The American flag goes up over Haiti's national bank

On 1 January 1915 the French tricolour came down from the offices of the Banque Nationale on the Rue des Magasins de l'Etat in Port-au-Prince and the flag of the United States went up in its place. Washington had taken over the protection of the bank that held the Haitian treasury. It warned the government that the newsprint gourdes would not be honoured, and the government printed more, while officials said openly that the time had come for Haitians to take what belonged to them. The gold already shipped to New York aboard the gunboat Machias was defended in law by the bank's Haitian counsel Seymour Pradel, who observed that the Banque had moved its own money from one pocket to another and had earned interest on it. Solon Menos, the Haitian minister in Washington, told Bryan the removal was an arbitrary and offensive act and a flagrant invasion of the independence of the republic. None of the Americans on the spot believed the bank had been in danger of a raid.

Hogsbjerg dates James's first work in theatre to a teaching post at a private school in Port of Spain. A schoolfriend recalled being told that James intended to stage The Merchant of Venice in a cinema in the town, and that he went on to mount a full public version of Othello which drew an enthusiastic response. James then wrote a drama about local life, now lost, and produced it with his students for the public. The editor treats this as the practical root of the later play rather than a curiosity, since it shows James working with amateur casts and public audiences a decade before London. He connects it to James's parallel effort to introduce West Indian history into a school curriculum that did not contain it, and to his reading on the Haitian Revolution.

The United States Marine Corps landed in Haiti in 1915 and stayed nineteen years. President Wilson appears to have feared growing German influence, with Mole Saint Nicolas sitting opposite Guantanamo. American investment in the country was small at the time. Just before the landing, President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was killed by a crowd and his torn limbs carried through the streets of the capital. It took four years to pacify the country, which required putting down the rising led by Charlemagne Peralte. The Americans then did in Haiti what they had done in Cuba, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic and created a modern constabulary combining army and police under Marine supervision, the Gendarmerie d'Haiti. It became the Forces Armees d'Haiti and from the late 1930s decided how long any sitting president would remain. Elections and plebiscites held up to 1929 were all controlled by the Marines.

Three Marine companies climbed to the crest through the night of 17 November 1915 and attacked on Butler's whistle. Under the walls the twenty four men of the storming party found the entrance bricked over. The only way in was a masonry drain four feet high and fifteen feet long with a Caco sentry firing down it. Three men, Butler among them, crawled through and came out unhurt into about seventy defenders. They fought at the drain mouth long enough for the rest of the party to get inside. The Cacos had machetes, sticks and stones. Their leader, known as General Josephette, was killed in his usual black frock coat, top hat and brass watch chain. Fifty of his men lay dead within a quarter of an hour, and the northern Caco movement died with them. A ton of dynamite brought the fort down afterwards. Pierre-Paul, one of the fiercest Haitian critics of the Americans, later wrote that the Cacos had made an industry of insurrection, raising and wrecking one government after another, and that the wreckage gave the invaders of 1915 their pretext.