The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana's Cane World, 1820-1860 (review)

Nobody writes books with grand titles like American Slavery any more, and with good reason. No matter how thick the volume, no single study can adequately depict the dazzling varieties of unfree labor in North America, even within a single era. Broad statements about unwaged labor practices in one part of the country will attract the criticism of specialists of another section. Even within a single colony or state, slavery on the countryside was rarely similar to that in towns and cities. As a result, historians now tend to produce only slim monographs that pertain to a single region or even a single crop.

Richard Follett's The Sugar Masters reveals both the virtues and vices of this recent approach, since it spans but a 40-year period and covers only half of the state of Louisiana. Its considerable strengths include exhaustive archival research, an impressive knowledge of the relevant secondary literature, elegant prose, and an understanding—as the subtitle suggests—that one cannot comprehend the master class without also describing the lives and culture of those men and women who actually worked the land. If read simply as a comprehensive account of life and labor within the southern Louisiana sugar parishes, this marvelous study provides rich data on production statistics, the geographical origin of the slaves shipped to the region, slave fertility, and even the cane-cutting rituals.

The danger of micro history, however, is that its practitioners often suggest that their findings have larger application. Early on, Follett wades into that historiographical perennial, the often intemperate debate over whether antebellum slavery in the United States was a variety of Atlantic capitalism (as scholars like William Dusinberre have argued), or if the nonmarket, prebourgeois nature of master–slave relations (as Eugene D. Genovese has suggested) forged an economic culture that was fundamentally hostile to the free wage labor ideology found in the northern states. To an extent, Follett here tries to split the difference, arguing that while sugar masters exhibited some aspects of "capitalist, and market-oriented thought," their paternalistic values "created a hybrid culture" that was socially at odds with much of the North Atlantic world (7). But, since most of this older discussion has dealt with planters and slaves along the cotton belt, Follett's theory, while convincing within this limited context, will hardly end this debate. Sugar plantations required enormous capital investment, and even historians enamored of the noncapitalist model have long conceded sugar slavery to be the exception. The fact that Follett names other historians within his text (rather than in his footnotes) suggests he believes his thesis may be applied to the rest of the Old South.

However, in at least one area, his excellent explication of paternalism, Follett does provide fresh insights into this increasingly stale debate. Although too many scholars redefine paternalism as benevolence, Follett argues that in Louisiana, a "hard nosed market paternalism" provided "business-conscious planters with an ideological vocabulary for negotiating a contractual relationship with slaves that aided plantation productivity" (156). Seen in this way, the giving of gifts, holiday rewards, and small acts of charity allowed sugar masters to see themselves as generous stewards of their extended households, even if many slaves recognized these moments of largesse as disguised incentives and management strategies. Far from being benevolent, Follett's depiction of slaveholders' paternalism emphasizes its cruel and controlling aspects. By providing whiskey on festive occasions, for example, sugar masters created a culture of dependence crucial to white hegemony. And, by providing alcohol in place of wages, slaveholders hid their refusal to recognize their workers as economic actors behind a façade of generosity, which also weakened the slave community and damaged slave marriages. "Whiskey rations," Follett observes, "pacified workers, leading them to conduct their day-to-day tasks thinking less of escape but more of their...