Page d'histoire: Tiresias Augustin Simon Sam, president.

Tirésias Augustin Simon Sam (b. Grande-Rivière du Nord, May 15, 1835 – d. 1916)

President: March 31, 1896 – May 12, 1902

Minister of War in the previous administration, General Tirésias Augustin Simon Sam was elected on March 31, 1896 for a seven-year term. He chose as ministers men of great education and integrity such as Anténor Firmin and Solon Ménos.

During his administration, the country was faced with a financial crisis which caused great hardships.
After Firmin’s departure from the cabinet, bad loans were contracted at very high interests and all the revenues were absorbed by the service of those debts.
Consolidation of the floating debt opened the door to large scale grafting involving the president, his family, his ministers, and foreign accomplices. Financial chaos brought about economic catastrophe.

In spite of the economic difficulties, the government tried to follow in the path of the previous administration in the field of public works; examples included the building of a new civil court in Port-au-Prince; the organization of a streetcar service in the capital; and the construction of the first railroad from Cap-Haïtien to Grande Rivière du nord followed by the railroad called P.C.S. (Port-au-Prince – Cul-de-Sac).

Under his administration, the immigration of Lebanese, called Syrians in Haiti, started in 1896.

Light industries were encouraged but by 1896 the financial situation worsened due to a drop in the price of coffee on the international market.

During President Simon Sam’s tenure, five Haitians founded the School for Applied Sciences, École des Sciences Appliquées, devoted to the formation of young engineers and architects.

The episode known as the Luders Affair also took place during this period. A half-German merchant established in the capital, Émile Luders, was arrested by the police, on September 1897, while protesting the arrest of one of his employees. He was sentenced to jail and a fine and later deported. The German minister in Port-au-Prince insisted that the judge and the policemen in the case be dismissed.

The government refused, and as a result of that incident, Germany sent two gunboats into the Port-au-prince harbor. On December6, 1897, two Haitian frigates were seized and an ultimatum was delivered to the government: pay an indemnity of $20,000 to Luders and consent to his readmission by 1:00 P.M. or be attacked. President Simon Sam decided to accept the humiliation and pay in order to save the population.

In spite of this capitulation, the Germans soiled the Haitian flag by spreading it with feces on the deck of one of the frigates.

Seen from another angle that show of force, in the Caribbean Sea by Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, provided that this power was not inclined to leave this part of the world to the U.S.’s influence alone.

The humiliation caused by the Luders Affair did nothing to boost President Simon Sam’s popularity. A controversy quickly erupted on the question of the end of his mandate. Feeling that the time for him to leave office had come, he resigned on May 12, 1902.

President Tirésias Augustin Simon Sam’s government can be regarded as on of the lesser if not the least repressive of the nineteenth century.

Even then people with common sense understood that railroad was a better mean of public transportation than these pick-up trucks that are polluted the air and costing so much to run.

You learned every day ;I did not know that it was during his government that the school of applied science was founded .It shows that the old haitians were more progressive than the new ones.It is during the adminstration of Antoine Simon that the first electrical power plant was installed in the capital ;yet haitians said he was an illiterate;a simple chief of rural section..I vote for Antoine Simon every day instead of Gerard latortie.