Dominican War of Independence
[citation needed] In 1838, Juan Pablo Duarte, an educated nationalist, founded a resistance movement called La Trinitaria ("The Trinity") along with Ramón Matías Mella and Francisco del Rosario Sánchez.When Duarte had not returned by February, because of illness, the rebels decided to take action anyway with the leadership of Francisco del Rosario Sánchez, Ramón Matías Mella, and Pedro Santana, a wealthy cattle-rancher from El Seibo who commanded a private army of peons who worked on his estates.On December 3, the squadron composed of the brigantines 27 de Febrero and General Santana and the schooners Constitución and Las Mercedes and commanded by Juan Alejandro Acosta, bombarded and burned the town of Petit Rivière.Navy Lieutenant David Dixon Porter, instructed to carry out an investigation with the purpose of seeing if the Dominican Republic could be recognized as an independent nation, he reported that the number of its inhabitants was 175,000 individuals.Firearms marked the evolution of the process of National Independence even when it was still in its infancy: an excited Manuel María Frómeta, while Juan Evangelista Jiménez read out loud the manifesto of September 1843 in Santo Cerro, offered his children as cartridges.The city's arsenal, "defended only by about sixty poorly armed and ill-disciplined soldiers," easily taken by the National Guard that same night[36] and formally handed over to the authorities of the new State on February 29 in the presence of Saint Denys,[37] must have contained only a few pieces, considering that President Charles Rivière-Herárd, during his visit to the eastern part of the island in 1843, "had taken care to empty the State warehouses";[38] this explains why, within a week of receiving it, the Central Governing Board sent to buy two thousand rifles from Curaçao,[39] undoubtedly with part of the funds raised from the forced contribution fixed as a result of the total lack of public funds.[43] The lack of sufficient weapons in the eastern part of the island to start a movement against the Haitian government was a negative condition recognized since 1843: when on November 15 of that year Vicente Celestino Duarte and Francisco del Rosario Sánchez wrote to Duarte, then in Caracas, they demanded, "even at the cost of a star in the sky," two thousand, one thousand or five hundred rifles; four thousand cartridges; 2 ½ or 3 quintals of gunpowder and “500 lances or as many as you can get.”[44] Just one month later, Consul André-Nicolas Levasseur, French diplomatic representative in Haiti, and representatives of the eastern part of the island before the Haitian constituent assembly agreed on the guidelines of a protectorate that included the supply by France of “everything that was necessary to establish and consolidate” the future Dominican government, particularly “arms, ammunition for war and for muzzle loading” (…) in sufficient quantity to arm the active part of the population that will be called under the flags of independence.”[45] In the "Demonstration of the peoples of the eastern part of the island formerly Hispaniola or Santo Domingo, on the causes of their separation from the Haitian Republic," of January 16, 1844, in a veiled allusion to the so-called Levasseur Plan, it was specified that, in addition to their own resources, "those that could be provided to us in such a case by foreigners" would be used, if necessary.The transfiguration of peasants who used machetes and lances as work tools into skilled masters of their performance as war props is contrasted with the four elements taken into account by the renowned British author John Keegan when determining the state of a troop before and during a battle in the 19th century, namely, fatigue, hunger, smoke and sound.[70] Virgilio Méndez Amaro, a scholar of the military history of the Dominican Republic, calls this to attention:[71] First of all, the march of the Haitian and Dominican armies to the battlefields of Santiago and Azua, for example, was carried out in days without pause —its components came from Haiti, in the case of the former, and from San Francisco de Macorís, Moca, La Vega and San José de Las Matas and from El Seibo, in the case of the latter, so their physical condition at the time of the confrontations must not have been satisfactory, in addition to the sure lack of knowledge of the terrain by a good part of the troops and officers of both sides.[73] Finally, the noise generated not only by the shots of cannons and muskets but also by the snorting of horses, nearby bullets and the orders of sergeants and officers (on both sides, since the distance at which you fought allowed you to hear your enemy), must have been a real madness for someone who was not accustomed to it.[83] Although historian Francisco Elpidio Beras thinks that the troops of Macorís, Cotuí, La Vega, Moca and Santiago did not lack weapons or ammunition due to the scarcity of news about it,[84] the situation would not be different in the Cibao.