Lewis has no illusions about why the marketing focuses on him, he told me; sugar cane is a lucrative business, and to keep it that way, the industry has to work with the government. Once inside the steeper, enslaved workers covered the plants with water. Underwood & Underwood, via the Library of Congress. Exactly where Franklin put the people from the United States once he led them away from the levee is unclear. Because of the nature of sugar production, enslaved people suffered tremendously in South Louisiana. position and countered that the Lewis boy is trying to make this a black-white deal. Dor insisted that both those guys simply lost their acreage for one reason and one reason only: They are horrible farmers.. Franklin sold a young woman named Anna to John Ami Merle, a merchant and the Swedish and Norwegian consul in New Orleans, and he sold four young men to Franois Gaienni, a wood merchant, city council member, and brigadier general in the state militia. Whitney Plantation opened to the public as a museum on December 7, 2014. In 1712, there were only 10 Africans in all of Louisiana. Even today, incarcerated men harvest Angolas cane, which is turned into syrup and sold on-site. In some areas, slaves left the plantations to seek Union military lines for freedom. In 1808, Congress exercised its constitutional prerogative to end the legal importation of enslaved people from outside the United States. The vast majority were between the ages of 8 and 25, as Armfield had advertised in the newspaper that he wanted to buy. Hes privileged with a lot of information, Lewis said. Sugar cane grows on farms all around the jail, but at the nearby Louisiana State Penitentiary, or Angola, prisoners grow it. Enslaved plantation workers also engaged in coordinated work stoppages, slowdowns, and sabotage. Slave housing was usually separate from the main plantation house, although servants and nurses often lived with their masters. Enslaved people planted the cane in January and early February. Historical images of slave quarters Slave quarters in Louisiana, unknown plantation (c. 1880s) Barbara Plantation (1927) Oakland Plantation (c. 1933) Destrehan Plantation (1938) Modern images of slave quarters Magnolia Plantation (2010) Oakland Plantation (2010) Melrose Plantation (2010) Allendale Plantation (2012) Laura Plantation (2014) The sugar districts of Louisiana stand out as the only area in the slaveholding south with a negative birth rate among the enslaved population. He had affixed cuffs and chains to their hands and feet, and he had women with infants and smaller children climb into a wagon. It seems reasonable to imagine that it might have remained so if it werent for the establishment of an enormous market in enslaved laborers who had no way to opt out of the treacherous work. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Caribbean became the largest producer of sugar in the world. The trade was so lucrative that Wall Streets most impressive buildings were Trinity Church at one end, facing the Hudson River, and the five-story sugar warehouses on the other, close to the East River and near the busy slave market. Neither the scores of commission merchant firms that serviced southern planter clients, nor the more than a dozen banks that would soon hold more collective capital than the banks of New York City, might have been noticeable at a glance. On both sugar and cotton plantations, enslaved people endured regimented, factory-like conditions, that used advanced management strategies to enforce ruthless efficiency. It was Antoine who successfully created what would become the countrys first commercially viable pecan varietal. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the population of free people of color in Louisiana remained relatively stable, while the population of enslaved Africans skyrocketed. Slave-backed bonds seemed like a sweet deal to investors. They thought little about the moral quality of their actions, and at their core was a hollow, an emptiness. Due to its complex history, Louisiana had a very different pattern of slavery compared to the rest of the United States.[1]. The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas. American Historical Review 105 (Dec. 2000): 153475. found, they were captured on the highway or shot at while trying to hitch rides on the sugar trains. The company was indicted by a federal grand jury in Tampa for carrying out a conspiracy to commit slavery, wrote Alec Wilkinson, in his 1989 book, Big Sugar: Seasons in the Cane Fields of Florida. (The indictment was ultimately quashed on procedural grounds.) In the mid-1840s, a planter in Louisiana sent cuttings of a much-prized pecan tree over to his neighbor J.T. The historian Michael Tadman found that Louisiana sugar parishes had a pattern of deaths exceeding births. Backbreaking labor and inadequate net nutrition meant that slaves working on sugar plantations were, compared with other