Cattle rearing dominated the southwest Attakapas region. 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. Their ranks included many of the nations wealthiest slaveholders. To achieve the highest efficiency, as in the round-the-clock Domino refinery today, sugar houses operated night and day. Thousands of indigenous people were killed, and the surviving women and children were taken as slaves. Sheet music to an 1875 song romanticizing the painful, exhausted death of an enslaved sugar-plantation worker. Please upgrade your browser. 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. St. Joseph is an actual operating sugar cane farm, farming over 2500 acres of prime Louisiana agricultural farm land. 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. 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 to the nation's constitution, which outlawed the practice unequivocally, was ratified in December 1865. Men working among thousands of barrels of sugar in New Orleans in 1902. In 1722, nearly 170 indigenous people were enslaved on Louisiana's plantations. 122 comments. Enslaved peoples' cabins and sugarcane boiling kettles at Whitney Plantation, 2021. In court filings, First Guaranty Bank and the senior vice president also denied Provosts claims. Whitney Plantation Museum offers tours Wednesday through Monday, from 10am-3pm. German immigrants, white indentured servants and enslaved Africans produced the land that sustained the growing city. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. New Orleans became the Walmart of people-selling. Cookie Policy During her antebellum reign, Queen Sugar bested King Cotton locally, making Louisiana the second-richest state in per capita wealth. Her estate was valued at $590,500 (roughly $21 million in 2023). In 1817, plantation owners began planting ribbon cane, which was introduced from Indonesia. [1][10], When control of Louisiana shifted to the United States, the Catholic social norms were deeply rooted in Louisiana; the contrast with predominantly Protestant parts of the young nation, where differing norms prevailed, was evident. In subsequent years, Colonel Nolan purchased more. What he disputes is Lewiss ability to make the same crop as profitable as he would. 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. Slaveholders and bondspeople redefined the parameters of . Based on historians estimates, the execution tally was nearly twice as high as the number in Nat Turners more famous 1831 rebellion. Field hands cut the cane and loaded it into carts which were driven to the sugar mill. Slaves lived in long barracks that housed several families and individuals, or in small huts. . Death was common on Louisianas sugar plantations due to the harsh nature of the labor, the disease environment, and lack of proper nutrition and medical care. Untroubled by their actions, human traffickers like Isaac Franklin built a lucrative business providing enslaved labor for Southern farmers. The United States makes about nine million tons of sugar annually, ranking it sixth in global production. The vast majority were between the ages of 8 and 25, as Armfield had advertised in the newspaper that he wanted to buy. Within five decades, Louisiana planters were producing a quarter of the worlds cane-sugar supply. 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. 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. Neither the scores of commission merchant firms that serviced southern planter clients, nor the more than a dozen banks that would soon hold more collective capital than the banks of New York City, might have been noticeable at a glance. 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. Picking began in August and continued throughout the fall and early winter. (In court filings, M.A. 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. 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. And in every sugar parish, black people outnumbered whites. Smithsonian magazine participates in affiliate link advertising programs. 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. By fusing economic progress and slave labor, sugar planters revolutionized the means of production and transformed the institution of slavery. 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. Exactly where Franklin put the people from the United States once he led them away from the levee is unclear. Due to its complex history, Louisiana had a very different pattern of slavery compared to the rest of the United States.[1]. 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 . Once white Southerners became fans of the nut, they set about trying to standardize its fruit by engineering the perfect pecan tree. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine Editors Note: Warning, this entry contains graphicimagery. Cotton Cotton was king in Louisiana and most of the Deep South during the antebellum period. Black lives were there for the taking. Whitney Plantation Museum offers tours Wednesday through Monday, from 10am-3pm. Joshua D. Rothman Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household. 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.. 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. Most sought to maintain nuclear households, though the threat of forced family separation through sale always loomed. Franklin mostly cared that he walked away richer from the deals, and there was no denying that. 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. 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. 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. Finally, enslaved workers transferred the fermented, oxidized liquid into the lowest vat, called the reposoir. 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. Hes privileged with a lot of information, Lewis said. The Americanization of Louisiana resulted in the mulattoes being considered as black, and free blacks were regarded as undesirable. Enslaved women were simply too overworked, exhausted, and vulnerable to disease to bear healthy children. Slave Cabin at Destrehan Plantation. 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. 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. Louisiana led the nation in destroying the lives of black people in the name of economic efficiency. The first slave, named . 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. Enslaved people also served as cooks, handling the demanding task of hulling rice with mortars and pestles. Florida Old Slave Market Stereo Card Litho Photo Fla V11. Pecan trees are native to the middle southwestern region of the Mississippi River Valley and the Gulf Coast of Texas and Mexico. He was powerless even to chase the flies, or sometimes ants crawling on some parts of his body.. When possible enslaved Louisianans created privacy by further partitioning the space with old blankets or spare wood. Cotton picking required dexterity, and skill levels ranged. In 1808, Congress exercised its constitutional prerogative to end the legal importation of enslaved people from outside the United States. 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. 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. Being examined and probed was among many indignities white people routinely inflicted upon the enslaved. Conditions were so severe that, whereas cotton and tobacco plantations sustained positive population growth, death rates exceeded birth rates in Louisianas sugar parishes. 