Istwa Nou

Dartiguenave's south stayed quiet. The north, the northwest and the Artibonite did not. In early August the American consul Livingston reported Caco bands burning plantations and killing peasants, and said nobody believed they would give up their weapons. The American plan was to buy the fighters out, 100 gourdes for a chief with his gun and 15 gourdes for an ordinary man with his, then defeat whoever remained. Gonaïves came first. Rameau cut the town's water and laid siege with 400 men. Major Smedley Butler arrived by gunboat with orders to break the siege, restore the water and reopen the railway from Ennery. He caught Rameau and 500 Cacos at Poteaux on 20 September. Rameau agreed to talk, denied writing the handbills issued over his name on the truthful ground that he could not read them, and asked whether a portfolio in the new government might be found for him. Five days later he was captured and jailed. That same day, 26 September, Cacos in the red scarves of Ogoun ambushed a Marine platoon at Haut du Cap and killed two men.

The French minister Girard wrote to Paris that the white master had arrived in Haiti, and that Americans wanting to carry out their programme would probably have to campaign through the interior at a cost beyond anything they expected. He was right. Armed Caco bands held the northern mountains that Sonthonax had once called the ramparts of liberty, and more were gathering along the lower Artibonite between Gonaïves and Saint Marc, opposed to the foreigners and to a light skinned president from the south alike. In the capital the lawyer Georges Sylvain called twelve leading men together, spoke against the intervention, and formed a committee named the Union Patriotique. That committee became the spine of elite resistance for the next twenty years. Its members belonged to the class that had lived off each government in turn, and their interests ran against those of the Haitian peasantry. The contradiction was never resolved. It separated the men who wrote the protests from the men fighting in the hills.