“‘Thoroughly Done For’:
Mastery & the Conflict over Wage Labor in Louisiana’s Sugar Country”
Richard Follett (University of Sussex)
“I think God intended the niggers to be slaves,” exhorted one Louisiana planter in 1866, “we have the
Bible for that.” Mincing few words on his vision of a post-emancipation American South, the Tensas
Parish landlord snapped: “Now since man has deranged God’s plan, I think the best we can do is to
keep ‘em as near a state of bondage as possible.” The New Orleans Daily Picayune gravely intoned
with similar clarity of purpose and steadfast commitment to racial bondage. “The two great staples of
the South—cotton and sugar,” the paper staunchly declared, “can only be profitably raised by the
negro, and by him, ex necessitaterei, in a condition of servitude.” Few white Louisianans would have
disagreed with these blunt speaking Southern racists. While some feared slave emancipation would
unleash a “servile outbreak” with bloodshed, incendiarism, and “all calamities of that sort,” others
welcomed the 13th Amendment with personal venom.1
Former bondswoman Henrietta Butler recalled that when freedom came to Lafourche Parish, deep in
Louisiana’s sugar country, mistress Emily Haidee wrought personal revenge on her erstwhile property.
Grabbing at Henrietta’s finger, Haidee screeched “come here, you little black bitch, you!” and bit
firmly into the flesh and bone before her. Others meted out their rage with gratuitous acts of violence
Richard Follett is Reader in American History, Department of American Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QN,
UK. r.follett@sussex.ac.uk I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Rick Halpern and the AHRC/SSHRC funded
research project team Documenting Louisiana Sugar, 1845-1917 in conducting research for this paper. Please do not quote
or cite this paper without written permission of the author. Small parts of this essay have appeared previously in Follett &
Halpern, “From Slavery to Freedom in Louisiana’s Sugar Country: Changing Labor Systems and Workers’ Power,” in
Bernard Moitt ed., Sugar, Slavery, and Society (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2006), 135-156
1
John T. Trowbridge, A Picture of the Desolated States and the Work of Restoration, 1865-1868 (Hartford: L. Stebbins,
1868), 392; Daily Picayune (New Orleans) July 9, 1862 quoted in C. Peter Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen in Civil War
Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), 69; New Orleans White to the Headquarters of the
Department of the Gulf, December 20, 1862 in Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Field, Thavolia Glymph, Joseph P. Reidy, Leslie S.
1
that imprinted their final act of authority on the slaves’ body. Emily Haidee employed her incisors
where whips and chains sufficed in the past while on Octave de la Houssaye’s plantation, the bosses
swung violently at their erstwhile slaves and applied the boot with telling effect.
Louisiana’s
antebellum sugar lords greeted emancipation with predictable force and in the final days and hours of
enslaved labor, they lashed out and inscribed their physical authority over those whose freedom lay in
the offing.2
The rage associated with the end of plantation slavery in the sugar country derived not only from
military defeat and the swift occupation of the Union Army, but from the slaveholders’ imminent loss
of mastery and the passing of a socio-economic complex upon which the identity and wealth of the
regional elite rested.3 On a very practical level, the Civil War dealt a hammer blow to the sugar
industry and to those who laid claim to the lands and laborers of the region. The scale of the collapse,
however, was almost inconceivable to planters who had prospered so richly from the pre-war industry.
On the eve of the Civil War, Louisiana sugar planters produced over 450,000 hogsheads of sugar (one
hogshead contained approximately 1000 lbs of raw, unrefined sugar). It was the largest and last sugar
crop ever made entirely with slave labor. By 1865, the Civil War had delivered a crushing blow to the
plantation elite; production slumped to levels not known since the 1790s, less than 200 of the 1292
Rowland, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867. Series I: Volume I-The Destruction of Slavery
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 232.
2
Interviews with Henrietta Butler and Carlyle Stewart in Ronnie W. Clayton, Mother Wit: The Ex-Slave Narratives of the
Louisiana Writers’ Project (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 38, 206.
