6

OCCUPATION

In December 1914, the USS Machias dropped anchor in the harbor of Port-au-Prince and a detachment of U.S. marines disembarked. They proceeded to carry out what can only be described as an international armed robbery. Entering the Banque Nationale d’Haïti, they removed from the vaults $500,000 worth of gold belonging to the Haitian government—the equivalent of $11 million today. Then, in broad daylight, they took the gold back to the harbor, loaded it onto their gunboat, and shipped it to New York. Louis Borno, the Haitian minister of foreign relations, denounced the seizure as a “criminal act,” but no one—neither bank employees, state officials, nor Haitian soldiers and policemen—dared step in to stop it.1

The official justification for the raid was that the seized gold might be required to cover Haiti’s debts to U.S. bankers. The Haitian government indeed owed large sums of money to banks in many countries, including the United States. In 1883 Haiti had at last paid off the “double debt” contracted with France in 1825—both the indemnity levied in return for recognition and all the loans it took out in order to cover that indemnity—but it had taken out many other loans in the intervening years. The Haitian government, however, had been assiduous in making all its debt payments as required. In fact, they were so committed to paying off their loans that they found themselves with little money to do anything else: by the 1914–15 budget year, a staggering 80 percent of all the money coming in through customs and taxes was being immediately spent on debt service. Given the situation, Haiti had little choice but to keep taking out yet more loans just to keep functioning. As this cycle continued, it was increasingly easy for foreign bankers to claim that there was a danger they would eventually not be repaid. That was the ultimate message of the Machias incident: the Haitian government, the United States had concluded, could no longer be trusted with its own money.2

The raid was the culmination of a process that, over the previous years, had placed Americans firmly in charge of Haiti’s national bank. In 1909, at the urging of the State Department, two U.S. banks had purchased a majority stake in the institution from the French, and they soon established complete control over its operations. Roger Farnham, the vice president of the National City Bank in New York, took on the additional title of vice president for the Banque Nationale, and the French tricolor that had flown in front of the bank since its founding was soon replaced with the Stars and Stripes. In a way, the marines who landed in December 1914 simply carried out a transfer between the two institutions that Farnham managed.3

The shift in power came as the United States increasingly established itself as Haiti’s main trading partner. In 1870, 46 percent of Haiti’s imports came from France, and just under 40 percent from the United States. By 1905, however, France accounted for only about 10 percent and the United States for 71 percent of all the country’s imports. As a French diplomat noted, many Haitians were alarmed by the change, seeing the Americans not just as foreign whites but as “those whites who had the most outrageous scorn for black people.” These opponents of U.S. power urged the country to forge trade alliances instead with smaller European nations. (“What Haitians find seductive about Belgium,” a Haitian official explained to a French minister in 1910, “is that they don’t have an armed navy.”) But most Haitians understood what Anténor Firmin had argued in his writings: the ultimate question was not whether Americans would dominate trade in the region—that, after a time, became a certainty—but how deeply the United States would come to control Haiti itself.4

The United States, for its part, was eager to solidify its grip on the Caribbean nation. Indeed, with Farnham in control, the Banque Nationale was at the center of a rather cynical plan: to bring on a financial emergency so that the United States would be called on to resolve it. A few months before the USS Machias carried out its raid, the U.S. ambassador in Haiti told the State Department that the Banque Nationale was considering ending all advances of funds to the Haitian government. When “confronted by such a crisis,” he explained, Haiti would have no recourse but to “ask for the assistance of the United States in adjusting its financial tangle and American supervision of the customs houses would result.” The United States had already taken over direct supervision of customs collection in the Dominican Republic, and on several occasions over the course of 1914 it proposed a similar arrangement to the Haitians. Under such an agreement, the entire financial system of Haiti would be directly in the hands of the United States, which would collect the government’s receipts, pay off its debts, and oversee the entire budget.5

Haitian leaders, unsurprisingly, were not eager to sign off on such a blatant surrender of sovereignty. But they knew that thanks to its control of the bank, the United States was in a strong position to pressure the Haitian government to do its will. Solon Menos, the Haitian ambassador in Washington, D.C., warned his friend Louis Borno in early 1915 that “through a system of progressive strangulation” the United States aimed to force Haiti’s government to “reach out for the chains.” Any misstep, Menos wrote, would be used as a pretext by the United States to intervene. American troops had already taken the government’s reserves from the Banque Nationale; it wouldn’t take much for another detachment of marines to assume control of the customs houses.6

A few weeks later, Menos again wrote to Borno from Washington. He was alarmed by a small but telling detail about his interactions with the State Department: the U.S. officials were getting increasingly jovial and jokey with him. They mentioned the political violence in the country with what Menos felt was a certain undisguised glee. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan informed him one day that rebels had taken the town of St. Marc and suggested once again that it was time for Haiti to accept the need for U.S. control. Menos understood what was happening, but he saw no way out. Neither did Borno. Indeed, like all of Haiti’s political class, Borno would soon find himself part of a nation under occupation, its government taking orders from the United States Marines.7

*   *   *

The U.S. tradesmen who did business in Haiti throughout the nineteenth century were never as connected with Haitian communities as the merchants from Germany and other European countries, who often married into Haitian families to circumvent constitutional limitations on foreign ownership of property. But during the early years of the twentieth century, several U.S. companies did manage to make inroads into Haiti by gaining government contracts for agricultural and infrastructure projects. American corporations participated in the expansion of the wharf in Port-au-Prince and helped to establish the country’s first electric company. Most important, they became involved with Haiti’s nascent railroads.

In 1905, Haitian businessmen had created the Compagnie Nationale des Chemins de Fer d’Haïti—the National Railroad Company—with the goal of building a railway between Port-au-Prince and Le Cap. They hoped that the railroad line would integrate the agricultural regions of the country’s north, northwest, and west, particularly the Artibonite Valley. The project ran out of money, however, and in 1910 a U.S. investor named James P. MacDonald acquired the company. Desperate to get the railroad constructed with foreign capital, the Haitian government granted him a series of major concessions. For fifty years, MacDonald was to have exclusive control of a twelve-mile-wide swath of land on either side of the railway line, where he proposed to create banana plantations. He also secured a monopoly on all future banana exports from the country. From the perspective of the Haitian government, the deal seemed like a remarkable opportunity to develop a new export, allowing Haiti to take advantage of the boom in banana consumption that was under way in North America.8

For the rural residents who lived in the region, however, the plan represented something very different: a profound threat to their carefully sustained and cherished autonomy. Generations of families and individuals had built their lives on the land granted to MacDonald, growing high-quality coffee, cultivating livestock, and harvesting acajou and other woods for export. Now, the same rich soil that made agriculture so productive in the area attracted the attention of foreign investors. MacDonald’s project aimed to replace the local way of life with a new version of an old but still vividly remembered system: monoculture plantation production for export. There would be bananas rather than sugar, and wage workers instead of slaves, but the overall effect remained the same: if the plan succeeded, many Haitians would be transformed from independent farmers into field laborers toiling for a foreign master.9

The dispossession process began in earnest in 1911. Many peasants in the valley could not show legal title to the land on which they lived and were easily expelled. But even those who had titles were often dispossessed by the authorities who supported MacDonald’s project. People were ejected from their homes without compensation, and their houses were razed or burned. Land prices in the region spiraled upward, so buying new land was nearly impossible for those who had lost theirs. Soon, desperate farmers began fighting back. With cries of “Down with MacDonald!” and “Down with the railroad!” they attacked the buildings of the U.S. company, destroying sawmills and lumberyards, smashing tools, and trying to intimidate Haitian workers into abandoning the construction sites.10

Popular anger created both a challenge and an opportunity for regional leaders. The situation could easily have led to intraregional conflicts between those deprived of land and those who still had it. Instead, however, local elites were largely able to channel the anger of the dispossessed into uprisings against the central authorities in Port-au-Prince. Military and political leaders in the north of the country declared that the poverty in the region was the result of its oppression by those in charge of the Haitian state, who were bowing too easily to U.S. influence. Gathering armies of followers anxious about losing land to outsiders, officers with presidential ambitions promised that once in power they would stop the dispossessions. Fueled by the peasants’ fury and fears, the insurrections sweeping across Haiti grew in frequency and intensity. Rural armies became a constant presence in the countryside, foraging for food and looting properties. In some areas, rival bands burned houses in towns that had supported their enemies. As the unrest spread, the farmers in the afflicted regions paid the steepest price: many lost homes and crops to passing armies, women became victims of rape by marauding soldiers, and men were strong-armed into fighting and never returned.11

In Port-au-Prince, meanwhile, presidents followed each other in rapid succession. Some met with a violent end: Cincinnatus Leconte, who took over the presidency at the head of an insurrection in 1911, was sleeping in the National Palace less than a year later when a mysterious explosion ripped through the building, killing him and many of his followers. Other presidents, dogged by insurrections, resigned or fled into exile. Over the course of four years, from 1911 through early 1915, the Haitian presidency passed through the hands of seven different men, and the internal struggles left the government in shambles. Watching the disintegration of the Haitian state from Washington, President Wilson wrote to his secretary of state in April 1915 that “the time to act is now.”12

The president of Haiti at the time of Wilson’s message was Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, a son of the earlier president Tiresius Antoine Sam (whose abdication in 1902 had set the stage for the clash between Firmin and Nord Alexis). Like other Haitian leaders during this turbulent period, Vilbrun Sam found himself in a nearly impossible situation. With the Banque Nationale under American control and refusing to fund the government, the Haitian state was bankrupt. The pressure to make a deal with the United States was therefore constantly mounting. But there was also loud and passionate resistance to accommodating the United States in any form—a sentiment that was shared by many members of the Haitian parliament and the larger urban elite as well as by the rebel armies in the countryside.

Among the leaders of this anti-U.S. movement was Rosalvo Bobo, who had served in the cabinet of Vilbrun Sam’s predecessor. Bobo was widely traveled and well educated, having studied in London and Paris and earned degrees in both medicine and law. He agreed that U.S. investment in Haiti was a necessary basis for economic advancement, but he vehemently opposed any surrender of control by his government to a foreign power. By July 1915, with strong support in the countryside and the capital, Bobo was on the verge of taking control of Port-au-Prince and overthrowing President Sam. Facing imminent defeat, Sam’s military commander tried to cow the opposition with a gruesome act: he executed 167 political prisoners. Many of the victims were members of prominent Haitian families, and the city of Port-au-Prince erupted. Fearing for his life, Sam tried to take refuge in the French legation, but a crowd dragged him into the street and tore him to pieces.13

These bloody events provided the perfect pretext for a long-meditated U.S. intervention in the country. As Haitian historian Roger Gaillard puts it, the United States simply took preexisting plans for occupation out of a file drawer and, “having adjusted them to the circumstances, put them into application.” Vivid depictions of Sam’s death cemented the idea that Haiti was in desperate need of foreign control. Lost from the story, of course, was the way in which the pressures placed on Haiti by American banks and investors had pushed the country toward chaos in the first place. As Gaillard notes, the United States had for several years helped to “ripen” political conflict in Haiti “according to its taste and its project.” All that was left in 1915 was to pick the fruit.14

On the morning of July 28, 1915, the USS Washington steamed into the harbor of Port-au-Prince. Many Haitians recognized the ship, which had been extensively described by the local press, and they were well acquainted with its specifications—its tonnage, its 20 cannon, its complement of nearly 900 men. Some had seen the ship lurking in the harbor on previous occasions. This time, however, it had come to stay.15

*   *   *

The U.S. occupation of Haiti was part of a broader sweep of American intervention in the Caribbean. In 1898 the United States had occupied Cuba and Puerto Rico, and soon thereafter it took over the construction of the Panama Canal, which was completed in 1914. These developments made the long-coveted Haitian port of Môle Saint-Nicolas even more important strategically for the U.S. Navy, which drew up a thorough plan for seizing it in case of a “military emergency.” At the same time, with the outbreak of World War I, U.S. strategists became particularly concerned about the presence of Germans in the region. They knew that Haiti’s powerful and well-established community of German merchants had occasionally bankrolled revolts in the country and had repeatedly called on their home government to back up their claims with gunboats. U.S. officials feared that it would not be too difficult for Germany to take another step and annex part of Haiti for use as a military base. Such concerns about German influence in the Caribbean helped justify U.S. involvement in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, as well as the U.S. purchase of the Danish West Indies in 1916.16

