Fifty-five minutes of trial buy five years of forced labour

Peralte was sentenced to five years of forced labour after a trial Michel times at fifty-five minutes. His brother Saul was found innocent by the same tribunal, and Michel uses what happened next to show that the court was decoration. Rather than being freed, Saul was placed under house arrest at Ouanaminthe and some time later was shot in the back and killed by a guard under the standard pretext of attempting to escape. Michel emphasises that Saul had formally refused to flee to the Dominican Republic although friends advised it and although the border river lay across an easy stretch of savanna, which removes the escape story's plausibility. The sentence sent Charlemagne to the prison at Cap-Haitien, a colonial-era building where the army chaplain turned out to be the priest who had taught him catechism.

Testifying before the Senate select committee that investigated the occupation in 1921 and 1922, General Smedley Butler said that the men who ran it understood themselves as trustees of a large estate belonging to minors, that Haitians were wards and that the Americans were building a rich and productive property to be handed over when their own government saw fit. Renda builds her argument on this. Historians have treated paternalism either as a genuine benevolence, or as a mitigating factor, or as rhetoric to be seen through, and she rejects all three. Paternalism was a whole constellation of images and values that shaped American relations with former European colonies, an assertion of authority and control expressed through the metaphor of fatherhood, structured as much by discipline as by care. On her reading it was not opposed to violence but one of the cultural vehicles for it. Where this account departs from the standard one: Renda rejects both the view that paternalism softened the occupation and the view that it was mere cover story, arguing it was an operative mechanism of violence.

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.

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.