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. Waiting for the slave ship United States near the New Orleans wharves in October 1828, Isaac Franklin may have paused to consider how the city had changed since he had first seen it from a flatboat deck 20 years earlier. Louisianas sugar-cane industry is by itself worth $3 billion, generating an estimated 16,400 jobs. Cotton flourished north of sugar country, particularly in the plains flanking the Red River and Mississippi River. In 1817, plantation owners began planting ribbon cane, which was introduced from Indonesia. [9][10], The Code Noir also forbade interracial marriages, but interracial relationships were formed in New Orleans society. In 1942, the Department of Justice began a major investigation into the recruiting practices of one of the largest sugar producers in the nation, the United States Sugar Corporation, a South Florida company. The American Sugar Cane League has highlighted the same pair separately in its online newsletter, Sugar News. He sold others in pairs, trios, or larger groups, including one sale of 16 people at once. It was Antoine who successfully created what would become the countrys first commercially viable pecan varietal. | READ MORE. One of the biggest players in that community is M.A. Field hands cut the cane and loaded it into carts which were driven to the sugar mill. While the trees can live for a hundred years or more, they do not produce nuts in the first years of life, and the kinds of nuts they produce are wildly variable in size, shape, flavor and ease of shell removal. It was also a trade-good used in the purchase of West African captives in the Atlantic slave trade. The open kettle method of sugar production continued to be used throughout the 19th century. Du Bois called the . With the advent of sugar processing locally, sugar plantations exploded up and down both banks of the Mississippi River. But not at Whitney. The Americanization of Louisiana resulted in the mulattoes being considered as black, and free blacks were regarded as undesirable. Being examined and probed was among many indignities white people routinely inflicted upon the enslaved. Thats nearly twice the limit the department recommends, based on a 2,000-calorie diet. Antoine undertook the delicate task of grafting the pecan cuttings onto the limbs of different tree species on the plantation grounds. Baton Rouge: Louisiana Historical Association, 1963. Slaves lived in long barracks that housed several families and individuals, or in small huts. Just before the Civil War in 1860, there were 331,726 enslaved people and 18,647 free people of color in Louisiana. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. 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. 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. 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. The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisianas Cane World, 18201860. 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. 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. Although the Coleman jail opened in 2001 and is named for an African-American sheriffs deputy who died in the line of duty, Rogers connects it to a longer history of coerced labor, land theft and racial control after slavery. As Franklin stood in New Orleans awaiting the arrival of the United States, filled with enslaved people sent from Virginia by his business partner, John Armfield, he aimed to get his share of that business. In 1860 Louisiana had 17,000 farms, of which only about 10 percent produced sugar. During cotton-picking season, slaveholders tasked the entire enslaved populationincluding young children, pregnant women, and the elderlywith harvesting the crop from sunrise to sundown. 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. Wages and working conditions occasionally improved. By 1853, Louisiana was producing nearly 25% of all exportable sugar in the world. The plantation's history goes back to 1822 when Colonel John Tilman Nolan purchased land and slaves from members of the Thriot family. An 1855 print shows workers on a Louisiana plantation harvesting sugar cane at right. None of this the extraordinary mass commodification of sugar, its economic might and outsize impact on the American diet and health was in any way foreordained, or even predictable, when Christopher Columbus made his second voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in 1493, bringing sugar-cane stalks with him from the Spanish Canary Islands. Conditions were so severe that, whereas cotton and tobacco plantations sustained positive population growth, death rates exceeded birth rates in Louisianas sugar parishes. Representatives for the company did not respond to requests for comment. The revolt has been virtually redacted from the historical record. 