Eighty-nine of them were boys and men, of whom 48 were between 18 and 25 years old, and another 20 were younger teens. Sometimes black cane workers resisted collectively by striking during planting and harvesting time threatening to ruin the crop. In the batterie, workers stirred the liquid continuously for several hours to stimulate oxidation. 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. 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. It was also an era of extreme violence and inequality. . 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. Visit the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana - Travel Whereas the average enslaved Louisianan picked one hundred fifty pounds of cotton per day, highly skilled workers could pick as much as four hundred pounds. 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. On large plantations enslaved families typically lived in rows of raised, wooden cabins, each consisting of two rooms, with one family occupying each room. 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. Field labor was typically organized into a gang system with groups of enslaved people performing coordinated, monotonous work under the strict supervision of an overseer, who maintained pace, rhythm, and synchronization. It sits on the west bank of the Mississippi at the northern edge of the St. John the Baptist Parish, home to dozens of once-thriving sugar plantations; Marmillions plantation and torture box were just a few miles down from Whitney. 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. 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. The common and visible way that enslaved people resisted plantation conditions was by running away. The mulattoes became an intermediate social caste between the whites and the blacks, while in the Thirteen Colonies mulattoes and blacks were considered socially equal and discriminated against on an equal basis. As the horticulturalist Lenny Wells has recorded, the exhibited nuts received a commendation from the Yale botanist William H. Brewer, who praised them for their remarkably large size, tenderness of shell and very special excellence. Coined the Centennial, Antoines pecan varietal was then seized upon for commercial production (other varieties have since become the standard). 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) Nearly all of Louisianas 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 of the 1820s. New Orleans became the Walmart of people-selling. swarms of Negroes came out and welcomed us with rapturous demon- But none of them could collect what they came for until they took care of some paperwork. 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. From slavery to freedom, many black Louisianans found that the crushing work of sugar cane remained mostly the same. And yet two of these black farmers, Charles Guidry and Eddie Lewis III, have been featured in a number of prominent news items and marketing materials out of proportion to their representation and economic footprint in the industry. Angola is the largest maximum-security prison by land mass in the nation. A congressional investigation in the 1980s found that sugar companies had systematically tried to exploit seasonal West Indian workers to maintain absolute control over them with the constant threat of immediately sending them back to where they came from. c1900s Louisiana Stereo Card Cutting Sugar Cane Plantation Litho Photo They are the exceedingly rare exceptions to a system designed to codify black loss. To achieve the highest efficiency, as in the round-the-clock Domino refinery today, sugar houses operated night and day. 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. Obtaining indentured servants became more difficult as more economic opportunities became available to them. A formerly enslaved black woman named Mrs. Webb described a torture chamber used by her owner, Valsin Marmillion. This dye was important in the textile trade before the invention of synthetic dyes. 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. Joanne Ryan, a Louisiana-based archaeologist, specializes in excavating plantation sites where slaves cooked sugar. The 13th Amendment to the nation's constitution, which outlawed the practice unequivocally, was ratified in December 1865. You are meant to empathize with the owners as their guests, Rogers told me in her office. An award-winning historian reveals the harrowing forgotten story of America's internal slave tradeand its role in the making of America. Thousands were smuggled from Africa and the Caribbean through the illegal slave trade. This influence was likely a contributing factor in the revolt. Few other purposes explain why sugar refiner Nathan Goodale would purchase a lot of ten boys and men, or why Christopher Colomb, an Ascension Parish plantation owner, enlisted his New Orleans commission merchant, Noel Auguste Baron, to buy six male teenagers on his behalf. 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. 