1910 · Haitianyear only

The last loan before the occupation is sold at a thirty eight percent discount

Six domestic loans between 1912 and 1914 finished off what credit Haiti had left.

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1910 · Diasporayear only

A Washington congregation goes into trance on a Sunday morning

Two thirds of a Baptist chapel leaping in a circle, and an American friend's one line explanation.

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3 February 1910 · Haitian

Haiti rewrites its constitution for every man who takes the palace

Dorsainvil read the constitutional record in 1910 as proof that no institution had ever set.

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10 February 1910 · Haitian

Antoine Michel corrects the national history and puts colour back in it

A study in L'Impartial answered Auguste Magloire and insisted colour ran through Haitian politics.

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28 February 1910 · Haitian

Colour decides which party a Haitian joins, says L'Impartial

J. Duclervil made the claim flatly in February 1910, and the political class knew its weight.

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15 March 1910 · Haitian

The papers tell Haitians to go back to the land

L'Impartial reprinted a series in 1910 offering agriculture as the answer to an empty treasury.

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1910 · Haitianyear only

A future president represents Haiti at Brussels in 1910

Stenio Vincent published a general survey of the republic with a Belgian press while serving as delegate.

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1910 · Haitianyear only

Haiti signs away a railway and the land along the track

British observers called the McDonald concession a forced contract and predicted financial ruin.

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1910 to 1913 · Haitianspan

A British writer finds Haitian lawyers trained for a country that is elsewhere

Harry Johnston admired the elite and despaired at what its schooling equipped it to do.

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1910 to 1911 · Haitianspan

The German legation becomes a place to hide between revolutions

Berlin sheltered the men it expected to win while the Haitian navy blew up or refused to move.

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1910 to the 1950s · Africanspan

South Africa builds apartheid on a union that was a bargain between white men

The 1910 settlement between Briton and Boer set terms the 1948 election only hardened.

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the 1910s to the 1940s · Haitianspan

Adelsia keeps what she earns and gives her father none of it

Comhaire-Sylvain recorded a plasaj second wife running her own economy inside the household.

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August 1910 to 1911 · Haitianspan

A five dollar string of pearls buys an American railway concession

McDonald reached President Simon through his daughter Celestina, who led a Vodou society.

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1911 to 1912 · Haitianspan

Leconte's body came out of the palace in pieces

The American minister reported the head and limbs severed from the trunk before the magazines went up.

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2 to 7 February 1911 · Haitianspan

Leconte raises his flag at Ouanaminthe and the capital panics

One rising on the Dominican border emptied the streets of Port-au-Prince in an afternoon.

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7 February to March 1911 · Haitianspan

Charlemagne Peralte enters the record marching for the government

The man who would lead the war against the Marines first appears putting down a rebellion.

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February 1911 · Haitianmonth known

A British consul in Port-au-Prince asks for foreign intervention

February 1911 brought executions at night, and the remedy proposed was an invasion.

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March to July 1911 · Haitianspan

Simon presses men into an army that melts away

Every name in the 1911 revolt reappears in the catastrophe of 1915.

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30 April 1911 · Haitian

British diplomats ask what the Monroe Doctrine leaves of Haitian sovereignty

Murray reported to London on 30 April 1911 that American intervention was becoming routine.

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8 May 1911 · Haitian

The Cacos come back and this time they aim at the railroad

Risings break out across the North, and the target is McDonald's construction camps.

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1911 to 1912 · Haitianspan

Leconte was made in Germany and then declined to behave like it

German merchants schooled him, employed him, and funded his rise for two million gourdes.

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1911 to 1912 · Haitianspan

Leconte pays the teachers and appoints customs collectors who do not steal

Haiti expected another looting government and got a year of actual administration.

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1911 to 1912 · Haitianspan

An inventory of ruin: shaking bridges, broken mains, posts like shanties

Leconte's public works minister wrote down what a century of extraction had left standing.

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1911 · Haitianyear only

A former Haitian president concedes African fanaticism in London

Legitime addressed the Universal Races Congress of 1911 and handed the sceptics a quotation.

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1911 · Haitianyear only

German troops land in Port-au-Prince to guard German property

The merchants who financed Haitian revolutions asked Berlin for protection from the results.

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7 August 1911 · Haitian

Antenor Firmin sees Haiti for the last time from a French steamer

The ablest mind in Haitian public life died in exile on St Thomas five weeks later.

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7 to 14 August 1911 · Haitianspan

A great-grandson of Dessalines is proclaimed president in the cathedral

Leconte entered Port-au-Prince on 7 August and the assembly ratified him a week afterward.

