Saint-Domingue

The colony of Saint-Domingue (pronounced /sɛ̃dɔmɛ̃ɡ/), also Known simply as Saint-Domingue or French Saint Dominic, it is the name by which the colony established by France in the western part of the island of Hispaniola since 1659 was known. until 1804, and which for a short period of time (1795-1804) covered the entire island territory, that is, the contemporary countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The name derives from the main Spanish city on the island, Santo Domingo, which came to refer specifically to the Captaincy General of Santo Domingo, current Dominican Republic, held by the Spanish. The borders between the two possessions were fluid and changed over time until they were finally solidified in the Dominican War of Independence in 1844.

The French had established themselves in the western part of the islands of Hispaniola and Tortuga in 1659. In the Treaty of Rijswijk of 1697, Spain formally recognized French control of Tortuga Island and the western third of the island of Hispaniola. In 1791, slaves and some Dominican Creoles participated in the Bois Caïman voodoo ceremony and planned the Haitian revolution. The slave rebellion was later allied with French republican forces following the abolition of slavery in the colony in 1793, although this alienated the island's slave-holding ruling class. France controlled all of Hispaniola from 1795 to 1802, when a new rebellion began. The last French troops withdrew from the western part of the island at the end of 1803, and the colony then declared its independence as Haiti, its indigenous name, the following year.

Generalities

Haiti is the name used by some of the Amerindian peoples to refer to the lands where they lived, which the Spanish took for the native name of the island and with which the current territory of Haiti was originally known.

The name Haiti was used for the colony of the Kingdom of France since 1659 by its inhabitants and by the Spanish since 1697 when it was recognized by Spain. Since 1795, when the eastern two-thirds that made up the rest of the island were annexed by treaty, the French called the colony Saint-Domingue, the French translation of the Spanish name Santo Domingo in the treaty. Upon declaring its independence on January 1, 1804, the name was changed to Haiti by Jean Jacques Dessalines, who was the first ruler of Haiti, conquering the entire island and expelling the French government. In reality, the French governor was stationed in the city of Santo Domingo, until the population revolted after the battle of Palo Hincado organized by the landowners.

These events occurred shortly after the French Revolution in the metropolis, and Toussaint-Louverture and then Dessalines and their collaborators took various measures, which at first were loyal to the French government, conquering the entire island for France, but then They proclaimed themselves independent and carried out various revolutionary acts, such as removing the white from the French flag, as a sign of repudiation of said domination.

Christopher Columbus had claimed the entire "Spanish" island (also known as the island of Santo Domingo or San Domingo), controlled by the Spanish authorities since the end of the century XV until XVII.

The island of Hispaniola in the Greater Antilles was discovered by Christopher Columbus on December 5, 1492, who named it that way. The Arawak, Carib and Taíno Amerindian peoples occupied the island before the arrival of the Spanish. These peoples mixed with the newcomers and currently at least 15% of the island's population has Amerindian ancestors in their genome, a phenomenon that is reproduced on the other islands of the Greater Antilles. Jamaica, for example, also has a high percentage of Afro-American Indian population.

The Taínos and the Caribs, the most common Amerindian groups on the island and mixed with each other, were very skilled in agriculture, hunting and fishing. They made animal traps, carved stone and wood, kneaded rubber, made ceramics and weaved with palm or cotton; they used fire and salt to preserve food; They made canoes of different sizes (normally for 15-20 paddlers, but from 2 to 150 warriors) that they used for war and attacking and fleeing from island to island. They hunted and fought with arrows that were often poisoned. The Carib Indians were even able to expel the Spanish from many lands in the Caribbean Sea, such as, for example, the nearby island of Santa Cruz. Upon the arrival of the Spanish, these Amerindian groups quickly mixed with them, which happened again with the arrival of sailors of other nationalities and blacks.

The Spanish had many conflicts with the Amerindian groups. Enriquillo, married to the mestiza Mencía, granddaughter of Anacaona, was one of the Taíno chiefs who rebelled against the Spanish. He began the uprising with a large group of Tainos in the Sierra de Bahoruco. This rebellion or guerrilla covered the period between 1519 and 1533. His father was killed in a Spanish raid against a peaceful indigenous protest in Jaragua. Guarocuya was another Amerindian rebel leader, he was the nephew of Anacaona, a rebel woman who instigated another uprising. Anacaona was the sister of the Jaragua chief, Bohechío, who also opposed the Spanish and when Bohechío was killed, she was his successor being killed along with her court. Anacaona was married to Caonabo, who was a chief who rebelled in the kingdom of Maguana.

The governors executed Indians in retaliation. In addition, needing labor, the colonists enslaved many natives, bringing them even from distant places and murdering them in an exemplary manner when they were not docile or did not obey properly, to subdue the rest through fear. The settlers expelled the Amerindian populations and settled on their lands and those who did not leave ended up executed by settlers who acted on their own. Most Europeans did not have women and stole Indian women. All this once again motivated the natives to rebel and distrust the colonial governments. Rebellions began that were bloodily subdued, with fierce campaigns killing everyone they could, and the survivors taking refuge in the mountains. The Amerindian population was decreasing and inversely their community needed more newcomers to survive. Many of the new arrivals were escaped blacks. Chiefs who previously received them to later sell them to the Spanish and others, began to ally themselves with them.

Called marabous by the French and zambos by the Spanish, the cultural and physical mixing between blacks and Amerindians was very common judging by the frequency with which they carried out joint attacks and was frowned upon by Europeans, a perception that was transmitted and It currently survives rooted in the population of several Latin American countries.

In Hispaniola, when the Spanish could not control rebellions, they signed treaties giving native groups, among other concessions, the right to freedom and property.

The western third was unhealthier for people and livestock, as it was made up of swampy lands and had several endemic diseases such as 'yellow fever', and it was also where there were always the most native and maroon rebels, For this reason, it was hardly populated by Spanish colonists, being in practice uncolonized, which was taken advantage of by French buccaneers who called it "Grande Terre", settling there from 1625 from their towns on Turtle Island and later beginning to extend new settlements, farms, etc. from the western portions of the island towards the center of the island, causing conflicts with the Spanish owners of plantations and pastures, which led to skirmishes. Both of them carried out raids to obtain livestock and slaves, leaving some plots as 'no man's land'.

Until the conquest of Jamaica by the English privateers of Admiral William Penn and General Robert Venables in 1655, the Spanish only had permanent control of the southeastern area of the island, leaving a large sector of the center and north of the island. island, very mountainous regions, as places where Africans and Tainos, slaves on the plantations, could settle. Both on the plantations and in the isolated towns of escapees, there was a strong mixing between indigenous people and Africans and also Europeans.

On the island "Hispaniola" the main Indian and later black groups chose to ally themselves with the French, to the point of being automatically considered enemies by the English government. There were numerous escapes, and flotillas of Taíno and Carib canoes transported bands of maroons who attacked the plantations again in 1656. In 1657 the slaves of the islands continued to rebel, Angolan slaves massacred all the whites they found.

The rise of the gens de couleur was key in French colonial society, many of them mulattoes descended from the filibusters, who prospered in marginal populations that were often relegated. The greatest concentration of the gens de couleur was in the southwestern peninsula, due to its distance from the Atlantic shipping routes and its difficult topography, with the highest mountains in the Caribbean. In the parish of Jérémie, they formed the majority of the population. Part of the French population was made up of escaped black slaves or their descendants, who came from the Spanish plantations in the eastern half. This population, considered escaped slaves and therefore property of the plantations, was protected by the French authorities, eager to have allies and inhabitants.