Fears of German expansion in the region turned out to be exaggerated: the German government does not seem to have had any plan to use its merchants to take control in Haiti. But in a time of looming war, such worries provided political ammunition for people who had a different reason to push for U.S. intervention in Haiti: businessmen interested in constructing plantations there. They found a receptive audience in the State Department, which had no in-house expertise in Haitian affairs and therefore turned to bankers and corporate leaders with experience in the country. In 1912, for instance, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan summoned John H. Allen, then president of the Banque Nationale, to explain Haiti to him—though he doesn’t seem to have learned very much. “Think of it!” Bryan exclaimed after the meeting. “Niggers speaking French!”17

One of those tapped for advice by the State Department was the railroad magnate James MacDonald, who told them that what Haiti really needed was employment. This, he argued, was something that could be provided only by outside investors constructing agricultural plantations in the country. Representatives from the United Fruit Company, a powerful player in Caribbean and Central American affairs, offered a similar perspective, informing the State Department that only an occupation by the United States could end the political conflict in Haiti and thereby open the way for business. To become a valuable economic satellite, like Cuba, Haiti was said to require massive corporate investment; such investment required political stability; and stability, U.S. officials concluded, could come only through a military occupation.18

One of the most persuasive and forceful advocates for intervention was Roger Farnham, the vice president of the National City Bank in New York and the Banque Nationale d’Haïti. As of 1913, Farnham also assumed the presidency of the National Railroad Company, which took over MacDonald’s earlier railroad projects. As Farnham saw it, Haiti’s problem was that an uncaring elite were oppressing and ignoring a poor population, which desperately needed U.S. assistance. He explained to Secretary of State Bryan that the political system in Haiti “constitutes a certain form of slavery for the masses, and no helping hand has been stretched out to the common people in an effort to improve their condition.” In March 1915, Farnham warned that unless the U.S. government did something to tamp down the chaos in Haiti, American companies would no longer do business there. He urged Bryan to take control of Haiti’s customs houses as a way of establishing a climate of financial stability conducive to economic development. Bryan was convinced, and helped convince President Wilson, who in any case had already decided that “the United States cannot consent to stand by and permit revolutionary conditions constantly to exist” in the Caribbean nation. Wilson did have a few misgivings after the fact: shortly after dispatching the marines to Haiti, he expressed concerns that the United States did not have “the legal authority to do what we apparently ought to do.” But, he concluded, in the end there was “nothing for it but to take the bull by the horns and restore order.”19

The strategic and economic arguments for the intervention were accompanied by a constant drumbeat of claims that Haitians were incapable of self-governance and needed to be saved from their own barbarism. The historian Hans Schmidt sums up the attitude: “The United States, as the self-appointed trustee of civilization in the Caribbean, was obligated to maintain minimal standards of decency and morality.” For Haitians, of course, such claims rang rather false. As the Haitian intellectual Dantès Bellegarde would pointedly note in 1929, during the years of the occupation, lynching was commonplace throughout the American South. The butchery of World War I, meanwhile, represented a mass display of savagery that made the civil wars of Haiti look comparatively mild. And as a U.S. congressman later observed, the United States was also hardly a model when it came to political violence: like Haiti, it had seen three presidents assassinated since 1862, not to mention having had its own cataclysmic civil war.20

In 1915, though, U.S. critics of intervention were an isolated minority. Indeed, many in Washington were barely aware that it was happening: Wilson had ordered the marines to Haiti without consulting Congress. It would take several years before opposition to the occupation gathered steam in the United States. In the meantime, U.S. plans went ahead with a clarity of purpose rooted in racist certainty. As Secretary of State Robert Lansing, who replaced Bryan in 1915, explained in a letter: “The experience of Liberia and Haiti show [sic] that the African race are devoid of any capacity for political organization and lack genius for government. Unquestionably there is in them an inherent tendency to revert to savagery and to cast aside the shackles of civilization which are irksome to their physical nature.”21

In July 1915, after the violent death of President Sam finally gave the U.S. government the pretext it had been waiting for, Lansing would effectively become the next ruler of Haiti. It was under his watchful eye that, as an article in Time magazine strikingly put it, the marines came ashore from their armored cruiser and “began forcibly soothing everybody.”22

*   *   *

“It hurt. It stunk.” So Private Faustin Wirkus, who later wrote a popular account of his time in Haiti, described his first moments in the country. “We were not welcome. We could feel it as distinctly as we could smell the rot along the gutters.” The Haitians lining the streets watched the marines with impassive expressions, taking stock of the new arrivals. “There was not a smile in sight. The opaque eyes in the black faces were not friendly. They seemed as indifferent as the lenses of cameras.”23

The first marines to step off the USS Washington—330 of them—disembarked at Bizoton, to the south of Port-au-Prince, with orders to enter the capital and secure the port and commercial district. The marines were unsure what awaited them, but they were lucky: neither the Haitian army nor the general population tried to fight back as they took control of the city. A man who saw the Washington arrive off the coast later recounted to the historian Roger Gaillard how he had watched boats carry the Americans ashore, “rifles in hand.” “Everyone fled,” he recalled. “Me too. You just had to see them, with their weapons, their swaggering and ostentatiously menacing attitude, to immediately understand both that they had come to hurt our country and that resistance was impossible.” The next morning the man returned to the harbor, where he saw more troops disembarking. “I understood then that a new phase of our history was beginning. I could have nothing to do with these people.” He fled to the woods, one among many who decided that if they couldn’t fight they could at least disappear, becoming a new kind of maroons.24

As the marines filtered from Bizoton to central Port-au-Prince, gunshots echoed throughout the city. But they weren’t directed at the intruders: gunfire was the traditional way of celebrating the arrival of a new president. Residents of the capital who were unaware of the U.S. invasion under way assumed that with the death of Vilbrun Sam, the popular Rosalvo Bobo would soon arrive and take over the National Palace. Two marines did die that night, one of them the nephew of the prominent labor leader Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor; according to their captain, they were victims of “fanatics” who had fired on them from behind bushes and trees as they approached. In fact, though, as Haitian witnesses reported and the U.S. military later confirmed, the two marines were victims of friendly fire. Other U.S. troops, nervous in the dark, unfamiliar with the surroundings, had shot them by mistake. As for the Haitian army, there was one soldier, a young man named Joseph Pierre, who refused to either retreat or surrender when confronted by the marines. He was gunned down at his post, becoming a legendary martyr: the only one to stand up against the United States that night.25

In the next weeks, more U.S. troops arrived from the mainland and from the nearby base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. By late August, when a 300-strong artillery unit disembarked, there were two thousand American soldiers in the country. Having taken control of Port-au-Prince and Le Cap, they proceeded to occupy the other port towns. In each one, they seized the customs houses and began to disarm and disband the Haitian army units. Haitians had no way to get clear information about the precise intentions of the U.S. government, but it was clear that the marines were embarking on something much more extensive than just a simple operation to reestablish order and to protect U.S. interests after the unrest surrounding President Sam.26

Among those who watched the influx of marines were two young boys, part of the generation who would grow up under U.S. occupation. The poet Carl Brouard, who was thirteen at the time, later recalled how “melancholy widened our eyes” as he and his friends saw their country occupied. And the politician Roger Dorsinville, looking back on the arrival of the marines many decades later, remembered similar emotions. “I understood the newness of their presence by the stupefaction on the faces and the silence suddenly all around me,” he wrote. Dorsinville watched the adults he knew sink into “stupor” and then “resignation.” “The white soldiers had come to defile our independence: where were the ancestors? Finally the ancestors were no more.”27

While much of the population watched and waited, unsure what was happening, Haiti’s political leaders began trying to figure out a way to negotiate with the Americans. The historian Roger Gaillard summarizes their cautiously hopeful perspective: “‘It’s only a punitive expedition,’ they thought. ‘All in all, we probably deserved it. Now we just need to tread softly, demonstrate goodwill, promise not to do it again, and these gentlemen will leave.’”28

But who, precisely, was in charge of Haiti? Rosalvo Bobo, who commanded large armies throughout the country, was Sam’s obvious successor, and a committee of prominent Haitians in Port-au-Prince was already preparing to name him the next president. But on August 6, Admiral William Caperton, the commander of the American forces in Haiti, had summoned Bobo to a meeting aboard a U.S. ship in the harbor of Port-au-Prince. The admiral’s chief of staff, well aware that Bobo had opposed U.S. control over Haiti during the previous years, had informed him that Bobo was an “idealist and a dreamer” and “utterly unsuited to be Haiti’s president.” Caperton commanded Bobo to give up any intention of taking power by force and to disband his troops. If Bobo did so, Caperton said, the United States would allow him to become a candidate for president in a new election.29

Bobo agreed to the conditions, assuming that given his widespread popular support, he would not have trouble winning an election. Caperton, however, had other plans; he had already begun looking for an alternative candidate who would be more tractable in office. His first contact was J. N. Léger, a prominent political leader who had previously served as minister to the United States. But Léger refused to become a mere figurehead. “I am for Haiti, not for the United States,” he declared. “Haiti’s president will have to accept directions and orders from the United States and I propose to keep myself in a position where I will be able to defend Haiti’s interests.” Undeterred, Caperton approached another Haitian politician, Philippe Sudre Dartiguenave, who proved to be more pliable. As Caperton reported to Josephus Daniels, the secretary of the navy—who, along with Lansing, was overseeing Haitian policy—Dartiguenave understood that his country must accept all the conditions set by the United States, and he was willing to use his influence to make sure that others agreed.30

Having secured his candidate, Caperton went to work pressuring the National Assembly delegates to select Dartiguenave rather than Bobo. As an enticement, he declared that the U.S. military would stand behind those congressmen who worked with them, capturing and executing any rebels who attacked them. In a special session, the senators and deputies elected Dartiguenave with a large majority. His appointment was celebrated symbolically in August by a call-and-response cannonade between a U.S. gunship and a Haitian coastal battery. Many among the elite in fact welcomed the prospect of a bright new beginning after decades of turmoil, seeing the occupation as an opportunity to end Haiti’s perpetual civil wars and pursue economic development. In mid-September, marine officers and Haitian political leaders came together for a cordial lunch at a prestigious club, the Cercle Bellevue.31

With Dartiguenave in power, the U.S. government rapidly proceeded to the next order of business: drafting a convention between the United States and Haiti that would establish an official basis for the marine presence in the country. The document they came up with had many familiar elements: the United States was to take control of Haitian customs houses and the state treasury, and the Haitian government was to promise not to cede or rent any portion of its territory to another foreign power. But the new proposal also included some additional stipulations. The marines were to create a new military structure that would replace the existing Haitian army. And the convention specified that appointments and nominations for all major Haitian state offices would be subject to approval by the president of the United States.32

Admiral Caperton wanted the convention to be signed as a treaty between two sovereign countries, legitimized by the approval of Haiti’s president and both houses of the Haitian Congress. He knew that most Haitian politicians were already on the side of the Americans. Their opponents—though they included such prominent figures as Pauléus Sannon, the minister of foreign relations, who insisted that the proposal imposed too many conditions on Haiti—were a relatively small and isolated group. And as the negotiations began, Caperton sought to reassure any doubters. In an interview with a Haitian journalist on September 2, Caperton explained that the U.S. occupation was taking control of the customs houses only so that they could carry out their benevolent mission to “re-establish order, peace, and security for all in the country,” and to provide employment to those who were “suffering.” He wanted everyone to know that the United States had “the best of intentions for the good of Haiti” and had no plans to involve themselves in its long-term financial affairs. As soon as the “irregularities” that had been practiced under the previous regime were eliminated, Caperton declared, the Haitian government would once again have control of its treasury.33

The day after this interview, however, Haitians found posters on the walls of Port-au-Prince with a different kind of message from Caperton. The government of Haiti, the admiral announced, was facing “conditions it is incapable of controlling.” Therefore, in order to “preserve fundamental human rights,” Caperton was declaring martial law in Port-au-Prince and all the other areas currently under the control of the marines. The police of Port-au-Prince were placed under the direct supervision of a U.S. officer. The local commanders of the U.S. Marines would be dictating regulations as needed to assure order in the territory.34

