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Patout and Son denied that it breached the contract. New York: New York University Press, 2014. 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 . Diouf, Sylviane A. Slaverys Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons. 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. 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. Lewis and the Provosts say they believe Dor is using his position as an elected F.S.A. An award-winning historian reveals the harrowing forgotten story of America's internal slave tradeand its role in the making of America. In plantation kitchens, they preserved the foodways of Africa. 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. Those who submitted to authority or exceeded their work quotas were issued rewards: extra clothing, payment, extra food, liquor. In 1795, there were 19,926 enslaved Africans and 16,304 free people of color in Louisiana. Bardstown Slaves: Amputation and Louisiana Sugar Plantations. Although it authorized and codified cruel corporal punishment against slaves under certain conditions, it forbade slave owners to torture them. A small, tightly knit group of roughly five hundred elite sugar barons dominated the entire industry. Theres still a few good white men around here, Lewis told me. The pestilent summer was over, and the crowds in the streets swelled, dwarfing those that Franklin remembered. Sugar cane grows on farms all around the jail, but at the nearby Louisiana State Penitentiary, or Angola, prisoners grow it. In 1712, there were only 10 Africans in all of Louisiana. 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. 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. 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. Among black non-Hispanic women, they are nearly double those of white non-Hispanic women, and one and a half times higher for black men than white men. In 1860 Louisiana had 17,000 farms, of which only about 10 percent produced sugar. In this early period, European indentured servants submitted to 36-month contracts did most of the work clearing land and laboring on small-scale plantations. The 60 women and girls were on average a bit younger. The origin of the slaves brought in by slave traders were primarily Senegal, the Bight of Benin and the Congo region,[7] which differed to that of states such as Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi, where the enslaved were culturally African-American after having resided in the United States for at least two generations. 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. Photograph by Hugo V. Sass, via the Museum of The City of New York. In 1817, plantation owners began planting ribbon cane, which was introduced from Indonesia. In the 1840s, Norbert Rillieux, a free man of color from Louisiana, patented his invention, the multiple effect evaporator. 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. In remote backwoods regions in northern and southwest Louisiana, these were often subsistence farmers, relatively cut off from the market economy. 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.. 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. In 1830 the Louisiana Supreme Court estimated the cost of clothing and feeding an enslaved child up to the time they become useful at less than fifteen dollars. 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 American Sugar Cane League has highlighted the same pair separately in its online newsletter, Sugar News. Arranged five or six deep for more than a mile along the levee, they made a forest of smokestacks, masts, and sails. 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. In the batterie, workers stirred the liquid continuously for several hours to stimulate oxidation. According to the historian Richard Follett, the state ranked third in banking capital behind New York and Massachusetts in 1840. 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 court filings, First Guaranty Bank and the senior vice president also denied Provosts claims. Was Antoine aware of his creations triumph? During this period Louisianas economic, social, political, and cultural makeup were shaped by the plantation system and the enslaved people upon which plantations relied. Slavery was introduced by French colonists in Louisiana in 1706, when they made raids on the Chitimacha settlements. Advertising Notice These incentives were counterbalanced by the infliction of pain and emotional trauma. Sugar has been linked in the United States to diabetes, obesity and cancer. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Whitney Plantation Museum offers tours Wednesday through Monday, from 10am-3pm. Louisianas sugar-cane industry is by itself worth $3 billion, generating an estimated 16,400 jobs. Lewis is seeking damages of more than $200,000, based on an independent appraisal he obtained, court records show. 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. 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. Negro Slavery in Louisiana. 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. Almost always some slave would reveal the hiding place chosen by his master. 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. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Caribbean became the largest producer of sugar in the world. Lewis is the minority adviser for the federal Farm Service Agency (F.S.A.) It has been 400 years since the first African slaves arrived in what is . Enslaved people often escaped and became maroons in the swamps to avoid deadly work and whipping. No slave sale could be entirely legal in Louisiana unless it was recorded in a notarial act, and nearly all of the citys dozen or so notaries could be conveniently found within a block of two of Hewletts Exchange. In November, the cane is harvested. Pecan trees are native to the middle southwestern region of the Mississippi River Valley and the Gulf Coast of Texas and Mexico. Slaves lived in long barracks that housed several families and individuals, or in small huts. The brig held 201 captives, with 149 sent by John Armfield sharing the misfortune of being on board with 5 people shipped by tavernkeeper Eli Legg to a trader named James Diggs, and 47 shipped by Virginia trader William Ish to the merchant firm of Wilkins and Linton. Cattle rearing dominated the southwest Attakapas region. Enslaved plantation workers were expected to supplement these inadequate rations by hunting, fishing, and growing vegetables in family garden plots. 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. But not at Whitney. These are not coincidences.. Johnson, Walter. Louisianas more than 22,000 slaveholders were among the wealthiest in the nation. 