In this context, with part of the island colonized by the French who occupied it with slave plantations, under the Treaty of Basel (July 22, 1795) after the defeat suffered by Spain in the metropolis, the cession was signed from the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo to France, which since August 1791 had a great slave rebellion. The rebellion was so serious for France that the annexation of the two-thirds of the island in the hands of the Spanish was put on hold, as it could not be made effective due to the need to first pacify the French third in the hands of the rebels. Although it was not clear in 1791, it actually turned out that the Haitian Revolution had begun, which culminated in the independence of Haiti in 1804 and the end of slavery 63 years before that in the USA.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, French, American and British authors often refer to «Saint- Domingue" (from French) as "Santo Domingo" (in Spanish), which gave rise to confusion with the former Spanish colony, called Santo Domingo in the pre-French colonial era and for a brief period in 1808, by the city of Santo Domingo, which is today the capital of the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic.

French colonization

Originally the entire island was part of Spanish America. Its aborigines tried to free themselves from the Spanish on several occasions, something very common in many other colonies and which gave rise to independent communities in mountainous or inaccessible areas in many places. Spanish rule over the island was reestablished by Governor Nicolás de Ovando in 1503. After the massacre of Queen Anacaona and her court in Hispaniola by the Spanish conquistadors, the Taíno Amerindian survivors took refuge on the island they called Gonavo (Gonâve Island). Ovando founded a colony near the southwestern coast, west of the salt lake currently known as Etang Saumâtre, to which he gave the name "Saint Mary of True Peace" and which would be abandoned several years later. Shortly after, Ovando founded "Santa María del Puerto", although it would be burned by French explorers in 1535 and again by the English in 1592. Other pirates or corsairs who frequently devastated Caribbean towns were Portuguese, Genoese and Dutch.

As some Amerindians had done, some descendants of Amerindians and escaped black slaves, known as maroons, remained independent, cornered in inaccessible areas that tended to be the most unhealthy.

In addition to piracy and confrontations with the maroons, another problem that the Spanish crown faced, always lacking money, were the activities against the commercial monopoly that Spain exercised with the colonies.

Families of settlers of various nationalities, especially French and British (Scots, Irish, Welsh...) with women, settled from 1605 in the northwestern region of Hispaniola and dedicated themselves to hunting, fishing and farming. to supply the ships that crossed the Caribbean. The feral wild pigs that they hunted and whose meat they smoked and sold to ships, were highly appreciated for their good conservation. The use of the buccaneer, a grill with green logs that they used to smoke it, gave them the name buccaneers.

Due to the prevailing smuggling, the government of Philip III of Spain, by Royal Decree of August 6, 1603, had ordered an exemplary act that would serve as a warning to the rest of the towns located on other large Antillean islands such as Cuba and Puerto Rico, which they also smuggled, circumventing the Spanish monopoly.

The Spanish colonial government considered the activities of the buccaneer settlers to be smuggling, which is why the buccaneers were expelled by the Spanish from areas such as Grand Terre and the island of Gonâve, which were divided into societies of Indians, blacks and Europeans who They lived and worked together.

Gonâve Island, for example, began to attract fishermen, agriculture appeared, and was then used as a base for pirates.

Obeying the ordinance of the king of Spain, the then governor Antonio de Osorio proceeded in 1606 to devastate the non-Spanish port towns of "Montecristi", "Puerto Plata", "La Yaguana", "Bayahá" and others.

Not being able to continue with their trade and their way of life and the Spanish attacks caused the colonists to unite and retreat to Turtle Island, north of Hispaniola, opting for piracy. These attacks were too costly for the Spanish colonial administration, deciding to abandon the area and move the Spanish populations from the north and west of the island.

Beginning in 1625 and for more than 50 years, the independent population grew from its settlements on Turtle Island and then began to extend new settlements from the western portions of the island from what is now Port-au-Prince towards the center of the island. Pirate ships of many nationalities stopped by and Dutch merchants frequented it in search of leather, which was abundant in this part of the island. The maroons, established in dispersed groups in those areas, led a community life, collaborating more or less normally in friendly, economic or commercial relations with pirates, privateers and colonists for their defense or prosperity.

Turtle Island, near the northern coast of Santo Domingo Island, was the base in the looting operations of the islands of the Caribbean Sea by the Brotherhood of the Brothers of the Coast, an association that was divided into filibusters, groups on board that stalked the maritime transport and rushed to board it; buccaneers, usually French, who were dedicated to hunting raised cattle, or stealing them from the estates to dry the hides and smoke the meats that they sold or exchanged to the previous inhabitants and inhabitants, who were the least dangerous because they were dedicated to cultivating the fields. Led by François Levasseur, they had built a system of fortifications designed to keep Tortuga Island safe from attacks by other countries, such as Spain or England, and had placed themselves under the protectorate of Louis XIII of France.

In 1640, the French envoy Le Vasseur took control of Tortuga Island. Commanding numerous soldiers, he expelled the representatives of the government of England, which was a benefit for the pirates, who found it easy to stock up on food and gunpowder. Instead of carrying their loot for several months of travel, adventurers could leave it there, and from the island it was only a day's journey to the river mouths and ports of what is now Haiti.

In 1652 they sacked San Juan de los Remedios in Cuba, and the Spanish authorities in Santo Domingo sent an unsuccessful expedition against their bases. In 1660, France continued in La Tortuga, after the punishment expedition. From there the French began to colonize the western area of the island of Santo Domingo. In 1697 the Treaty of Ryswick formalized the cession of that part to France. The French part took the name of Saint-Domingue. The first capital was Cap-Français ("French head" or "French cape", current Cap-Haïtien), a port located in the north of the island.

On June 6, 1665, the Tortuga was handed over to Bertrand d'Ogeron under French rule. D' Ogeron had led the life of a buccaneer, after which, from 1662 to 1664, he had contributed to the development of the Greater Antilles by ensuring the transportation of hundreds of enlisted men from Nantes to Léogâne and Petit-Goâve. However, the filibusters now enjoyed a kind of anarchic regime that left them free from all imposition and allowed them to traffic as they pleased.

French filibusters created a settlement on small Turtle Island in 1625, adjacent to the northwest coast of Hispaniola. They survived the piracy of Spanish ships, feeding on wild animals and the pigs they raised, and thanks to the sale of hides to the merchant ships of all nations. Although the Spanish Empire destroyed buccaneer settlements each time they were established, each time they returned due to the abundance of natural resources: hardwood trees, wild pigs, cattle, and fresh water. Around 1650, French pirates began to reach the northwestern coast of Hispaniola from that small adjacent island, founding a colony in "Trou-Bord" which, as it grew, installed a hospital not far from the coast (in the hamlet of Turgeau, in Port-au-Prince). This led to the region being known as “Hôpital”. The colony of Tortuga was officially established in 1659 under the commission of King Louis XIV.

