1915, January 1–17: (The Stars and Stripes Over the Banque and the Machias Gold Heist): Neither logic nor legality governed the actions of any party.

1915, January 1–17: (The Stars and Stripes Over the Banque and the Machias Gold Heist): Neither logic nor legality governed the actions of any party. Despite warnings from the United States — now openly the Banque’s protector, having on January 1, 1915, lowered the Tricolor over the offices on Rue Magasins de l’État and raised the Stars and Stripes — that the Bons Da would not be recognized, the government plowed ahead, while officials muttered in the spirit of Tonton Nord that the time had come for Haitians to take what was theirs. A raid on the Banque could hardly be ruled out, as Théodore’s unpaid Cacos were treating Port-au-Prince like a conquered town. It was therefore in a highly jittery frame of mind that the authorities in Washington and New York determined their next step. After consultation with Bryan, New York officials of the Banque decided to withdraw from Port-au-Prince $500,000 of the currency retirement fund known as La Retraite, arranging to have the money shipped aboard U.S.S. Machias, an ancient gunboat. Farnham later explained to a Senate investigating committee that the money was brought from Haiti to New York in a warship because it was impossible to obtain insurance on it in the small ships of the Dutch Line then operating. On December 17, 1914, a detachment of Marines landed during the somnolent noon hours, proceeded to the Banque, and took the gold back without incident to the gunboat, which duly delivered its cargo to New York. Legally, as the Banque’s eminent Haitian counsel Seymour Pradel advised, the Banque had every right to transfer money from one pocket to another — it was moreover money only recently brought into Haiti from New York, and in New York it even earned interest. The Haitians, however, were in no mood for niceties: they saw the money as theirs, raised and secured by a Haitian bond issue and clearly marched beyond their reach by foreign military force. Haitian minister Solon Ménos bitterly protested to Bryan what he described as an arbitrary and offensive intervention, a flagrant invasion of the sovereignty and independence of the Republic of Haiti. Behind Haiti’s angry protests and the State Department’s precisely drawn legalities lay two questions: whether the transfer really had to be made — apparently none of the people on the spot felt convinced that the Banque was in clear and present danger of a raid, especially with three U.S. naval vessels and a regiment of Marines in Port-au-Prince harbor — and how the whole affair looked, especially to Haitians. The short answer was that it looked bad then and, if only in terms of misreading and misjudgment, still does in hindsight. The Machias incident — Marines marching through Port-au-Prince at midday to seize gold from Haiti’s own bank and carry it to New York aboard a warship — enacted in broad daylight what the indemnity of 1825 had accomplished through diplomatic coercion: the physical extraction of Haitian wealth by foreign military force, justified by legal fictions that technically absolved the perpetrators while materially dispossessing the sovereign state whose resources were being removed.