working-age slaves in the United States, far less able to resist the common and life-threatening diseases of dirt and poverty, wrote Tadman in a 2000 study published in the American Historical Review. "Grif" was the racial designation used for their children. Before the Civil War, it's estimated that roughly 1,500 "sugarhouses . The true Age of Sugar had begun and it was doing more to reshape the world than any ruler, empire or war had ever done, Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos write in their 2010 book, Sugar Changed the World. Over the four centuries that followed Columbuss arrival, on the mainlands of Central and South America in Mexico, Guyana and Brazil as well as on the sugar islands of the West Indies Cuba, Barbados and Jamaica, among others countless indigenous lives were destroyed and nearly 11 million Africans were enslaved, just counting those who survived the Middle Passage. Library of Congress. Du Bois called the . To maintain control and maximize profit, slaveholders deployed violence alongside other coercive management strategies. Franklin is especially likely to have spent time at Hewletts Exchange, which held slave auctions daily except on Sundays and which was the most important location of the day for the slave trade. By then, harvesting machines had begun to take over some, but not all, of the work. The common and visible way that enslaved people resisted plantation conditions was by running away. Before the year was out, Franklin would conduct 41 different sales transactions in New Orleans, trading away the lives of 112 people. One-Year subscription (4 issues) : $20.00, Two-Year subscription (8 issues) : $35.00, 64 Parishes 2023. They have been refined and whitewashed in the mills and factories of Southern folklore: the romantic South, the Lost Cause, the popular moonlight and magnolias plantation tours so important to Louisianas agritourism today. By fusing economic progress and slave labor, sugar planters revolutionized the means of production and transformed the institution of slavery. A group of maroons led by Jean Saint Malo resisted re-enslavement from their base in the swamps east of New Orleans between 1780 and 1784. Its residents, one in every three of whom was enslaved, had burst well beyond its original boundaries and extended themselves in suburbs carved out of low-lying former plantations along the river. The German Coast, where Whitney Plantation is located, was home to 2,797 enslaved workers. By hunting, foraging, and stealing from neighboring plantations, maroons lived in relative freedom for days, months, or even years. If it is killing all of us, it is killing black people faster. Basic decency was something they really owed only to white people, and when it came down to it, Black peoples lives did not matter all that much. Enslaved people planted cotton in March and April. Louisiana's Whitney Plantation pays homage to the experiences of slaves across the South. Louisianas more than 22,000 slaveholders were among the wealthiest in the nation. Sugar barons reaped such immense profits that they sustained this agricultural system by continuously purchasing more enslaved people, predominantly young men, to replace those who died. He pored over their skin and felt their muscles, made them squat and jump, and stuck his fingers in their mouths looking for signs of illness or infirmity, or for whipping scars and other marks of torture that he needed to disguise or account for in a sale. Nearly all of Louisiana's sugar, meanwhile, left the state through New Orleans, and the holds of more and more ships filled with it as the number of sugar plantations tripled in the second half . The Antebellum Period refers to the decades prior to the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861. Slavery was officially abolished in the portion of the state under Union control by the state constitution of 1864, during the American Civil War. Sugar planters in the antebellum South managed their estates progressively, efficiently, and with a political economy that reflected the emerging capitalist values of nineteenthcentury America. Enslaved women were simply too overworked, exhausted, and vulnerable to disease to bear healthy children. Franklin was no exception. In 1853, Representative Miles Taylor of Louisiana bragged that his states success was without parallel in the United States, or indeed in the world in any branch of industry.. He was powerless even to chase the flies, or sometimes ants crawling on some parts of his body.. Cookie Policy Roman did what many enslavers were accustomed to in that period: He turned the impossible work over to an enslaved person with vast capabilities, a man whose name we know only as Antoine. After the planting season, enslaved workers began work in other areas on the plantation, such as cultivating corn and other food crops, harvesting wood from the surrounding forests, and maintaining levees and canals. From