1918-00-00: (Forty Thousand Peasants Launch the Cacos Rebellion Against the American Occupation, the Largest Armed Resistance to Foreign Rule Since the Revol…

1918-00-00: (Forty Thousand Peasants Launch the Cacos Rebellion Against the American Occupation, the Largest Armed Resistance to Foreign Rule Since the Revolution Itself, Led by Charlemagne Péralte): In 1918, approximately forty thousand Haitian peasants launched the Cacos Rebellion against the U.S. military occupation, the largest armed resistance to foreign rule on Haitian soil since the Revolution. The rebellion was driven by outrage at the corvée labor system, which the peasants experienced as a reimposition of the forced labor that the Revolution had been fought to destroy. The Cacos, armed Black peasants from northern Haiti who took their name from the sound of a bird of prey and identified themselves with patches of red cloth, had been a destabilizing force in Haitian politics for decades. Now they turned their weapons against the Americans. The rebellion was led by Charlemagne Péralte, an ardent nationalist born on October 10, 1885, in Hinche, who had been the chief of the military garrison at Léogâne at the time of the American invasion. Sentenced to five years of hard labor for destroying U.S. property, he escaped and organized the insurgency. A new constitution was promulgated under American supervision the same year, imposed on a nation that had no say in its drafting.