Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

Dominican Republic: Historical Setting
some 30,000 whites and 27,000 freedmen extracted labor from
some 400,000 black slaves.
The Struggle for Formal Sovereignty
The nineteenth-century struggle for independence of what
was to become the Dominican Republic was an incredibly difficult
process, conditioned by the evolution of its neighbor.
Although they shared the island of Hispaniola, the colonies of
Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo followed disparate paths,
primarily as a result of economic factors. Saint-Domingue was
the most productive agricultural colony in the Western Hemisphere,
and its output contributed heavily to the economy of
France (see French Colony of Saint-Domingue, 1697-1803,
ch.6.) Prosperous French plantation owners imported great
numbers of slaves from Africa and drove this captive work force
ruthlessly. By contrast, Santo Domingo was a small, unimportant,
and largely ignored colony with little impact on the economy
of Spain.
Although by the end of the eighteenth century economic
conditions were improving somewhat, landowners in Santo
Domingo did not enjoy the same level of wealth attained by
their French counterparts in Saint-Domingue. The absence of
market-driven pressure to increase production enabled the
domestic labor force to meet the needs of subsistence agriculture
and to export at low levels. Thus, Santo Domingo
imported far fewer slaves than did Saint-Domingue. Spanish
law also allowed a slave to purchase his freedom and that of his
family for a relatively small sum. This fact contributed to the
higher proportion of freedmen in the Spanish colony than in
Haiti; by the turn of the century, freedmen actually constituted
the majority of the population. Again, in contrast to conditions
in the French colony, this population profile contributed to a
somewhat more egalitarian society, plagued much less by racial
schisms.
With a revolution against the monarchy well underway in
France, the inevitable explosion took place in Saint-Domingue
in August 1791 (see Fight for Independence, 1791-1803, ch.
6). The initial reaction of many Spanish colonists to news of
the slaughter of Frenchmen by armies of rebellious black slaves
was to flee Hispaniola entirely. Spain, however, saw in the
unrest an opportunity to seize all or part of the western third of
the island through an alliance of convenience with the British.
These intentions, however, did not survive encounters in the
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