Auguste Garoute was one of two men who refused to sign the protectorate

Ghislaine Charlier was born in 1918, the year the Wilson administration dissolved the Haitian national assembly and rewrote the constitution, which put her among the occupation generation who knew no other Haiti. Her mother's parents took the invasion hard. Her grandmother Alice Garoute told and retold the story of her own influence: some months before the landings she wrote to Louis Borno, a friend from childhood then serving as minister of foreign affairs and justice and later president, pressing him to nominate her husband Auguste Garoute to the Tribunal de Cassation. Auguste was appointed, and within months was asked to sign the Haitian American treaty of 16 September 1915. He and a man remembered as Monsieur Cabeche were the only two who refused. Ghislaine sat nearby while her grandmother poured tea, read books, staged small plays and discussed with her friends how to get the foreigners out. Those women went on to organise antioccupation protests. In 1935 Alice Garoute and several of her guests founded the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale.

The Caco rising began in earnest in 1918, and its cause was the corvée. Peasants were being taken by gendarmes and set to work without pay on roads the occupation wanted for moving troops. Charlemagne Péralte gave the resistance a command and a political programme. Nicholls calls it the most serious armed opposition the American occupation ever faced. Peasant irregulars turned out in thousands across the Central Plateau and the North, and the Gendarmerie, created two years earlier so that marine garrisons would be unnecessary, proved unable to hold the country without marine reinforcement. That failure is the point of the entry. The occupation had built a Haitian force to do its policing, and the first serious test showed the force could not police Haitians who had decided to fight. What followed was a campaign of nearly two years, fought by United States Marines with aircraft, machine guns and paid informers, against people armed mostly with what they could take from the posts they overran.

The corvée failed where it touched Haitian officials. Magistrats and gendarmes worked out that they could exempt anyone who paid and impress anyone who could not. A peasant who finished his annual stint was given a card by the Americans; the chef seksyon would tear the card up in front of him and send him back to work with a blow from the kokomakak. By late 1918, after Butler had gone, men were being roped together and marched to distant work sites like conscripts for the old army. Educated townsmen were caught in it too. Dantès Bellegarde was still angry twenty three years later about the gendarme who knocked on Jean Price-Mars's door in Pétionville and took him away for three days. Out of this came the teledjòl that ran through the mountains of the North and the Artibonite: the blan have come to bring slavery back, and the corvée is only the beginning. Major A. S. Williams wrote that the labour system had taught peasants to hate the occupation and taught gendarmes to treat civilians as material. He abolished it on 1 October 1918. It was already too late.

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.