“Calumny that would enslave us”: Spanish Caribbean Slavery and the Dominican Guerra de Restauración

Literature on colonialism, insurgency, and abolition in the Caribbean often overlooks the struggles of the Dominican Republic, whose nineteenth century presented a complicated trajectory of sovereignty and economic fortunes.  National history focuses on these vicissitudes, often laying blame on neighboring Haiti.  Despite these limited accounts, however, the republic embodied a much more complex and revolutionary historical presence in the period.   As the site of one of the earliest emancipated peasantries in the Caribbean, its occupants enjoyed a remarkable degree of social equity relative to their colonial neighbors.  When Spain, a slave power, reoccupied the territory in 1861, therefore, fears that the “Mother Country” would re-enslave her progeny comprised an immediate and powerful threat to Spanish control.  These suspicions were heightened by Spanish colonial officials’ own rhetoric about abolition at mid-century.  Their actions in the newly-recolonized Santo Domingo soon spurred all-out social war that would last for nearly two years, ending only with Spanish surrender.
In my paper, I will explore the sometimes delicate, often blundering language and policies of colonial officials in Santo Domingo as they tried to reconcile a renewed colonial project without slavery.  Using documents from archives in Spain, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, my paper then explores the political allegiances and identities of the purportedly quiescent population who quickly mobilized en masse to reject Spanish rule.  In discourse spurred by resentment of Spanish policies and fear of re-enslavement, how did new vocabularies of race and nation emerge?  How did collaboration with Haitian rebels influence such imaginings of identity?  Finally, how did this struggle reverberate elsewhere in the late colonial Caribbean? The aims and failures of the rebels -- from both sides of the border -- reflect how the struggle for full social and political emancipation was ongoing, even after the Spanish were rebuffed for the last time.