Sheridan Libraries/Levy/Gado/Getty Images. Resistance was often met with sadistic cruelty. They supplemented them with girls and women they believed maximally capable of reproduction. Copyright 2021. [1], Secondly, Louisiana's slave trade was governed by the French Code Noir, and later by its Spanish equivalent the Cdigo Negro,[1] As written, the Code Noir gave specific rights to slaves, including the right to marry. It remained little more than an exotic spice, medicinal glaze or sweetener for elite palates. He sold others in pairs, trios, or larger groups, including one sale of 16 people at once. Some diary entrieshad a general Whipping frollick or Whipped about half to dayreveal indiscriminate violence on a mass scale. (1754-1823), Louisiana plantation owner whose slaves rebelled during the 1811 German Coast Uprising . Though usually temporary, the practice provided the maroon with an invaluable space to care for their psychological well-being, reestablish a sense of bodily autonomy, and forge social and community ties by engaging in cultural and religious rituals apart from white surveillance. The American Sugar Cane League has highlighted the same pair separately in its online newsletter, Sugar News. He may have done business from a hotel, a tavern, or an establishment known as a coffee house, which is where much of the citys slave trade was conducted in the 1820s. The United States banned the importation of slaves in 180708. The founders of Wallace include emancipated slaves who had toiled on nearby sugar plantations. They just did not care. But it did not end domestic slave trading, effectively creating a federally protected internal market for human beings. Enslaved people also served as cooks, handling the demanding task of hulling rice with mortars and pestles. On the eve of the Civil War, the average Louisiana sugar plantation was valued at roughly $200,000 and yielded a 10 percent annual return. Population growth had only quickened the commercial and financial pulse of New Orleans. The Mississippi River Delta area in southeast Louisiana created the ideal alluvial soil necessary for the growing of sugar cane; sugar was the state's prime export during the antebellum period. An award-winning historian reveals the harrowing forgotten story of America's internal slave tradeand its role in the making of America. . but the tide was turning. In the last stage, the sugar crystallized. After placing a small check mark by the name of every person to be sure he had seen them all, he declared the manifest all correct or agreeing excepting that a sixteen-year-old named Nancy, listed as No. The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America, Kids Start Forgetting Early Childhood Around Age 7, Archaeologists Discover Wooden Spikes Described by Julius Caesar, Artificial Sweetener Tied to Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke, Study Finds, Rare Jurassic-Era Insect Discovered at Arkansas Walmart. Including the history of the Code Noir, topics of gender, and resistance & rebellion. Franklin sold two people to John Witherspoon Smith, whose father and grandfather had both served as presidents of the College of New Jersey, known today as Princeton University, and who had himself been United States district judge for Louisiana. Focused on the history of slavery in Louisiana from 1719-1865, visitors learn about all aspects of slavery in this state. In contrast to those living on large plantations, enslaved people on smaller farms worked alongside their owner, the owners family, and any hired enslaved people or wageworkers. Which plantation in Louisiana had the most slaves? [1][10], When control of Louisiana shifted to the United States, the Catholic social norms were deeply rooted in Louisiana; the contrast with predominantly Protestant parts of the young nation, where differing norms prevailed, was evident. In 1795, tienne de Bor, a New Orleans sugar planter, granulated the first sugar crystals in the Louisiana Territory. After a major labor insurgency in 1887, led by the Knights of Labor, a national union, at least 30 black people some estimated hundreds were killed in their homes and on the streets of Thibodaux, La. Your Privacy Rights Please upgrade your browser. Dor, who credits M.A. With the advent of sugar processing locally, sugar plantations exploded up and down both banks of the Mississippi River. During cotton-picking season, slaveholders tasked the entire enslaved populationincluding young children, pregnant women, and the elderlywith harvesting the crop from sunrise to sundown. They were often known simply as exchanges, reflecting the commercial nature of what went on inside, and itinerant slave traders used them to receive their mail, talk about prices of cotton and sugar and humans, locate customers, and otherwise as offices for networking and socializing. Buyers of single individuals probably intended them for domestic servants or as laborers in their place