Jacques Nicolas Leger refuses the presidency and gives his reason

The Americans looking for a Haitian to install in the National Palace in 1915 approached Jacques Nicolas Leger. He had served as Haiti's minister in Washington, knew the men making the offer, and was one of the few Haitians whose standing would have made the appointment look respectable abroad. He declined politely. His reason, as he gave it, was that he was for Haiti and not for the United States. Leger's calculation ran forward in time. A man who took the presidency from the occupying power would hold it for as long as the occupation lasted and would then be judged by the Haitians who came after, remembered as the person who signed. He kept his name out of that ledger. The office went to Philippe Sudre Dartiguenave. The refusal belongs on a Haitian timeline because it establishes what the men who accepted already knew. The cost of collaboration was understood in 1915 by at least one man who was offered the palace and said no.

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.

Refused formal meetings by Harding and the rest of the American government, the Union Patriotique delegation was received in 1921 by the leadership of the NAACP: its president W. E. B. Du Bois, its secretary James Weldon Johnson and its treasurer Addie Hunton. The two organisations had been working toward each other for two years. In 1920, while Washington hesitated over sending any commission to look at the occupation, the NAACP sent Johnson to Haiti for two months of its own inquiry. He published the results in the Nation. American marines, he wrote, were steeped in colour prejudice, and they raped and assaulted Haitian women so often that the acts went unrecorded as crimes at all. Johnson then made the comparison that gave his reporting its force. What was being done to Haitians resembled what was being done to Black Americans at home in the same decade. The occupation ran on the racial logic that sanctioned lynching in Mississippi, exported under a flag and a treaty.

Michel makes the coincidence of dates the hinge of his narrative. The tenth of October 1917 was Peralte's thirty-second birthday, and that evening, he writes, brought a particular gift, because during the night the cacos made their first attack on the town of Hinche. He treats the raid as the opening of a duel to the death between Haiti's heroes and the occupying army rather than as an isolated act of banditry. The attack was repulsed, partly for want of preparation, but the occupiers and their local auxiliaries felt the heat of the engagement and set about finding who was responsible. Michel notes the setting that made the central plateau suitable ground: the population there had not been disarmed as coastal regions had been, and the forced labour system was applied with particular severity.