Haiti

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  With the new Caco movement spreading over much of the country and mobilizing many more insurgents than the resistance of 1915, Péralte allowed different groups of Cacos to operate autonomously to a certain extent. His leadership, though, provided an important measure of coordination and communication. The U.S. authorities grudgingly acknowledged his considerable political skills: one report described him as “a born organizer.” A well-educated man, Péralte articulated the political goals of the movement in letters directed to the French and British ambassadors. He also provided a rallying point for the dispersed Cacos, a visible alternative to being ruled by U.S. forces and their Haitian collaborators. He sometimes dressed in a well-tailored black suit and black shoes, with a white panama hat atop his head. “They were the clothes and the bearing of a head of state,” one of the Cacos later recalled. Péralte was often greeted by his troops with the presidential hymn of Haiti, and he dubbed himself “General in Chief of the Revolution.” Through such symbolism, Péralte presented himself and his comrades-in-arms as Haiti’s rightful, legitimate government.105

  Those who joined the movement were mostly farmers, some prosperous and some less so, animated by anger over forced labor and other abuses carried out by the marines. In some ways the revolt resembled Acaau’s 1844 uprising in the south, and like the Piquet movement, it loaded its demand for institutional change with spiritual overtones. When preparing for a fight, the rebels would often carry out religious ceremonies. A Haitian gendarme who survived a Caco raid on his town recalled hearing singing and the sound of a Vodou drum before the attack. “We realized immediately that it was a charge, and that there was only one thing to do: retreat.” Many of the Cacos wore red scarves as an homage to Ogou, the god of war in Haitian Vodou. Péralte, a practicing Catholic, would go into battle carrying the Haitian flag mounted on a pike that was decorated at the top with a crucifix.106

  In open combat with marines, the Cacos were decisively outmatched, and most encounters ended in defeat and retreat. But the Cacos nevertheless survived and successfully harassed the U.S. forces for nearly two years. Marines and gendarmes frequently found themselves confused by Caco tactics, and on several occasions ended up killing one another during firefights. Terrifying stories circulated among the marines about what happened to those who were captured by the Cacos, including rumors that they were flayed alive, had their hearts ripped out, and were cannibalized; the rebels probably encouraged and sustained such fears. The Cacos set up camps in high, inaccessible locations and were able to repeatedly outwit and escape marine missions sent against them. At one point in 1919, marines and gendarmes closed in on one of Péralte’s camps, where the Cacos were clearly outnumbered and outgunned. But before they could break into the camp, the attackers saw Péralte and his men appear above them on horseback, having escaped via an unseen path. In another incident, the marines surrounded a camp constructed by Péralte near the border with the Dominican Republic. After four hours of fighting, Péralte and all his men escaped across a river and fled into the Dominican Republic, unmolested by Dominican border guards who had watched the battle unfold. Although the United States was then occupying the Dominican Republic as well and controlled its army, the Americans clearly had little control over the border region. In fact, in a few cases the Cacos formed alliances with groups of Dominican insurgents who were also fighting the U.S. marines, joining in combat against a common enemy.107

  Haitians fought on both sides of the conflict. “The gendarmes,” one Haitian newspaper pointed out, “are the sons, brothers, and cousins of the Cacos.” In many engagements, family and friends faced off against one another. Péralte, for his part, actively tried to recruit members of the Gendarmerie. In a 1919 letter to the Gendarmerie office at Maïssade, he addressed himself to “Haitians, sons of the fatherland of Pétion and Dessalines,” proclaiming: “you are black, my brothers, and I love you all.” He urged them to attack Maïssade and join his revolution. If they did, they would have the “joy” of knowing that they were “defending a just cause.” Such efforts had at least some effect: after one attack, in the town of Saut-d’Eau, a gendarme noted that many of the Cacos were wearing Gendarmerie uniforms. In addition, the fear of desertion by gendarmes ultimately sapped their usefulness for the U.S. marines. When a new marine lieutenant arrived to take over the Gendarmerie in July 1919, he discovered that his “predecessors had discouraged target practice on the theory that it was dangerous to teach the native how to shoot.”108

