Haiti

  Admiral Caperton wanted the convention to be signed as a treaty between two sovereign countries, legitimized by the approval of Haiti’s president and both houses of the Haitian Congress. He knew that most Haitian politicians were already on the side of the Americans. Their opponents—though they included such prominent figures as Pauléus Sannon, the minister of foreign relations, who insisted that the proposal imposed too many conditions on Haiti—were a relatively small and isolated group. And as the negotiations began, Caperton sought to reassure any doubters. In an interview with a Haitian journalist on September 2, Caperton explained that the U.S. occupation was taking control of the customs houses only so that they could carry out their benevolent mission to “re-establish order, peace, and security for all in the country,” and to provide employment to those who were “suffering.” He wanted everyone to know that the United States had “the best of intentions for the good of Haiti” and had no plans to involve themselves in its long-term financial affairs. As soon as the “irregularities” that had been practiced under the previous regime were eliminated, Caperton declared, the Haitian government would once again have control of its treasury.33

  The day after this interview, however, Haitians found posters on the walls of Port-au-Prince with a different kind of message from Caperton. The government of Haiti, the admiral announced, was facing “conditions it is incapable of controlling.” Therefore, in order to “preserve fundamental human rights,” Caperton was declaring martial law in Port-au-Prince and all the other areas currently under the control of the marines. The police of Port-au-Prince were placed under the direct supervision of a U.S. officer. The local commanders of the U.S. Marines would be dictating regulations as needed to assure order in the territory.34

  As part of the new martial law regime, Caperton moved to muzzle the opposition press. On September 4, Haitian journalists and newspaper editors were summoned by a marine captain to a press conference. There they were told that “the situation of the press, under martial law, is exactly the same as in the United States,” which meant that “there will be no attacks on freedom of the press.” Nevertheless, the captain went on, the publication of “false or incendiary propaganda” attacking either the government of the United States or the government of Haiti was outlawed. The publication of “false, indecent or obscene” articles was also banned, as were “signed or unsigned” letters to the editor that might undermine public order. Anyone deemed guilty of violating these rules would be brought in front of a military tribunal and could face imprisonment. As Haitian journalists would soon find out, the U.S. officers were ready to enforce the new regime. Just a few weeks after the conference, the marines ordered a newspaper called Haïti Intégrale to be shut down and all its published copies to be impounded. When the editors refused, they were arrested, along with the newspaper’s printer, by a detachment of marines, and were only able to avoid jail time by paying a fine to the Americans.35

  Ernest Chauvet, editor in chief of the prominent newspaper Le Nouvelliste, was so taken aback by the actions of the marines that he traveled to Washington, hoping to speak to President Wilson directly. Chauvet had previously lived in the United States and was, as he wrote to Wilson, an “admirer” of the Americans. He had long worked to forge closer economic ties between the two countries, convinced that U.S. companies could help Haiti develop. “Above all,” he explained to Wilson, “I was persuaded of the desire of the American people (and especially of its government) to act with fair play towards those with whom it has relationships.” Because of this, Chauvet was convinced that the United States was making a terrible mistake in its approach to the occupation. If the United States had come, as it declared, to help “suffering humanity” in Haiti, then it had to “respect to the end” the desires of the people they wished to assist. Chauvet pleaded with Wilson not to impose the convention through force, warning that otherwise the occupation would end in bloodshed.36

  As Chauvet waited in a hotel in Washington, however, he received no response. No one was listening. Even African American leaders denied his logic. Booker T. Washington, for example, published an article in which he celebrated the occupation of Haiti as the only way to civilize the blacks of that country. Likewise, W.E.B. Du Bois, whom Chauvet met in New York, told him that African Americans could do nothing for the Haitians, and that the current situation was beneficial for Haiti. Du Bois’s only intervention was a letter to Wilson urging him to send black soldiers and officers to Haiti rather than white ones, in order not to irritate the population. As the Haitian ambassador in Washington wrote to a friend back home, there was little hope of changing U.S. policy. Nobody was going to take up the “disinterested defense of a weak people.” As things stood, the ambassador concluded, “we must look only to ourselves to save the situation, and can count on no one else to break the spell.”37