Among the buccaneers was Bertrand d'Ogeron, who played an important role in the establishment of Saint-Domingue. He was able to obtain the first tobacco crops, which in turn allowed the sedentary population to increase, although a significant number of buccaneers and pirates did not passively accept royal authority until 1660. D'Orgeron also attracted many settlers from Martinique. and Guadalupe, like Jean Roy, Jean Hebert and his family, and Guillaume Barre and his, expelled by the land pressure generated by the expansion of housing with sugar crops. But in 1670, shortly after Cape France had been founded, the tobacco crisis affected the territory and a large number of places were abandoned. Pirate fleets grew. The lootings, such as those of Veracruz in 1683 or Campeche in 1686, became increasingly numerous until Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Marquis of Seignelay, and then Minister of the Navy, brought some order through a large number of measures., among which the creation of indigo and sugar cane plantations stood out. The first sugar mill was built in 1685.

Cession of the western third of Hispaniola and surrounding islands to France

In 1697, by the Treaty of Ryswick, Spain officially ceded the western third of Hispaniola to France.

In Spanish and later French times, the island of Hispaniola also served as a warehouse for blacks for sailboats sailing to the rest of the American colonies. Both on the island of Hispaniola and on the rest of the islands in the Caribbean Sea, the plantations and the slavery that they entailed, needed an abundant workforce to where shipments of African slaves were frequently sent. However, slaves were also taken from the Caribbean populations in the continuous wars between the colonial powers. Several countries had privateers and Portuguese and French piracy were the most feared in the Spanish possessions, to which Dutch and English filibusters were added. In Hispaniola, as a result of the cruel way in which they were treated, several slave revolts occurred throughout the entire period of slavery, usually burning the plantations where they were held captive. The authorities and slave owners pursued the escapees, inflicting serious and inhuman punishments on them if they managed to capture them. Thousands of escaped slaves found freedom in the mountains, forming communities of maroons and raiding isolated plantations. After a revolt and a period of anarchy, Saint-Domingue has its own island self-government. A council of chiefs from among the black maroons who govern the island and administer it, tacitly linking it to France.

The French founded two towns in the northern area of Saint-Domingue, one called "Éster" (near the current Petite-Rivière) with straight streets, inhabited by merchants where the governor lived, and the other town called Gonaïves.

The first French presence of filibusters in "Hôpital" (current Port-au-Prince), became a true French city. The French privateers were useful in repelling the English who tried to usurp French territory, and they acted independently since they did not receive orders from the administration and therefore were rivals for the colonial government. In the winter of 1707, the then French governor Choiseul-Beaupré tried to get rid of them. Finally the filibusters gave in and closed the hospital, ceding their control to the governor and the majority settled in the area as farmers, being the first stable European inhabitants in the region, thus reinforcing the colonial administration.

"Ester" was eventually abandoned after a major fire in 1711. However, the surrounding Petite-Rivière region continued to grow. Some time later a new city was founded in the south, called Léogâne.

Before the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), the economy of Saint-Domingue gradually expanded thanks to the cultivation of sugar and, later, coffee, with significant surpluses for export. After the war, which disrupted maritime trade, the colony experienced rapid expansion. In 1767, 72 million pounds of raw sugar and 51 million pounds of refined sugar, one million pounds of indigo and two million pounds of cotton were exported. Saint-Domingue became known as the Pearl of the Antilles., being one of the richest colonies in the XVIII century of the French colonial Empire. In the year 1780, Saint-Domingue produced about 40% of all the sugar and 60% of the coffee consumed in Europe. This single colony, about the size of Maryland or Belgium, produced more sugar and coffee than all the colonies of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and the West Indies combined.

The small Antilles, initially despised by the white colonizers, had become prosperous and highly populated dependencies. Their main value was that they constituted the assets of influential businessmen who lived in their metropolises from the income from tropical crops. The British and the Dutch had demonstrated in their American and Asian colonies that plantations with slave labor were a very healthy business that reported great income in a very short time.

The labor for these plantations in Saint-Domingue was provided by some 790,000 African slaves (representing in 1783-1791 a third of the entire Atlantic slave trade), given that the brutal conditions of slavery and tropical diseases, such as yellow fever, prevented the white or Amerindian population from experiencing high growth through natural growth. Between 1764 and 1771, the average importation of slaves was 10,000 to 15,000 per year, in 1786 around 28,000 per year, and from 1787 onwards, the colony received more than 40,000 slaves annually. However, the impossibility of maintaining the number of slaves without constant replenishment from Africa meant that the slave population—which in 1789 was 500,000—grew above the white population, which in the same year was only 32,000. Throughout this time, the majority of slaves in the colony were of African origin. African culture remained strong among slaves in the late French period, particularly the voodoo religion, which combined Catholic liturgy and ritual with the beliefs and practices of Guinea, Congo, and Dahomey. Slave traders captured their victims. from the entire Atlantic coast of Africa, and the slaves who arrived came from hundreds of different tribes; That is why their languages were often innumerable. Most came from the Gold Coast and the Slave Coast, followed by the Bantu from Congo and Angola.

In addition, military units were formed from the black population in the French forces, both in the army and in the colonial police and other formations distributed throughout the French Caribbean colonies. Many slaves were promised freedom if they served under French rule. These units went on to fight in French wars outside the island and an all-black unit from Haiti participated with French forces in the American War of Independence.

To regularize slavery, in 1685, Louis for the general welfare of his slaves. This code also sanctioned corporal punishment, although it authorized overseers to apply brutal methods to instill in their slaves the necessary docility, ignoring provisions intended to regulate the administration of punishments. A passage from the personal secretary of Henri Christophe, who lived more than half of his life as a slave, describes some crimes perpetrated in French Saint-Domingue by overseers to frighten the slave population.

A famous one was the execution of Francisco Mackandal, a voodoo slave and houngan (spiritual leader) originally from Guinea, who escaped in 1751 and joined many of the different gangs, spending the next six years making successful raids and evading capture by the French, while preaching against white domination in Saint-Domingue. In 1758, after his capture he was accused of a failed plot to poison the drinking water of the planters' plantations and he was burned alive in the public square at Cape French.

Saint-Domingue also had the largest number of "free" in the Caribbean, also known in French as the gens de couleur. The Royal Census of 1789 counted around 25,000 such people. While many "free" people of color They were descendants of former African slaves (freedmen), the majority of the members of this social group seem to have never been slaves themselves, but rather Indians or a mixture of people of African, European or Amerindian descent called in Spanish: marabou, mulatos, mestizos, dark-skinned, brunette, cuarterones, etc. Being descended from Indians or blacks was considered a degradation, so even if the majority of a person's ancestors were white and their complexion was rosy, anyone remotely descended from another race was considered a person of color.

Normally, they were the descendants of the enslaved women or servants that the French colonists took as lovers, through plaçage, a type of law that regulated concubinage or barraganía with quarters (quarteronnes or < i>quadroons), daughters of a European and a mulatto or mestiza, but common-law couples between whites and mulattoes or mestizas, and between whites and blacks or Indian women, were also regulated by plaçage. In parishes such as Grand'Anse they formed the majority of the population.

Others were descendants of wealthy landowners. In the relationships between landowners and their concubines, many times, they were benefited by wills to inherit considerable assets.

