worth] of sugar, ginger, and other products left for this kingdom every year, not counting the gold, silver, and pearls, which were sold and used for merchandise that came back to the city, and royal customs duties were paid on everything that came in and went out.”50 After citing studies by Ramón Carande on the value of the ducat and its fluctuations in relation to other currencies (Carlos V y sus banqueros), Peña Batlle, the author of La Isla de la Tortuga, says about the significance of the sum total of this trade, “setting the purchasing power of the ducat in the sixteenth century at just five times higher than its present equivalent, the commercial value of the island of Santo Domingo at the end of the sixteenth century can be estimated at 12,020,000 [gold dollars].”51 Among the consequences of the rescates, or smuggling, was the collapse of this prosperous state of affairs. At the time he was writing the Report, Baltazar de Castro said that exports from the port of Santo Domingo did not account for “one-fiftieth” of the total of all the trade. This was why, “all the vecinos, the church, the monasteries, and the hospitals, were so poor and were invaded and robbed by enemies every day,” including audiencias and archbishoprics. He is quite clear about the reasons for the decline into poverty: it is because for the past seventy years and more, a great many vecinos have been, and still are, engaged in smuggling in some of the island’s northern port with foreigners from the following countries: the Portuguese, who

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were the first to introduce this diabolical practice here, and the French, the Flemish, and the English, all or almost all of them, Lutheran heretics. Every year they take upwards of 80,000 cow hides back to their home countries, which have a first sale value in Spain of somewhere around 300,000 ducats, and more than 600,000 in the countries these foreigners take them to, as well as gold, silver, pearls, sugar, ginger, indigo, pepper, tobacco, ironwood, and other things that there are on the island, which, taken altogether, are worth more than 600,000 ducats in Spain.52 The Report’s author also goes on to clearly show that it wasn’t that they had stopped producing on the island, because production continued on its normal course, but, rather, since their products were being sold as contraband to the “heretics,” and they, in turn, were smuggling manufactured goods and blacks into the colony, which they exchanged without going through customs and paying any of the required duties, the colonial administration and the church were growing poorer and lacked the means to support themselves. In this connection, it should be added that “since cash on hand and savings came from criminal sources, they had to hide it and go on feigning poverty. Many smugglers stockpiled the products they obtained from the foreigners to send them to other Spanish settlements in the Indies in independent ships or armed vessels which they financed themselves. In this way they profited several times over from a single smuggling operation because the merchandise was also smuggled into these other ports.”53 On this subject, López de Castro says, “the damage this sin does the smugglers and their accomplices, and abettors, and accessories, is self-evident from the misery in which they find themselves and from the fact that this is a very profitable business, for with some of them being the richest men on the island, they are never at rest, they owe money …”54 There is no way of determining the number of blacks who were smuggled in through the northern part of the island, the Banda Norte. However, the most conservative analysts of the time believe that black slaves represented one of the main trading currencies. “Because the privateers exchange each black that is chosen, as stolen goods, for between forty and fifty cow hides, large and small.”55 In the late sixteenth century, smuggling assumed such importance in the Banda Norte, particularly in the towns of Puerto Plata, Bayajá, Monte Cristy, and La Yaguana, that even the emerging Spanish bourgeoisie lobbied the Crown to put an end to the situation, which was threatening to undermine their business, not just on the island, but in all of Spanish America.56 And it should be mentioned here that among those who benefited from the contraband trade were the Spanish monarchy’s high-ranking representatives in the colony. The result was that when the solution ordered by Felipe III was to move all the population out of the north and resettle the residents and livestock in the south of the island, the Cabildo of Santo Domingo, the oidores, and other royal and Church

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officials joined the smugglers in resolutely resisting such a measure. There is no question that the movement against the population removals had deep popular roots. Manifestos against Don Antonio de Osorio, the Governor and President of the Real Audiencia, were even posted in the city square. The Governor responded by ordering the strictest censorship. On August 20, 1604, a proclamation was published, ordering that “the issue of the population removals not be discussed either in public or in private.”57 Several days later in the same month, the full Cabildo protested against the decree ordering the removals. They drafted a lengthy report to that effect listing the practical and administrative “obstacles” making it impossible to carry out such a measure. The report addressed the impossibility of rounding up the livestock in many years because the majority were wild and untamed; the shortage of help to bring in and remove the livestock; the shortage of horses to bring in the livestock; the fact that “most of the vecinos and inhabitants in that part of the island are common people and mestizos, mulattos, and blacks: some have no property or nothing to lose, and others have very little, and no means of getting it out or moving any part of it.” The eighth obstacle added: The slaves are so aggressive and untamed that many of them will have to stay there, with their masters unable to do anything about it; just by themselves there will be enough of them to engage in their usual smuggling; and besides that, many of the blacks from this city and from the estates around here, which have very limited means, are running away from their masters’ service, as they typically do; and to enjoy more freedom, they are going into all the land that has been left deserted. Many of them flee there in search of smuggling opportunities, and nobody can control them, and it has been like that for a long time; how much less do you think they will be running away, and with greater audacity, even the most domesticated of them, with the countryside left deserted and empty of people, to live there in freedom, with plenty to eat and wear? For in the past, there weren’t the opportunities that there are now, and the island had more towns and sugar mills, with a lot of Spaniards; there were a lot of encampments of blacks and other such people which caused this city a lot of concerns and problems, like Enriquillo’s, Lemba’s, and Juan Vaquero’s; and a long time after that, a black from Gregorio de Ayala’s sugar mill in Casui, who had been hired by Valdés, who took off with the English when Francis Drake entered this city; and it was feared they would do more damage when they came ashore, because of the intelligence he gave them.58 The issue of the blacks’ belligerence was used not only by those opposed to the removal of the population from the Banda Norte, but also by those in favor

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of it. Referring to the need to evacuate Guaba, Puerto Plata, Bayajá and Yaguana, one of López de Castro’s Reports, dated Madrid, 1598, says: And because the places are a long way from Santo Domingo and from each other, not only are they subject to any privateer who wants to plunder them, but also to the black slaves who want to rebel and make themselves masters of them, and they are rebelling every day; fifty years ago, a black named Juan Vaquero rose up in arms, with more than a thousand slaves on horseback, with lances and shields, in his company and if there had not been as many Spaniards in Santo Domingo back then, who resisted and captured them, they would be the masters of the island; and since then, there have been another three black uprisings here that have caused concern, which were led by Lemba, Ambo, and Juan Criollo; and if these three places were joined together, and joined with the city of Santo Domingo, not only will they be more secure against privateers and slaves, but even with no more Spaniards than there are on the island now, every time enemies descended on the city of Santo Domingo, within ten hours, four hundred men on horseback would come to its aid.59 The royal decree ordering the removal of the population had been addressed to both Governor Osorio and Fray Agustín de Dávila y Padilla, the Archbishop of Santo Domingo. It turned out that by the time the order reached the island, the latter had died. This produced new disagreements over the problem among the colonial authorities, with the majority believing that they should inform the Crown of the situation and then await new orders. Osorio, on the other hand, “of his own accord and without the agreement of any of the oidores, decided on the aforementioned removals.”60 And so in February 1605 the Governor set off for the north of the island with a strong military force. By this time, the situation in the Banda Norte had gone from simple protest to open rebellion, supported, let it be said, by foreign forces. Count Maurice “Prince of Orange, Marquis of the towns of Veray, [Flushing, …], Governor-General of the United Provinces of the Low Countries, Admiral-General of the Southern Sea [of Flanders], Lord of the Conquest of the Kingdom of Java, Amboyna, and the Molucca Islands, and the Kingdoms of Panderane, Malacca in the East Indies, and the Kingdom of Chile and its trade through the Straits of Magellan in Peru,”61 was among those who, even issued a proclamation in support of the residents of the Banda Norte. Whereas it has come to our attention that the King of Spain, with his usual tyranny has ordered all the coastal towns of Hispaniola to be evacuated, destroyed, burned, and demolished, because of the trade and smuggling that their residents and vecinos have engaged in with the ships of

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the Low Country provinces, which has increased their personal assets and benefits; and, not satisfied with that, he wants to deprive them of their lands, which were won at the expense of the actions, sweat, and blood of their forebears, taking their livestock, women, children, and slaves and possessions through uninhabitable and inaccessible mountains to end up destroying them completely, as he tried to do, and did, in the states of Flanders, Orirtonus, Senagaud, Brabant, Zeeland, and Suelanda, and recently, in the kingdoms of Granada, Portugal, Aragon; therefore, with his customary mercy, his Excellency, as the father and defender of those who are unreasonably and unjustly afflicted and affronted, offers and promises all the cities and towns of [Hispaniola and all its vecinos, generally and particularly, and especially you, the residents of this town of] La Yaguana, that to all those who wish to take advantage of his favor, mercy, and assistance, he will freely give their lands, livestock, towns, dwellings, and possessions, provided that they swear to be his vassals and recognize him as their Prince and defender, and to finance the war to defend them, their wives and children, slaves, livestock, and possessions, that they contribute and pay the subsidies, taxes, and contributions they are accustomed to pay and contribute for such wars in the United Provinces of the Low Countries. Furthermore, he offers to protect them against all attacks and humiliations that might be attempted against them by the said king, and his ministers, judges, and military forces, and to routinely maintain soldiers on maneuvers and warships at sea, so blocking Spain’s customary commerce and trade, and his ships of the Flanders trade will supply them with an abundance of everything they need; and to those who try to go against this, or who think of doing so, on behalf of his Excellency and the EstatesGeneral, I hereby give notice and order notice to be given that they immediately evacuate their towns and leave their dwellings, estates, lands, and possessions vacant for the people, subjects, and vassals of the aforementioned Count Maurice, in order that they may immediately settle, work, and farm them, under penalty that he who does otherwise shall be stripped of his possessions, his property, his wife and children, and his life, without exemption. Executed on the ship named “The Maurice,” on the twentyfifth day of the month of January, in the year sixteen hundred and five, by order of General Fossaus Massusgens.62 Until now, the historical documents have not been sufficiently clear to determine the point reached by this implicit [sic] invitation for an alliance between the smugglers in the north and the Flemish forces of Count Maurice. But other indications have appeared that do provide information about a similar position vis-àvis Spain’s other commercial rivals, the French, the Dutch, and the English. And it has to be said that on the basis of their common interests, foreign privateers and

The Black Population

45

traffickers provided the smugglers in the Banda Norte with significant military assistance. Subsequent events attest to this. This can be said to have been the first clash between the forces of primitive capitalism and feudal absolutism in Spanish America. On one side were the forces of the future, on the other, the forces of the present and the past. When the government representatives of Spanish feudalism showed up in the north intent on enforcing royal orders, the rebellion reached its critical point and its leader emerged in the person of Hernando de Montoro. With the backing of mulattos, free blacks, and slaves, the battle began in the Valle de Guaba. Osorio says that he took many measures to force the vecinos of the city of Bayahá and those in the Valle de Guaba into obedience, but without success. With great uproar and commotion, many people assembled and gathered in the aforementioned valley and they took as their leader and commander a vecino from Bayahá called Hernando Montoro. Osorio sent them a pardon and safe conduct and they did not accept them, “because they will not give up, as they never have, their ancient custom of smuggling and trading with pirates; and to defend themselves, they have taken up arms against our lord, the King, taking and buying them from the said pirates and enemies. Not only have they refused to surrender and lay down their weapons, but to satisfy their ambitions, they have made use of the enemy pirates, boarding the ships of those who are in the port of Guanaybes and other ports of this island, and they have taken up arms with them and fought with our Majesty’s forces, as they did last Sunday of this year. His lordship had gone with some people in pursuit of the aforementioned rebels, who had withdrawn, and he followed their trail to the aforementioned port of Guanaybes, and the rebels came off the pirate ships which were at anchor in the place they had withdrawn to, and with the help of the enemy, they fought his lordship’s forces with much artillery and musketry.63 The rebellion lasted for several months, despite the radical measures of burning towns and villages taken by Governor Osorio. But in the end, the monolithic power of the Crown’s colonial representatives overcame the fragmented resistance of the residents of the Banda Norte. The removal of the residents and some of their livestock and slaves to the south of the island—which had been made ready in advance by the authorities—was thus achieved. In the short term this resulted in real economic disaster; much of the livestock could not be moved, and sugar mills and plantations in full production were left in a state of complete abandonment. Furthermore, this event continued to deepen the breakdown of the island’s slave-holding system, because “not only did a large number of blacks stay behind, escaping into the mountains, but many of those who came to the new settlements with their owners, went back.”64

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The Black Population

In this connection, a report by Bartolomé Sepero and Gaspar de Xuara, dated August 18, 1608, notes: When the blacks got to these places and recognized how barren they were, and how fertile the places were that they were leaving behind, they went back to the abandoned places. And though the vecinos asked the aforementioned President for permission to go back and look for them, and it would have been very easy to bring them back, the President refused; instead, he told them that it was they themselves who had cast them off into the mountains, along with other slanderous remarks and insults, and so that was the end of it; and in this way the President gave the said blacks the opportunity to remain at liberty, as a result of which they rose up in arms and have engaged in many smuggling activities with the foreigners, and they have fought with the vecinos and other people, and Don Pedro Cedano, in particular; they fought with him twice, killing one of his men and wounding another and they killed and wounded a corporal with twenty-five men [from this garrison], and did other damage that the witnesses will speak of; and they have stayed on as lords and masters of the deserted places, which are the best and most productive lands, with the best climate, that there are in this island.65 Here we would venture to state that this situation, the flight of the blacks to the Banda Norte, constitutes the dawn of buccaneering, which, as is well-known, assumed legendary status in the Caribbean just a few years later.

CENSUS OF 160666 FREE POPULATION Number of vecinos

Town Santo Domingo Santiago La Vega Cotuí Azua Seibo Higüey Bayaguana Monte Plata Boyá Total

648 155 40 24 46 7 22 115 83 13 1,157

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47

CENSUS OF 1606 SLAVES Economic Activity

Number of slaves

Sugar mills Domestic service in sugar mills Ranches Agricultural farms Domestic service Total

800 88 550 6,742 1,468 9,648

Total population Vecinos……………………. 1,157 Slaves…………………….. 9,648 Total 10,805

A census carried out by Governor Osorio in the final months of 1606 allows us to see clearly how serious the island’s decline was in the wake of the population removals. A clarification is in order: the term vecino was understood at this time to mean any “well-to-do” head of household, i.e. the owners of ranches and estates, proprietors of any kind of business, colonial officials, or anyone who practiced a profession or trade. The figure of 648 residents for Santo Domingo does not include their families.67 The total number of residents must therefore have been three or four times greater. Even so, the population is still quite small. It is appropriate to note here that many of the residents of the Banda Norte soon emigrated to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the mainland. Among the 648 vecinos in the city of Santo Domingo, only 18 held the title of “don,” an expression that conferred honor and status; on the other hand, a surprisingly large number of doñas are recorded: a total of 54, all of them widows with families. The total number of residents included 423 men and 207 women. There were 12 foreigners, namely: 6 Portuguese 2 English 1 Frenchman 1 Fleming 1 Greek 1 Gypsy

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The Black Population

In addition, thirty-five persons of color, the majority of them mulattos, had earned the right to be classified as vecinos, by virtue of the various professions they practiced. On this subject, we should mention that based on this census, the heads of household in the city of Santo Domingo in 1606 included: 1 apothecary 2 painters 9 silversmiths 1 silk merchant 15 carpenters 11 tailors 10 shoemakers 2 blacksmiths 3 masons 2 swordsmiths 2 sailors 1 sexton With no indication of their numbers, shopkeepers, merchants, bakers, makers of pots and pans, etc. are also mentioned. It is apparent that colonial society had entered into a free and open decline. The population had become concentrated in a relatively small area to the northeast of Santo Domingo, leaving the rest of the country virtually deserted. Smuggling, the raids by privateers and pirates and, above all, the black uprisings and the fateful decision to move the population, shattered Santo Domingo’s colonial splendor. We have already seen the first stirrings signaling the formation of an embryonic colonial bourgeoisie in Santo Domingo. Its members were primarily dealers in contraband, smugglers of consumer goods, and illegal exporters of meat and hides. The engine driving this emerging colonial bourgeoisie was the intensive trade carried on throughout Spanish America by Dutch, French, and English ships against the orders of the Spanish monarchy in a reflection of the war of plunder that was developing in the heart of Europe in this first stage of primitive capitalism. Nevertheless, it was a small social group and thus rooted in the norms of the feudal colonial system. Consequently, there was none of that spirit of entrepreneurship that characterizes the bourgeois movement. In addition, there were no defined political aspirations, apart from [opposition to] the Crown’s rulings that prevented the development of trade with the previously mentioned traffickers. It was a group that was imbued with a certain spirit of adventure, but this was based on the outdated ideological notions of feudalism and slavery. Therefore when the Spanish monarchy made the decision to forcibly relocate the residents of the island’s north coast, because of its concern at the intensive trade that had developed behind its back and against its orders, while the resistance of

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49

the residents was intense, it was disorganized, and ultimately confined to simply retreating into the nearby forests. However we should not confine this embryonic group’s presence just to the northern part of the country. It is true that opportunities were more available there to make money through illegal contraband activities. However, this particular form of primitive accumulation— the factor that triggered the emergence of the bourgeoisie here—was on the rise throughout the length and breadth of the island. In the sphere of property, i.e. in the legal expression of relations of production, we can see how specific forms of capitalism were emerging, albeit timidly, alongside the characteristic features of feudalism. The Catholic Church, for example, which as an institution largely blocked the emergence of the bourgeoisie for political reasons (not just in the colony, but also in Spain) nevertheless came to have in its ranks individuals who amassed numerous properties—a disgraceful number, given a scenario as small and newly established as ours. Bishop Bastidas, “who raised cattle, was positively wealthy when, in 1551, he tried to pass on his possessions to his family. The most important of these were twentysix houses in the city of Santo Domingo; eleven ranches on the island, with some twenty-five thousand head of cattle and eighty slaves; half a sugar mill; and four caballerías [of land].”68 This brief quote from Lugo amply demonstrates how current and past relations of production were interwoven in the formation of what can be called the embryonic colonial bourgeoisie. The lessons deriving from this distinctive characteristic which shows up in colonial countries in relation to the process of the “primitive accumulation of capital” are, so to speak, beautifully instructive. Whereas in the metropole this accumulation is a phenomenon that emerges from the natural historical development [of capitalism] (i.e. from the evolution of its first stage of formation that is taking shape within feudal society) and is inherent in the first forms or elements of capitalism as an economic system, in the colonies the process of primitive accumulation is interwoven in the material base with other social and economic relationships, namely capitalist slavery and feudalism. Colonial economic history can therefore be said to constitute a break with natural historical development. However, the limited commercial vision of the Spanish monarchy slowed the development of a colonial commercial bourgeoisie in Santo Domingo. The order to depopulate the north of the island and resettle its population and livestock in locations determined in advance by the colonial authorities, as a way of putting an end to violations of the monopolistic decrees, had the effect of the sorcerer’s medicine, which cures the illness by killing the patient. So the fetus died in embryo in this first stage. The events of 1606 subjected the colonial economy to a huge slowdown, and it was only when the French colony was established in the western part of the island, and thanks to the intensive development of the plantation economy there, that the economy took on new momentum, fueling once again the contraband

50

The Black Population

trade in meat and hides, but now principally to the French colony. By 1720, Spanish Santo Domingo was already, in practice, the main supplier of French Saint-Domingue, where almost a quarter of a million black slaves were working at that time. Spurred on by the many advantages to be gained from growing sugarcane, coffee, ginger, indigo, etc., the French completely gave up on ranching and agriculture. Sánchez Valverde says of this: As the French grew in numbers, they needed us for their supplies and their survival; as they farmed the land, there was a growing shortage of pastures and livestock farms; and the more sugar mills they set up, the greater was the need for animals to power them and transport their products. What we had an excess of on the island were cattle and horses, which were of no use to us with no work for the horses to do and no trade for them, and no one to eat the cattle. So it opened up a very useful door for us through which to take out what we had too much of, and bring in what the vecinos needed. Some of the items our people took in exchange for their animals were the tools and utensils they lacked, and blacks, who were needed so badly. The same trading took place along the coast with the Dutch and the English, who were procuring the adjacent islands. So, in this way, we gradually equipped ourselves with slaves and tools. We began farming the land and started up some ingenios and trapiches, such as they were.69 On more than one occasion, the special contradictions arising from the competing interests of the representatives of the colonial powers and the colonists rested on the horns of cattle in both colonies. In French Santo Domingo they were triggered by disputes among certain groups over control of the trade, which had developed to such an extent that it became one of the most lucrative sources of investment for the emerging French colonial bourgeoisie. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the President of the Audiencia of Spanish Santo Domingo, who was no doubt amazed by the increase in the cattle trade in the colony he was running, tried to slow it down, or at least make it lucrative for himself, by demanding an export tax; but the unhappy Spanish vecinos on the border, particularly those in Santiago, declared an uprising of sorts. “By early 1721, the movement had grown to such an extent that it made the French governor think there might be something else behind it, and that they were covering up hostile intentions against his territory. Count d’Arquian, the Governor of Le Cap, had troops brought up to the border, and to conceal his greed the president claimed that the objective of the Santiago rebels had been to hand the city over to the French. These various circumstances at least forced the Governor to give up on his proposed export tax.”70 This was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that the internal conflicts of each society would have repercussions on the other.

