1915, August 12–17: (The Only Thing to Do: Dartiguenave’s Inauguration Without a Te Deum, Sannon’s Outburst, and the Treaty Delivered Without Modification): …

1915, August 12–17: (The Only Thing to Do: Dartiguenave’s Inauguration Without a Te Deum, Sannon’s Outburst, and the Treaty Delivered Without Modification): Under stormy skies Dartiguenave took oath with an appeal for national unity — for the first time in memory, conceivably indicative of the Church’s reservations about the American presence, there was no Te Deum. Dartiguenave would not allow the inaugural procession to move until Beach was beside him in the carriage — the Americans took this for a gesture of respect, but those who had seen the installation and demission of so many past regimes recognized the measure of the new president’s insecurity. As Beach noted, everything was quiet and Port-au-Prince had the appearance of being owned in fee simple by U.S. Marines. Dartiguenave might well have suffered twinges of uncertainty: besides being a civilian with no army behind him except a foreign one, he was the first elite mulâtre from the South to take office since 1876, an office that since the days of Boisrond had been all but monopolized by noirs, generals, and men of the North and Artibonite. His constituency, like that of Haiti’s presidents for the next thirty years, was the elite — numerically insignificant, usually without lucrative occupation save politics, the group that events were now propelling into a monopoly of office. At the first cabinet meeting on the 13th, held in the bedroom of the house where the widower president had lived, Captain Beach told the group a second Marine regiment was arriving — Dartiguenave murmured approval, only to be shouted down by his own Foreign Minister Pauléus Sannon, who burst out: by what right does Admiral Caperton presume to land troops in Haiti — if he wishes to do that he should make a request of the Haitian government. Four days later, Beale Davis paid his first formal call on the new president carrying in his attaché case the draft of a treaty the United States expected to be accepted without modification — Washington would extend recognition when the National Assembly had blessed the treaty and authorized Dartiguenave to sign.