Guillaume Sam locks up two hundred men from the leading families

Guillaume Sam took office with money, some from Simon Sam and some a shipload of Theodore's New York banknotes, worthless in substance and convincing enough to spend. Caperton called him a strong man feared by the better class of Haitians for his methods. The French minister Pierre Girard described a manner of marked sweetness laid over a nature that was authoritarian, vindictive and pitiless. In March 1915, when word came that Rosalvo Bobo was mounting an invasion with the usual help from Desiderio Arias, Sam began seizing hostages. At least two hundred men were shut in the old jail as sureties for the quiet of the capital, most of them mulatres and all of them from the leading families: Oreste Zamor, three sons of Edmond Polynice, General Jules Preval, General Gaspard Peralte of Hinche, three Chatelains, and men named Nau, Lafontant, Alexis, Vincent and Douyon. He was right that a plot existed. By the end of April Bobo held Fort Liberte, and by the middle of May his Cacos held a perimeter around the Cap.

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.

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.

Justin Chrysostome Dorsainvil published a study of vodou in the journal Haiti Medicale in 1912 and 1913, the first attempt to treat the possession crisis as a clinical question rather than a moral one. He defined it as a religious and racial psycho neurosis marked by a doubling of the self, with functional alteration of sensibility and of movement, and a predominance of symptoms curable by persuasion. In 1924 he brought out at Port au Prince a philological explanation of vodou which took a different road. There he showed that vodoun is a Dahomean word meaning spirit, that the whole religion of the Fon flows from the cult of the vodoun, and that this cult stands as high as the most spiritualist. He asked at the end whether it was too much to say that such a people had arrived at a clear and precise monotheist conception. The two positions sit badly together, and the twelve years between them measure how fast the ground was moving.