  Péralte’s efforts to recruit converts to his cause, however, were undermined by the Cacos’ techniques for obtaining food and supplies. The term “bandits,” which the marines and Haitian politicians preferred to use for the resistance, was not entirely inaccurate: the Cacos often pillaged houses and farms, sometimes using violence to get what they needed. One man recounted to Roger Gaillard how his grandfather, a local farmer, was tied up and struck on the head by a group of Cacos who came and looted his house and took his cow. Others claimed that Cacos perpetrated numerous rapes in some areas and even trafficked in captive women. Some victims of the pillaging complained to Péralte, assuming that their assailants were renegades and would be punished by their leader. But Péralte seems to have tacitly accepted the looting, or was simply unable to control those operating under his loose command. It is difficult to say whether such abuses of power were widespread or simply aberrations, though it’s clear that over time some farmers and merchants who had supported the Cacos ultimately turned against them. Still, one man who recounted stories of pillaging by the rebels also added that it is crucial to remember that “the abuses of the Cacos were born of other abuses. They were caused by the abuses of the Occupation.” A Haitian bishop interviewed by Gaillard likewise argued that the Cacos had little choice. “They were both pillagers and patriots,” he declared, and most people were glad that someone was standing up for Haiti. “They rose up to defend the country: their intentions were good.”109

  Besides perpetually looking for soldiers, Péralte also understood that, like the Haitian revolutionaries he hoped to emulate, he needed allies outside Haiti if he was to succeed. In June 1919, he sent a letter to the British consul in Port-au-Prince asking for assistance. Calling on the “humanity” of the consul and on his “great nation that is the master of the universe,” Péralte—drawing on the internationalist language of the time propounded by none other than President Wilson—argued that it was incumbent upon the powerful to give support to “a small nation that is trying to save its flag and its territory from the ambitions of a greedy nation.” He declared that he was leading forty thousand men, “fighting valiantly and with help only from Providence,” and pleaded with the British government to at least investigate the abuses perpetrated by the United States. He had been struggling for nine months for a just cause, Péralte lamented, but no other nation was paying attention. In “a time of enlightenment and progress,” with people “everywhere preaching justice,” Haiti’s plight was being forgotten. Soon afterward, Péralte sent a similar message to the French minister in Haiti. This letter, signed by him and a hundred supporters, proclaimed that the Haitian people had suffered four years of “perpetual vexations, unbelievable crimes, assassination, theft, and acts of barbarism” that the United States was carefully covering up. Now their movement was demanding the rights that had been trampled by “Americans without scruples.” Neither of these missives got any response: the diplomats simply forwarded them to the U.S. authorities.110

  Even without outside support, however, the Caco movement was strong enough that the U.S. military decided to deploy a nascent technique against them: aerial bombardment. They brought several planes into the country, set up an aviation station at Gonaïves, and requested a shipment of five hundred bombs. On August 13, 1919, the first mission was carried out, with ground troops attacking a Caco camp supported by airplanes dropping bombs from above. The results were, an officer reported, “very satisfying.” They eradicated fifty-two “bandits” a
nd saw a great deal of blood, which suggested that many more had been hurt. “The aviators did splendid work and killed many.”111

  U.S. military officials later downplayed the use of bombing during the occupation, saying that only a few aerial missions had been carried out. Testimonies from Haiti, though, make it clear that the attacks were devastating. Many in rural areas had never seen an airplane before, let alone one dropping bombs; according to one account, the machines became known as “God’s bad angels.” Unsurprisingly, the aerial bombardments were not always precise in their targets—especially since even the marines on the ground had long had difficulty distinguishing Cacos from the broader rural population. Furthermore, the Caco camps that were bombed were often not so much military compounds as temporary villages: the families of the Cacos settled there, sometimes even growing crops if they stayed in one place for long enough. The rebels’ partners and children were also caught in the aerial attacks.112

