A family known to be contrary to the occupation is put under watch

Poor women, peasants and working women in the towns took the worst of the road building and the injuries that came with it. Surveillance reached everyone. Ghislaine Charlier remembered an atmosphere of watching that ran through every layer of Haitian social life while she was growing up. Robert Cabeche, the man who had refused to sign the protectorate alongside her grandfather Auguste Garoute, appears in American records of rebel activity, filed under his name as one of a family known to be contrary to the occupation and its gendarmerie. Households close to the Garoutes were followed in the street. Wives and children drew particular attention as likely carriers of antioccupation newspapers and pamphlets, because the occupation understood that opposition travelled through families and through women's networks as reliably as through armed bands. The Americans watched what Haitians read and repeated because in the first ten years their reputation for brutality was spreading. They went on denying the brutality while they watched for news of it.

On the morning of 26 August 1915, a month after the Marines came ashore, Caroline Dagille sent Ludowick Jeudi, aged seventeen or nineteen, out on errands. Her instructions took him toward the corner of Rue du Pont and Rue Oswald Durand in Cap-Haïtien. On that same morning a man named Louie Joseph was being held at the American regional headquarters in the railway station on Rue du Pont, accused of stealing a cow. When the woman who had accused him arrived to make her statement, Joseph saw her and ran. Corporal Fred Parsons drew his pistol and fired twice down a busy street. People scattered after the first shot, apart from a few children crouching at the west end of the bridge. Joseph stopped and gave himself up. Ludowick had just turned the corner. He was hit, ran along Rue Oswald Durand and dropped. Dagille found him sitting in a chair against a wall some two hundred yards off, his body cooling to the temperature of the stone behind him. His parents lived in the country and had trusted her with him.

Davilmar Theodore, short of money and short of allies, could not refuse Vilbrun Guillaume the post of military delegate for the north and northwest. Cap Haitien was full of unpaid Cacos drifting back from the capital and attaching themselves to the Zamorist faction, now led by Bussy Zamor and by Charlemagne Peralte, Charles Zamor's brother in law. On 15 January 1915 Guillaume called the leading citizens of the Cap together, announced that he was a candidate for the presidency, and told them a Caco army was approaching and the government had given him nothing to stop it with. The morning paper reported that the Capois had unanimously entrusted their fate to him. The Caco general Metellus appeared the same day at Barriere-Bouteille with a thousand men and several cannon. He paraded them in front of the cathedral, went inside, marched around the town and looted nothing. On the nineteenth his guns fired a seventeen gun salute, and Guillaume declared himself head of the executive power.

The armoured cruiser Washington was off Cape Hatteras when a signal reached her flag officer: proceed to Cap Haitien without delay. She anchored outside the harbour on 23 January 1915 with Rear Admiral William B. Caperton aboard. The American consul Livingston had cabled for a warship the day Vilbrun Guillaume announced he wanted the presidency. On 27 January Livingston reported to Washington that not one shot had been fired in the town or anywhere near it, that Metellus had brought a thousand men in on the sixteenth and stayed to escort Guillaume south, and that the whole business had the look of a public holiday. Caperton's chief of staff, Captain E. L. Beach, had last seen the Cap in 1891. He found business at a standstill, cobblestones the French had laid a hundred and fifty years earlier still unrepaired, walls cracked and crumbling, and one activity in good health, which was revolution. Caperton called on Guillaume on the twenty fifth and recognised the general as the servant who had shown him in.