A commission in top hats sails north to collect Rosalvo Bobo

To quiet the north, the Americans needed Rosalvo Bobo detached from his Cacos and brought down to the capital. On the advice of Jacques Nicolas Leger, Captain Beach assembled a delegation with standing: Archbishop Conan, the former president Legitime, and Charles Zamor. In black silk hats and topcoats, escorted by Caperton's French speaking flag lieutenant Coffey, they sailed for Cap Haitien aboard the Jason. A day of high confusion followed, with landing parties from two American warships helping to sort out the claimants. Demobilised government soldiers who wanted to go home were put aboard another ship, and the Jason came south with government men berthed forward and Bobo's people aft. Caperton listed the passengers: General Bobo with a staff of twenty six generals, two more generals besides, and seventeen nuns. Bobo talked without stopping about regenerating Haiti and named no measure for doing it. Coffey thought him unbalanced. Zamor told Coffey the man was crazy. Caperton's orders were to hold an election and see that a suitable candidate won it.

In 1920 the critics of the occupation emerged in force. James Weldon Johnson, poet, novelist and field secretary of the NAACP, went to Haiti and published a severe critique in a national weekly under the title Self-Determining Haiti, which also set out to direct American attention to the dignity of the Haitian peasant, the accomplishment of educated Haitians and above all the grandeur of Haitian history. Johnson later claimed he had encouraged a new literary interest in Haiti, and Renda agrees, tracing his influence into the work of O'Neill, Vandercook, Seabrook, Hughes and Cook. In the first five years of the occupation almost no critical voices had been raised, with Jane Addams and the Women's Peace Party, Du Bois at the Crisis and Fort-Whiteman at the Messenger among the very few exceptions. She notes the irony that writers who admired Haiti and writers who defamed it both turned it into an exotic object of desire.

In 1916 the United States disbanded the Haitian army and created the Gendarmerie d'Haïti in its place, a force trained, armed and officered by American personnel. The army it replaced had taken part in twenty uprisings between 1908 and 1915, which was the argument for abolishing it. The new body crushed the Caco rebellion, enforced the corvée, and kept the order the occupation required. It was renamed the Garde d'Haïti in 1928. When the marines left in 1934 the Garde became the whole of Haiti's armed forces, and in 1947 it was renamed the Armée d'Haïti. The institution built to hold the country down for a foreign power became the machine every Haitian strongman afterwards used to take it. Paul Magloire came out of it, François Duvalier bent it to his purposes, and Raoul Cédras used it in 1991. The Americans had removed the one instrument capable of overthrowing a Haitian government and put a better trained one in its place, then handed it over on their way out.

Justin Chrysostome Dorsainvil published a study of vodou in the journal Haiti Medicale in 1912 and 1913, the first attempt to treat the possession crisis as a clinical question rather than a moral one. He defined it as a religious and racial psycho neurosis marked by a doubling of the self, with functional alteration of sensibility and of movement, and a predominance of symptoms curable by persuasion. In 1924 he brought out at Port au Prince a philological explanation of vodou which took a different road. There he showed that vodoun is a Dahomean word meaning spirit, that the whole religion of the Fon flows from the cult of the vodoun, and that this cult stands as high as the most spiritualist. He asked at the end whether it was too much to say that such a people had arrived at a clear and precise monotheist conception. The two positions sit badly together, and the twelve years between them measure how fast the ground was moving.