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IV An important thing to observe in Spain’s colonial rule over the island of Santo Domingo is the rigid control it maintained over the colony’s civil administrative and military systems. Afraid that the creoles might become an influential force that could affect Spanish policy on the island, Spain prohibited their recruitment into the colonial army until the first half of the eighteenth century. Specifically, it was not until September 1738 that the military regulations for Hispaniola established by the Royal Decree of San Ildefonso stated in Article 14: Bearing in mind the difficulties in recruitment, and because of the high confidence I have in the zeal, courage, and ability of the people of Hispaniola, as they have shown in the different military functions that have been provided to my Royal Service and in their own defense, I hereby permit half the soldiers in each company of the Plaza de Santo Domingo Battalion and the Artillery Battalion to be from this island, provided they are of Spanish descent, unmarried, and do not practice a profession, because they must lodge in the barracks like everyone else and perform their service in the same way as soldiers born in Spain.71 Farming and cattle-raising were not the only factors involved in strengthening an emerging colonial bourgeoisie made up of creoles and Spaniards. The embryonic middle class drew useful lessons from the philistine teachings of the pirates and freebooters who plundered the island over several decades. Thus, during the eighteenth century, organized and well-financed groups “collectively known as ‘briganes’ (bandits), entered neighboring territory to sell the black men and women or children they kidnapped in their own territory. Even whites were not safe because they had to pay the ransom for their people in money, or cattle, or slaves. When blacks in the west had already been declared free, whites from Santiago de los Caballeros abducted French blacks and sold them. The French raised such a protest over this that the Governor, don Joaquín García, was ordered to surrender the towns in the Spanish region as punishment and retaliation, and even though the order was cancelled, Toussaint, the main instigator of that punishment, swore to carry it out by himself.”72 Furthermore, the deepening conflicts arising from the different interests at work in Europe during this period of trade expansion led to the creation on our island of certain groups who under the “legal” protection of being in a war situation, used privateering and piracy as another means to facilitate the accumulation of capital. It has been said that the important role this practice played on the island provides material for a history on the topic. And this statement is warranted, given the still scattered information that is obtainable today. In a note in Antonio Sánchez Valverde’s Idea del valor de la isla Española, Fray Cipriano de Utrera states that during the war of 1763 alone, “a packet boat, a brigantine,

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The Black Population

six sloops, two schooners, and a coastal vessel were brought into port and it was Dominican privateers, Lorenzo Daniel, Juan Bautista San Marcos, Juan Cueto, and Domingo Antonio Serrano, who brought them in. In June 1747, Domingo Sánchez Moreno and José Sánchez captured an English frigate with twenty-two cannon and pedreros and a cargo of 192 blacks, ivory, beeswax, and dyewood, with a total value of thirty-two thousand pesos. The list of legal privateers is a very long one and includes don José Campusano Polanco, who enjoyed great success in the first half of the eighteenth century, and Lorenzo Daniel (Lorencín), in the second half. In 1774, the latter alone brought in nineteen ships and twelve barges and piraguas.”73 We also have to stress the huge importance of slave labor in the base economic activity of colonial society. Santo Domingo’s economy certainly never reached the same level of development as that of Saint-Domingue, and as we have seen, the two colonies were also not involved in the same kinds of material productive activity. Nevertheless, on both sides of the island, slave labor was the basis of production. Given its close ties to the political and social ups and downs of its colonial power, Spanish Santo Domingo saw itself plunged into deep crisis on more than one occasion. Among the colonists, there was no shortage of ideologues who emphasized the role that slavery played in economic development and who blamed the lag on the difficulties Spain faced in supplying black slaves. Therefore, when the blacks’ struggle intensified to the point where it was threatening the authority of the owners and the owners relaxed the obstacles to freeing them, it was a reflection of the times that even some priests protested this wise move. Nothing is more revealing than the voice of the priest Sánchez Valverde when he says: A misunderstood religious principle which favors indiscriminately freeing slaves by all means has led us, and is leading us, to another pernicious abuse, which the French have sensibly restricted. For us, giving or bequeathing freedom to a slave passes for an act of piety. Sometimes this is indeed the case, but as a rule, it is an act that is contrary to religion, an act of wickedness, and deeply sinful. When a slave who is well-known to be dedicated, hard-working, and free of vice, is freed [by an owner with no impoverished relatives], for whom it would be better if he or she remained a slave, then freedom is a commendable religious act. But this, or the case of a special reward for the servant who saves his master’s life, is very rare. Freedom is usually granted or bequeathed by besotted old men and women under the guidance of inexperienced priests, thus leaving many relatives in indigence, and idle, disorderly freed slaves, who have to survive by wickedness, almost out of necessity. Far from being piety, this is an obvious scandal which civil and ecclesiastical law must stop. Because

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53

being able to grant freedom in this way, by infinitely increasing sins, is filling the towns with thieves, prostitutes, and perpetrators of vice, and is taking away the most useful workers. We feel and see the resulting chaos in our island.74

V After the Treaty of Ryswick, the indifference of the Spanish monarchy practically legalized what the colonists were physically unable to prevent, namely, the occupation by the French of the western part of the island. Following this, Hispaniola was partitioned into two colonies, which followed different paths in line with the economic development of their respective colonial powers—specifically, the level of development of capitalism in each of them. Thus, while the plantation economy in the French-occupied west experienced a growth which was without parallel in any of the Spanish American colonies, in the Spanish colony in the east, ranching and subsistence agriculture formed the basis of the emerging and naturally deformed colonial capitalism. This disparity triggered a particular kind of development in each historical and social sphere. Even with the limited information to be found on the economic situation in each colony, this is clearly shown by the numbers. At the end of the eighteenth century, of the 562 ships France used to take on cargo in its possessions, 353 loaded only in the ports of Saint-Domingue. “The French colony annually exported to France 163,406,000 pounds of sugar, 63,152,000 pounds of coffee, 1,808,700 pounds of indigo, 1,978,800 pounds of cacao, 52,000 pounds of achiote (bija), 6,900,000 pounds of cotton, 14,700 hides, 6,500 pounds of tortoiseshell, 22,000 pounds of cañafistola, and 11,286,000 pounds of dyewood, plus many other products or raw materials like beeswax, tobacco, cane syrup, and wood for cabinet-making, the amounts of which have been variously estimated. At today’s prices, the total value would amount to 265,200,000 francs, i.e. more than 53,000,000 pesos.75 To this must be added the share of production that the colonists kept for their domestic trade and for trade with the Central American coast, and above all, to have an idea of the total, the share that many farmers and traders used in their illicit dealings with North Americans, “who went to small out-of the-way ports to unload livestock, flour, salt fish, and construction timber. In exchange, they annually took on more than fifty thousand barrels of cane syrup, sugar, coffee, and many products reserved for that trade.”76 This significant output, which provided a huge boost to the development of industrial capitalism in France, “was produced by 792 sugar mills, 2,587 indigo factories, and other plantations that contained 24,018,336 cotton plants, 197,303,365 coffee trees, and 2,757,691 cacao plants, with the capital represented by these establishments amounting to 1,487,840,000 francs,”77 an amount raised, let it be said, with the blood and sweat of black slave labor.

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What follows is a breakdown of the output of the French colony in 1776, based on the value of the peso, the currency of the period:

OUTPUT OF THE FRENCH COLONY IN 177678 Product

Amount

Current price in the colony

White sugar Brown sugar

613,500 quintales 914,250

@ 7 pesos fuertes @ 3.5

4,294,500 3,199,876

Indigo Cotton Coffee Barrels of cane syrup Rum Undressed hides

21,150 37,640 304,500 45,600

@ 9 silver reales per pound @ 20 pesos @6 @4

2,374,312 752,800 1,827,080 sic 182,400

12,300 30,000

Total value in pesos Fuertes

@ 10 @1 Pesos fuertes

123,000 30,000 12,783,968 sic

While Spanish Santo Domingo had certainly seen some growth in the development of its productive force, the most developed sectors of the economy were cattle and horse breeding, and, on a smaller scale, the cultivation of sugarcane, tobacco, and cacao. “Two hundred thousand head of cattle is in fact the number found in the general census ordered by the president in that same year of 1780, and if one includes the animals that were exempt from tax, that number can perhaps be increased to 250,000.”79 The economic growth of the Spanish colony can perhaps be seen more clearly in the numbers given for the tithes levied on cattle, although, unfortunately, these are only for some of the towns on the island:

1760

1780

Jurisdiction

Tithed

Total in pesos fuertes

Tithed

Total in pesos fuertes

Santiago La Vega and Cotuí Hincha and San Rafael Bánica and San Juan

500 200 350 450 1,500 head

2,400 1,600 2,200 3,400 9,600

650 400 600 650 2,300 head

7,000 7,600 8,050 7,000 29,65080

The Black Population

55

As we have already seen, this slight improvement doesn’t mean that a comparison can be drawn between the economic progress in the French and Spanish parts of the island. The delayed development of capitalism in Spain and hence its mercantilist view of trade were among the factors responsible for the lag. In 1786, a partial attempt was made to correct the problems in order to bring about the improvement of the colony: “to satisfy requests made since 1767, the King of Spain declares that the importation of blacks shall be free and exempt from all duties when they are used in agriculture; the same applies to the export of metals or the articles resulting from their sale. [The law] promises to distribute fifteen hundred [slaves] to landowners, to be paid for in two years. Domestic slaves are subject to tax, in order to encourage their use in agriculture, and this tax is to be used to give bonuses to the slave importers. Exemption from duty is extended to agricultural tools and the implements used to produce and distill rum. All new facilities or factories are exempt from tithes for ten years.”81 Information on recorded population movements contributes to helping establish the growth noted above, given the close relationship between migration and the economic situation, a distinctive feature recorded throughout Spanish America at this time. The parish census of 1777 showed 117,000 settlers. According to Saint-Mery, in 1783 they numbered 125,000; in 1785, there were 152,000 (122,000 of them free and 30,000 slaves), and four years later in 1789, there were 130,000 free settlers and 30,000 slaves.82 Among the factors that undoubtedly played a role in this new impetus was the 1777 Peace of Aranjuez. “By virtue of Carlos III’s order of October 12, 1778, the monopoly of the Casa de Contratación of Seville was abolished, at least for a time, in the French and Spanish possessions on the island and free trade was proclaimed in the Indies. The franchise was extended to other ports [in the Peninsula. This provided a major boost to the colony, thanks to the participation of the ports] of Santo Domingo and Monte Cristi in the profits of the new province. Their residents were able to expand their commercial operations and make a significant contribution to the prosperity of the other towns in the interior and on the coast.”83

VI The close geographical, commercial, racial, and cultural ties between the eastern and western parts of the island necessarily resulted in social phenomena in one area having an impact on the historical development of the other. It is not possible to understand anything about the complicated development of Spanish Santo Domingo without having a clear idea of what was happening in the French part of the island. Having the same process of economic production naturally resulted in similarities between the social configurations of the two colonies, although developed to different degrees. In both the east and the west, the production of material goods was based on slave labor. However, the framework supporting the system

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of production differed in the following ways: in the west, the plantation was an economic phenomenon within the system of capitalist ownership and there were many French trading companies driving the colonial economy there. In the east, on the other hand, ranching was the rigid framework that supported the colonial economic structure. Thus, “in vast tracts of land with their respective natural limitations, the ranch owner, a figure of importance because of his economic position in the region, would set up on what they called the asiento his farm or family home, and other buildings where he housed his family and servants (usually purchased slaves), trapiches for producing sugar and cane syrup, as well as his vegetable plot for growing the produce needed to meet the needs of his family and servants.”84 The feudal character of this Spanish institution is evident in the dependency on the Crown to acquire the property. This was achieved mainly through “amparos reales” (royal letters patent), enshrined in law on November 20, 1578, and, to a lesser degree, through mercedes, which were essentially gifts. Since a high percentage of the colony’s economic production was destined for the external market—especially the French part of the island—we thus see the presence of commercial capitalism. The process of social class formation in the colonial societies of both French Saint-Domingue and Spanish Santo Domingo shows an overlapping of structural and, in equal measure, super-structural elements associated with three opposing and contradictory economic and social systems. And in our case it was the strong persistence of feudal elements and the limited development of forms of capitalist production that gave rise to a type of colonial mentality that was different from the one that developed in the French colony. For particular reasons, including the rapid rate of growth of capitalism in France, the Haitian economy had taken a radically different path from the kind of economic development in the eastern part of the island; nevertheless, structurally, i.e. in their relations of production, the two colonies exhibited essentially similar features. In both east and west, the essential characteristic of the slave mode of production was based on land being concentrated in the hands of only a few whites. The difference in the different degrees of development of their productive forces therefore led to the final outcome contributing unique features to each country in its historical process. Free mulattos, for example, were a much more important social and economic force in Haiti than in Santo Domingo. On the other hand, subject to the limited horizons of Spanish monopolistic policies, Spanish Santo Domingo succumbed slowly, according to historians. Despite the prohibitions, however, Santo Domingo was an important supplier of meat to the French part of the island, where the butchery trade was, incidentally, one of the most important sectors to be taken over by the slave-holding oligarchy, who sold the rights to the facilities at truly fabulous prices. “In 1789, 40,000 cattle and 3,000 horses and mules came in from the Spanish side of the island.”85 In the French colony, “Typically, only two classes of people were recognized, whites and people of color, and under this second label, blacks [slaves—FJF] were

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57

included along with mulattos [mostly freedmen—FJF]. However, this dividing line was far from being strictly observed and the whites, who must always have felt the need to remain united, had introduced very sharp distinctions among themselves. Whites were divided into two classes: the big plantation owners, who owned numerous slaves, and the group known as the petits blancs (los blanquitos), which was the larger group, and the more active and hard-working. It included all those farmers who hadn’t yet made their fortune and everyone who worked in the professions that were so essential to the prosperity of the colony.”86 In 1789, the total white population stood at 30,000, the majority of them officials in the colonial bureaucracy, soldiers, and artisans. A minority of this group owned 8,512 plantations in the colony.87 The mulatto population, which, incidentally, at this time already owned around 2,500 plantations, stood at almost 40,000, and there were some 500,000 black slaves.88 In 1794, more or less around the same time, the white population of the Spanish colony stood at 35,000 and comprised ranchers, crown officials, bureaucrats and soldiers, small farmers, and Catholic priests. There were 38,000 freed slaves, most of them mulatto artisans and day-laborers, and 30,000 black slaves. The total population of the [Spanish part of the] island therefore stood at 103,000. In contrast to the French colony, where the freed population (mulattos for the most part) came to constitute a significant economic force which can be said to have served as the incubator for the Haitian bourgeoisie, the Spanish colony’s archaic system placed strict controls on the participation of black and mulatto freed slaves in the economic life of the colony. A 1768 ordinance prohibited leasing land to former slaves, as well as prohibiting renting them houses in the city.89 But to make tax collection easier, these “free” men had to live close to a “known master.” As in the French part of the island, two kinds of people, whites and people of color (i.e. blacks and mulattos) were recognized in the Spanish colony, except there, the latter became an influential group due to their active participation in the economy, and more than a few French mulattos enjoyed a good education. In our case, by contrast, while it is true that a whole series of hierarchies separated first generation mixed race individuals (the offspring of a white man and a black woman) from subsequent generations (terceroons, quadroons, etc.), the draft black slave code, the Código Negro Carolino, stated that only the sixth generation would be considered white “if there have always been unions with persons of white blood.”90 The draft was written in 1784 and its authors included don José Núñez. It may be tiresome to mention this, but here even religion and its rituals were subject to this rigid social divide based on color. “Church festivals were classified as being of one, two, and three crosses. Three-cross festivals were obligatory for all believers; by a privilege of Paul III, blacks, mulattos, and slaves were exempted from two cross festivals; only ‘white Europeans’ were required to observe the single cross festivals.”91 And it was Spanish whites, together with white creoles, who monopolized all the economic life in the colony and, on the social level, left the stamp of their

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peculiar, outdated mindset, which was contrary to the historical progress of the period. Work had become demeaning for them and was therefore to be scorned; their leadership role was based solely on the privileges granted them by the Spanish monarchy by virtue of their being white. But it couldn’t be any other way. In Spain itself, the bourgeoisie as a class was barely beginning to take its first steps in the struggle to seize power. Therefore, when hard class struggle, the eternal expression of a slave society, received inspiration from the Declaration of the Rights of Man promulgated by the French Assembly, and blacks, slaves, and mulattos transformed the neighboring French colony into the stage for one of the most beautiful epics ever recorded in the abused history of America, and this redemptive violence knocked at the door of our history and Spain ceded the Spanish part of the island to France through the Treaty of Basel in 1795, this human social group, the embryonic colonial bourgeoisie, was reduced to singing its swan song: Yesterday I was born a Spaniard, in the afternoon I was French, by nighttime I was Ethiopian, today they say I’m an Englishman, I don’t know what will become of me!92

2 THE BLACK POPULATION AND THE NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS

The historical process of creating a social consciousness, which, as the psychological and ideological basis of the people, would subsequently pave the way for the creation of the Dominican nation, is closely linked first and foremost with the black slaves’ struggle for freedom, the abolition of slavery and the resulting social rise of the mulattos, the largest group. Under pressure from the white Spanish colonialists and despised by them, the mulattos made common cause with their black brothers. And this was warranted, because although within the limitations of the time, most mulattos had no trouble in gaining their freedom—almost always through blood ties to their white owners—the ordinances regulating everyday social interactions in Hispaniola stipulated that “blacks, mulattos, or terceroons shall be as submissive [and respectful] to every white person as if each one of them were his master.”93 On the one hand, the struggle to abolish slavery and hence all forms of social distancing based on color, hastened the final demise of the slaveholding Spanish colony’s deformed emerging bourgeoisie. On the other hand, it led to the creation of a creole bourgeoisie that was thoroughly integrated in terms of race, and socially, politically, and historically rooted in Dominican issues—a group which, incidentally, consolidated its actions against the colonial system among groups of black slaves and freed mulattos. “Quite a few slaves belonging to these vecinos are fleeing to the French side of the island, carried by the voice of freedom of that Republic” says the regidor don Luis Gómez Franco in a letter to Governor García.”94 In the historical record, this was the first blow to undermine the system upheld by the colonial authorities of the Spanish Crown and the emerging colonial bourgeoisie, closely allied with the landowners (ranchers), and it took place

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within the framework of Toussaint Louverture’s takeover of the formerly Spanish part of the island (ceded to France through the Treaty of Basel in 1795) and the resulting abolition of slavery ordered under the treaty. The colonists therefore resorted to every subterfuge to avoid complying with the terms of the treaty, i.e. the occupation of the formerly Spanish part of the island by the French army, and the natural outcome of this, the abolition of slavery. Hence when the French colonial bourgeoisie received assistance from England to invade the island of Saint-Domingue, recover their wealth, and put down the black insurgency in the west, Spanish colonialists enthusiastically joined the chorus in support of this retrogressive move, and in the former border region, where the English had already occupied part of the territory along the north coast, Spanish landowners and merchants “did not cease to maintain the most culpable intelligence with them [i.e. the English—FJF], and every night, signals from the ships were returned from the town.”95 Amid the vortex, despite an anguished Governor García telling the Spanish monarchy that the blacks preferred being slaves of the Spaniards to being free with the French, there was an announcement of the sudden news of black uprisings in the Spanish-occupied area.96 Governor García broke the news to the Prince of Peace [Manuel Godoy] in a letter dated November 1, 1796, “The day before yesterday, during the night, an uprising of blacks in the jurisdiction of this capital started on the plantations owned by Spaniards. The fact that it began on the one with the most slaves makes one suspect that it will spread in keeping with the strength of the cause of the contagion, which until this point has been concealed with the greatest hypocrisy.”97 Naturally, the Spanish monarchy expected its subjects to leave the part of the island that had been relinquished. What is more, if any obstacle stood in the way of its immediate handover, the governor was ordered, “gather with all your forces in the most fortified location on the island and remain there as best you can, abandoning all the rest, if the French commissioners do not want to take possession.”98 But in addition to the problems related to the properties of the admittedly small number of settlers who had expressed their desire to not accept French law and to leave the island and go and live in other Spanish possessions, the most serious obstacle standing in the way of implementing the handover concerned the relations of production. On June 26, 1797, the Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo made the Spanish settlers’ position clear to Governor García, “and it has been seen that they do not intend to leave, and that all the time that has passed, all the government’s preparations, all the ships that have been lined up to take them, have not been sufficient to make them show up or to get ready.”99 And this was because the biggest problem concerned the slaves. The handover of the eastern part of the island was occurring at the precise moment when the bitter fight of Saint-Domingue’s blacks to abolish slavery had forced the French to declare in accordance with the principles of the French Revolution that all men were equal, both in the colonies and in Europe. This put the Spanish colony’s emerging, pro-slavery bourgeoisie in a peculiar legal

