The elite takes up the pen and calls itself the Union Patriotique

The Haitian peasantry feared the return of white mastery less than the Haitian elite did. In 1917 the French envoy de la Batie reported to Paris that the oligarchy which had bled the country for a century now dreaded the rebuilding of a white society above it, a fear he thought natural in the descendants of free coloured proprietors and reasonable given what was being done to Black Americans at the time. The elite had encouraged the cacos in order to embarrass President Dartiguenave, then noticed how many caco generals were Black. Once the revolt was crushed Dartiguenave turned on the Americans himself, and the trouble moved from the central plateau to the capital. In early 1920 Herbert Seligman spent a short time in Haiti and published in The Nation the charge that marines had shot three thousand Haitian men, women and children. His informant was the Union Patriotique, founded in 1915 by Georges Sylvain, by then claiming thirty thousand members and led by Stenio Vincent, Price-Mars, Perceval Thoby and Pierre Hudicourt. A Haitian wit called them the cacos of the pen.

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.

The oldest movement in sub-Saharan Africa that can fairly be called nationalist was at the southern end of the continent. The South African Native National Congress was founded in 1912 and became the African National Congress in 1923. Elsewhere, politics on the scale of a whole territory was rare before the Second World War. It worked in small colonies that resembled a precolonial state, and it worked in Tanganyika, where Swahili was spoken widely enough to carry a message from one end to the other. The Tanganyikan African Association was founded in 1929 with branches across the territory. The war pushed matters forward through hardship and sharpened political awareness. Colonial schooling, restricted as it was, produced elites who meant to build European style nation states in Africa and who then had to close the distance between themselves and everybody else. Women organised and campaigned, and were promised an equality that independence did not deliver. Nationalism had to supply an identity for peoples a European mapmaker had grouped together. It usually failed.

Forty-five days after the ambush that killed Lieutenant Muth, a peasant told the marines where Batraville was sleeping. At daybreak on 19 May 1920 patrols closed on the rocks at the top of Morne Ti Bois Pin, five miles southeast of Lascahobas. The cacos fired first. An automatic rifle cut Batraville down, still carrying the binoculars taken from Muth, and a sergeant shot him with a pistol as he tried to rise and draw. Armed caco resistance ended there, and so did the presidential hopes of Dr Bobo, the mulatto physician for whose ambitions a great many peasants had paid. Marines and gendarmerie together lost 98 killed and wounded across the whole war. Caco dead are counted differently by everyone. A conservative figure for 1915 to 1920 is 2,250. Hans Schmidt put it at 3,250. Roger Gaillard asked whether the total, counting repression and the after effects of the fighting, might approach 15,000, and said the war often resembled a massacre. Not a shot was fired south of the Cul-de-Sac.