Nineteen years of American administration and 1,200 miles of road

American administrative control of Haiti ran from 28 July 1915 to 15 August 1934. In those nineteen years the occupation rebuilt the Haitian armed forces on an American model and laid 1,200 miles of all weather highway, much of it built by peasants conscripted under an old corvee law that the Americans revived. The same period produced Charlemagne Peralte, who led the Caco war against the occupation, was shot dead in 1919 and was then photographed tied upright to a door so that the picture could be circulated as proof. The photograph became the standing image of Haitian resistance and did the opposite of what the occupation intended. The Americans who governed treated Vodou as a police problem and never grasped how much of Haitian life ran through it. Haitians called the withdrawal of August 1934 the second independence. The phrase set the terms of every argument that followed about what exactly the country had to take back.

The armoured cruiser Washington was off Cape Hatteras when a signal reached her flag officer: proceed to Cap Haitien without delay. She anchored outside the harbour on 23 January 1915 with Rear Admiral William B. Caperton aboard. The American consul Livingston had cabled for a warship the day Vilbrun Guillaume announced he wanted the presidency. On 27 January Livingston reported to Washington that not one shot had been fired in the town or anywhere near it, that Metellus had brought a thousand men in on the sixteenth and stayed to escort Guillaume south, and that the whole business had the look of a public holiday. Caperton's chief of staff, Captain E. L. Beach, had last seen the Cap in 1891. He found business at a standstill, cobblestones the French had laid a hundred and fifty years earlier still unrepaired, walls cracked and crumbling, and one activity in good health, which was revolution. Caperton called on Guillaume on the twenty fifth and recognised the general as the servant who had shown him in.

Colonel Littleton Waller took the north in hand. He paid off the Haitian garrison at Ouanaminthe, most of whom claimed the rank of brigadier general at the pay table, and put a Marine company on the Dominican border in their place. More companies went into Grande Rivière du Nord and Fort Liberté, giving him a triangle of garrisons to patrol from. Butler took forty men to locate the Caco strongholds, crossing country no foreigner had entered since the French, and afterwards said Haiti looked like a crumpled sheet of paper. On the afternoon of 24 October 1915 he came within sight of Fort Capois, a cone of rock a thousand feet above him ringed with stone walls and trenches, seven miles south of Saint Suzanne. He turned back toward Grande Rivière and spent the night surrounded and under fire from 400 Cacos. From 1 November the Marines swept west from the Dominican frontier, taking the strongholds one after another, nearly all of them old French forts. The last was Fort Rivière, on the peak of the Montagne Noire, 4,000 feet up.

Holding an army in the north was costing the Haitian government 140,000 gourdes a week and producing nothing. Recruiters were again pulling old men and boys out of village huts, clubbing them and roping them together for the march to the barracks. The fighting had stalled and Rosalvo Bobo was losing his hold on his Cacos, who told him they could walk east over the bridge into the mountains and find another leader whenever they liked. To make the point they beheaded two men of Cap Haitien who had not been enthusiastic enough, and shot others. Consul Livingston watched the heads carried about the streets and called it the worst savagery he had seen in seventeen years there. Bobo was a doctor educated in Paris and campaigning as a progressive. When he reproached a Caco general, the man answered that the Angels had ordered the killings and that if there had been a hundred people he would have killed all of them. The French cruiser Descartes landed marines to guard the consulates.