As the number of gens de couleur grew, they became subject to discriminatory legislation. The statutes prohibited the gens de couleur from accessing certain professions, marrying whites (although not cohabitation), wearing European clothing, carrying swords or firearms in public, or attending social functions, where whites were present. However, these regulations did not limit their purchase of land, and many gens de couleur farms accumulated substantial wealth and even became slave owners. In 1789, the freedmen owned a third of the plantations and a quarter of the slaves in Saint-Domingue. It was key to the rise of the gens de couleur, the increasingly numerous coffee plantations, which thrived on the marginal slopes of plots that were often relegated. The largest concentration was in the southern peninsula, called El Tiburón, with the highest mountains in the Caribbean.

Saint-Domingue was an important colony where there was a military infrastructure. This infrastructure was used in the context of French support for the American Revolutionary War. André Rigaud and Henri Christophe among others, participated in the "volunteer regiment of the hunters of Santo Domingo" to go help the American insurgents in their War of Independence, for example in the siege of Savannah.

In 1785 there were many Haitian blacks who had military experience and training enrolled in military units, in the navy, in the police and in other French colonial administrative formations, as soldiers, sailors, non-commissioned officers and officers. There were also a considerable number of black veterans who had fought in North America with French forces in the last war between France and Great Britain in the American War of Independence.

There were also ties with the plantation owners of the southern colonies of the future United States, including those of New France. Before the war, these ties attempted to limit the influence of anti-slavery, pro-independence New England. However, in this relationship there was also the antagonism of New France in North America and the Thirteen British colonies. Louisiana (New France) was finally sold in 1803 to the United States by France and part of its French population was spread throughout the colonies, including Saint-Domingue and nearby Martinique and Guadeloupe.

Consequences of the French Revolution in Saint-Domingue

In France, in 1788, on the eve of the French Revolution, Brissot founded the Society of Friends of the Negroes, but despite the efforts of its most prominent members, such as Abbé Grégoire or Condorcet, he was unable to obtain abolition. of slavery with the Constitution.

Faced with the situation of anarchy in Paris starting in 1789, where royal power and the government had difficulty implementing decisions and the army had collapsed in part of its administration, Great Britain and Spain saw the opportunity to divide the French colonies.. Especially Great Britain, since in 1776, France aligned itself with the rebels in the War of Independence of the American Colonies, it is motivated to make amends. The government of Spain, which had always been an ally of France, because British ships and their merchants were a perpetual threat to the development of Spanish trade with Latin America and the French and Spanish royal families were related, became an enemy of the revolutionary French government that He had executed the king and subverted the absolutist order of government.

On August 14, 1791, a key event occurred in the history of the island, as a ceremony took place in Bois-Cayman by the Jamaican Dutty Boukman, the Houngan or voodoo spiritual leader, this being the starting point of a great change in attitude that caused days later, on the night of August 22, a great rebellion of slaves, thus starting the Haitian Revolution. Dutty Boukman, and a large number of slaves swore an oath to free themselves from slavery, quickly reaching the number of 40,000 former slaves. The group formed a council or senior staff that deliberated decisions and coordinated the different rebel groups. Several black leaders commanded armies of black volunteers, George Biassou, a fifty-year-old former slave at that time, was one of them and quickly took over the leadership of the rebel leadership along with the black leader Jean Francois, one of the most prominent leaders. important. The long emancipation process finally had the black slave François Dominique Toussaint-Louverture as its main protagonist. His real name was Toussaint de Breda. Born in Cape France, he was a freed slave on the Breda plantation when in 1791 he joined the slave rebellion led by Boukman in the French part of Hispaniola. In November 1791, the uprising continued but already with tens of thousands of African Americans. When rebel leader Dutty Boukman died, Toussaint-Louverture became one of the leaders of the insurgent movement.

Only on February 4, 1794 did the French Convention abolish slavery. But this measure was not applied, by any means, in all the French possessions of the time.

In Martinique with large plantations on the island it was always a dead letter, because a group of monarchist French settlers under the direction of Paul-Louis Dubuc, had a pact with the British who occupied the island from 1794 to 1802.

In 1794, Great Britain sent a powerful expedition whose exact number of troops is uncertain but which may have been in the several tens of thousands that occupied Port-au-Prince and other coastal points. The British government, in favor of slavery and the plantation system, was called by the slave masters to ensure the continuity of their businesses, and the British commander Thomas Maitland and his fifteen thousand men had the support of the white chiefs and their armies. private.

Spain, for its part, attempted to curry favor with the slaves by promising to abolish slavery, and attacked the French colony from its part of the island. The main black leaders of the slave rebellion go on to fight for Spain with their troops. Louverture recruits a black army from the towns on the Spanish side.

In 1793 Toussaint-Louverture led the uprising against French colonialism, taking advantage of the conflict between France and its enemies: Great Britain and Spain (the French Revolution) to move to the Hispanic sector of the island, where with the acquiescence of the Spanish authorities, recruited and commanded an army with which he fought the French, implementing a scorched earth policy.

The island of Hispaniola was invaded by the British Navy and Spanish troops who had been joined by numerous white French royalists. The Republican French forces are defeated in coastal cities by British ships and in much of the interior by Spanish army troops.

After the French defeat at the hands of Toussaint-Louverture, this black leader became a supporter of France and reached an agreement with the French government, being proclaimed governor for life of the island by France.

The Spanish empire was subject to the vagaries of the metropolis, always lacking money and with uneven results. By an agreement between the Kingdom of Spain and the First French Republic of July 22, 1795, sealed in the Treaty of Basel, the eastern part of the island passed to France, which thus became absolute owner of the entire island. Great Britain, in turn, obtained Jamaica, thus dividing the Spanish Greater Antilles, with the victorious colonial states.

Toussaint-Louverture rejected the attempted British invasion of 1798 that attempted to end Republican French rule and maintain slavery. With the support of black chiefs such as Christophe and mulatto leaders such as André Rigaud and Pétion, Toussaint-Louverture expelled the British and Spanish in 1798 and 1799.

Cession of the remaining part of Hispaniola to France

On April 27, 1800, following orders from the French Commissioner Roume de St. Laurent, Toussaint implemented the Treaty of Basel in which Spain ceded the eastern part of the island of Santo Domingo to France in 1795.

On January 26, 1801, Toussaint-Loverture arrived with his troops in the city of Santo Domingo. With the consent of France, on January 27, 1801, the Haitian-born general of the French army, Toussaint-Louverture, took command of the entire island, as governor for life.

One of his first measures was to formally abolish slavery in the name of the French Republic, although he also closed the university. He applied a production system that, although it led to economic reactivation, caused discontent that gave rise to various insurrections that were brutally repressed and produced significant emigrations.

The Creoles of Spanish and French origin, upon the arrival of Louverture's troops, feeling that France had abandoned them in the hands of its former slaves, carried out a collective exodus. The Spanish Creoles went to the mainland, Cuba and Puerto Rico, which contributed to the prosperity of those colonies. The French Creoles did the same, settling in the French islands, Cuba and Puerto Rico. Napoleon was disappointed with the situation, he wanted to reestablish the rule of the French colonists with their slave plantations, to recover the sugar industry that had fallen into bankruptcy after the proclamation of the abolition of slavery by Toussaint-Louverture.

The then first consul of France, Napoleon, eager to restore slavery in the French empire with the Law of May 20, 1802, and return to the society before 1789, withdraws French citizenship from almost all "free citizens of color" and restricts it to whites (Order of July 17, 1802). Furthermore, in the specific case of Sant Domingue, the powers granted to Toussaint gave rise to a policy of autonomy, with the constitution of July 12, 1801, which was not desired. Shortly after, Napoleon sent an army that for a few months subdued the entire island and ruled it.

