A TRIPARTITE INTERVENTION IN HAYTI, J851 



By Feedekic L. Paxson 



It has generally been the policy of the United States to avoid 

 entangling alliances with the Powers of Europe and to act independ- 

 ently of them in all matters of national interest. At times the 

 United States has seen fit to act in co-operation with the European 

 States, but in most cases this action has been independent, on paral- 

 lel lines, rather than in combination with them. One of the rare in- 

 stances in which the United States has deviated from this policy, oc- 

 curred in 1851, when, in conjunction with Great Britian and France, 

 an intervention was made in the affairs of Hayti and San Domingo. 

 Without its futility and petty humiliations the intervention would 

 have been sufficiently impolitic; but fortunately for the repute of the 

 Fillmore administration it has gone unnoticed by the historians of 

 the period. 



With the various governments on the island of Santo Domingo 

 the relations of the United States have always been Intimate. From 

 the time of the slave revolts and massacres of the period of the 

 French Revolution, through the filibustering period, through the days 

 of the Panama Congress and the anti-slavery petitions, through the 

 era of annexation schemes, until the present day there has hardly 

 been a five-year period in which some phase of its Dominican 

 policy was not actively before the Department of State. Only too 

 often the same Department has been unable to keep the questions 

 from acquiring a popular standing until it became necessary to base 

 their solution upon political considerations. 



The island of Santo Domingo had been the key to the colonial 

 empire in America which it had been Napolean's ambition to erect. 

 And even after he had given evidence that he had relinquished the 

 ambition he could not bring himself to surrender the island to its 