3
On the pre-eminent role of slavery within planter identity, see above all, Eugene D. Genovese The Slaveholder's Dilemma:
Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820-1860 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1992) and
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese, The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern
Slaveheolders’ Worldview (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) . More specifically see, Christopher Morris,
Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life, Warren Country and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770-1860 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995); Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina
Low Country, 1740-1790 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), and Jeffrey R. Young, Domesticating Slavery: The
Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670-1837 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Enrico
Dal Lago, Agrarian Elites: American Slaveholders and Southern Italian Landowners, 1815-1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 2005). On sugar planters see, Richard Follett, The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in
Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Richard Follett, “Slavery and
2
antebellum sugar plantations remained in operation by the end of the war, while the value of the
regional sugar industry had collapsed seven fold. Wartime confiscation and destruction weakened the
industry still further, but it was the four-fold collapse in land values and the elimination of almost $100
million of slave capital from the portfolios of the state’s sugar planters that really compounded the
problem of plantation debt. As agriculturist William C. Stubbs subsequently put it, “destruction,
desolation, and despair” stalked throughout the sugar producing parishes and among the landholding
elite.4
The crippling effect of civil war and emancipation cast a decade-long shadow over the regional
industry; not until the late 1870s would the industry begin to emerge from a climate of “general
paralysis” and ruinous depreciation of property. During the following decade, planters began to harvest
crops that matched their pre-war yields, invest in the refining technology required to produce highgrade sugars, and reassert their complete control over labor. For a regional elite who defined
themselves by the terms of mastery, the post-war changes were both alarming and bewildering. As one
planter from Bayou Goula exclaimed “what a difference between the present and past . . . . freedom has
come, contentment and happiness have fled!” Above all, the planters’ ire focused most specifically on
their former slaves and the ensuing conflict over labor control. Postbellum anger at worker
intransigency fuelled dewy-eyed romanticism for the halcyon days of the past, yet their contempt for
“chronic loafers and idlers” reflected their desperate search for stability in a world turned upside down.
Northern journalist Edward King summed up the planters’ growing discord, describing their pre-war
Plantation Capitalism in Louisiana’s Sugar Country,” in J. William Harris eds., The Old South: New Studies of Society and
Culture (New York: Routledge, 2008), 37-57.
4
Follett & Halpern, Documenting Louisiana Sugar, 1845-1917 www.sussex.ac.uk/louisianasugar; Richard Follett, Rick
Halpern, Alison Bambridge, Alex Lichtenstein, “Documenting Louisiana Sugar: An On-Line Database Project” in
‘Rethinking Agrarian Labor in the US South,’ ed., Alex Lichtenstein, Journal of Peasant Studies (forthcoming); Weekly
Iberville South (Plaquemine, La), January 6, 1866; Walter Prichard, “The Effects of the Civil War on the Louisiana Sugar
Industry,” Journal of Southern History 5 (August 1939): 321-323; Charles P. Roland, Louisiana Sugar Plantations During
the Civil War (Amsterdam: E.J. Brill, 1955), 139; “Untitled manuscript,” 7-8, 27, William Carter Stubbs Papers, # 703,
Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (hereafter UNC).
3
existence as “a grand and lordly life . . . filled with culture, pleasure, and the refinements of living;—
but now!”5
The sugar masters had ever reason to believe that the social pyramid had inverted its-self and their once
profitable sugar industry lay in tatters. Former slaves exercised political power in Reconstruction era
Louisiana, they overturned white-only privileges, and violently contested the terms of free labor. The
howling cries of the postbellum sugar planters suggests that a sea change occurred with emancipation
and that the war ushered in, historian John Rodrigue observes, “a seismic shift . . . in the way planters
and workers related to one another.” But as we shall see, no such Rubicon existed. Freed Louisianans
were broadly familiar with many of the concessions over working conditions and the use of wage work
as part of a payment system that defined the master-slave relationship just a decade earlier. Under
slavery, planters had introduced a range of financial incentives and crop-over perquisites such as
overwork payment, rewards for rapid work, harvest bonuses, and cash or credit for the produce of the
slaves’ provision grounds. Beyond direct payments, slaves and slaveholders established definable
holidays, improved housing, and the provision of whiskey and other goods for post-harvest
celebrations.
