Istwa Nou

The National Palace had been a temporary structure since the explosion, and Tancrède Auguste did nothing about it. Michel Oreste held a design competition, which the Haitian architect Georges Baussan won against French and local rivals, and got three hundred and fifty thousand dollars out of the legislature in August 1913 to build with. Work began on 20 May 1914. Oreste was gone by then. Closing out the year, the British minister Pyke told the Foreign Office that nothing had changed except for the worse, that the peasants' famous patience under their rulers had probably spared the country a repeat of the previous century's massacres, and that Haitian distrust of foreigners was the standing obstacle to any development that might keep the state solvent. On 1 January 1914 a rising broke out at Thomazeau, timed with a failed attempt to burn Port-au-Prince. Government troops went out in cane cars behind the little wood burning locomotives of the railway, took nineteen rebels and a general, and shot them where they stood.

Three days after Thomazeau, Trou du Nord was seized in the night and so was Monbin Crochu in the mountains near Vallière. Two separate forces were in the field, one loyal to the Zamor family and one to Davilmar Théodore of Ennery. The government rushed troops and arms by ship to Cap-Haïtien and Fort Liberté in time to clear each town, then lost the initiative. By 23 January 1914 the whole North and Northwest were gone. Fires broke out in Port-au-Prince, press gangs and firing squads worked through Jacmel and Jérémie, and the Môle, Port-de-Paix and Gonaïves declared for the revolution without specifying whose. On 27 January Charles Zamor landed at the Cap from exile and persuaded Théodore that the two Caco armies should combine. Michel Oreste had guests to dinner the night before. Word arrived mid meal that Saint-Marc had gone over. He finished the meal, announced he would resign in the morning, and tried to let the palace to the American, German or British legation. All three declined.