1870, February: (Grant’s Annexation Threat and Haiti’s Monroe Doctrine): Haiti’s foreign affairs under Nissage were jolted by the U.S.

1870, February: (Grant’s Annexation Threat and Haiti’s Monroe Doctrine): Haiti’s foreign affairs under Nissage were jolted by the U.S. drive to annex Santo Domingo — Manifest Destiny had been running strong toward the Partie de l’Est for more than twenty years, and once in the White House, Ulysses S. Grant wasted no time negotiating an annexation treaty signed on November 29, 1868 with dictator Buenaventura Báez, who was locked in mortal contest with his rival Cabral. The threat of a foreign power on the other half of Hispaniola provoked instant resistance in Haiti: with the backing of France and England, Nissage threw Haiti’s weight into Dominican politics in 1870 — applying, as historian Ludwell Montague remarked, its own Monroe Doctrine to Hispaniola — through sanctuaries for Cabral, printing presses for his manifestos, financial subsidy, Caco raids over the border, and gunrunning from the national arsenal. Grant’s response was that of the conqueror of Vicksburg: he ordered the Atlantic Fleet into Haitian waters, and on February 10, 1870, Rear Admiral Charles H. Poor — aboard the aptly named U.S.S. Dictator lying within easy range of the rebuilt National Palace — delivered the blunt message that any Haitian interference with the Dominicans during negotiations would be considered a hostile act against the American flag. Within seventy-two hours Haiti capitulated, though the assurance was neither made nor kept in entire good faith. That the United States could deploy its naval power to extort compliance from the world’s first Black republic over the internal affairs of a neighboring state — while simultaneously pursuing the annexation of that state — reveals the neocolonial architecture that Césaire described: formal sovereignty persists as juridical fiction while the material capacity for self-determination remains perpetually subordinated to the warships of the metropole.