"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 . June and I hope to create a dent in these oppressive tactics for future generations, Angie Provost told me on the same day this spring that a congressional subcommittee held hearings on reparations. committees denied black farmers government funding. Being examined and probed was among many indignities white people routinely inflicted upon the enslaved. Slaveholders in the sugar parishes invested so much money into farm equipment that, on average, Louisiana had the most expensive farms of any US state. This was advantageous since ribbon cane has a tough bark which is hard to crush with animal power. About a hundred were killed in battle or executed later, many with their heads severed and placed on pikes throughout the region. 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. The American Sugar Cane League has highlighted the same pair separately in its online newsletter, Sugar News. This dye was important in the textile trade before the invention of synthetic dyes. But not at Whitney. Freedmen and freedwomen had little choice but to live in somebodys old slave quarters. 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. Please upgrade your browser. 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. Their representatives did not respond to requests for comment.). These incentives were counterbalanced by the infliction of pain and emotional trauma. They also served as sawyers, carpenters, masons, and smiths. Mary Stirling, Louisianas wealthiest woman, enslaved 338 people in Pointe Coupe Parish and another 127 in West Feliciana Parish. Only eight of them were over 20 years old, and a little more than half were teenagers. This juice was then boiled down in a series of open kettles called the Jamaica Train. The Rhinelander Sugar House, a sugar refinery and warehouse on the site of what is now the headquarters of the New York Police Department, in the late 1800s. The enslaved population soared, quadrupling over a 20-year period to 125,000 souls in the mid-19th century. Example: Yes, I would like to receive emails from 64 Parishes. Including the history of the Code Noir, topics of gender, and resistance & rebellion. Pork and cornmeal rations were allocated weekly. From slavery to freedom, many black Louisianans found that the crushing work of sugar cane remained mostly the same. Focused on the history of slavery in Louisiana from 1719-1865, visitors learn about all aspects of slavery in this state. 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. 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) Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. The institution was maintained by the Spanish (17631800) when the area was part of New Spain, by the French when they briefly reacquired the colony (18001803), and by the United States following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. He sold others in pairs, trios, or larger groups, including one sale of 16 people at once. Sugar, or "White Gold" as British colonists called it, was the engine of the slave trade that brought . You need a few minorities in there, because these mills survive off having minorities involved with the mill to get these huge government loans, he said. Patout and Son, the largest sugar-cane mill company in Louisiana. A trial attorney from New Orleans, Mr. Cummings owned and operated the property for 20 years, from 1999 - 2019. Cookie Policy During the Spanish period (1763-1803), Louisianas plantation owners grew wealthy from the production of indigo. Once inside the steeper, enslaved workers covered the plants with water. One-Year subscription (4 issues) : $20.00, Two-Year subscription (8 issues) : $35.00, 64 Parishes 2023. Roman, the owner of Oak Alley Plantation. Enslaved people led a grueling life centered on labor. They supplemented them with girls and women they believed maximally capable of reproduction. 144 should be Elvira.. 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. But it is the owners of the 11 mills and 391 commercial farms who have the most influence and greatest share of the wealth. Even accounting for expenses and payments to agents, clerks, assistants, and other auxiliary personnel, the money was a powerful incentive to keep going. 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. Reservations are not required! Now that he had the people Armfield had sent him, Franklin made them wash away the grime and filth accumulated during weeks of travel. 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 . Then he had led them all three-quarters of a mile down to the Potomac River and turned them over to Henry Bell, captain of the United States, a 152-ton brig with a ten-man crew. It made possible a new commodity crop in northern Louisiana, although sugar cane continued to be predominant in southern Louisiana. If such lines were located too far away, they were often held in servitude until the Union gained control of the South. 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. 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.. Large plantations often deployed multiple gangsfor example, one to drill holes for seeds, another to drop the seeds, a third gang to close the holesworking in succession like an assembly line. He had sorted the men, most of the women, and the older children into pairs. From mid-October to December enslaved people worked day and night to cut the cane, feed it into grinding mills, and boil the extracted sugar juice in massive kettles over roaring furnaces. . Resistance was often met with sadistic cruelty. There was direct trade among the colonies and between the colonies and Europe, but much of the Atlantic trade was triangular: enslaved people from Africa; sugar from the West Indies and Brazil; money and manufactures from Europe, writes the Harvard historian Walter Johnson in his 1999 book, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. People were traded along the bottom of the triangle; profits would stick at the top., Before French Jesuit priests planted the first cane stalk near Baronne Street in New Orleans in 1751, sugar was already a huge moneymaker in British New York. Enslaved people kept a tenuous grasp on their families, frequently experiencing the loss of sale. It was a period of tremendous economic growth for Louisiana and the nation. 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. 