1915 to 1930 · Haitianspan
The corvee returns and resistance costs more than two thousand Haitian lives
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Dartiguenave held the presidency through the most violent years of the occupation under American military supervision. By 1922 he was protesting the transfer of Haitian money into American banks, and Washington removed him, installing Louis Borno alongside Major General John Russell as high commissioner. The Borno and Russell government ran the country, ignored the violence around it, and denied what it could not ignore. Under Major Smedley Butler the Americans revived the corvée, a labour draft with precedents in French colonial rule and in Henry Christophe's building of the Citadelle. Conscription was indiscriminate. Butler wrote to Franklin Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy, that it would not do to ask too many questions about how the work was done. People walked long routes through the mountains to keep off the roads. The brutality filled the ranks of the Cacos under Charlemagne Péralte and Benoît Batraville, who took their tactics from Dessalines. Fighting between Cacos and Marines killed more than 2,250 Haitians in the first decade, some in combat and some at the hands of careless or predatory Marines.
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