The Cacos give the American officer coffee, oranges and a turkey

The Washington reached Cap Haitien on the morning of 1 July 1915. Caperton thanked the captain of the French cruiser Descartes for his landing party and told him the United States would take charge from there. He sent Captain Beach ashore with a marine squad to inform the government commander Probus Blot and the insurgent Rosalvo Bobo that the town was neutral ground and that any further fighting would happen well away from it. Beach never reached Bobo. Guided by Consul Livingston, he found one of the revolution's ministers, a man named Pierrot, in the village of Petite-Anse just east of the town. Beach wrote that he had never seen a more villainous looking set of men, each of them carrying a musket, a pistol, a sword and a long knife. They brought cane bottomed chairs out of the huts, set them in the shade for the visitors, and produced coffee, coarse sugar, and oranges that were sweet under green skins. Beach thought it the best coffee there ever was. When the party left, the Cacos gave them a dressed turkey.

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.

Nobody settled how many were killed in the Port-au-Prince prison. The American chargé Davis said nearly two hundred, the French minister Girard reported 160, the British minister Kohan said 168, and H. P. Davis gave 167. Charles Oscar Etienne and his men fired a last volley into the yard, pretending to be rescuers so that the wounded would move, and then left for the Dominican legation. When the crowd marched to the jail to free the prisoners, which was a normal stage of a Haitian revolution, it found the yard full of bodies. Almost no family in the elite was untouched. Survivors walked the town behind pairs of men carrying a corpse on a plank. Edmond Polynice went to see what had been done to his three sons, then put on a morning coat and gloves, called at the Dominican legation, sent in his card to Etienne, and shot him three times when he appeared at the door. The crowd took the body apart and burned what was left of it in the gutter the next morning.

Nine days after leaving Port-au-Prince, Paul Fuller told Robert Lansing what he had found. Any concession a Haitian government made to the United States would be read at home as selling the country, and the men who made it would be killed for it. At the same time the government and a large part of every class wanted a convention with the United States, and would accept indirect control of the customs and the transfer of the Mole Saint Nicolas. The president and the foreign minister had told him they were willing to sign on the Mole and to find a legal route by which the Americans could take it. Fear of personal violence was the obstacle. Fuller concluded that negotiation had no future and recommended landing marines and imposing a treaty on the model of the Platt Amendment, which had governed Cuba since 1901. Wilson read the report on 2 July 1915 and noted that action was evidently necessary and that postponing it long would be a mistake. The marines landed twenty six days later.