Istwa Nou

Three Marine companies climbed to the crest through the night of 17 November 1915 and attacked on Butler's whistle. Under the walls the twenty four men of the storming party found the entrance bricked over. The only way in was a masonry drain four feet high and fifteen feet long with a Caco sentry firing down it. Three men, Butler among them, crawled through and came out unhurt into about seventy defenders. They fought at the drain mouth long enough for the rest of the party to get inside. The Cacos had machetes, sticks and stones. Their leader, known as General Josephette, was killed in his usual black frock coat, top hat and brass watch chain. Fifty of his men lay dead within a quarter of an hour, and the northern Caco movement died with them. A ton of dynamite brought the fort down afterwards. Pierre-Paul, one of the fiercest Haitian critics of the Americans, later wrote that the Cacos had made an industry of insurrection, raising and wrecking one government after another, and that the wreckage gave the invaders of 1915 their pretext.

The elite had recovered the presidency and got nothing from it, neither authority nor money. In Les Cayes, where the old president Antoine Simon still had influence and Célestina still remembered the fake pearls she had been sold, the mood of the capital found backers. During the night of 4 January 1916 heavy firing broke out against the barracks and the palace in Port-au-Prince while men ran through the streets shouting for the Cacos. Marine sentries answered sparingly and killed or wounded five men before it stopped. The affair took the name of Pierre-Paul, who appears to have hoped to take the palace, upset the Americans and the government together, and install Pauléus Sannon as president. German merchants and Antoine Simon almost certainly paid for it, with Mizaël Codio commanding. Codio was given 30,000 gourdes for expenses, kept most of it, and was arrested in the end. The French minister reported that Haitians would read American tact as weakness, and quoted Léger saying two or three more nights like it would send the Americans home.