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

More than fifty years ago, J. Carlyle Sitterson provided students of the slave South with the first comprehensive account of the cane sugar industry in Louisiana (Sugar Country: The Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1753–1950 [1953]). Now, in a book first printed in 2005, Richard Follett, who earned his doctorate at Louisiana State University and teaches at the University of Sussex in England, has written an equally detailed study of the Louisiana agro-industrial complex during a much shorter period—the four decades preceding the Civil War. Unlike Sitterson, Follett concentrates more narrowly on the master-slave relationship and more particularly on the labor management techniques employed by the so-called sugar masters.

In this well written and exhaustively researched work, Follett depicts the Louisiana sugar planters as profit-maximizing capitalists who ruthlessly exploited their servile labor force to reap huge profits at the expense of those whose lives they controlled. The sugar producers, asserts Follett, presided over “a manipulative and wholly oppressive regime” in which the slaves, despite their desire for a more humane existence, could not escape the “web of duties and obligations” imposed upon them by their owners (13). Consequently, the slaves unwittingly helped to sustain the system that oppressed them.

Dividing his work into six chapters, the author addresses such topics as the gender imbalance in the sugar parishes; the increasing mechanization of the sugar industry; management techniques, ranging from brutal punishments to such incentives as pay for overwork and Christmas bonuses; and, finally, cultural survivals that enabled the slaves to preserve their African identity and to forge their own communal world. Throughout the work, Follett emphasizes slave agency in the negotiations between master and slave that led to compromises by both parties. Nevertheless, it was the slave masters who dictated the ultimate parameters of the system.

It is not difficult to discern where the author’s sympathies lie. Among other things, he charges that owners managed the birth intervals of slave mothers in order to “maximize reproductive activity”; that efficient management devices were designed by the master to extend control over the slaves’ lives; that apparently benevolent treatment by masters was merely a charade; that the architecture of slave houses was ideologically motivated; that slave hospitals were “plainly self-serving” (76, 187); and that in providing medical care for their laborers masters were emphasizing their authority over their patients. In short, the system of sugar production was “brutal” and “exploitative,” and the sugar masters were “ruthless and intrusive capitalists” (117).

In many ways, this is a meritorious book. The author should be commended for his incredible command of both primary and secondary sources. He also deserves credit for emphasizing the hybrid character of a worldview that combined capitalist values with a paternalistic social ethic and for emphasizing slave agency in the adjudication of rights and privileges between masters and slaves. That said, this reviewer found The Sugar Masters unnecessarily and excessively polemical. Indeed, if I were to locate this book in the historiographical spectrum of slavery, I would characterize it as a neoabolitionist tract so extreme in tone that it would have brought a smile to the lips of Solomon Northup or Theodore Dwight Weld, both of whom the author quotes frequently and approvingly. If one believes Follett, the sugar masters were a universally villainous crew, devoid of any vestige of human compassion or Christian charity. Perhaps so, but I suggest that this is a classic example of applying twenty-first-century values to nineteenth-century conditions.

Now that William Dusinberre has vilified the rice planters (Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps [1996]) and Richard Follett the sugar masters, it remains only for some enterprising historian of the slave South to apply similar treatment to the cotton nabobs. So much for any pretense of scholarly objectivity.