Istwa Nou

In April 1912 General F. P. Paulin, a senator, led disgruntled southerners in a short rising at Les Cayes that took in the looting of the customs house. The revolt was crushed. A search of the warehouses of a German firm in the town produced contraband arms and records of cash put into Paulin's cause. Paulin reached the German legation in Port-au-Prince and used it as a base of operations for months, protected by diplomatic asylum. The Germans were not the only old friends turning on Cincinnatus Leconte. His new insistence on collecting the customs honestly irritated the Cacos of the North, whose delegate there, Charles Zamor, had begun looking at the palace for himself. Nord Alexis, the aged president who had used Caco levies in his own time, was reported to have said that once they were loosed nothing would call them back, and that a foreign army would then land to protect life and property. He was describing machinery he had helped assemble.

At three in the morning on 7 August 1912 an explosion shook Port-au-Prince and a column of fire went up from the National Palace. The Italian powder Antoine Simon had left in the basement finally caught, and with it a million rounds of ammunition and other explosives stored there by a run of presidents who preferred their munitions underfoot to out of reach. The floor of President Cincinnatus Leconte's bedroom dropped into the fire. His daughter and son-in-law got out of a window before the building came down. The dead included his grandson and three hundred men of the presidential guard. Roger Farnham of the National City Bank, who had no affection for Haitian politicians, wrote to Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan in 1914 that Leconte's had probably been the best administration Haiti had seen in many years, and that the bank once reckoned ninety percent of customs duties were actually reaching the treasury. Leconte had told him officeholders were threatening his life over exactly that.