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. Yet in 1803 Congress outlawed the international importation of enslaved people into the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase territory, while four years later, in 1808, Congress outlawed the transatlantic slave trade entirely. Glymph, Thavolia. The death toll for African and native slaves was high, with scurvy and dysentery widespread because of poor nutrition and sanitation. 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 . Before the year was out, Franklin would conduct 41 different sales transactions in New Orleans, trading away the lives of 112 people. Enslaved workers dried this sediment and cut it into cubes or rolled it into balls to sell at market. Enslaved people kept a tenuous grasp on their families, frequently experiencing the loss of sale. In 1838 they ended slaveholding with a mass sale of their 272 slaves to sugar cane plantations in Louisiana in the Deep South. Resistance was often met with sadistic cruelty. Smithsonian magazine participates in affiliate link advertising programs. One-Year subscription (4 issues) : $20.00, Two-Year subscription (8 issues) : $35.00, 64 Parishes 2023. It began in October. 122 comments. But none of them could collect what they came for until they took care of some paperwork. 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. 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. Pork and cornmeal rations were allocated weekly. Eighty-nine of them were boys and men, of whom 48 were between 18 and 25 years old, and another 20 were younger teens. In 1795, on a French Creole plantation outside of New Orleans, tienne de Bors enslaved workforce, laboring under the guidance of a skilled free Black chemist named Antoine Morin, produced Louisianas first commercially successful crop of granulated sugar, demonstrating that sugarcane could be profitably grown in Louisiana. Willis cared about the details. 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. Exactly where Franklin put the people from the United States once he led them away from the levee is unclear. What he disputes is Lewiss ability to make the same crop as profitable as he would. The first slave, named . 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. You passed a dump and a prison on your way to a plantation, she said. Excerpted from The Ledger and the Chain: How Domestic Slave Traders Shaped America by Joshua D. Rothman. Click here to email info@whitneyplantation.org, Click here to view location 5099 Louisiana Hwy 18, Edgard, LA 70049. 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. In Louisianas plantation tourism, she said, the currency has been the distortion of the past.. by John Bardes Carol M. Highsmith via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Enslaved peoples' cabins and sugarcane boiling kettles at Whitney Plantation, 2021. 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. Every February the land begins getting prepared for the long growth period of sugar. Louisiana's Whitney Plantation pays homage to the experiences of slaves across the South. By 1860 Louisiana produced about one-sixth of all the cotton and virtually all the sugar grown in the United States. Plantation labor shifted away from indentured servitude and more toward slavery by the late 1600s. Scrutinizing them closely, he proved more exacting than his Balize colleague. 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. Obtaining indentured servants became more difficult as more economic opportunities became available to them. Lewis and Guidry have appeared in separate online videos. From the darkness of history they emerge out of a silver spinning disc: two black slaves sold by a sugar plantation owner named Levi Foster on Feb. 11, 1818, to his in-laws. But other times workers met swift and violent reprisals. This was originally published in 1957 and reprinted in 1997 and which looks at both slavery and the economics of southern agriculture, focusing on the nature of the Louisiana sugar industry - primarily the transition that occurred during the Civil War. Even before harvest time, rows had to be dug, stalks planted and plentiful wood chopped as fuel for boiling the liquid and reducing it to crystals and molasses. Patout and Son, the largest sugar-cane mill company in Louisiana. Population growth had only quickened the commercial and financial pulse of New Orleans. interviewer in 1940. Finally, enslaved workers transferred the fermented, oxidized liquid into the lowest vat, called the reposoir. Enslaved plantation workers also engaged in coordinated work stoppages, slowdowns, and sabotage. In late summer and autumn the entire plantation prepared for the most arduous stage of the annual cycle, the harvest and grinding season, when the raw sugarcane needed to be processed into granulated sugar or molasses before the first frost destroyed the entire crop. Marriages were relatively common between Africans and Native Americans. This juice was then boiled down in a series of open kettles called the Jamaica Train. Sugar and cottonand the slave labor used to produce themdefined Louisianas economy, politics, and social structure. Cotton picking required dexterity, and skill levels ranged. Others were people of more significant substance and status. [2] While Native American peoples had sometimes made slaves of enemies captured in war, they also tended to adopt them into their tribes and incorporate them among their people. Slave-backed bonds seemed like a sweet deal to investors. Slavery was officially abolished in the portion of the state under Union control by the state constitution of 1864, during the American Civil War. Thousands of indigenous people were killed, and the surviving women and children were taken as slaves. Cookie Settings. Taylor, Joe Gray. In 1844 the cost of feeding an enslaved adult for one year was estimated at thirty dollars. At the mill, enslaved workers fed the cane stalks into steam-powered grinders in order to extract the sugar juice inside the stalks. The cotton gin allowed the processing of short-staple cotton, which thrived in the upland areas. The French introduced African slaves to the territory in 1710, after capturing a number as plunder during the War of the Spanish Succession. Black lives were there for the taking. One of Louise Patins sons, Andr Roman, was speaker of the house in the state legislature. During the Civil War, Black workers rebelled and joined what W.E.B. Even accounting for expenses and payments to agents, clerks, assistants, and other auxiliary personnel, the money was a powerful incentive to keep going. Giant screw presses compacted the cotton lint into four-hundred-pound bales, which were shipped to New Orleans for export. The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas. American Historical Review 105 (Dec. 2000): 153475. It remained little more than an exotic spice, medicinal glaze or sweetener for elite palates. Joshua D. Rothman The landscape bears witness and corroborates Whitneys version of history. It was also an era of extreme violence and inequality. [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. Due to its complex history, Louisiana had a very different pattern of slavery compared to the rest of the United States.