As part of the new martial law regime, Caperton moved to muzzle the opposition press. On September 4, Haitian journalists and newspaper editors were summoned by a marine captain to a press conference. There they were told that “the situation of the press, under martial law, is exactly the same as in the United States,” which meant that “there will be no attacks on freedom of the press.” Nevertheless, the captain went on, the publication of “false or incendiary propaganda” attacking either the government of the United States or the government of Haiti was outlawed. The publication of “false, indecent or obscene” articles was also banned, as were “signed or unsigned” letters to the editor that might undermine public order. Anyone deemed guilty of violating these rules would be brought in front of a military tribunal and could face imprisonment. As Haitian journalists would soon find out, the U.S. officers were ready to enforce the new regime. Just a few weeks after the conference, the marines ordered a newspaper called Haïti Intégrale to be shut down and all its published copies to be impounded. When the editors refused, they were arrested, along with the newspaper’s printer, by a detachment of marines, and were only able to avoid jail time by paying a fine to the Americans.35

Ernest Chauvet, editor in chief of the prominent newspaper Le Nouvelliste, was so taken aback by the actions of the marines that he traveled to Washington, hoping to speak to President Wilson directly. Chauvet had previously lived in the United States and was, as he wrote to Wilson, an “admirer” of the Americans. He had long worked to forge closer economic ties between the two countries, convinced that U.S. companies could help Haiti develop. “Above all,” he explained to Wilson, “I was persuaded of the desire of the American people (and especially of its government) to act with fair play towards those with whom it has relationships.” Because of this, Chauvet was convinced that the United States was making a terrible mistake in its approach to the occupation. If the United States had come, as it declared, to help “suffering humanity” in Haiti, then it had to “respect to the end” the desires of the people they wished to assist. Chauvet pleaded with Wilson not to impose the convention through force, warning that otherwise the occupation would end in bloodshed.36

As Chauvet waited in a hotel in Washington, however, he received no response. No one was listening. Even African American leaders denied his logic. Booker T. Washington, for example, published an article in which he celebrated the occupation of Haiti as the only way to civilize the blacks of that country. Likewise, W.E.B. Du Bois, whom Chauvet met in New York, told him that African Americans could do nothing for the Haitians, and that the current situation was beneficial for Haiti. Du Bois’s only intervention was a letter to Wilson urging him to send black soldiers and officers to Haiti rather than white ones, in order not to irritate the population. As the Haitian ambassador in Washington wrote to a friend back home, there was little hope of changing U.S. policy. Nobody was going to take up the “disinterested defense of a weak people.” As things stood, the ambassador concluded, “we must look only to ourselves to save the situation, and can count on no one else to break the spell.”37

In Haiti, Pauléus Sannon, having similarly given up hope of reasoning with the United States, resigned from his position as the minister of foreign affairs. The proposed convention, he wrote, attacked the “national dignity” of his country, deeply undermining its sovereignty “to the profit of the United States.” Even without the benefit of the convention, Sannon noted, the United States had already declared martial law. What would the Americans do once their power over Haiti was “consecrated” and they were free to invoke all the “exorbitant privileges” specified in the document? He could not in good conscience remain part of a government that had so easily surrendered its sovereignty to a foreign power.38

Sannon was replaced by Louis Borno, who had been the minister of foreign affairs during the Machias incident. A colleague later described Borno as someone who “sincerely believed that an American apprenticeship was necessary for our political and administrative education.” The choice facing his country, as Borno saw it, was either to “disappear permanently into abjection, famine, and blood, or redeem itself with the help of the United States.” He entered eagerly into the negotiations, and on September 16, after a few minor revisions, he signed the convention on behalf of President Dartiguenave. The agreement still had to be ratified by the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, however, and Dartiguenave and the U.S. authorities put heavy pressure on the deputies to sign. They used a simple and effective technique: since the United States now controlled the treasury, they stopped paying the officials, making it clear that the money would start flowing again once the convention was signed. In early October, the Chamber of Deputies duly ratified the document, with only a small minority voting against. One despairing member, resigning in protest after the vote, described the convention as “moral slavery” and lambasted those around him who had just “re-forged” the chains that the Haitians had broken a century before.39

The Haitian Senate proved the toughest for Dartiguenave to convince. As the debate dragged on, everything seemed suspended in Port-au-Prince: in the words of one Haitian journalist, if you didn’t want to deal with something, you just had to say that you would take care of it after the convention was signed. Then, after more than a month of discussion, the Senate committee examining the convention issued a report stating that the treaty was unconstitutional and could not be ratified. As the committee saw it, the proposed convention violated the constitution’s first article, which proclaimed Haiti to be “one and indivisible, absolutely free, sovereign and independent.” “There are sacred limits that the Haitian people cannot exceed,” the report declared.40

Still, the bulk of Haiti’s cultural and political elite disagreed with the senatorial committee. The popular singer August de Pradines, known as Candio, wrote a song ridiculing those politicians who “preferred the Cacos to the convention.” The term “Caco”—which seems to have originally been derived from a small, fierce species of bird known in Kreyòl as the Taco—was used to describe the rural rebels who had carried out revolts during the previous years, and Candio’s implication was clear. If the United States had occupied the country, it was only because Haitians had spent so much time fighting among themselves. Now there was nothing to do but to sign the convention, which would bring relief to an exhausted country. “The people will finally be able to breathe a little,” Candio announced. “They are crushed. They are hungry.” He spoke for many who believed that the politicians should have done something to save Haiti before the Americans came; now there was no point in complaining. “What?” one lawyer demanded in a newspaper editorial. “You are facing a military regime, the territory is occupied, and you have the naiveté to talk about sovereignty and the constitution?”41

On November 11, just a few days after its committee’s report, the Senate voted to ratify the convention by a vote of 26 to 10. President Dartiguenave hailed the accord as “the most important event in our national history” and the “consecration of a new era.” It would be, he proclaimed, the “foundation of national independence.” Dessalines, presumably, turned over in his grave.42

The convention formally declared the Haitian government incapable of addressing its financial and military challenges and gave the United States sweeping power over the country’s institutions. It created two innocuously named but tremendously powerful positions, receiver general and financial counselor, which would officially be filled by the Haitian president but with all the candidates nominated by the American president. The agreement also created a new military and police force, the Gendarmerie, to be run by U.S. officers appointed in the same way.

At the heart of the convention was a blinding paradox. The treaty presented the United States as the defender of Haiti’s sovereignty, yet at the same moment that this sovereignty was confirmed it was almost entirely eviscerated. The convention prohibited the Haitian government from signing a treaty with any foreign power that would diminish the country’s independence. But the document in which these words were included had itself reduced that independence to virtually nothing.43

*   *   *

As the central government in Port-au-Prince lurched toward an agreement with the Americans, the regional officers and soldiers of the Haitian army observed the proceedings with wariness and dismay. The country’s culture, after all, had long emphasized the danger that whites might one day come back and try to gain control. Now the army watched in disbelief as their government allowed precisely that to happen. Faced with acquiescence on the part of the politicians, and exhausted from several years of intense internal conflict, most soldiers grudgingly accepted that they had little choice but to subordinate themselves to the arriving marines. For many, however, it was a devastating experience. One officer in Dondon later recalled that, when he told his troops that they would soon have U.S. marines as their officers, his men cried “tears of powerlessness.” A corporal threw down his gun, proclaiming that he would rather die than be commanded by foreign whites.44

A few Haitian officers did try to take a more active stand against the United States. One of them was Charlemagne Péralte, the ranking commander in the town of Léogâne, an important hub south of Port-au-Prince. In mid-August, when a marine officer came to announce that the town was to be occupied, Péralte refused to hand it over without an official order from the Haitian president. Though a detachment of marines had already arrived by train from Port-au-Prince, Péralte told them to stay in the train station and had his soldiers surround the station so they wouldn’t leave. Even with a U.S. warship hovering off the nearby coast, Péralte insisted that he was still in command and kept the Haitian flag flying over Léogâne headquarters.45

Péralte’s refusal to hand over the town to the marines was courageous but mostly symbolic. President Dartiguenave soon fired him and replaced him with a more tractable officer, and Péralte packed up his belongings and went home. But he continued to wear his Haitian army uniform and, according to one account, ordered his soldiers to bury their guns before the U.S. marines could confiscate them. “You all accept working with the Americans,” he chided his fellow soldiers. “I never will.” As one of his friends later recalled, Péralte announced before he left: “I will not stay under the domination of the whites. You’ll hear news of me.”46

In mid-September 1915, another Haitian officer, Benoît Rameau, tried to drive the marines out of the town of Gonaïves. Rameau, once a domestic servant, had risen through the ranks of the army thanks to his support of regional insurrections in the previous decades, and he saw the arriving forces as a threat to his own position and his town. When the marines first arrived, Rameau wrote to the U.S. consul in Port-au-Prince explaining that he had no wish to fight the American troops but could not accept their control over his town. “For almost 112 years, we have been a free and independent people. Our sweat and our courage gave us our independence. In that time, we have never been governed by a head of state chosen by a foreign power.” Receiving no response to his letter, Rameau decided to communicate instead by force of arms. He sent out a proclamation calling on all Haitians to join together and resist the intruders who had come “to re-establish slavery.”47

A detachment of marines attacked Rameau’s followers, and the disparity in weaponry between the two groups became strikingly clear. Over the next few weeks, Rameau’s troops were repeatedly routed, and he was eventually captured and imprisoned. But this defeat did not end the fighting. Indeed, as the U.S. occupation became more firmly entrenched, the tradition of the Cacos—rebels in the countryside rising up against the central government in Port-au-Prince—became adapted, quite smoothly, into guerrilla resistance against the American forces. Near the town of Grande-Rivière-du-Nord, for example, the officer Josaphat Jean-Joseph set up a camp in the mountains and called on local soldiers to join him in repelling the invaders. They must remember Dessalines, Jean-Joseph wrote, “who, in giving us our country, had not given us the right to give it to the whites.”48

Such opposition from the Cacos did not come as a complete surprise to the marines being shipped out to Haitian towns: they had been warned that Haitians might be “inclined to resist” U.S. attempts to restore order in the country. Aside from that warning, though, the preparation given to the American troops was remarkably limited. Before his departure, Private Faustin Wirkus learned only that there was “something going on in Haiti … which required the ‘Marines to land, and take the situation in hand.’” The marines had a lot of questions, “but none of us could seem to get any idea as to where this Haiti place was … Somebody said Haiti was a land of black people—‘just like Africa.’” The commanding officers, for their part, had rushed to libraries to find about the Black Republic, where they probably encountered the popular writings of racist observers such as Spenser St. John. One marine recalled that the officers taught them that Haitians were “devotees of Voodooism and past masters in the art of poisoning their enemies.” Private Wirkus eventually learned from his superiors that a Haitian president had been overthrown and killed by a mob; he was also informed that President Sam had been a “brute throwback to his jungle ancestry.”49

All of the marines were white, and they brought to the “land of black people” their own experiences and expectations from the racially segregated United States. Some historians have argued that there was a specific and purposeful policy of dispatching to Haiti marines from the American South, with the assumption that they would be particularly effective at controlling a black population. While there is no proof of such a policy, many of the marines were indeed southerners. One of the highest-ranking commanders in the early part of the occupation, for example, was Colonel Littleton W. T. Waller, who had led a bloody campaign in the Philippines in 1901. Waller was a Virginian, the descendant of a prominent family of slave owners; in fact, some of his ancestors had been killed in an 1831 rebellion led by Nat Turner, who was partly inspired by the example of the Haitian Revolution. Waller saw a continuity between what was needed to maintain order—that is, white supremacy—in the United States and in Haiti. “I know the nigger and how to handle him,” he wrote. He reacted in disbelief at one point to the idea that the U.S. marines in Haiti might serve under the command of the country’s president: “Did you ever hear of anything so fantastic in your life?” He was also wary about the notion of developing a Haitian gendarmerie, remarking that “you can never trust a nigger with a gun.”50

Meanwhile, as Faustin Wirkus fired at Cacos who had taken refuge at the base of a cliff, he thought back to an amusement park game he’d played as a child, called “hit the nigger and get a cigar.” He also recalled the orders he had received from his superiors: “Any Negro or any dark person out of doors after nine o’clock, whose behavior makes him seem like a sympathizer with the Caco rebels, is to be shot on sight by the patrol, if he does not surrender.” But how, precisely, were those who were to be “shot on sight” to surrender? And what did it mean to “seem like” a Caco sympathizer? Years later, an odd pair of photographs published in a book by a writer sympathetic to the occupation suggested that for many U.S. observers, rural farmers were indistinguishable from Cacos. The photo on the left showed a bearded elderly man in ragged clothes and a hat. The caption read simply “A Peasant.” On the right was the same man, now with a bag and a raised machete. The caption read “A Caco.”51

