Istwa Nou

Dartiguenave swore his oath under a storm, and for the first time anyone could remember there was no Te Deum, which observers read as the Catholic church declining to bless the arrangement. He refused to let the inaugural carriage move until Captain Beach sat beside him. Americans took this for courtesy. Haitians who had watched presidents installed and pushed out read it as fear. Beach wrote that the capital looked as though the Marines owned it outright. The new president had reason to be nervous. He was a civilian with no army of his own and the first light skinned elite man from the south to hold the office since 1876, in a country where the presidency had gone almost without interruption to Black generals from the north and the Artibonite. At the first cabinet meeting, held in the widowed president's bedroom, Beach announced that a second Marine regiment was landing. Dartiguenave assented. His foreign minister Pauléus Sannon shouted him down, demanding to know by what right an American admiral put troops ashore without asking the Haitian government.

The document Beale Davis carried was the most sweeping instrument the United States had put to a Caribbean neighbour. Washington would name a customs receiver, the customs staff and a financial adviser with wide powers. It would raise and officer a Haitian gendarmerie, send sanitary engineers, and direct the development of Haitian farming, mines and trade. Haiti would undertake never to cede territory to any power except the United States and to settle its outstanding foreign claims. Every decision requiring judgement rested with the Americans. Public education, the courts and the legal standing of the occupying troops went unmentioned, which left a government resting on force while bound by a treaty. On 13 August Robert Lansing wrote to President Wilson that negotiating this way, with Marines policing the Haitian capital, was high handed, offended his sense of what a nation was owed, and amounted to an invasion of Haitian independence. He added that he could think of nothing else to do. Wilson replied that it was necessary and had his approval.