American republic, American empire [electronic resource] : the United States, post-civil war reconstruction, and the state of Santo Domingo, 1868-1871
Keywords: History

"American Republic, American Empire" explores the connections between Reconstruction and American foreign relations during the late 1860s and early 1870s. It focuses upon the most significant foreign policy controversy of the Reconstruction era: the attempt to annex Santo Domingo, the present-day Dominican Republic, to the United States between 1868 and 1871. Scholars have traditionally cast the annexation controversy as a debate over imperialism, arguing that annexationists sought to establish a colonial empire in the Caribbean. This dissertation argues, instead, that what Americans at the time called the "Santo Domingo affair" was primarily understood as a question of creating a new state of the Union in the Caribbean and incorporating the black-majority population of Santo Domingo into the American nation. Americans also believed that if the annexation of Santo Domingo occurred, it would very likely serve as a precedent for the eventual incorporation of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the rest of the Caribbean into the Union. In addition to recasting the annexation controversy as a debate over statehood and the boundaries of American nationalism, this dissertation argues that Americans viewed annexation through the prism of Reconstruction. Americans considered the consequences of annexation by envisioning Dominicans as citizens and voters who would likely influence national politics in ways similar to southern African Americans. Most Americans opposed annexation, arguing that black Dominicans would elect "carpetbagger" demagogues who would help corrupt American politics. But a majority of the U.S. Senate and many national newspapers endorsed annexation. They agreed with anti-annexationists that Reconstruction provided a model for understanding the future of Santo Domingo if it became part of the United States. They simply drew different conclusions about Reconstruction, arguing that American republican institutions had successfully incorporated African Americans and predicting that black Dominicans could be incorporated in the same fashion. The annexation controversy was, at its heart, a political and ideological struggle over whether reconstructing the Caribbean would benefit the United States. This study contributes to the historical literature on Reconstruction by demonstrating that the Santo Domingo affair became one of the most intense political controversies of the late 1860s and early 1870s because it overlapped so thoroughly with the simultaneous and even more heated controversy over Reconstruction. It also contributes to the historiography on American foreign relations by showing that when the United States' influence in the Caribbean dramatically expanded in the last third of the nineteenth century, Americans considering what form that influence should take did not limit their options to colonialism or informal empire. Although the annexation of Santo Domingo failed, the prospect that Dominicans might have been incorporated into the American nation demonstrates that U.S.-Caribbean relations in the late nineteenth century were more complex and contested than prevailing narratives assume.