Sugar Plantations

Sugar cane cultivation best takes place in tropical and subtropical climates; consequently, sugar plantations in the United States that utilized slave labor were located predominantly along the Gulf coast, particularly in the southern half of Louisiana. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Caribbean became the largest producer of sugar in the world. The spread of sugar plantations failed to keep pace with demand until the mid-eighteenth century, and European wars disrupted supply lines, keeping demand high. Span-ish and French émigrés from the Caribbean brought sugar production with them when they began to colonize the southern United States. In 1795 Étienne de Boré became the first Louisianan to successfully produce sugar. Louisiana could not produce the crop year round as the Caribbean could, but following Louisiana's annexation to the United States sugar production there became lucrative nonetheless, due to protective tariffs that kept the price of Caribbean sugar high. Given the lack of reliable roads in the early national period, plantations were generally located near waterways so that sugar could be more easily transported out and the slaves and equipment to manufacture it more easily transported in.

Sugar is a labor-intensive product that required a great deal from the slave labor force. Storms and flooding were a frequent danger to the crop and the facilities of the plantation, requiring slaves to engage in constant rebuilding and repairs. Slaves were responsible for the labor that allowed a plantation to be established. Slaves cleared the land in order to plant sugar cane, cutting down trees and removing their stumps. The slaves also built a system of levees and dikes to protect the growing area from rivers and in some cases seawater. This system would contain redundancies, such that if one levee broke, others would be present to save the sugar crop. Slaves also dug ditches in order to divert water and to drain the area. This was a continuous process, as silt would gradually block the drainage. The work was so constant that some observers doubted the wisdom of engaging in the project at all: "I must confess that there seems to me room for grave doubt, if the capital, labour, and especially the human life, which have been and which continue to be spent in converting the swamps of Louisiana into sugar plantations, and in defending them against the annual assaults of the river, and the fever, and the cholera, could not have been better employed somewhere else" (Olmsted 1861–1862, p. 324). In addition, slaves built the homes for the planters and themselves, as well as the factory buildings involved in the production of sugar. Joseph John Gurney described the series of buildings found on most of the sugar plantations he observed: "Neat planting settlements visible in various spots; severally consisting of a mansion, a boiling house, a number of negro huts, and a wind mill on some neighboring elevation, for grinding the sugar" (1840, p. 10). Sugar plantations were massive complexes with a series of buildings and a large labor force.

SUGAR AND THE ATTRITION OF FREEDOM

Sidney Mintz in his work Sweetness and Power explores the profound effect sugar had on the modern world. In many ways sugar laid the basis for industrialization. Sugar was one of the first foods to introduce mechanization into its production and it also provided the cheap calories necessary to feed the early proletariat that labored in the cities.

The track sugar has left in modern history is one involving masses of people and resources, thrown into productive combination by social, economic, and political forces that were actively remaking the entire world. The technical and human energies these forces released were unequaled in world history, and many of their consequence have been beneficial. But the place of sugars in the modern diet, the strangely imperceptible attrition of people's control over what they eat, with the eater becoming the consumer of a mass-produced food rather than the controller and cook of it, the manifold forces that work to hold consumption in channels predictable enough to maintain food-industry profits, the paradoxical narrowing of individual choice, and of opportunity to resist this trend, in the guise of increasing convenience, ease, and 'freedom'—these factors suggest the extent to which we have surrendered our autonomy over our food. (Mintz 1986, p. 211)

SOURCE: Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Once land had been cleared and protected from potential flooding, slaves plowed the fields and planted the sugar cane. Sugar quickly robs the soil of nutrients, requiring more and more land to be cleared, the use of animal manure, or crop rotation if production is to keep pace with previous crops. Once planted, however, the crop did not require significant work on the part of the slave labor force. Rather, slaves continued to maintain the levees and drainage ditches, and prepared for the manufacture and packaging of the sugar. Slaves gathered wood for fuel, but also to make the hogsheads in which the sugar was shipped.

