Dominican rebels drive out Spain with quiet Haitian backing

An anti annexation movement rose at Moca, in the Cibao region, in 1861, and grew into the war Dominicans call the War of Restoration, fought from 1863 to 1865 against Spanish rule. Dominican rebels used Haiti as a base. Parties of them crossed back over the border accompanied by Haitians, some regular soldiers and some volunteers, who helped clear foreign troops off the land. Spanish reprisals forced President Fabre Geffrard into a public show of neutrality while he went on supplying the insurgents with provisions, and he also worked the diplomatic channels for an armistice and a Spanish withdrawal. Jean Price Mars treated the war as a turning point for both countries. Dominicans and Haitians had fought a common enemy together, and afterwards Haitian governments gave up the old doctrine that the island had to be one state. What replaced it, from the 1870s, was a long argument about where exactly the border ran.

The United States refused to recognize Haiti for fifty nine years, because recognizing it meant seating a black ambassador in Washington while the South still held four million people in bondage. Lincoln finally extended recognition in 1862, during the Civil War, when the Confederacy had removed those senators from the chamber. Almost immediately came the Pelletier case. On 27 July 1863 the Haitian government, through Roumain, submitted a formal defense including Captain Hubbard's report, arguing that Pelletier's vessel the William had been engaged in illicit activity and was lawfully seized under Haitian law. Washington felt obliged to protect an American citizen abroad and equally anxious not to rupture with a newly recognized ally mid war. Note the shape of it. Recognition arrives, and the first thing that follows is a dispute about whether Haitian law applies to an American in Haitian waters. That question never really closes.

In 1864 the New Orleans paper L'Union became La Tribune de la Nouvelle Orleans. Louis Charles Roudanez stayed active in it and Paul Trevigne, another descendant of Saint-Domingue refugees, ran it as chief editor. They argued for black suffrage in editorials, political articles, fiction and poetry, and they printed an English edition and posted it to members of Congress in Washington. Two years before, they had opened a campaign to desegregate the public schools and the streetcars of the city. They set up the Louisiana chapter of the National Equal Rights League, founded the Friends of Universal Suffrage in 1865, and came back in 1867 for civic equality, voting rights and access to public facilities. Trevigne pushed hard for the desegregation of Masonic lodges as well. The families doing this work descended from people who had left Saint-Domingue during its revolution, and in Louisiana they were pressing the claim that revolution had made.

In 1863 the Dutch colonies and the United States abolished slavery. The two acts fell in the same year at opposite ends of the same system, one by legislation in a small colonial power, the other in the middle of a civil war and applying to territory the government did not yet control. Set beside the British abolition of 1834 and the French of 1848, they show emancipation in the Americas arriving as a run of separate national decisions spread over three decades, each taken with the earlier ones in plain view and argued over in their light. What followed in the Caribbean was departure. Migration out of the islands after emancipation pushed the number of United States residents of Caribbean derivation past three hundred thousand by the 1920s. Haiti had settled the question for itself in 1804 by revolution, six decades before the last of these acts.