LITMIR.BIZ

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an era of prosperity which soon made it the richest country of the West Indies. Great plantations of tobacco, indigo, cacao, coffee and sugar were established. The country came to be known as the paradise of the West Indies and the wealth of the planters became proverbial. The grave defect was that this prosperity was built on the false foundation of slavery. In 1754 the population numbered 14,000 whites, 4000 free mulattoes and 172,000 negroes.

      The Spanish colony on the other hand sank lower than ever. Practically abandoned by the mother country, there was no commerce beyond a little contraband and only the most indispensable agriculture, the inhabitants devoting themselves almost entirely to cattle raising. The ports were the haunts of pirates, and a number of Dominicans also became corsairs. By the year 1730 the entire country held but 6000 inhabitants, of whom about 500 lived in the ruined capital and the remaining urban population was disseminated among the vestiges of Cotui, Santiago, Azua, Banica, Monte Plata, Bayaguana, La Vega, Higuey and Seibo. Such was the poverty prevailing that a majority of the people went in rags; and the arrival of the ship from Mexico, which brought the salaries of the civil officials and the military, was hailed with the joyful ringing of church bells.

      To how great an extent this depression was due to trade restrictions is evident from the circumstance that when in 1740 several ports were opened to foreign commerce there was an immediate change for the better. Agriculture expanded, exports and imports increased, money circulated, the cost of the necessaries of life fell, the population rapidly increased and many new towns sprang up. According to an ecclesiastical census the population had in 1785 advanced to 152,640 inhabitants. Of these only 30,000 were slaves, owing to the Spanish laws which made it easy for a slave to purchase his freedom. Many of the freemen were negroes or mulattoes.

      In 1751 the colony was visited by a severe hurricane, which caused the Ozama to leave its banks, and by a destructive earthquake which overthrew the cities of Azua and Seibo and did much damage to the church buildings of Santo Domingo. Azua and Seibo were reestablished on their present sites. Another earthquake in 1770 destroyed several towns in the French part of the island.

      From the beginning of the century the boundary between the French and Spanish colonies of Santo Domingo had been a source of constant friction and bickerings. A preliminary agreement had been made in 1730, but in 1776 a permanent treaty was drafted, it was ratified at Aranjuez in 1777, and the boundary was marked with stone monuments.

      When the French revolution broke out in 1789 both the Spanish and French colonies of Santo Domingo were enjoying a high degree of prosperity. In the French colony there were about 30,000 whites, and the haughty white planters were wont to indulge in every form of luxury and sybaritic pleasure; the negro slaves, whose number had grown to almost half a million, were subjected to the most barbarous ill-treatment; and a class of about 30,000 ambitious free mulattoes had arisen, many of whom where cultured and wealthy, but who were all rigidly excluded from participation in public affairs. It was evident that but a spark was needed to produce what might turn out to be a general conflagration.

      The spark came in the formation of the National Assembly in France and its declaration of the rights of man. The mulattoes at once petitioned the National Assembly for civil and political rights, which were in 1790 equivocally denied and in 1791 finally granted them. The whites resisted the government decrees and uprisings began. The first of these was a revolt of the mulattoes under Ogé, which was quickly suppressed. Ogé fled to Spanish Santo Domingo, but was surrendered by the Spaniards on condition that his life be spared, a promise that was not kept for he was publicly broken on the wheel. Jean François, another mulatto, then raised an insurrection of the negroes in the north, marching on Cape Français, burning and murdering, with the body of a white infant carried on a spear-head at the head of his troops. His forces were defeated by the whites, who commenced an indiscriminate slaughter of their victims. The negroes thereupon rose in every direction and the paradise of the West Indies became a hell. The great plantation houses were burned, the wide estates desolated, white women were ravished and murdered and white men put to death with horrible tortures, while the liberated slaves indulged in orgies at which the beverage was rum mixed with human blood. It was a fearful day of reckoning.

      In 1793, France went to war with England and Spain. The Spanish authorities of Santo Domingo made overtures to negro leaders of whom a number entered the Spanish army as officers of high rank, among them Toussaint, an intelligent ex-slave who later assumed the surname of l'Ouverture and who showed remarkable military and administrative qualities. The French government sent commissioners to the colony, whose tactless handling of a difficult situation fanned the flames of civil war. The English attacked the colony, captured Port-au-Prince, and enlisted the aid of the revolted slaves in overrunning the surrounding country. When they besieged Port-de-Paix the French commander sent secret emissaries to Spanish Santo Domingo and induced Toussaint to desert from the Spanish ranks and with his negro followers help to drive out the English. Killing the Spanish soldiers he found in his way, Toussaint went to fight the English, with such success that in 1797 he was made general-in-chief of all the French troops. The English, decimated by disease, were obliged to leave in 1798 and sign a treaty of peace with Toussaint by which the island was recognized as an independent and neutral state during their war with France. The operations in Santo Domingo are said to have cost the English $100,000,000 in money and 45,000 lives.

      In the meanwhile border fights were going on in Spanish Santo Domingo between Toussaint's troops and forces collected from the various Spanish possessions on the Caribbean Sea. They continued until 1795, when by the treaty of Basle peace was declared between France and Spain and the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo was—to the dismay of its inhabitants—ceded to France, the whole island thus passing under French control. Toward the end of that year part of the Spanish troops and members of religious orders embarked and an emigration of the better families began, many taking their slaves with them. The Spaniards also exhumed what they supposed to be the remains of Columbus in the cathedral of Santo Domingo and carried them to Havana. One of the terms of the treaty was that the colony should formally be delivered when French troops were sent to occupy it, but as the French were at this time kept busy in the western portion, the Spanish governor and authorities continued to administer the country for several years. Little by little troops and civil officials were withdrawn and in 1799 the royal audiencia or high court was transferred to Puerto Principe, in Cuba, most of the lawyers of the colony leaving at the same time with their families.

      Toussaint l'Ouverture was now in supreme command in the west, though nominally holding under the French republic. He displayed considerable ability in promoting peace, ordered the blacks to return to work and gave protection to the whites. It was evident, however, that he aimed to make himself absolute master of the whole island. Pursuant to this plan he called on the Spanish governor, General Joaquin Garcia, to surrender the Spanish colony in accordance with the stipulations of the treaty of Basle, Governor Garcia prepared to resist, but Toussaint invaded the colony with an army, was successful in a skirmish on the Nizao River and appearing before the capital protested that he came as a French general in the name of the French republic. Garcia had no alternative but to comply with the negro chief's demands. On the 27th of January, 1801, Toussaint l'Ouverture entered the capital with his troops and formally took possession. Amid the booming of cannon the Spanish ensign was lowered and the French tricolor raised; and Toussaint invited the authorities to the cathedral where a Te Deum was chanted. Governor Garcia immediately embarked for Cuba with the remaining Spanish civil and military authorities.

CHAPTER III

       Table of Contents

      HISTORICAL SKETCH.—CHANGES OF GOVERNMENT.-18O1 TO 1844

      Rule of Toussaint l'Ouverture.—Exodus of whites.—Capture of Santo

       Domingo by French.—War with negroes.—Government of Ferrand.

      —Incursion of Dessalines.—Insurrection of Sanchez Ramirez.

      —Reestablishment of Spanish rule.—Proclamation of Colombian

       State of Spanish Haiti.—Conquest by Haiti.—Haitian rule.—Duarte's

      

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