Butler lifts the siege of Gonaives and the Cacos kill two Marines

Dartiguenave's south stayed quiet. The north, the northwest and the Artibonite did not. In early August the American consul Livingston reported Caco bands burning plantations and killing peasants, and said nobody believed they would give up their weapons. The American plan was to buy the fighters out, 100 gourdes for a chief with his gun and 15 gourdes for an ordinary man with his, then defeat whoever remained. Gonaïves came first. Rameau cut the town's water and laid siege with 400 men. Major Smedley Butler arrived by gunboat with orders to break the siege, restore the water and reopen the railway from Ennery. He caught Rameau and 500 Cacos at Poteaux on 20 September. Rameau agreed to talk, denied writing the handbills issued over his name on the truthful ground that he could not read them, and asked whether a portfolio in the new government might be found for him. Five days later he was captured and jailed. That same day, 26 September, Cacos in the red scarves of Ogoun ambushed a Marine platoon at Haut du Cap and killed two men.

On 28 July 1915 a crowd broke into the French embassy in Port-au-Prince, found President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam hiding in a bathroom, dragged him into the street and tore him to pieces. The day before, Sam had ordered the killing of 167 political prisoners taken from elite families, among them the former president Oreste Zamor. Those executions produced the rising that killed him. In Washington, Woodrow Wilson learned of it and feared that Rosalvo Bobo, whom his advisers took for a German sympathiser, would take power. On 29 July he ordered the Marines to occupy Haiti. The stated reason was humanitarian, the restoring of order in a country said to be incapable of governing itself. The working reasons were strategic: keeping Germany out of the Caribbean during the European war, holding the Windward Passage that guards the approach to the Panama Canal, and protecting American money already placed in Haiti. The occupation ran nineteen years. A century of Haitian self government, disorderly as it had been, ended inside a week.

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.

In 1920 the critics of the occupation emerged in force. James Weldon Johnson, poet, novelist and field secretary of the NAACP, went to Haiti and published a severe critique in a national weekly under the title Self-Determining Haiti, which also set out to direct American attention to the dignity of the Haitian peasant, the accomplishment of educated Haitians and above all the grandeur of Haitian history. Johnson later claimed he had encouraged a new literary interest in Haiti, and Renda agrees, tracing his influence into the work of O'Neill, Vandercook, Seabrook, Hughes and Cook. In the first five years of the occupation almost no critical voices had been raised, with Jane Addams and the Women's Peace Party, Du Bois at the Crisis and Fort-Whiteman at the Messenger among the very few exceptions. She notes the irony that writers who admired Haiti and writers who defamed it both turned it into an exotic object of desire.