  In Haiti, Pauléus Sannon, having similarly given up hope of reasoning with the United States, resigned from his position as the minister of foreign affairs. The proposed convention, he wrote, attacked the “national dignity” of his country, deeply undermining its sovereignty “to the profit of the United States.” Even without the benefit of the convention, Sannon noted, the United States had already declared martial law. What would the Americans do once their power over Haiti was “consecrated” and they were free to invoke all the “exorbitant privileges” specified in the document? He could not in good conscience remain part of a government that had so easily surrendered its sovereignty to a foreign power.38

  Sannon was replaced by Louis Borno, who had been the minister of foreign affairs during the Machias incident. A colleague later described Borno as someone who “sincerely believed that an American apprenticeship was necessary for our political and administrative education.” The choice facing his country, as Borno saw it, was either to “disappear permanently into abjection, famine, and blood, or redeem itself with the help of the United States.” He entered eagerly into the negotiations, and on September 16, after a few minor revisions, he signed the convention on behalf of President Dartiguenave. The agreement still had to be ratified by the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, however, and Dartiguenave and the U.S. authorities put heavy pressure on the deputies to sign. They used a simple and effective technique: since the United States now controlled the treasury, they stopped paying the officials, making it clear that the money would start flowing again once the convention was signed. In early October, the Chamber of Deputies duly ratified the document, with only a small minority voting against. One despairing member, resigning in protest after the vote, described the convention as “moral slavery” and lambasted those around him who had just “re-forged” the chains that the Haitians had broken a century before.39

  The Haitian Senate proved the toughest for Dartiguenave to convince. As the debate dragged on, everything seemed suspended in Port-au-Prince: in the words of one Haitian journalist, if you didn’t want to deal with something, you just had to say that you would take care of it after the convention was signed. Then, after more than a month of discussion, the Senate committee examining the convention issued a report stating that the treaty was unconstitutional and could not be ratified. As the committee saw it, the proposed convention violated the constitution’s first article, which proclaimed Haiti to be “one and indivisible, absolutely free, sovereign and independent.” “There are sacred limits that the Haitian people cannot exceed,” the report declared.40

  Still, the bulk of Haiti’s cultural and political elite disagreed with the senatorial committee. The popular singer August de Pradines, known as Candio, wrote a song ridiculing those politicians who “preferred the Cacos to the convention.” The term “Caco”—which seems to have originally been derived from a small, fierce species of bird known in Kreyòl as the Taco—was used to describe the rural rebels who had carried out revolts during the previous years, and Candio’s implication was clear. If the United States had occupied the country, it was only because Haitians had spent so much time fighting amo
ng themselves. Now there was nothing to do but to sign the convention, which would bring relief to an exhausted country. “The people will finally be able to breathe a little,” Candio announced. “They are crushed. They are hungry.” He spoke for many who believed that the politicians should have done something to save Haiti before the Americans came; now there was no point in complaining. “What?” one lawyer demanded in a newspaper editorial. “You are facing a military regime, the territory is occupied, and you have the naiveté to talk about sovereignty and the constitution?”41

  On November 11, just a few days after its committee’s report, the Senate voted to ratify the convention by a vote of 26 to 10. President Dartiguenave hailed the accord as “the most important event in our national history” and the “consecration of a new era.” It would be, he proclaimed, the “foundation of national independence.” Dessalines, presumably, turned over in his grave.42

  The convention formally declared the Haitian government incapable of addressing its financial and military challenges and gave the United States sweeping power over the country’s institutions. It created two innocuously named but tremendously powerful positions, receiver general and financial counselor, which would officially be filled by the Haitian president but with all the candidates nominated by the American president. The agreement also created a new military and police force, the Gendarmerie, to be run by U.S. officers appointed in the same way.

