History Story Time: The Time the US Almost Annexed the Dominican Republic

[Fizzzzle]

So, towards the end of this, we're going to go into a little bit of alternate history here. I know a lot of people don't like alternate history - I think it has its benefits. For example, the most commonly posited question of alternate history is "what if Germany won WW2?" To examine what the world would be like if Germany won the war, you have to examine why they *didn't* win. To ponder alternate history necessitates a sort of reverse engineering of history that can lead you to fun conclusions that you otherwise might not have considered. It's "deductive history," if you will, and I'm here for it.

 

 

With that out of the way, let's go back to 1869. The dead of the Civil War were barely cold in the dirt, the US was still in the middle of reconstruction, and was effectively a one-party state (Congress in 1870 was 84% Republican). The Dominican Republic (back then just referred to as "Santo Domingo" most of the time) was in fear that they would be invaded by Haiti.

 

Santo Domingo, at the time, was barely 25 years old as a country and was ruled by a dictator named Buenaventura Báez. This guy was pretty much exactly the cum stain of a person you imagine in your head when you think of "Latin American dictator." Báez actually came up in the 1840's under the Haitian government, serving as Deputy of Azua (which was then part of Haiti) under a fairly liberal government that abolished things like Dictators and guaranteed things like trials by jury. It was one of the many times that Haiti tried to get their shit together before being ruined by foreign capital interests, but that's another story we won't be going into today. 

 

Long story short, the government in Haiti started to get a little... let's just say "anti-white." The people in power on the east side of the island, who were mostly white or mixed race (Báez himself was the offspring of a wealthy white businessman and his mother was a mixed-race former slave) started to panic and tried to get European countries to sponsor a rebellion against Haiti, which would have made the Dominican Republic a protectorate of either France or Spain, whoever would do it first. He didn't really care.

 

The French said "uhh.... fuck you, no, we've already tried that, it didn't go very well," but the Revolution ball was already rolling and there wasn't anything Báez could do to stop it. Báez clearly saw that attempting rebellion to put white people back in charge in FUCKING HAITI without European support was probably a doomed venture.

 

Lo and behold, however, they did win independence from Haiti without European support after Báez joined. After a few short years, Báez becomes dictator, basically bankrupts the country while he gets rich, gets exiled, goes to live it up in Spain for a few years where he eventually convinces the King of Spain to try and re-occupy Hispaniola. You know, as you do. Spain decides to fuck around in 1863, by 1865 they've lost between 30,000-50,000 dead and they say "I think we've fully found out now, France was right," and they leave. Also, to be clear, in this particular case Spain was mostly fighting the Dominican nationalists, not Haitians. Though I'm sure those lines were more like canyons.

 

However, Báez manages to get "elected" AGAIN and now his back is in a corner. This finally brings us back to 1869. I didn't mean to spend so much time going into the turbulent history of Hispaniola, but here we are.

 

Buenaventura Báez was barely holding onto power. He had already survived like 16 coups. He knows the game is up sooner or later. France and Spain were both like "fuck off," but he knows that without outside help he might be facing full-on proletariat revolution. He ends up going to President of the United States, Ulysses "Unconditional Surrender" Grant and tries to make a case that A) we might be invaded by Haiti, and B) we might become a protectorate of a European power as a result. I don't think Grant gave a rat's ass about the first thing, but the second thing would clearly be a violation of the Monroe Doctrine.

 

You might fairly ask "why didn't the US care when Spain invaded in 1863?" The answer is that the US was, uh.... busy.

 

So, Grant says "you know what, old chap? Annexing the Dominican Republic sounds like a FINE idea!" and they... go through with it. Seriously, it happened. Báez' government and Grant's administration draft up the agreements and everything. The Dominican Republic wouldn't just become a United States protectorate, the agreement straight up specified that it would eventually become a STATE.