of business. Territory of Orleans, the largest slave revolt in American history began about thirty miles outside of New Orleans (or a greater distance if traveled alongside the twisting Mississippi River), as slaves rebelled against the brutal work regimens of sugar plantations. Plantation labor shifted away from indentured servitude and more toward slavery by the late 1600s. Supply met demand at Hewletts, where white people gawked and leered and barraged the enslaved with intrusive questions about their bodies, their skills, their pasts. Patout and Son, the largest sugar-cane mill company in Louisiana. On cane plantations in sugar time, there is no distinction as to the days of the week, Northup wrote. This video of our slave cabin was done by the National Park Service as part of their project to capture the remaining slave . During her antebellum reign, Queen Sugar bested King Cotton locally, making Louisiana the second-richest state in per capita wealth. Coming and going from the forest were beef and pork and lard, buffalo robes and bear hides and deerskins, lumber and lime, tobacco and flour and corn. Enslaved people often escaped and became maroons in the swamps to avoid deadly work and whipping. Enslaved workers had to time this process carefully, because over-fermenting the leaves would ruin the product. Fatigue might mean losing an arm to the grinding rollers or being flayed for failing to keep up. In 1838 they ended slaveholding with a mass sale of their 272 slaves to sugar cane plantations in Louisiana in the Deep South. [6]:59 fn117. Sugarcane cultivation was brutal, even by the standards of American slavery. Many African-Americans aspired to own or rent their own sugar-cane farms in the late 19th century, but faced deliberate efforts to limit black farm and land owning. This was advantageous since ribbon cane has a tough bark which is hard to crush with animal power. Rotating Exhibit: Grass, Scrap, Burn: Life & Labor at Whitney Plantation After Slavery And the number of black sugar-cane farmers in Louisiana is most likely in the single digits, based on estimates from people who work in the industry. . Serving as bars, restaurants, gambling houses, pool halls, meeting spaces, auction blocks, and venues for economic transactions of all sorts, coffee houses sometimes also had lodging and stabling facilities. Enslaved Black workers made that phenomenal growth possible. The museum also sits across the river from the site of the German Coast uprising in 1811, one of the largest revolts of enslaved people in United States history. Many specimens thrived, and Antoine fashioned still more trees, selecting for nuts with favorable qualities. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. committee member to gain an unfair advantage over black farmers with white landowners. But not at Whitney. Wages and working conditions occasionally improved. Plantation Slavery in Antebellum Louisiana Enslaved people endured brutal conditions on sugarcane and cotton plantations during the antebellum period. Malone, Ann Patton. Enslaved peoples' cabins and sugarcane boiling kettles at Whitney Plantation, 2021. c1900s Louisiana Stereo Card Cutting . The most well-known portrait of the Louisiana sugar country comes from Solomon Northup, the free black New Yorker famously kidnapped into slavery in 1841 and rented out by his master for work on . The crop, land and farm theft that they claim harks back to the New Deal era, when Southern F.S.A. With fewer and fewer black workers in the industry, and after efforts in the late 1800s to recruit Chinese, Italian, Irish and German immigrant workers had already failed, labor recruiters in Louisiana and Florida sought workers in other states. Enslaved women who served as wet-nurses had to care for their owners children instead of their own. These black women show tourists the same slave cabins and the same cane fields their own relatives knew all too well. Theres still a few good white men around here, Lewis told me. Small-Group Whitney Plantation, Museum of . When I arrived at the Whitney Plantation Museum on a hot day in June, I mentioned to Ashley Rogers, 36, the museums executive director, that I had passed the Nelson Coleman Correctional Center about 15 miles back along the way. Some were tradesmenpeople like coach and harness maker Charles Bebee, goldsmith Jean Claude Mairot, and druggist Joseph Dufilho. NYTimes.com no longer supports Internet Explorer 9 or earlier. Just before dawn on October 2, Armfield had roused the enslaved he had collected in the compound he and Franklin rented on Duke Street in Alexandria. One of the biggest players in that community is M.A. . Their ranks included many of the nations wealthiest slaveholders. Louisianas enslaved population exploded: from fewer than 20,000 enslaved individuals in 1795 to more than 168,000 in 1840 and more than 331,000 in 1860. Cotton exports from New Orleans increased more than sevenfold in the 1820s. The 