Page 79 - 1619 Project Curriculum

August 18, 2019

To achieve the highest efficien-

cy, as in the round-the-clock Dom-
ino refinery today, sugar houses

operated night and day. ‘‘On cane

plantations in sugar time, there

is no distinction as to the days of

the week,’’ Northup wrote. Fatigue
might mean losing an arm to the

grinding rollers or being flayed for

failing to keep up. Resistance was
often met with sadistic cruelty.
A formerly enslaved black

woman named Mrs. Webb
described a torture chamber used

by her owner, Valsin Marmillion.
‘‘One of his cruelties was to place a
disobedient slave, standing in a box,

in which there were nails placed in
such a manner that the poor crea-

ture was unable to move,’’ she told a
W.P.A. interviewer in 1940. ‘‘He was

powerless even to chase the flies, or

sometimes ants crawling on some

parts of his body.’’
Louisiana led the nation in

destroying the lives of black people

in the name of economic efficien-

cy. The historian Michael Tadman
found that Louisiana sugar parishes

had a pattern of ‘‘deaths exceed-

ing births.’’ Backbreaking labor and

‘‘inadequate net nutrition meant
that slaves working on sugar plan-

tations were, compared with other

working-age slaves in the United

States, far less able to resist the

common and life-threatening dis-

eases of dirt and poverty,’’ wrote

Tadman in a 2000 study published
from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library
in the American Historical Review.
Life expectancy was less like that
on a cotton plantation and closer to

that of a Jamaican cane field, where

the most overworked and abused

Children on a Louisiana sugar cane plantation around 1885.
could drop dead after seven years.
Most of these stories of brutal-

to the historian Richard Follett, the eve of the Civil War. In 1853, Rep- most dangerous agricultural and ity, torture and premature death

state ranked third in banking capital resentative Miles Taylor of Louisi- industrial work in the United States. have never been told in classroom

behind New York and Massachusetts ana bragged that his state’s success In the mill, alongside adults, chil- textbooks or historical museums.

in 1840. The value of enslaved people was ‘‘without parallel in the United dren toiled like factory workers with They have been refined and white-

alone represented tens of millions States, or indeed in the world in any assembly-line precision and disci- washed in the mills and factories

of dollars in capital that financed branch of industry.’’ pline under the constant threat of of Southern folklore: the romantic

investments, loans and businesses. The enslaved population soared, boiling hot kettles, open furnaces and South, the Lost Cause, the popular

Much of that investment funneled quadrupling over a 20-year period to grinding rollers. ‘‘All along the end- ‘‘moonlight and magnolias’’ plan-

back into the sugar mills, the ‘‘most 125,000 souls in the mid-19th century. less carrier are ranged slave children, tation tours so important to Loui-

industrialized sector of Southern New Orleans became the Walmart whose business it is to place the cane siana’s agritourism today.

agriculture,’’ Follett writes in his of people-selling. The number of upon it, when it is conveyed through

2005 book, ‘‘Sugar Masters: Planters enslaved labor crews doubled on the shed into the main building,’’ When I arrived at the Whitney

and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World sugar plantations. And in every sugar wrote Solomon Northup in ‘‘Twelve Plantation Museum on a hot day in

Photograph 1820-1860.’’ No other agricultural parish, black people outnumbered Years a Slave,’’ his 1853 memoir of June, I mentioned to Ashley Rogers,

region came close to the amount of

These were some of the most
36, the museum’s executive direc-

whites.

being kidnapped and forced into

tor, that I had passed the Nelson

skilled laborers, doing some of the
slavery on Louisiana plantations.

capital investment in farming by the

73