Praslin. Rivière’s proclamation recalls the taking up of arms there; news of it reaches Santo-Domingo.

Meanwhile Rivière, full of his intention to have done with the Constituent Assembly, wished to publish a proclamation, dated 26 February, in which he recalled the taking up of arms at Praslin, which had delivered the country from the yoke of tyranny, and set out his grievances and those of the nation against most of the acts of that Assembly. But the secretaries of state Laudun, Féry and J. S. Hippolyte opposed this publication, judging that it would bring about the dissolution of the Assembly in fact. Military men such as Chéry Archer, Bellanton, Paul Bayard, and Guerrier himself urged him against the Constituent Assembly, telling him that he would lose too much time, that the dinner was served, that it must be eaten, or else it would grow cold.

It was then that an immense piece of news, producing a deep impression of disquiet and sorrow in all the ranks of our society, reached Port-au-Prince: the eastern part had just, in the night of 27 to 28 February, at eleven o’clock, declared itself independent of Haiti, under the name of the Dominican Republic.

We have already related that within fifteen days of the departure of President Boyer from Santo-Domingo in 1822, the Dominicans had regretted having united with the Haitians. From that time the people and the chosen men of the eastern part aspired only to a separation, which was, in their tertulias, the political ideal. The instinctive aversion they had for the Haitians, most often called French, (*) had not escaped the perspicacity of President Boyer, who sometimes said, in a circle of friends or in his family, that if the inhabitants of the East should come to revolt, it would be very difficult to subdue them.

Between 1836 and 1837 a priest named Gaspard Hernandez arrived at Santo-Domingo; he was made curé of the Cathedral, and soon after canon. Having mixed with the people and with society, he found just and well founded the aspirations of the Domingois, which were those of all the inhabitants of the East, even of those who, by their employments and their connections, seemed the most attached to the Haitians. He soon opened a kind of University, a classroom, attended as students by several young men, among whom one distinguished Juan Pablo Duartes, Francisco Sanchez, Juan Isidro Perez and Pedro Pina. When they had finished their studies, they conceived the idea of detaching their country from the Haitian government. Gaspard Hernandez, for his part, having means through his family, went abroad and, among other lands, visited the Côte-Ferme, where his ideas grew stronger. Back at Santo-Domingo, he spread them as far as he could, but with great prudence, for the Haitian police were very watchful with regard to the inhabitants of the East. Yet his former pupils and he had not boldness enough to attempt an enterprise of such greatness; their project stood still. (**) They had, however, succeeded in winning to it Don Jose Dieso, Don Félix Mercenario, Don Vicente Duartes and many others; but what was needed to raise the cry of deliverance and separation, they did not have!(f)(g)

Meanwhile the news of the taking up of arms at Praslin, 27 January 1843, reached Santo-Domingo. Immediately afterwards, most of the Haitians of that town, hostile to Boyer, undertook to rise against general Carrié, commander of the Arrondissement, with the aim of seconding the rising of Praslin, at whose head was, as we know, the chef de bataillon Charles Hérard the elder, surnamed Rivière. The Dominicans, for their part, members of the conspiracy whose aim was to proclaim independence, hastened to rally to the Haitian opposition, so as to be able to carry out their project under cover of the troubles that, in their opinion, the demonstration of the Haitian patriots against President Boyer must produce. (*)