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position, which was totally incompatible with their outdated world view. If efforts were made to prevent the immediate takeover of the Spanish side of the island by taking advantage of the difficulties brought on by the out-of-control situation in the west, these efforts were first and foremost essentially an attempt to salvage the slave relations of production which the French occupation was threatening to end. It wasn’t the change in nationality that mattered to the Spanish, a fact borne out by the small number who made the decision to emigrate to other Spanish possessions (mainly Cuba and Puerto Rico); instead, it was the change in the relations of production, in the material structure of colonial society, which was inevitably going to bring about a whole new system of social, political and economic relationships. Above all, and this is what was of serious concern to the Spanish settlers, it was going to translate into a radical change in the everyday interracial relationships among Spanish whites, blacks, and mulattos. A few months after the Treaty of Basel was signed, the Spanish authorities raised their complaints to the French authorities. Specifically, they stated that the French had made it public knowledge that the French Republic had ordered that the slaves be freed. Furthermore, they added that, under the terms of the treaty, any Spanish subjects who so desired had the right to leave the island with all their assets and belongings. The answers to these complaints are contained in the letter from General Étienne Laveaux to Governor García, the highest representative of the Spanish colonial authorities. This is a historic document that provides an in-depth exploration of the issue. It says: Port-au-Prince, November 1795 Liberty – Equality —in Port-au-Prince, Frumaire, Year 4 of the one and indivisible French Republic. Étienne Laveaux, Commanding-General and Governor of the Island of Saint-Domingue. To don Joaquín García, President and Captain-General in the service of His Catholic Majesty. As a proud bearer of the name of French Republican, steeped in the principles that have made them victorious over other nations, I must not, nor can I, take your letters and responses personally, especially Article 6. I must put aside my own feelings and concern myself only with the interests of the French Republic, whose aims are to spread happiness across the earth, and to make this known to all peoples who wish to open their eyes and recognize that man was born to achieve Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. These three virtues have been the three invincible strengths of France. You complain that the deputation I sent you has distributed leaflets without your involvement; that it has widely distributed the decree of liberty for all, and has made it known that the slaves in the Spanish part of the island will enjoy their freedom from the moment the Republic takes possession.

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You tell me that the treaty gives subjects a year to decide whether to stay, that the subjects of your king hold most of their assets in the form of slaves, that Spanish laws have not abolished slavery and that in violating this consideration, I have ensured the ruin of the subjects of your king. You add, “I hope your intelligence can fathom” my way of thinking about these fundamental matters and that “you will do whatever is best to avoid causing offence to the Spanish.” In everything I have said, and everything my deputation has done, I see nothing that is not legal and fair. I am going to demonstrate that to you. Under Article 9, the King of Spain fully relinquishes the Spanish part of the island; it therefore forms part of the French Republic immediately upon ratification of the treaty, and the month granted is only to make preparations to take possession, but that doesn’t alter the fact that the territory is acquired as of the day of ratification of the treaty. The paragraph says: “Residents of that part of Saint-Domingue who, for reasons of interest or other motives, prefer to move with their belongings to His Catholic Majesty’s possessions have a year in which to do so.” When it says “residents,” it is referring to all men, whatever their color. The French nation does not recognize slaves, it recognizes only men; therefore since your supposed slaves are in territory granted to the French Republic, they have gained their freedom; so here you see them, free from the day the treaty was ratified; or, if you want to hold to a short period of time, from the day of notification of the said treaty. Your supposed slaves have become residents … ; to be a resident, one need only live here; therefore the paragraph quoted above applies to them, just as it does to all the other residents. They have the right to remain on the soil of freedom, in conformity with its laws. Or they have the option of moving with their assets to His Catholic Majesty’s possessions, but their former owners cannot force them to leave the island because, as residents, the treaty gives them the right to choose. The Spaniards who came to me at Fort-Dauphin as a deputation begged me to issue a proclamation that would reassure all Spaniards. I quickly expressed to them the feelings of true Republicans; I acquainted them with our principles in order to entice them to adopt our customs, our uses, the friendship and fraternity that we offer in advance to all those who will remain with us. I also had to explain about freedom of religion, about the freedom to choose the clergy. I did so quickly in order to reassure all the residents. If some were uneasy about freedom of religion, if they wanted to know about this freedom of religion in order to decide to stay with us, if I satisfied them, was I not also obliged to satisfy those residents who, having been slaves when this was Spanish territory, were being set free with the transfer of this land to France, [and inform them] about the year they are being given to make up their minds whether to stay or leave?

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I had to apprise them of the advantages they would find if they stayed; I had to tell them that freedom of religion, physical freedom, and freedom of thought would be religiously observed by the French Republicans. Who else if not a Republican, a Governor named by the Convention and entrusted with its confidence, would have educated these new men? To forget these men, to leave them for a longer time in ignorance of their rights, to withhold from them the privilege that the paragraph in Article 9 had given them, was to make myself a criminal in the eyes of the nation, it was to ignore the principles of our blessed constitution, it was, in short, to be an apostate. To have made known the decree of liberty for all is to have made known the victory over ourselves, it is to make ourselves immortal; therefore what I have done, what my deputation has done, is done with full awareness; it is legal and it is right. You tell me that the treaty gives subjects a year to decide whether to stay. Yes, I know, but consider under what terms; it is always under the terms of the sacred principle of freedom. Your king is ceding your country to the Republic and the Republic is giving all residents a year to accustom themselves to our customs and laws. If they cannot do so after a year, they are free to return to His Catholic Majesty’s possessions with their assets. A man’s body is not to be viewed as property, as an asset that belongs to another man; it would be a violation of our constitution if you were to aim to try and take men as property, as your assets. The treaty is quite clear. Residents may relocate with their assets. The Republic has decreed that one man cannot be the property of another; therefore as of the date of notification of the peace treaty, no Spaniard has been able to, nor may he, remove a single individual from the island of Saint-Domingue by force. Nothing but his own free will, his own choice, can make him decide to prefer the possessions of His Catholic Majesty. How can you write and tell me that Spanish law has not abolished slavery? You are not being consistent. Have you forgotten all the documents that have appeared under your name, signed by your deputy, don Vásquez? These documents say: “The French Republicans are promising blacks their freedom and my lord, the King of Spain, gives it to you.” These wellknown, mendacious, and misleading documents had no other purpose than to spread confusion and to impede our citizens, who were mistakenly returning to their homeland. How many underhanded blows are not assembled in don Vazquez’s works? During the war, you wanted soldiers and, ideally, you gave them their freedom. Today, when peace has been made, you want slaves. You can no longer recognize slaves on the island of Saint-Domingue, our principles oppose it, and they demonstrate that the Republic faithfully executes its constitution. It is these basic principles of our constitution that I abide by, they are what I fear violating, no human considerations can make me violate them. I believe this is enough to

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demonstrate to you that I cannot undo what is done. I am a French Republican, which is to tell you that I am an apostle of liberty. In my capacity as Major-General and Governor of the island of Saint-Domingue, I hereby give you notice that in the name of the French nation, in the name of this Republic, one and indivisible, I protest the departure from the island of all the black men whom you look upon as slaves, and who are residents. I shall ask the National Convention to deem it a violation to remove a single one of these men who have been so unfortunate, and who are now experiencing happiness as a result of the labors of Republicans. I salute you in the name of the Republic – Étienne Laveaux. As interpreter for this captaincy-general, I certify that this is a faithful translation of the original. Saint-Domingue, December 18, 1795. José Joaquín Pellon. This is a copy. Nicolás de Toledo.100 This document clearly expresses the reasons that made it possible for Toussaint Louverture’s coming to power to be received with rapturous jubilation by the great majority of the residents of what would later be known as the Dominican Republic. With a bitterness typical of the racist mentality of the white Spanish colonists of that time, doña Francisca Valerio, a member of an old family, gave an account of the spectacle of Toussaint’s entry into the city of Santo Domingo on January 3, 1801 to the priest, Dr. Francisco González y Carrasco, in Santiago, Cuba. She says, in part, “the renegade Toussaint entered our city and the only thing missing would be to have received him under the canopy, because, to my mind, they wouldn’t have done more for our king.”101 In Santiago, the mere announcement of the transfer of the eastern part of the island, the modern-day Dominican Republic, was received with acts of support from the popular masses—black slaves and freed mulattos—who even used subversive pamphlets against the pro-slavery Spanish authorities. These pamphlets, “circulated throughout the city, full of insults and invective against ministers of the altar, and they also offended the decorum of a number of families of highstanding, who were very well-known for their reputation and virtues.”102 This was class struggle masquerading as a conflict motivated by racial differences: a conflict that was prematurely launched by the development of events on the French side of the island, where the black slaves had already gained their freedom. It was perceived in this way because in those countries where black slavery had reached a certain degree of development, skin color represented close ties with a particular class: black and mulatto with “the masses,” and white with “the aristocracy.” Don Gaspar de Arredondo y Pichardo, a member of one of Santiago’s most important families, ironically expressed the white colonists’ resentment at the equal social treatment of blacks which had been an unintended consequence of the abolition of slavery that resulted from the occupation of the region by the

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French army under Toussaint Loverture. In one of the most important historical accounts he says, “In a dance they held to celebrate the entrance of Moïse [Louverture], before the arrival of the French army, the master of ceremonies paid me the great honor of asking me to dance with a young black slave from my household. She was one of the most distinguished young women at the dance because she was pretty, and she had no title or price with which to gain her freedom other than blacks entering the country with weapons of violence.”103 It must be stated that the occupation notably advanced the process of racial integration. Despite the fact that this was soon halted by the arrival of the Napoleonic army under Leclerc and the resulting establishment of Ferrand’s regressive regime in the eastern part of the island—a regime which would reinstitute slavery—it still represented the first, admittedly premature, step in the long road of social struggle that in the near future would permit a social consciousness to be formed which, “as the psychological and ideological basis of the people, would subsequently pave the way for the creation of the Dominican nation.”

3 THE CONSTITUTION OF 1801

Once the eastern part of the island was occupied, Toussaint embarked upon the total political, economic, and social reorganization of Spanish Santo Domingo based on the model of the western part of the island. He knew that he had to act quickly in light of the events that were unfolding daily in France and threatening to derail his latent plans for independence. As his first order of business, he proceeded to replace the old cabildos with local councils “each composed of four members, a Corregidor, and a secretary, vesting them with the responsibility to hear minor matters, perform marriages, and validate births and deaths.”104 In contrast with the past, blacks and mulattos, along with whites, were now integrated into the colonial administration. In addition, to replace the Spanish militia, he ordered the formation of a company of gendarmes charged with monitoring public order, and he named the chief authorities, entrusting the government of the south of the island to his brother Paul, who was based in Santo Domingo, and the north to General Clerveaux, headquartered in Santiago. By an express order issued in early February, everyone living in the countryside was ordered to plant sugarcane, coffee, cotton, and cacao. In what seems to have been an attempt to shift agriculture towards crops that commanded a high price at that time, they were forbidden to grow pumpkins, sweet potatoes, plantains, and other fruits and vegetables.105 At the same time, he outlawed the sale of land without municipal authorization. This was clearly done to stem the flight of the white population who, terrified by the loss of their complete supremacy, were trying to sell their land and leave the island. As a trade incentive, the import duty was lowered from 20% to 6%. Toussaint’s entire political strategy “was oriented towards the peaceful integration of the two colonies into a single political unit. To that end, he stimulated

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the economy, which the Spanish had left as a natural economy, by promoting the development of agriculture and trade. Since Spanish Santo Domingo depended exclusively on livestock-raising and logging—there was barely enough sugar [at this time—FJF] to satisfy domestic consumption; coffee, cacao, indigo, cotton etc. weren’t being produced, and tobacco was only grown and marketed around Santiago—and its main trade with the French colony, England, and the United States had been interrupted since the start of the [Haitian—FJF] Revolution, Toussaint opened up the ports of Santo Domingo, Monte Cristi, Puerto Plata, Samaná, Neyba, and Azua to British and North American trade and resumed livestock exports to the western part of the island. These measures, and the resulting economic boom, won him the support of the landowners and the merchants.”106 On February 5, 1801, with the goal of further liberalizing his regime and legitimizing his power, and, in turn, laying the foundations for his plans for independence, Toussaint convened a national assembly made up of representatives from the whole island and a constitution was subsequently passed. Along with Etienne Viard, Julien Raymond, Philippe Collet, Gaston Nogéré, the Dominicans Andrés Muñoz, Francisco Morillas, Carlos de Rojas, and Juan Mancebo issued the first political Constitution that was valid in both parts of the island.107 The solemn document produced by the political forces of the first country in the Americas to take an unequivocal stand against racial inequality and openly declare itself against slavery is a link in the history of the Dominican Republic with which one has to be familiar in order to understand its subsequent history. First and foremost, the 1801 Constitution represented a complete overthrow of the political, economic, and social conditions upheld by the Spanish colonialists. It was a radical shift that had the solid support of the popular masses and the more progressive sectors of the upper classes. Broadly speaking, the inspiration for the first Haitian Constitution is to be found in the principles of the 1789 French Constitution. Yet despite the fact that the Haitian activists didn’t formally proclaim independence, the broad autonomy that this constitution gave Toussaint forced Napoleon, then First Consul, to write to him, “The constitution that you have produced, while containing many good things, also has many others that are contrary to the dignity and sovereignty of the French nation, of which SaintDomingue is only a part.”108 The document consists of thirteen titles with seventy-seven articles. The first article establishes the political boundaries of the colony and states, “The whole of Saint-Domingue, together with Samana, La Tortue, La Gonâve, Les Cayemites, Île-à-Vache, Saône, and other contiguous islands, form the territory of a single colony, which is part of the French empire but governed by special laws.” Article Three states, “There shall be no slaves in this territory, servitude is permanently abolished. All its residents are born, live, and die, free and French.” And later, in Article Four, “All persons, whatever their color, shall be admitted to all forms of employment.” Article Five adds in the same vein, “There is no distinction other than that of virtue and talent, nor any superiority other than that granted by the

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law by reason of the exercise of a public office. The law is the same for everyone, regarding both punishment and protection.” Articles Six, Seven, and Eight of Title Three deal with religion and state that Catholicism shall be the only publicly professed religion. Articles Nine, Ten, and Eleven of Title Four regulate domestic relations, and state, “There shall be no divorce in the colony.” This article was apparently aimed at stabilizing the institution of marriage, which had been seriously affected by the proliferation of de facto unions, a practice imposed by the former system of slavery. Title Five establishes laws on individual rights: Article 12: The Constitution guarantees individual liberty and safety. No one can be arrested without an express order issued by a legally competent official. Imprisonment shall be in the locations designated for that purpose. Article 13: Property is sacred and inviolable. Every individual, whether in person or through his representatives, has the free disposition and administration of his property. Anyone who challenges this right becomes a criminal in the eyes of society and responsible toward the person disturbed while on his property. The abolition of slavery resulted in the sudden appearance of a new order consisting of some 400,000 slaves. This, together with the need to maintain a set rate of production in agriculture, the basis of the Haitian economy, forced Toussaint to regulate the lives of this overwhelming mass of newly free people. He regulated agricultural work by placing the workers with the big plantation owners under a new system of dependency. There is no question that this was one of the smartest moves made by the Haitian revolutionary to ease the transition from compulsory slave labor to the new conditions of “free,” rational labor, a stage which, in Toussaint’s mind, involved passing through certain other phases. But if such “regulation” on the part of the state was necessary, it was in open contradiction to the eminently liberal content of those articles which guaranteed individual liberty, for example. The presence of these incompatible features in the same document is clear evidence of the bitter fighting among the political forces driving the Haitian Revolution. At the center of the conflict, Toussaint apparently represented the reconciliation of the two tendencies. Hence, perhaps, the obvious paternalism that is paramount in the 1801 Constitution. Title Six, which regulated agriculture and trade, and hence the life of the agricultural worker, is quoted verbatim: Article 14: Since the colony is essentially agrarian, agricultural work must not suffer the slightest interruption. Article 15: Every plantation is a manufactory that requires a group of cultivators and workers; it is the peaceful refuge of a constant and active family, whose father must always be the landowner or his representative.

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Article 16: All the workers and cultivators are members of the said families and share in their revenues. Any change of residence by the cultivators entails the ruin of the crops. In order to suppress a vice that is as disastrous to the colony as it is contrary to public order, the governor will issue all police regulations demanded by the circumstances, pursuant to the terms and conditions of the police regulation of 20 Vendémiaire, Year IX, and the proclamation issued by General-in-Chief, Toussaint Louverture on the following 19 Pluviôse. Article 17: Workers essential for re-establishing and improving farming shall be introduced into Saint-Domingue. The Constitution charges the Governor [with adopting the appropriate measures] to encourage and promote this increase in workers, coordinating and balancing the diverse interests, and ensuring and guaranteeing the execution of the contracts that ensue from their introduction. Article 18: Since the colony’s trade is limited to the exchange of local commodities and products, the introduction of similar commodities and products is, and shall remain, prohibited. But it turned out that although this institutionalization of a system of dependency represented a major advance for the French side of the island with its huge slave population, these regulations meant stagnation for Spanish Santo Domingo, where the slave mode of production had been seriously damaged by specific historical circumstances and where the slave population at the time was not very big—around twenty thousand, according to the most reliable sources—and, moreover, the principal mode of production was feudalism. In this sense, the 1801 Constitution is a very special paradox for our side of the island, although it cannot be denied that abolition and racial equality signified a major boost for the (now short-lived) integration of blacks and mulattos into the country’s political and economic life. This explains Toussaint’s extraordinary popularity among the popular masses in the early days of his government, and the lack of effective support when, on Napoleon’s orders, French troops landed in Spanish Santo Domingo. In the final analysis, we might say that, ultimately, his most faithful ally was the intermediate goods sector. This is easily explained by the important measures aimed, firstly, at trade expansion, secondly, at protectionism, and lastly, his urgent steps to consolidate the monetary system.

