The plantation's restoration was funded by the museum's founder, John Cummings. As the historian James McWilliams writes in The Pecan: A History of Americas Native Nut (2013): History leaves no record as to the former slave gardeners location or whether he was even alive when the nuts from the tree he grafted were praised by the nations leading agricultural experts. The tree never bore the name of the man who had handcrafted it and developed a full-scale orchard on the Oak Alley Plantation before he slipped into the shadow of history. 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. Johnson, Walter. An award-winning historian reveals the harrowing forgotten story of America's internal slave tradeand its role in the making of America. 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! 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. Plantation Slavery in Antebellum Louisiana - 64 Parishes A trial attorney from New Orleans, Mr. Cummings owned and operated the property for 20 years, from 1999 - 2019. Focused on the history of slavery in Louisiana from 1719-1865, visitors learn about all aspects of slavery in this state. in St. Martin and Lafayette Parish, and also participates in lobbying federal legislators. Most sought to maintain nuclear households, though the threat of forced family separation through sale always loomed. These are not coincidences.. 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. Franklin was not the only person waiting for slaves from the United States. The harvest season for sugarcane was called the grinding season, orroulaison. Diouf, Sylviane A. Slaverys Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons. In order to create the dye, enslaved workers had to ferment and oxidize the indigo plants in a complicated multi-step process. Family, and the emotional nourishment it provided, were among the most valuable survival resources available to enslaved plantation workers. Dor does not dispute the amount of Lewiss sugar cane on the 86.16 acres. 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 pestilent summer was over, and the crowds in the streets swelled, dwarfing those that Franklin remembered. In 1808, Congress exercised its constitutional prerogative to end the legal importation of enslaved people from outside the United States. Cattle rearing dominated the southwest Attakapas region. This process could take up to a day and a half, and it was famously foul-smelling. And yet two of these black farmers, Charles Guidry and Eddie Lewis III, have been featured in a number of prominent news items and marketing materials out of proportion to their representation and economic footprint in the industry. Like most of his colleagues, Franklin probably rented space in a yard, a pen, or a jail to keep the enslaved in while he worked nearby. 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. From slavery to freedom, many black Louisianans found that the crushing work of sugar cane remained mostly the same. 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. Yet those farms reported $19 million worth of agricultural equipment (more than $635 million in 2023). 144 should be Elvira.. The Plantation System - National Geographic Society Domino Sugars Chalmette Refinery in Arabi, La., sits on the edge of the mighty Mississippi River, about five miles east by way of the rivers bend from the French Quarter, and less than a mile down from the Lower Ninth Ward, where Hurricane Katrina and the failed levees destroyed so many black lives. 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. Overall, the state boasted the second highest per-capita wealth in the nation, after Mississippi. Few of John Armfields purchasing records have survived, making a precise tally of the companys profits impossible. A formerly enslaved black woman named Mrs. Webb described a torture chamber used by her owner, Valsin Marmillion. 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. Because of the nature of sugar production, enslaved people suffered tremendously in South Louisiana. 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. Enslaved peoples' cabins and sugarcane boiling kettles at Whitney Plantation, 2021. 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. 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. Sheet music to an 1875 song romanticizing the painful, exhausted death of an enslaved sugar-plantation worker. If you purchase an item through these links, we receive a commission. Then the cycle began again. Cookie Policy Its not to say its all bad. The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the white gold that fueled slavery. A Fate Worse Than Slavery, Unearthed in Sugar Land Theres still a few good white men around here, Lewis told me. Indigo is a brilliant blue dye produced from a plant of the same name. At the Whitney plantation, which operated continuously from 1752 to 1975, its museum staff of 12 is nearly all African-American women. The 13th Amendment to the nation's constitution, which outlawed the practice unequivocally, was ratified in December 1865. "Grif" was the racial designation used for their children. 