The corvee returns and resistance costs more than two thousand Haitian lives

Dartiguenave held the presidency through the most violent years of the occupation under American military supervision. By 1922 he was protesting the transfer of Haitian money into American banks, and Washington removed him, installing Louis Borno alongside Major General John Russell as high commissioner. The Borno and Russell government ran the country, ignored the violence around it, and denied what it could not ignore. Under Major Smedley Butler the Americans revived the corvée, a labour draft with precedents in French colonial rule and in Henry Christophe's building of the Citadelle. Conscription was indiscriminate. Butler wrote to Franklin Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy, that it would not do to ask too many questions about how the work was done. People walked long routes through the mountains to keep off the roads. The brutality filled the ranks of the Cacos under Charlemagne Péralte and Benoît Batraville, who took their tactics from Dessalines. Fighting between Cacos and Marines killed more than 2,250 Haitians in the first decade, some in combat and some at the hands of careless or predatory Marines.

Seabrook's travel narrative The Magic Island, built around the marine sergeant Faustin Wirkus and Seabrook's own fanciful account of Haitian religion, was chosen by the Literary Guild as its featured book for January 1929 and became a national bestseller. Renda uses its reception to show how empire was absorbed at home. Seabrook printed Wirkus's address, and schoolboys in Pennsylvania wrote to the man they understood to be a king, identifying with him as a Pennsylvanian, a working class boy and a Boy Scout, and asking about wild animals and chief exports. The Guild editor Carl Van Doren praised the book as a work in the literature of American empire and told readers they were citizens of an empire reaching far beyond their own continent. Renda notes that in 1929 empire was no longer debated in the United States, it was a point of pride.

On the morning of 26 August 1915, a month after the Marines came ashore, Caroline Dagille sent Ludowick Jeudi, aged seventeen or nineteen, out on errands. Her instructions took him toward the corner of Rue du Pont and Rue Oswald Durand in Cap-Haïtien. On that same morning a man named Louie Joseph was being held at the American regional headquarters in the railway station on Rue du Pont, accused of stealing a cow. When the woman who had accused him arrived to make her statement, Joseph saw her and ran. Corporal Fred Parsons drew his pistol and fired twice down a busy street. People scattered after the first shot, apart from a few children crouching at the west end of the bridge. Joseph stopped and gave himself up. Ludowick had just turned the corner. He was hit, ran along Rue Oswald Durand and dropped. Dagille found him sitting in a chair against a wall some two hundred yards off, his body cooling to the temperature of the stone behind him. His parents lived in the country and had trusted her with him.

Davilmar Theodore, short of money and short of allies, could not refuse Vilbrun Guillaume the post of military delegate for the north and northwest. Cap Haitien was full of unpaid Cacos drifting back from the capital and attaching themselves to the Zamorist faction, now led by Bussy Zamor and by Charlemagne Peralte, Charles Zamor's brother in law. On 15 January 1915 Guillaume called the leading citizens of the Cap together, announced that he was a candidate for the presidency, and told them a Caco army was approaching and the government had given him nothing to stop it with. The morning paper reported that the Capois had unanimously entrusted their fate to him. The Caco general Metellus appeared the same day at Barriere-Bouteille with a thousand men and several cannon. He paraded them in front of the cathedral, went inside, marched around the town and looted nothing. On the nineteenth his guns fired a seventeen gun salute, and Guillaume declared himself head of the executive power.