As marines faced continued resistance from bands under the leadership of men like Josaphat Jean-Joseph, they enacted harsh reprisals. Entering the village of Bertol, for example, marine officer Chandler Campbell found the residents waving white flags from their houses. He questioned the local women about Caco activity, and he told them that “if in the future a single shot is fired” by rebels in the area, the marines would “return and burn all their houses and completely destroy their crops.” This was not an idle threat. As his troops moved on to another town in early November 1915, Campbell recorded in his journal that his unit had gone “eastward burning all shacks in that direction.” The next day’s entry is “burned all shacks along route,” and a week later “burned many shacks.” What Campbell described as “shacks” were peasant homes, many occupied for generations. Sometimes the reprisals went further, targeting not only houses but entire villages. Catholic priests in the village of Dupity later recalled how, after a few shots were fired at marines from the heights near the town, they set fire to the whole area. “The chapel went up like the rest. Everything fell prey to the flames: chapel, presbytery, vestments, organ.”52

In some towns, the marines were welcomed. The Cacos fighting against them, after all, were often the same bands who had been active in a given region over the previous years, attacking local farms, robbing women on the way to town, and looting shops for supplies. Many Haitians were tired of war. One merchant wrote in strong support of the U.S. troops, declaring that it was necessary for them to attack the Cacos and “massacre them to the last.” When marines arrived in the town of Pignon, an officer recorded, they were greeted as “liberators” and told by local leaders that they were “freeing the Haitians from slavery.” The words may have been heartfelt, or simply strategic: in the new order, the marines controlled the salaries of local employees, so the officer in charge of any particular town became “the paymaster for the loyal Haitians.” And some U.S. commanders did make an effort to win over hearts and minds in rural Haiti by explaining what they saw as their mission. At Fort Liberté, for instance, marine officer Adolph Miller “sent for natives & held audience.” Miller told them about the “American Idea in Haiti,” which included using revenues from the customs houses to “employ several thousand natives to clean and pave the streets, put in sewers, a water supply system,” and even an “electric light plant.” “We will pay the natives daily so that they can accumulate a little money and get the wrinkles out of their belleys [sic],” he promised. In addition, Miller said, the marines would also provide villagers with protection, for they would “not stand for the [Haitian] Generals confiscating their farms, stealing their cattle,” and “enforcing them into the army.” Once the Haitians saw that the United States offered jobs, infrastructure, and security, he predicted, “they will be for us.”53

But despite such reassurances, resistance to the occupation was widespread enough in the north of the country that the marines were forced to mount a coordinated campaign there against the rebels. The task was given to an experienced officer named Smedley Darlington Butler. A Quaker from Philadelphia who apparently saw no contradiction between his faith and a military career, Butler had previously fought in several campaigns, including the occupation of the Philippines and the repression of the Boxer Rebellion in China. Like many other officers, he carried strong racist attitudes to Haiti. He understood the Cacos to be “bad niggers, as we would call them at home,” and described their leaders as “shaved apes, absolutely no intelligence whatsoever, just plain low nigger.” He spoke of his Haitian domestic servant, Antoine, as an “ape man” and a “faithful slave.” But he found the country exhilarating: “Oh the wildness of it all, the half-clothed, vicious natives, the wonderful scenery and fine clean air, there is no country like it that I have ever seen.” And he had faith in the righteousness of his mission. “We were all embued [sic] with the fact that we were trustees of a huge estate that belonged to minors,” Butler later said, “that the Haitians were our wards and that we were endeavoring to make for them a rich and productive property, to be turned over to them at such a time as our government saw fit.” Still, he saw those Haitians who resisted the occupation less as children than as animals, and felt that he knew better than his higher-ups what was necessary to win against the Cacos. He derided the high-ranking U.S. military men, products of “a million dollar war college,” who were “endeavoring to defeat an ignorant, treacherous crowd of niggers by ‘constructive’ warfare”—that is, through a combination of combat and negotiation with the enemy. Butler, by contrast, was an adherent of the “old-fashioned school” of war, which “believes the way to end a row with a savage monkey is to first go into the region or territory occupied by that monkey and find out how savage he is. If the monkey attacks you, return the compliment but only to a degree necessary to impress him with the danger he runs by repeating his attacks.”54

The Cacos who confronted Butler’s forces sought to draw on Haitian military traditions that stretched back to the slave insurrection of 1791. Like Haiti’s original rebels, they avoided open and direct engagements with the superior firepower of their opponents, opting instead for guerrilla warfare. “The technique of the Cacos,” one of them later recalled, was “to never stay more than twenty minutes on the battlefield once the outcome had been decided.” They attacked suddenly, by surprise, then rapidly retreated into the hills to prepare for another engagement. Even their most successful raids usually involved occupying towns only long enough to seize guns from the local garrisons and take money and food to support themselves. Such guerrilla techniques had worked to startling effect in the eighteenth century, and the Cacos drew inspiration from the memory of those victories. In 1915, however, the dynamics were quite different. The marines had arrived as a modern army with the newest rifles and machine guns, while the outnumbered Cacos were primarily operating with the relatively antiquated weaponry of Haiti’s regional conflicts: pikes, machetes, and a few old rifles. (These limited weapons partly explain why Haiti’s constant civil wars seem to have produced far fewer casualties than the U.S. Civil War or European conflicts of the period.) Indeed, the last Haitian leaders to put substantial money into the defense infrastructure of the country were Dessalines and Christophe. And it was to their crumbling, century-old forts that the Cacos fled as they found themselves increasingly surrounded by the marines.55

In early November 1915, a few hundred Cacos under the command of Josaphat Jean-Joseph took refuge in Fort Rivière, not far from Christophe’s Citadel. The rebels realized they were probably making a last stand, and they sent their families—who traditionally traveled with them—back home before preparing for a siege. But under the command of Butler, marines crawled through a small tunnel that led into the center of the fort, taking the Cacos by surprise. Other marines scaled the walls surrounding the fort and began firing from above with machine guns. Soon it was all over. In the wake of the battle, the marines burned sixty houses in the area surrounding the fort and then dynamited the structure. The corpses of the Cacos were still inside, so the ruins became a tomb, long seen by local inhabitants as a sacred and haunted place.56

The attack on Fort Rivière was widely celebrated in the U.S. press, especially because the victory was gained without a single marine casualty, and Butler and another officer received the Congressional Medal of Honor. In a 1917 visit to Haiti, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy, accompanied Butler on a tour of the site. In the wake of the Cacos’ defeat, Roosevelt was optimistic about the possibility of U.S. investment in Haiti. On the way to the fort, the group stopped at the ruins of Sans-Souci palace, which Roosevelt imagined could be an attractive place for American tourists to visit before they headed up to Fort Rivière to enjoy the “cool nights” there. At the fort itself, Butler narrated the battle for Roosevelt and declared that he and his troops had killed at least two hundred Cacos. He later included a swashbuckling and self-congratulatory account of the campaign in his memoir, which was published in 1933. In the book, Butler claimed that among the dead Cacos was the leader Josaphat Jean-Joseph, whom he described derisively as decked out in looted jewelry, including a gold watch chain.57

Haitian accounts of the event tell a different story. They describe fifty Cacos killed during the fighting, with perhaps the same number escaping and disappearing into the nearby hills. Indeed, while the battle at Fort Rivière represented a decisive victory for the marines, convincing the remaining Cacos to disband, few of them disarmed. As one man later recalled, the Cacos who had escaped from Fort Rivière went home, greased up their guns, wrapped them in palm leaves, and hid them in their attics, keeping the weapons ready for another day. And Jean-Joseph had not been killed. He escaped the fort and went to the Dominican Republic for a time, then returned to Haiti when he heard that U.S. troops had arrested his wife and his mother. Imprisoned for seven years, Jean-Joseph was released in 1922. In 1934, the year after the publication of Butler’s memoir describing his gold-bedecked corpse, Jean-Joseph was living in Le Cap and working as a mason.58

*   *   *

Back in Washington, reading reports of the Haitian campaign, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels was both pleased and a little alarmed. “Department appreciates excellent work done and gallantry displayed,” he telegraphed to Admiral Caperton. But “in view of the heavy losses to Haitians in recent engagements,” Daniels asked that the “offensive be suspended in order to prevent further loss of life.” The war, he realized, could easily come to look like a massacre. Caperton replied reassuringly that most Haitians supported the marines and that the fighting had been “purely of defensive character,” aimed at the “suppression of revolutionary activity against present Government and military intimidation of people, and for protection of life and property of innocent farmers and tradesmen, who form by far [the] majority population in these districts.” The Cacos, he added, were “bandits pure and simple, owing no allegiance to the Government or any political faction, but organized under petty chiefs for sole purpose of stirring up strife against [the] Government and robbing, pillaging, and murdering innocent people.” Caperton argued that the marines were not so much at war as simply protecting the Haitian population from bandits. Eventually, the U.S. Marines even issued an official order regarding terminology, instructing soldiers to stop using the term “Cacos” and to replace it with “Bandits” in all official correspondence. They were also to try to get the Haitians to follow suit, apparently: the order explained how the word “bandits” should be pronounced in French and in Kreyòl.59

The fact that the Caco resistance had often been led by officers from the Haitian army reinforced the determination of occupation authorities to disband that army and replace it with a different kind of order-keeping organization, a centralized one overseen by marine officers. In early 1916, they announced that all Haitian military officers would be removed from their positions. The new Gendarmerie, as provided for by the U.S.-Haiti convention, would have Haitian soldiers but American commanders. Smedley Darlington Butler, fresh from his successful campaign against the Cacos, was placed in charge of training the new units, and he eagerly took on the task of civilizing those he called “my little chocolate soldiers.” “I am beginning to like the little fellows,” he wrote as he worked with the new recruits. He styled himself a defender of the mass of rural Haitians, whom he described as the repressed, shoeless class, “the most kindly, generous, hospitable, pleasure-loving people” he had ever met. They were only dangerous, Butler said, when the elites, the one percent of the population who wore shoes, stirred them up with “liquor and voodoo stuff.” Then they were “capable of the most horrid atrocities: they are cannibals.” Still, Butler was convinced that his work would help create “a real and happy nation out of this blood crazed Garden of Eden.”60

The Gendarmerie largely proved to be an effective tool in the war against the Cacos, and it also became the main institution for policing throughout the country. Butler recruited junior officers for the Gendarmerie from among career marines, inviting them to remain in Haiti as long as they wished, which allowed some to develop close ties to the Haitian soldiers they worked with. A young marine named Lewis Puller later recalled being particularly impressed by the drilling of the gendarmes, which he said made the cadets at Virginia Military Institute look “like amateurs,” and by the commanding demeanor of their Haitian sergeant major. He found the gendarmes to be committed and dependable allies in the campaigns they participated in.61

An attempt to construct a viable coast guard for Haiti, however, met with a set of failures that read like a parable of early-twentieth-century Haitian history. One boat, La République, went up in flames in 1917 after a fire was accidentally started by a U.S. sailor; the next year, a ship called Le Progrès foundered on a reef. The ship L’Indépendance exploded in the harbor at Guantánamo Bay in 1922. The only vessel to survive the experiment, the ship Haïti, did so because it was sold in 1920.62

With the Haitian army officers who had served as regional governors removed from their posts, the U.S. marines essentially became colonial administrators. Each town and rural district was now overseen by a marine officer leading units of Haitian gendarmes, and these officers took over most of the tasks that had once been in the hands of the Haitian commanders, from tax collection to public works projects and judicial affairs. These marines exercised near-absolute power, but they did so with almost no knowledge or understanding of local conditions. Few spoke either of the languages of Haiti. When the U.S. Senate conducted an inquiry into the occupation in 1922, the chairman of the inquiry confided to the secretary of state that he was “amazed” to find that “not a single officer” in either the Navy or the Marine Corps in Haiti “spoke French with perfect accent and fluency.” In time, some officers and soldiers did learn Kreyòl, with a few becoming quite proficient in the language. But misunderstandings between marine officers and the populations under their control represented a continuing source of tension.63

Like colonial administrators elsewhere, marine officers depended heavily on the collaboration of Haitians in local communities. In addition to the Haitian soldiers whom they trained and deployed to battle Cacos, the marines also cultivated a network of spies. Paid in cash based on what they reported, these informants worked independently, finding out where Caco groups were camped and then leading marines to them, or infiltrating the ranks of the rebels as double agents. More broadly, the marines sought to make spies out of all the Haitians: they commanded that anyone who saw Cacos passing their farms or villages had to go immediately to the nearest Gendarmerie post and report what they had seen. Anyone who didn’t do so would be suspected of sympathy with the rebels: their houses, and in some cases an entire village, could be burned as punishment. In time, the marines began issuing certificates of good conduct to locals who proved helpful, providing them with documents that they could show to occupation forces when they were stopped. But such enticements were counterbalanced by a harsh judicial system in which residents could be arrested for many crimes. The marines began strictly enforcing regulations against the practice of Vodou, for instance, jailing many oungans and manbos (priests and priestesses) during the occupation simply for conducting religious rituals. The punishment for cursing the U.S. occupiers, meanwhile, was nine months in prison.64

