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

2 Envisioning Freedoms

c h a p t e r t w o Envisioning Freedoms William J. Minor, the owner of three large sugar plantations in Louisiana, expressed his vision of freedom to a federal commission immediately after the Civil War. “The only certain remedy that we know of is, to take us back under the Constitution & establish things as they were,” he explained in April 1865, “but perhaps under some other name.” Asked if he meant the retention of slavery , Minor assented eagerly. “Yes Sir, I think this state & all the states would come back under the Constitution Sir,” he replied. “I am the more inclined to think so because I was one of those who were altogether opposed to going out in the beginning.” Nearly three years of wage labor under Union military occupation , according to Minor, had proven that sugar production would cease without slavery. Louisiana, he insisted, was too cold for sugarcane cultivation without enslaved labor—winter frosts were a perennial threat to ripened cane stalks after October—and too hot for white labor. He felt that “the white man can not bear the climate or sun & he can get as much as we can afford to give, elsewhere.” Increased foreign imports would eventually drive down agricultural prices and wages, making white labor impossible to control “to any extent” or to attract “to live among mosquitos & mud” of southern Louisiana. “When emancipation is perfected,” Minor stated resignedly, “we will have to get ‘Cooly labour’ or some other,—labourers that can stand this Climate.”1 Envisioning freedom, like defending slavery, implicated exploiting coolies. Forswearing coolie labor in the name of slavery, alongside slavery itself, was a casualty of the Civil War. As in the Caribbean decades earlier, slavery’s death generated a planter demand for Asian coolies in the South. This racial logic, however, never materialized uniformly across postemancipation societies. In addition to depictions of Asian labor before the war, local wartime developments , themselves shaping and shaped by events near and far, drove former American ex-slaveholders to seek coolie labor after the war. Louisiana sugar planters, in particular, exhibited a swift and high demand for coolies, although they were by no means the only former slaveholders and proslavery ideologues to look to the Caribbean for historical guidance. Southern Louisiana was not an exception, but its distinctive history of colonial subjugation and sugar production made it as much a part of the Caribbean as the Old South. Political, economic , and social networks that stretched across the Gulf of Mexico in tandem with the revolutionary potential of the Civil War propelled New Orleans and its surrounding sugar-producing parishes to the forefront of postbellum movements for and against coolies. Although Asian workers remained on the margins of antebellum and wartime struggles over sugar production, their arrival in Louisiana so soon after the war was ultimately and intimately tied to the violently competing visions of freedom among planters, workers, and federal officials . Federal policies to sustain and then abolish slavery, driven by the words and actions of planters and workers, ironically would recast coolies as potentially free immigrants in American culture during the Civil War. The Ties That Bound Sugar and slavery—the twin forces that enriched western Europe, enslaved western Africa, and colonized the Americas for centuries—emerged and died in Louisiana during revolutionary times. Before the late eighteenth century, French and Spanish attempts to establish a plantation slave regime comparable to Saint Domingue had failed miserably, finding neither a viable staple crop nor a controllable labor force. The encroachment of American Indian lands, the impor40 Coolies and Cane tation and enslavement of Africans, and the production of plantation staples proceeded haphazardly in the lower Mississippi Valley, marred and jarred by African and American Indian insurgencies (real and feared), maroon communities , and competitive and fickle markets. Throughout the eighteenth century, slave importations from Africa and the Caribbean, intensely pursued at times, were forbidden repeatedly to guard against slave uprisings. Aspiring planters often found producing foodstuffs for sale within Louisiana and export to Saint Domingue, Martinique, Mexico, and Cuba more profitable than plantation staples like tobacco or indigo. For about a century after the French began colonizing Louisiana in 1699, mercantilist ties oriented Louisiana to the south, making it a northern colony within what some historians have aptly labeled the “Greater Caribbean.” It, however, seemed incapable of producing the kind of wealth generated by Caribbean sugar colonies, even as its military and commercial...