Georges Sylvain gathers twelve men and the Union Patriotique is born

The French minister Girard wrote to Paris that the white master had arrived in Haiti, and that Americans wanting to carry out their programme would probably have to campaign through the interior at a cost beyond anything they expected. He was right. Armed Caco bands held the northern mountains that Sonthonax had once called the ramparts of liberty, and more were gathering along the lower Artibonite between Gonaïves and Saint Marc, opposed to the foreigners and to a light skinned president from the south alike. In the capital the lawyer Georges Sylvain called twelve leading men together, spoke against the intervention, and formed a committee named the Union Patriotique. That committee became the spine of elite resistance for the next twenty years. Its members belonged to the class that had lived off each government in turn, and their interests ran against those of the Haitian peasantry. The contradiction was never resolved. It separated the men who wrote the protests from the men fighting in the hills.

In 1916 the United States disbanded the Haitian army and created the Gendarmerie d'Haïti in its place, a force trained, armed and officered by American personnel. The army it replaced had taken part in twenty uprisings between 1908 and 1915, which was the argument for abolishing it. The new body crushed the Caco rebellion, enforced the corvée, and kept the order the occupation required. It was renamed the Garde d'Haïti in 1928. When the marines left in 1934 the Garde became the whole of Haiti's armed forces, and in 1947 it was renamed the Armée d'Haïti. The institution built to hold the country down for a foreign power became the machine every Haitian strongman afterwards used to take it. Paul Magloire came out of it, François Duvalier bent it to his purposes, and Raoul Cédras used it in 1991. The Americans had removed the one instrument capable of overthrowing a Haitian government and put a better trained one in its place, then handed it over on their way out.

Churchstone-Lord told the Chicago Defender that if the United States meant to keep its protectorate over Haiti, Haitians would rather have Black American troops. White troops, he said, were arrogant and known for their contempt toward Haitians, women and girls in particular. The request measured what people expected to survive. Under a foreign army that was going to stay, the only choice on offer was which soldiers were least likely to read Haitian skin as permission. His report put a structure of rape, assault and murder in front of an American public with no other way of learning about it. Few of the incidents were ever investigated by the marines or by the gendarmerie. Haitians moved the information themselves, by word of mouth, in newspapers and journals, in open letters, and where it was possible through courts martial. Churchstone-Lord learned about the dead girls through those channels and sent the story north. The Black press in the United States did the work of a court of inquiry because there was no court of inquiry.

Money reached Davilmar Théodore from Antoine Simon's dairy farm in Kingston, and weapons and recruits from Desiderio Arias across the Dominican border. From the French legation, where he had taken asylum, Vilbrun Guillaume was quietly organising support for Théodore against the Zamors. By the end of May 1914 the plain between Cap-Haïtien and Ouanaminthe was full of Cacos. The American consul Livingston drove round through Montecristi to Ouanaminthe on 21 May to see whether terms were possible, and was told they would sooner see the country perish ten times over than leave the Zamors in place. On 19 June Roger Farnham wired Bryan that rebels held Bahon, Grande Rivière and Lacombe, that the railway station had been taken, telephone and train service cut, two men shot and that day's trains probably captured. Trou had fallen the day before. From the Cap you could watch the plain burn, as people there had watched it burn in 1791. Charles Zamor answered by shooting townsmen he suspected, fourteen of them at La Fossette on 25 June.