In larger towns the marines operated under the scrutiny of local town councils and judges, who sometimes complained to the authorities in Port-au-Prince about abuses, though rarely to much effect. In more isolated rural districts, however, marine officers had broad leeway in how they governed, and indeed acted with broad impunity. Faustin Wirkus, perhaps inspired by a reading of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, described three Americans in one outpost who looked “unlike any marines, officers or men, I had ever seen … Their eyes were sunken in their heads. They had bedraggled, untrimmed whiskers; their uniforms hung about them, slack and creaseless.” One of them, Wirkus wrote, had developed a particular hobby: on a pole in front of the garrison, he stacked the “native hats” of all the local rebels he had killed. Some marine officers broke down completely: one in Les Cayes, for instance, was relieved of duty after randomly killing a local resident; he later committed suicide by jumping out a porthole of the ship taking him home. In fact, as the military itself later admitted, officers frequently abused their power, executing captured rebels or prisoners without trial and in some cases killing residents of the towns they commanded for refusing to provide information about the Cacos, or for no clear reason at all.65

Women were particularly vulnerable to abuse by the marines who controlled their communities. A Methodist Episcopal pastor working in Haiti who reported on the occupation for the Chicago Defender accused the marines of widespread rape, including the rape of young girls. He had also observed, he wrote, marines pressuring the Haitian gendarmes under their command “to procure native women for the use of the whites as concubines.” Haitian women were said to be universally immoral and promiscuous; after just a day in the country, one soldier had confidently asserted that “all native women are of easy virtue and all its accompanying vices.” Such attitudes helped justify and normalize coercive sexual relationships. Looking back on the occupation, one marine later wrote that “rape, I believe, implies a lack of consent. I never heard of a case where consent was lacking in Haiti’s black belt.” When it came to longer-term relationships with Haitian women, marines sometimes talked about such liaisons as being strategically useful—a mechanism for learning about the local culture—and occasionally referred to sexual partners as the “sleeping dictionary.”66

The historian Roger Gaillard, who gathered oral testimony from many Haitians about the occupation, heard from a number of residents in Haiti’s central plateau about one particularly sadistic local commander, Dorcas Lee William, whom they referred to by the Kreyòl name Ouiliyanm. One story described how Ouiliyanm had humiliated the family of a local Haitian general by riding his horse into their house, having it shit on the floor, and then ordering the general’s daughter to clean it up in front of him. A man remembered how Ouiliyanm used to walk into the local market and stare at people; if he determined they “looked Caco”—“based on clues only he knew”—he would beat them up. Two market woman died from the beatings they received from him. Another resident recalled how his sister-in-law had died at Ouiliyanm’s hands. The marine commander had encountered her on a path outside the town and demanded that she tell him where the Cacos were hiding. When she replied that she didn’t know, he shot her on the spot.67

Gaillard also heard about how Ouiliyanm once hung two brothers he suspected of being Cacos from a tree and lit a large fire under them, killing one and leaving the other burned all over his body. And in yet another incident, Ouiliyanm reportedly carried an elderly notary from the town to his police station in front of several witnesses, beat him nearly unconscious, then buried him alive in the courtyard. These stories were gathered by Gaillard in the early 1980s, and they might have been refracted through the more recent forms of terror that Haitians had experienced under the Duvalier dictatorship. Indeed, they were so dramatic that Gaillard himself wondered if they were all true. But he was deeply impressed by the way that, more than six decades later, Ouiliyamn’s “terrifying shadow” still haunted the towns where he had ruled.68

When such abuses came to light, some high-ranking marines blamed them on Haitians and their culture. Questioned by the U.S. Senate about executions carried out under his command, for instance, Lieutenant Colonel Alexander S. Williams cited Haitian history to provide a justification. “For the unauthorized killing of prisoners,” he declared, “there is an uninterrupted series of precedents running back to that established by the Cacique Coanabo in 1492.” Coanabo was a chieftain ruling in the area where Columbus arrived that year, and he seems to have killed the Spaniards whom Columbus had left behind to create a small settlement on the island. Similarly, Williams argued that Haitian soldiers recruited into the Gendarmerie brought callous brutality with them. “Our greatest problem in the organization of the Gendarmerie was the gendarme,” Williams explained. The recruits were “utterly indifferent to the value of human life,” he said; they were “prone to make the most of police authority, and very liable to exceed it.” In fact, Williams told the Senate, it was the United States that had worked to civilize the gendarmes, to limit the brutality of the Haitians by punishing those who overstepped their bounds.69

Several years later, U.S. Marine Brigadier General Ivan W. Miller also claimed that any violence during the occupation had been made necessary by the culture of Haiti. “You have to remember that what we consider brutality among people in the United States is different from what they considered brutality,” Miller explained. “Those people, particularly at the time there, their idea of brutality was entirely different from ours. They had no conception of kindness or helping people.” John Russell, the high commissioner of the U.S. occupation for most of its duration, concurred, writing in 1929 that the “Haitian mentality only recognizes force, and appeal to reason and logic is unthinkable.” Such arguments were apparently persuasive: even when military reports and a Senate inquiry turned up evidence of a wide range of abuses by marines, the perpetrators were almost never punished.70

These convenient justifications for the violence that U.S. soldiers perpetrated on Haitians ignored the ways in which structural changes brought about by the occupation facilitated the abuse. The Haitian army officers who had commanded Haiti’s towns and rural districts throughout the nineteenth century had exercised tremendous power and could easily have acted as local despots; but the dispersed nature of the Haitian state had forced them to cultivate support among local populations. The lack of a powerful central government, and the frequency of insurrection, had provided villagers with opportunities to get rid of commanders who overstepped their bounds. That changed dramatically during the occupation, for the new Gendarmerie units had the firm support of the entire U.S. military command. The marine officers who commanded the gendarmes reported directly to their superiors in Port-au-Prince, and the local populations largely lost the mechanisms through which they had held the military leaders accountable. The change was a key part of a larger transformation in twentieth-century Haiti: what had been a highly regionalized economic and political order became firmly, and effectively, centralized. The authority of governors and merchants who had depended on the economies of local ports faded, superseded by the power that emanated from Port-au-Prince. The capital, whose influence had previously been counterbalanced by that of other towns and regions, increasingly became the exclusive center of economic and political activity, and in time a magnet for migrants from throughout the country.71

The Gendarmerie established by the marines was one of the few institutions created during occupation that actually outlasted it. Renamed the Garde d’Haïti in 1928, it became a powerful political force, the basis for a centralized military that would continue to shape Haitian life long after the Americans departed. But at its root, the Gendarmerie was an army created with one overarching goal: to crush internal resistance to the U.S. occupation. “It received its baptism of fire in combat against its countrymen,” writes the Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot; and the Gendarmerie, like the new Haitian army that emerged from it after the occupation, “indeed never fought anyone but Haitians.”72

*   *   *

The first major task carried out by the Gendarmerie confirmed what many Haitians had long asserted: if white outsiders got control of the country, they would turn the people back into slaves. Within a year of the arrival of the marines, Haitian men found themselves taken from their homes, sometimes tied together in coffles, and put to forced labor.

It was all quite logical to the occupation authorities. Haiti needed new roads: it had become clear over the course of 1915 that one of the main problems in fighting Cacos was the difficulty of accessing the rugged terrain in which they operated. Better roads would allow the marines to move troops more quickly to combat zones. Such roads, of course, could also help improve the circulation of goods within the country, helping Haitian farmers to transport agricultural products to market and encouraging outside investment. But where to get the labor for this massive task? Haitian law provided an answer: the corvée. Article 54 of the 1864 Code Rural, which remained in effect in Haiti, allowed the government to conscript men as laborers on public works projects. These laws had not been enforced since Boyer’s time, but they were still on the books.

In August 1916, invoking the corvée regulations, U.S. marines began using rural residents as road-building crews. On paper, the corvée was presented as a relatively humane institution. The men were to be paid, fed, and only made to work in the vicinity of their homes. Many in the U.S. administration considered it an effective and appropriate way of supplying labor needs for the development of infrastructure in the country. When Roosevelt traveled to the north of Haiti in early 1917, he encountered a group of corvée laborers who appeared quite happy to see the American visitors. Indeed, the hundred or so “natives” even presented a short performance, singing and dancing in honor of the august guests from the United States. Of course, the vision of the corvée as a harmless and even salutary arrangement was partly due to the Americans’ assumptions about the place of blacks in their own society. On his trip to Haiti, Roosevelt was accompanied by John A. McIlhenny, a friend from New Orleans. At one luncheon that the Americans attended with President Dartiguenave and members of his cabinet, McIlhenny found himself unable to eat, staring intently at the Haitian minister of agriculture seated across from him. “I couldn’t help saying to myself that that man would have brought $1,500 at auction in New Orleans in 1860 for stud purposes,” McIlhenny later admitted.73

Among the marines who oversaw the system, a few did have misgivings. Colonel Waller, the Virginian who openly expressed racist views about Haitians, said that he personally disliked the use of corvée labor. As he testified at the U.S. Senate a few years later, it did not seem to be “the proper way or the economical way of getting the work done,” and it also struck him as “rather un-American.” But the orders were coming from above, so Waller followed them and “made no effort to have it stopped.” When Haitian officials tried to resist the corvée, meanwhile, they had little success. In 1917, a Haitian town council objected to the use of local residents, but the marines arrested the mayor and forced him, under armed guard, to round up the workers. After being released, the mayor traveled to Port-au-Prince to complain about the actions of the marines, but to no avail.74

The corvée as it was actually practiced involved tremendous abuse, which echoed the historical horrors of colonial slavery. Dantès Bellegarde, who served as minister of agriculture in 1918 and energetically denounced the corvée, declared that it reminded him of the “terrible epoch of the colony” of Saint-Domingue. Laborers who tried to escape from what Bellegarde called “concentration camps” were frequently shot. Questioned about such shootings by the U.S. Senate in 1921, an officer admitted that they did occur, though he declared that the total number of laborers who died this way was only “a hundred or less.” A Baptist missionary who had witnessed the corvée testified that he saw numerous bodies around the construction sites of laborers he believed had been executed by gendarmes. He estimated that more Haitians had “met their deaths through the corvée thus illegally practiced” than “were killed in open conflict with the Cacos.”75

The “recruitment” of laborers was deeply traumatic for local residents. Sometimes it was done through brute force: a Haitian man testified in the Senate that one day in 1917 a “white man” and several others had come to his house to claim his son for the corvée. They struck the boy on the head and, as he was bleeding, dragged him away. The man never saw his son again. At other times, marines delegated the task of gathering laborers to the Haitian gendarmes, though this hardly improved the procedure. As one Haitian recalled, the U.S. soldiers would simply order, “bring me men,” and “had no interest in how the orders were carried out.” A victim of the corvée system described how the gendarmes came to his house early one morning and told him that he was under arrest. He was taken out to the road, where a group of other men were already tied up together, and added to the convoy. He was never told why he was arrested, because there was no reason, except that men were needed to build the roads. The Baptist missionary who testified in the Senate in 1921 declared that had seen many Haitians, including preachers and parishioners from his church, “roped tightly and cruelly together, and driven like slaves.”76

Many men fled into the woods to avoid capture, making it increasingly difficult for the gendarmes to find laborers. One Haitian man, a local administrator at the time of the occupation, later recalled how a group of gendarmes took advantage of a wake to collect workers. Hearing the sound of singing, they stormed in, finding a group of men and women dressing a body for burial. They held their guns on the assembled party, tied up the men—including the carpenters who were building the coffin—and carried them away. The women, left behind, buried the corpse directly in the dirt.77

