Mr. Peck to Mr. Seward.
Sir: By a vessel which leaves for New York to-night, I have an opportunity to inform you that this government received this morning the important intelligence that the people of the city of Santo Domingo have risen against President Biaz, and put him and his brother (or brothers) into prison preparatory to sending them out of the country.
I am sorry to have to say that with the fall of Biaz, if he has fallen, this government has had too much to do. It is a well authenticated fact that during a visit which he made here a month since, Cabral was supplied by an outside government’s agent with some ten thousand dollars, (gold value,) with which means he has been operating against President Biaz. I fear that President Geffrard will some time regret the example which he has thus set his Dominican neighbors.
Affairs in Santo Domingo are said to be in desperate confusion. A party which wishes to make Santiago the capital; another which desires to keep the government at Santo Domingo city; a third which strives to put Pimental into the presidency; and two others which favor the ambition of other leaders; such are the threads which are tangling into a seemingly hopeless knot.
There is in this republic a lull in the political excitement which has long been so active. The great fire here, the fall in cotton and coffee which has been going on for some weeks, and other circumstances, had, before the war news from Europe was received, depressed business to a level which it had never before reached, and the forbidden news brought by the last European packet sunk it yet lower. General bankruptcy seems to impend; the government is in great straits for money, and many people, even of the better class, are suffering actual want; with affairs in such a state, politics are for the time forgotten. But persons in the revolutionary interest say that the calm is only the lull before the storm; they even go so far as to assert that Salnave’s forces will make a simultaneous assault on Cape Haytien and this city by the last of this month.
I am, sir, very respectfully, your obedient servant,
Hon. William H. Seward, Secretary of State, Washington, D. C.