Caperton leaves for Santo Domingo and the occupation's manners go too

Caperton and Beach ran the first year of the occupation on charm. The French minister Girard noticed how carefully the American officers courted Haitian sympathy. Caperton accepted invitations to the Cercle Port-au-Princien and threw small coins to people along the road when he drove up to Pétionville. Even Danache, Dartiguenave's confidant, who loathed the occupation and thought Americans brutal, allowed that the two men spoke correct French and had manners, and remembered the admiral as a tireless dancer. On 10 May 1916 a crisis in Santo Domingo pulled Caperton next door, leaving Colonel Littleton Waller of the marine brigade in charge of Haiti. Two months later Caperton was given the Pacific Fleet and never returned. In his last letter to Admiral Benson he admitted the occupation was less popular than it had been. Waller sent Washington a blunter reading: the Haitian government had broken every promise, denied making them, and was insincere and unstable, with Borno running the cabinet. Both men were describing the same souring, which followed the dissolution of the Senate in April.

Franklin Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the navy and the Democratic candidate for vice president, told an audience that he had had something to do with running a couple of small republics and that he had written Haiti's constitution himself. Pamphile places the remark in a sequence. On 9 August a NAACP delegation including Johnson had met Harding at Marion, Ohio, putting to him an agenda of anti-lynching legislation, federal aid, voting rights and an end to the occupation; Harding took little interest in any of it except Haiti, which Johnson said he treated as a gift off the Christmas tree. Roosevelt's boast gave him his opening. On 17 September Harding promised he would not authorise an assistant navy secretary to draft a constitution for helpless West Indian neighbours and force it on them at marine bayonet point, and in his Constitution Day speech he called the admission a confession of the rape of Haiti and Santo Domingo.

Around forty thousand Haitian peasants took up arms against the American occupation in 1918. Nothing on that scale had happened on Haitian soil since the war of independence. The grievance was the corvée, the unpaid road labour the occupation had revived from an 1863 statute, which the peasantry read as the return of the forced work their great grandparents had fought a revolution to destroy. The fighters were called Cacos, after a bird of prey, and they marked themselves with patches of red cloth. They had been a factor in Haitian politics for decades, hired and paid by presidential candidates from the North to march on the capital. In 1918 they turned on the Americans instead. Their leader was Charlemagne Péralte, born at Hinche on 10 October 1885, who had commanded the garrison at Léogâne when the marines landed in 1915. Sentenced to five years of hard labour for destroying United States property, he escaped and built the insurgency. The same year a constitution drafted under American supervision was promulgated over a population that had no part in writing it.

Haiti conducted its government in French from independence in 1804 onward, and no law said so until 1918, when French was legally recognised as the official language of the nation for the first time. Nearly everyone in the country spoke Creole and only Creole. The bilingual minority who could work in French were the people who held office, drafted laws, taught school and heard court cases, so the rule put on the books in 1918 confirmed an arrangement that had already settled who could take part in public life. Creole waited another forty six years for its first appearance in a Haitian constitution. That came in 1964, and the clause permitted Creole only where the use of French would place a monolingual speaker at a disadvantage, in a courtroom for instance. Creole was recognised as a national language alongside French in 1983, and in 1987 Haiti became officially bilingual, at a point when about seven percent of Haitians actually were.