Istwa Nou

In March 1911 Cincinnatus Leconte bribed his way out of the German consulate, where he had taken asylum, and joined General Desiderio Arias, the Dominican frontier commander whose own rebellion in 1916 would help bring American troops into Santo Domingo. Leconte waited near Capotillo on the border. President Antoine Simon chartered a merchant ship to carry soldiers north and sent a delegate south to raise more. The peasants who once sang for Simon had stopped singing. So men were taken at night out of their houses, off the roads and out of the fields, penned in corrals and sorted every few days, the young ones shipped to Port-au-Prince as soldiers and the older ones fined according to what they were thought to own. Dantès Bellegarde wrote that regiments raised this way melted like ice in the sun. Simon ended up pinned at Fort Liberté with a garrison an American naval officer called half starved. On 20 July, with Simon out of the North, General Vilbrun Guillaume Sam declared for Leconte at Cap-Haïtien.

Antoine Simon's army had gone through the North in February, burning villages and stripping gardens. It withdrew, and on 8 May 1911 revolt broke out again in every district the troops had crossed. The insurgents were Cacos, peasant fighters of the northern mountains who hired themselves to whichever general could pay. This time they chose their targets. They burned the sawmill and the construction camps of the National Railroad, fired into the houses of railway employees, and shouted against James P. McDonald, the American who held the concession. The company had handed its dynamite, powder and blasting caps to government troops, which placed it on one side of the fight. Foreign observers filed the Cacos under banditry. Bandits do not single out the physical plant of a foreign concession from everything else available to burn. The men who lit those camps knew who was laying track across their land and on whose account.