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The first 10 years of the 19th century saw a complicated type of military and diplomatic chess game waged among France, Spain, and the newly empowered ex-slave army in Haiti. In 1801, L’Ouverture marched into Santo Domingo and took the city virtually unopposed. The Haitians were now in effective control of the entire Spanish colony; one of L’Ouverture’s first acts was to free the slaves there. In France, Napoleon Bonaparte dispatched his brother-in-law, General Leclerc, to quash the slave rebellion. The French drove the black army back to the west, and Spain ceded its territory in the east to the French in exchange for land that Napoleon had captured in Spain. L’Ouverture officially established the Republic of Haiti on the western third of Hispaniola in 1804, which remained independent. But France ruled the eastern part of the island until 1809, when a force of Dominicans drove them out and reincorporated with Spain. Meanwhile, slavery had been reinstituted in the colony, making the Haitians nervous about their own security.
In 1822, Haitian forces once again invaded the Spanish colony and regained control, abolishing slavery again and ruling over the entire island for the next 22 years. By the 1830s, a resistance movement among white property owners was brewing in the east, led by Juan Pablo Duarte, a young nationalist who had studied in Spain. In early 1844, Duarte and two other conspirators –Ramón Mella and Francisco del Rosario Sánchez, known as the Trinitarians – successfully led a revolt against the Haitians, resulting in the founding of the new Dominican Republic. Dominicans still celebrate February 27, 1844, as their Independence Day. And Duarte, Mella, and Sánchez have remained national heroes. The nation’s first constitution was signed in San Cristóbal in 1844.
Juan Pablo Duarte.
In a preview of the political instability that was to follow, the Trinitarians ruled only briefly before themselves being ousted. For the rest of the century and into the next, the country was ruled by a succession of caudillos, military strongmen who grabbed control from each other and ruled with iron fists. Corruption and repression reigned, as the caudillos rewarded their cohorts and families with the spoils of power and brutally suppressed their opponents. The country remained roiled in turmoil, with periodic coups, outbreaks of civil war, and economic crises alternating with all-too-short periods of relative peace and prosperity.
In 1861, as a means of consolidating his own power, one caudillo, General Pedro Santana (the same man who had earlier ousted the Trinitarians), invited the Spanish to annex the country. Spain sent in troops and issued new laws, spurring rebellion and civil war in 1863. Independence was restored in 1865 when Dominicans drove the Spanish out for good in the War of Restoration. (August 16, Restoration Day, is another national holiday.) Less than two decades later, another tyrant, General Ulises Heureux, overthrew a relatively liberal government to initiate his own reign of corruption from 1882 to 1899, when he was assassinated.
The 19th century also brought American influence to the Dominican Republic. First to arrive were two shiploads of freed American slaves, who settled in Santa Bárbara de Samaná during the 1820s. By mid-century, then-US Secretary of State William Seward was coveting the Samaná Peninsula for a naval base (Santana had offered to sell him the territory). Charges of corruption helped sink that deal, and later led to the 1870 US Senate defeat of President Grant’s scheme to annex the entire country.
Some aspects of the Dominican economy did improve in the latter decades of the 19th century. Sugar, timber, tobacco, coffee, and bananas all emerged as important export crops, and the north coast towns of Puerto Plata and Sosúa both became prosperous shipping ports.
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