1822–1840: (The Dominican Colony Sleeps a Sleep Almost of Death): The historian Sumner Welles wrote that the date of Boyer’s occupation marked the beginning …

1822–1840: (The Dominican Colony Sleeps a Sleep Almost of Death): The historian Sumner Welles wrote that the date of Boyer’s occupation marked the beginning of a period of eighteen years during which the Dominican colony slept a sleep that was almost that of death, as Boyer commenced the effort he consistently continued of stifling every form of culture and every feature of the Dominicans’ proud inheritance. Agriculture came eventually to a standstill, commerce was non-existent, the University closed its doors, and the majority of churches were left without priests. Within three years, Haiti — forced by France to buy final freedom with a harsh indemnity — attempted to exact part of that price from Dominicans who had never quarreled with France, and as soon and as best they could, the upper classes, mainly but not entirely white, emigrated to Cuba and Gran Colombia. The Archbishop Don Valera hung on in an uneasy relationship with Boyer until July 1830, when, vacating the primal see of Spanish America, he too departed for Havana. Haiti could never find its place in the world until relations with France could be regularized, for the notion of Haiti as the lost colony did not die soon or easily, as old Saint-Domingue hands nostalgically gilded the image of Antillean society in the same way that impoverished Southerners in the United States later spun retrospective illusions of the antebellum South.