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.) Sugar cane grows on farms all around the jail, but at the nearby Louisiana State Penitentiary, or Angola, prisoners grow it. Because of the harsh nature of plantations from labor to punishment enslaved people resisted their captivity by running away. The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the white gold that fueled slavery. The company is being sued by a former fourth-generation black farmer. But the new lessee, Ryan Dor, a white farmer, did confirm with me that he is now leasing the land and has offered to pay Lewis what a county agent assessed as the crops worth, about $50,000. 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. Focused on the history of slavery in Louisiana from 1719-1865, visitors learn about all aspects of slavery in this state. Louisianas more than 22,000 slaveholders were among the wealthiest in the nation. It was the introduction of sugar slavery in the New World that changed everything. At roughly the same moment, American inventors were perfecting new mechanized cotton gins, the most famous of which was patented by Eli Whitney in 1794. Their representatives did not respond to requests for comment.). The first slave, named . Roughly fifteen percent of enslaved Louisianans lived on small family farms holding fewer than ten people in bondage. 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. Privacy Policy, largest rebellion in US history occurred in Louisiana in 1811. These ships, which originated in the West Coast of Africa, carried captive rice farmers who brought the agricultural expertise to grow Louisianas rice plantations into profitable businesses for their European owners. In antebellum Louisiana roughly half of all enslaved plantation workers lived in two-parent families, while roughly three-fourths lived in either single-parent or two-parent households. 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. It was a population tailored to the demands of sugarcane growers, who came to New Orleans looking for a demographically disproportionate number of physically mature boys and men they believed could withstand the notoriously dangerous and grinding labor in the cane fields. Transcript Audio. Enslaved women were simply too overworked, exhausted, and vulnerable to disease to bear healthy children. "Above all, they sought to master sugar and men and compel all to bow to them in total subordination." The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana's Cane World, 1820-1860. p. 194 Louisiana's plantation owners merged slaveholding practices common to the American South, Caribbean modes of labor operations, the spirit of capitalism and Northern business practices to build their . The landowners did not respond to requests for comment. Excerpted from The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America by Joshua D. Rothman. 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. Sugarcane is a tropical plant that requires ample moisture and a long, frost-free growing season. 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. In the 1840s, Norbert Rillieux, a free man of color from Louisiana, patented his invention, the multiple effect evaporator. Negro Slavery in Louisiana. In addition to enslaved Africans and European indentured servants, early Louisianas plantation owners used the labor of Native Americans. 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. By 1853, Louisiana was producing nearly 25% of all exportable sugar in the world. Then the cycle began again. The city of New Orleans was the largest slave market in the United States, ultimately serving as the site for the purchase and sale of more than 135,000 people. He sold roughly a quarter of those people individually. Even accounting for expenses and payments to agents, clerks, assistants, and other auxiliary personnel, the money was a powerful incentive to keep going. Slavery and plantation capitalism in Louisiana's sugar country Slavery In Louisiana | Whitney Plantation Enslaved plantation workers also engaged in coordinated work stoppages, slowdowns, and sabotage. German immigrants, white indentured servants and enslaved Africans produced the land that sustained the growing city. Franklin was not the only person waiting for slaves from the United States. Enslaved peoples' cabins and sugarcane boiling kettles at Whitney Plantation, 2021. If things dont change, Lewis told me, Im probably one of two or three thats going to be farming in the next 10 to 15 years. The Slave Community Evergreen Plantation 122 comments. The sugar districts of Louisiana stand out as the only area in the slaveholding south with a negative birth rate among the enslaved population. The free people of color were on average exceptionally literate, with a significant number of them owning businesses, properties, and even slaves. Slavery n Louisiana - JSTOR Once inside the steeper, enslaved workers covered the plants with water. An 1855 print shows workers on a Louisiana plantation harvesting sugar cane at right. Whitney Plantation opened to the public as a museum on December 7, 2014. Franklin mostly cared that he walked away richer from the deals, and there was no denying that. 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. From slavery to freedom, many black Louisianans found that the crushing work of sugar cane remained mostly the same. interviewer in 1940. Patout and Son denied that it breached the contract. Much of the 3,000 acres he now farms comes from relationships with white landowners his father, Eddie Lewis Jr., and his grandfather before him, built and maintained.