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August 1911 · Haitianmonth known

Dessalines's great grandson takes the palace and lasts a year

Five presidents follow in four years, and each one leaves faster than the last.

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August 1911 · Haitianmonth known

Six heads of state in four years begin with the fall of Antoine Simon

August 1911 opens the stretch of Haitian politics that ends with American Marines on the wharf.

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30 November 1911 · Haitian

London is told that order in Port-au-Prince has stopped existing

Murray's dispatch describes power changing hands faster than a legation can record it.

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1912 to 1928 · Haitianspan

Occupation expropriation sends Haitian peasants to cut cane abroad

Land seizure and forced labour at home produced the first mass emigration of cane cutters.

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1912 to 1913 · Haitianspan

A budget worthy of Switzerland and five hundred schools nobody could find

Harry Johnston went looking for the rural schools the Haitian budget paid for and doubted they existed.

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1912 to 1913 · Haitianspan

The bank holds the government's own money and names its price

Customs control was what the Banque Nationale wanted in return for a monthly allowance.

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1912 to the late 1920s · Africanspan

The pass laws produce the organisations that will end them

A congress of the educated in 1912, forty thousand miners on strike in 1920, a union of a hundred thousand.

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1912 to 1924 · Haitianspan

Dorsainvil calls possession a psycho neurosis and then changes ground

Twelve years take a Haitian physician from clinical pathology to Fon metaphysics.

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April to July 1912 · Haitianspan

A German warehouse in Les Cayes holds the rebels' guns

Paulin's rising is put down, and the arms and the money are traced to a firm on the waterfront.

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3 April 1912 · Haitian

Knox tells Haiti that the canal requires quiet neighbours

The first American secretary of state in Port-au-Prince since Seward arrives with a standard speech.

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15 April 1912 · Diaspora

The richest Black passenger on the Titanic was a Haitian engineer

Joseph Laroche put his wife and daughters into a lifeboat and went down with the ship.

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30 April 1912 · Haitian

Pyke puts the concession hunters on the record

A dispatch to London makes the traffic in specialists the leading fact about Haiti.

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1912 · Haitianyear only

A school opens in Port-au-Prince to keep German children German

Its stated purpose was to Germanise the descendants of German families settled in Haiti.

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1912 · Haitianyear only

Every steamer into Port-au-Prince carries another surveyor

The British legation counted the arrivals and understood what they had come to measure.

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July 1912 · Haitianmonth known

Price-Mars says the schools decide whether Haiti survives

An article in Haïti Littéraire et Scientifique makes primary education a question of national existence.

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1912 · Haitianyear only

Félix Morisseau-Leroy is born, and Antigone will speak Kreyòl

His adaptation settled whether the language of nine Haitians in ten could carry a tragedy.

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7 August 1912 · Haitian

A million rounds under the president's bedroom go off at three in the morning

The palace Salomon built comes down on Leconte, his grandson and three hundred guardsmen.

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12 August 1912 · Haitian

HASCO is incorporated and American sugar returns to the plain

The company that would work the Cul-de-Sac cane fields is formed three years before the Marines land.

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August 1912 · Haitianmonth known

The assembly picks a sugar planter before the rubble cools

Tancrède Auguste farmed the ground the international airport stands on and paid for schools on it.

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20 August 1912 · Haitian

L'Essor makes Sténio Vincent the young nationalists' man

A newspaper profile fixes his reputation eighteen years before he reaches the presidency.

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October 1912 · Haitianmonth known

Price-Mars argues that trade schools would make a middle class

Three months after the primary school article, he moves to the workshop and the farm.

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1913 to 1915 · Haitianspan

The secretary of state asked where Haiti was

William Jennings Bryan learned about the country from a banker with money in it.

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1913 to 1931 · Diasporaspan

Hundreds of thousands of Haitians go to Cuba to cut sugar cane

The depression ended the traffic and repatriation began soon after the prices fell.

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February to 3 May 1913 · Haitianspan

Tancrède Auguste dies of syphilis while the country says poison

Célestina returned to Les Cayes, arrests followed in three towns, and the president took to his bed.

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4 May 1913 · Haitian

Soldiers shoot up the cathedral in the middle of the funeral mass

At half past eight the archbishop was crossing the nave, and fire came in from three sides.

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4 May 1913 · Haitian

Haiti elects its first civilian president in a building under fire

Every elector left holding a note for six hundred dollars in gold, redeemable at the treasury.

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May to December 1913 · Haitianspan

Everything Oreste tried to reform made him another enemy

The army, the school sinecurists, the bank and the Cacos each had a reason to want him gone.

