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

2??8Book Reviews101 Block's bibliography is exhaustive. He relies equally on A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (a primary -source bible for Civil War naval historians) and contemporary newspapers. He has also trolled through a variety ofjournal articles, master's dieses, and other unpublished sources. The result is amazing. No detail of die ships that Block discusses (and there must be hundreds) escapes his notice. For instance, "The Dan [a steamboat] was a V-bottom, deep sea steamer, built of white oak, with a five foot (1.5 m) depth of hold and capacity for 600 bales of cotton. The Dan was a 1 1 2-ton side wheeler , 99 ft. long and 23 ft. (30 ? ? m)" (p. 87). The book is a good read. Block's work is full of tales of running gun-battles at sea, of blockade-running seamen hiding along the Gulf Coast until time and tide were right to make a run, and of loneliness and tedium aboard the Union blockading ships. While this book is perhaps not for readers with only a passing interest in Civil War naval operations, it is, however, a fine, thorough, well-organized study of an often overlooked topic. This is good, bare-bones history. Highly recommended . Southwestern Adventist UniversityR. StevenJones The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana's Cane World, 1820—1860. By Richard Follett. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Pp. 300. Maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780807130384. $54.95, cloth. ISBN 0807132470. $18.95, paper.) The sugar planters of south central Louisiana operated the harshest, most profitable plantations in the antebellum South. Yet, black and white life in this country often takes a backseat within a historiography largely focused on slavery in cotton and rice fields. The strength of Follett's articulate "social history" is that he applies this historiography to the "hybrid region" where Caribbean and American methods of plantation management intertwined, providing a savvy analysis of antebellum sugar production that combines cultural and economic perspectives. Follett's sugar masters, roughly 500 elite planters who owned over twothirds of the slaves and acreage in the sugar bowl, represented an assortment of Anglo and French entrepreneurs. Drawing from extensive research in plantation records, diaries, local newspapers, trade publications, slave narratives, and travelers ' accounts, Follett exposes "modern, factory-like plantations" where slaves toiled "at the metered cadence of the steam age" (p. 5). The cost-conscious planters described by Follett embraced technology. In the 1840s, die wealthiest replaced open boiling kettles with expensive vacuum pans to create high-quality sugar. They also invested in bagasse furnaces, which used cane husks rather than dwindling (and thus ever more expensive) wood supplies. Sugar masters likewise "engineered" the slave population to maximize production. Eighty-five percent 102Southwestern Historical QuarterlyJuly of slaves purchased were males typically an inch taller than most African Americans , a sign of greater strength and health. Planters also preferred slaves from South Carolina or Florida where similar heat and marshes acclimatized them to Louisiana. The gender imbalance and the grueling work in the cane fields forced planters to continuously replenish their workforce as natural increase could not offset the losses from death and injury. Occasionally, Follett's depiction of the hard-driving sugar masters appears too absolute, as when he declares diat the "slaveholding barons rarely cooperated for their mutual good" (p. 41). He points to the reluctance of planters to support either a state university other than a military academy or a railroad infrastructure. Military academies were much more dian mere devotion to "[h]onor and militarism" (p. 41). Such academies provided engineers that were vital to tasks such as levee construction not to mention providing a militia leadership capable of crushing potential slave rebellions. Likewise, railroad, canal, or plank-road companies often galvanized communities (as even Follett concedes) but then failed, not due to lack of support but because of the distances between southern towns interspersed by isolated plantations and die lack of traffic to make such ventures profitable. Follett stresses the industrial nature of the sugar plantation to such an extent that he occasionally falls into contradictions, as when...