 

(there was also the idea that the Dominican Republic could be a refuge for free black people because "shipping off the blacks somewhere else where they can be free like birds" was still a thing a lot of people thought was a grand idea)

 

To circle back to the beginning of this, now is the part where we have to ask "why *didn't* it happen?"

 

The simple answer is... and this is strange to say... there were Senators who maaaaaaaaybe, like.... had the best interests of the Dominican people at heart? Notably Senators Charles Sumner (R-MA) and Carl Schurz (R-MO). They made points like "Báez is a corrupt dictator" and "we shouldn't prop up his government" and "the Dominican Republic has only been around for 25 years and they'e basically constantly been in some kind of conflict" and "this would only serve to benefit wealthy American businesses at the expense of the Dominican people" which were.... y'know... correct.

 

***important disclaimer - Schurz also notably opposed the annexation because he didn't want to admit a state of black people, so...

 

Sumner and Schurz rally the "radical" Republicans and get the annexation voted down in the Senate by a vote of 28-19, with 13 abstentions. It's actually one of the key moments that started the schism in the Republican party between the Radical Republicans and the Liberal Republicans, sowing the seeds for the end of one-party rule following the Civil War (don't bother looking up the differences between the two flavors of Republicans, they both wound up pretty much being the same thing again within a a few years until the party re-divided into the Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds)

 

 

 

With all of that out of the way, we get to the fun part of "what if the Dominican Republic WAS annexed by the US?"

 

The most fascinating part is the idea that, in all likelihood, it WOULD have become a state fairly quickly. That was kind of the whole deal. The United States was kind of new to the whole colonization game. They had just purchased Alaska a couple years earlier, but hardly any (white) people lived there and it wouldn't have any real U.S. government presence until 1884 and wouldn't "boom" until the discovery of gold in 1896. Alaska was, for our purposes, just an empty piece of land the government purchased. It was called "Seward's Folly" at the time because everyone thought he was a big stupid dummy for doing it.

 

Santo Domingo, on the other hand, was FULL of people. I can't find reliable numbers for the population of the Dominican Republic in 1870, but at the very minimum it would have been about 300,000 people, which would have put it over 6 or 7 other states. The ones in power who had directly beseeched the United States government to become their government daddy were wealthy white people. There's no reason to believe that the Senators who voted in favor of annexation would have voted against statehood, as that wasn't really something that had ever been done before.

 

 

Here's where it gets really juicy: I think that, had the United States actually annexed the Dominican Republic in 1870 (we've already covered why that didn't happen), A LOT changes. More than you might think at first.

 

For starters - it would have been a fucking mess. We saw exactly how the United States performed when taking over a country where the previous government was barely in power to begin with in 1899 when the Americans faked out the Philippines into colonization, causing a war that lasted 3 years (most Americans don't even know the Philippine-American War even happened, let alone that we were totally the fucking bad guys in that war... maybe those two things are related...). The fact that the only people in the Dominican Republic (who, remember, just fought for their independence from Haiti like 20 years ago) that wanted to be part of the United States were the rich and powerful, you've got a big fucking mess on your hands.

 

Not to mention, if the annexation of DR had the intended (by some) consequence of free black people moving there, that has all kinds of ramifications. 1) the Dominican government wouldn't actually want it, since the whole reason they rebelled against Haiti in the first place was because "too many black people," 2) the former Confederacy, as you may know, still pretty much kept black people as slaves in all but name after the Civil War, and 3) the Dominican Republic would have looooooved if they could re-introduce slavery. Loved it.

 

 

Let's take a step back and just assume the rest of history plays out as it did in our timeline. Namely, that the Spanish-American War still happens. The United States, after an aggressive war with Spain, becomes the brand new owners of Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines (look up the "Philippine-American War" to see how the Filipino people took that), Guam, and other places. In this new timeline where Santo Domingo was admitted as a state in like 1875, the precedent has already been set for statehood in new territories where brown people live. There's literally no legal standing for Congress to tell them "no" if the people vote to be a state.