4 THE OTHER FACE OF THE RECONQUEST

Despite the fact that the eastern side of the island was occupied by Toussaint Louverture in the name of France in 1801, it was after Leclerc’s arrival in 1802 that the period known as “The French Era in Santo Domingo” began in the Spanish part of the island. Although the French general and his army of more than fifty thousand men had been totally defeated by the insurgent slaves in the west, the remnants of the Napoleonic troops were successful in first occupying, then bringing under control, the extreme eastern part of the island. They proceeded to extend their authority to the central area, the Cibao region. The radical political shift that France had undergone with Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise to power thus had violent repercussions for our island. First and foremost, it overturned the social and political advances that Toussaint had introduced into Spanish Santo Domingo, in keeping with the liberal spirit of the Haitian Constitution of 1801. Thus, among the first measures passed was the re-establishment of slavery, an order actually given by Napoleon himself to his brother-in-law Leclerc in advance of the effective occupation of the eastern part of the island: “If the political goal of the French part of Saint-Domingue is to disarm the blacks and turn them into cultivators, as free men, they should likewise be disarmed in the Spanish part, but returned to slavery.”109 Furthermore, the decision was made to view Toussaint’s takeover as “null and void.”110 Thus the economically dominant groups, the ranchers, and what remained of the colonial oligarchy, who had previously opposed the French occupation of this side of the island “because of the freedom for blacks”111 that was passed by the National Assembly during the Republic, now allied themselves with the Napoleonic empire and gave their enthusiastic support to the return to the racial inequalities among blacks, mulattos, and whites that Toussaint’s brief regime had

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largely begun to smooth out. Of course, the return to the old labor system was not achieved so easily. Although controlling the border towns was not impossible during the “French Era,” control was always weak, and throughout the country as a whole a period of dissent began among the blacks. This culminated in several uprisings, which were successfully put down by the French occupation forces with the help of the pro-slavery Spanish colonialists.112 With French power precariously established in the extreme east of Spanish Santo Domingo, the systematic harassment of the newly proclaimed Republic of Haiti and the traffic in black slaves began following the coup carried out by General Ferrand against General Kerseveau. On January 6, 1805, the following decree was issued: L. Ferrand, Commander-in-Chief in Santo Domingo. DECREE, Santo Domingo, January 6, 1805. Has decreed the following: Article 1: Residents in the border regions of the departments of Ozama and Cibao, and troops deployed in the garrison posts on the border, are authorized to enter territory occupied by the insurgents to hunt them down and take prisoner everyone of either sex under the age of fourteen. Article 2: The prisoners resulting from these raids shall be the property of their captors. Article 3: Captured boys and black and mulatto girls under the age of ten must expressly remain in the colony and may not be exported under any circumstances. According to their preference, the captors may either leave them on their plantations or sell them to the residents of the departments of Ozama and Cibao. Article 4: The blacks and persons of color mentioned in the preceding article who may not be exported shall not be considered the property of their captors and may not be sold by them until each individual in the department of Ozama has been provided with a certificate by the elders in Azua, endorsed by Commander Ruiz, and those in the Department of Cibao have been provided with a similar certificate by the city council of Santiago, endorsed by Commander Serapio, which confirms that these blacks, etc. were indeed captured in territory occupied by the insurgents and were a part of them. The elders in Azua and Santiago shall maintain registers in which they shall keep a complete record of every certificate issued, and the captors will pay them two pesos for each certificate. Article 5: Boys aged between ten and fourteen and black, mulatto, etc. girls between the ages of twelve and fourteen, shall be expressly sold for export.

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Article 6: Those designated for export may only be shipped from the port of Santo Domingo, whose Government shall be paid five per cent export duty on the sale price. Article 7: Anyone who takes these blacks and persons of color to Santo Domingo to be sold and exported shall be required to obtain for each individual in the department of Ozama a certificate issued by the elders in Azua, endorsed by Commander Ruiz, and in the department of Cibao, a similar certificate from the city council of Santiago, endorsed by Commander Serapio, which confirms that these blacks, etc. were indeed captured in territory occupied by the rebels and were a part of them. These certificates must also be recorded in the registers kept by the elders in Azua and Santiago, and two pesos shall be paid for each. Article 8: No black, etc. may be shipped from Santo Domingo without individual authorization from the general-in-chief, which he shall issue with the required documents before him. Article 9: Those blacks and persons of color for whom these formalities have not been completed shall be considered stolen goods and shall be confiscated or recovered wherever they may be in the colony of SaintDomingue and the neighboring colonies. Article 10: Any person who has kept or sold blacks etc., and also any person who has exported, or attempted to export them from the colony without completing the aforementioned formalities, shall be required to pay a fine of fifty pesos a head; and any landowner or ship’s captain, as well and any civil or military official who has assisted, or has been caught assisting, in a fraud of this nature, shall be sent to prison or removed from his employment, and shall pay one hundred pesos for each black, etc. who was removed or whom there was an attempt to remove. Article 11: The compensation paid to the city councils of Azua and Santiago for the certificates they are required to issue shall be used for community expenses and only the amount the elders deem appropriate for the Secretary’s salary shall be deducted from that amount. Article 12: The military commanders and the elders are charged with implementing this decree in their respective departments, principally in regard to the vigilance needed to prevent any kind of abuse. Article 13: The moment the rebels recognize the error of their ways and make an act of submission to the French Emperor and surrender into the hands of General Ferrand, and there is assurance that they are acting in good faith, all hostilities shall cease.

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This decree, of which two hundred copies shall be translated and printed in both languages (French and Spanish) and published and posted in the cities and towns of the departments of Ozama and Cibao, [shall be registered in the Office of Colonial Inspection] in the Secretariat of the Interim Commission on Justice and filed in the offices of the councils of elders of the department. Drawn up in Military Headquarters in Santo Domingo, 16 Nivôse, Year XIII (January 6, 1805). Brigadier-General, Commander-in-Chief, Interim Captain-General, Member of the Legion of Honor. Signed: FERRAND113 The reorganization process begun by Dessalines in his newly proclaimed Republic offered a period of calm, which was further extended following the Haitian leader’s assassination in 1806, an event that would split political forces in the country and culminate in Haiti being partitioned into two states under Pétion and Christophe. Ferrand took advantage of the lull and issued several administrative measures to benefit the commercial sector. They increased his support among the economically powerful groups and succeeded in bringing the unstable colonial economy under control for a short period of time. He began a major push to promote the cultivation of coffee and other commodities in the militarily strategic Samaná Peninsula and in the eastern and southern regions he organized the timber export trade and encouraged a profitable trading relationship with the United States. In addition, he organized a fleet and authorized privateering under the control of French citizens. He ordered the expropriation of the assets of those families who had left the country, terrified by the permanent state of war: “assets which ended up in his hands and in those of his relatives.”114 Despite the current situation, until late 1805, the Cibao and most of the border areas continued to profit from supplying goods—mainly cattle—to Haiti. This was due to the fact that the unpopularity of the Ferrand government forced him to concentrate its troops in the southern and eastern parts of the colony. In 1804, faced with the threat of the region being occupied by General Ferrand’s French forces, and with the support, needless to say, of the most resolute groups of blacks and mulattos, the merchants and landowners in Santiago sought the protection of the Dessalines government. Dessalines sent forces under the command of one of his colonels, the Dominican mulatto José Tavarez, not only with the intention of taking possession of the town, but also of demanding that the most important economic groups contribute five hundred Tours pounds to help cover the Republic’s war expenses. This move disheartened those groups who supported union and it undermined support for the Haitian cause by splitting the anti-French or, what amounts to the same thing, the anti-slavery front. As feared, Ferrand sent a detachment under Deveaux to occupy the stronghold of Santiago and, with their forces divided, the pro-Haiti troops led by the mulatto

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José Tavarez were driven out. This event had such an impact on the populace of the town that within a short space of time the civilian population got organized and under the Reyes brothers and Melchor Rodríguez, they engaged the French troops and forced them back to Santo Domingo. The French army never achieved complete control over all of the eastern part of the island and this would soon pave the way for the development of a series of circumstances that would soon bring down the Ferrand regime. Among these we can mention the following interrelated manifestations: first, the permanent state of war between the newly proclaimed Republic of Haiti and France, which reached its peak with Dessalines’ invasion in 1805 and the resulting siege of the city of Santo Domingo; the looting of some cities in the interior, which would end up having an adverse effect first, on agricultural production and second, on the cattle and tobacco trade, the main economic basis of the battered colonial economy. Second, the situation gave rise to a conflict between the fragile growth of the city of Santo Domingo and the worsening economic problems in the surrounding areas and the rest of the country—especially in the Cibao region. This caused huge discontent among the ranchers, merchants, middlemen, and groups of small rural land owners, whose lives essentially unfolded in step with trade with Haiti. Another factor we should add that acted as a catalyst to the overall situation was the continual stacking of the bureaucracy with French citizens, to the disadvantage of the traditional Spanish and, to a lesser extent, the creole bureaucracies. On top of this, if trade in the interior had picked up again, this was not the case in the rest of the colony, and it benefited French merchants and Ferrand’s favorites in the capital more than anyone else.115 In the spiritual realm, the customs and lifestyle of the masses, alienated by the dogmas and traditions that the Catholic Church’s representatives had introduced into the colony over the centuries, openly clashed with the rationalist, revolutionary ideas that pervaded the troops and many of the people of French origin whom Ferrand’s occupation had drawn to this part of the island. Thus at the end of his journal, where he is attempting to depict the situation in the eastern part of the island at that time, Guillermin, a former officer in the French army, writes, “The only activity permitted and encouraged [by the Spanish colonial authorities—FJF] was related to religious ceremonies, which took up most of their time; the voice of the priests was for them a harsh oracle, which did not allow any reflection.”116 It should also be noted that the highest French authorities even went so far as to commit the “sacrilege” of turning convents into theaters.117 Furthermore, the Catholic Church, specifically the Spanish clergy, endorsed the insurgency campaign against French authority. Their reasons are to be found in Ferrand’s proclamation against religious servitude and the closure of the monasteries and convents, because in the past, during the colonial period, “most

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property was taxed, and the hard work of private individuals financed the idleness of the monks.”118 Lastly, France’s precarious control over the colony was further undermined by its war with England, which led to confrontations, and even naval encounters, off our coasts.119 This then, in broad terms, was the political landscape in the colony when the 1808 uprising of the Spanish people against the Napoleonic forces that had invaded Spain impacted our shores. It caused a spillover of the feelings of resentment that had built up among the people and made possible what is known in our history as “The Reconquest.” Thus, around this time, a period of open conspiracy began against Ferrand’s authority, which was led by the ranchers, the Catholic Church, the merchants, and the small rural land owners. This movement was, in turn, organized under the auspices of the Spanish colonial wartime authorities, and the role of supplying the groups of conspirators fell to don Toribio Montes, the governor of Puerto Rico. Spanish ships went back and forth between Puerto Rico and our coasts transporting weapons and other military supplies. England, which was also at war with France, supported the “Reconquest,” even landing troops in the Bay of Samaná at an early date, where they captured two French corsairs, took the garrison of the fortress prisoner, and flew the Spanish flag over it.120 Pétion’s Haitian Republic contributed what it could to help the insurgency against its natural enemies, the pro-slavery French, while, for his part, Christophe sent three hundred rifles, three hundred sabers and three hundred pairs of pistols, and other military supplies (and there are claims that he also sent some forces from his own army).121 By the first months of 1808, the rebellion was essentially organized. The participation in the movement of different groups with opposing views inevitably gave rise to friction among the chief native-born organizers. The prevailing discord grew to the point of threatening the very existence of the rebellion. However, the ranchers, the majority group, called for an assembly to resolve the conflict. After heated discussions among the other leaders, “the supreme command of the army was given to Juan Sánchez Ramírez, who was ‘elected’ by the troops.” This was done behind the back of Ciriaco Ramírez, the representative of the most progressive group. However, inside the army, and especially among the military leaders, there were serious differences of opinion that reflected the class contradictions of society, i.e. the different political objectives of the various social groups, and their aspirations for the revolutionary movement. Thus, on the one hand, along with the assistance from Puerto Rico provided by Toribio Montes, a group of Spanish officers arrived with instructions that they be named to key positions in the army,122 including that the overall command be given to Colonel Jiménez.123 This aroused resentment among the creole officers. On the other hand, the goal of the revolutionaries in the south, headed by Ciriaco Ramírez, Cristóbal Huber, and Salvador Felix, who were in contact with General Pétion,

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was to proclaim independence in the eastern part of the island, a plan “that was probably encouraged by Pétion.”124 It therefore has to be emphasized that there were two factions within the revolutionary movement of 1808–1809: on one side were the pro-slavery groups that had the enthusiastic backing of Spain and England, and on the other side was a timidly nationalist, progressive group, representing abolitionist ideals; this was led by Ciriaco Ramírez and Huber, who, in turn, were backed by Christophe and Pétion. To grasp the reactionary nature of the faction headed by Sánchez Ramírez, one need only say that the orders he received from the governor of Puerto Rico included “having no dealings with the mulatto Pétion, or with Christophe, without his authorization,” and that “under no circumstances should blacks be admitted to the campaign.” It was also added that “blacks living in towns in the Spanish part of the island should be assembled and put under guard by armed troops as far away from the city as possible.”125 A final point: within its military ranks, Ferrand’s government contained the seeds of a contradiction that would plunge Napoleonic power into its deepest crisis in Europe around this time. The vast majority of the soldiers who wore the uniform of the occupying army alongside Ferrand were not Frenchmen, but Piedmontese and Italians. And this would be another factor that would greatly weaken French colonial power as it faced the continual open intrigues of the Spanish colonialists, the ranchers, and the Catholic clergy. This state of affairs is clearly expressed in the seditious manifesto that was brought to the Spanish part of the island by Brasseti around that time: “Take up arms, citizens of Santo Domingo! Against the enemy you have in your homes, with the assurance, just like I’m telling you, that the Piedmontese and the Italians who make up the greater part of the garrison will not stain their great courage by serving the treachery and bad faith with which the French government has persecuted all the monarchies of Europe. Believe that the Almighty, who is infinitely just and fair, will reward this courage employed in the defense of religion and the monarchies destroyed by the common enemy of the world.”126 A note in Guillermin’s journal, dated April 1, 1809, confirms the hope expressed by Brasseti in his document, “the ever-increasing desertions of the Piedmontese added to the perplexity of our situation; those vile mercenaries, preferring abundance bought at the cost of honor to glorious privation, deserted every day to the enemy camps.”127 In late 1808, the conspiracies turned into open insurrection, and with the help of the English, Spanish forces landed not only military supplies in the east, but also “volunteers” for the war front.128 Learning of this, General Ferrand set out to put down the insurgency in person. His army was ambushed in Palo Hincado and his forces were put to flight. This occurrence led him to take his own life, leaving Joseph Dubarquier at the head of the French colonial government.

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Having for all intents and purposes lost control of the situation in most of the eastern part of the island, the French colonial government focused all its efforts on defending the city of Santo Domingo. Driven to his wit’s end by the creole, Spanish, and English land and naval forces that were attacking and besieging the capital, General Dubarquier authorized General Aussenac to form a company of freed blacks “who were granted their freedom by the government, on condition that they serve for eight years under the flag of the Empire.”129 This measure was aimed, first and foremost, at gaining him some measure of support among the black and mulatto populations. In June, the English not only contributed a squadron of ships to the siege of the city of Santo Domingo, but English troops sent by Rear-Admiral Rowley under the command of Major Carmichael, landed in Palenque, to the west of the city.130 Inside the city walls, as the days passed and basic supplies ran out, the civilian population fled to the mountains as the Piedmontese and Italians deserted. The price of food skyrocketed so that, in the currency of the time, a sack or barrel of yucca cost sixty pesos and thirty ounces of bread cost six pesos; a pound of corn cost one peso, and coffee was five pesos a pound; plantains, a staple food item for the population, sold for two pesos a dozen, all this despite the government’s efforts against the usual speculators. Lemonnier-Delafosse writes that after seven months of siege, “everything that could be eaten, already had been: horses, donkeys, cats, dogs, and even rats and mice” and, he continues, “some parrots had died of hunger! … In the deserted streets, old black women pulled up grass to prepare as food.”131 Guillermin says, “The widespread use of guailliga (guayiga) for food caused the whole body to swell up, and such weakness of the legs, that many unfortunate people fell as they walked through the streets, and they died a few days later because of the lack of more substantial food.”132 He goes on, “So urgent was the need to eat, that some starving hunters even went over to the enemy’s entrenchments to compete with them over killing some pigeons.”133 In July 1809, with all resources exhausted after almost a year spent defending the city against the siege by the English, Spanish, and creoles—the lastnamed under the command of General Sánchez Ramírez—the French were forced to surrender to the English troops, after a convention was signed that established: Article 1. As of this date, hostilities between the troops of His Britannic Majesty and the French garrison shall cease in order to carry out the evacuation of the city of Santo Domingo within the time frame and under the conditions stated below; it being fully understood that until the city has been completely evacuated, no position may be occupied except by the troops of His Britannic Majesty, and no one from the outside shall enter the city

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without special permission from the Commander-in-Chief of the forces of His Imperial and Royal Majesty. Response: The suspension of hostilities between the forces of His Britannic Majesty and their allies on the one hand, and the French troops on the other, shall take place in order to achieve the desired goal; but the positions that must be surrendered shall be occupied by English troops and the Spanish regiment from Puerto Rico.134 And so when the occupation of the city by the English and the Spanish was already in effect, the rancher Juan Sánchez Ramírez and his troops entered the city of Santo Domingo, heading for the Government Palace. He was wearing “a uniform that was highly appropriate for the role he was playing in these circumstances: a hat shaped like a rainbow, decorated with white feathers and embroidered in gold; a blue frock-coat covered in portraits of Ferdinand VII; Souvarow-style boots, [which could be heard at a distance because of the loud noise they made—FJF]; a saber dragging along the ground that prevented him from walking erect; a large entourage of people as variegated as their clothing, in short, looking like a hero in a play.”135

5 “FOOLISH SPAIN” AND “REBELLIOUS AFRICA”

Nine months of siege and blockade and several more months of resistance and conspiracy had been enough to disrupt the weak economic reorganization launched by the Ferrand regime. When Juan Sánchez Ramírez took over the government of the island, the situation “could not have been more wretched.”136 Dr. José María Morilla, a contemporary witness, states in a report that “the Treasury was depleted … since there was very little revenue coming in from the customs posts; thanks to its heavy trade with the United States and Europe, the one in Puerto Plata, where they took the tobacco harvested in the Cibao region, generated the most”; he continues, “Agriculture had fallen off a lot as you can imagine, because of the wars, emigration, and many other difficulties, and exports were limited to the tobacco produced in that region, some livestock, hides, and, after a few years, timber (mainly mahogany), and syrup and rum manufactured in what was left of the old ingenios, which was now just the dilapidated buildings; sugarcane was planted on a small scale with a lot of hard work.” He goes on, “Coffee and cacao production was almost negligible and there was no cotton or indigo being harvested; not a single mine had been worked in a very long time, so trade was reduced to importing consumer goods and exporting the products mentioned above; but business was sluggish and of minor importance and limited to the importation of items to meet the needs of a small, poor population that knew little of luxury, for there weren’t even half a dozen carriages in the capital.”137 And in fact “the population [of the Spanish part of the island] can be estimated at 80,000, with probably more than a tenth of them in the capital.”138 Another factor that must be mentioned to complete the picture is that the “situado”—a type of subvention that Spain had previously contributed towards the upkeep of Santo Domingo’s costly colonial bureaucracy from the coffers of

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Mexico and Venezuela—was no longer available, due to the serious political upheavals caused by the revolutionary independence movements in those countries, and by Spain’s own war of independence against France. As a result, “Brigadier Sánchez Ramírez was hard-pressed to come up with the wherewithal to feed and clothe the army, pay public employees, and maintain the justice system.” The situation even forced Sánchez Ramírez himself to get personally involved in selling slaves for a time, “many of whom he had available to swap with Francisco Braceti, the captain of the schooner ‘María,’ for items needed to fill the most pressing requirements of the military. Braceti made regular trips to Puerto Rico where he sold them at good prices.”139 Sánchez Ramírez died in February 1811, with occupied Spain not having been able to provide any kind of assistance to those who, with English help, had managed to throw the French out of the rest of the island, as they raised cheers for Fernando VII and the Catholic Church. Spain’s first liberal Constitution was enacted in Cádiz in 1812. This event brought hope to broad sectors of the colony’s population. And “they had reason to be joyful, because the Cortes had not merely limited itself to enacting the constitution, it had also tried to complete the work of regeneration that had been begun by strengthening it with important organic laws and regulations: it had abolished the parading of the royal standard, which was traditionally done every year in the cities of America as proof of loyalty and an acknowledgement that they were conquered countries; it had authorized Spanish citizens who could trace their origin from Africa through any line, and who were also endowed with estimable qualities, to be admitted to the universities, study in seminaries, take the habit in religious communities, and receive holy orders.”140 Marx says of this significant development, which had a decisive impact on America, “Since one of the main objectives of the Cortes was to retain control of the American colonies, which had already started to rise up in revolt, it recognized the political equality of American and Peninsular Spaniards and proclaimed a general amnesty, with no exceptions; it issued decrees against the oppression weighing upon the indigenous peoples of America and Asia; it put an end to the mita141 and the repartimientos; it abolished the quicksilver monopoly; and by outlawing the slave trade, it took the lead in Europe in that respect.”142 But the metropole was one thing and the colony was a different matter. In Spanish Santo Domingo, the colonial authorities continued to cling to the old framework of the feudal-monastic order’s antiquated structures, so giving fresh urgency to the intense social and racial struggle unfolding within our society. So let us say that “in addition to the economic problems, there were others of a political nature stemming from the marked discontent now taking root among all social classes, when the uprising among persons of color masterminded by José Leocadio, Pedro de Seda, Pedro Henríquez, and many other free people and slaves, was on the brink of erupting on the night of August 15-16, 1812.”143

