Africans refuse the Europeans' war and settle older accounts

Refusal took many shapes. In the French territories young men crossed borders and waited in hiding until the recruiting sergeants had moved on, the same evasion they used against tax collectors and labour levies. Revolts that looked like protests against conscription carried grievances that had been building since the 1890s. Armed resistance broke out against the British in Nigeria and against the French in Dahomey. In Mozambique the Barwe rose in 1917 against Portuguese rule. The Ottoman empire joined Germany late in 1914 and called for a jihad across the colonial world, which never came. The Sanusiyya, supplied with German and Ottoman money and weapons, beat the Italians in Libya early in 1915 and attacked the British in Egypt. Britain answered by declaring a protectorate over Egypt, crushing nationalist activity there, and taking the sultanate of Darfur in 1916. In Nyasaland in 1915 the preacher John Chilembwe led a short and fierce insurrection, driven in part by the scale of conscription and the number of local men killed fighting the Germans.

Fifty United States marines came ashore at Port-au-Prince on 17 December 1914, walked to the National Bank of Haiti, took 500,000 dollars in gold from its reserves and carried it out to a warship. The gold was delivered to the National City Bank in New York. The Americans described this as safekeeping. Joseph Davilmar Theodore was president. His anti-American speeches had irritated Washington, and Washington was already uneasy about the speed with which Haitian governments were falling and about German commercial weight in the country in the first months of the European war. The removal did what a robbery would have done. It emptied the reserve standing behind the currency, it left Theodore visibly unable to protect the national bank of his own country, and it told every Haitian who read a newspaper that the United States treated Haitian sovereignty as conditional and Haitian assets as available. Seven months later the marines came back and stayed for nineteen years.

On 12 August 1915 American Marines stood inside the Haitian National Assembly with fixed bayonets until the members confirmed Philippe Sudré Dartiguenave as president. Dartiguenave, born on 6 April 1863 into a wealthy light skinned family, had been president of the Senate when Sam was killed. The Americans refused Rosalvo Bobo, the man most likely to win, and settled on Dartiguenave as someone who would cooperate. He was the first light skinned southerner to hold the office since 1879, and he governed as a proxy for American officials who ran the money, the armed forces and foreign policy. He signed a treaty giving the occupation legal form and placing Haitian finances under American control. The Haitian army was dissolved and replaced by a national guard armed, trained and commanded by the United States. That guard administered the corvée, which required peasants to work without pay on the national roads, a compulsory labour system imposed on the grandchildren of people who had fought a revolution to end compulsory labour.

Caperton had 400 men ashore in a city holding at least 1,500 of Rosalvo Bobo's Cacos, the remnants of the Reforme faction and what was left of the army. The Comite Revolutionnaire belonged to Bobo and was pressing the National Assembly to elect him. When the deputies asked whether they might proceed to an election, the admiral put them off. On 2 August he reported to Washington that the Cacos were professional soldiers under chiefs who sold their services to whoever offered most, that all Haitians feared them, that they effectively decided who governed, and that Congress had been about to elect Bobo out of fear until he stopped it. The Comite went on as though nothing had changed. It jailed a senator named Joseph Dessources for criticising it, and the Americans ordered him released. It took over the telegraph offices and filled the wires with messages for Bobo, and Caperton took charge of communications. It began drawing government money, and Caperton moved every gourde into a blocked account.