Market women returned to the same street and an officer demanded an example

Bernadel's commanding officer was less troubled by the market women's unlicensed trading than by their evident calculation. They had judged that they could escape punishment, they had judged the limits of a gendarme's authority, and they had tested both. Going back to the same street after release showed how loosely the American military actually held Haitian towns. Both sides of the war used the same resource. Gendarmes and Cacos alike depended on women's knowledge of the roads, and women decided in each case what to say and to whom. Claire Saint-Lot used hers to damage the antioccupation movement. The four peddlers used theirs to keep trading. In both cases the answer was a threat of public violence, and the officer's insistence on making an example confirmed what Haitian women already understood, that they were the first targets and the principal witnesses of the ordinary physical punishment of those years. The occupation could not function without what women knew, and could not tolerate their knowing it.

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.

Lansing softened the pressure on 25 August with a private message over Beach's signature, offering Dartiguenave full support should he wish to dissolve the assembly and form a government of his own choosing. Dartiguenave replied mildly, asking only for changes of wording that would let the treaty read as an agreement between two states. What the Haitians submitted on 27 August was a general counter draft that removed or hollowed out every clause of the original. The tactic had worked on American envoys in 1914 and again earlier in 1915. It failed now. Within two days Lansing sent word to conclude the treaty as written. Two decisions had already settled the question. From 21 August American naval paymasters took charge of the customs houses, installing themselves as collectors and port captains at Jacmel, Les Cayes, Jérémie, Miragoane, Petit Goâve, Saint Marc, Gonaïves, Port de Paix and Cap-Haïtien, and on 2 September at Port-au-Prince. For an elite that had lived off the public treasury, the loss was immediate and personal.

Hostility in the capital ran against Dartiguenave as much as against the Americans. He had sat in the Senate in 1914 when members nearly lynched Joseph Justin for proposing a foreign overseer. On 2 September 1915 he privately asked the Americans to impose martial law, and Caperton did so the following day. What followed was a limited military government on the model of the American occupation of Veracruz. Provost courts tried political offenders and anyone charged with an offence against the occupation. A decree announced that press freedom would stand, while false or incendiary writing against the American or Haitian governments would go before military courts. Haitian journalists knew such rules from every government they had lived under. The difference was that the men making and enforcing them now were foreigners, and would be for years. On 16 September Louis Borno, who had replaced Sannon at the foreign ministry, signed the treaty. The next morning the U.S.S. Washington fired a twenty one gun salute and the city learned that Dartiguenave's government had American recognition.