A United States Senate decision creates the army that would rule Haiti

Bellegarde-Smith identifies the creation of the new Haitian army by American Senate fiat as the institutional legacy that mattered most. The gendarmerie could reach the outlying districts of the countryside in a way earlier Haitian forces had not, which completed the centralisation of power in Port-au-Prince at the expense of provincial capitals and the elites based in them. Fatton develops the point into a general claim about the state. What the occupation implanted was not merely a military that arbitrated power but a centralised apparatus of coercion whose main function was disciplining and punishing the population. After the withdrawal this force became the pivot of Haitian politics, so that presidents held office only with its consent and coups became the normal method of transferring power. Fatton calls the military created by the occupiers the Trojan horse through which American influence continued after the troops left.

Charlemagne Masséna Péralte of Hinche was a graduate of Saint Louis de Gonzague, a former commandant de la place at Port-de-Paix and at Léogâne, and a brother in law of Oreste Zamor, which made him an enemy of Dartiguenave. In early 1918 he was convicted of taking part in a night raid on Gendarmerie headquarters at Hinche, where a payroll of twelve thousand dollars had just arrived. Caught at Ouanaminthe before he could reach the border, he was sentenced to five years of hard labour in the civil prison at the Cap and set to sweeping the gutters under guard. On 3 September 1918 he persuaded his guard to run with him into the mountains behind the Plaine du Nord. He gathered Bobo's old Cacos and Zamorist bands from Hinche and declared war to drive the invaders into the sea. On the night of 17 October a hundred Cacos wearing the scarlet badge of Ogoun attacked Hinche and lost thirty five dead to a garrison that had been warned. On 10 November sixty of them took Maïssade.

Refused formal meetings by Harding and the rest of the American government, the Union Patriotique delegation was received in 1921 by the leadership of the NAACP: its president W. E. B. Du Bois, its secretary James Weldon Johnson and its treasurer Addie Hunton. The two organisations had been working toward each other for two years. In 1920, while Washington hesitated over sending any commission to look at the occupation, the NAACP sent Johnson to Haiti for two months of its own inquiry. He published the results in the Nation. American marines, he wrote, were steeped in colour prejudice, and they raped and assaulted Haitian women so often that the acts went unrecorded as crimes at all. Johnson then made the comparison that gave his reporting its force. What was being done to Haitians resembled what was being done to Black Americans at home in the same decade. The occupation ran on the racial logic that sanctioned lynching in Mississippi, exported under a flag and a treaty.

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.