They therefore attained political and civil liberty suddenly, with no prudent transitions. A caudillo, Toussaint Louverture, was the hero of the war of liberation. The metropolis made this ex-coachman a general. Sober and active, crafty and patriotic, he aspired to seize the reins of government; he expelled the English and fought against the people of colour who were led by General Rigaud; he was the indomitable defender of his race. The slaves regarded him as a tutelary deity; they thought him inspired; he gradually became the fetish of a superstitious caste. In 1801 an Assembly elected him governor for life; but he did not renounce the protection of France. In vain did his adulators call him the Napoleon of the negroes; he did not aspire to absolute rule. He organised an army and set the finances in order; he proved a vigilant administrator. Like the dictator Francia in Paraguay, he forced his people to work by strict regulations; he prosecuted vagabonds, won the esteem of the whites, and introduced a severe morality into matters of finance.
Napoleon wished to reconquer the emancipated colony, and sent a strong army against it. The negroes rallied round their chief, and offered a heroic resistance; finally the French withdrew, and abandoned the island to the ex-slaves. In 1825 the metropolis recognised the independence of Hayti.
The Constitution of the new republic was promulgated in 1801. Without disdaining the suzerainty of France, which had prematurely abolished slavery, the negroes made laws intended to establish a democracy; they organised municipalities, and recognised Catholicism as the State religion. They recognised that labour, painful as it is to an indolent nation, is yet obligatory. From this time forward the history of Hayti is a perpetual succession of civil wars and dictatorships. Liberal laws were given to a caste habituated to slavery. Pétion, who was honoured by the friendship of Bolivar, was President in 1807; he applied himself more especially to the education of his people, and was called the father of his country; his government was a period of peace between two crises of vandalism. Before him the successor of Toussaint Louverture, Dessalines, had ordered the killing of all the whites, and had commenced a disastrous racial war. Nothing could be more hateful to the ex-slaves than the aristocracy of the skin; neither whites nor mulattos escaped the fury of the rulers. The integrity of the negro race was the ideal of these ferocious dictators.
No South American republic had to suffer such ill-augured tyrannies as those of Hayti; no autocracy was so formidable as that of these ex-slaves, whose leaders were notable amateurs of pageantry and bloodshed. Soulouque, the sworn enemy of the mulattos, proclaimed himself Emperor in 1849, taking the name of Faustinus I., and surrounding himself with a grotesquely ambitious court: he was the most execrable of despots. The Republic was re-established in 1859, and the monotonous sequence of servile coxcombs who made use of their power to gratify their passion for extermination recommenced: civil wars, international wars, assassinations, and massacres filled the bloodstained chronicles of the isle. The Haytian rulers exercised a harsh domination over San Domingo, where mulattos abounded and the Spanish tradition was not extinct; the negro invasion exiled the Dominican writers, destroyed the culture of the university, and swept like a wave of barbarism into the brilliant colony.
The Dominicans abhorred their long servitude, and, despite the terrible reprisals of their rulers, they prepared in silence for liberation. In 1821 Nuñez de Caceres declared San Domingo to be separated from Spain, and demanded protection of Colombia; the President of Hayti, Boyer, could not permit this unexpected autonomy, and sent an army to occupy the capital of the new republic. After a long period of secret preparation another group of patriots again proclaimed the independence of San Domingo, and in 1844 a movement which coincided with the revolt of the Haytian liberals against the tyranny of Boyer. This campaign, known as "the Revolt," was directed by an impassioned ideologist, Juan-Pablo Duarte, who was surrounded by intellectuals and men of action. The traditional oppressors were vanquished, and the victors proclaimed that "the peoples of the ancient Spanish portion, in vindication of their rights and desiring to provide for their own welfare and future happiness in a just and legal manner, have formed themselves into a free, independent, and sovereign State."
In winning her autonomy San Domingo did not realise the dream of the strict republicans. Her history is less troubled than that of Hayti, and education and literature have attained an astonishing development in the old Spanish colony, but political life has been indecisive and full of revolutionary upheavals, as in the other democracies of South America. Perhaps we must attribute to the great number of mulattos, always incapable of self-government, or to the long duration of the Haytian domination, the anarchy of this, one of the youngest of the overseas republics. After 1844, the year of liberation, Santana, a half-breed dictator, cunning, uncultured, and implacable in hatred, retained the supreme power. The Februarists were at the head of the revolution known as the Reformation—Duarte, Mella, Sanchez—noble idealists in love with the idea of democracy. However, a caudillo profited by this movement of regeneration, overruling the ideologists in the name of practical despotism. "Februarism," said a remarkable Dominican thinker, "that is to say, the constitution of a free government founded upon equity, without caciquism and without the shameful fetters which sometimes limit the exercise of sovereignty, has predominated for too short a time on two or three occasions of our national life. On the contrary, Santanism—that is, personal autocracy, rigid and stifling, such as characterised the entire policy of Santana, and which has been practised since his time by nearly all our rulers, attenuated in some cases and in others exasperated—Santanism seems to have deep and inextricable roots."[[2]]
But is it not the fact that despotism is the necessary form of all government in these republics, where the division of castes opposes unity and the normal development of nationality? The future of Haytians and Dominicans both is full of grave problems: among the first we find poetry, imagination, a high state of culture, but political evolution is very slow. The peoples of the Tropics seem incapable of order, laborious patience, and method; so that the prodigal literature of San Domingo forms a striking contrast to the archaic quality of its political life. "Its geographical situation," says Señor Garcia Godoy, "places it almost at the mercy of North American imperialism." Hayti is still a barbarous democracy. It is not easy to turn a colony of negro slaves into an orderly and prosperous republic merely by virtue of political charters of foreign origin; and it has not been proved that parliamentarism, municipal life, and the classic division of powers, the creation of the East, form an adequate system of government for negroes and mulattos. In vain did General Légitime, once President of Hayti, affirm that had they been properly encouraged and directed, his people would already have arrived at "the highest degree of prosperity and civilisation"; in vain did he pretend that the decadence of his country was due not to a question of race but to a problem of social economy: excess of taxation and paper money. Hayti possesses immense natural wealth, yet the taxes are crushing, the railways go bankrupt, labourers emigrate, and agriculture and industry are dwindling, as the General recognised; all because the indolence of the race does not permit it to take advantage of the fertility of the soil nor to govern itself.
[[1]] Histoire de l'Isle cspagnole, Amsterdam, 1733, vol. iv. p. 362.
[[2]] Rufinito, by F. Garcia Godoy, Santo Domingo, 1908, pp. 53, 54.