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The movement had broad ramifications, especially in the east of the country, an area with a large concentration of black slaves engaged in sugarcane cultivation. The historian José Gabriel García also notes that “the pretext for this evil deed was that the government had usurped the freedom granted to the slaves by the General and Extraordinary Cortes of the Nation.”144 Dr. Morilla, a contemporary witness, plainly states that “the goal was freedom for their race and to join the Republic of Haiti.” The ringleaders of the insurgency were betrayed as they were about to launch their action with the assault on a hacienda in Mendoza. They were taken prisoner and immediately handed over to the colonial justice system. Among the members of the court was José Núñez de Cáceres. García presents the information about their sentences as follows: Pedro de Seda, Pedro Henríquez, and Marcos were sentenced to die on the scaffold. They were to be beheaded and the head of the first-named was to be affixed along the road to Montegrande, that of the second in Mojarra, and that of the third at the entrance to El Enjaguador. José María Osorio, Dionisio, and Domingo had to witness the torture, then [the first-named would go to end his days in a prison overseas], and the other two would suffer a hundred lashes at the whipping-post and a year’s imprisonment on their master’s hacienda with shackles and chains on their feet. Their lives were spared because, despite the fact that they were among those involved and knew of Leocadio’s plans well in advance, after they realized the patrols were looking for them, they fled to the capital and told their masters what they knew, and their masters handed them over to the arm of the law. María de Jesús, in whose cabin Leocadio and Osorio had eaten dinner on the night of the Mendoza incident, and where the former had slept until dawn, was ordered to be given fifty lashes at the railing of the jail, and her master was required to remove her from the island immediately.145 Leocadio, Fragoso, the Meas, and other comrades merited a special punishment: “They went to the scaffold shrouded in sacks and dragged by the tail of a donkey, and their limbs were cut off and fried in tar.”146 Although the Constitution of Cádiz only envisioned putting an end to the slave trade, and not the abolition of slavery per se, under the liberal principles of the Constitution, and propelled—as we have seen—by the vehemence of the slaves’ struggle, mulattos and free blacks became established in positions in society that they had long yearned for. Naturally, this was accepted with reluctance by the most illustrious representatives of the old feudal order, entrenched within the colonial bureaucracy. But the liberalization of the system was short-lived. With the valuable help of the English, the French were defeated in Spain and the Treaty of Valençay was signed on December 1813. Under the treaty, the French emperor recognized

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Fernando VII as King of Spain, and with Fernando, the Inquisition and the gallows made their return. On May 4, 1814, he signed the famous decree in which he declared himself against the Constitution, so repealing all the legislative work of the Cortes of Cádiz “as if such acts had never occurred,”147 and in our colony, “the old colonial practices immediately came back into full effect; the ayuntamientos lost many of their powers, the diputación provincial (provincial council) was eliminated, the representation of the province in the Cortes ended, and under a royal decree of May 4, 1814, the jefes políticos were abolished and their powers were assumed by the Captain-General. And so another victory for racial equality disappeared, such as admitting persons with a mixture of African blood in their veins into the universities.”148 All this was taking place amid a deepening economic crisis which would be further exacerbated by the continual social struggles of the forces upon whom production in the colony rested—the black slaves, freedmen, and mulattos. An additional factor would be the constant pressure on our shores from the South American pro-independence movement. At this historical juncture two political groups emerged, representing different social forces: the radicals, who advocated the union of the eastern part of the island with Haiti, a proposal which had huge support from the vast majority of the population—the black slaves, freed blacks, mulattos, and some agricultural and livestock sectors in the northern part of the country—and the timidly proindependence liberals, led by Núñez de Cáceres. The fundamental principles of the first group were the abolition of slavery and racial equality. The second group held to liberal Spanish thinking of the time, which, while condemning the slave-trade, refused to end such a shameful system. The first movement had deep-rooted popular support; the latter was the result of the resentment felt by the colonial bureaucracy and the small oligarchy at having been “abandoned” by Spain.149 The first group was fighting for political, social, and racial equality; the second for a political equality that few believed in, and they forgot to mention anything about racial inequality. In 1820, a military mutiny in Spain forced Fernando VII to swear allegiance to the 1812 Constitution of Cádiz and to enforce it in all Spain’s possessions. In March, the royal decree ordering the colonial authorities to swear allegiance to the Constitution in the colony arrived, “along with his Majesty’s address to the residents of the overseas possessions, the Provisional Junta’s manifesto on convening the Cortes, and the decree and instructions according to which the elections of delegates would be held. All this was made known [by the Governor of Hispaniola—FJF] in a proclamation issued on June 2, that informed the community that by an agreement with the ayuntamiento made on May 31, the third of June at four o’ clock in the afternoon was the day designated for the solemn act of publication of the monarchy’s political charter and on the following day, Sunday the fourth, a high mass of thanksgiving would be celebrated in the cathedral of the parish of Santa Barbara, and all the vecinos and the clergy would take the

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oath in the manner prescribed by the General and Extraordinary Cortes’ decree of March 18, 1812.”150 This news created a general commotion among the black slaves, freedmen, and mulattos. There is every indication to believe that the spirit of equality found in the Constitution of Cádiz met the desires of the people. And even though our traditional historiography is silent on the matter, all the evidence indicates that the black slaves, as well as the freed slaves and mulattos, demanded that the colonial authorities fully implement political, social, and racial equality. All this can be inferred from the appeal to the “Most Faithful Natives and Residents of Hispaniola,” signed in June 1820, by Sebastián Kindelan, the governor at that time: MOST FAITHFUL NATIVES AND RESIDENTS OF HISPANIOLA The Government, ever anxious and always alert to guarantee you the incomparable benefits of stable tranquility and inner peace, which allow everyone to enjoy the rights of free citizens, has not wished to interrupt the solemn festivities with which you have celebrated the promulgation and swearing of the oath of allegiance to the Spanish Monarchy’s political constitution by bringing to mind bitter and painful memories which could upset your happiness … But now that the moments of pleasure and rejoicing are over, it is not inappropriate to offer you a very important lesson, so that you might tread the new path of constitutional order without any missteps. It is with great sorrow that the government has come to learn that there are many restless and rebellious souls who are spreading dangerous ideas among the unsuspecting, by erroneously interpreting the notions of civil liberty and equality. And if these ideas are not checked in time, they could produce thorns and thistles instead of the seasoned and precious fruits which should be reaped from a faithful observance of the Constitutional Charter. You know very well that our population is made up of people of different colors and conditions: there are white people, there are dark-skinned people, there are black people, and among these last two groups there are free people and there are slaves. Taking advantage of this difference, disruptive elements have begun to sow discord in the shadow of the right to liberty, equality, and independence that the Constitution guarantees all Spanish citizens, and through error or malice they are persuading the less educated that there are now no differences among white, dark-skinned, and black people, and between free people and slaves. This is an interpretation that is not just absurd, but so dangerous that the very people who nurture it and cherish it in their hearts may end up by being the first unfortunate victims of the loss of their reason. Understand the seriousness and extent of the danger and to contain it in a timely

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manner, meekly receive the true and legitimate explanation of the importance and value of these rights to liberty, equality, and independence. The civil liberty of citizens is not an authorization to do whatever they please, for that would be license, not a right, and your reasoning alone, even though not very advanced, can reveal through your own inner voice whether men could ever come together to live in societies without laws or restraints to moderate the unruly appetite of their passions. This right to liberty does not, and cannot, consist in anything other than being able to do everything that we ought to will, and in no one having the authority to force us do what we ought not to will. And what is it that we ought to will? What is it that we ought not to will?151 We ought to will everything that is fair and results in good, everything that is conducive to preserving the social order, personal security, the honor and property of our fellow citizens, the increase and participation in common happiness, and we ought not to will anything that either directly or indirectly destroys or prevents the enjoyment of all these benefits that we are promised in civil life. If an even simpler explanation is needed, one may say that civil liberty is the right of a citizen to do whatever is not contrary to established law; and since in free countries, as the Spanish nation is today, only the nation itself, through its representatives, has the power to make laws, this means that if some individual could, or dared to, violate the observance of these established laws, he would be acting directly against his will. And what is meant by the equality of citizens? It is the right they have for there to be one law for all; for there not to be privileges that benefit some but are burdensome to others; equality doesn’t mean that everyone gives orders and no one obeys; what it entails is that nobody is to obey or give orders to anyone except his equals. Properly speaking, independence is an attribute of nations and it means that each nation, whether large or small, may govern itself in whatever way it deems best, without being subject to some other nation or receiving its laws; but if you wish to apply it to citizens, even though this is less correct, then you can say that independence is the citizen’s right not to accept or recognize any laws except those established by the general will of the nation. In short, independence delivers Spanish citizens from the whims of a despot and from blind obedience to the absolute will of a tyrant. But if these explanations were not in accord with the letter and spirit of the Constitution, little would be gained from convincing you, and so it is necessary to make you see that they are all drawn from the wisdom of its articles. Man has sought in society the security of his rights, something that could not be guaranteed or expected in a state of nature. In this regard, Article 4 says that the nation is required to preserve and protect the civil

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liberty, the property, and the other legitimate rights of all its members with wise and just laws. It is therefore clear that since this liberty is a right of all people, no one individual can violate the liberty of others, because, naturally the people must necessarily be more powerful than he to punish his attempt. Article 7 states that “every Spaniard is required to be faithful to the Constitution, obey its laws, and respect the established authorities.” Accordingly, there are laws that place just limits on immoderate freedom: there is, therefore, an essential difference between the authorities and ordinary citizens. The authorities are put in place to protect the laws and citizens must respect those authorities and, by mutual accord, cooperate with them in the faithful discharge of their responsibilities. There is another difference among Spaniards that the Constitution recognizes, because some are free, others have been set free, and others are Citizens in the free use and exercise of their rights, and according to Article 23, only Citizens can obtain municipal positions and be selected for them in the cases prescribed by law. And here you can see how, without damaging the principle of equality, there are some Spaniards who can aspire to positions in the Republic and others who are without that privilege. Personal servitude or slavery appears quite clearly in the fourth point of Article 5, when it says that freed slaves are Spaniards “as soon as they gain their freedom in Spanish territory;” and everyone knows that freedmen are those persons who come out of slavery, or who are set free, in any of the lawful ways. Free men and freed slaves are Spaniards, whether they are dark-skinned or black, but they are not Citizens until they obtain the corresponding certificate from the Cortes for the reasons and in the terms set out in Article 22, and slaves are neither Spaniards nor Citizens. Notwithstanding these distinctions, everyone agrees on one point of equality, which is one of the most notable benefits that the Constitution extends to all people. This is equality before the law, since henceforward, the law will be the same for the free, the white, the dark-skinned or the black, the rich, and the poor; and in matters of crime, some people will not be punished with one sentence and others with a different sentence. The government’s aim in providing you with this explanation is to avoid a repeat of the wretched episode of August 29 last year, eighteen hundred and twelve, when José Leocadio, Pedro de Seda, Pedro Henríquez and many other free people and slaves, seduced by villains, or deluded by the same false ideas about liberty and equality, dared to disturb the public peace. Recall the swift and exemplary punishment that was carried out on them all when they were sentenced to die on the gallows as an example to other agitators. There is no doubt that the benefits of the Constitution are going to be abundant and of the greatest value to the whole community, but that does not mean that a slave is no longer a slave or that persons of

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color are suddenly on a level with white citizens. They all remain subject to the laws and responsibilities of their status, class, and position, and anyone who spreads rumors or doctrines that are contrary to the true interpretation of these principles, let him henceforth understand that he will be swiftly prosecuted and punished as a troublemaker and disturber of the public peace. The government much regrets using this language, but its responsibilities and the desire to avoid the disastrous results which a perverse interpretation of the rights of liberty and equality can lead to, have made it necessary to give you this useful lesson. Anyone who abuses these rights to the detriment of his fellow citizens shall be the first to lose them, and the best way to preserve them intact is to prove by your behavior that you are worthy of them. “Santo Domingo, June 10, 1820.” “Sebastián Kindelan.”152 This pronouncement would prove to be extremely helpful to those who supported union with Haiti, given the unpopularity among the exploited classes of the small, resentful bureaucracy and certain sectors of the tiny oligarchy which held opposing views. The movement continued to gain strength in the north because of that region’s close ties with Haiti. For many producers in the Cibao region, their business essentially depended on Haiti, where the production of basic necessities had been seriously disrupted as a result of its long, bloody revolutionary struggle. By the end of 1829, several border towns had even raised the Haitian flag, as delegations went back and forth between Santo Domingo and Haiti with the proposal for the political union of the two territories. The letter reproduced below dates from January 1821: Santo Domingo, January 8, 1821. José Justo de Sylva To His Excellency J.P. Boyer President of Haiti Your Excellency: Your Excellency having been good enough to receive favorably the proposal or overture that I was charged with bringing before Your Excellency in the city of Cap-Haïtien on behalf of my fellow-countrymen, whose mandate and signatures Your Excellency has read, and at Your Excellency’s invitation to return here to give an account of the outcome of the mission with which I was entrusted, I left immediately. When I was once again with my people, I told them everything that Your Excellency wished to communicate to me. My fellow countrymen and a great many other people are very satisfied with everything I have told them, and they put all their hopes in the answer that Your Excellency gave me regarding the matter. They were

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most flattered by the cordial welcome I received, so much so, that they are holding a large assembly to address the people and show them the path they should follow. I expect to be in Port-au-Prince very soon to inform Your Excellency of what has taken place here. My countrymen are planning to send a message to Your Excellency. I have just become aware of much commotion in the city because, according to what people are saying, freedom is about to be granted to everyone. Captain Manuel Carvajal and Captain José Soza are firmly opposed to this. They have volunteered to go and skillfully negotiate this issue with Your Excellency on behalf of the government and ascertain if by any chance there can be some arrangement in this regard. But I doubt that will occur. There is much secret information concerning the French. Three ships from that country have just informed us that vessels are arriving in Guadalupe and Martinique. Your Excellency will take this warning as he sees fit. José Justo Sylva153 Several months later, the commander of the stronghold of Monte Cristy himself, Diego Polanco, wrote to the Haitian General, Magny, “The people of San Fernando de Monte Cristo have deemed it appropriate to raise the Haitian flag and we have agreed. I am sending three commissioners to Your Excellency, don José Domínguez, don José Diaz, and don Gregorio Escarfúlez, to ascertain the intentions of your government. We expect Your Excellency to protect that city which, as of today, forms part of the Republic of Haiti.”154 In Dajabón, Neyba, and Beler, where the military leaders remained loyal to Spain, the masses rose up in support of political union with Haiti. In the midst of this situation, popular rumor viewed the entry of President Boyer’s military forces into Spanish Santo Domingo as being imminent. These rumors, taken with the events which had taken place previously on the border, precipitated the fall of the unhappy bureaucracy, the small oligarchy, and many white creoles who opposed union with “black Haitians” and supported national independence under the protection of Gran Colombia, because this would preserve slavery and racial inequality and, at the same time, their feudal privileges. And in fact the rebellion broke out in the capital on November 30, 1821. The coup had the support of Colonel Pablo Alí, the commander of the Free-Colored Battalion (Batallón de Pardos Libres), a colonial strike force that had been organized by Spain to hunt down rebellious slaves more effectively. “At dawn on December 1, the residents realized what had happened during the night, because the city gates weren’t open as they normally were, and they saw groups of patriots wearing the tri-colored rosette [of Gran Colombia], racing through the streets on horseback, cheering for Colombia, Independence, and the Fatherland; because when the sun came up, the Colombian f lag was f lying.”155

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Once independence was proclaimed, don José Núñez de Cáceres was named Political Governor and President, and he immediately proceeded to reorganize his government. “The ayuntamiento, the Customs, and other public offices continued to operate with the same staff, except that people of Spanish origin were replaced by natives of the country.”156 The President and his Cabinet immediately immersed themselves in the difficult task of drawing up the Political Constitution of the newly created Independent State of Spanish Haiti, while the majority of the country’s population simply observed the spectacle with indifference.

6 COMPLETE UNITY AND NATIONAL UNITY

I The unification of the eastern and western parts of the island was a definitive step in the development of social and economic forces. As the first measure of importance, slavery was at last definitively abolished and the country embarked upon a real and effective process of racial integration. Blacks and mulattos made the leap from the lowest social strata—i.e. slaves and freedmen, who were the object of mistreatment and discrimination—to the top of the social pyramid. Of course, not everyone could be at the top, but at least the barriers associated with the old system were abolished and, as a result, the doors of the classic, formal, political equality of the period were suddenly opened. And this was only right, in a society where political power was suddenly placed in the hands of the blacks, or at least in the hands of those who had joined their cause. Reaction was swift. A movement of dissent began, which was reflected in a hasty emigration to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. Traditiona l historians state that it was “the crème de la crème of Dominican families” who emigrated. In order to bring about a return to the old, vanished order, some of the more radical representatives of this group even tried to obtain foreign assistance, first from France, later from Spain. The Catholic Church marched at the forefront of every action. At a very early date—March 1822—the French even used several ships to land part of a significant military contingent in the Bay of Samaná for that very purpose, but the lack of effective support from the local population and the prompt presence of the Republic’s military forces frustrated their desires. Traditional histories mention other displays of resistance. However, it is clear that they lacked strong, effective support from the majority of the population. Once he had consolidated his power, Boyer turned his attention to economic matters in Santo Domingo. Trusted Dominican and Haitian associates had been

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installed in military and administrative posts, and the community assemblies had been convened which would elect citizens to represent the eastern part of the country in the Chamber of Representatives—this, along with the Senate, formed the legislative body of the Republic. In June 1822, “Farmers were offered the right to acquire ownership of the plots of land where they grew coffee, cacao, sugarcane, cotton, tobacco, and fruits and vegetables, as a gift from the nation.”157 At the same time, an investigation was begun, aimed at determining those properties “which should belong to the Republic: first, because their owners were absent because they had left the country long before the events that had brought about this change; second, because they had left, although with permission, with the [formal] intention of not returning to the country, because they were not in agreement with the established system of government; and third, because they had abandoned them as a result of their not being able to pay the taxes or the mortgage.”158 This investigation was carried out by a commission made up of citizens from both sides of the island. In fulfillment of its mandate, this commission produced a very extensive report in which, based on considerations inherent in the points under study, it concluded by declaring on October 21 that the following belonged irrevocably to the state: first, properties belonging to the Spanish government; second, the convents of Santo Domingo, San Francisco, La Merced, Regina, and Santa Clara, and the various houses, ranches, animals, and land owned by them; third, the buildings and premises of the hospitals of San Andrés, San Lázaro, and San Nicolás, located in Santo Domingo, with the properties belonging to them; fourth, French assets seized by the Spanish government that had not been returned to their owners; fifth, the assets of those persons who participated in the assault on Samaná and who left the country in the French fleet; sixth, all ecclesiastical liens (censos o capellanías) on real property which had reverted to the archbishopric due to obsolescence or because they had expired, and which had been donated so that their income could be used for priests who had died or who were absent; and seventh, mortgages established in favor of the cathedral with monies from the church construction fund.159 The report was sent by President Boyer to the Senate and then to the Chamber, where, in order for it to be enacted into law, they added, “all feudal and class privileges in existence in the Spanish part of the island prior to February 10, 1822 had ceased to have effect and were to be considered abolished.”160 Taken together with the offer made in June, this legislation opened up cracks in the material foundations underlying the set of ideas and beliefs that enabled an important and influential group socially opposed to the social relationships imposed by the new political system to exist in our part of the island. This was, so to speak, the coup de grâce that shifted economic power to other social groups and triggered the entry into the economic and political leadership of the country by others, who, for social reasons, had previously been prevented from playing

