The Eastern Stars Read Online Free PDF Page A

York and Philadelphia—many of them freed slaves—to move to underpopulated areas. After twenty years of occupation, the Dominicans were left a little bit Spanish, a little bit French, not quite black or white—the only mulatto country, obsessed with race and deeply insecure.
    Dominican history teaches of the Dominican military victory that drove the Haitians out in 1844. But one of the Dominican leaders, Buenaventura Báez, was educated in France and seems to have suffered from that age-old affliction Francophilia. When he returned from France, he collaborated with the Haitian occupiers while opening a dialogue with the French government on having France take over the Dominican Republic, known at the time as Haiti Español. There is some evidence that the French had a hand in negotiating the Haitian retreat. Even as Haiti Español was being christened the independent nation named the Dominican Republic, negotiations were under way for the French takeover.
    Dominican historian Frank Moya Pons wrote about a “defeatist attitude” that set in, with a conservative upper class preoccupied with the fear that the Haitians would return and take their property. In the first years as an independent nation, Dominicans discussed possible takeovers by not only the French but the Spanish, the Americans, and the British. This was threatening to the Haitians—particularly their leader from 1847 to 1859, Faustin-Élie Soulouque—who feared above all else an attempt by outsiders to reestablish slavery in Haiti. Soulouque, a black brought to power as a puppet of the upper-class mulattos, had a surprising cunning and quickly consolidated power and crowned himself Emperor Faustin I. A militant black nationalist, his fear of foreigners—especially Americans, who by then ran the leading slaving nation—led to three attempts to retake the Dominican Republic. This in turn led the Dominicans to a desperate desire to be taken over and rescued by a foreign power.
    None of the four powers under consideration was particularly interested in acquiring the Dominican Republic. Columbus, it seems, was the first and last to have considered it a prize. The French were interested only in Haiti and had gotten the Haitians to agree to a huge indemnity in exchange for recognition of the nation. The only French interest in the Dominican side was to stop the Haitians from spending all their money trying to take over the Dominican Republic instead of paying them. The British and the Spanish were concerned only about American designs on the real prize, Cuba, and feared that the U.S. saw the Dominican Republic as a stepping-stone. Far from worrying about preserving their nation while all these militarized world powers were looking them over, many Dominicans, not all of them white, were claiming Spanish citizenship. Spanish law promised citizenship to any descendant of a Spanish colonist. As Spanish citizens, they were exempt from Dominican military service.
    But at the end of the international debate, in 1860 the Spanish came back. Dominicans did not like Spanish rule this time any more than they had the other times, and they fought a war of independence against the Spanish, which they won in 1865. They were independent at last, and from 1865 to 1879 had twenty different governments.
    In despair and defeatism, Dominicans tried to become part of the United States. U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant was interested but the American people had no interest in the Dominican Republic, and so most politicians were not particularly receptive; the project was rejected by the Senate in 1871. In fact, Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, an old-time abolitionist, was remembered in the U.S. as a hero for opposing the measure and sparing the U.S. the annexation. Once Dominicans came to know the U.S. better, Sumner came to be remembered with equal admiration by Dominicans.
    An independent Dominican Republic, without economic resources, went deeper into debt and was increasingly