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. Louisianas more than 22,000 slaveholders were among the wealthiest in the nation. Follett,Richard J. The 1619 Project examines the legacy of slavery in America. Sugar plantations produced raw sugar as well as molasses, which were packed into wooden barrels on the plantation and shipped out to markets in New Orleans. Sugarcane was planted in January and February and harvested from mid-October to December. Americans consume as much as 77.1 pounds of sugar and related sweeteners per person per year, according to United States Department of Agriculture data. Indigenous people worked around this variability, harvesting the nuts for hundreds and probably thousands of years, camping near the groves in season, trading the nuts in a network that stretched across the continent, and lending the food the name we have come to know it by: paccan. This cane was frost-resistant, which made it possible for plantation owners to grow sugarcane in Louisianas colder parishes. In remote backwoods regions in northern and southwest Louisiana, these were often subsistence farmers, relatively cut off from the market economy. The French introduced African slaves to the territory in 1710, after capturing a number as plunder during the War of the Spanish Succession. 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. 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. Life expectancy was less like that on a cotton plantation and closer to that of a Jamaican cane field, where the most overworked and abused could drop dead after seven years. . A second copy got delivered to the customs official at the port of arrival, who checked it again before permitting the enslaved to be unloaded. During her antebellum reign, Queen Sugar bested King Cotton locally, making Louisiana the second-richest state in per capita wealth. Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for c1900s Louisiana Stereo Card Cutting Sugar Cane Plantation Litho Photo Fla V11 at the best online prices at eBay! 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.) eventseeker brings you a personalized event calendar and let's you share events with friends. Within five decades, Louisiana planters were producing a quarter of the worlds cane-sugar supply. The first slave, named . On huge plantations surrounding New Orleans, home of the largest slave market in the antebellum South, sugar production took off in the first half of the 19th century. The premier source for events, concerts, nightlife, festivals, sports and more in your city! The German Coast, where Whitney Plantation is located, was home to 2,797 enslaved workers. When possible enslaved Louisianans created privacy by further partitioning the space with old blankets or spare wood. Her estate was valued at $590,500 (roughly $21 million in 2023). 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. He objected to Britain's abolition of slavery in the Caribbean and bought and sold enslaved people himself. Click here to Learn more about plan your visit, Click here to Learn more about overview and tickets, Click here to Learn more about tours for large groups, Click here to Learn more about education tours for 5th through 12th grade, Click here to Learn more about education department, Click here to Learn more about education tours for 5th through 12th grade students, Click here to Learn more about virtual book club, Click here to Learn more about photo gallery, Click here to Learn more about filming and photography requests, Click here to Learn more about interview and media requests, Click here to Learn more about job opportunities, Click here to Whitney Plantation's Enslaved Workers. They are the exceedingly rare exceptions to a system designed to codify black loss. Plantation labor shifted away from indentured servitude and more toward slavery by the late 1600s. 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. A third of them have immediate relatives who either worked there or were born there in the 1960s and 70s. Sugarcane is a tropical plant that requires ample moisture and a long, frost-free growing season. Even with Reconstruction delivering civil rights for the first time, white planters continued to dominate landownership. Including the history of the Code Noir, topics of gender, and resistance & rebellion. Rotating Exhibit: Grass, Scrap, Burn: Life & Labor at Whitney Plantation After Slavery For slaveholders sugar cultivation involved high costs and financial risks but the potential for large profits. Slave housing was usually separate from the main plantation house, although servants and nurses often lived with their masters. 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. The free people of color were on average exceptionally literate, with a significant number of them owning businesses, properties, and even slaves. Enslaved people led a grueling life centered on labor. Others were people of more significant substance and status. Based on historians estimates, the execution tally was nearly twice as high as the number in Nat Turners more famous 1831 rebellion. By hunting, foraging, and stealing from neighboring plantations, maroons lived in relative freedom for days, months, or even years. Florida Old Slave Market Stereo Card Litho Photo Fla V11. Glymph, Thavolia. In 1822, the larger plantation owners began converting their mills to steam power. In 1808, Congress exercised its constitutional prerogative to end the legal importation of enslaved people from outside the United States. The Africans enslaved in Louisiana came mostly from Senegambia, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra, and West-Central Africa. These black women show tourists the same slave cabins and the same cane fields their own relatives knew all too well. Following Robert Cavelier de La Salle establishing the French claim to the territory and the