  At the heart of the convention was a blinding paradox. The treaty presented the United States as the defender of Haiti’s sovereignty, yet at the same moment that this sovereignty was confirmed it was almost entirely eviscerated. The convention prohibited the Haitian government from signing a treaty with any foreign power that would diminish the country’s independence. But the document in which these words were included had itself reduced that independence to virtually nothing.43

  * * *

  As the central government in Port-au-Prince lurched toward an agreement with the Americans, the regional officers and soldiers of the Haitian army observed the proceedings with wariness and dismay. The country’s culture, after all, had long emphasized the danger that whites might one day come back and try to gain control. Now the army watched in disbelief as their government allowed precisely that to happen. Faced with acquiescence on the part of the politicians, and exhausted from several years of intense internal conflict, most soldiers grudgingly accepted that they had little choice but to subordinate themselves to the arriving marines. For many, however, it was a devastating experience. One officer in Dondon later recalled that, when he told his troops that they would soon have U.S. marines as their officers, his men cried “tears of powerlessness.” A corporal threw down his gun, proclaiming that he would rather die than be commanded by foreign whites.44

  A few Haitian officers did try to take a more active stand against the United States. One of them was Charlemagne Péralte, the ranking commander in the town of Léogâne, an important hub south of Port-au-Prince. In mid-August, when a marine officer came to announce that the town was to be occupied, Péralte refused to hand it over without an official order from the Haitian president. Though a detachment of marines had already arrived by train from Port-au-Prince, Péralte told them to stay in the train station and had his soldiers surround the station so they wouldn’t leave. Even with a U.S. warship hovering off the nearby coast, Péralte insisted that he was still in command and kept the Haitian flag flying over Léogâne headquarters.45

  Péralte’s refusal to hand over the town to the marines was courageous but mostly symbolic. President Dartiguenave soon fired him and replaced him with a more tractable officer, and Péralte packed up his belongings and went home. But he continued to wear his Haitian army uniform and, according to one account, ordered his soldiers to bury their guns before the U.S. marines could confiscate them. “You all accept working with the Americans,” he chided his fellow soldiers. “I never will.” As one of his friends later recalled, Péralte announced before he left: “I will not stay under the domination of the whites. You’ll hear news of me.”46

  In mid-September 1915, another Haitian officer, Benoît Rameau, tried to drive the marines out of the town of Gonaïves. Rameau, once a domestic servant, had risen through the ranks of the army thanks to his support of regional insurrections in the previous decades, and he saw the arriving forces as a threat to his own position and his town. When the marines first arrived, Rameau wrote to the U.S. consul in Port-au-Prince explaining that he had no wish to fight the American troops but could not accept their control over his town. “For almost 112 years, we have been a free and independent people. Our sweat and our courage gave us our independence. In that time, we have never been governed by a head of state chosen by a foreign power.” Receiving no response to his letter, Rameau decided to communicate instead by force of arms. He sent out a proclamation calling on all Haitians to join together and resist the intruders who had come “to re-establish slavery.”47

  A detachment of marines attacked Rameau’s followers, and the disparity in weaponry between the two groups became strikingly clear. Over the next few weeks, Rameau’s troops were repeatedly routed, and he was eventually captured and imprisoned. But this defeat did not end the fighting. Indeed, as the U.S. occupation became more firmly entrenched, the tradition of the Cacos—rebels in the countryside rising up against the central government in Port-au-Prince—became adapted, quite smoothly, into guerrilla resistance against the American forces. Near the town of Grande-Rivière-du-Nord, for example, the officer Josaphat Jean-Joseph set up a camp in the mountains and called on local soldiers to join him in repelling the invaders. They must remember Dessalines, Jean-Joseph wrote, “who, in giving us our country, had not given us the right to give it to the whites.”48