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. Giant screw presses compacted the cotton lint into four-hundred-pound bales, which were shipped to New Orleans for export. We rarely know what Franklins customers did with the people they dispersed across southern Louisiana. At the Balize, a boarding officer named William B. G. Taylor looked over the manifest, made sure it had the proper signatures, and matched each enslaved person to his or her listing. For slaveholders sugar cultivation involved high costs and financial risks but the potential for large profits. Black lives were there for the taking. Click here to email info@whitneyplantation.org, Click here to view location 5099 Louisiana Hwy 18, Edgard, LA 70049. A small, tightly knit group of roughly five hundred elite sugar barons dominated the entire industry. Privacy Statement (1754-1823), Louisiana plantation owner whose slaves rebelled during the 1811 German Coast Uprising . Slaves lived in long barracks that housed several families and individuals, or in small huts. Slavery was introduced by French colonists in Louisiana in 1706, when they made raids on the Chitimacha settlements. Exactly where Franklin put the people from the United States once he led them away from the levee is unclear. They just did not care. Two attempted slave rebellions took place in Pointe Coupe Parish during Spanish rule in 1790s, the Pointe Coupe Slave Conspiracy of 1791 and the Pointe Coupe Slave Conspiracy of 1795, which led to the suspension of the slave trade and a public debate among planters and the Spanish authorities about proper slave management. Aug 22, 2019 6:25 PM EST. In addition to enslaved Africans and European indentured servants, early Louisianas plantation owners used the labor of Native Americans. 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. Wages and working conditions occasionally improved. Sugarcane was planted in January and February and harvested from mid-October to December. It was Antoine who successfully created what would become the countrys first commercially viable pecan varietal. The German Coast, where Whitney Plantation is located, was home to 2,797 enslaved workers. In 1712, there were only 10 Africans in all of Louisiana. Dor denied he is abusing his F.S.A. Free shipping for many products! Some were tradesmenpeople like coach and harness maker Charles Bebee, goldsmith Jean Claude Mairot, and druggist Joseph Dufilho. 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. . 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. Slave-backed bonds seemed like a sweet deal to investors. Franklin had them change into one of the two entire suits of clothing Armfield sent with each person from the Alexandria compound, and he gave them enough to eat so they would at least appear hardy. The change in seasons meant river traffic was coming into full swing too, and flatboats and barges now huddled against scads of steamboats and beneath a flotilla of tall ships. Thousands of indigenous people were killed, and the surviving women and children were taken as slaves. 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. According to the historian Richard Follett, the state ranked third in banking capital behind New York and Massachusetts in 1840. Joshua D. Rothman is a professor and chair for the department of history at the University of Alabama. When workers tried to escape, the F.B.I. From Sheridan Libraries/Levy/Gado/Getty Images. 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. Arranged five or six deep for more than a mile along the levee, they made a forest of smokestacks, masts, and sails. Cotton Cotton was king in Louisiana and most of the Deep South during the antebellum period. Sugar cane grows on farms all around the jail, but at the nearby Louisiana State Penitentiary, or Angola, prisoners grow it. To begin, enslaved workers harvested the plants and packed the leaves into a large vat called a steeper, or trempoire. One of his cruelties was to place a disobedient slave, standing in a box, in which there were nails placed in such a manner that the poor creature was unable to move, she told a W.P.A. "Grif" was the racial designation used for their children. The pestilent summer was over, and the crowds in the streets swelled, dwarfing those that Franklin remembered. 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). Louisiana had a markedly different pattern of slave trading compared to other states in the American South as a result of its French and Spanish heritage. 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. 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. Theres still a few good white men around here, Lewis told me. These machines, which removed cotton seeds from cotton fibers far faster than could be done by hand, dramatically increased the profitability of cotton farming, enabling large-scale cotton production in the Mississippi River valley. The Whitney, which opened five years ago as the only sugar-slavery museum in the nation, rests squarely in a geography of human detritus. Throughout the year enslaved people also maintained drainage canals and levees, cleared brush, spread fertilizer, cut and hauled timber, repaired roads, harvested hay for livestock, grew their own foodstuffs, and performed all the other back-breaking tasks that enabled cash-crop agriculture. The landscape bears witness and corroborates Whitneys version of history. In the last stage, the sugar crystallized. Pecan trees are native to the middle southwestern region of the Mississippi River Valley and the Gulf Coast of Texas and Mexico. Planters tried to cultivate pecan trees for a commercial market beginning at least as early as the 1820s, when a well-known planter from South Carolina named Abner Landrum published detailed descriptions of his attempt in the American Farmer periodical. Just before the Civil War in 1860, there were 331,726 enslaved people and 18,647 free people of color in Louisiana. [11], U.S. A seemingly endless cycle of planting, hoeing, weeding, harvesting, and grinding comprised the work routine on Louisiana's sugarcane plantations during the 19th century. They worked from sunup to sundown, to make life easy and enjoyable for their enslavers. Louisianas more than 22,000 slaveholders were among the wealthiest in the nation. Eighty-nine of them were boys and men, of whom 48 were between 18 and 25 years old, and another 20 were younger teens. Due to its complex history, Louisiana had a very different pattern of slavery compared to the rest of the United States.