  One Haitian gendarme who participated in a coordinated ground-air assault later provided a harrowing description of what he saw. The occupation troops had surrounded a Caco village near Terre-Rouge by night, and in the morning they were awaiting the order to charge when they heard people approaching. It was two women and an eleven-year-old boy, going to get water from a nearby spring. When they were just steps away from where the gendarmes were hiding, one of the women stopped. She’d smelled something: a U.S. cigarette, a foreign smell that she knew could only come from marines or Haitian gendarmes. The small group turned back toward the camp to warn the others. The boy ran ahead, until one of the gendarmes shot and killed him. The two women began to scream, and the gendarmes were about to charge when an airplane appeared overhead. “Here come the vultures!” shouted the villagers as the airplane began its bombing run. The gendarmes heard the screams of women in the explosions and injured animals braying, as those who could scattered and ran from the camp. All that was left to do was finish the work. The marines and gendarmes entered the village, killed the wounded who had been left behind, counted the dead, and headed home.113

  Even with the fearsome new technology on their side, however, the conflict dragged on. Eventually, the marines decided that there was a more efficient way of crushing the Caco revolt: assassinating Péralte. The job fell to two marines, William R. Button—who, according to a fellow soldier, “could speak all varieties of Creole” and “pass as a Haitian of any class”—and Herman Hanneken. Another key figure in the plot was a Haitian man, Jean-Baptiste Conzé. The three, along with a few other Haitian accomplices, constructed an elaborate plan for infiltrating the Caco movement and drawing Péralte into a trap.114

  Conzé came from a prominent family in the town of Grande-Rivière and was a distant relative of Péralte. He had some personal reasons for disliking the Cacos: in 1914, before the occupation, he’d been stopped twice by rebels in the countryside and forced to hand over a ransom to support their cause. By the U.S. military’s own accounts, however, Conzé was most of all an opportunist. An American report later described him as having no particular political affiliation and “leaning to whatever side has the most money.” Infiltrating the Cacos was not an easy task. Péralte had developed an effective and widespread spy network, depending heavily on market women who circulated throughout the countryside and the towns. Some of these women duly warned the Caco leader about the assassination plot, and specifically about Conzé. Nonetheless, he succeeded in working his way into Péralte’s trust, largely through an elaborate ruse. He and Hanneken staged a battle, with Conzé posing as a Caco and the marine pretending to have been defeated and wounded. Impressed with the fake Caco’s exploit, Péralte welcomed him into his camp and gave him an officer’s commission. Together, they set about engineering a raid on Grande-Rivière.115

  On the night appointed for the attack, October 31, 1919, Conzé planned to lead Péralte into an ambush. At the last minute, though, Péralte decided to stay back from the battle. Improvising, Hanneken and Button covered their faces in black shoe polish and dressed themselves in tattered clothes. Thus disguised, and accompanied by several Haitian gendarmes, they made it all the way to the small house where Péralte was staying. There, Hanneken shot him twice in the heart at point-blank range.116

  Péralte had developed a near-legendary status in the country, and the marines could not simply declare that they had killed him: they needed to prove it. So they carried his body down the hill and put it on display in Grande-Rivière. One resident of the town, a friend of Péralte’s, later described watching the procession enter the town, with Jean-Baptiste Conzé proudly in the middle. “I was penetrated with sadness,” he recalled. “All at once, my hopes and those of my comrades had collapsed. The Americans would not be chased away.”117

  The next day, Péralte was brought by train to Le Cap and there stripped bare. A piece of cloth was placed over his midsection, and his body was tied to a door and propped up against a wall in the police station. The marines officially identified Péralte by using the file filled out about him when he was in prison in Le Cap, which listed his hair and eye color, his height, and his scars. Then they gathered local residents to come and see the body, including the guard who had helped Péralte escape the previous year—now a prisoner himself—and the French priest serving in Le Cap. Afterward, a marine photographer took a picture of the corpse to show to those who had not seen it for themselves. Several hundred copies of the photo were made, and airplanes dropped them over the countryside in the areas where Cacos were still active.118