13th Amendment to the nation's constitution, which outlawed the practice unequivocally, was ratified in December 1865. Free shipping for many products! This dynamic created demographic imbalances in sugar country: there were relatively few children, and over two-thirds of enslaved people were men. As many as 500 sugar rebels joined a liberation army heading toward New Orleans, only to be cut down by federal troops and local militia; no record of their actual plans survives. Was Antoine aware of his creations triumph? The Whitney, which opened five years ago as the only sugar-slavery museum in the nation, rests squarely in a geography of human detritus. Every February the land begins getting prepared for the long growth period of sugar. Cotton picking required dexterity, and skill levels ranged. He made them aware of the behavior he expected, and he delivered a warning, backed by slaps and kicks and threats, that when buyers came to look, the enslaved were to show themselves to be spry, cheerful and obedient, and they were to claim personal histories that, regardless of their truth, promised customers whatever they wanted. Picking began in August and continued throughout the fall and early winter. The demand for slaves increased in Louisiana and other parts of the Deep South after the invention of the cotton gin (1793) and the Louisiana Purchase (1803). They also served as sawyers, carpenters, masons, and smiths. On October 21, after 19 days at sea, the United States arrived at the Balize, a dismal place where oceangoing ships often stopped to hire one of the boat pilots who resided there and earned a living ushering larger vessels upriver. June Provost has also filed a federal lawsuit against First Guaranty Bank and a bank senior vice president for claims related to lending discrimination, as well as for mail and wire fraud in reporting false information to federal loan officials. Lewis is the minority adviser for the federal Farm Service Agency (F.S.A.) More French planters and their enslaved expert sugar workers poured into Louisiana as Toussaint LOuverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines led a successful revolution to secure Haitis independence from France. Representatives for the company did not respond to requests for comment. Few of John Armfields purchasing records have survived, making a precise tally of the companys profits impossible. Founded in 1825, Patout has been known to boast that it is the oldest complete family-owned and operated manufacturer of raw sugar in the United States. It owns three of the 11 remaining sugar-cane mills in Louisiana, processing roughly a third of the cane in the state. Its impossible to listen to the stories that Lewis and the Provosts tell and not hear echoes of the policies and practices that have been used since Reconstruction to maintain the racial caste system that sugar slavery helped create. Follett,Richard J. Modernization of the Louisiana Sugar Industry, 1830-1910 by John A. Heitmann Louisiana sugar estates more than tripled between 1824 and 1830. In the batterie, workers stirred the liquid continuously for several hours to stimulate oxidation. Enslaved people led a grueling life centered on labor. Field hands cut the cane and loaded it into carts which were driven to the sugar mill. They followed one of two routes: an upriver journey to Ohio, or a downriver journey to New Orleans, where they hoped to stowaway aboard oceangoing vessels bound for the Northeast or Europe. Traduzione Context Correttore Sinonimi Coniugazione. But none of them could collect what they came for until they took care of some paperwork. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. But several scholars estimate that slave traders in the late 1820s and early 1830s saw returns in the range of 20 to 30 percent, which would put Franklin and Armfields earnings for the last two months of 1828 somewhere between $11,000 and $17,000. Much of that investment funneled back into the sugar mills, the most industrialized sector of Southern agriculture, Follett writes in his 2005 book, Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisianas Cane World 1820-1860. No other agricultural region came close to the amount of capital investment in farming by the eve of the Civil War. Taylor, Joe Gray. In an effort to prevent smuggling, the 1808 federal law banning slave imports from overseas mandated that captains of domestic coastal slavers create a manifest listing the name, sex, age, height, and skin color of every enslaved person they carried, along with the shippers names and places of residence. In 1795, there were 19,926 enslaved Africans and 16,304 free people of color in Louisiana. In 1860 his total estate was valued at $2,186,000 (roughly $78 million in 2023). At the Whitney plantation, which operated continuously from 1752 to 1975, its museum staff of 12 is nearly all African-American women. Workplace accidents were common: enslaved people were cut by cane knives, dragged into mills and crushed between the grinders, mauled by exploding boilers, or burned by boiling cane juice. As such, the sugar parishes tended toward particularly massive plantations, large populations of enslaved people, and extreme concentrations of wealth. Lewis is himself a litigant in a separate petition against white landowners. 