[1]. Prospective planters flooded into the territory, carving its rich, river-fed soils into sugar and cotton plantations. Marriages were relatively common between Africans and Native Americans. Slaveholders often suspected enslaved people of complicity whenever a barn caught fire, a tool went missing, or a boiler exploded, though todays historians often struggle to distinguish enslavers paranoia from actual organized resistance. Which plantation in Louisiana had the most slaves? Every February the land begins getting prepared for the long growth period of sugar. The United States makes about nine million tons of sugar annually, ranking it sixth in global production. They raised horses, oxen, mules, cows, sheep, swine, and poultry. In 1722, nearly 170 indigenous people were enslaved on Louisiana's plantations. Dor, who credits M.A. Enslaved workers had to time this process carefully, because over-fermenting the leaves would ruin the product. I think this will settle the question of who is to rule, the nigger or the white man, for the next 50 years, a local white planters widow, Mary Pugh, wrote, rejoicing, to her son. 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. . Gross sales in New Orleans in 1828 for the slave trading company known as Franklin and Armfield came to a bit more than $56,000. 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. In the mill, alongside adults, children toiled like factory workers with assembly-line precision and discipline under the constant threat of boiling hot kettles, open furnaces and grinding rollers. Before the Civil War, it's estimated that roughly 1,500 "sugarhouses . Slave housing was usually separate from the main plantation house, although servants and nurses often lived with their masters. Slavery was then established by European colonists. 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. 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. John James Audubon (1785-1851), American naturalist. In 1808, Congress exercised its constitutional prerogative to end the legal importation of enslaved people from outside the United States. Once fermented, the leaves dyed the water a deep blue. . The crop, land and farm theft that they claim harks back to the New Deal era, when Southern F.S.A. Antoine undertook the delicate task of grafting the pecan cuttings onto the limbs of different tree species on the plantation grounds. After enslaved workers on Etienne DeBores plantation successfully granulated a crop of sugar in 1795, sugar replaced indigo as the dominant crop grown by enslaved people in Louisiana. He would be elected governor in 1830. The sugar districts of Louisiana stand out as the only area in the slaveholding south with a negative birth rate among the enslaved population. 122 comments. Marriages were relatively common between Africans and Native Americans. The museum tells of the everyday struggles and resistance of black people who didnt lose their dignity even when they lost everything else. The Antebellum Period refers to the decades prior to the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861. 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. 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. The historian Rebecca Scott found that although black farmers were occasionally able to buy plots of cane land from bankrupt estates, or otherwise establish themselves as suppliers, the trend was for planters to seek to establish relations with white tenants or sharecroppers who could provide cane for the mill.. Modernization of the Louisiana Sugar Industry, 1830-1910 by John A. Heitmann Johnson, Walter. 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. Library of Congress. Decades later, a new owner of Oak Alley, Hubert Bonzano, exhibited nuts from Antoines trees at the Centennial Exposition of 1876, the Worlds Fair held in Philadelphia and a major showcase for American innovation. The average Louisiana cotton plantation was valued at roughly $100,000, yielding a 7 percent annual return. New Orleans became the Walmart of people-selling. The first slave, named . Wealthy landowners also made purchasing land more difficult for former indentured servants. Both routes were vigorously policed by law enforcement, slave patrols, customs officials, and steamboat employees. Slave Cabin at Destrehan Plantation. Sugar has been linked in the United States to diabetes, obesity and cancer. Rotating Exhibit: Grass, Scrap, Burn: Life & Labor at Whitney Plantation After Slavery Sugar production skyrocketed after the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and a large influx of enslaved people to the territory, including thousands brought from Saint Domingue (Haiti). The German Coast Uprising ended with white militias and soldiers hunting down black slaves, peremptory tribunals or trials in three parishes (St. Charles, St. John the Baptist, and Orleans), execution of many of the rebels, and the public display of their severed heads. Advertising Notice Privacy Policy, largest rebellion in US history occurred in Louisiana in 1811. Before cotton, sugar established American reliance on slave labor. Over the last 30 years, the rate of Americans who are obese or overweight grew 27 percent among all adults, to 71 percent from 56 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control, with African-Americans overrepresented in the national figures. By 1853, three in five of Louisiana's enslaved people worked in sugar. 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. 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. Louisianas sugar-cane industry is by itself worth $3 billion, generating an estimated 16,400 jobs. After the Louisiana Purchase, an influx of slaves and free blacks from the United States occurred. In the mid-1840s, a planter in Louisiana sent cuttings of a much-prized pecan tree over to his neighbor J.T. In order to create the dye, enslaved workers had to ferment and oxidize the indigo plants in a complicated multi-step process. [To get updates on The 1619 Project, and for more on race from The New York Times, sign up for our weekly Race/Related newsletter. In 1817, plantation owners began planting ribbon cane, which was introduced from Indonesia. To this day we are harassed, retaliated against and denied the true DNA of our past., Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a Suzanne Young Murray professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and author of The Condemnation of Blackness. Tiya Miles is a professor in the history department at Harvard and the author, most recently, of The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits..
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