By order, the cacos stop being cacos and become bandits

The general headquarters of the gendarmerie ordered that in official reports the cacos should no longer be called cacos but bandits. Michel records the order in his chronology as an operation in its own right, alongside the aerial attacks and the ground sweeps, and elsewhere glosses the label as pejorative, adding that in his own day such men would be called terrorists. He turns the word back on the occupiers, describing the Americans as the real bandits whom Peralte held in check while making a mockery of their power. The renaming came in a month that also saw a change of Marine command in Haiti and the decoration of the outgoing commander with a Haitian military medal, which Michel later argues should be revoked along with every honour granted to the occupying forces.

Eugene O'Neill's play opened at the Provincetown Playhouse and passed within a year to the young Paul Robeson, whose performance drew praise for its emotional strength, before going to Broadway in 1921. Jackson notes that Robeson had first encountered Toussaint and the revolution as a seventeen year old schoolboy in New Jersey in 1915, the year American troops landed in Haiti. The film version of 1933 opened simultaneously to segregated audiences and met immediate black criticism, with a New York paper reporting in September that Harlem objected to the constant use of a racial slur and a Philadelphia paper editorialising in November that it found not one redeeming feature in the picture. A later critic read the film as mapping its hero onto a Haitian primitivism drawn from nineteenth century colonial thinking.

Colonel Wise told Major Meade in the North to get Péralte, and the job went to Gendarmerie Captain Herman Hanneken, a marine sergeant commanding at Grande Rivière. Finding one man in a country that was on his side, guarded by people who moved him every night through mountains nobody had mapped accurately, was the assignment. In August 1919 Jean-Baptiste Conzé, a former Caco general living at Grande Rivière, left town after letting everyone know he had finished with the blan. A Gendarmerie deserter, Private Jean-Edmond François, went with him. Conzé occupied Fort Capois with rum, rations and money, and Cacos joined him. The money came out of Hanneken's own pocket, and every week François or Conzé slipped back into town to report. Péralte was suspicious, which was why he was still alive. Hanneken then led an attack on Fort Capois that failed as conspicuously as he could arrange, and went about afterwards with his arm bandaged and stained with issue red ink. Péralte sent Conzé congratulations and a commission as général de division. On 26 October he brought twelve hundred men to Fort Capois.

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.