Haiti twice refuses to sign away control of its customs revenue

The first of the three points in Johnson's published report was chronological. Twice during 1914, before the killing that supplied the official justification, the American government pressed Haiti to accept what it called peaceable intervention, asking the Haitian government to sign a convention placing Haitian finances under American control on the model already applied in Santo Domingo. The Haitian government refused the terms both times. Pamphile presents this as the evidence that dismantles the benevolence narrative, because it shows an American objective already fixed and already rejected. When the violence of July 1915 came, it supplied what Johnson called the long awaited opportunity, and the intervention that followed secured more than the original demand: not only the finances but the country's military forces as well. Johnson's second point named the interested party, Roger L. Farnham of the National City Bank of New York, whose bank controlled the Banque Nationale and through it the Haitian economy. Where this account departs from the standard one: Against the official account that the marines landed to restore order, Pamphile follows Johnson in dating American designs on Haitian finances to 1914 and treating 1915 as the opportunity rather than the cause.

Nobody settled how many were killed in the Port-au-Prince prison. The American chargé Davis said nearly two hundred, the French minister Girard reported 160, the British minister Kohan said 168, and H. P. Davis gave 167. Charles Oscar Etienne and his men fired a last volley into the yard, pretending to be rescuers so that the wounded would move, and then left for the Dominican legation. When the crowd marched to the jail to free the prisoners, which was a normal stage of a Haitian revolution, it found the yard full of bodies. Almost no family in the elite was untouched. Survivors walked the town behind pairs of men carrying a corpse on a plank. Edmond Polynice went to see what had been done to his three sons, then put on a morning coat and gloves, called at the Dominican legation, sent in his card to Etienne, and shot him three times when he appeared at the door. The crowd took the body apart and burned what was left of it in the gutter the next morning.

Guillaume Sam took office with money, some from Simon Sam and some a shipload of Theodore's New York banknotes, worthless in substance and convincing enough to spend. Caperton called him a strong man feared by the better class of Haitians for his methods. The French minister Pierre Girard described a manner of marked sweetness laid over a nature that was authoritarian, vindictive and pitiless. In March 1915, when word came that Rosalvo Bobo was mounting an invasion with the usual help from Desiderio Arias, Sam began seizing hostages. At least two hundred men were shut in the old jail as sureties for the quiet of the capital, most of them mulatres and all of them from the leading families: Oreste Zamor, three sons of Edmond Polynice, General Jules Preval, General Gaspard Peralte of Hinche, three Chatelains, and men named Nau, Lafontant, Alexis, Vincent and Douyon. He was right that a plot existed. By the end of April Bobo held Fort Liberte, and by the middle of May his Cacos held a perimeter around the Cap.

Lansing softened the pressure on 25 August with a private message over Beach's signature, offering Dartiguenave full support should he wish to dissolve the assembly and form a government of his own choosing. Dartiguenave replied mildly, asking only for changes of wording that would let the treaty read as an agreement between two states. What the Haitians submitted on 27 August was a general counter draft that removed or hollowed out every clause of the original. The tactic had worked on American envoys in 1914 and again earlier in 1915. It failed now. Within two days Lansing sent word to conclude the treaty as written. Two decisions had already settled the question. From 21 August American naval paymasters took charge of the customs houses, installing themselves as collectors and port captains at Jacmel, Les Cayes, Jérémie, Miragoane, Petit Goâve, Saint Marc, Gonaïves, Port de Paix and Cap-Haïtien, and on 2 September at Port-au-Prince. For an elite that had lived off the public treasury, the loss was immediate and personal.