Whitney Plantation Museum offers tours Wednesday through Monday, from 10am-3pm. The open kettle method of sugar production continued to be used throughout the 19th century. Enslaved women who served as wet-nurses had to care for their owners children instead of their own. 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. Buyers of single individuals probably intended them for domestic servants or as laborers in their place of business. These farms grew various combinations of cotton, tobacco, grains, and foodstuffs. On October 21, after 19 days at sea, the United States arrived at the Balize, a dismal place where oceangoing ships often stopped to hire one of the boat pilots who resided there and earned a living ushering larger vessels upriver. The enslaved population soared, quadrupling over a 20-year period to 125,000 souls in the mid-19th century. Advertising Notice Franklin sold a young woman named Anna to John Ami Merle, a merchant and the Swedish and Norwegian consul in New Orleans, and he sold four young men to Franois Gaienni, a wood merchant, city council member, and brigadier general in the state militia. Lewis and the Provosts say they believe Dor is using his position as an elected F.S.A. 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. 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. List of slave owners - Wikipedia 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. interviewer in 1940. Sugar's Bitter History : We're History Then the cycle began again. 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. In 1838 they ended slaveholding with a mass sale of their 272 slaves to sugar cane plantations in Louisiana in the Deep South. Lewis is the minority adviser for the federal Farm Service Agency (F.S.A.) Slaves often worked in gangs under the direction of drivers, who were typically fellow slaves that supervised work in the fields. As first reported in The Guardian, Wenceslaus Provost Jr. claims the company breached a harvesting contract in an effort to deliberately sabotage his business. 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. Many specimens thrived, and Antoine fashioned still more trees, selecting for nuts with favorable qualities. The harvest season for sugarcane was called the grinding season, orroulaison. Enslaved Black workers made that phenomenal growth possible. St. Joseph is an actual operating sugar cane farm, farming over 2500 acres of prime Louisiana agricultural farm land. $6.90. Arranged five or six deep for more than a mile along the levee, they made a forest of smokestacks, masts, and sails. Here, they introduced lime to hasten the process of sedimentation. Dor denied he is abusing his F.S.A. The Sugar Plantation | St. Joseph and Felicity Plantations Brashear was a Kentucky slave owner who had grown up in Bullitt County, KY, practiced medicine in Nelson County, KY, and served one term in the Kentucky Legislature in 1808. This dynamic created demographic imbalances in sugar country: there were relatively few children, and over two-thirds of enslaved people were men. The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the white gold that fueled slavery. It was also an era of extreme violence and inequality. What he disputes is Lewiss ability to make the same crop as profitable as he would. 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. 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). The common and visible way that enslaved people resisted plantation conditions was by running away. After enslaved workers on Etienne DeBores plantation successfully granulated a crop of sugar in 1795, sugar replaced indigo as the dominant crop grown by enslaved people in Louisiana. He sold others in pairs, trios, or larger groups, including one sale of 16 people at once. The first slave, named . Once fermented, the leaves dyed the water a deep blue. Your Privacy Rights The New Orleans that Franklin, one of the biggest slave traders of the early 19th century, saw housed more than 45,000 people and was the fifth-largest city in the United States. At the Whitney plantation, which operated continuously from 1752 to 1975, its museum staff of 12 is nearly all African-American women. Vintage Postcard Louisiana Reserve 1907 Sugar Cane Train Godchoux 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. One of the biggest players in that community is M.A. At roughly the same moment, American inventors were perfecting new mechanized cotton gins, the most famous of which was patented by Eli Whitney in 1794. 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. About a hundred were killed in battle or executed later, many with their heads severed and placed on pikes throughout the region. In court filings, First Guaranty Bank and the senior vice president also denied Provosts claims. 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. . Patrols regularly searched woods and swamps for maroons, and Louisiana slaveholders complained that suppressing marronage was the most irksome part of being a slaveholder. Louisiana sugar estates more than tripled between 1824 and 1830. 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. It opened in its current location in 1901 and took the name of one of the plantations that had occupied the land. In 1860 his total estate was valued at $2,186,000 (roughly $78 million in 2023). New Orleans became the Walmart of people-selling. Small-Group Whitney Plantation, Museum of . All Rights Reserved. Bardstown Slaves: Amputation and Louisiana Sugar Plantations. 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. Louisiana History | Whitney Plantation Many others probably put the enslaved they bought to work in the sugar industry. 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. 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. Grif was the racial designation used for their children. 122 comments. In addition to regular whippings, enslavers subjected the enslaved to beatings, burnings, rape, and bodily mutilation; public humiliation; confinement in stocks, pillories, plantation dungeons, leg shackles, and iron neck collars; and family separation. Plantation labor shifted away from indentured servitude and more toward slavery by the late 1600s. 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. Population growth had only quickened the commercial and financial pulse of New Orleans. In plantation kitchens, they preserved the foodways of Africa. Slavery was introduced by French colonists in Louisiana in 1706, when they made raids on the Chitimacha settlements. If you purchase an item through these links, we receive a commission. 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. My family was farming in the late 1800s near the same land, he says, that his enslaved ancestors once worked. Before cotton, sugar established American reliance on slave labor It was a period of tremendous economic growth for Louisiana and the nation. 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) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. The Best of Baton Rouge, Louisiana - The Planet D The landscape bears witness and corroborates Whitneys version of history. 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. 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. [1], Secondly, Louisiana's slave trade was governed by the French Code Noir, and later by its Spanish equivalent the Cdigo Negro,[1] As written, the Code Noir gave specific rights to slaves, including the right to marry. 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. Enslaved women worked in the indigo fields growing and maintaining the crop. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. $11.50 + $3.49 shipping. Picking began in August and continued throughout the fall and early winter. Trying to develop the new territory, the French transported more than 2,000 Africans to New Orleans between 17171721, on at least eight ships. Reservations are not required! Yet those farms reported $19 million worth of agricultural equipment (more than $635 million in 2023). A vast majority of that domestic sugar stays in this country, with an additional two to three million tons imported each year.