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1913 · Haitianyear only

Dorsainvil defends Vodou by calling it a neurosis

A Haitian physician answers the foreign charge of savagery with a diagnosis.

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August 1913 to January 1914 · Haitianspan

Oreste funds a new palace he will never see finished

Georges Baussan won the competition, and building began four months after the president fled.

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1914 to 1915 · Haitianspan

A National City Bank officer becomes Bryan's private adviser on Haiti

Roger Farnham told the Secretary of State that Berlin would take Haiti unless Washington did.

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1914 to 1918 · Africanspan

The First World War finishes the scramble for Africa

One in five of the million Africans pressed into service as porters died of it.

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1914 to 1919 · Africanspan

Africans refuse the Europeans' war and settle older accounts

John Chilembwe rose in Nyasaland over the death toll of a war Africans had not started.

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1914 to the 1920s · Africanspan

Africans who watched Europeans kill each other draw conclusions

The South African Native National Congress asked George the Fifth for a seat at Versailles.

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1914 to 1920 · Haitianspan

Concrete enters Port-au-Prince as the material of cathedrals and palaces

The cathedral came first, then the National Palace under American occupation.

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4 to 27 January 1914 · Haitianspan

Two Caco armies take the North and Oreste finishes his dinner

He tried to let the National Palace to a foreign legation before writing out his resignation.

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20 January 1914 · Haitian

The British minister judged Guantánamo of little use to the Americans

Which is why Washington kept coming back to the Môle Saint-Nicolas.

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27 January 1914 · Haitian

The president fires his revolver at his own escort on the way to the ship

Marines from four navies came ashore as soon as the German cutter took him off.

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27 January 1914 · Haitian

American forces land eighteen months before the occupation is declared

The roundtable dates the military presence to 1914, not to the killing of President Sam.

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28 January to 8 February 1914 · Haitianspan

Théodore gives the Zamors his war chest and they use it on him

He walked up to Gonaïves expecting allies and was met with a volley.

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February to March 1914 · Haitianspan

The Cacos were promised ten gourdes a day and got nothing

When the police stations were stripped, the police force stopped existing.

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8 February 1914 · Haitian

The assembly is pulled out of hiding to elect Oreste Zamor

Leech's notes on the three brothers, and Théodore already regrouping in the Caco country.

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May to 25 June 1914 · Haitianspan

Fourteen hostages are shot at La Fossette in a single day

Charles Zamor was hemmed in at the Cap, and the plain was burning as it had in 1791.

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June to 29 August 1914 · Haitianspan

Théodore crosses into the Dominican Republic dressed as a woman

Delly's July attack on the palace failed, and the old Simon Sam fortune moved to Vilbrun Guillaume.

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1914 · Haitianyear only

Haiti twice refuses to sign away control of its customs revenue

Johnson's finding: Washington asked for financial control before the crisis it later blamed.

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1914 · Haitianyear only

Washington is told German houses hold eighty percent of Haitian trade

That figure did more to bring the Marines ashore than any revolt in the North.

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20 August 1914 · Haitian

A Haitian writes to London a year before the Marines land

Tribonien Saint-Juste asked Britain to help protect the republic from Yankee expansion.

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September to 29 October 1914 · Haitianspan

France stops buying coffee and the Zamor government runs out

Sixty-two thousand dollars in hand, a bank that would not pay, and a war closing the coffee market.

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29 to 30 October 1914 · Haitianspan

A president's family leaves and the gold spills on the wharf

A maid carrying the family's savings was the last person in the party to reach the ship.

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November to December 1914 · Haitianspan

The government prints its own money on newsprint

Unpaid Cacos took the new bills at face value and made the shopkeepers do the same.

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4 to 12 November 1914 · Haitianspan

Washington offers Haiti a plan that was built for Santo Domingo

Recognition required revenue, and revenue required the recognition that was being withheld.

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6 to 10 November 1914 · Haitianspan

Davilmar Theodore reaches the palace and cannot pay the men who put him there

The bells rang for a Caco general of sixty seven who inherited an empty treasury.

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3 December 1914 · Haitian

A foreign minister says Haiti needs a foreign master

The Senate came at him with canes, knives and revolvers before he could finish.

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17 December 1914 · Haitian

Marines carry half a million dollars in gold out of Haiti's bank

The reserves went to a bank in New York for what Washington described as safekeeping.

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23 to 28 December 1914 · Haitianspan

A clerk slams the vault and asks the magistrate if he can be of service

The state carried out 66,910 dollars and left 400,000 behind a door it could not open.

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