Charlemagne Péralte is jailed, and the sentence makes the rebellion

In 1917 American authorities arrested Charlemagne Péralte for his alleged part in an attack on the home of a United States officer. He was tried and sentenced to five years of hard labour. He escaped, went into the mountains, and organised the largest peasant rising Haiti had seen since the war of independence. Nicholls records the arrest in a single line, which is roughly how the occupation's own paperwork treated it at the time. Péralte was a district commander from Hinche, educated at one of the best schools in the country, well connected, and hostile to Dartiguenave long before he was hostile to the marines. Putting such a man in prison clothes and setting him to sweep streets under guard was a decision whose consequences no court weighed. The occupation produced its most dangerous opponent through the ordinary operation of its own justice, and then spent two years, a marine brigade, an air detachment and a covert operation undoing the result.

The treaty provided for five American services in Haiti: financial adviser, customs receivership, public works, public health and gendarmerie. The gendarmerie came first. The Haitian army was dissolved, and on 1 February 1916 the Gendarmerie d'Haïti took over policing the whole country with 1,500 men. French speaking American officers held the senior posts, while Marine sergeants and navy hospital corpsmen were made junior officers. The first commandant was Smedley Butler, whom Dartiguenave commissioned a général de division; Butler later said the rank made him chief of police. Recruits were easy to find, many of them former Cacos, because the pay arrived on time and the rations were decent. By June 1916 the force numbered 2,553 under 115 Americans. Medical examinations found malaria, yaws or syphilis in 95 percent of recruits and intestinal parasites in 85 percent. An American writing in 1919 noted that a Marine serving as a gendarmerie officer judged the civil and criminal cases of his district, paid out all national government money there, ran its schools and controlled its mayor and council.

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.

The treaty still needed the National Assembly, and the assembly refused. Dartiguenave, short of money for salaries including his own, asked the Americans for funds and was told to ratify first. On 3 October, after he had threatened resignation for the second time, Davis informed him that no revenue whatever would be released, above all no back pay for deputies, senators or ministers, until both houses had voted. The lower house capitulated within seventy two hours, 75 to 6, attaching its own interpretive commentary to the text. Caperton wrote to Admiral Benson that the deputies had followed the president because he had called an extraordinary session worth 600 gold apiece, while the Senate gained nothing and stayed on the fence. Beach was recalled from his dying wife's bedside to lobby them. On 5 November the Senate foreign relations committee reported against the treaty and asked for a new one. On 11 November Caperton went to the palace and told the cabinet the United States would keep control of Haiti with or without a treaty. The Senate ratified that evening, 27 to 6.