introduction of the name Louisiana, the first settlements in the southernmost portion of Louisiana (New France) were developed at present-day Biloxi (1699), Mobile (1702), Natchitoches (1714), and New Orleans (1718). Territory of New Orleans (18041812), Statehood and the U.S. Civil War (18121865), Differences between slavery in Louisiana and other states, Indian slave trade in the American Southeast, Louisiana African American Heritage Trail, "Transfusion and Iron Chelation Therapy in Thalassemia and Sickle Cell Disease", "Early Anti-Slavery Sentiment in the Spanish Atlantic World, 17651817", "Sighting The Sites Of The New Orleans Slave Trade", "Anonymous Louisiana slaves regain identity", An article on the alliance between Louisiana natives and maroon Africans against the French colonists, Genealogical articles by esteemed genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_slavery_in_Louisiana&oldid=1132527057, This page was last edited on 9 January 2023, at 08:15. In 1722, nearly 170 indigenous people were enslaved on Louisianas plantations. 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. This juice was then boiled down in a series of open kettles called the Jamaica Train. [3] Although there was no movement toward abolition of the African slave trade, Spanish rule introduced a new law called coartacin, which allowed slaves to buy their freedom and that of other slaves. In the 1830s and 1840s, other areas around Bayou Lafourche, Bayou Teche, Pointe Coupee, and Bayou Sara, and the northern parishes also emerged as sugar districts despite the risk of frost damage. Sugarcane cultivation was brutal, even by the standards of American slavery. The bureaucracy would not be rushed. The plantation's restoration was funded by the museum's founder, John Cummings. Slavery was officially abolished in the portion of the state under Union control by the state constitution of 1864, during the American Civil War. At the mill, enslaved workers fed the cane stalks into steam-powered grinders in order to extract the sugar juice inside the stalks. New Yorks enslaved population reached 20 percent, prompting the New York General Assembly in 1730 to issue a consolidated slave code, making it unlawful for above three slaves to meet on their own, and authorizing each town to employ a common whipper for their slaves.. 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. He is the author of The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America. 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. Louisiana led the nation in destroying the lives of black people in the name of economic efficiency. 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. Prospective planters flooded into the territory, carving its rich, river-fed soils into sugar and cotton plantations. In 1722, nearly 170 indigenous people were enslaved on Louisiana's plantations. 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. The 13th Amendment passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified by the states on December 6, 1865, formally abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States. $6.90. William Atherton (1742-1803), English owner of Jamaican sugar plantations. It was safer and produced a higher-quality sugar, but it was expensive to implement and only the wealthiest plantation owners could afford it before the Civil War. A trial attorney from New Orleans, Mr. Cummings owned and operated the property for 20 years, from 1999 - 2019. Some-where between Donaldsonville and Houma, in early 1863, a Union soldier noted: "At every plantation . It was a period of tremendous economic growth for Louisiana and the nation. 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. 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 United States makes about nine million tons of sugar annually, ranking it sixth in global production. An award-winning historian reveals the harrowing forgotten story of America's internal slave tradeand its role in the making of America. Louisiana planters also lived in constant fear of insurrections, though the presence of heavily armed, white majorities in the South usually prohibited the large-scale rebellions that periodically rocked Caribbean and Latin American societies with large enslaved populations. How sugar became the white gold that fueled slavery and an industry that continues to exploit black lives to this day. . 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. Pouring down the continental funnel of the Mississippi Valley to its base, they amounted by the end of the decade to more than 180 million pounds, which was more than half the cotton produced in the entire country. AUG. 14, 2019. 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. Enslaved plantation workers were expected to supplement these inadequate rations by hunting, fishing, and growing vegetables in family garden plots. Only eight of them were over 20 years old, and a little more than half were teenagers. 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. Black lives were there for the taking. Cattle rearing dominated the southwest Attakapas region. Slave Cabin at Destrehan Plantation. Slave-backed bonds seemed like a sweet deal to investors. Lewis and the Provosts say they believe Dor is using his position as an elected F.S.A. During the Spanish period (1763-1803), Louisianas plantation owners grew wealthy from the production of indigo. 