Vodou priests led the countryside against the marines

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.

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.

The Haitian legislature had become the gathering point for elite opposition to the occupation, and the president had no way to buy it off. Coups were impossible while the marines held the country, and American auditors had closed off the palace patronage and the contract fraud that earlier presidents used to manage the chambers. In February 1916 Sudre Dartiguenave and Louis Borno went privately to Admiral Caperton and asked for backing if the president dissolved the legislature and replaced the constitution of 1889. Their interests matched for the moment. Dartiguenave wanted his critics gone, and Washington wanted the Dessalinian ban on foreign land ownership gone. On 5 April 1916 the president locked the senators out, turned the deputies into a constituent assembly, and named a council of state of twenty one men. Elections in January 1917 were held with gendarmes unarmed at the polls, and some northern districts tried to elect marines. When Washington returned the Héraux draft it had removed the property bar and added a clause ratifying every act of the occupation. Sténio Vincent's assembly began writing its own.