[1]. One man testified that the conditions were so bad, It wasnt no freedom; it was worse than the pen. Federal investigators agreed. 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. The Americanization of Louisiana resulted in the mulattoes being considered as black, and free blacks were regarded as undesirable. Thousands of indigenous people were killed, and the surviving women and children were taken as slaves. These were some of the most skilled laborers, doing some of the most dangerous agricultural and industrial work in the United States. [11], U.S. Fatigue might mean losing an arm to the grinding rollers or being flayed for failing to keep up. Few of John Armfields purchasing records have survived, making a precise tally of the companys profits impossible. 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. AUG. 14, 2019. Picking began in August and continued throughout the fall and early winter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. But it is the owners of the 11 mills and 391 commercial farms who have the most influence and greatest share of the wealth. 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) Most of these stories of brutality, torture and premature death have never been told in classroom textbooks or historical museums. Du Bois called the . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. If such lines were located too far away, they were often held in servitude until the Union gained control of the South. The museum tells of the everyday struggles and resistance of black people who didnt lose their dignity even when they lost everything else. Even with Reconstruction delivering civil rights for the first time, white planters continued to dominate landownership. Enslaved Black workers made that phenomenal growth possible. The 13th Amendment to the nation's constitution, which outlawed the practice unequivocally, was ratified in December 1865. Aug 22, 2019 6:25 PM EST. $11.50 + $3.49 shipping. The German Coast, where Whitney Plantation is located, was home to 2,797 enslaved workers. Cookie Policy And in every sugar parish, black people outnumbered whites. 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. 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. In the last stage, the sugar crystallized. Patout and Son for getting him started in sugar-cane farming, also told me he is farming some of the land June Provost had farmed. 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). They built levees to protect dwellings and crops. Black men unfamiliar with the brutal nature of the work were promised seasonal sugar jobs at high wages, only to be forced into debt peonage, immediately accruing the cost of their transportation, lodging and equipment all for $1.80 a day. in St. Martin and Lafayette Parish, and also participates in lobbying federal legislators. 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. From slavery to freedom, many black Louisianans found that the crushing work of sugar cane remained mostly the same. The harvest season for sugarcane was called the grinding season, orroulaison. 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. Their world casts its long shadow onto ours. By then, harvesting machines had begun to take over some, but not all, of the work. This influence was likely a contributing factor in the revolt. In New Orleans, customs inspector L. B. Willis climbed on board and performed yet another inspection of the enslaved, the third they had endured in as many weeks. Louisiana led the nation in destroying the lives of black people in the name of economic efficiency. The sugar districts of Louisiana stand out as the only area in the slaveholding south with a negative birth rate among the enslaved population. 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. Whitney Plantation opened to the public as a museum on December 7, 2014. eventseeker brings you a personalized event calendar and let's you share events with friends. 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. Slaves lived in long barracks that housed several families and individuals, or in small huts. Jones-Rogers, Stephanie E. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. 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. By World War II, many black people began to move not simply from one plantation to another, but from a cane field to a car factory in the North. But it did not end domestic slave trading, effectively creating a federally protected internal market for human beings. 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. Joanne Ryan, a Louisiana-based archaeologist, specializes in excavating plantation sites where slaves cooked sugar. Leaving New Orleans, you can meander along one of America's great highways, Louisiana's River Road.If you do, make sure and stop at Whitney Plantation Museum, the only plantation that focuses on the lives of enslaved people, telling their stories through . He stripped them until they were practically naked and checked them more meticulously. On both sugar and cotton plantations, enslaved people endured regimented, factory-like conditions, that used advanced management strategies to enforce ruthless efficiency. 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. For slaveholders sugar cultivation involved high costs and financial risks but the potential for large profits. 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. He had affixed cuffs and chains to their hands and feet, and he had women with infants and smaller children climb into a wagon. The United States makes about nine million tons of sugar annually, ranking it sixth in global production. Plantation Slavery in Antebellum Louisiana Enslaved people endured brutal conditions on sugarcane and cotton plantations during the antebellum period. Here, they introduced lime to hasten the process of sedimentation. Yet those farms reported $19 million worth of agricultural equipment (more than $635 million in 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. Farm laborers, mill workers and refinery employees make up the 16,400 jobs of Louisianas sugar-cane industry. As we walk through the fields where slaves once collected sugar cane, we come upon Alles Gwendolyn . There had been a sizable influx of refugee French planters from the former French colony of Saint-Domingue following the Haitian Revolution (17911804), who brought their slaves of African descent with them.