In January 1802, a naval expedition arrived in Samaná made up of three French reconquering squadrons with 16,000 men under the command of General Leclerc, brother-in-law of Emperor Napoleon, with Viscount Rochambeau as lieutenant and several companies, some made up of colored troops., mestizos and mulattoes under the command of French mulatto officers.

French General Leclerc's mission was easy in the eastern part of the island (Spanish-speaking, the current Dominican Republic), the white inhabitants rushed to help dislodge Toussaint Louverture's forces.

Louverture defeated the French troops in several battles but not definitively, the Haitian generals Dessalines (black leader) and Rigaud (mulatto leader) had allied themselves with the French of General Leclerc and defeated Toussaint in turn. Faced with the situation of stagnation, Leclerc negotiated with Toussaint, offering him a splendid retirement. He later held a reception for Toussaint at which he took him prisoner on June 7, 1802 and sent him to France along with his family. In France he was imprisoned in the Fort de Joux, dying on April 7 of the following year, due to not receiving medical assistance after having fallen ill.

In 1802, General Antoine Richepanse reestablished slavery on the French Antillean island of Guadeloupe by order of Napoleon Bonaparte and repressed the uprising of Louis Delgrès.

After the capture of Louverture, slavery was also reestablished in Hispaniola and many of the white plantation-owning settlers returned. A period of great economic prosperity was renewed in the colony, establishing a relationship of understanding between the Spanish Creoles, the white French settlers and the mulattoes, where the governor of the island, the French general Jean-Louis Ferrand, took care not to damage the pride of the white Hispanic settlers, abiding by the Napoleonic decree of 1803. In it he ordered respect for the Spanish customs of the Creoles, including the institution of slavery that was the source of their wealth and their legal organizations. In this period, the new white French immigrants alone numbered around twenty or twenty-two thousand and they bought land in Cuba to establish new plantations. This harmony was broken when Ferrand prohibited commercial dealings with Haitians, especially cattle and timber.

After Leclerc's initial success and Toussaint's capture and deportation, opposition from black Haitians and their indigenous troops led by Toussaint's officers led to two more years of war.

On the night of October 13, 1803, the mulatto soldier Alexandre Pétion, son of a rich landowner and a black woman, arrived from Guadeloupe in command of 550 men and managed to take over the fort of Haut du Cap, disarming to his soldiers and saving fourteen gunboats from being beheaded by his men, then forming the "Army of the Independents". The generals Clervaux, Nicolas Geffrard and Henri Christophe would soon join Pétion who handed over command of the insurrection to Christophe. Jean Jacques Dessalines would be the last to join the insurgents and during the congress of L'Arcahaye from May 15 to 18, 1803, Dessalines obtained command. From that moment on, the gangs that roamed the fields had leaders, contributing to mulattos and blacks rising up again against the French. The population of the colony was estimated at 550,000 people of which about 42,000 were white.

One of the reasons why black officers deserted was that after the First French Republic abolished slavery in 1794, slavery had been approved again, but also the policy of blood, inaugurated by the French general Leclerc, made the black Haitian officers distrustful, and made them think that their lives could be in danger alongside the white French of the metropolis. The war intensified as General Leclerc, like many of the white troops, fell ill with yellow fever and died, and Rochambeau took command, who was even more ruthless than his predecessor.

Rochambeau, believing that with fear he could get the rebels to surrender, buried 500 prisoners alive, which was the reason for Dessalines to sacrifice 500 white prisoners by hanging them.

Rigaud, Pétion and other mulatto soldiers who returned in 1802 with the expedition of General Charles Leclerc, as officers of the French army, ended up deserting the French army and joining the rebels.

In the end Jean-Jacques Dessalines led the new free state of Saint-Domingue to victory and independence, declaring the nation's new name Haiti.

Toussaint Louverture

The slave system generated problems that ended, in 1791, with the black revolt, led by the Haitian general Toussaint-Louverture.

Toussaint Louverture, a black leader who since 1791 had fought against France aided by Spain, on May 5, 1794, influenced by the commissioners and the governor-general Étienne Laveaux, leaned towards the French side. Thanks to the French Revolution, the insurgents gained satisfaction. A decree of the Convention abolished slavery in 1794. Toussaint-Louverture then allied himself with the French government.

The army he commanded, which included black, mulatto and even some white soldiers, attacked his former allies and took a dozen cities from them. Within a year, and thanks to his skillful handling of the situation, he repelled the Spanish to the eastern border of the island and managed to defeat his former chiefs, who had remained loyal to Spain. In March 1796, he saved Laveaux, in danger after a mulatto rebellion in Cap-Français, the brutal punishments he ordered caused him more serious problems controlling the population.

However, the fight against the British was more complicated. Toussaint could not drive them out of the North or the West. In the South, the mulatto general André Rigaud managed to contain them, but he was not able to repel them.

The return of Sonthonax as civil commissioner in May 1796 cast shadows on Toussaint Louverture's ambitions to become sole leader. He managed to have Lavaux and Sonthonax elected deputies to the Directory in September 1796 so that they would return to the metropolis: the first in October, the second in August 1797. But to reassure France, Toussaint sent his two sons to study in Paris.

Thanks to the weapons arrived with the commission of 1796, Louverture had an army of 51,000 soldiers, including 3,000 whites. He resumed the fight against the British and had several victories, although none of them were decisive. Tired of this resistance, after heavy casualties due to both fighting and disease, faced with the threat of a counterattack by Toussaint in Jamaica and with little to gain in that war, the British government decided to negotiate. Louverture managed to remove from the negotiations the last civil commissioner Julien Raimond and the last general-in-chief Hédouville, who arrived in March 1798. To get rid of Hédouville, Louverture alerted the blacks of the North, who on October 16, 1798 rebelled against the general, who had ordered the disarmament of the blacks, which forced Hédouville to hastily reembark towards France along with numerous whites. On August 31, 1798, British troops left the island of Hispaniola.

Once free from French controls, Toussaint turned against the head of the mulattoes, Rigaud. Louverture, supported by generals Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe, took advantage of an incident and provoked Rigaud, with which Rigaud began hostilities in June 1799, beginning the War of the Knives. Since November the mulatto faction had been cornered in the strategically important port of Jacmel, on the southern coast. Alexandre Sábes, called Pétion, heads the defense, and Jean Jacques Dessalines leads the assault. The fall of Jacmel in March 1800 puts an end to the revolt and Rigaud and Pétion, along with other black leaders, go into exile in France. Toussaint defeated his enemy's troops after a bloody war.

In January 1801 he occupied the Spanish part of the island that in 1795 had been ceded to France by the Treaty of Basel and annexed it, freeing the slaves. On May 9, 1801, he made public his intention to establish a black republic in Haiti, proposing a Draft Constitution by which the colony, proclaimed an integral part of France, would have a government that would enjoy enormous autonomy. In the project he also proposes himself for the position of governor for life. Eager to restore the country's economy, Louverture had published on October 12, 1800 a crop regulation that forced blacks to forced labor on the plantations, for which there was considerable discontent. At the end of October, black groups in the North rebelled and even cut the throats of some whites. In a few days, Toussaint dispersed the rebels and ordered the shooting of 13 leaders, among whom was his own nephew, General Moise. To gain the support of the white planters, he called back the escapees and decreed that Catholicism became the official religion. With these events he displaced his internal adversaries and the French authorities, although he never proclaimed independence.

