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The crowd takes Guillaume Sam out of the French legation

28 July 1915 · Haitian

The 1900sSezisman1 source
28 July 1915 · Haitian

The crowd takes Guillaume Sam out of the French legation

The smell of iodoform on a dressing gave away where the president was hiding.

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A mob surrounded the French legation on 27 July calling for Vilbrun Guillaume Sam. Minister Girard held the door. Charles Zamor came in with a machete and a party of soldiers and was stopped by the minister's daughter Alice, eighteen years old, who had fed Zamor through the ten months he had spent in that house as a refugee. He lowered the machete and took his men away. Five more attempts were turned back before dark. The president crawled from room to room and went on all fours past open windows. The funerals of the prison dead were held on the morning of 28 July, and then eighty men in black coats and bowler hats came over a side wall and into the building. Guillaume Sam had hidden in the water closet behind the minister's bed, and the iodoform on his dressing gave him away. He asked them to finish him. They hauled him down the stairs and threw him over the wall to the crowd, which dismembered him and carried the pieces through the city on poles. Caperton's cruiser anchored in the bay that forenoon.

Vilbrun Guillaume SamPierre GirardAlice GirardCharles ZamorHerard SylvainWilliam Caperton Port-au-Prince
Where this comes from Heinl, R. D., & Heinl, N. G. (2005). Written in blood: The story of the Haitian people. University Press of America.HT-WIB-000379HT-WIB-000380HT-WIB-000381

A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.

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Meanwhile, and next door

28 June 1919 · Diaspora

Versailles sends Germany a bill for thirty three billion dollars

Keynes counted three lethal flaws in the treaty and one of them was the guilt clause.

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The treaty was signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 28 June 1919. John Maynard Keynes named three fatal defects in it that same year. It transferred German coal, iron and steel properties to France and barred German industry from using them, which struck at the organisation of production itself. It stripped Germany of colonies, foreign investments and merchant shipping and limited her control of her own waterways and tariffs. Then it charged this weakened country some thirty three billion dollars in reparations. Article 231 required the Germans to accept sole responsibility for the war. Prince Fumimaro Konoye of Japan, then twenty seven, published an article urging his countrymen to reject a peace built around Britain and the United States which refused to write racial equality into the settlement. Two decades later Konoye was premier and signed the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy.

John Maynard KeynesFumimaro Konoye VersaillesGermanyJapan
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1915 to 1934 · Haitianspan

Vodou priests led the countryside against the marines

Bellegarde-Smith puts the dead of the first American occupation at perhaps fifty thousand.

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During the first United States occupation of Haiti, which ran from 1915 to 1934, opposition in the countryside was often led by Vodou priests and priestesses. Bellegarde-Smith puts the number of Haitians who died fighting the invading army at perhaps fifty thousand, and describes the religion as the popular vehicle of a wider culture of refusal. He reads the missionary side of the occupation as policy. Detaching Haitians from Roman Catholicism and from the French hold on the Haitian elite was expected to turn enemies into friends, and the written record of the period carries the argument openly. Washington had tried the same approach in Puerto Rico after 1898, where replacing Spanish and Catholicism with English and Protestantism was supposed to pacify the island. The French bishops who ran the Haitian church were nervous accordingly. Decades later Francois Duvalier replaced every French bishop with a Haitian of his own choosing and brought American fundamentalist Protestants in against Rome.

Francois Duvalier HaitiPuerto RicoUnited States
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17 November 1915 · Haitian

Fifty Cacos die inside Fort Riviere and the first Caco war ends

The storming party found the gate bricked up and went in through a drain four feet high.

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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.

Smedley ButlerGeneral JosephetteCacosPierre-Paul Fort RivièreMontagne NoireHaiti
Meanwhile, and next door Read these right here. You keep your place. Peek ›28 July 1915The crowd takes Guillaume Sam out of the French legation
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