(55) In this sense, Soto Jiménez himself specifies that although the machete assault of the men commanded by Duvergé completed the total withdrawal of the Haitian army, this action was supported by the riflemen of Nicolás Mañón, stationed in Fort Resolí.(57) And already in the savannah of the town, in the battle that took place on March 30, the artillery, with its cannons loaded with shrapnel, and the infantry, "within rifle range," were the ones that defined that warlike encounter, as can be deduced from the reading of the official report of General José María Imbert, (58) even though in that same document it is stated that, in the first phase of the battle - in allusion to the charge of the Andulleros led by the then Captain Fernando Valerio - (59) "ours came to blows with the enemy" and some Haitian soldiers of the infantry column that attacked our left flank, preceded by a cavalry corps, were "killed by our lances and machetes."It would be enough for his troops to become "invincible and self-confident," "a reasonable credit, some French officers, a few hundred soldiers and weapons" that France could take from its Antillean possessions, as Saint Denys commented to Guizot on April 23, 1844.On May 7, 1844, the Central Governing Board had commissioned Lieutenant Colonel Juan Nepomuceno Ravelo Reyes to buy arms, ammunition and provisions in Curaçao and Saint Thomas in a ship armed for this purpose,(79) and on an undetermined date, José Díez, as an envoy of the Central Governing Board headed by Duarte's followers, traveled to Venezuela with the same objective, as can be deduced from a letter from Saint Denys to Minister Guizot dated July 1, in which he reported the blow to the corporation presided by Bobadilla on the 9th of the previous month.In the various clashes in the south between the troops of Santana and those of Riviere, the latter suffered considerable losses, while the former lost only three men?The monetary emissions authorized by the Central Governing Board in July and August 1844(82) provided the public coffers with an exchange agent that facilitated the financing of war expenses.Indeed, Tomás Bobadilla, in his speech before the Constituent Assembly held in San Cristóbal on September 26, pointed out that the government had provided itself with "a large quantity of rifles and other war elements,"(83) although he did not specify the source of supply.(92) This assertion is confirmed by the fact that Navy Lieutenant David Dixon Porter, the second special agent sent by the State Department after receiving Hogan's report, (93) noted in his diary in May 1846 that the government had "thirty-five thousand sets of weapons and other war munitions in abundance.""[105] Santana was aware of this reality and in a letter addressed to this official, he stated the following:[106] There is only one thing we lack: arms, and we need good ones; and for this I thought I could count on the friendship of France, of that great nation that has declared itself the friend of peoples who know how to fight and perish for their freedom."(110) This reality gives allows many to understand a letter dated December 4, 1855, to the political chief of Santiago, ordering him to send the blacksmiths and gunsmiths of La Vega to repair the damaged rifles, (111) as well as a letter dated the 7th of the same month and year from the political governor of Azua, F. Sosa, who required the commander of weapons of Barahona, José Leger, to go to Azua on a ship that would be destined for their transfer, in which, in addition to 50 artillery men, "all the rifles that were in bad condition" were to be transported.(151) The first circumstance was determined by the decision to use it for the assault of a position after a suitable intervention on it by the artillery and the infantry - which would have undermined the enemy's morale - taking advantage of the moments of reloading of the Haitian musketry, (152) of which several actions are a manifestation.For example, in the battle of Cachimán, on December 4, 1844, General Antonio Duvergé, commander of the expeditionary army of the southern borders, with "a force of about one hundred and fifty infantrymen and seventy cavalrymen," broke the attack with the infantry, but the capture of the fort built by the Haitians in the place, given its topographical and constructive conditions, implied its assault by the Dominican troops.We cannot at this time give you certain news of the large number of deaths, because they are appearing more and more in the mountains, where the fire was bloody.In the battle of Beller, on October 27, 1845, the strategy of General Francisco Antonio Salcedo, commander in chief of the northeastern borders and political chief of the province of Santiago, was also to consecutively confront the enemy with rifle fire and after this, take his