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. 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 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. One man testified that the conditions were so bad, It wasnt no freedom; it was worse than the pen. Federal investigators agreed. Men working among thousands of barrels of sugar in New Orleans in 1902. 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. Enslaved people planted the cane in January and early February. Their descendants' attachment to this soil is sacred and extends as deep as the roots of the. Enslaved people often escaped and became maroons in the swamps to avoid deadly work and whipping. 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. 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. Slaves often worked in gangs under the direction of drivers, who were typically fellow slaves that supervised work in the fields. He says he does it because the stakes are so high. . And in every sugar parish, black people outnumbered whites. swarms of Negroes came out and welcomed us with rapturous demon- Some diary entrieshad a general Whipping frollick or Whipped about half to dayreveal indiscriminate violence on a mass scale. . While elite planters controlled the most productive agricultural lands, Louisiana was also home to many smaller farms. 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. Free shipping for many products! The pestilent summer was over, and the crowds in the streets swelled, dwarfing those that Franklin remembered. At the Customs House in Alexandria, deputy collector C. T. Chapman had signed off on the manifest of the United States. Enslaved people planted cotton in March and April. Those ubiquitous four-pound yellow paper bags emblazoned with the company logo are produced here at a rate of 120 bags a minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week during operating season. Dor denied he is abusing his F.S.A. Farm laborers, mill workers and refinery employees make up the 16,400 jobs of Louisianas sugar-cane industry. It held roughly fifty people in bondage compared to the national average plantation population, which was closer to ten. What he disputes is Lewiss ability to make the same crop as profitable as he would. 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. It is North Americas largest sugar refinery, making nearly two billion pounds of sugar and sugar products annually. Franklin was no exception. 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. A brisk domestic slave trade developed; many thousands of black slaves were sold by slaveholders in the Upper South to buyers in the Deep South, in what amounted to a significant forced migration. Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana. 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). They raised horses, oxen, mules, cows, sheep, swine, and poultry. By 1860 more than 124,000 enslaved Africans and African Americans had been carried to Louisiana by this domestic slave trade, destroying countless families while transforming New Orleans into the nations largest slave market. [4] Spain also shipped Romani slaves to Louisiana.[5]. (In court filings, M.A. The indigo industry in Louisiana remained successful until the end of the eighteenth century, when it was destroyed by plant diseases and competition in the market. Taylor, Joe Gray. 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 . On my fourth visit to Louisiana, I wanted to explore Baton Rouge so I left New Orleans for the 90 minute drive to this beautiful city. 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. 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. The sugar districts of Louisiana stand out as the only area in the slaveholding south with a negative birth rate among the enslaved population. Many specimens thrived, and Antoine fashioned still more trees, selecting for nuts with favorable qualities. Louisiana seldom had trouble in locating horses, sugar, or cotton hidden on a plantation. 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. 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. My family was farming in the late 1800s near the same land, he says, that his enslaved ancestors once worked. Enslaved women were simply too overworked, exhausted, and vulnerable to disease to bear healthy children. Marriages were relatively common between Africans and Native Americans. In Europe at that time, refined sugar was a luxury product, the backbreaking toil and dangerous labor required in its manufacture an insuperable barrier to production in anything approaching bulk. Patout and Son, the largest sugar-cane mill company in Louisiana. 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). 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. From Sheridan Libraries/Levy/Gado/Getty Images. Early in 1811, while Louisiana was still the U.S. The enslavement of natives, including the Atakapa, Bayogoula, Natchez, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Taensa, and Alabamon peoples, would continue throughout the history of French rule. By comparison Wisconsins 70,000 farms reported less than $6 million. This would change dramatically after the first two ships carrying captive Africans arrived in Louisiana in 1719. 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.