  Even after all of these displays, the marines remained oddly obsessed with Péralte’s body, which they didn’t quite know where to put. Fearing that the Cacos would attempt to take back the corpse of their leader, they held five different fake funerals in different places to create confusion. Péralte’s actual final resting place was carefully chosen: a prison camp at Chabert, not far from Le Cap. An official description of the institution provided to the U.S. Senate in 1921 described it in bucolic terms as a farm worked by convicts to feed the local population and experiment with new agricultural methods. A Haitian newspaper provided a rather different account, referring to the camp as “organized slavery.” The crops grown at Chabert were sold for the profit of the occupation, and prisoners there died by the hundreds. The carpenter hired to bury Péralte later recalled that the marines didn’t have a coffin to put him in: the prison was out of them. Instead, the soldiers wrapped the body in a Haitian flag and laid it directly in the grave. Then they asked the laborer to pour concrete around it, apparently to make sure that the body couldn’t be easily disinterred. A Haitian guard who was among those ordered to stand sentinel over the grave in the following days remembered bitterly: “Charlemagne was buried like a dog.”119

  The Caco war was not yet over, for Benoît Batraville took over the movement’s leadership from Péralte and continued to fight for nearly another year. Eventually, however, he, too, was killed, and the remaining insurgents dispersed. Back in the United States, meanwhile, the press published swashbuckling accounts of how Hanneken and Button had tricked and killed Péralte. James Weldon Johnson, an African American writer and critic of the occupation, was among the few to offer a different reading, arguing that the assassination was anything but heroic and represented a “black mark” on the tradition of U.S. military action. The two marines were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and were lauded by the Haitian government: in a ceremony on the Champ de Mars in Port-au-Prince, President Dartiguenave pinned Haitian military medals on them to the sounds of the Haitian national anthem and the Marine Corps hymn. The Haitians who had worked with them, including Conzé, got medals, too—but in a separate ceremony.120

  Lieutenant Button died of malaria in Haiti the following year, while Hanneken went on to a long military career, fighting in Nicaragua and later in the Pacific during World War II. He did not, it seems, take particular pride in his role in Péralte’s killing. In 1971, when the Haitian historian Roger Gaillard came to Washington to carry o
ut his research on the occupation in the U.S. National Archives, he managed to find Hanneken’s phone number in San Diego. But when he called Hanneken to ask if he could interview him, the ex-marine told him simply: “I’m an old soldier. I don’t want to think about that affair anymore.”121

  In Haiti, meanwhile, traveling to the place where Péralte had died, Gaillard found many local residents who kept the memory of the event alive and pointed out to him the precise location where the killing had taken place. In the 1970s it was a lush forest, full of trees offering mangoes, oranges, avocados, guavas, and breadfruit, surrounded by bamboo and fern: perhaps a fitting memorial. For, as Gaillard wrote, while Péralte’s assassins were once the ones celebrated and decorated, eventually things changed. “The dialectic of history has reversed the poles, and the one who still lives among us now is Charlemagne Péralte.”122

  It was the marines who, unwittingly, offered Haitians the most lasting and widely known vision of the slain Caco leader. In the photograph taken in 1919, Péralte is nearly naked, with just a cloth covering his groin. Tied to a board propped against a wall, with his head tilted back to one side and his eyes closed, he almost seems to be sleeping. Draped behind him, nestled against his head, is his banner: the Haitian flag, mounted on a flagpole topped with a crucifix. The similarity of this image of the slain Péralte—killed at the age of thirty-three—to the crucified Christ is striking. If the photographer had consciously tried to create a picture of a martyr, he couldn’t have done better.123

  Passed from hand to hand, copies of the photograph of Péralte’s corpse circulated throughout Haiti. In 1932, when the journalist and antioccupation activist Félix Viard wrote a poem in honor of Péralte, dubbing him “the last maroon,” the publication was illustrated with a sketch of the same photo. Later, Philomé Obin, a painter from Le Cap—once arrested by U.S. marines on suspicion of sympathy with the Cacos—created several works based on the image. In Obin’s paintings, the black-and-white of the original is transformed into color, so that the blue and red of the Haitian flag and the yellow of the crucifix stand out against the sky. Obin also added Péralte’s mourning mother, clad in black, to the scene. And the title of his work, inscribed directly on the painting, expressed what so many had long seen in the image: “The Crucifixion of Charlemagne Péralte for Liberty.”124