Fouchard lists the occupation last among the punishments for 1804

Asked why a country with such a past became a country of misery, Fouchard answers by placing the occupation at the end of a sequence rather than treating it as a separate episode. Independence was won by four hundred thousand people barely out of their chains, ragged, unlettered and exhausted, on burnt and devastated ground with no structures and no resources, in an America that was still pro-slavery. Other new nations of the hemisphere changed their flags and kept their productive structures intact. Then came the heavy payment exacted, as he puts it, for recognition of a sovereignty already won in battle, the punishment inflicted by the so-called civilised nations for founding the first free Black republic, and the constant threats that forced a small country to spend its scarce resources defending its territory. He counts nineteen years of American occupation and places them on the eve of the First World War, which misdates the landing. Where this account departs from the standard one: Fouchard places the American occupation on the eve of the First World War; the landing came in July 1915, well after the war began.

Captain Beach went ashore with orders from Caperton to lodge in the legation, give whatever orders he judged necessary, haul down no Haitian flag under any circumstances, find where the government money was kept and protect it, and locate every weapon in the city. He met the Comite Revolutionnaire each morning and noticed that it answered some questions and slid past others, particularly about funds and about the soldiers. On 4 August 1915, while Beach kept the Comite talking through a long meeting, marines went to the barracks and the arsenal, disarmed everyone they found, loaded some 3,000 rifles and four million rounds of ammunition into mule wagons, walked the soldiers out of town and handed each man a ten gourde note. These were men recruited with rope and club. They tore off the red tape that marked their clothes as a uniform, and when they understood that they were being paid, the noise was enormous. The Comite was on its feet protesting, and its power was gone.

The Haitian legislature had become the gathering point for elite opposition to the occupation, and the president had no way to buy it off. Coups were impossible while the marines held the country, and American auditors had closed off the palace patronage and the contract fraud that earlier presidents used to manage the chambers. In February 1916 Sudre Dartiguenave and Louis Borno went privately to Admiral Caperton and asked for backing if the president dissolved the legislature and replaced the constitution of 1889. Their interests matched for the moment. Dartiguenave wanted his critics gone, and Washington wanted the Dessalinian ban on foreign land ownership gone. On 5 April 1916 the president locked the senators out, turned the deputies into a constituent assembly, and named a council of state of twenty one men. Elections in January 1917 were held with gendarmes unarmed at the polls, and some northern districts tried to elect marines. When Washington returned the Héraux draft it had removed the property bar and added a clause ratifying every act of the occupation. Sténio Vincent's assembly began writing its own.

On 18 June 1917 Josephus Daniels cabled Colonel Cole full discretion to end the National Assembly without using troops. Cole wrote a dissolution decree in the French he had learned at the Naval Academy, put it in the brigade safe, and asked Dartiguenave if he meant to sign. The president said yes. Next morning no decree appeared, and Cole learned that the assembly, knowing what was coming, had shouted down Charles Zamor when he counselled moderation and was racing its own constitution through in batches. Cole sent Major Butler to the palace. As Butler left, an officer telephoned that 320 of the 360 articles had passed and the rest would take half an hour. At the palace an aide in red trousers and a green coat said the president was sick but had ordered the Gendarmerie to do the job. Butler insisted on a written decree. Dartiguenave asked him to go and use force instead. Butler refused, and the president produced four of his five ministers, who signed in handwriting so small that Butler said afterwards he needed a magnifying glass to read the names.