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. [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. This dynamic created demographic imbalances in sugar country: there were relatively few children, and over two-thirds of enslaved people were men. He had sorted the men, most of the women, and the older children into pairs. He stripped them until they were practically naked and checked them more meticulously. They raised horses, oxen, mules, cows, sheep, swine, and poultry. During this period Louisianas economic, social, political, and cultural makeup were shaped by the plantation system and the enslaved people upon which plantations relied. 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. Serving as bars, restaurants, gambling houses, pool halls, meeting spaces, auction blocks, and venues for economic transactions of all sorts, coffee houses sometimes also had lodging and stabling facilities. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Caribbean became the largest producer of sugar in the world. For thousands of years, cane was a heavy and unwieldy crop that had to be cut by hand and immediately ground to release the juice inside, lest it spoil within a day or two. Almost always some slave would reveal the hiding place chosen by his master. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Basic decency was something they really owed only to white people, and when it came down to it, Black peoples lives did not matter all that much. 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. After the planting season, enslaved workers began work in other areas on the plantation, such as cultivating corn and other food crops, harvesting wood from the surrounding forests, and maintaining levees and canals. Enslaved people kept a tenuous grasp on their families, frequently experiencing the loss of sale. What he disputes is Lewiss ability to make the same crop as profitable as he would. 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. Editors Note: Warning, this entry contains graphicimagery. 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. This video of our slave cabin was done by the National Park Service as part of their project to capture the remaining slave . 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. Resistance was often met with sadistic cruelty. Making sugar, making 'coolies': Chinese laborers toiled alongside Black In 1722, nearly 170 indigenous people were enslaved on Louisiana's plantations. Due to its complex history, Louisiana had a very different pattern of slavery compared to the rest of the United States.[1]. As new wage earners, they negotiated the best terms they could, signed labor contracts for up to a year and moved frequently from one plantation to another in search of a life whose daily rhythms beat differently than before. The Whitney, which opened five years ago as the only sugar-slavery museum in the nation, rests squarely in a geography of human detritus. The Best of Baton Rouge, Louisiana - The Planet D It has been 400 years since the first African slaves arrived in what is . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. It was a period of tremendous economic growth for Louisiana and the nation. From the earliest traces of cane domestication on the Pacific island of New Guinea 10,000 years ago to its island-hopping advance to ancient India in 350 B.C., sugar was locally consumed and very labor-intensive. Once white Southerners became fans of the nut, they set about trying to standardize its fruit by engineering the perfect pecan tree. He was powerless even to chase the flies, or sometimes ants crawling on some parts of his body.. From Sheridan Libraries/Levy/Gado/Getty Images. 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. Most of these stories of brutality, torture and premature death have never been told in classroom textbooks or historical museums. Louisiana sugar estates more than tripled between 1824 and 1830. But it is the owners of the 11 mills and 391 commercial farms who have the most influence and greatest share of the wealth. To begin, enslaved workers harvested the plants and packed the leaves into a large vat called a steeper, or trempoire. 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. Aug 22, 2019 6:25 PM EST. Provost, who goes by the first name June, and his wife, Angie, who is also a farmer, lost their home to foreclosure in 2018, after defaulting on F.S.A.-guaranteed crop loans. 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. When it was built in 1763, the building was one of the largest in the colony. . When workers tried to escape, the F.B.I. In remote backwoods regions in northern and southwest Louisiana, these were often subsistence farmers, relatively cut off from the market economy. This cane was frost-resistant, which made it possible for plantation owners to grow sugarcane in Louisianas colder parishes. 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. Sugar, or "White Gold" as British colonists called it, was the engine of the slave trade that brought . [6]:59 fn117. Children on a Louisiana sugar-cane plantation around 1885. The core zone of sugar production ran along the Mississippi River, between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Typically the enslaved plantation worker received a biannual clothing allotment consisting of two shirts, two pants or dresses, and one pair of shoes. They thought little about the moral quality of their actions, and at their core was a hollow, an emptiness. Eighty-nine of them were boys and men, of whom 48 were between 18 and 25 years old, and another 20 were younger teens. 