The Constitution is rejected by Napoleon who decides to send a strong military expedition to reconquer the island in addition to reestablishing slavery. Brigadier General Charles-Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc arrived in Haiti, initially achieving compliance with his command, under false promises of not reinstating slavery and respecting the military ranks of the French of colonial origin. Rigaud and Pétion, the mulatto leaders expelled by Louverture, returned on this expedition.

But Louverture, with part of his troops, retreated to safer positions. He had signed a friendship pact with the United Kingdom and was also waiting to see the decisions of General Leclerc, who gave him guarantees, splendid honors and proposed negotiations. On May 2, 1802, Toussaint at the same time offered his capitulation in exchange for being free from him and for his troops to be integrated into the French Army.

The false promises of the French metropolitan government were soon unmasked with the capture by deception of Louverture on June 7, who had retired to an estate, and when news arrived of the reinstatement of slavery in other colonies such as the island of Guadeloupe.. This attempt to deprive the Haitians of their leader resulted in a great failure because the Haitian military, experienced in fighting against the British and Spanish, sensed that they would follow the same fate and rebelled.

The arrest of Toussaint and his sending to France (Fort de Joug) where he died imprisoned under harsh conditions, followed by an order for the general disarmament of the population, exalted indignation, and Charles Belair proclaimed himself general-in-chief of the blacks rebels General Dessalines, now on the French side, obtained authorization from Leclerc to fight him, and captured him in an ambush. Tried before a court martial, Belair was shot.

End of the French colony of Hispaniola

The struggle for independence in Haiti took place in several stages. In the first, the great landlords, the slaves, the merchants and the poor whites joined the revolutionary movement that had exploded in the metropolis, the French revolution, and formed a local assembly, which claimed the end of the colonial covenant. In a second stage, the free mulattoes began to support the French revolution in Paris, believing that with that they would obtain from the whites residing in the colony full equal rights for free men, regardless of colour. In 1790 the white planters repressed the claims of the liberties (black, mulatto and mestizos). And these had no alternative but to ally to the uprisings.

Dessalines definitively defeated the French troops in the battle of Vertieres, on November 18. Declaring on January 1, 1804 the independence of the Republic of Haiti.

In the French-speaking western part of the island, present-day Haiti, French troops despite reinforcements had not been successful. General Leclerc was killed in the fight, and his generals, officers, troops and sailors, except for some who managed to flee to Cuba on December 4 from Môle-Saint-Nicolas, perished.

Dessalines placed in the command of the French troops of southern Saint-Domingue, after Toussaint was arrested and sent to France, with the arrival of news of the re-establishment of slavery in other French colonies, organizes in October 1802 a riot against the French forces to which he defeats in the battle of Vertieres in 1803 and drives them out of the island.

In his government he tried to restore the plantation economy through a system of forced labour. He is betrayed and killed in 1806 by his collaborators, Alexandre Pétion and Henri Christophe, who divide the country. This coup was promoted by well-off sectors, which had previously supported it, because it had enacted an agrarian reform law with revolutionary characteristics.

In this way the island of Santo Domingo with the name of Haiti became the second American nation to become independent, after the United States, and considered the first black republic in the world and one of the few slave rebellions, ended successfully.

This catastrophe for France led to the death of more than 25,000 men of the French army. It was due to both illnesses and defeats in the battles against the Haitian rebels.

Following in the footsteps of Napoleon, Dessalines proclaimed himself emperor of Haiti, under the name of Jacques I, being crowned by Archbishop Cornejo Breille, on September 20, 1804, nominally covering the entire island.

In 1805, Dessalines, after crowning himself emperor, invaded the eastern part under French sovereignty with an army of 25,000 men.

Dessalines ordered General Henri Christophe to send a commission to the inhabitants of the east to allow his army of 25,000 men to pass towards the city of Santo Domingo. Dessalines himself would lead another in the south.

In the towns there were armed forces as an auxiliary body of public order in rural areas, destined to protect the domains of the large landowners. Around two hundred residents of Santiago, led by Reinoso del Orbe, decided to fight against Christophe's troops, but the city fell into their hands, was burned and the prisoners' throats were slit. The French governor Jean-Louis Ferrand prepared to defend his place in the city of Santo Domingo. On March 8, 1805, Dessalines laid siege to this city. The siege lasted three weeks, during which a French naval squadron sailing through the Caribbean arrived in the city. Seeing that two frigates continued westward, Dessalines believed that they were heading to Cap-Français and lifted the siege to go defend the west against a possible landing. During his retreat through the Cibao, the Haitian army looted and burned the towns of Santiago de los Caballeros and Moca, Monte Plata, Cotuí and Concepción de La Vega, killing and stabbing most of their neighbors.

When Dessalines was proclaimed emperor, he was betrayed and assassinated on October 17, 1806 by his political rival Henri Christophe, thus leaving the forces of the Haitian army and the country divided in two, with the Haitian armies of Alexandre Pétion (Anne Alexandre Sabès) and Christophe located in their respective fiefdoms and the capture of the city of Santo Domingo, on hold.

Pétion was confined to the south of the country and became the president of a democratic republic, succeeded by Jean-Pierre Boyer.

The division of the country was due to the social fracture that existed among Haitians. From the beginning, the Haitian side had been made up of gangs led by mulattoes and gangs led by blacks. Both groups made decisions separately, frequently having a black leader such as Louverture or Dessalines as supreme command as this was the largest rebel social group on the island and they distrusted the mulattoes, a group more closely linked to the white masters and in many cases themselves slave owners or influential French-educated members of the French military. Thus André Rigaud, a mulatto, was the leader of the free colored people of the south, who joined François Dominique Toussaint-Louverture, the general leader of the slaves of the North, during the War of the Knives that began in June 1799. In November 1979 the mulatto faction, with Pétion leading the defense, was defeated by the black leader Jean Jacques Dessalines who led the assault. In March 1800, the revolt ended and Pétion, along with other black leaders, went into exile in France. Some time later, considering that the island has already been taken, Christophe, one of the black leaders, declares himself king and, by assassinating Dessalines, takes possession of a part of the country: the north, the main place of support for insurgencies in the entire history of uprisings. blacks from Santo Domingo.

A part of the Haitian leaders are grouped around the figure of Pétion. Christophe will be fought by Pétion without success, for having the same imperialist pretensions that he had reproached his predecessor Dessalines. Christophe in the north of the country, initially governed the State of Haiti and then becoming king, the Kingdom of Haiti, Christophe ruled dictatorially, harshly subduing his people, to build the citadel of Laférrière and the Palace of Sanssouci. Christophe's kingdom of Haiti would be unified into the southern Republic of Haiti, after a war that lasted about ten years and was won by Jean-Pierre Boyer, Pétion's successor, who managed to reunify the two parts of the island again in 1822.