Though most corvée laborers worked building roads, they were also put to other tasks. One man recounted watching a marine overseeing the work of prisoners who were picking up dung in the streets of Hinche, an inland town along the border with the Dominican Republic. “It was his manner that struck me,” the man recalled. Riding a mule, the marine poked the prisoners with a stick, and prodded his mule to walk so close to them that its hooves tore their skin as they worked. The men cried out, cowed by the threats of the marine, while the townspeople had little choice but to look on, “terrified.” Other marine officers were noted for their own forms of sadistic treatment. One of Roger Gaillard’s interviewees claimed that he had watched an officer delivering the meager salaries of the workers through a form of highly choreographed torture. The officer lined up the laborers, placed their money on the ground a few steps in front of them, and stood there with a large attack dog. As the workers stepped forward to get their money, he let the dog lunge forward to growl and bite at them. Gaillard also heard accounts of recalcitrant workers being punished with a treatment that came to be known as the baton-lamnò, the baton of death. A marine would take the hat off a worker, throw it on the ground, and order him to pick it up. As the man did so, the marine would strike him forcefully on the back of the neck.78

In Hinche, the local commander targeted a particular neighborhood on the outskirts of town that he believed harbored “bandits” from the surrounding countryside. He put the neighborhood’s residents to work constructing a new garrison for the Gendarmerie. They were neither paid nor fed. “Were those men prisoners?” a U.S. senator later asked a marine involved in overseeing the construction in Hinche. “They were not prisoners, but they were kept in a compound there,” he responded. “Were they detained in the compound against their will?” the senator asked again. The marine’s reply was equivocal. “They had no other place to sleep, probably … They were detained in the town. They were not allowed to leave the town.”79

From the Haitian perspective, the situation was much less ambiguous. When Gaillard asked one man why he used the term “slavery” to describe the corvée, he answered succintly: “One: the work isn’t paid. Two: you worked with your back in the sun, wearing nothing but pants. Three: they only sent you home when you were sick. Four: You didn’t eat enough, just corn and beans. Five: You slept in a prison or at the construction site. Six: When you tried to run away, they killed you. Isn’t that slavery?”80

Some Haitians decided that if the corvée was a new form of slavery, it deserved the same response given by their ancestors: revolt. The marines, who had turned to the corvée partly because they’d hoped that new roads would solidify their military control over Haiti, eventually found that they had in fact incited a new round of war through their use of the practice. In October 1917, a group of armed men stormed into Hinche, planning to attack the commanding U.S. officer in the town and free the prisoners held there. They were soon beaten back by the marines and gendarmes, but the local commander suspected that they had not acted on their own. He ordered the arrest of several prominent men in the town he thought were behind the attack, including members of the family of Charlemagne Péralte—the Haitian officer who had refused to let American troops into Léogâne. Péralte’s home was burned and his brother’s residence pillaged by gendarmes, with the furniture, art, silver, and porcelain carried off to furnish the houses of the marines. The looting was seared into the memory of Péralte’s niece, who six decades later could still recite the precise inventory of what was taken, including her mother’s jewelry and a treasured phonograph. Péralte and his brother, meanwhile, were sent to Le Cap, where they were convicted of having supported the attack on Hinche and condemned to forced labor. Charlemagne Péralte, former commanding officer in the Haitian army, began spending his days in a prisoner’s uniform, sweeping the streets of Le Cap.81

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“Haiti is a beautiful country,” U.S. Admiral Caperton told a Haitian journalist in February 1916. “She can be proud of her ancestors who destroyed slavery and conquered a glorious independence.” Caperton effused that there were many Haitians whom he was “happy and proud to count as friends.” “The peasant class is docile, amiable and naturally happy,” he went on. All that was needed for the country to flourish was for Haitians to create a “good government” for themselves. Once that was done, Caperton imagined, there would be “many more beautiful fields of sugarcane, vast plantations growing coffee, cotton, and fruit, and everywhere a happy, satisfied population.” With “peace and order” spreading throughout Haiti, the government could “build schools everywhere in the magnificent land, so that all Haitians can elevate themselves mentally.” This would lead to a flourishing of culture, an era of “great engineers, poets, artists.” In the end, “everyone will be able to exercise their talents; everyone will be proud of being Haitian, and will thank God.”82

But while the U.S. occupation authorities proclaimed that their only goal was “good government” for Haiti, they also wanted to make sure that the Haitian government was compatible with American economic interests and friendly to foreign investment. The 1916 convention, by giving the United States control over customs revenues and the state budget and establishing the Gendarmerie as a new police force, had already gone partway to fulfilling that desire. But Haiti’s constitution still contained a provision that U.S. politicians, bankers, and corporate leaders saw as a barrier to their plans: the ban on foreign ownership of property. Erasing this ban would be no simple matter. Back in 1867, a Haitian writer had called it the “Holy Grail” of the country’s liberty, and the provision was still tremendously popular half a century later.83

The U.S. authorities, and President Dartiguenave, were astute enough to realize they would face serious opposition if they tried to simply amend the constitution to allow foreign property ownership—especially in the Senate, which had been so reluctant to ratify the 1915 convention. So Dartiguenave tried to outmaneuver the opposition by dissolving the Senate and creating an assembly from the more tractable Chamber of Deputies. When senators protested the move, continuing to hold meetings (which were broken up by U.S. troops), the president took a gamble, calling for elections in January 1917. Dartiguenave hoped to secure a more supportive set of deputies, but the move backfired. A group of charismatic leaders who opposed the occupation swept the first round of balloting, winning a majority in the Chamber of Deputies and putting themselves on track to gain a majority in the Senate as well.84

The opposition to Dartiguenave became even more intense after he made a controversial deal with U.S. authorities. The 1916 convention had given total control of Haiti’s financial affairs to the U.S. for a period of ten years. But now the U.S. government told Dartiguenave that this time frame was too short. American bankers were willing to give Haiti a loan of $30 million (the equivalent of roughly $500 million today), but they needed reassurance that the money would be paid back responsibly. In order to provide that guarantee, the U.S. needed to extend its financial control for another decade, through 1934. Sténio Vincent, Haiti’s interior minister, vociferously resisted the proposal, but Dartiguenave signed the agreement. In disgust, Vincent resigned from the government, joined the opposition, and campaigned successfully for a seat in the Senate. Suddenly, Dartiguenave found himself in a precarious position: the election had given him a Senate and a Chamber of Deputies firmly in the hands of antioccupation activists, among them a defector from his own cabinet.85

The activists were confident that they were now in a position to protect the constitutional ban on foreign land ownership, which they saw as an essential element of Haitian sovereignty. They underestimated the determination of the U.S. authorities, however. After the elections, as discussions about a new constitution began, the Americans informed Dartiguenave that if the Haitian parliament did not agree to remove the ban on foreign land ownership, he was to dissolve the legislature. If he refused, he would also be replaced, and a direct military government—similar to that which had been put in place in the Dominican Republic—would be installed in Haiti. Aware of the threat, the deputies worked furiously to wrap up a new constitution, with the ban preserved, and vote it into effect. But not quickly enough: the U.S. authorities in Haiti were determined to prevent the constitution under consideration from being enacted. Selected for the task, Smedley Darlington Butler marched troops into the legislature and, at gunpoint, ordered the deputies to disperse. He also seized all the papers of the constitutional commission in order to leave behind no trace of their work. Dartiguenave justified the action by declaring that the deputies had refused to “offer foreign capital the guarantees it deserves,” and therefore had “stood in the way of the realization of the work of regeneration being carried out in concert by the two governments” of the United States and Haiti. Butler himself, though, later looked back on what he had done in Haiti (and elsewhere) with a more jaundiced eye. He described himself as having been little more than a “racketeer, a gangster for capitalism,” a “high-class muscle-man for big business,” who had “made Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.”86

Deprived of its parliament, Haiti now found itself without any obvious path forward for putting a new constitution into place. The United States proposed an innovative solution, one for which there was no existing provision in Haitian law: in consultation with Washington, occupation authorities would draft a new document and then submit it directly for the approval of the population through a national referendum. Dartiguenave celebrated the idea, arguing that the foreign ownership ban did nothing for small farmers but only benefited large Haitian landowners who enjoyed a monopoly in some parts of the country. A referendum, he said, would finally sideline the politicians who “talked about sovereignty” merely as a way of “enriching themselves from the sweat of the workers.” Now, the populace would have a chance to speak directly. “The sovereign power is you, the people. You are the nation,” Dartiguenave declared. A State Department memo later made clear that from Washington’s perspective, the advantage of the plebiscite was that it would skirt opposition from elected representatives while providing a pretense of democracy. “The people casting ballots would be 97% illiterate, ignorant of what they were voting for,” the memo explained, and could certainly be pressured into casting their ballots as desired.87

Indeed, the United States took no chances with the election. Vocal opponents of the new constitution were arrested before the vote. Throughout the country, the referendum took place under the watchful eyes of U.S. marines backed up by Haitian gendarmes. As voters lined up at polls on June 12, 1918, they were offered a white ballot that signified a “yes” vote in favor of the new constitution, which they then dropped into the ballot box. Those who wanted to vote “no” had to request a different ballot. The result? 98,294 “yes” votes to 769 votes against. The proceedings were clearly a sham, involving no more than 5 percent of the population, but even those who tried to abstain faced reprisals: six leading professors at a medical school were fired when they refused to participate in the voting.88

The new constitution enacted by this process was largely a copy of the previous ones, but it made the key change to the ownership regulations. “Foreign residents” as well as “foreign companies” now had full rights to the ownership of property in Haiti. It had taken a military occupation, a dissolution of parliament, and a manipulated referendum, but American corporations had finally secured the clause they desired. Over the coming years, they would use it to transform Haiti’s economic landscape.89

The 1918 constitution also included sections that sought to preemptively protect the occupation regime from accusations that the United States seemed to know would be coming. The document provided for the automatic “ratification of all the acts of the U.S. government during its military occupation of Haiti.” It also declared that all Haitians who served under the authority of the occupation were exempt from any future legal action, civil or criminal. And while the new constitution nominally maintained the bicameral legislature, it also allowed the Haitian president or the U.S. government to defer legislative elections at will. Indeed, for the next twelve years the occupation authorities would refuse to hold any elections to replace the dissolved legislature. As a result, President Dartiguenave and his successor served with essentially no limits on their power except those imposed by the United States itself. In effect, the occupation propelled Haiti’s political system backward by a century, returning the Haitian government to the days of 1806, when there had been no parliament at all.90

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On September 3, 1918, Charlemagne Péralte escaped from forced labor in Le Cap. He had at least one accomplice: his Haitian prison guard fled the city with him. Péralte made his way back to his home town of Hinche, traveling—according to one account—disguised as a woman on a Vodou pilgrimage, singing religious songs and telling anyone who asked that he was going up into the hills to carry out a ranvwaye nanm, or “sending the spirit,” a ritual for a recently departed family member. Setting up camp outside Hinche, he began to make contacts with friends and family, to gather guns, and to collect bullets and powder, which he stored in calabashes. Ever since the defeat of the Cacos at Fort Rivière in 1915, military resistance to the occupation had been sporadic and poorly organized. Péralte now set about creating a new movement, an insurrection aimed at ending the occupation’s abuses once and for all by pushing the United States out of Haiti altogether.91

The first order of business was to seek out recruits. One man later recalled how Péralte came to visit his father, explaining that he was going to “fight a war against the Americans” and looking approvingly over the weapons the man had hidden in the house, including a Remington rifle and a .48 caliber pistol. Another Haitian remembered that his father, Dolciné Pierre, once hosted the rebel and two companions on his farm. The group sat together for a long time, and Pierre joyfully shook hands with them when they left. He then explained to his family that “a serious civil war was about to begin, a revolutionary war.” Pierre, who had maintained his position as the local chief of the rural district where he lived, had told Péralte that he couldn’t join the rebels himself. But he promised to help them get food and other supplies.92

Not everyone was ready to support Péralte. The man with the Remington and the .48 pistol, for instance, took his family away from the area rather than get involved in the war. And a trusted friend of Péralte, the godfather to one of his sons, met with him one day—the two talked at length under an avocado tree in a cane field—and then warned the local marine commander of Péralte’s presence. (The officer didn’t seem particularly concerned, replying: “Let him come, and he’ll see who he has to deal with!”) But there was one group that was particularly ripe for recruitment: the corvée laborers. In an isolated area near the village of Pignon, Péralte presented himself to a large group of workers building a road; he called on them to join him in revolt, and three hundred men followed him into the hills. Later, he located a house where corvée laborers were locked up at night by the marines and broke open the doors. “I’m fighting for liberty,” he announced, inviting those who wished to “fight and die with me.”93