During the harvest, the slaves cut the sugar cane and along with beasts of burden transported the cane to the sugar mill. Slaves stored some of the cane under leaves and soil to protect it from the elements, so that it could be used for seeding another crop. Slaves also worked the mill as a sort of protoindustrial labor force. The first sugar mills used manual and animal labor to turn the machinery, but by the mid-eighteenth century planters began to adopt steam-powered sugar mills. If sugar mills were steam-powered, slaves would fuel the fires; if driven by an animal, they would guide it. Once the sugar was ground, slaves transported the syrup to the boiling house, while using the chaff for the fertilization of future crops and as fuel. Slaves also fired the fuel needed to boil the syrup into sugar and oversaw the crystallization process. This process required a specialized knowledge that distinguished the slaves employed in it from field hands involved in the production of other crops: "Negroes bred to mechanical employments, to sugar boiling, and the like, and some domestic slaves, fare much better than those who work in the fields" (Ramsay 1784, p. 82). Slaves would then take the raw sugar to a purgery packed in hogsheads, with holes for molasses to drain out. The extracted molasses would be sold, often for the manufacturing of rum. Once the molasses drained, the sugar was stored in more hogsheads for shipment to market. The entire manufacturing process required specialized knowledge, and would generally be overseen by an engineer or knowledgeable sugar maker. Given the necessary technical knowledge, labor, and machinery, sugar planting required a large capital investment.

Once the sugar was manufactured, slaves generally received a break from work. Then the process would start over again with another planting and the gathering of fuel for the mill and crystallization process. Slaves on sugar plantations had a more difficult labor regimen than slaves farming tobacco, cotton, and most other agricultural products. Fanny Kemble unfavorably compared the slave labor associated with sugar to that associated with these other products: "When I am most inclined to deplore the condition of the poor slaves on these cotton and rice plantations, the far more intolerable existence and harder labour of those employed on the sugar estates occurs to me, sometimes producing the effect of a lower circle in Dante's 'Hell of Horrors,' opening beneath the one where he seems to have reached the climax of infernal punishment" (1863, p. 106). Slave quarters were generally of poor quality—simple shacks—and the food provided was of inferior quality and consisted predominantly of corn and pork. Planters rarely offered any incentives other than the lash. Slaves, however, had many opportunities to escape, and the surrounding swampland made it difficult to recapture runaways.

Sugar plantations required a large investment of both capital and labor. The work that slaves performed in Louisiana and along the Gulf coast was far more rigorous than that found in plantations that produced other crops. Sugar plantations turned large profits, thanks to high demand. The process of making sugar became increasingly technical over time, and represented an early step toward industrialization within agriculture. At the same time, the sugar produced provided cheap calories for the populations of Europe and the United States, making sugar one of the crops most central to the global changes brought about by colonization.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.

Follett, Richard. The Sugar Masters. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.

Gurney, Joseph John. A Winter in the West Indies: Described in Familiar Letters to Henry Clay, of Kentucky. London: 1840. Available online in Sources in U.S. History Online: Slavery in America. Gale. Available at http://galenet.galegroup.com.

Kemble, Fanny. Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839. London: 1863. Available online in Sources in U.S. History Online: Slavery in America. Gale. Available at http://galenet.galegroup.com.

Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin, 1985.

Moody, V. Alton. Slavery on Louisiana Sugar Plantations [1924]. New York: AMS Press, 1976.

Olmsted, Frederick Law. The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States: Based upon Three Former Volumes of Journeys, vol. 1. New York: 1861–1862. Available online in Sources in U.S. History Online: Slavery in America. Gale. Available at http://galenet.galegroup.com.

Ramsay, James. An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies. London: 1784. Available online in Sources in U.S. History Online: Slavery in America. Gale. Available at http://galenet.galegroup.com.

Whitten, David O. Andrew Durnford: A Black Sugar Planter in the Antebellum South. Natchitoches, LA: Northwestern State University Press, 1981.

                            Michael Kelly Beauchamp