Initially the island was divided between France and the Empire of Haiti, the French army had occupied the island without managing to reduce the Haitian rebels, and finally the French colonial forces had been defeated on land, being confined behind the walls of the capital Santo Domingo, but the situation became even more complex when at the beginning of 1808, the Napoleonic Empire invaded the Kingdom of Spain to occupy Portugal, an ally of the United Kingdom, and went to war with Spain. Alliances between European countries changed and this resulted in changes in the colonies of European countries as well.

The Haitian forces, although in practice they were owners of the island, were divided into two factions, the many years of war had devastated the island and the armies were very equal and worn out to impose themselves, retired in their places of origin, a situation that would last for 10 years until Christophe's suicide. Meanwhile, the French governor remained in the capital Santo Domingo without reinforcements from the metropolis, due to the British blockade of the seas during the Napoleonic Wars and the problems of the French emperor on European soil, but with the support of the Creoles who owned plantations. initially loyal to the French government, out of fear of the Haitian rebels. The balance of forces could change when the wars in Europe ended and France could perhaps take control of the island again. Furthermore, the reality of national sovereignty had been established. Various colonies were now contemplating the possibility of becoming sovereign states.

Seeing the situation of weakness of the French command in 1808 due to the Napoleonic invasion of Spain and fearing the consequences of a Haitian government for their interests and even for their lives, the Creoles of the island, initially loyal to the colonial government French, led by the soldier Juan Sánchez Ramírez, rebelled against French rule (which had been reduced to the capital Santo Domingo and its surroundings) with the help of Spain, Great Britain (Spain's ally in the European war) and Haiti. The supporters of Spain organized quickly, some returned from their exile, the vast majority being landowners from the Spanish colony of Puerto Rico or landowners from the island, members of the forces that supported the French governor. The troops gathered by Juan Sánchez Ramírez consisted of only about 1,700 men so Sánchez Ramírez, appointed Spanish governor of the island, negotiated with the British and with the Spanish Captain General of Puerto Rico to send more men to take the island. city of Santo Domingo. The few French troops left to meet with the island forces opposed to the Haitian rebels, considering them allies. Before retreating towards the city of Santo Domingo, the French troops consisting of 600 men were surprised and practically annihilated in the battle of Palo Hincado on November 7, 1808.

The final capitulation of the besieged city of Santo Domingo was on July 9, 1809, with the help of the British Royal Navy. In the capital Santo Domingo, upon receiving news of the landing, the people rose up and forced the French to capitulate. Shortly afterwards, after the surrender of the French administrators, the French governor Ferrand shoots himself to death, putting an end to the French colony of Saint-Domingue. British troops occupied the city of Santo Domingo until August, and the eastern part nominally once again became a colony of Spain with little or no metropolitan intervention in the affairs of the colony. which lasted until 1821. Haiti had remained outside the conflict, benefiting the most from the prevailing situation since this prevented both the Spanish and French from trying to take control of the island. This type of action by the owners of plantations of Spanish and French origin, to protect their investments, occurred several times in the Dominican Republic in the following decades, eventually uniting the island to Spain again for 4 years from March 18, 1861 to July 15, 1865. Union that ended with the victory of the independentists in the Restoration War.

The leader of the revolt, Juan Sánchez Ramírez, became the new Spanish governor of the Captaincy General of Santo Domingo in 1809, beginning an era known in Dominican historiography, as Spain Boba, in which in practice They were independent of the metropolis.

Social consequences of the French colonial period

After the Napoleonic Wars, between 1817 and 1819 Sebastián de Kindelán y O'Regan took charge of the general captaincy of the island of Santo Domingo. Many Latin American countries had become independent or were involved in wars between royalists and independentists, South American privateers in the service of Simón Bolívar sailed the waters of the Caribbean harassing Spanish ships. The crown had ordered the military mobilization of Santo Domingo's forces to guard the southern and eastern coasts of the colony, but could not pay for troops due to the bankruptcy produced by the war. Rumors circulated in the capital about a coup planned by influential residents of the colony to proclaim independence, stimulated by a subversive letter written in Caracas and addressed to the natives of the colony in which they urged them to rise up against Spain.

The new authorities of the Spanish part of Santo Domingo, made up of Creole plantation owners and royalist and French refugees, refused to free the slaves and avoided applying the new liberal Spanish Constitution of 1812 that recognized some rights to citizens who They were not white: it conferred nationality without citizenship to the children of freedmen and the possibility for slaves to buy their freedom. There was a plot to eradicate slavery that ended with the reunification of the island, carried out by the population of African origin from the Spanish-speaking eastern part of Haiti.

Núñez de Cáceres was involved in problems with Lieutenant José Álvarez de Toledo and Dubois, a sympathizer of the emancipation of Latin American countries, who had been appointed by the Creoles of Santo Domingo as a substitute deputy for the Junta to the Cortes of Cádiz. Álvarez de Toledo's revolutionary ideas were denounced by Núñez de Cáceres, president of the Cortes, who relied on two confidential letters that Álvarez de Toledo had sent to Juan Sánchez Ramírez. The Cortes decided to prosecute Álvarez de Toledo, but he could not be found. It is known that in 1812 a manifesto printed in Philadelphia censured the conduct of the Cortes. Later Núñez de Cáceres thought about the tyranny he had and in turn urged the American provinces to become independent and unite Santo Domingo with Greater Colombia.

In Santo Domingo, social and racial tensions had worsened as a consequence of what was expressed in article 4 of the second title of the liberal Constitution promulgated in Cádiz, which equated Creoles with equal rights with the natives of Spain. whites, but excluding the descendants of slaves even if they were freedmen. This exclusion produced deep unrest among free blacks and mulattoes, who tried to revolt on the night of August 16 to 17 with the purpose of incorporating the colony into the Republic of Haiti. This period culminated on December 1, 1821, with the short-lived Independence of José Núñez de Cáceres, and with the subsequent Haitian occupation of Santo Domingo, on February 9, 1822.

When the authorities refused to free the slaves and avoided applying several provisions of the new liberal Spanish constitution of 1812 that conferred nationality, but not citizenship, on the children of freedmen and the possibility for slaves to buy their freedom, there was a conspiracy of freedmen and slaves to eradicate slavery and join the Republic of Haiti. Discovered, their leaders were sentenced to death and their heads were displayed at various points around the capital. The other culprits were sentenced to prison and lashings. Pedro Seda, José Leocadio, Pedro Henríquez, and someone only known as Marcos were the ringleaders of this revolt.