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an active role. Dominican society now entered a period of hitherto unknown prosperity. The new regime gave considerable momentum to the politics of unification by bitterly attacking those social groups in which pro-Spanish feelings were strongest. In February 1823, the Haitian General, Borgella, suspended the official salaries of the members of the ecclesiastical cabildo, who “in the future should support themselves with church revenues and if these weren’t sufficient, they should go and serve some parish in the south.”161 At the same time, he made it easier for young men to join the military and in conjunction with this, he closed down the university, the academic bastion of the most ideologically regressive groups. The unbridled race towards complete unification nevertheless led to serious mistakes, like the attempt to replace the Spanish language. The order stated that “since most of the authorities still corresponded with the government only in Spanish, strict orders were to be given that henceforward they must do so in French, which was the language recognized by the State.”162 Furthermore, since President Boyer was determined to bring the young black nation out of its isolation and was, in turn, under pressure from the emerging bourgeoisie in the west of the island, which was making strenuous demands for trade relations to be restored with their traditional market, he accepted France’s demand that the Republic of Haiti commit to paying 150,000,000 francs as indemnity, in exchange for a recognition of its independence. The text of the document read: Royal Ordinance: Charles, by the Grace of God King of France and Navarre To all those present and to come, Salutations. In consideration of Articles 14 and 73 of the Constitution, desirous to provide for the interests of French trade, the misfortunes of the former colonists of Saint-Domingue, and the precarious state of the inhabitants of that island, We hereby order as follows: Article 1. The ports of the French part of Saint-Domingue shall be open to trade with all nations. The tariffs collected in those ports, either on ships or merchandise, on entry and upon departure, shall be uniform for all flags, with the exception of the French flag, for which the tariffs shall be reduced by half. Article 2. To compensate the former colonists who are demanding reparations, the present inhabitants of the French part of the island shall surrender the sum of one hundred and fifty million francs to the Deposit and

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Consignment Fund of France, in five equal, annual installments, with the first falling due on December 31, 1825. Article 3. Under such conditions, by virtue of this ordinance we grant the inhabitants of the French part of Saint-Domingue the full and complete independence of their government.163 Note: Ordinance of King Charles personally delivered by Baron de Mackau to the commission charged by Boyer with formulating an agreement with the French government. This commission was made up of Senator Rouanez, General Inginac, and Colonel Frémont. The amount payable was legally declared to be a national debt, and a complicated tax system was immediately set up to be applied to the indemnity as a “patriotic donation.” This aroused bitter feelings of resentment in the eastern part of the island. Under pressure, therefore, to increase national production to the maximum, in an interpretation of the spirit of paternalism of the 1816 Haitian Constitution, the government passed into law a Rural Code in May, 1826. The dependency of the agricultural worker on the large estates was thus officially ordered. Boyer stated, “It is necessary both in the interest of the State and of our brothers who have just regained their freedom that they be required to work the land upon which they were dependent, receiving in return a portion of the revenues that the regulations shall establish for them. Indeed, without such a measure, all the crops would be lost and the country would fall into a state of terrible destitution. In order for an agricultural worker to be able to leave a property to which he is bound to go to another, that decision must be made by a justice of the peace, and the reason shall be that he was not paid or he was mistreated.”164 Price-Mars gives the following summation of the effects of the Rural Code: Concerned about finding a way out of the situation, Boyer believed that increasing the volume of production would overcome, at least to some extent, the failure of the methods used to remedy the situation up to that point. He had a Rural Code passed into law, which was a bid to organize agricultural labor based on an attempted reconciliation of the old and new social systems. This was a bold and reckless move at a time when political unrest was infiltrating all levels of the community. Indeed, the sole aim of this rural code was to force agricultural workers to attach themselves to the large and medium-sized estates, receiving by way of compensation the post-sale price of the harvested crops divided “into quarter shares, half shares, and whole shares.” Employers and workers were to be bound by bilateral contracts drawn up before a notary public. As might be imagined, this last condition was just a ploy, since such contracts between illiterate laborers and employers backed by the prestige of their social position could only result in the legal, disguised subjugation of rural workers.

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Therefore, according to the rural code, workers could not leave the estates where they worked without a permit signed by the manager or the owner. This was necessary in order for them not to be viewed as vagrants and imprisoned, or sentenced to forced labor in the event of a second offense. They didn’t even have the right to indulge in their favorite pastime—dancing—except from Friday to Sunday evenings. In addition, they were required to be humble, respectful, and obedient towards their employers.165 As was to be expected, such measures produced considerable discontent among the former slaves, who had initially had a sympathetic view of the Boyer occupation. This fact, in conjunction with those mentioned above, was the spur that set a new course for the ideological perspective of the agricultural workers, the middle class, and certain sectors of the creole commercial bourgeoisie, especially in Azua and Montecristy, where the export trade had been seriously affected by the ruling that closed their ports [to foreign trade].166 Meanwhile, the remnants of the creole and Spanish oligarchy, who had remained in the country through thick and thin, sought the protection of the regime by fully integrating themselves into the upper levels of the Haitian administration and from the top they kept up their massive seizure of the best land in Spanish Santo Domingo, along with a group of officers in Boyer’s army. Very soon—in May 1826—the central government was forced to put an end to the land concessions made to civilian and military officials.167 By this time, the most important administrative positions and many of the military positions in this part of the island were held by citizens of the east. “Arriving in Santo Domingo, it was easy to see that the local aristocracy had simply bowed to the need to accept unification.”168 As the regime’s financial commitments to France grew because of the obligations imposed by the indemnity, there was a parallel growth in the government’s tax system. In 1826 a law was created “that imposed a tax on the value and income generated by real estate; this was paid semi-annually at the rate of five per cent of the value of houses located in the towns and cities; houses in the countryside belonging to farms were also subject to the tax.”169 And as the tax race picked up speed, so general dissatisfaction was also increasing. The ousted pro-Spain faction, which had previously been at the helm of the colony’s government, tried to take advantage of this situation. They even tried to re-establish the former power of the Spanish crown with the help of the governors of Cuba and Puerto Rico. The scheme was discovered in time and the regime brought the full force of the law to bear on the leaders involved. As events unraveled, the monarch himself entered the fray through his representative, don Felipe Fernández de Castro, the Intendente General of Cuba. He was named as King Fernando VII’s commissioner for the purpose of presenting the Boyer government with claims aimed at restoring Spanish rule in Santo Domingo. The request was roundly rejected by Boyer, who, among other things, reminded

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the monarchy of the shameful old slave system. At that point, the commissioner confined his response to saying that “slavery in the form in which it survived in the present day in civilized nations is a national right in which no state or foreign power can attempt to intervene without threatening the independence of nations.”170

II Despite the latent conflict that was evolving at an intense pace, the economy in the east maintained a fast rate of growth. In this regard, the notable increase in the production of tobacco, sugarcane, coffee, and fruits and vegetables deserves special attention. This rise would, in turn, further strengthen the economic clout of the commercial petty bourgeoisie, a group that was now showing signs of dissatisfaction with the situation, first and foremost, because of the tax burden which, as part of the Republic, they had to pay to liquidate the debt contracted with France. Another reason was the increasing integration into the regime’s administrative framework of those same families who had monopolized the Spanish colonial government apparatus in the old days. Amid the changing circumstances, they had taken full advantage of the situation to take possession of huge tracts of land (ranches), along with a large number of Haitian officials, who did the same thing. The last names of the Dominican representatives in the Haitian legislature and those holding other important positions is, in itself, enough to explain this conflict. They include Bobadilla, Aybar, Caminero, Bonilla, Delmonte, Tejera, Valverde, Bermúdez, Ginebra, Marchena, Machado, Abad Alfau, Cabral, Bernal, Velázquez, Jiménez, Báez, Ureña, Santana, etc., with many of them still to be found occupying similar positions today. And it was now, in the midst of this vortex, that notions of independence cloaked in feelings of dissatisfaction towards the Haitian government made their first appearance among the people. The situation had its highest expression in the founding of Santo Domingo’s first patriotic organization, the secret society “La Trinitaria” (The Trinity), an organization that laid upon the shoulders of its members the herculean task of “establishing a Republic free and independent of all foreign domination.” However, the social and racial make-up of the first members complicated the difficult task of winning converts. The founding members—nine in total—were all from Hispanic families native to the Peninsula, the Canaries, and the Balearics, and those who joined included individuals who openly expressed clear racial prejudices. The advance groups, the popular classes, with mulattos in the majority, viewed this organization with fear rather than sympathy and “according to the daughter of an eminent national hero, this was why the political and patriotic ferment aroused by La Trinitaria, initially made it appear to be a racist movement on the part of the white population who prided themselves on having rocked the cradle of American civilization.”171

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Juan Pablo Duarte, the leading figure in the Dominican independence movement, fought tirelessly against such outward appearances and ideas. His sister, Rosa Duarte, stated in this connection that the principles proclaimed by the Trinitarians included: “the law recognizes no vileness except that of vice, no nobility except that of virtue, nor any aristocracy except that of talent, aristocracy by blood being permanently abolished as contrary to the Unity of Race, which is one of the basic principles of our political association.” (Italics added).

III While the differences which would bring an end to the unity of the island continued to develop and fuel separatist sentiments, in the west, Boyer’s regime faced what seems to be the traditional conflict in Haitian society, namely, the struggle between blacks and mulattos. Just as in Spanish Santo Domingo, each group represented different social forces, even though the situation was, of course, not necessarily identical. On the western side of the island, for example, whites were not strongly represented in society, and mulattos too were in the minority. It was the reverse in the east, where mulattos formed the largest group. In the west, the overwhelming majority of the population—the popular classes—was represented by blacks. The way this “traditional” conflict unfolded would greatly facilitate the development of the events that would culminate in the emergence of the Dominican Republic. Boyer was a mulatto, which is to say that he was a member of a group which, thanks to its close blood ties to the French colonialists, had always maintained a position of economic and political superiority in the colonial period. Except for rare, brief interludes, mulattos continued to enjoy this position even after independence. The reasons can be easily explained. In addition to their position of economic superiority, because of their level of education, they were the only group capable of assuming the difficult administrative tasks of the young state. Although the black population did indeed produce extraordinary leaders, in practice, they were pushed aside in favor of mulatto leaders. We should also keep in mind that by the final years of the preceding century, most of the mulatto population enjoyed the status of freedmen and controlled some 2,500 plantations, while the vast majority of blacks languished in slavery. Nevertheless, the regime went to unusual lengths to avoid problems and, above all, to avoid the impression that it favored its own group: Stating that the policy of his government was to put an end, as far as possible, to jealousies of castes, [Boyer] consistently for a few years promoted a black every time a promotion had been given to a mulatto or other lightskinned person. This procedure soon met an insuperable obstacle. Government posts in general required literacy and only a very small number of negroes were educated, so that the number of blacks was not sufficient to

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furnish him with candidates. Since one of the few ways to lucrative success lay in official positions, ambitious young colored men sought eagerly for government office, and Boyer soon had no alternative but to advance men of his own complexion. In the army, on the other hand, literacy was not necessary for promotion, Ambitious negro youths, therefore, frequently chose this career, which, while not very profitable in monetary rewards, at least gave a man a certain social status and economic security.172 At the end of the 1830s and 40s, although the economy in the east maintained the same rate of development described above, the western side of the island entered into decline and, not surprisingly, that was where the crisis emerged.173 Practically every acre of the fertile soil of Haiti was cultivated in 1806, the methods steadily improving under Christophe. Irrigation projects were then being developed to replace those destroyed in the wars, and a measure of experimentation went on with new crops and fertilizers. In 1843, however, what was called a coffee “plantation” was actually only a large tract of land on which coffee trees grew wild. There was no laying out of the lands, nor any improvement of the soil or pruning of the trees to strengthen the parent stem. Until the berries were ready to be picked, the coffee tree was rarely touched, except when pigs scratched their backs on it, or goats and donkeys cropped the grass around it. Cotton likewise received little cultivation. Cocoa raising practically ceased altogether, for it required intelligent management.174 The spark that set off the powder keg was the continual violations of the rulings of the Chamber of Representatives. A significant opposition movement suddenly emerged there, which the regime tried belatedly to crush. Specifically, several candidates from the opposition, which was led by Hérard Dumesle and David Saint-Preux, had been elected as representatives in the 1842 electoral assemblies. President Boyer was furious, and he used the Senate as the instrument to take the steps needed to ban his opponents from the Haitian legislature. He addressed the Senate with the following words: Port-au-Prince, March 15, 1842 Senators: Intrigues hatched with the intent and goal of changing the established order brought about the election of some men who are already only too well-known for their subversive plans. They were removed by the fifth legislature for having had the temerity to attack our institutions. The resolution of the Chamber of Representatives was approved by the Senate in a message dated October 9, 1839, in which they expressed to me their satisfaction at such a measure which re-established a happy harmony among

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the three great constitutional branches of government. Likewise, the State’s civilian and military bodies expressed the same sentiment to me in their own messages, a sentiment which is shared by all honorable citizens. Do these facts not lead one to assume that the re-election of those men is an act of hostility against the wishes of the nation? No one has more respect than I for the independence of the electoral assemblies; but the question here is whether the partial vote by a small number of electors can overturn the effect of the vote by the majority of the Chamber of Representatives, and whether the men who were removed by the Chamber three years ago because of their culpable attempts can once again occupy the position of national representation which they have profaned, alongside the other branches of government which they were trying to nullify. In short, the question is what the Senate and the President of Haiti will decide to do if the new Chamber of Representatives declares the election of the aforementioned men to be valid. And by closing off parliamentary opportunities to the opposition, Boyer was opening the doors to conspiracy, a conspiracy that even had international ramifications. For some time, French diplomatic representatives had had secret relations with Dominican representatives. Their goal was to encourage the eastern part of the Haitian Republic to break away as a first tactical step in a plan to regain control of their lost possession. The movement erupted in March 1843, in Praslin, whence its name. It was led by Rivière-Hérard, a high-ranking officer in Boyer’s own army. The guiding principle of the movement was the enactment of a new constitution that would be more liberal than its predecessor. With fewer political barriers, it would offer blacks greater guarantees of participation in the country’s political leadership and, at the same time, it would place limits on the predominance of the executive. The means used by the “reformers” (for such they must be called) to draw the support of the masses were those that were naturally indicated by general sentiment; in a solemn manifesto, they promised to cure the Haitian people of their age-old concerns and summon them to the banquet of civilization by repealing Articles 38 and 39 of the 1816 Constitution; they promised to reform the public schools by adopting an education plan better suited to the nature and customs of the people; to reform the army, which was absorbing half the revenue, and organize the national guard under a new plan; to reform the rural code and the agricultural system; to create model plantations and organize labor; to reform trade legislation; to reduce duties and taxes; to abolish all exclusionary restrictions; to reform the plantation system; to depreciate paper money and create a means of exchange that had real, not fictitious, value.175

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The repeal of Articles 38 and 39 of the 1816 Constitution under which Boyer governed had particular importance for the reformist groups in the eastern part of the island, and there is no need to go into this in depth. Let us look at the content of these articles of the 1816 Constitution without adding a word: Article 38: No white, whatever his nationality, may enter this territory as a master and owner. Article 39: Whites who serve in the army, who hold public office, and who were admitted into the Republic prior to the promulgation of the Constitution of December 27, 1806, are recognized as Haitian citizens. And in the future following the promulgation of this revision, no whites may claim the same rights, neither may they be employed, enjoy the right of citizenship, or acquire property in the Republic.176 With Haitians and Dominicans united, the movement spread like wildfire through the island. In the east, since “concerns about color presented a breach in the revolutionary wall,”177 officials tried to pass through it by convincing the blacks that the goal of the Reform movement was to return the country to slavery. The propaganda didn’t have the desired effect and the movement continued gaining ground rapidly until, within just a few days, it brought down the Boyer regime.

IV Once the revolution had achieved its primary objective and the country had returned to a precarious normality, a provisional government was installed in Port-au-Prince without any Dominican representation, which caused wounded feelings. Elections for the Constituent Assembly which would pass a new national Constitution were held immediately. By this time, the Trinitarios, who had played a critical role in the struggle against the Boyer regime, were viewed as an important force and their separatist vision continued to gain traction, chiefly among the powerful economic groups and the middle class. As a result, when the electoral colleges were convened to elect representatives from the eastern part of the island to the constituent assembly that would draw up the new constitution, the Duarte faction won an overwhelming victory. The constituent assembly of 1843 enacted one of the most liberal constitutions known in the history of the Haitian people. Appearing for the first time are principles which became “an established part of the national life of the Haitian people: expropriation on the grounds of public interest; the National Assembly, the meeting in joint session of the two Houses, and whose role is to make the most important decisions in the life of the nation; the executive veto or objection to legislative agreements, clearly American-inspired; the requirement that

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actions taken by the President of the Republic be countersigned by a Secretary of State; the annual presidential address to the Houses; the impeachment process against the President of the Republic.”178 In the articles relating to citizens’ rights, the right to resist illegal arrest was enshrined. It was, in short, a document which expressed the highest level of political liberalism. But the growing contradictions between the two peoples were such that Dominican aspirations were impervious to any kind of political victory that didn’t take into consideration a definitive split. These were, first, the contradictions between the Haitian and Dominican rural and commercial bourgeoisies. The Dominicans were increasingly squeezed by the rising tax burden as a result of the financial commitments the regime had entered into to pay off the indemnity to France. They understood that they were under no obligation to pay and they therefore viewed it as a mortal burden aimed at bringing about their ruin. Although these groups had formerly been united in their struggle against the landowning oligarchy and Boyer’s exploitative bureaucracy, they were now divided by their conflicting interests. Second, there were the contradictions stemming from the unequal development of the two regions. Lastly, we should mention the contradictions arising from the different cultural make-up and the attempt on the part of the Boyer government to dilute the cultural values of the Spanish part of the island. This last contradiction had strong roots among the popular masses, where feelings of nationalism were growing daily, a factor that, in turn, paved the way for a part of the bourgeoisie to lead the independence movement. The whole artificial edifice of unity collapsed under the weight of the contradictions in the base and the superstructure. Although the 1843 Constitution can be categorized as eminently liberal and the Constituent Assembly that drew it up repealed Articles 38 and 39 of the 1816 Constitution, the Dominican representatives in the Assembly were unable to prevent the inclusion of another article which, despite different wording, expressed the same content. What we are referring to is Article 8 of the new Constitution, which stated, “No white may become a Haitian citizen or own property in Haiti.” After this, the notion of partition advanced with giant steps. The idea was taken up by the most apathetic groups within the commercial sector and even the Dominican supporters of Boyer’s regime, who were by now at odds with the Hérard government, joined the cause. Such was the case with Bobadilla, Caminero, and others. At this point, the movement showed signs of a dangerous split. On one side there were the separatists, advocates of protectionism in some cases, of colonialism in others, and on the other side there was the Duarte faction, loyal defenders of full national independence. This split has always been there throughout the long process of Dominican history. We should also emphasize the presence of the movement that defended the principle of union with Haiti, a group which even sent a petition to the Junta Popular in Santo Domingo, urging it to fight for a federal-style political union, similar to that of “the United States of America,

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which is governed by general laws constitutive of the democracy which render the unity and indivisibility of the Republic indissoluble, with each state issuing its own economic, local, and administrative laws.”179 Among the signatories who expressed this hope were two members of La Trinitaria, Juan N. Ravelo and Félix María Ruíz. In late 1843, while Hérard was parading his laurels through the Republic as a triumphant conspirator, notions of partition and independence were already spreading by word of mouth in the eastern part of the island. And this accounts for the fact that instead of drawing applause, which is what had happened in the west, “on the contrary, he came up against a hostility that overwhelmed him. He thought it wise to order arrests as he moved through the Cibao region, until he reached the bank of the Ozama. The prisoners were sent to the West.”180 But rather than intimidating people with these acts, he pushed them into revolutionary action. Before Hérard had completed his journey of inspection in the east, new trouble broke out in Haiti. The issue of the Constitution was once again taken up as the guiding principle and the struggle evidenced the traditional divide between blacks and mulattos, the typical expression of class conflict in Haiti, we say again. Led by Salomon, a popular caudillo, the blacks in the south accused the government of violating the principles of constitutional liberalism and of using fraudulent means to prevent blacks from participating in the Constituent Assembly, thus favoring the mulattos. The provisional government quickly moved its representatives there, and obtained an agreement between blacks and mulattos, which, according to Price-Mars, simply put things on hold. It fell apart when Hérard returned to Port-au-Prince from his inspection tour of the east and ordered the imprisonment of Salomon, his father, their friends and supporters. The ramifications of this virtual split in Haiti’s political forces was the happy circumstance that proponents of independence seized upon to precipitate events. In January 1844, the first open declaration against the unity of the Republic of Haiti was already being widely circulated. It was a confusing document, seemingly inspired by the most conservative forces within the movement. It was a strange political object, which even defended the Spanish colonial administration while using false premises to attack union with Haiti. What is more, it lacked solid foundations to strengthen national sentiment. It spoke of partition without mentioning the word “independence,” despite the fact that its proposals included the idea of establishing a free and sovereign state to be called the “Dominican Republic” since it would adopt a republican form of government. The document did have one merit, however: it recognized the huge popularity of the Boyer government in the early days; “there wasn’t a single Dominican who didn’t receive him with demonstrations of good will at that time. Wherever he went, the people came out to meet him.” The heavy ethos of conservatism and, particularly, the close relationship that certain separatist circles maintained with France, as well as their sympathies towards Spain, both of them slave powers, placed the independence movement in

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a difficult position vis-à-vis all the free blacks and mulattos, and the former slaves, who had not forgotten the horrors of their previous exploitation. “They therefore believed that the re-establishment of the inhumane system of slavery would be inevitable if the discovering nation were to succeed in restoring its sovereignty in what had been the Spanish part of Santo Domingo, as it had tried unsuccessfully to do in 1830 by sending don Felipe Dávila Fernández de Castro to the Haitian government for that purpose (his slaves had been freed in 1822, ‘cuando la Palma,’ as they used to say); or if, once the harsh yoke of the Haitians had been thrown off, the French government were to come, which was the wish of many notable Dominicans, who had been pro-French since the days of Ferrand.”181 The cry of independence went out in February, 1844. Although the January document—the “Manifestación del 16” as it is often called—gave careful consideration to the “thorny issue of slavery,” and did, in fact, enshrine among its principles “the freedom of the citizens, by permanently abolishing slavery,” black and mulatto former slaves initially viewed the event with skepticism. A contributing factor was the antinationalist propaganda unleashed by those groups opposed to independence, which identified partition from Haiti with the return of the pro-slavery regime. Former slaves came to christen this movement the “Spanish Revolution.” And they had good reason to do so. Even the words of the first national anthem, composed by Félix María del Monte, served to raise suspicions with its opening line, “Take up arms, Spaniards!” The former slaves didn’t just stand and watch as events unfolded. The wellfounded fears of a return to slavery led to immediate action. Santiago Basora, a black who had been born in Africa and brought to Santo Domingo at a very young age, succeeded in gathering a large number of former slaves in open rebellion in Monte Grande. Fear was no less manifest in other areas of the country. This was happening just hours after independence had been declared. As the number of rebels in Monte Grande grew, and there was, in turn, a dangerous increase in the possibility of a deep split in the young nation which had newly declared its independence, the Governing Committee—the Junta Gubernativa—installed just a few hours earlier, viewed the situation with trepidation. The decision was made to send their President, don Tomás Bobadilla, and his Vice President, don Manuel Jimenes, to confer with the rebels. This took place on February 28, 1844. The next day, March 1, the Dominican Republic’s first legislative resolution stated, “Slavery has permanently disappeared from the territory of the Dominican Republic and any person who says otherwise will be considered a criminal, and prosecuted and punished, as appropriate.”182 The resplendent vestments of a priest, Dr. José María Bobadilla y Briones, were used to fashion the cuffs and epaulettes of a uniform for Basora183 now designated “commanding officer” of the President of the Central Governing Committee’s faction: [Tomás Bobadilla], a former slave owner, then a Boyer supporter, a unionist, and now a Febrerista. Up to this point, this has been the history of official inequality. From here on, the issue will be unofficial inequality.