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. Some were tradesmenpeople like coach and harness maker Charles Bebee, goldsmith Jean Claude Mairot, and druggist Joseph Dufilho. The sugar districts of Louisiana stand out as the only area in the slaveholding south with a negative birth rate among the enslaved population. 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. NYTimes.com no longer supports Internet Explorer 9 or earlier. Roman did what many enslavers were accustomed to in that period: He turned the impossible work over to an enslaved person with vast capabilities, a man whose name we know only as Antoine. [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. It also required the owners to instruct slaves in the Catholic faith, implying that Africans were human beings endowed with a soul, an idea that had not been acknowledged until then. John Burnside, Louisianas richest planter, enslaved 753 people in Ascension Parish and another 187 people in St. James Parish. 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. 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. An 1855 print shows workers on a Louisiana plantation harvesting sugar cane at right. But this is definitely a community where you still have to say, Yes sir, Yes, maam, and accept boy and different things like that.. From slavery to freedom, many black Louisianans found that the crushing work of sugar cane remained mostly the same. They are the exceedingly rare exceptions to a system designed to codify black loss. Slaves lived in long barracks that housed several families and individuals, or in small huts. Enslaved people kept a tenuous grasp on their families, frequently experiencing the loss of sale. 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. 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. Louisianas more than 22,000 slaveholders were among the wealthiest in the nation. 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. The company is being sued by a former fourth-generation black farmer. These were some of the most skilled laborers, doing some of the most dangerous agricultural and industrial work in the United States. Advertising Notice . Privacy Statement New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. Bardstown Slaves: Amputation and Louisiana Sugar Plantations. The Africans enslaved in Louisiana came mostly from Senegambia, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra, and West-Central Africa. interviewer in 1940. This influence was likely a contributing factor in the revolt. 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. The presence of pecan pralines in every Southern gift shop from South Carolina to Texas, and our view of the nut as regional fare, masks a crucial chapter in the story of the pecan: It was an enslaved man who made the wide cultivation of this nut possible. In 1838 they ended slaveholding with a mass sale of their 272 slaves to sugar cane plantations in Louisiana in the Deep South. All of this was possible because of the abundantly rich alluvial soil, combined with the technical mastery of seasoned French and Spanish planters from around the cane-growing basin of the Gulf and the Caribbean and because of the toil of thousands of enslaved people. He had sorted the men, most of the women, and the older children into pairs. 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. Photograph by Hugo V. Sass, via the Museum of The City of New York. Enslaved Black workers made that phenomenal growth possible. Most of these stories of brutality, torture and premature death have never been told in classroom textbooks or historical museums. 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. Glymph, Thavolia. One-Year subscription (4 issues) : $20.00, Two-Year subscription (8 issues) : $35.00, 64 Parishes 2023. Slavery was introduced by French colonists in Louisiana in 1706, when they made raids on the Chitimacha settlements. It was Antoine who successfully created what would become the countrys first commercially viable pecan varietal. Grif was the racial designation used for their children. A formerly enslaved black woman named Mrs. Webb described a torture chamber used by her owner, Valsin Marmillion. Slave-backed bonds seemed like a sweet deal to investors. 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. Cotton flourished north of sugar country, particularly in the plains flanking the Red River and Mississippi River. Click here to email info@whitneyplantation.org, Click here to view location 5099 Louisiana Hwy 18, Edgard, LA 70049. Although it authorized and codified cruel corporal punishment against slaves under certain conditions, it forbade slave owners to torture them. Once it crystalized the granulated sugar was packed into massive wooden barrels known as hogheads, each containing one thousand or more pounds of sugar, for transport to New Orleans. The French introduced African slaves to the territory in 1710, after capturing a number as plunder during the War of the Spanish Succession. Thousands were smuggled from Africa and the Caribbean through the illegal slave trade. Sometimes black cane workers resisted collectively by striking during planting and harvesting time threatening to ruin the crop. Your Privacy Rights A seemingly endless cycle of planting, hoeing, weeding, harvesting, and grinding comprised the work routine on Louisiana's sugarcane plantations during the 19th century. Lewis is himself a litigant in a separate petition against white landowners. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. 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. 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 St. Martin and Lafayette Parish, and also participates in lobbying federal legislators. eventseeker brings you a personalized event calendar and let's you share events with friends. Even accounting for expenses and payments to agents, clerks, assistants, and other auxiliary personnel, the money was a powerful incentive to keep going. Cookie Settings. Eighty-nine of them were boys and men, of whom 48 were between 18 and 25 years old, and another 20 were younger teens. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Enslaved men typically worked to produce the dye from the plants. Family, and the emotional nourishment it provided, were among the most valuable survival resources available to enslaved plantation workers. A small, tightly knit group of roughly five hundred elite sugar barons dominated the entire industry. [1][8] Moreover, the aim of Code Noir to restrict the population expansion of free blacks and people of color was successful as the number of gratuitous emancipations in the period before 1769 averaged about one emancipation per year. In 1863 and 1864 growing numbers of Maryland slaves simply left their plantations to join the Union Army, accepting the promise of military service in return for freedom. Enslaved people often escaped and became maroons in the swamps to avoid deadly work and whipping. Despite the fact that the Whitney Plantation , a sugar-cane plantation formerly home to more than 350 African slaves, is immaculately groomed, the raw emotion of the place . 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. Once it was fully separated, enslaved workers drained the water, leaving the indigo dye behind in the tank. 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. Lewis and the Provosts say they believe Dor is using his position as an elected F.S.A. 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.