Núñez de Cáceres advocated confederating the country to Gran Colombia, for which he had attempted to carry out a coup d'état in the spring of 1821, which failed due to the measures adopted by Sebastián de Kindelán and the fact that the conspirators did not receive in time a response from Bolívar. The surprising thing is that the Spanish governor Kindelán, despite the measures taken, and the denunciation of the plot, was content with describing the intrigue as despicable, allowing Núñez de Cáceres to prosecute Captain Manuel Martínez for the crime of slander. Less naive than Governor Kindelán, the new Spanish governor Pascual Real, who arrived in the colony in May 1821, not only gave credence to the confidants who confirmed the veracity of the conspiracy led by Núñez de Cáceres, but very soon knew the name of the conspirators. As the Spanish governor Pascual Real lacked troops, he dedicated himself to observing the behavior of the suspects and gaining the trust of the main military leaders. The Haitianophile group, aware of the plans of Núñez de Cáceres and his people, asked the president of Haiti Jean-Pierre Boyer to move to the Spanish colony with the Haitian army to add the Spanish colony to Haiti. On November 8, 1821, Commander Andrés Amarante proclaimed the annexation of the Spanish part of Hispaniola to the Republic of Haiti, in the depopulated area of Beler, and seven days later the towns of Dajabón and Montecristi spoke in the same direction. When the news was heard in the capital Santo Domingo, Núñez de Cáceres and his group decided to act quickly, and on December 30, troops from the Morenos battalion commanded by them stormed the Ozama Fortress in the city of Santo Domingo, locking in its enclosure to the Spanish governor. In the early hours of the next day, a salute of cannon fire announced the constitution of the Independent State of Spanish Haiti. Immediately afterwards, the Declaration of Independence of the Dominican people, written by Núñez de Cáceres, was read, in which the evils derived from Spanish rule were summarized. Also on the same day, the Constitutive Act of independence was announced, which generally outlined the functions of the new government and stated the determination to celebrate an agreement with Gran Colombia to establish a confederated State with it, without renouncing sovereignty. from the country. To do this, Núñez de Cáceres sent one of the most prominent members of his party, Antonio María Pineda, to Venezuela to inform Bolívar, but the Liberator was absent from Caracas and neither the vice president Francisco de Paula Santander nor the commander general of the city, General José Antonio Páez, paid attention to him. Almost at the same time as the proclamation of the Independent State of Spanish Haiti, a commission of three Haitian army officers sent by President Jean-Pierre Boyer arrived in the city of Santo Domingo to communicate to Pascual Real the pronouncements of Dajabón and Montecristi and observe the situation. Aware of the political change, Colonel Fremont, head of the Haitian commission, informed Núñez de Cáceres, appointed president of Spanish Haiti, that the president of French Haiti, Jean-Pierre Boyer, would support the new independent Government of Spain. However, President Jean-Pierre Boyer convened the Senate of French Haiti to inform it of the decision to move the government to the East, to the city of Santo Domingo, in order to make effective the unity and indivisibility of the island.

On January 11, 1822, Boyer wrote a letter to Núñez de Cáceres in which he announced his intention to visit the eastern part accompanied by the Haitian army, but not as an invader, but as a peacekeeper, while at the same time He warned him that there would be no obstacles capable of preventing him. When Núñez de Cáceres read that message, he understood that resistance was useless. As the majority of the population was black and mulatto, he preferred to join Haiti, where slavery did not exist and he had no choice but to answer that the military leaders and the City Council had agreed to place themselves under the protection of Haitian laws. On February 9, the president of Haiti, Jean Pierre Boyer entered the city of Santo Domingo leading 21,000 men. The brief 22 years of Haitian domination of the entire island began.

Society in the French colonial period

The crops of sugar, tobacco, cocoa, cotton, coffee and indigo were based on the use of the plantation system with a large number of slaves, who lived and worked in difficult conditions and died quickly, forcing massive imports of new slaves and gave rise to a highly organized society, based on exploitation and prejudices to promote moral acceptance of that exploitation, which is organized into different groups based on racial purity and economic power.

Grands blancs (Great whites)

Small and heterogeneous social group, were the summit of the social pyramid of the colony, also known as the colonial slave bourgeoisie. This group was made up of the officials of the French government and the owners of the big plantations. In fact the Grands blancs, owners of the plantations had ties of kinship with the senior officials, appointing them from among themselves or assimilating them by marriage. They were both Creole and Spanish, French, British, Dutch, American, Portuguese and other nationalities who often resided outside the island in the European or American metropolises, having employees to carry their business. Despite its small number, all political and economic power was in their hands. Both the French and Spanish governments and the Haitian leaders were subordinate to the Grands blancs. On numerous occasions they resorted to the murder of the rebel leaders and raised armies against those contrary to their interests, whether they were colonial governments as rebels. The civil uprisings against the advance of the armies of Toussaints first and Dessalines later, at the first time, were organized by the Grands blancs. By losing support on the island due to the taking of political power by mulattos and blacks, they increasingly saw the need to act from outside the island. The most active groups abroad resided in Cuba and Puerto Rico, where they organized several expeditions.

Petits blancs (white children)

This group consisted of whites who did not own land and who worked in commercial and artisanal tasks. It was a very conflicting group because they had strong recitals of the mulattos to those who considered inferior but who often possessed very superior fortunes, the attempt to strengthen their supremacy was transmuted into the violence that in connivance with the authorities and the "Grands blancs", exercised over the groups that they considered inferior or on the groups that they considered dangerous because they were contrary to their commercial interests. In the beginning, society consisted of 30,000 whites and 24 000 mulattoes and black libertos. Half of the whites were poor workers and fishermen, among others, who had to endure the consequences of the system without benefiting from privileges. Their frustration, resolved in abuses to confirm their supremacy, led to new problems with the majority of African descent. The white man instituted relations of exploitation, exclusion and subjugation of the African rural mass, promoted the idea of shaking Black people for hundreds before a single white man. The cruelty was institutionalized and thus the word of a person of the couleur gene or the crimes against the couleur gene did not harm the white. It was a common practice to shoot a black man without explaining, so that he was not a slave to a white man and to burn the black population alive, both men and women. In the case of women, slavery has been linked, as a matter of priority or added, with its sexual exploitation as concubine slaves. The poor whites, like the rich, had numerous black women at their disposal whose children recognized or not, served them to prosper. The wealth generated passed to the white descendants of the only legal wife, who was white in most cases. Violating, kidnapping, beating, maiming or killing concubines was not a crime.

The civilian community, formed by non-white people mostly, was alien to the state legal institutions (in the hands of the whites), and was more valid for the population than the state structures. One example: in the Caribbean nation justice was often exercised by local communities, not to resort to white justice. The looters received punishment, even with the practice of lynching, without recourse to police protection or judicial convictions. During the French colonial period, the importation of slave labour of African origin led the white population to become numerically minority. After the rebellions the accumulated rage stopped in the poor whites who were killed or had to flee.

People of couleur

A very heterogeneous group, of which the slaves were excluded, formed by liberties and descendants of black and Indian (mulates, mestizos, etc.). They usually intended to emulate French life and customs. Their members accurately accounted for the percentage of black blood in their blood so that those who had less percentages were at a higher social level. This classification was so precise that it had 32 different levels with different names for each color level.

Slaves

The number of slaves exceeded that of whites in a proportion of more than 20 to 1, about 80 percent worked in plantations. Its origin was very varied since they belonged to many different ethnic groups with very different customs and languages. This would contribute, together with continuous traffic, early deaths, diseases and leaks, to the emergence of a language from the mixing of different African languages with French. Today the language of the Haitian people is créole, result of this smother.

Black Marrows

The term “Copron”, which originates in the Spanish Santo Domingo, means “savage”, and applies to the slaves fleeing from their owners and who often took refuge in the mountains, either in solitary form or forming small communities. Even though their number remained limited by the persecution and hunting that they were subject to, their importance has been fundamental since these fugitives rounded the plantations to provide food and encouraging the slaves to rebel. Between 1751 and 1758, Mackandal, a slave born in Africa, having lost an arm in the labors of a sugar mill, flees to the mountains from where the plantations frequently attack, killing whites, many times according to legends, with the help of poisons, and encouraging the black to rise. He was finally captured and executed, but his memory, and especially his tactics, exerted great influence on the later facts.