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NOTES

Prologue 1 These features of Franklyn J. Franco’s intellectual work are already apparent in his award-winning work La República Dominicana: Clases, crisis y comandos. La Habana: Casa de las Américas, 1966. 2 L. Althusser, in the introduction to Marta Harnecker’s, Los conceptos elementales del materialismo histórico. 3 Perhaps the most important example is Emilio Cordero Michel’s, La revolución haitiana y Santo Domingo. 4 St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas viewed slavery as a fact of nature. The latter even maintained that owners had the right to whip their slaves. The CounterReformation, the movement which provided the theoretical basis for Spanish power in the Americas, confirmed that slavery was natural. (See St. Augustine, The City of God, Book XIX, Chapter XV, and Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Question 57, Articles 3 and 4.) 5 In their Introducción a la historia de España, Ubieta, Reglá, Jover and Seco state “as for the slaves, Antonio Domínguez Ortiz puts their number at 100,000 at the end of the sixteenth century (the highpoint of slavery).” 6 See R. Mallafe, La esclavitud en Hispanoamérica. 7 After exploring the issue in his noteworthy recent book, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, F. Gunder Frank reaches the conclusion that feudalism never existed in Spanish America.

The Black Population 1 José Antonio Saco, Historia de la esclavitud desde los tiempos más remotos hasta nuestros días, condensación y revisión por A. Garzón del Camino (Buenos Aires: Editorial Andina, 1965), 164. 2 Saco, 237. In 1494, in an early report to the Catholic Monarchs, Columbus himself raised the idea of permitting as many Carib slaves as possible to enter Castile. He proposed that ships be fitted out to annually bring to Hispaniola everything required for its development, which could be paid for with slaves.

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3 Luis M. Díaz Soler, Historia de la esclavitud negra en Puerto Rico (Río Piedras: Editorial Universitaria, Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1965), 27. 4 Jean Price-Mars, La República de Haití y la República Dominicana: diversos aspectos de un problema histórico, geográfico y etnológico, vol. 1, trans. Martín Aldao and José-Luis Muñoz Azpiri (Port-au-Prince: Colección del Tercer Cincuentenario de la Independencia de Haití, 1953), 74–75. Price-Mars, in turn, bases the statement on P.-F.-X. Charlevoix, Historia de la Isla Española o Santo Domingo. 5 Richard Konetzke, Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamérica,1493–1810 (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1953), 1:527. 6 Price-Mars, p. 65. Again, this is based on Charlevoix. 7 Ibid., 68. The figure is taken from Michel-Placide Justin, Histoire politique et statistique de l’île d’Hayti Saint-Domingue écrite sur des documens officiels et des notes communiquées par Sir James Barskett (Paris: Brière, 1826), 40, 42. 8 Saco, 168. 9 Saco, Historia de la esclavitud de la raza africana en el Nuevo Mundo y en especial en los países americo-hispanos (Habana: Cultural, 1938) 1:97–98. The author had to consult two different editions of this work. All subsequent references are to this 1938 edition.—Trans. 10 Ibid. 11 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias, vol. 1. Biblioteca de Autores Españoles (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1959), 106. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 106–10. 14 Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, Obras escogidas de Fray Bartolomé de las Casas. Vol. 2, Historia de las Indias. Biblioteca de Autores Españoles (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1961), 488. 15 Konetzke, 630. 16 Saco, 1:182. 17 Ibid., 128. 18 Ibid., 209. 19 Oviedo, 100. 20 Saco, Vol. 2:5. 21 Carlos Larrazábal Blanco, Los negros y la esclavitud en Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo, Julio Postigo e hijos, Editores, 1967), 146. 22 Saco, 2:6. 23 Oviedo, 131, 132. 24 Oviedo, 221. 25 Saco, 2:7. 26 Vetilio Alfau Durán, “Ordenanzas para el gobierno de los negros de la Isla Española,” Anales de la Universidad de Santo Domingo 16, No. 57–60, (1951), 256. 27 Ibid., [please add page number]. 28 Ibid., [please add page number]. 29 Ibid., [please add page number]. 30 Ibid., 259. 31 Ibid., 273. 32 Ibid., 276–77. In 1540, there was still no aqueduct in Santo Domingo. On the projected aqueduct, see Fray Cipriano de Utrera, Santo Domingo, Dilucidaciones históricas, Vol. I, Santo Domingo: Impr. de Dios y Patria, 1927, 124. 33 Ibid., 274–75. 34 Saco, 1:306. 35 Ibid., 303.

Notes

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

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Ibid., 301. Ibid., 301–02. Ibid., 303. Ibid., 502. Konetzke, 256. Ibid., 502. Alejandro Lipschutz, El problema racial en la conquista de América y el mestizaje (Santiago, Chile: Ed. Andrés Bello, 1967), 268. “Colección Lugo: Archivo General de Indias,” Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación, No. 34–35 (1944), 219–20. “Relación de la Isla Española enviada al Rey D. Felipe II por el licenciado Echagoian, oidor de la Residencia de Santo Domingo,” Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación, No. 19 (1941), 446. Pedro Andrés Pérez Cabral, La comunidad mulata: el caso socio-político de la República Dominicana (Caracas, Venezuela: Gráficas Americana, 1967), 80. Antonio Sánchez Valverde, Idea del valor de la Isla Española (Ciudad Trujillo: Editora Montalvo, 1947), 108. Ibid., 108–09. Pérez Cabral, p. 88. Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi, Invasión inglesa de 1655: notas adicionales de Fray Cipriano de Utrera (Ciudad Trujillo: Editora Montalvo, 1957), 51. Ibid. Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi, Relaciones Históricas de Santo Domingo (Ciudad Trujillo: Editora Montalvo, 1945), 2:167. Manuel Arturo Peña Batlle, La Isla de la Tortuga: plaza de armas, refugio y seminario de los enemigos de España en Indias (Madrid: Instituto de Cultura Hispánica, 1951), 63. Rodríguez Demorizi, Relaciones históricas, 2:168. Peña Batlle, 63. Rodríguez Demorizi, Relaciones históricas, 2:171. Ibid., 169. See Carvajal y Rivera, “Noticias de la Isla Española,” in Rodríguez Demorizi, Relaciones Históricas, 3:117. Américo Lugo, Historia de Santo Domingo (Ciudad Trujillo: Editorial Librería Dominicana, 1952), 131. Ibid., 135. Rodríguez Demorizi, Relaciones históricas, 2:186–87. Lugo, 130. Rodríguez Demorizi, Relaciones históricas, 2:236. Ibid., 236–38. Lugo, 149. Ibid., 175–76. Rodríguez Demorizi, Relaciones históricas, 2:325–26. The figures are taken from Lugo, 204–16 and Rodríguez Demorizi, Relaciones históricas, 2:376–445. Lugo, 205. Ibid., 311. Sánchez Valverde, 141. Médéric-Louis-Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, Descripción de la parte española de Santo Domingo, trans. Cayetano Armando Rodríguez (Ciudad Trujillo: Editora Montalvo, 1944), 368. Sánchez Valverde, 111. Ibid., 143. Ibid.

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74 Ibid. 171–72. 75 Démesvar Delorme, La miseria en el seno de las riquezas: reflexiones sobre Haití (Santiago, Cuba: Imp. de Ravelo y Hermano, 1882), 2. 76 Ibid., 1. 77 Ibid. 78 Sánchez Valverde, 160. 79 Moreau de Saint-Méry, 413. 80 Ibid., 412. 81 Ibid., 407. 82 Moreau de Saint-Méry. 83 Gustavo A. Mejía Ricart, Historia de Santo Domingo (Ciudad Trujillo: Editorial Pol Hermanos, 1951), 433. 84 Alcibíades Albuquerque, Títulos de los terrenos comuneros de la República Dominicana (Ciudad Trujillo: Impresora Dominicana, 1961), 17. 85 Ramón Marrero Aristy, La República Dominicana: origen y destino del pueblo cristiano más antiguo de América (Ciudad Trujillo: Editora del Caribe, 1957–58). 86 Jean-Baptiste Lemonnier-Delafosse, Segunda campaña en Santo Domingo, trans. Cayetano Armando Rodríguez (Santiago, R.D.: Editorial El Diario, 1946), 30. 87 Gérard Pierre-Charles, La economía haitiana y su vía de desarrollo, trans. María Teresa Toral (Mexico City: Cuadernos Americanos, 1965). 88 Alfred Métraux, Vodú, trans. Jorge Eneas Cromberg (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sur, 1963), 30. 89 Larrazábal Blanco, 114. 90 Ibid., 122–23. 91 Sánchez Valverde, 169. 92 Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi, Invasiones haitianas de 1801, 1805 y 1822 (Ciudad Trujillo: Editorial del Caribe, 1955), 133.

The Black Population and the National Consciousness 93 Larrazábal Blanco, 122. 94 Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi, Cesión de Santo Domingo a Francia, Archivo General de la Nación, vol. 14 (Ciudad Trujillo: Impresora Dominicana, 1958), 138. 95 Ibid., 142. 96 Ibid., 47. 97 Ibid., 169. 98 Ibid., 191. 99 Ibid., 234–35. 100 Ibid., 17–20. 101 Rodríguez Demorizi, Invasiones haitianas, 71. 102 Ibid., 126–27. 103 Ibid., 132.

The Constitution of 1801 104 José Gabriel García, Compendio de la historia de Santo Domingo, 4th ed. (Santo Domingo: Talleres de Publ. Ahora, 1968), 1:288. 105 Ibid. 106 Emilio Cordero Michel, La revolución haitiana y Santo Domingo (Santo Domingo: Editora Nacional, 1968), 110. 107 García, 1:290. 108 Luis Mariñas Otero, ed. Las constituciones de Haití, Constituciones Hispanoamericanas 17 (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1968), 17.

Notes

107

The Other Face of the Reconquest 109 In the text, the date of Leclerc’s arrival is given as 1803.—Trans. 110 Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi, La era de Francia en Santo Domingo (Ciudad Trujillo: Editora del Caribe, 1955), 9. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid., 194. 113 García, 1:298. 114 In the text, the year of Dessaline’s assassination is given as 1807. 115 José Cordero, “La reconquista de la parte española de la isla de Santo Domingo, 1808–1809 (Unpublished manuscript.) 116 Lemonnier-Delafosse, 122. 117 Gilbert Guillermin, Diario histórico: Guerra dominico-francesa de 1808, trans. Cayetano Armando Rodríguez (Ciudad Trujillo: Imp. J.R. vda. García, 1938), Appendix, p. 1. 118 Guillermin, 15. 119 García, 1:323. 120 García, 1:323. 121 See El Imparcial (Port-au-Prince), April 22, 1822. 122 García, 1:337. 123 García, 1:340. 124 José Cordero, 7. 125 No sources are given for these statements.—Trans. 126 Guillermin, 30. 127 Ibid., 209–10. 128 J. Marino Incháustegui, Documentos para estudio: marco de la época y problemas del Tratado de Basilea de 1795 en la parte española de Santo Domingo, (Buenos Aires: Academia Dominicana de la Historia, 1957), 233. 129 Guillermin, 180. 130 Incháustegui, 234. 131 Delaffose, 188. 132 Ibid. 133 Guillermin, 251. 134 Ibid., 267. 135 Ibid. 273.

“Foolish Spain” and “Rebellious Africa” 136 García, 2:24. 137 “Noticias de lo que presenció el Dr. Morilla, escritas por él mismo,” in Antonio del Monte y Tejada, Historia de Santo Domingo, 3rd ed. (Ciudad Trujillo: s.n., 1952–53), 3:326. 138 Rodríguez Demorizi, Invasiones Haitianas, 165. 139 García, 2:26. 140 Ibid., 36. 141 Mita: Mobilization of Indians for “public works,” through a lottery system. 142 Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, La revolución española: artículos y crónicas 1854–1873 (Moscow: Ediciones en Lenguas Extranjeras). 143 García, 2:39. 144 Ibid., 40. 145 Ibid. 146 Ibid., 41. 147 Ignacio Fernández de Castro, De las Cortes de Cádiz al Plan de Desarrollo, 1808–1966: ensayo de interpretación política de la España contemporánea (Paris: Ed. Ruedo Ibérico, 1968), 38. 148 García, 2:51.

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149 Note: Some of the notions that support our observations include: “Being loyal to Spain, bearing Spain’s slights with a foolish patience, not living, not moving, not existing for ourselves but for Spain, this was everything and the sole basis for our happiness, the reputation of our virtues, and the reward for the most distinguished services.” (Italics added.) The Declaration of Independence of 1821. 150 García, 2:60. 151 The translation of “lo que (no) debemos querer,” etc. as “what we ought (not) to will,” etc. (taken from Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws) follows the usual translation of these concepts.—Trans. 152 Documentos históricos procedentes del Archivo de Indias (Santo Domingo: Tip. Luis Sánchez, 1928), 65. 153 Price-Mars, 115. 154 Ibid., 116. 155 García, 2:74. 156 Ibid., 75.

Complete Unity and National Unity 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183

García, 2:98. Ibid., 98–99. Ibid., 99. Ibid. Ibid., 106. Ibid., 118. Price-Mars, 200. Ibid., 244–45. As per García, 2:125.—Trans. García, 2:126. Rodríguez Demorizi, Invasiones Haitianas, 22. García, 2:126. Ibid., 141–42. Alcides García Lluberes, “Duarte, Ravelo y la bandera dominicana,” cited by Vetilio Alfau Durán in “En torno a Duarte y su idea de unidad de las razas,” Clío, año 22, No. 100 (1954). James G. Leyburn. El pueblo haitiano, trans. Juan Manuel Castelao (Buenos Aires: Editorial Claridad, 1946). For the western part of the island, see the figures given by Leyburn. For Spanish Santo Domingo, see García, 2:168–75. Leyburn, 85. Price-Mars, 281–82. García, 2:180–81. Mariñas Otero, 165. García, 2:183. Mariñas Otero, 41. “La representación del 8 de junio de 1843 a la Junta Popular de Santo Domingo,” Revista Panfilia, Santo Domingo, June 15, 1924. The quotation has been amended, based on García, 2:193, and others. Price-Mars, 293. Alfau Durán in “En torno a Duarte,” 108. Colección de leyes y decretos (Santo Domingo: Editora Listín Diario, 1927), 19. Larrazábal Blanco, “Papeles de familia,” Clío, No. 71–73, 1945, 77. Cited by Alfau Durán in “En torno a Duarte.”

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INDEX

Abad Alfau, 94 Abolition of slavery, 68, 82 Aboriginal, 14 Acosta, José, 39 Africa, 80 African, 82 Agrarian, 68 Agricultural work, 68 Aguilar, Joan de, 28 Albert Batista, Celsa, 9 Alix, Juan Antonio, 11 Althusser, L., 21 Ambo, 43 Amboyna, 43 America, 80 Amin, Idi, 19 Amparos reales, 56 Ampies, Joan de, 28 Angulo Guridi, Alejandro, 15 Apothecary, 48 Aragon, 44 Arbol Gordo, Santo Domingo, 28 aristocracy, the, 64 Arredondo y Pichardo, Gaspar de, 64 Artillery Battalion, 51 Asia, 80 Asiento, 56 Atienza, Pedro, 27 Atlantic Sea, vii Audiencia, 36 Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, 5, 18

Avila, Alonso de, 28 Aybar, 94 Ayuntamiento, 82, 88 Ayuntamientos, 82 Azua, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 46, 67, 71, 93 Badilla, Pedro de, 28 Báez, 94 Bahía de Samaná, 89 Bahoruco mountains, 31 Bahoruco region, 31, 40 Bajayá, 41 Balaguer, 6 Balaguer, Joaquín, 4, 5, 19 Baleares, the, 94 Banda Norte, 41, 43, 45, 46, 47 Bánica, 54 Bardecia, Lope de, 28 Barnet, Miguel, 3 Barón, Juan, 12, 13 Barrels of cane, 54 Barrionuevo, Francisco de, 28 Basora, 101 Basora, Santiago, 101 Bastidas, 49 Batallón de Pardos Libres, 87 Bautista, Juan, 52 Bay of Samaná, 89 Bayaguana, 46 Bayajá, 43 Beler, 87 Berber slaves, 27

116

Index

Berbers, 26 Bermúdez, 94 Bernal, 94 Big plantation owners, 57 Black, 71, 101 Black Haitians, 87 Black man, 28, 34 Black men, 30, 32, 51 Black people, 28 Black population, 29, 35 Black slaves, 22, 25, 27, 29, 30, 31, 36, 37, 41, 59, 64 Black women, 26, 30, 34, 35, 36, 51 Blacks, viii, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 16, 17, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 45, 46, 56, 59, 61, 69, 70, 72, 89, 95, 97, 100, 101 Blacksmiths, 48 Blanquitos, 57 Bobadilla, 94, 99 Bobadilla y Briones, José María, 101 Bobadilla, Tomás, 101 Bonao, 28, 29 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 70 Bonilla, 94 Borgella, 91 Bosch, Juan, 5 Bourgeoisie, 49, 58, 59 Bourgeoisies, 99 Boyá, 46 Boyer, 15, 23, 24, 89, 90, 91, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99 Boyer, J. P., 86 Boyer, Jean-Pierre, 8 Bozal slaves, 32, 33 Brabant, 44 Braceti, Francisco, 80 Brasseti, 76 Briganes, 51 British, 67 Brown sugar, 54 Buenaventura, 29 Caballero, Diego [de la Rosa], 27, 28 Cabildo, 31, 39, 41, 42, 91 Cabildos, 66 Cabral, 94 Cabral, Manuel del, 7 Cacao, 66, 67 Caminero, 94, 99 Campusano Polanco, José, 52 Canary, the, 94 Candelario, Ginetta E. B., 10 Cape Higüey, 36