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. Lewis is himself a litigant in a separate petition against white landowners. committee member to gain an unfair advantage over black farmers with white landowners. Enslaved Black workers made that phenomenal growth possible. Example: Yes, I would like to receive emails from 64 Parishes. 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. Copyright 2021. The Barbaric History of Sugar in America - The New York Times You passed a dump and a prison on your way to a plantation, she said. Slavery was introduced by French colonists in Louisiana in 1706, when they made raids on the Chitimacha settlements. 2023 Smithsonian Magazine Enslaved people planted cotton in March and April. Buyers of single individuals probably intended them for domestic servants or as laborers in their place of business. Obtaining indentured servants became more difficult as more economic opportunities became available to them. Before cotton, sugar established American reliance on slave labor. 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. Malone, Ann Patton. 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. He would be elected governor in 1830. | READ MORE. The diary of Bennet H. Barrow, a wealthy West Feliciana Parish cotton planter, mentions hand-sawing enslaved persons, dunking them underwater, staking to them ground, shooting them, rak[ing] negro heads, and forcing men to wear womens clothing. 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. The Sugar Plantation | St. Joseph and Felicity Plantations By 1853, Louisiana was producing nearly 25% of all exportable sugar in the world. As such, it was only commercially grown in Louisianas southernmost parishes, below Alexandria. These incentives were counterbalanced by the infliction of pain and emotional trauma. The German Coasts population of enslaved people had grown four times since 1795, to 8,776. It made possible a new commodity crop in northern Louisiana, although sugar cane continued to be predominant in southern Louisiana. 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. The cotton gin allowed the processing of short-staple cotton, which thrived in the upland areas. 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. Your Privacy Rights 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. Slave-backed bonds seemed like a sweet deal to investors. The Demographic Cost of Sugar: Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas. American Historical Review 105 (Dec. 2000): 153475. He pored over their skin and felt their muscles, made them squat and jump, and stuck his fingers in their mouths looking for signs of illness or infirmity, or for whipping scars and other marks of torture that he needed to disguise or account for in a sale. Before the year was out, Franklin would conduct 41 different sales transactions in New Orleans, trading away the lives of 112 people. As first reported in The Guardian, Wenceslaus Provost Jr. claims the company breached a harvesting contract in an effort to deliberately sabotage his business. 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.. 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. The Africans enslaved in Louisiana came mostly from Senegambia, the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra, and West-Central Africa. Hidden in Fort Bend's upscale Sienna: A rare plantation building where Louisiana seldom had trouble in locating horses, sugar, or cotton hidden on a plantation. But it did not end domestic slave trading, effectively creating a federally protected internal market for human beings. The Americanization of Louisiana resulted in the mulattoes being considered as black, and free blacks were regarded as undesirable. The value of enslaved people alone represented tens of millions of dollars in capital that financed investments, loans and businesses. 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. Finding the lot agreeing with description, Taylor sent the United States on its way. After each haul was weighed and recorded, it was fed through the gin. Some were tradesmenpeople like coach and harness maker Charles Bebee, goldsmith Jean Claude Mairot, and druggist Joseph Dufilho. To achieve the highest efficiency, as in the round-the-clock Domino refinery today, sugar houses operated night and day. As Henry Bell brought the United States around the last turn of the Mississippi the next day and finally saw New Orleans come into view, he eased as near as he could to the wharves, under the guidance of the steam towboat Hercules. Was Antoine aware of his creations triumph? They worked from sunup to sundown, to make life easy and enjoyable for their enslavers. Louisiana led the nation in destroying the lives of black people in the name of economic efficiency. William Atherton (1742-1803), English owner of Jamaican sugar plantations. New Orleans became the Walmart of people-selling. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library. He objected to Britain's abolition of slavery in the Caribbean and bought and sold enslaved people himself. 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. Before the Civil War, it's estimated that roughly 1,500 "sugarhouses .