  Such opposition from the Cacos did not come as a complete surprise to the marines being shipped out to Haitian towns: they had been warned that Haitians might be “inclined to resist” U.S. attempts to restore order in the country. Aside from that warning, though, the preparation given to the American troops was remarkably limited. Before his departure, Private Faustin Wirkus learned only that there was “something going on in Haiti … which required the ‘Marines to land, and take the situation in hand.’” The marines had a lot of questions, “but none of us could seem to get any idea as to where this Haiti place was … Somebody said Haiti was a land of black people—‘just like Africa.’” The commanding officers, for their part, had rushed to libraries to find about the Black Republic, where they probably encountered the popular writings of racist observers such as Spenser St. John. One marine recalled that the officers taught them that Haitians were “devotees of Voodooism and past masters in the art of poisoning their enemies.” Private Wirkus eventually learned from his superiors that a Haitian president had been overthrown and killed by a mob; he was also informed that President Sam had been a “brute throwback to his jungle ancestry.”49

  All of the marines were white, and they brought to the “land of black people” their own experiences and expectations from the racially segregated United States. Some historians have argued that there was a specific and purposeful policy of dispatching to Haiti marines from the American South, with the assumption that they would be particularly effective at controlling a black population. While there is no proof of such a policy, many of the marines were indeed southerners. One of the highest-ranking commanders in the early part of the occupation, for example, was Colonel Littleton W. T. Waller, who had led a bloody campaign in the Philippines in 1901. Waller was a Virginian, the descendant of a prominent family of slave owners; in fact, some of his ancestors had been killed in an 1831 rebellion led by Nat Turner, who was partly inspired by the example of the Haitian Revolution. Waller saw a continuity between what was needed to maintain order—that is, white supremacy—in the United States and in Haiti. “I know the nigger and how to handle him,” he wrote. He reacted in disbelief at one point to the idea that the U.S. marines in Haiti might serve under the command of the coun
try’s president: “Did you ever hear of anything so fantastic in your life?” He was also wary about the notion of developing a Haitian gendarmerie, remarking that “you can never trust a nigger with a gun.”50

  Meanwhile, as Faustin Wirkus fired at Cacos who had taken refuge at the base of a cliff, he thought back to an amusement park game he’d played as a child, called “hit the nigger and get a cigar.” He also recalled the orders he had received from his superiors: “Any Negro or any dark person out of doors after nine o’clock, whose behavior makes him seem like a sympathizer with the Caco rebels, is to be shot on sight by the patrol, if he does not surrender.” But how, precisely, were those who were to be “shot on sight” to surrender? And what did it mean to “seem like” a Caco sympathizer? Years later, an odd pair of photographs published in a book by a writer sympathetic to the occupation suggested that for many U.S. observers, rural farmers were indistinguishable from Cacos. The photo on the left showed a bearded elderly man in ragged clothes and a hat. The caption read simply “A Peasant.” On the right was the same man, now with a bag and a raised machete. The caption read “A Caco.”51

  As marines faced continued resistance from bands under the leadership of men like Josaphat Jean-Joseph, they enacted harsh reprisals. Entering the village of Bertol, for example, marine officer Chandler Campbell found the residents waving white flags from their houses. He questioned the local women about Caco activity, and he told them that “if in the future a single shot is fired” by rebels in the area, the marines would “return and burn all their houses and completely destroy their crops.” This was not an idle threat. As his troops moved on to another town in early November 1915, Campbell recorded in his journal that his unit had gone “eastward burning all shacks in that direction.” The next day’s entry is “burned all shacks along route,” and a week later “burned many shacks.” What Campbell described as “shacks” were peasant homes, many occupied for generations. Sometimes the reprisals went further, targeting not only houses but entire villages. Catholic priests in the village of Dupity later recalled how, after a few shots were fired at marines from the heights near the town, they set fire to the whole area. “The chapel went up like the rest. Everything fell prey to the flames: chapel, presbytery, vestments, organ.”52