The children of the occupation gave the clearest account of what changed

Nobody can reconstruct what Haitian women and their families felt in the first weeks of the invasion, though fear, confusion and anger were certainly part of it. The most revealing accounts of daily change come from people who were children in 1915, of the age of Eleanor Charles or of Alice Garoute's older grandchildren. They folded the occupation into everything else about growing up, treating it as one more thing that required caution and rewarded careful curiosity. The literary scholar Nadève Ménard reads the novels written in Haiti during those years for what they show about the mind of a person raised under foreign rule. Oral histories, novels and archival records agree that young Haitians absorbed the occupation into ordinary life, by conscription, by necessity or by self preservation. Some remembered a before and an after. Ghislaine Charlier, born in 1918, had never known another Haiti, and described the Marines as deeply familiar and vividly out of place at once.

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.

Captain Beach went ashore with orders from Caperton to lodge in the legation, give whatever orders he judged necessary, haul down no Haitian flag under any circumstances, find where the government money was kept and protect it, and locate every weapon in the city. He met the Comite Revolutionnaire each morning and noticed that it answered some questions and slid past others, particularly about funds and about the soldiers. On 4 August 1915, while Beach kept the Comite talking through a long meeting, marines went to the barracks and the arsenal, disarmed everyone they found, loaded some 3,000 rifles and four million rounds of ammunition into mule wagons, walked the soldiers out of town and handed each man a ten gourde note. These were men recruited with rope and club. They tore off the red tape that marked their clothes as a uniform, and when they understood that they were being paid, the noise was enormous. The Comite was on its feet protesting, and its power was gone.