By the fifteenth of October, Péralte was ready for his first attack, storming the town of Hinche with about a hundred soldiers. But the engagement ended poorly for Péralte’s forces, who lost as many as thirty-five dead without inflicting much damage on the marines. And it came at a steep personal cost for Péralte himself: three of his brothers were in prison in Hinche, and in the days after the attack, all three were killed by their guards, who claimed they had been trying to escape. But none of that deterred him from his path. Péralte’s October raid marked the beginning of a new Caco war, one that would soon outstrip the previous conflict in both the size of the revolt and the brutality used to suppress it.94

The fact that this new uprising began in a town in the northern part of Haiti was not mere happenstance. Colonel Clark H. Wells, the marine commander in charge of the region, was a particularly ruthless officer, whose methods for controlling the local population alarmed even his superiors. By the time that Péralte started gathering supporters for his uprising, for instance, the occupation authorities—responding to the urging of Haitian politicians and some marines—had already declared an end to the practice of the corvée. But it was only a limited abolition: corvée workers could still be used if there was a “real urgency” or a lack of funds for a given project. Taking advantage of the loophole, Wells continued to promote the use of forced labor in many areas under his command.95

Several months after the corvée officially ended, Albertus Catlin, who took over as high commissioner of the U.S. occupation in December 1918, encountered a large group of laborers outside the northern town of Maïssade. When he asked all those who were there involuntarily to cross to one side of the road, only three men stayed put. Major Richard Hooker, who was dispatched by Catlin on an investigative tour of the region, found similar cases. Outside Hinche he saw a group of 150 peasant laborers who were being paid only a tiny wage and carefully guarded, in what Hooker dubbed a “camouflage corvée.” In Maïssade, meanwhile, he discovered that the local magistrate, in collaboration with the marine commanders, was using the corvée system to put fifty forcibly conscripted men to work on his own property.96

Hooker also found that other abuses abounded. He had to intervene in Hinche to stop a marine from hitting a market woman who had supposedly overcharged him for tobacco. In the town’s prison, he saw three gendarmes beating a prisoner. And when he talked to Wells, the colonel told him quite unself-consciously that under his command “bandits” were simply “bumped off,” with no trial or report of their execution. Hooker was so surprised that at first he thought the officer was joking, but Wells was completely in earnest.97

The execution of captured Cacos without a trial was in fact the standard practice in the area. “The orders down there were: the prisons are filled; we don’t want any more prisoners,” recalled Lewis Puller, the same young marine who had been so impressed with the drilling of the Haitian gendarmes. After a year in Haiti, Puller admitted in a letter to a friend that the tactics they were using could easily be seen as criminal. “You may rest assured that I was relieved when I found out that I had been ordered to Port-au-Prince to be decorated for killing Cacos,” he wrote, “and not to be court-martialed for the same.” Though he derided the occasional “misguided fool” in the United States who might “set up a howl over a few black bandits being knocked off,” Puller also urged his friend to stay put at home. “You don’t want to come down here … It’s a dog’s life.” The NAACP magazine the Crisis published a terrifying photograph of one such summary execution. In it, a captured Caco, his hands severed, is about to be shot by a U.S. marine holding a pistol to his head. On the ground nearby is a previous victim.98

As they had in 1915, marines sometimes burned entire villages they considered friendly to the Cacos. A Catholic priest from the town of Thomazeau testified in the Senate that after a group of retreating Cacos stopped in his town, a Gendarmerie unit decided to punish the local population. They looted the houses, took the residents’ horses, then burned down several hundred homes, along with the chapel that stood among them. For the next months, the homeless townspeople camped in the nearby woods, ready to flee at the first sight of the gendarmes. When the U.S. officer who commanded the detachment returned to the area two weeks later, the priest confronted him. The marine insisted that the town had given shelter to Cacos, though he admitted that he should have interrogated the inhabitants before burning their houses. He apologized only for having destroyed the chapel, saying he hadn’t realized that the modest structure was a house of worship.99

A few observers in Haiti at the time also wrote descriptions of the occupation’s abuses. In March 1919, the French vice-consul in Haiti produced a hair-raising summary of recent reports of violence. A marine officer in St. Marc had beaten a seventy-five-year-old woman, a relative of the former town mayor, unconscious in the street and then had his dog attack her. The same officer had imprisoned a local official and tortured him by burning much of his body with a hot iron, seeking a confession about a theft, and had executed four teenagers for minor thefts they had committed. Another officer had gunned down a woman because she refused to give him information about the location of Cacos. In the prison at Le Cap, 10 percent of the prisoners, on average, were dying. “With such approaches to ‘civilization,’” the vice-consul wrote, “it is not surprising that the people are exasperated and the peasants would rather die fighting than submit to the caprices of such individuals.” With a measure of hope, the vice-consul concluded by saying that the cabinet in Washington must not be aware of the situation, otherwise they would surely be acting to correct it.100

The Haitian government publicly denied the importance of the new Caco uprising, attributing it to the ambition of a few embittered leaders who hadn’t understood that the “time of revolutions is over” and to “ignorant peasants” who followed such leaders into battle. But some politicians realized that the situation was veering out of control. Louis Borno, the minister of foreign relations, suggested in a letter to a Catholic bishop that what was needed was a “general amnesty” for the Cacos, most of whom had been “propelled into revolt by the abuses caused by the occupation.” It was a generous thought, but also perhaps a naïve one, for Péralte’s movement—unlike the earlier Caco resistance—was not only protesting the terms of U.S. rule and the overbearing behavior of the marines. Rather, its clear political and military goal was to rid Haiti of the occupation entirely. “The worst of it,” wrote Charles Moravia, Haiti’s ambassador in Washington, to Secretary of State Robert Lansing, “is that as it develops this movement of brigands is acquiring the character of a struggle for liberty.”101

Moravia, who at the beginning of the occupation had celebrated the United States as “the enemy of Sovereign Despotism,” laid out a devastating summary of the occupation’s problems: the imposition of martial law, the privileging of U.S. officials over qualified Haitians in bureaucratic appointments, the daily brutality suffered by rural populations at the hands of gendarmes. Many in Haiti, he insisted, wished to collaborate with the U.S. forces in order to bring peace and progress to the country. But that desire didn’t compensate for the “deprivation of certain liberties guaranteed by the constitution” and the “bad treatment to which they are constantly exposed.” Like the French vice-consul, Moravia retained confidence in the best intentions of the United States, which he described as the “honored champion of Civilization, defender of the rights of Humanity.” He was confident that, having established the fundamental right to the “pursuit of happiness” in its constitution, the United States was bound to help others exercise that same right. But to do that in Haiti, Moravia wrote, they would need to gain an understanding of the “true needs of the people, its mentality,” and find ways to pursue improvement without “unnecessary violence.”102

Moravia’s examination highlighted the increasingly difficult situation faced by the Haitian leaders. In many cases, they had welcomed the U.S. occupation, seeing it as a necessary step to resolving the country’s profound problems. But they now found themselves unable to defend their population from the brutality of the U.S. regime. The Caco rebels had stepped into the breach, presenting themselves as the true defenders of Haiti and its people, the rightful heirs to the ancestors who had won freedom from slavery.

Catlin, the high commissioner of the occupation, was well aware that the resistance movement was steadily growing. The Cacos were not only active in the northeast, where Péralte operated, but also in the Artibonite region, where rebel troops under the command of Benoît Batraville attacked and killed a marine officer in March 1919. Catlin requested—and received—reinforcements from Guantánamo Bay, and he budgeted money for building more roads in the regions where Péralte’s Cacos were strongest. But while they publicly exuded confidence that there would be no trouble defeating the Cacos militarily, some U.S. officials were clearly worried. General Alexander S. Williams, the head of the Gendarmerie, moved his residence from the outskirts of Port-au-Prince into the more heavily guarded center of town. Meanwhile, fights between U.S. soldiers and young Haitian men were regularly breaking out in the capital’s streets. And in August 1919, the city’s residents were infuriated when a deaf-mute teenage boy, leaving his house to tell his relatives about the death of his father, was shot and killed by marines for breaking the curfew.103

One night Port-au-Prince was papered with bold posters: “For the last four years, the Occupation has constantly insulted us. Each morning brings some new offense.” President Wilson, the posters declared, was a “traitor, brigand, trouble-maker, and thief.” Invoking Dessalines and the Haitian Declaration of Independence, the posters announced that a new day, “like that of January 1804,” would soon arrive. Haitians needed to “follow the example of Belgium,” which had resisted German occupation during World War I by flooding a part of the country and preserving a tiny sovereign territory. In a similar way, Haitians were to take to the mountains to defend their nation from barbarous invaders. The revolt that was already under way in the north would soon spread to the south. “There is no danger. We have weapons. Let us chase away these savage men,” the poster exhorted. “Long live independence!… Long live just war! Down with the Americans!”104

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With the new Caco movement spreading over much of the country and mobilizing many more insurgents than the resistance of 1915, Péralte allowed different groups of Cacos to operate autonomously to a certain extent. His leadership, though, provided an important measure of coordination and communication. The U.S. authorities grudgingly acknowledged his considerable political skills: one report described him as “a born organizer.” A well-educated man, Péralte articulated the political goals of the movement in letters directed to the French and British ambassadors. He also provided a rallying point for the dispersed Cacos, a visible alternative to being ruled by U.S. forces and their Haitian collaborators. He sometimes dressed in a well-tailored black suit and black shoes, with a white panama hat atop his head. “They were the clothes and the bearing of a head of state,” one of the Cacos later recalled. Péralte was often greeted by his troops with the presidential hymn of Haiti, and he dubbed himself “General in Chief of the Revolution.” Through such symbolism, Péralte presented himself and his comrades-in-arms as Haiti’s rightful, legitimate government.105

Those who joined the movement were mostly farmers, some prosperous and some less so, animated by anger over forced labor and other abuses carried out by the marines. In some ways the revolt resembled Acaau’s 1844 uprising in the south, and like the Piquet movement, it loaded its demand for institutional change with spiritual overtones. When preparing for a fight, the rebels would often carry out religious ceremonies. A Haitian gendarme who survived a Caco raid on his town recalled hearing singing and the sound of a Vodou drum before the attack. “We realized immediately that it was a charge, and that there was only one thing to do: retreat.” Many of the Cacos wore red scarves as an homage to Ogou, the god of war in Haitian Vodou. Péralte, a practicing Catholic, would go into battle carrying the Haitian flag mounted on a pike that was decorated at the top with a crucifix.106

In open combat with marines, the Cacos were decisively outmatched, and most encounters ended in defeat and retreat. But the Cacos nevertheless survived and successfully harassed the U.S. forces for nearly two years. Marines and gendarmes frequently found themselves confused by Caco tactics, and on several occasions ended up killing one another during firefights. Terrifying stories circulated among the marines about what happened to those who were captured by the Cacos, including rumors that they were flayed alive, had their hearts ripped out, and were cannibalized; the rebels probably encouraged and sustained such fears. The Cacos set up camps in high, inaccessible locations and were able to repeatedly outwit and escape marine missions sent against them. At one point in 1919, marines and gendarmes closed in on one of Péralte’s camps, where the Cacos were clearly outnumbered and outgunned. But before they could break into the camp, the attackers saw Péralte and his men appear above them on horseback, having escaped via an unseen path. In another incident, the marines surrounded a camp constructed by Péralte near the border with the Dominican Republic. After four hours of fighting, Péralte and all his men escaped across a river and fled into the Dominican Republic, unmolested by Dominican border guards who had watched the battle unfold. Although the United States was then occupying the Dominican Republic as well and controlled its army, the Americans clearly had little control over the border region. In fact, in a few cases the Cacos formed alliances with groups of Dominican insurgents who were also fighting the U.S. marines, joining in combat against a common enemy.107

Haitians fought on both sides of the conflict. “The gendarmes,” one Haitian newspaper pointed out, “are the sons, brothers, and cousins of the Cacos.” In many engagements, family and friends faced off against one another. Péralte, for his part, actively tried to recruit members of the Gendarmerie. In a 1919 letter to the Gendarmerie office at Maïssade, he addressed himself to “Haitians, sons of the fatherland of Pétion and Dessalines,” proclaiming: “you are black, my brothers, and I love you all.” He urged them to attack Maïssade and join his revolution. If they did, they would have the “joy” of knowing that they were “defending a just cause.” Such efforts had at least some effect: after one attack, in the town of Saut-d’Eau, a gendarme noted that many of the Cacos were wearing Gendarmerie uniforms. In addition, the fear of desertion by gendarmes ultimately sapped their usefulness for the U.S. marines. When a new marine lieutenant arrived to take over the Gendarmerie in July 1919, he discovered that his “predecessors had discouraged target practice on the theory that it was dangerous to teach the native how to shoot.”108