120 and described as black on the manifest, was in his estimation a yellow girl, and that a nine-year-old declared as Betsey no. Joanne Ryan, a Louisiana-based archaeologist, specializes in excavating plantation sites where slaves cooked sugar. Slaves lived in long barracks that housed several families and individuals, or in small huts. Enslaved plantation workers were expected to supplement these inadequate rations by hunting, fishing, and growing vegetables in family garden plots. After the United States outlawed the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, many captives came to Louisiana from the Upper South through the domestic slave trade. History of Whitney Plantation. Farm laborers, mill workers and refinery employees make up the 16,400 jobs of Louisianas sugar-cane industry. In a few instances, Franklin sold slaves to free people of color, such as when he sold Eliza and Priscilla, 11 and 12 years old, to New Orleans bricklayer Myrtille Courcelle. $11.50 + $3.49 shipping. The museum tells of the everyday struggles and resistance of black people who didnt lose their dignity even when they lost everything else. Hewletts was where white people came if they were looking to buy slaves, and that made it the right place for a trader like Franklin to linger. Cattle rearing dominated the southwest Attakapas region. Cotton flourished north of sugar country, particularly in the plains flanking the Red River and Mississippi River. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. Editors Note: Warning, this entry contains graphicimagery. Freedmen and freedwomen had little choice but to live in somebodys old slave quarters. Despite the fact that the Whitney Plantation , a sugar-cane plantation formerly home to more than 350 African slaves, is immaculately groomed, the raw emotion of the place . By the 1720s, one of every two ships in the citys port was either arriving from or heading to the Caribbean, importing sugar and enslaved people and exporting flour, meat and shipbuilding supplies. Enslaved Africans cleared the land and planted corn, rice, and vegetables. Slavery had already been abolished in the remainder of the state by President Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, which provided that slaves located in territories which were in rebellion against the United States were free. Johnson, Walter. It was a rare thing if a man lived from more than ten to twelve years of those who worked at the mill, one formerly enslaved person recalled. Thousands were smuggled from Africa and the Caribbean through the illegal slave trade. Pecan trees are native to the middle southwestern region of the Mississippi River Valley and the Gulf Coast of Texas and Mexico. Even with Reconstruction delivering civil rights for the first time, white planters continued to dominate landownership. The pestilent summer was over, and the crowds in the streets swelled, dwarfing those that Franklin remembered. As first reported in The Guardian, Wenceslaus Provost Jr. claims the company breached a harvesting contract in an effort to deliberately sabotage his business. These were some of the most skilled laborers, doing some of the most dangerous agricultural and industrial work in the United States. But from where Franklin stood, the transformation of New Orleans was unmistakable nonetheless. The simultaneous introduction of these two cash cropssugarcane and cottonrepresented an economic revolution for Louisiana. Yet those farms reported $19 million worth of agricultural equipment (more than $635 million in 2023). Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. A Note to our Readers Large plantations also gave rise to enslaved specialists: enslaved foremen and drivers who managed menial workers, as well as skilled artisans like blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers, and spinners. And in every sugar parish, black people outnumbered whites. The average Louisiana cotton plantation was valued at roughly $100,000, yielding a 7 percent annual return. It forbade separation of married couples, and separation of young children from their mothers. The enslavement of natives, including the Atakapa, Bayogoula, Natchez, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Taensa, and Alabamon peoples, would continue throughout the history of French rule. Plantation owners spent a remarkably low amount on provisions for enslaved Louisianans. One man testified that the conditions were so bad, It wasnt no freedom; it was worse than the pen. Federal investigators agreed.

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