 

Cuba's a separate thing, the United States only got involved with Spain after passing the Teller Amendment which pinky promised to not make Cuba a territory, but if the DR was already a state... maybe they don't do that? If the DR becomes a state, I think the odds are that Cuba and Puerto Rico do, too (not the Philippines because of the whole war of conquest thing).

 

Or, on the other hand, if the US had a disastrous attempt at annexing a people who didn't really want to be annexed, maybe they just don't do it anymore?

[Fizzzzle]

I was going to write a full conlusion but I'm already over 1700 words and I told myself i wouldn't go over 1000.

 

I should also mention that technically Baez first applied to have the US take over his country in 1867 under the Johnson administration, but that would involve explaining how the Senate basically blocked anything the Johnson Administration brought forth out of principle and I felt like it wasn't important. So I kind of lied a little for the sake of... brevity... he says without a hint of irony...

[Zaku3]

It's a long read but with all the Dominicans in Paterson, DR might as well be a state. 

 

It's a different time. The US would put down a DR uprising like it did with the Philipines. The Taliban just needed to fight us and wait us out. 

 

I do think we would have tried to make Cuba a state. There was alot of interest in Cuba. Check out the blowback series on the Cuban Revolution.

[Fizzzzle]

5 minutes ago, Zaku3 said:

It's a long read but with all the Dominicans in Paterson, DR might as well be a state. 

 

It's a different time. The US would put down a DR uprising like it did with the Philipines. The Taliban just needed to fight us and wait us out. 

 

I do think we would have tried to make Cuba a state. There was alot of interest in Cuba. Check out the blowback series on the Cuban Revolution.

That's the thing, in our timeline, we purposefully did *not* try to make Cuba a territory. There are a lot of reasons for that, but if the US already had a disastrous experience with the DR (I agree that the rebellion would have been put down and it would have become a state in the end), does that make the US more or less likely to make places like Cuba and Puerto Rico into states? I can honestly think of reasons for both.

 

The United States was also totally willing to (sort of) respect the Cubans' wishes for independence while completely ignoring the Filipinos in the SAME YEAR.

 

Personally I think the DR becoming a state in the 1870's would have made the US more likely to make Cuba and Puerto Rico states as the precedent would have already been set, but I think it also makes it less likely that the US goes to war with Spain in the first place.

 

Then you open up a rabbit hole of "if the US never goes on an aggressive war of conquest with Spain, does the Pacific theater of WW2 ever happen?" 

[Zaku3]

We are an openly rascist nation. It's hard to imagine a country that fought a war over slavery to accept the Dominican Republic. Cuba was allows to be Cuba because it's close enough to dominate economically. Well until our tin pot dictator was so bad he got overthrown.

[Fizzzzle]

1 hour ago, Zaku3 said:

We are an openly rascist nation. It's hard to imagine a country that fought a war over slavery to accept the Dominican Republic. Cuba was allows to be Cuba because it's close enough to dominate economically. Well until our tin pot dictator was so bad he got overthrown.

The thing is "annexation=statehood" was a commonly accepted idea. Couple that with the idea that some (including Grant) thought that the DR would be a great place for free blacks to have their own state would have set a precedent for statehood that I'm not certain could be reversed once it happened.

 

At the time this was proposed, we were still fully in reconstruction government. 84% of Congress was Republican. It was a one-party state. Most slave-owning power brokers at the time were still entirely locked out of national government.

 

Once the precedent is set that the Dominican Republic becomes a state, it's harder to make any legal ground for rejecting Puerto Rico as a state, assuming the Spanish-American War still happens.

 

Hell, the US might have just up and conquered Haiti.

[Fizzzzle]

Also, I didn't put this in the ramble/essay because I didn't think it fit anywhere, but Frederick Douglass was also a very vocal supporter of the US annexing the Dominican Republic. Grant actually had him personally make a case for annexation before the Senate. There are a lot of questions about how genuine he was about it as by this point in his life Douglass was pretty much in full-on politician mode, but it's worth mentioning.