Péralte’s efforts to recruit converts to his cause, however, were undermined by the Cacos’ techniques for obtaining food and supplies. The term “bandits,” which the marines and Haitian politicians preferred to use for the resistance, was not entirely inaccurate: the Cacos often pillaged houses and farms, sometimes using violence to get what they needed. One man recounted to Roger Gaillard how his grandfather, a local farmer, was tied up and struck on the head by a group of Cacos who came and looted his house and took his cow. Others claimed that Cacos perpetrated numerous rapes in some areas and even trafficked in captive women. Some victims of the pillaging complained to Péralte, assuming that their assailants were renegades and would be punished by their leader. But Péralte seems to have tacitly accepted the looting, or was simply unable to control those operating under his loose command. It is difficult to say whether such abuses of power were widespread or simply aberrations, though it’s clear that over time some farmers and merchants who had supported the Cacos ultimately turned against them. Still, one man who recounted stories of pillaging by the rebels also added that it is crucial to remember that “the abuses of the Cacos were born of other abuses. They were caused by the abuses of the Occupation.” A Haitian bishop interviewed by Gaillard likewise argued that the Cacos had little choice. “They were both pillagers and patriots,” he declared, and most people were glad that someone was standing up for Haiti. “They rose up to defend the country: their intentions were good.”109

Besides perpetually looking for soldiers, Péralte also understood that, like the Haitian revolutionaries he hoped to emulate, he needed allies outside Haiti if he was to succeed. In June 1919, he sent a letter to the British consul in Port-au-Prince asking for assistance. Calling on the “humanity” of the consul and on his “great nation that is the master of the universe,” Péralte—drawing on the internationalist language of the time propounded by none other than President Wilson—argued that it was incumbent upon the powerful to give support to “a small nation that is trying to save its flag and its territory from the ambitions of a greedy nation.” He declared that he was leading forty thousand men, “fighting valiantly and with help only from Providence,” and pleaded with the British government to at least investigate the abuses perpetrated by the United States. He had been struggling for nine months for a just cause, Péralte lamented, but no other nation was paying attention. In “a time of enlightenment and progress,” with people “everywhere preaching justice,” Haiti’s plight was being forgotten. Soon afterward, Péralte sent a similar message to the French minister in Haiti. This letter, signed by him and a hundred supporters, proclaimed that the Haitian people had suffered four years of “perpetual vexations, unbelievable crimes, assassination, theft, and acts of barbarism” that the United States was carefully covering up. Now their movement was demanding the rights that had been trampled by “Americans without scruples.” Neither of these missives got any response: the diplomats simply forwarded them to the U.S. authorities.110

Even without outside support, however, the Caco movement was strong enough that the U.S. military decided to deploy a nascent technique against them: aerial bombardment. They brought several planes into the country, set up an aviation station at Gonaïves, and requested a shipment of five hundred bombs. On August 13, 1919, the first mission was carried out, with ground troops attacking a Caco camp supported by airplanes dropping bombs from above. The results were, an officer reported, “very satisfying.” They eradicated fifty-two “bandits” and saw a great deal of blood, which suggested that many more had been hurt. “The aviators did splendid work and killed many.”111

U.S. military officials later downplayed the use of bombing during the occupation, saying that only a few aerial missions had been carried out. Testimonies from Haiti, though, make it clear that the attacks were devastating. Many in rural areas had never seen an airplane before, let alone one dropping bombs; according to one account, the machines became known as “God’s bad angels.” Unsurprisingly, the aerial bombardments were not always precise in their targets—especially since even the marines on the ground had long had difficulty distinguishing Cacos from the broader rural population. Furthermore, the Caco camps that were bombed were often not so much military compounds as temporary villages: the families of the Cacos settled there, sometimes even growing crops if they stayed in one place for long enough. The rebels’ partners and children were also caught in the aerial attacks.112

One Haitian gendarme who participated in a coordinated ground-air assault later provided a harrowing description of what he saw. The occupation troops had surrounded a Caco village near Terre-Rouge by night, and in the morning they were awaiting the order to charge when they heard people approaching. It was two women and an eleven-year-old boy, going to get water from a nearby spring. When they were just steps away from where the gendarmes were hiding, one of the women stopped. She’d smelled something: a U.S. cigarette, a foreign smell that she knew could only come from marines or Haitian gendarmes. The small group turned back toward the camp to warn the others. The boy ran ahead, until one of the gendarmes shot and killed him. The two women began to scream, and the gendarmes were about to charge when an airplane appeared overhead. “Here come the vultures!” shouted the villagers as the airplane began its bombing run. The gendarmes heard the screams of women in the explosions and injured animals braying, as those who could scattered and ran from the camp. All that was left to do was finish the work. The marines and gendarmes entered the village, killed the wounded who had been left behind, counted the dead, and headed home.113

Even with the fearsome new technology on their side, however, the conflict dragged on. Eventually, the marines decided that there was a more efficient way of crushing the Caco revolt: assassinating Péralte. The job fell to two marines, William R. Button—who, according to a fellow soldier, “could speak all varieties of Creole” and “pass as a Haitian of any class”—and Herman Hanneken. Another key figure in the plot was a Haitian man, Jean-Baptiste Conzé. The three, along with a few other Haitian accomplices, constructed an elaborate plan for infiltrating the Caco movement and drawing Péralte into a trap.114

Conzé came from a prominent family in the town of Grande-Rivière and was a distant relative of Péralte. He had some personal reasons for disliking the Cacos: in 1914, before the occupation, he’d been stopped twice by rebels in the countryside and forced to hand over a ransom to support their cause. By the U.S. military’s own accounts, however, Conzé was most of all an opportunist. An American report later described him as having no particular political affiliation and “leaning to whatever side has the most money.” Infiltrating the Cacos was not an easy task. Péralte had developed an effective and widespread spy network, depending heavily on market women who circulated throughout the countryside and the towns. Some of these women duly warned the Caco leader about the assassination plot, and specifically about Conzé. Nonetheless, he succeeded in working his way into Péralte’s trust, largely through an elaborate ruse. He and Hanneken staged a battle, with Conzé posing as a Caco and the marine pretending to have been defeated and wounded. Impressed with the fake Caco’s exploit, Péralte welcomed him into his camp and gave him an officer’s commission. Together, they set about engineering a raid on Grande-Rivière.115

On the night appointed for the attack, October 31, 1919, Conzé planned to lead Péralte into an ambush. At the last minute, though, Péralte decided to stay back from the battle. Improvising, Hanneken and Button covered their faces in black shoe polish and dressed themselves in tattered clothes. Thus disguised, and accompanied by several Haitian gendarmes, they made it all the way to the small house where Péralte was staying. There, Hanneken shot him twice in the heart at point-blank range.116

Péralte had developed a near-legendary status in the country, and the marines could not simply declare that they had killed him: they needed to prove it. So they carried his body down the hill and put it on display in Grande-Rivière. One resident of the town, a friend of Péralte’s, later described watching the procession enter the town, with Jean-Baptiste Conzé proudly in the middle. “I was penetrated with sadness,” he recalled. “All at once, my hopes and those of my comrades had collapsed. The Americans would not be chased away.”117

The next day, Péralte was brought by train to Le Cap and there stripped bare. A piece of cloth was placed over his midsection, and his body was tied to a door and propped up against a wall in the police station. The marines officially identified Péralte by using the file filled out about him when he was in prison in Le Cap, which listed his hair and eye color, his height, and his scars. Then they gathered local residents to come and see the body, including the guard who had helped Péralte escape the previous year—now a prisoner himself—and the French priest serving in Le Cap. Afterward, a marine photographer took a picture of the corpse to show to those who had not seen it for themselves. Several hundred copies of the photo were made, and airplanes dropped them over the countryside in the areas where Cacos were still active.118

Even after all of these displays, the marines remained oddly obsessed with Péralte’s body, which they didn’t quite know where to put. Fearing that the Cacos would attempt to take back the corpse of their leader, they held five different fake funerals in different places to create confusion. Péralte’s actual final resting place was carefully chosen: a prison camp at Chabert, not far from Le Cap. An official description of the institution provided to the U.S. Senate in 1921 described it in bucolic terms as a farm worked by convicts to feed the local population and experiment with new agricultural methods. A Haitian newspaper provided a rather different account, referring to the camp as “organized slavery.” The crops grown at Chabert were sold for the profit of the occupation, and prisoners there died by the hundreds. The carpenter hired to bury Péralte later recalled that the marines didn’t have a coffin to put him in: the prison was out of them. Instead, the soldiers wrapped the body in a Haitian flag and laid it directly in the grave. Then they asked the laborer to pour concrete around it, apparently to make sure that the body couldn’t be easily disinterred. A Haitian guard who was among those ordered to stand sentinel over the grave in the following days remembered bitterly: “Charlemagne was buried like a dog.”119

The Caco war was not yet over, for Benoît Batraville took over the movement’s leadership from Péralte and continued to fight for nearly another year. Eventually, however, he, too, was killed, and the remaining insurgents dispersed. Back in the United States, meanwhile, the press published swashbuckling accounts of how Hanneken and Button had tricked and killed Péralte. James Weldon Johnson, an African American writer and critic of the occupation, was among the few to offer a different reading, arguing that the assassination was anything but heroic and represented a “black mark” on the tradition of U.S. military action. The two marines were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and were lauded by the Haitian government: in a ceremony on the Champ de Mars in Port-au-Prince, President Dartiguenave pinned Haitian military medals on them to the sounds of the Haitian national anthem and the Marine Corps hymn. The Haitians who had worked with them, including Conzé, got medals, too—but in a separate ceremony.120

Lieutenant Button died of malaria in Haiti the following year, while Hanneken went on to a long military career, fighting in Nicaragua and later in the Pacific during World War II. He did not, it seems, take particular pride in his role in Péralte’s killing. In 1971, when the Haitian historian Roger Gaillard came to Washington to carry out his research on the occupation in the U.S. National Archives, he managed to find Hanneken’s phone number in San Diego. But when he called Hanneken to ask if he could interview him, the ex-marine told him simply: “I’m an old soldier. I don’t want to think about that affair anymore.”121

In Haiti, meanwhile, traveling to the place where Péralte had died, Gaillard found many local residents who kept the memory of the event alive and pointed out to him the precise location where the killing had taken place. In the 1970s it was a lush forest, full of trees offering mangoes, oranges, avocados, guavas, and breadfruit, surrounded by bamboo and fern: perhaps a fitting memorial. For, as Gaillard wrote, while Péralte’s assassins were once the ones celebrated and decorated, eventually things changed. “The dialectic of history has reversed the poles, and the one who still lives among us now is Charlemagne Péralte.”122

It was the marines who, unwittingly, offered Haitians the most lasting and widely known vision of the slain Caco leader. In the photograph taken in 1919, Péralte is nearly naked, with just a cloth covering his groin. Tied to a board propped against a wall, with his head tilted back to one side and his eyes closed, he almost seems to be sleeping. Draped behind him, nestled against his head, is his banner: the Haitian flag, mounted on a flagpole topped with a crucifix. The similarity of this image of the slain Péralte—killed at the age of thirty-three—to the crucified Christ is striking. If the photographer had consciously tried to create a picture of a martyr, he couldn’t have done better.123

Passed from hand to hand, copies of the photograph of Péralte’s corpse circulated throughout Haiti. In 1932, when the journalist and antioccupation activist Félix Viard wrote a poem in honor of Péralte, dubbing him “the last maroon,” the publication was illustrated with a sketch of the same photo. Later, Philomé Obin, a painter from Le Cap—once arrested by U.S. marines on suspicion of sympathy with the Cacos—created several works based on the image. In Obin’s paintings, the black-and-white of the original is transformed into color, so that the blue and red of the Haitian flag and the yellow of the crucifix stand out against the sky. Obin also added Péralte’s mourning mother, clad in black, to the scene. And the title of his work, inscribed directly on the painting, expressed what so many had long seen in the image: “The Crucifixion of Charlemagne Péralte for Liberty.”124

The name of the marine who snapped the photograph in 1919 is unknown, but he ended up making a lasting contribution to the artistic and political culture of Haiti. The image he produced, meant to make Haitians forget about Péralte, remains the most widely recognized depiction of the U.S. occupation, the ultimate monument to its cruelty and to the resistance it inspired.