Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation

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Notes Abbreviations ASC Assistant Subassistant Commissioner BRFAL Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands DR De Bow’s Review EJGP Edward J. Gay and Family Papers HED House Executive Document HNOC Historic New Orleans Collection, New Orleans, Louisiana LSL Louisiana Department, Louisiana State Library, Baton Rouge, Louisiana LSU Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Louisiana State University Libraries, Baton Rouge, Louisiana NA National Archives, Washington, D.C. NILSB New Iberia Louisiana Sugar-Bowl NODP New Orleans Daily Picayune NYHS New-York Historical Society, New York, New York NYT New York Times RG Record Group SED Senate Executive Document Tulane Manuscripts Department, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana UNC Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina WBRSP West Baton Rouge Sugar Planter Introduction 1. Reuben Kartick, “O Tye Kim and the Establishment of the Chinese Settlement of Hopetown,” Guyana Historical Journal 1 (1989): 37; Marlene Kwok Crawford, Scenes from the History of the Chinese in Guyana (Georgetown: Author, 1989), 43, 46–47; Walton Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar: Chinese and Indian Migrants to the British West Indies, 1838–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 199; Lucy M. Cohen, Chinese in the Post–Civil War South: A People without a History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 68. Orr was also known as O Tye Kim and Wu Tai Kam. 2. Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar, 197–98 (quote); Kartick, “O Tye Kim and the Establishment,” 37–38; Crawford, Scenes from the History of the Chinese, 48. Ultimately, 238,909 South Asian (most commonly called East Indian in the Caribbean) and 13,533 Chinese migrants arrived in British Guiana between 1838 and 1917 (Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar, 19). 3. Kartick, “O Tye Kim and the Establishment,” 38–44 (newspaper quotes on 41); Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar, 198–99; Crawford, Scenes from the History of the Chinese, 43–46; Edward Jenkins, The Coolie: His Rights and Wrongs (New York: George Routledge and Sons, 1871), 114–16. 4. Kartick, “O Tye Kim and the Establishment,” 44–46; Look Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar, 199; Crawford, Scenes from the History of the Chinese, 43; Etta B. Peabody, “Effort of the South to Import Chinese Coolies, 1865–1870” (M.A. thesis, Baylor University , 1967), 23; NODP, November 16, 1867. 5. John H. Brough to Bvt. Capt. H. H. Pierce, General Superintendent of Education, August 31, 1868, vol. 264:102, Letters Sent; District Superintendent’s Monthly School Report by John H. Brough, August 31, 1868; District Superintendent’s Monthly School Report by Victor Benthien, September 30, 1868; District Superintendents School Reports ; Agent and ASC, Donaldsonville, LA, BRFAL, RG 105, NA. 6. Marina E. Espina, Filipinos in Louisiana (New Orleans: A. F. Laborde and Sons, 1988), 1–18. These Filipinos had been involved in the galleon trade across the Pacific, between the Philippines and Mexico, which lasted for more than two centuries. 7. I am building on the work of anthropologist Lucy M. Cohen, who argued that southern proponents of Asian labor migration drew their historical lessons most dearly from the Caribbean. See Cohen, Chinese in the Post–Civil War South; “Entry of Chinese to the Lower South from 1865 to 1870: Policy Dilemmas,” Southern Studies 17, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 5–37. 8. See, e.g., Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1989), 35–36. 9. Historians have tended to interpret southern postbellum movements for Asian migrant laborers and white immigrants as analogous, if not equivalent, in origin and effect. For a recent iteration, see John C. Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana’s Sugar Parishes, 1862–1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), 136–38. 10. Edward D. Beechert, “Patterns of Resistance and the Social Relations of Production in Hawaii,” in Plantation Workers: Resistance and Accommodation, ed. Brij V. Lal et al. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), 45–46. 11. Gary Y. Okihiro, Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 3–30. See also Lucie Cheng and Edna Bonacich, eds., Labor Immigration under Capitalism: Asian Workers in the United States before World War II (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984); John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 12. Matthew Frye Jacobson...