An American admiral escorts a Caco army down the coast

Admiral Caperton got a promise out of Vilbrun Guillaume that his men would not loot the towns they entered, would not burn them and would not fire in the streets. For the leader of a Caco army marching on the capital that was a large undertaking, and Guillaume largely kept it. He told Caperton later, laughing, that every city he entered had Americans waiting outside it to ask him to behave himself. The Washington and her sister ship Montana, carrying 650 marines the State Department had thought it useful to move into Haitian waters, were too big for any harbour but Port-au-Prince. Caperton therefore put the gunboat Wheeling and the cruiser Des Moines on the coast to shadow the march south and hold Guillaume to his word. On 5 February 1915 Guillaume entered Gonaives and the local warlord Mizael Codio saluted him with twenty one guns. In the capital, Rosalvo Bobo lost his place in the cabinet, left for the north, and began talking about a revolution of his own.

Hogsbjerg dates James's first work in theatre to a teaching post at a private school in Port of Spain. A schoolfriend recalled being told that James intended to stage The Merchant of Venice in a cinema in the town, and that he went on to mount a full public version of Othello which drew an enthusiastic response. James then wrote a drama about local life, now lost, and produced it with his students for the public. The editor treats this as the practical root of the later play rather than a curiosity, since it shows James working with amateur casts and public audiences a decade before London. He connects it to James's parallel effort to introduce West Indian history into a school curriculum that did not contain it, and to his reading on the Haitian Revolution.

In 1914 the American State Department received reports that German merchants controlled roughly eighty percent of all commerce in Haiti. The community numbered only a few hundred people and had made itself indispensable in the one way the law allowed. Foreigners could not own Haitian land, so German traders married Haitian women, held the import business, financed governments at high interest and lent to whichever faction looked likely to win. By 1914 they were the working bank of Haitian politics. Washington read this as a strategic problem rather than a commercial one. Europe went to war that August, the Panama Canal opened in the same month, and the prospect of a German-leaning republic sitting on the Windward Passage was the argument that carried in the American cabinet. The occupation that began in July 1915 is usually explained by Haitian disorder. The disorder was real enough. The eighty percent is what made it urgent.

Three Marine companies climbed to the crest through the night of 17 November 1915 and attacked on Butler's whistle. Under the walls the twenty four men of the storming party found the entrance bricked over. The only way in was a masonry drain four feet high and fifteen feet long with a Caco sentry firing down it. Three men, Butler among them, crawled through and came out unhurt into about seventy defenders. They fought at the drain mouth long enough for the rest of the party to get inside. The Cacos had machetes, sticks and stones. Their leader, known as General Josephette, was killed in his usual black frock coat, top hat and brass watch chain. Fifty of his men lay dead within a quarter of an hour, and the northern Caco movement died with them. A ton of dynamite brought the fort down afterwards. Pierre-Paul, one of the fiercest Haitian critics of the Americans, later wrote that the Cacos had made an industry of insurrection, raising and wrecking one government after another, and that the wreckage gave the invaders of 1915 their pretext.