Charlemagne Péralte walks out of the Cap and raises the North

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.

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.