Ingano, Samaná. Duties reduced to 6 percent

The indolence of the Spaniards, most of them landowners or herdsmen, had given rise to the greatest poverty in the eastern part; there were even frequent and terrible famines. To create some abundance, Toussaint ordered on 8 February that all landowning inhabitants of the eastern part should henceforth plant cane, coffee, cotton and cacao; he prohibited the cultivation of yams, sweet potatoes and plantains, articles of no value for export. In his proclamation he spoke to them in the language of a father of a family who shows his children the road to happiness. So that his decrees might be carried out throughout the countryside, he organized in each commune of the colony a company of fifty-four gendarmes; it was clothed, paid and mounted at the expense of the commune, and the government furnished it with arms only. Under this new order of things the commerce of the eastern part was to be favored; as for the inhabitants of the fertile plain of Samaná, they needed some advantages in order to devote themselves profitably to agricultural labor. It was decreed on 12 February (23 Pluviôse, Year 9) that the duties of 20 percent established by the regulation of 21 Frimaire on goods imported into the colony and on produce exported from it would be modified for the departments of Samaná and the Ingano and fixed at 6 percent on exports; and that all goods imported into the towns of Monte Cristi, Puerto Plata, Samaná, Santo Domingo, Azua and Neiba, and the produce leaving them, would pay a duty of 6 percent. He decreed that the Spanish piastre gourde, which was worth eight escalins, would have the value of eleven escalins, as in the French part; he thus made the rate of the coinage in the Spanish part equal to that of the French part. He then had money struck at Santo Domingo bearing his effigy; and beside the legend of the French Republic he had his profile placed.