US Black Emigrants and the “Invisible Institution” in the Dominican Republic, 1850s–60s

This paper examines British Wesleyan missionary letters from the 1850s-1860s to understand the evolution of US Black emigrant religious communities on the Dominican Republic’s northern coast. In the 1820s upwards of 13,000 Black people emigrated from the United States to Haiti during the period of Unification (1822-1844) when Haiti governed the whole island of Hispaniola. During this same period, the London Wesleyan Missionary Society sent missionaries to Haiti where they evangelized to US Black emigrants living on the island’s northern coast. Missionary stations at Cap-Haïtien, Puerto Plata, and Samaná formed part of the society’s “Haiti circuit.” However, in 1844 the Dominican Republic separated from Haiti, and a few years later Wesleyan missions at Puerto Plata and Samaná were attached to the Wesleyans’ “Bahamas circuit.” Historians have yet to analyze Bahamian records for information on the Dominican Republic. Nevertheless, Bahamian records reveal that by the mid-1860s Wesleyan stations in Puerto Plata and Samaná operated as de facto autonomous Black religious spaces. This state of affairs was not by design. In 1861, Spain annexed the Dominican Republic, and soon thereafter Dominicans rebelled in a war to restore the independent republic. During the War of Restoration (1863-1865), British missionaries and many African American parishioners fled the island. After the war, African Americans returned to the ruins of their former churches in Puerto Plata and Samaná, but the white missionaries did not. In their absence, African American preachers led these Protestant congregations. Analyzing Wesleyan documents from before and after Spanish annexation, this paper examines African American religious history in the Dominican Republic. It argues that US Black emigrants in the Dominican Republic formed the country’s first permanent Protestant congregations, creating an ‘invisible institution’ that foreign white travelers, British missionaries, and future historians have since overlooked.