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 { 230} 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]
