Fuller tells Washington to land marines and dictate a treaty

Nine days after leaving Port-au-Prince, Paul Fuller told Robert Lansing what he had found. Any concession a Haitian government made to the United States would be read at home as selling the country, and the men who made it would be killed for it. At the same time the government and a large part of every class wanted a convention with the United States, and would accept indirect control of the customs and the transfer of the Mole Saint Nicolas. The president and the foreign minister had told him they were willing to sign on the Mole and to find a legal route by which the Americans could take it. Fear of personal violence was the obstacle. Fuller concluded that negotiation had no future and recommended landing marines and imposing a treaty on the model of the Platt Amendment, which had governed Cuba since 1901. Wilson read the report on 2 July 1915 and noted that action was evidently necessary and that postponing it long would be a mistake. The marines landed twenty six days later.

Mother Leafy Anderson founded the Eternal Life Spiritual Church in New Orleans in 1918, the first of the Spiritual churches of that city. The form was protective. With Vodou practice exposed to prosecution, a congregation with a spiritualist name was legally safe, and the churches carried Vodou, Pentecostalism, spiritualism and Catholicism together: elaborate altars to ancestors, saints and spirit guides, women serving as priests and as mothers, prophecy and healing performed in ecstatic trance. Catholic Creoles of colour used a second cover, the seance, in which a medium delivered detailed messages in French from the dead. Rene Grandjean, born in France and resident in Haiti for several years, kept written records of those Creole seances. Zora Neale Hurston, working in the city in this period, put the arrangement plainly: the practice was in disrepute and parts of it were illegal, so a spiritualist name protected the congregation and worked as camouflage.

A mob surrounded the French legation on 27 July calling for Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. Minister Girard held the door. Charles Zamor came in with a machete and a party of soldiers and was stopped by the minister's daughter Alice, eighteen years old, who had fed Zamor through the ten months he had spent in that house as a refugee. He lowered the machete and took his men away. Five more attempts were turned back before dark. The president crawled from room to room and went on all fours past open windows. The funerals of the prison dead were held on the morning of 28 July, and then eighty men in black coats and bowler hats came over a side wall and into the building. Guillaume Sam had hidden in the water closet behind the minister's bed, and the iodoform on his dressing gave him away. He asked them to finish him. They hauled him down the stairs and threw him over the wall to the crowd, which dismembered him and carried the pieces through the city on poles. Caperton's cruiser anchored in the bay that forenoon.

United States marines came ashore at Port-au-Prince on 28 July 1915, hours after a crowd had killed President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. The last of them left in 1934. Washington gave two reasons, the collapse of order in the capital and the strategic value of the Windward Passage in the second year of the European war. Nobody met the landing party at the waterfront with a rifle. Parts of the capital received the marines with relief. Syrian traders whose shops had been looted in every recent revolution wanted troops in the streets. Members of the mulatto elite, who had just buried relatives killed in the prison yard, feared what Bobo and his Caco army would do if he reached the palace, and preferred American marines to him. That preference was stated in private and almost never in public, because saying it aloud was dangerous. Nineteen years of foreign administration began on an afternoon when the Haitians best placed to object had their own reasons for silence.