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

This extensively researched book draws ambitious conclusions about the sugar industry and slavery in pre-bellum Louisiana. It relies heavily on traditional historical sources—correspondence and plantation records left by large planters, travelers' accounts, newspapers, slave narratives, and extensive secondary sources about slave systems in other places in the United States and in the Caribbean. It emphasizes the capitalist nature of this market-driven sugar industry, which operated with a partial cash wage system for its slaves. It presents the Louisiana sugar masters as highly efficient and innovative. It touches on demographic history—age, gender, and birthing patterns among slaves on estates, as well as among slaves that the masters purchased. Its greatest strength is in its impressively rich, descriptive details from the points of view of both masters and slaves. Like many good, serious scholarly works, it raises questions and arrives at answers that call for further exploration. But it touches much too lightly upon the slave system in Louisiana before 1820, including early sugar estates.

The book's greatest weakness as an interdisciplinary study is, surprisingly, its economic and demographic research of Louisiana's sugar plantations, arriving at conclusions that are speculative rather than based upon solid evidence. For example, Follett understates the masters' problems in controlling their slaves. The motivation for masters' purchase of young women could have been to keep the male slaves on the estates with their wives and children. On most sugar plantations in the Americas, however, it was much cheaper to buy than to breed; this issue calls for a cost-benefit analysis. The unhealthy climate of Louisiana should not be ignored. Moreover, Follett fails to consider masters' sexual exploitation of nubile females as a motive. The extent of wage labor among slaves no doubt stemmed from the traditional customary demands of Louisiana slaves.

As Follett points out, the Louisiana sugar system was unique in that the grinding season lasted six to eight weeks to avoid frost and freezing. In the Caribbean and Latin America, the grinding season lasted six to eight months. The Louisiana system was protected by tariff walls and could not have survived without them. Certainly the Cuban system was technologically competitive with the Louisiana system. Steam engines and railroads were introduced early. Fraginals pointed out that the Cuban sugar system could not have survived without Norbert Rillieux's closed vacuum-pan system. ¹ The assumption that Louisiana sugar masters were exceptionally and extraordinarily efficient is based upon their own self-images rather than economic studies.

If Follett had paid sufficient attention to the Louisiana slave system before 1820, he would have avoided some serious mistakes. He claims that the masters taught the slaves whatever skills they knew. In fact, African slaves brought many skills with them from Africa, especially from Senegambia and West Central Africa—most notably, blacksmithing and metallurgy. Remarkably, he claims that the sugar belt was far removed from New Orleans and its slave-operated markets, and that slaves remained isolated on plantations. In fact, commercial sugar was first produced in rural sections of Orleans Parish and then spread to the nearby German Coast. The broad network of rivers and bayous and the presence of runaway-slave communities in the cypress swamps greatly facilitated communications and marketing by slaves.

Follett's brief concluding discussion of culture ignores the 100 years of developing Afro-Creole culture in Louisiana before 1820. In the sugar belt, the Louisiana Creole language was widely spoken until World War II. Nevertheless, Follett writes of "large Louisiana slave communities where Afro-Haitian traditions fused with those of Virginia and Carolina slaves" (229–230). Although Haitian influence was strong in urban New Orleans, few Haitian slaves arrived in rural areas.