The Maroons of Santo Domingo in the Age of Revolutions: Adaptation and Evasion, 1783–1800

INTRODUCTION

In 1794, despite poor health, advanced age, revolutionary warfare and a gruelling journey on horseback, the Archbishop of Santo Domingo, Fernando Portillo y Torres, visited Baoruco, a remote and mountainous region in the centre of the island of Hispaniola, close to the most southern stretch of the border between the Spanish colony Santo Domingo and the French colony Saint-Domingue (see Fig. 1). His purpose was to assess recent evangelization initiatives. He identified ‘the administration of sacraments, serious and severe practices of divine services, and [Spanish] language’, as vital components in the project to ‘españolizar’ (Hispanicize) newly-annexed peoples, particularly African-descendants of varied backgrounds. The archbishop particularly wanted to visit Naranjo, a village of maroon initiates who had reluctantly forfeited their ‘savage’ outsider status. Maroons were defiant runaways who established autonomous polities outside the slave system, that sometimes outlasted slavery itself, and Spanish officials sought to turn them into pliant royalists and imperial instruments by redeeming souls and colonizing minds. Though maroon motives were more opaque, the attention that the archbishop gave them on his arduous trip and in numerous letters and documents signals their disproportionate importance to Spain’s colonialist cultural politics at this moment. Their power demanded it.¹

The Spanish began this project in the 1780s amid local and imperial anxiety to revitalize the struggling Dominican economy and the institution of slavery. The maroons hindered both for over a century by repelling frequent armed imperial incursions. The palenque (maroon community) of Maniel had existed for at least several decades, and was the single most visible and consistent fixture of black autonomy on Hispaniola. Naranjo, founded in 1790 after years of wrangling, was a few miles away from Maniel; its settlers had agreed, at least officially, to submit to the authority of the Spanish state and church.² At Naranjo both maroons and Spanish officials temporarily suspended customary contentions to search uneasily for stability. The intertwined turmoil of the French and Haitian Revolutions in the 1790s, though, caused a decrease in emphasis on the Spanish project of

Fig. 1.

. Map showing Spanish Santo Domingo and French Saint-Domingue on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, and the mountainous borderland region of Baoruco where maroons established settlements.

Thanks to Kevin Remington(University of south Carolina)and to Bernard Canavan(History Workshop Journal.)

reinvigorating Dominican slavery. Instead, the military potential of the maroons provided a desired catalyst for the Spanish counter-revolution’s campaign against ‘impious’ republicanism and slave insurrection. Despite being constrained by Spanish and French collaboration, threatened with re-enslavement, and jeopardized by warfare, as pins in major imperial hinges these maroons wielded pivotal influence.

This article focuses on Maniel and Naranjo, peripheries of two colonies often at the fringe of a Eurocentric conceptualization of the so-called Atlantic Age of Revolutions.³ From 1783–1800 events in these communities were microcosmic embodiments that reflected wider contentions over race, slavery, religiosity, and state. They stood at the intersection of three major phenomena – the African diaspora, Spanish colonialism, and the Age of Revolutions. Here people, ideas and power not only passed between Santo Domingo and Saint-Domingue (the future Dominican Republic and Haiti), they also passed through the disorienting, metamorphic and generative schisms between royalism and republicanism, religiosity and secularism, and slavery and freedom.

Five questions guide this study. How did Spanish efforts to convert dissident maroons into useful subjects, and the maroons’ tenuous consent, even arise? Why did these maroons hold negotiating power and what were their aims? How did the scope of this situation change in light of the Haitian Revolution? How did the maroons enhance and use their leverage and in the process shape the trajectory of Spanish colonialism? What new perspectives might this case offer about interactions between states and maroons and the pragmatism of disempowered peoples during the Age of Revolutions?

First, this article analyses the maroons’ acceptance of a peace offer in the 1780s that sacrificed their achievement of non-state, outsider status.⁴ The state extended beyond urban...