position with knives: (157) (…) we had barely appeared in the clear savannah of Beler, when we perceived that the enemy was positioned at the height of Coco de Beler, where they had a perfectly built castle, walled and ditched, two pieces of artillery, and a large garrison under the command of Colonel Seraphin.I gave the order to attack and after an unstoppable fire of an hour and a half and tenacious resistance on the part of the enemy, we entered the said castle, sabre in hand, and a few moments later the standard of the Dominican Cross was seen waving in the same place where the enemy flag was, leaving in the fort and its enclosure more than three hundred and fifty enemy corpses, victims of our lances and machetes, plus ten prisoners, some of them seriously wounded and who are in this canton.In that battle, the charge on Beller Castle was also accompanied by artillery, according to an eyewitness: (158) At seven in the morning, when our troops faced each other in the spacious field of Beler, the Haitian artillery, with accurate shots, decimated our men, but they answered with their three pieces and advanced at a charging pace towards the fort, despite the heavy ground, which due to the rain of the previous day made the artillery difficult to roll, they dominated those fires, and at twelve o'clock, the Invincible was in the hands of our men (…).In the action of El Número, on April 17, 1849, the short distance at the most compromised moment of the advance towards the Haitian positions determined that this was the propitious occasion for the white weapons, without the support of the artillery, but with previous discharges of rifle fire, to be established as elemental, as can be seen in the description made by the French consul Victor Place referring to Santana's role:(159) In two days he was able to gather between 700 and 800 men, with whom he decided to take decisive action.Finally he received a blow from a lance in the middle of the chest, collapsed, and fell hugging the cannon that he wanted, alive, not to leave the Dominicans.A fifth opportunity would be determined by the Haitian retreat, at which time the Dominican action was better served by having troops mobilized on favorable terrain."(175) And José María Cabral, in a speech given in honor of Santana in Las Matas de Farfán on January 25, 1856, attributed his performance to an unknown aid: "Never would that presumptuous man who calls himself Emperor have managed to "level us" with his slaves, because while they take one step forward they retreat two, intimidated by the heroic courage of our soldiers and the edge of our steel swords, which merge with each other and devour them, despite all that might oppose them."(182) The superiority that Franco Bidó and this unknown officer referred to was complementary to the participation, in the first moments, of the artillery and the infantry in the different battles, and as seen in the reports and testimonies transcribed above, was based on the fact that the Haitians did not repel - exceptionally - the Dominican charges either with rifle fire or with hand-to-hand combat with knives; rather they became disorganized and retreated due to the brutality of the attack and the impression caused by seeing a mass of men advance at the greatest possible speed and even if not on horseback, who, after firing with their rifles, would throw themselves on top of them with lances and machetes to execute what Soto Jiménez calls the coup de coteau or knife blow:(183)(184) The machete-wielder, as infantryman or cavalry dragoon, rifleman in the early stages of any combat or lancer on horseback, arrived at the supreme moment of the use of the machete, when the short distance gave rise to hand-to-hand combat, almost always facing the bayonet, which, regardless of the skills of the expert in its effective es grima, so popular in North America and Europe, always came out badly against the attack of the Dominican encabao.The initial blows of the encabao were always aimed at mutilating the arms or hands that held the musket or rifle at that moment (…).The culminating contribution to the victories explains why Franco Bidó placed the importance of the bladed weapons above the role of the riflemen and the artillerymen, soldiers and officers who interacted in the handling of an artillery piece.(186) The use of bladed weapons after artillery fire and in parallel or consecutively with rifle volleys reveals the tactical teachings received by citizens from the eastern part of the island who did their compulsory military service during Haitian domination and who later joined the ranks of the nascent Dominican army.Puerto Rican independence advocate, Eugenio María de Hostos, influenced by positivism, valued August 16, 1863 more than February 27, 1844, since on that date the country showed the highest degree of patriotic consciousness.
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