A protocol binds Haiti's revenues past the treaty's expiry

Munro identifies the instrument that made withdrawal legally impossible to complete. The foreign loan relied on to fund a constructive programme had not materialised, first because of the war and after 1919 because of Haitian hostility to the financial adviser. In 1919 the two governments nonetheless signed a protocol authorising a loan and providing that the revenues pledged for its service would continue to be collected and allocated by American officials after 1936, throughout the life of the bonds. Haiti obtained the 1922 loan on favourable terms partly because of this clause and because Secretary Hughes told the bankers and bondholders that the United States intended to exercise the authority it conferred. Bonds of over sixteen and a half million dollars were still outstanding in September 1930, and it seemed unlikely they could be retired before 1942 even with rapid amortisation.

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.

In November 1919 American forces reached Charlemagne Péralte in his camp and killed him during a raid. Nicholls records that he was betrayed by a member of his own family. His body was then tied to a door and displayed publicly in the town square to discourage anyone from carrying on the fight. The occupation had spent more than a year unable to find him in country that was almost entirely on his side, and took him in the end through information supplied by someone close to him. That is worth saying plainly, because the display of the body was meant to communicate something else, that American arms had beaten Haitian resistance in a fair contest. What ended the rebellion in the North was money and access, applied to the network of kinship and obligation that had kept Péralte alive for fourteen months. The display then handed his movement the one thing his living command had lacked, which was an image every Haitian would recognise on sight.

On 1 November 1919 United States Marines killed Charlemagne Péralte. His body was stripped, lashed to a door and photographed in a posture that read as a crucifixion, and the picture was circulated around Haiti so that anyone thinking of joining the rebellion would see it. The French had done the same thing in 1791 with Boukman's head on a pike outside Cap Francais. The result was the same both times. Péralte became a permanent figure in Haitian memory and his image the standard picture of resistance to foreign occupation, reproduced by Haitian painters for the rest of the century. More than two thousand Haitians died in the Caco rebellion. Fewer than a hundred Americans and gendarmes were killed. The disparity brought the campaign to the attention of the United States Senate, which held an inquiry in 1921 and concluded that the marines should stay. They stayed another fifteen years.