The exemption card is torn up and the word goes round: slavery is back

The corvée failed where it touched Haitian officials. Magistrats and gendarmes worked out that they could exempt anyone who paid and impress anyone who could not. A peasant who finished his annual stint was given a card by the Americans; the chef seksyon would tear the card up in front of him and send him back to work with a blow from the kokomakak. By late 1918, after Butler had gone, men were being roped together and marched to distant work sites like conscripts for the old army. Educated townsmen were caught in it too. Dantès Bellegarde was still angry twenty three years later about the gendarme who knocked on Jean Price-Mars's door in Pétionville and took him away for three days. Out of this came the teledjòl that ran through the mountains of the North and the Artibonite: the blan have come to bring slavery back, and the corvée is only the beginning. Major A. S. Williams wrote that the labour system had taught peasants to hate the occupation and taught gendarmes to treat civilians as material. He abolished it on 1 October 1918. It was already too late.

The board of directors resolved to send James Weldon Johnson to investigate reports of atrocities. Pamphile explains why this was a departure. Until then the association had confined itself to equal rights for Black Americans and above all to the campaign against lynching. Johnson, newly in charge, added an international dimension on the conviction that racism was embedded in American policy toward Black nations and not merely in domestic practice. Haiti was his prime example of American racism exported. He was suited to the errand, having served as consul at Puerto Cabello in Venezuela and at Corinto in Nicaragua, and his maternal great-grandmother Hester Argo had left Haiti in 1802 during the war of independence. Before sailing he consulted Theodore Roosevelt, who was also unhappy with Wilson's handling of Haiti, and went with Roosevelt's blessing, taking Herbert Seligman with him.

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.

The Héraux constitution took a year of paperwork between Port-au-Prince and Washington. Franklin Roosevelt later claimed to have written it. It was mostly the work of Ferdinand L. Mayer, the American chargé, and officials of the State Department. With no National Assembly left to ratify anything, the occupation used a device Haiti had never seen, a national plebiscite, held on 12 June 1918. Colonel John Russell, commanding the brigade, admitted that his forces were openly in favour and that any Haitian who knew enough to vote knew how the soldiers had voted. The elite stayed home. The count came back 98,225 in favour and 768 against. Russell thought every government employee had voted at least once, and noted that some voters believed they were choosing a president while one believed he was voting for a Pope. The trap sat in Title VIII, the transitory provisions, which let the president govern through his Council of State until he chose to call elections, in whatever even numbered year he liked. Dartiguenave never chose one.