Cape St. Nicolás, 36 Cape Verde, 32 Capitalist slavery, 49 Cardinal de Tortosa, 38 Carib Indians, 29 Caribbean, the, 46 Caribbean intellectual history, 2 Carpenters, 48 Carta de Justicia, 37 Carvajal, Hernando de, 28 Carvajal, Manuel, 87 Casa de Contratación in Seville, 25, 55 Casa de las Américas, 6 Casanova, Jaiana Cassava, 39 Castro, Alvaro de, 35, 36 Castro, Baltazar de, 40 Castro, Felipe Fernando de, 93 Castro, Melchor de, 28, 30, 36 Catholic Church, 22, 74, 80 Catholic hierarchy, 24 Catholic Majesty, 61, 62, 63 Catholic Monarchs, 25 Catholicism, 68 Caudillo, 100 Cazuy, 28 Cedano, Pedro, 46 Ceibo, 29 Censos o capellanías, 90 Central Cibao, 31 Césaire, Aimé, 3 Chamber of Representatives, 96, 97 Change in nationality, 61 Chile, 43 Christian power, 25, 27 Christian religion, 31 Christians, 31 Christophe, 73, 75, 76, 96 Cibao, 26, 36, 71, 72, 73 Cibao region, 70, 74, 79, 100 Ciguayos, 36 Cimarrón, 30 Citizens, 63 Class struggle, 64 Código Negro Carolino, 32 Coffee, 66, 67 Collet, Philippe, 67 Colombia, 10, 87 Colón, 30 Colón, Bartolomé, 29 Colón, Cristóbal, 14 Colón, Diego, 32 Colón, Luis, 28 Colonel Frémont, 92

Index

Colonel Jiménez, 75 Colonel Pablo Alí, 87 Colonial Administration, 66 Colonial Bourgeoisie, 48, 59 Colonial Capitalism, 53 Colonial commercial bourgeoisie, 49 Colonial system, 59 Colored men, 96 Columbian National Board, 14 Columbus, 14, 29 Commander Ruiz, 71, 72 Commander Serapio, 71, 72 Concepción, 26 Concepción de La Vega, 26, 29 Conservatism, 100 Conservative forces, 100 Constituent Assembly, 98, 99, 100 Constitution, 67 Constitution of Cádiz, 81, 82, 83 Constitutional liberalism, 100 Contraband, 30 Convention, 63 Cordero Michel, 8 Cordero Michel, Emilio, 7 Cordero, Walter, 8 Corregidor, 66 Cortes, 85 Cotton, 66, 67, 54 Cotuí, 46, 54 Cotuy, 29 Count d’Arquian, 50 Creole bourgeoisie, 59 Creoles, 51 Criollo, Juan, 43 Crown, 25, 26, 28, 41, 43 Cuarterón, 37 Cuba, 17, 47, 61, 64, 89, 93 Cueto, Juan, 52 Customs, 88 Dajabón, 87 Daniel, Lorenzo, 52 Dávila Fernández de Castro, Felipe, 101 Dávila y Padilla, Agustín de, 43 Davis, Martha Ellen, 9 Decree of liberty, 63 Deive, Carlos Esteban, 8 Delmonte, 94 Despradel, Lil, 8 Dessalines, 73 Devaux, 73 Díaz, José, 87 Dionisio, 81 Domingo, 81

117

Domínguez, José, 87 Dominican Communist Party, 18 Dominican nation, 65 Dominican Republic, vi, 15, 64, 95, 100, 101 Dominican Revolutionary Party (PRD), 17 Dominican Workers Party (PTD), 17 Drake, 39 Drake, Francis, 42 Duarte, 98 Duarte, Juan Pablo, 95 Duarte, Rosa, 95 Dubarquier, Joseph, 76 Dumesle, Hérard, 96 Dutch, 38, 44, 48 Echagoian, 38 Eight Ordinance, 33 El Enjaguador, 81 Eleventh Ordinance, 34 Encomienda, 29 Engels, Friedrich, 6 England, vii, 67 English, 38, 44, 47, 48, 60, 77 Enriquillo, 31, 42 Enslaved Africans, 2 Equality, 61 Escarfúlez, Gregorio, 87 Europe, 25, 79 Fanon, Frantz, 3 Felipe II, 38, 41 Felix, Salvador, 75 Female slave, 35 Female slaves, 29 Fennema, Meinert, 9 Ferdinand VII, 78 Fernández Retamar, Roberto, 3 Fernández Rocha, Carlos, 7 Fernando VII, 80, 82 Ferrand, 23, 65, 73, 74, 75, 76, 101 Feudal privileges, 87 Feudalism, 48, 49, 69 Flanders, 44 Fleming, 47 Former slave, 101 Fort-Dauphin, 62 Fragoso, 81 France, 60, 70, 89, 92 Franco, 3, 6, 7, 9, 16, 17, 18, 19 Franco, Ana Carolina, 16 Franco, Angela, vii Franco, Franklin, vii, 16 Franco, Franklin J., viii, 1, 21, 22, 23

118

Index

Fraternity, 61, 62 Free mulattos, 56 Free-Colored Battalion, 87 Freed blacks, 37 Freedmen, 37 Freedom, 61, 87 Freedom of religion, 62, 63 Freedom of thought, 63 Freedwomen, 37 French, 38, 44, 48, 92 French authorities, 61 French Colonial Bourgeoisie, 50 French colony, 67 French commissioners, 60 French Emperor, 72 French Era, 71 French Era in Santo Domingo, 70 French general, 70 French Law, 60 French nation, 67 French occupation, 61 French Republic, 61, 62 French Republicans, 63 French Revolution, 60 French Saint Domingue, 50, 56 Frenchman, 47 Frumaire, 61 García, Joaquín, 51 García, José Gabriel, 12, 81 García-Peña, Lorgia, 10 Gender, 16 General Aussenac, 77 General Clerveaux, 66 General Dubarquier, 77 General Ferrand, 71, 72 General Inginac, 92 General Kersevau, 71 General Magny, 87 General Sánchez Ramírez, 77 Gimbernard, 16 Gimbernard, Jacinto, 15 Ginebra, 94 Godoy, Manuel, 60 Gómez Franco, Luis, 59 González y Carrasco, Francisco, 64 Gorjón, Fernando, 28 Governor, 64 Governor García, 59, 60, 61 Gran Colombia, 87 Granada, 44 Granada, Germán de, 12 Greek, 47 Grifos, 37

Guaba, 43 Guadalupe, 87 Guanaybes, 45 Guillermin, 74, 76, 77 Guinea, 26, 32 Guinta, Kimberly, vii Guzmán, Diego, 31 Gypsy, 47 Haiti, 86, 91, 96 Haitian bourgeoisie, 57 Haitian constitution, 70, 92 Haitian Revolution, 68 Havana, 26 Henríquez, Pedro, 80, 81, 85 Henríquez Pimentel, Antonio, 38 Hérard, 99, 100 Hernández, 17 Hernández Franco, Tomás, 7 Hernández, Ramona, 7 Higüey, 46 Hincha, 54 Hispaniola, 10, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 38, 39, 43, 44, 51, 59 Howard, David, 9 Huber, Cristóbal, 75 Incháustegui Cabral, Héctor, 7 Independence, 66, 88, 100 Independent State of Spanish Haiti, 88 Indian woman, 35 Indian women, 26, 35 Indians, 26, 29, 30, 31, 35 Indies, the, 25 Indigenous population, 26, 29 Indigo, 54 Ingenios, 27, 28, 50, 79 Initial Ordinances, 32 Inquisition, 82 Institutionalization of a system of dependency, 68 Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Planificación, 17 Integration, 66 Interracial relationships, 61 Israel, 18 Italians, 76, 77 James, C. L. R., 3 Java, 43 Jews, 25 Jimenes Grullón, Juan I., 24 Jimenes, Manuel, 101 Jiménez, 94

Index

Jover, Miguel, 28 Junta Gubernativa, 101 Junta Nacional Colombina, 14 Junta Popular, 99 Kindenlan, Sebastián, 83, 86 King Charles, 92 King Fernando VII, 93 King of Spain, 62, 63 Kom, Anton de, 3 La Concepción, 36 La Gonave, 67 La Merced, 90 La Tortue, 67, 100 La Trinitaria, 94 La Vega, 26, 27, 31, 46, 54 La Yaguana, 41, 43, 44 Ladino, 33 Lamming, George, 3 Landowner, 68, 74 Landowners, 59, 67 Lares de Guaba, 29 Larrazabal Blanco, Carlos, 11 Las Casas, 28 Latin America, vi, 19 Laveaux, Etienne, 61, 64 Laws of Burgos, 29 Le Cap, 50 Lebrón, Cristóbal, 28 Leclerc, 65, 70 Leguizamón, Diego de, 39 Lemba, 32, 42, 43 Lemonnier-Delafosse, 77 Leocadio, José, 23, 80, 81, 85 Les Cayemites, 67 Liberal, 98, 99 Liberalism, 99 Liberty, 61 Lister, Elissa L., 10 Livestock exports, 67 Livestock-raising, 67 Lizardo, Fradique, 8 López de Castro, 41, 43 López de Velazco, 39 Louverture, Toussaint, 3, 8, 12, 22, 23, 60, 64, 65, 69, 70 Low Country provinces, 44 Lowenthal, Troetje, 9 Lugo, 48 Machado, 94 Maestre, 35 Major Carmichael, 77

119

Major-General, 64 Malacca in the East Indies, 43 Male slaves, 29 Males, 29 Mancebo, Juan, 67 Manifestación del 16, 101 Marchena, 94 Marcos, 81 Maroon, 30 Marrero Aristy, Ramón, 14 Martinique, 87 Marx, 21, 80 Marx, Karl, 6 Marxism, 23 Marxist, 24 Mason, Patricia, viii, 1 Masons, 48 masses, the, 64 Material structure of colonial society, 61 Maurice “Prince of Orange”, 43 Mayes, April J., 10 Meas, the, 81 Méndez, Danny, 10 Mendoza, 81 Merchants, 60, 67 Mestizos, 32, 37, 42 México, 17 Middle East, 19 Mir, Pedro, 8 Mita, 80 Moise [Louverture], 65 Mojarra, 81 Molucca Islands, 43 Monetary system, 69 Monte, Félix María, 101 Monte Cristi, 55, 67 Monte Cristo, 29 Monte Cristy, 41 Monte Grande, 19, 81, 101 Monte Plata, 46 Monte y Tejada, Antonio del, 12 Montecristy, 93 Montejo, Esteban, 3 Montes, Toribio, 75 Montoro, Hernando de, 45 Moorish, 26 Moors, 25, 27 Morales, Diego de, 28 Morilla, 81 Morilla, José María, 79 Morillas, Francisco, 67 Moya Pons, Frank, 8 Mulatto, 71, 101 Mulatto population, 57

120

Index

Mulattos, viii, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 16, 17, 22, 37, 42, 45, 48, 59, 61, 69, 70, 95, 100, 101 Muñoz, Andrés, 167 Napoleon, 67, 69 Napoleonic army, 65 Napoleonic forces, 75 National Assembly, 70, 98 National Guard, 4 National independence, 87 Natural economy, 67 Negro youths, 96 Negroes, 95 Negrophobia, 16, 19 Negros, 6 Neyba, 67, 87 Ninth Ordinance, 34 Nizao, 28 Nogere, Gaston, 67 North American trade, 67 Núñez, Manuel, 19 Núñez de Cáceres, 15, 82 Núñez de Cáceres, José, 11, 14, 23, 81, 88 Ocampo, Diego de, 31 Ocoa, 28 Office of Colonial Inspection, 73 Oidor of the Real Audiencia of Santo Domingo, 38 Oidores, 41 Old labor system, 71 Oligarchy, 99 Ordenanzas para el Sosiego y Seguridad de los Esclavos Negros, 32 Ordinance, 34, 35 Orirtonus, 44 Osorio, 43, 45, 47 Osorio, Antonio de, 42 Osorio, José María, 81 Ovando, 27 Ovando, Nicolás de, 25, 29 Oviedo, 31, 35 Oviedo, Fernández de, 27 Ozama, 71, 72, 73, 100 Painters, 48 Palenque, 77 Palestine, 18 Palo Hincado, 76 Panamá, 40 Panderane, 43 Pasamonte, Esteban de, 27

Pasamonte, Miguel de, 28, 29 Paul, 66 Peninsula, 94 Peña Batlle, Manuel Arturo, 4 Peña Gómez, José Francisco, 17 Peralta, Alonso de, 28 Pérez Cabral, Pedro Andrés, 11 Peru, 43 Petion, 73, 76 Petit blancs, 57 Physical freedom, 63 Pichardo, Bernardo, 12 Piedmontese, 76, 77 Plantation system, 97 Polanco, Diego, 87 Political, economic and social reorganization, 66 Political, social, and racial equality, 82 Political equality, 89 Political Governor, 88 Population exodus, 30 Port-au-Prince, 61, 96, 98, 100 Portugal, 44 Portuguese, 47 Praslin, 97 Price-Mars, 100 Price-Mars, Jean, 2 Prince of Peace, 60 Pro-slavery groups, 76 Protectionism, 69 Psychological and ideological basis, 65 Puello, José Joaquín, 64 Puerto Plata, 28, 29, 41, 43, 67, 79 Puerto Real, 29 Puerto Rico, 10, 17, 47, 61, 74, 89, 93 Quiabón, Santo Domingo, 28 Racial equality, 82 Racial inequality, 67, 70, 87 Racial integration, 65, 89 Raful, Tony, 19 Ramírez, Ciriaco, 75, 76 Ramírez, Jane, 9 Ramírez, Juan Sánchez, 75, 79 Ranchers, 59, 70 Rationalist revolutionary ideas, 74 Ravelo, Juan N., 100 Raymond, Julien, 67 Real Audiencia, 30, 40, 42 Real Audiencia de Santo Domingo, 60 Rear-Admiral Rowley, 77 Reconquest, the, 75

Index

Reformers, 97 Reformist group, 98 Regidor, 59 Relations of production, 60, 61 Repartimiento, 29, 80 Republic, 63, 70 Republic of Haiti, 71, 74, 87, 100 Republicans, 64 Rescate, 40 Revolutionary Independence movement, 80 Revolutionary movement, 75 Reyes Brothers, 74 Rio Nigua, 27, 28 Rivière-Hérard, 97 Rodríguez, Melchor, 74 Rodríguez, Néstor R., 10 Rodríguez, Pedro, 23 Rodríguez Demorizi, Emilio, 4, 13 Rojas, Carlos de, 67 Roldán’s repartimientos, 25 Rosario Candelier, Bruno, 7 Rosenberg, June C., 8 Royal Decree of San Ildefonso, 51 Royal Decree of San Lorenzo, 37 Royal Ordinance, 26, 29 Ruiz, Félix María, 100 Rum, 54 Runaway blacks, 31 Runaway slaves, 31, 32 Rural Code, 92 Saco, 27 Sagás, Ernesto, 10 Sailors, 48 Saint-Domingue, 2, 8, 52, 62, 63, 67, 69, 72 Saint-Preux, David, 96 Salomon, 100 Salvaleón de Higüey, 29 Salvatierra de Sabana, 29 Samaná, 67, 75 Samaná Peninsula, 36, 73 San Rafael, 54 San Cristóbal, 26 San Fernando de Monte Cristo, 87 San Francisco, 90 San Francisco de Macorís, 17 San Juan, 28, 31, 32, 54 San Juan de la Maguana, 29, 31 San Lázaro, 90 San Marcos, 52 San Miguel, Pedro L., 9 San Nicolás, 90 Sanate, Higüey, 28

121

Sánchez Ramírez, 80 Sánchez Ramírez, Juan, 78 Sánchez Valverde, 22, 39, 50 Sánchez Valverde, Antonio, 12, 13, 51 Sánchez, José, 52 Santa Clara, 90 Santa María del Puerto de la Yaguana, 29 Santana, 94 Santiago, 46, 50, 54, 64, 66, 67, 73 Santiago de los Caballeros, 29, 51 Santo Domingo, 6, 17, 25, 27, 29, 30, 31, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 89, 43, 46, 47, 48, 52, 55, 72, 74, 77, 79, 86, 90, 93, 101 Saône, 67 Second Ordinance, 32 Secretariat of the Interim Commission on Justice, 73 Seda, Pedro de, 23, 80, 81, 85 Seibo, 46 Senagaud, 44 Senate, 96, 97 Senator Rouanez, 92 Separatists, 99 Sepero, Bartolomé, 46 Serrano, Antonio, 28 Serrano, Domingo Antonio, 52 Servitude, 67, 85 Seville, 29 Sexton, 48 Shapiro, Daniel, vii Shoemakers, 48 Silversmiths, 48 Simmons, Kimberly Eison, 9 Situado, 79 Slave, 85 Slave code, 32 Slave labor, 55 Slave labor system, 25 Slave mode of production, 29, 56 Slave owners, 13, 34 Slave relations of production, 61 Slave society, 58 Slave states, 34 Slave workforce, 30 Slaveholding, 59 Slave-holding regime, 33 Slave-masters, 13 Slavery, 22, 23, 25, 29, 48, 59, 63, 65, 67, 70, 85, 87 Slaves, 13, 23, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 44, 45, 60, 61, 62, 63, 101 Social and racial struggle, 80 Social consciousness, 59, 65

122

Index

Soto, Angela, 16 Soza, José, 87 Spain, vii, 26, 31, 35, 39, 44, 51, 89 Spaniards, 31, 33, 35, 36, 42, 51 Spanish, 38, 62 Spanish America, 22, 41, 48 Spanish authorities, 64 Spanish bourgeoisie, 41 Spanish colonialists, 67, 71 Spanish colonialist forces, 32 Spanish Crown, 38, 59 Spanish militia, 30 Spanish part of the island, 70 Spanish population, 35, 39 Spanish possessions, 60 Spanish Revolution, 101 Spanish Santo Domingo, 50, 54, 56, 66, 68, 71, 87 Spanish settlers, 30 Spanish whites, 61 Straits of Magellan, 43 Suelanda, 44 Sugar mills, 28 Sugarcane, 66 Swordsmiths, 48 Sylva, José Justo de, 86, 87 Syrup, 54 Tapia, Cristóbal de, 28 Tavarez, José, 73, 74 Tejada Ortiz, Dagoberto, 8 Tejera, 94 Tejera, Emiliano, 14 Tenth Ordinance, 33 Tercerón, 37 Terceroons, 59 Third Ordinance, 33 Tobacco, 67 Toledo, 30 Toledo, Nicolás de, 64 Tolentino Dipp, Hugo, 8 Tomín, 34 Torres, Melchor de, 38 Torres-Saillant, 7, 13 Torres-Saillant, Silvio, vii, 9 Tostado, Francisco, 27 Toussaint, 51, 66, 67, 68, 70 Trade expansion, 69 Trapiche, 27, 28 Trapiches, 38, 50, 56 Treaty of Basel, 12, 58, 60, 61 Treaty of Ryswick, 53 Trinitarios, 98

Troncoso Sánchez, Pedro, 14 Trujillo, 5, 6, 13, 15, 17 Trujillo, Rafael Leonidas, 4 Undressed hides, 54 Unión Patriótica Antiimperialista, 17 United Provinces of the Low Countries, 44 United States of America, 99 United States, viii, 17, 67, 79 Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo, 5 Ureña, 94 Ureña, Pedro Henríquez, 15 Utrera, Cipriano de, 51 Valdés, 42 Valdez, Juan R., 10 Valladolid, 37 Valle de Guaba, 45 Valverde, 94 Vaquero, Juan, 42, 43 Vásquez de Mella, 28 Vázquez de Ayllón, 26 Vecino, 47 Vecinos, 48, 50 Velázquez, 94 Velerio, Francisco, 64 Velosa, Gonzalo de, 27 Venezuela, 17, 89 Vera Paz, 29 Viard, Etienne, 67 Victoriano-Martínez, Ramón Antonio, 10 Villanueva de Yaquimo, 29 Villoria, Joan de, 28 Visitador, 34 West, Christian, 8 West Indies, 15 White, 22, 32, 34, 98 White population, 31, 35, 57 White residents, 36 White Spaniards, 36 White sugar, 54 White women, 26 Whites, 29, 39, 51, 56, 70, 95, 98 Wolof, 30 Wolofs, 26 Women, 26, 32, 65 Xuara, Gaspar de, 46 Zaiter, Josefina, 9 Zuazo, Licenciado, 28