The Annexation of Santo Domingo was an attempt to annex “Santo Domingo” by an expansionist movement in 1870 during the Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, for the United States of America to acquire the Dominican Republic as a U.S. territory and given eventual statehood. This movement was preceded by three other attempts at annexation in 1856, 1866 and 1868. The 1870 attempt included famous politicians and political activists such as Frederick Douglass and Charles Sumner, who were at odds over the issue. This movement appeared to have been widely supported by the inhabitants of the Dominican Republic, according to the plebiscite ordered by the Dominican President, Buenaventura Baez. He wanted to annex the country because he believed the Dominican Republic had better survival odds under a protectorate and could sell a much wider range of the national goods to the U.S. than could be sold in European markets. The country's unstable history was one of invasion, colonization, and civil strife.
In 1869, President Grant commissioned Orville E. Babcock and Rufus Ingalls to negotiate the treaty of annexation with President Báez. The treaty included the annexation of the country itself and the purchase of Samana Bay for two-million American dollars. The treaty was ratified by the Dominican Congress, but in 1871 it was defeated in the United States Congress. It lacked public support. The schism between Frederick Douglass and his counter-part, Charles Sumner impaired the annexation further.
The United States wanted to gain control over the island for many reasons. The United States wished to establish a naval base nearby to protect the projected canal across the Isthmus of Darien, as well as its abundance of natural resources. Other reasons included a plan to expatriate there freed southern Blacks.
Thus, in an age of U.S. Imperialism, the militaristic, socio-economic and cultural idea of the annexation of the Dominican Republic by the United States of America, while well-supported by many popular reasons, ultimately failed due to political turmoil and misunderstanding between the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant and Congress.[1][2][3]
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On November 30, 1821, José Núñez de Cáceres, Spanish lieutenant governor of the Spanish portion of Hispaniola, announced the independence from Spain as the state of Spanish Haiti. But in a few months the Haitian President, Jean Pierre Boyer, answered a call from one of the Dominican parties and occupied the entire island. The Haitian occupation lasted for about 22 years. On February 27, 1844 Juan Pablo Duarte, Francisco del Rosario Sanchez and Matias Ramon Mella led a successful rebellion against the Haitian government. This day is now known as Dominican Independence Day. Some devious leaders, manipulating fear of a repeated invasion by Haiti, wanted an imperial country to annex them to as a means of protection.[4][5][6][7][8][9][10]
Although Baez’s plebiscite said that many in the Dominican Republic supported the annexation, there were also many detractors that called for the Republic to remain an independent nation. One in particular, Gregorio Luperón among many others, was a patriot opposing the annexation because he understood the dangers that it entailed. He and others helped give voice to the majority of people who did not want to lose their national freedom. In fact, the U.S. immediately called Luperón a thief and terrorist because he was against the imperialist expansion.
In the United States, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner was among the leading detractors to the annexation. He argued counter point to Frederick Douglass, that by annexing the small mostly freed Black Country, it would only lead to the exploitation of the freed blacks on the island. Sumner’s standpoint which drastically differed from Douglass’s, was one of the primary reasons that the annexation did not pass in congress.[11][12]
The primary reasons the annexationists offered for the annexation of the Dominican Republic into the U.S. were the rich natural resources the island offered, the Monroe Doctrine being weakened by European business ventures, a potential canal across the Isthmus of Darien, a strategic naval basic granting the U.S. control of the Caribbean, and to encourage the Southern U.S. to grant civil rights to recently freed blacks. The island of Hispaniola, for them, offered many resources such as sugar cane. However, they thought the country did not have the infrastructure to export its goods. If the U.S. would had annexed the Dominican Republic it would had also cut back on importing raw materials from other places, and have a new market for its manufactured goods. Alongside manufactured goods, the free-black labor force in the American south, according to President Grant, would have been granted more civil rights by their employers. This was assumed because many free-blacks would leave for Dominican Republic causing a shortage of cheap labor in the South where most work was done through harsh, manual labor. In order to encourage them to stay, President Grant figured they would have no choice, but to give them the civil liberties they had been asking for.
The spirit of Manifest Destiny in the westward expansion had been fulfilled to a large extent in the American public’s eye and it was time to expand beyond the continent’s borders. Rising European industries like the Dutch East India Company had begun encroaching on the Caribbean’s potential market. In turn, a portion of the U.S. government wanted to annex the Dominican Republic so that they would have a foothold in the market and gain from the enormous profits that could be made exporting goods off the island. In addition to an economic foothold, the island presented an opportunity to build a canal across the Isthmus of Darien, which would cut back on the time it took for trade vessels to travel throughout the Caribbean. An idea for a naval base was also presented as another solid reason to annex the small country. The naval base would allow the U.S. to prevent current and future enemies from stationing dangerous units close to its own shoreline.[13][14][15]
The annexation of the Dominican Republic, under the Grant administration, failed to take hold of the American public’s interest. President Grant tried to explain in his State of the Union Address on December 5, 1870 the dire necessity of the treaty to Congress from both the American and Dominican side of the deal. In a bold strategy, Grant tried to muster up support by pointing out that it is in the Dominicans’ interest and hopes that the United States would annex the island in order to spread the United States’ free society and way of law to a country that was unable to support itself under its established government. Grant also explained what kind of factor geography played by pointing out that this positioning could give the United States an “entrance to the Caribbean Sea and the Isthmus transit of commerce”. Following this, President Grant pushed the points of the island being able to prevent external enemies from ever reaching our coast (naval importance), the annexation forcing Puerto Rico and Cuba to abolish slavery in order to keep its work force from emigrating to the Dominican Republic, an increase of American exportation through cheap furnishing of the people, vanishing of the national debt without raising taxes, the opening of new markets for American products, and ultimately being “an adherence to the ‘Monroe Doctrine’”. None of these reasons ever took the country or Congress by storm, and in his last State of the Union Address on December 5, 1876, Grant left Congress with speculation about what could have happened if the annexation had been ratified. His main points consisted of everything produced in Cuba could have been produced in the Dominican Republic, the luxury of free commerce, and the freed slaves could have used the free labor in the Dominican Republic as leverage against the people denying them of their rights, therefore making the freed slaves “’master of the situation’”. The driving force of Congress not supporting the annexation can be accredited to the feud between Frederick Douglass and Massachusetts United States Senator Charles Sumner. These two men were allies on abolition and civil rights for African Americans, but their views on the annexation differed. Douglass was appointed to assistant secretary to the Commission of Inquiry for the annexation of the Dominican Republic. He strongly believed that the people of the Dominican Republic were craving and needed this annexation. He stated, “San Domingo asked for a place in our union…Santo Domingo wanted to come under our government…” Sumner, who was traditionally an ally in most racial politics with Douglass, saw this as an example of the imperialistic politics and agenda of the Grant administration to promote greedy capitalists who wanted to exploit the Dominican Republic and African Americans. Sumner also saw this as an infringement on self-determination of the black race because it would be taking sovereignty away from one of the few self-governing black countries. Too many politics got in the way in Congress, therefore preventing the Grant administration from fomenting support from the American people.[16][17]
Despite the failure of the treaty to annex Dominican Republic, the United States did occupy the island for eight years (1916–1924) in order to ensure payments on its foreign debt and as a broader imperial project, which scholars today call "Dollar Diplomacy". The United States also got the canal in Central America by constructing it intervening in Panama. The naval base was established at Guantanamo Bay, again coat-tailing from the United States efforts to annex the Dominican Republic.
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