Each one of these financial “incentives” served as part of a broader
compensation/payment system specifically designed to maximize effort through the harvest season, a
system of course backed up with the omnipresent lash. Slaveholders convinced themselves--if few
others--that such incentives demonstrated their benevolence and moral authority, but even if the planter
class believed this fictitious idea, the slaves were wholly unconvinced by the slaveholders
Henry Latham, Black and White: A Journal of a Three Months’ Tour in the United States (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott,
1867), 166; J Carlyle Sitterson, Sugar Country: The Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1753-1950 (Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 1953), 231-290; The Pioneer of Assumption (Napoleonville, La) July 28, 1877; Weekly Iberville South,
January 28, 1867; Florence Dymond, drafts of “Yesteryear on a Louisiana Sugar Plantation,” Dymond Family Papers,
Historic New Orleans Collection (hereafter HNOC); 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), 127; Edward
King, The Great South: A Record of Journeys, ed. W. Magruder Drake and Robert R. Jones (1879; reprint, Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1972), 81. For discussion on the way planters perceived their loss of mastery, see James L.
Roark, Masters Without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977),
68-108.
5
4
objectionable pastiche. For them, reciprocity and compromise did not carry the ideological clutter of
paternalism and mastery, rather it was a convenient way to put money in their pockets. The very
experience of working in a waged version of slavery bequeathed a powerful legacy for postemancipation Louisiana. Freedpeople not only understood wage payment and the sketchy contours of
free labor from their experience under slavery, but they also appreciated how to levy their power at the
heart of the sugar economy to maximize payment. Although the scale of cash payments evidently
changed with the introduction of free labor, neither planters nor freedmen were thus complete novices
in the principles of waged work, reward structures, or the practice of compromising over the terms of
labor. As practised negotiators, freedmen—like the slaves before them—accordingly manipulated the
wage and remuneration system to secure a relatively decent wage and adequate working conditions in
the postbellum world. In return, they continued to labor on large unitary plantations, in massed gangs,
much as they done a decade earlier. The structure of post-emancipation working relations thus mirrored
in many respects that of the pre-war era; to be sure, the nature of employer-employee relations had
become substantially more equitable, and contentious with it, but what irked the plantation elite was
their apparent (and very real) loss of mastery, be it over their workers or the pay structure that now
dictated life in Reconstruction era Louisiana.6
Above all, the planter class dreaded strike action--particularly during the harvest--and they persistently
grumbled about “unreliable negro labor,” a term that masked a deeper emotional scar, namely their
incapacity to control workers with the kind of authority they had once jealously guarded. Particularly
troubling was the freedmen’s inclination to “move about” in search of better wages or seek a more
lenient manager at the end of the year long contract. Planters disgorged their anger and torrent of
protest in their personal papers and local news columns, but like the freedpeople of the cane parishes,
6
Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields, 2, 41; Follett, Sugar Masters, 118-150.
5
they too accommodated themselves to waged work. True, some planters “mourned over their inability
to get farm work properly done and sighed for good old times when by the lash they could enforce their
command” but as one planter observed, “the large landed Baronial system . . . is gradually fading
away.” In its place, however, was a workplace regime characterized by an eclectic mix of labor
relations (some peaceful, others acrimonious) though one where the work crews continued to toil much
as they done in the past. Chinese workers, as Moon Ho-Jung has so ably demonstrated, joined and in
some instances replaced black labor during the late 1860s (as indeed did some migrant workers from
Europe), but despite these experiments, planters remained focused (much as they had done for the
previous half-century) on black gang labor, white mastery, and indeed on the alleged ‘suitability’ of the
African American male for sugar work.7
The very nature of late antebellum slavery in the sugar country thus defined emancipation era
Louisiana in two important ways. First, planters remained resolutely committed to the language and
cultural practices associated with mastery and they envisioned postbellum sugar work through the lens
of wage work, labor order, and planter authority. Having successfully combined aspects of wage and
slave labor in antebellum times, the sugar lords were relatively well equipped to address the changes
wrought by emancipation, but as this essay shows, they remained wholly anchored to their belief,
fictitious though it may have been, of their cultural and economic mastery. For African Americans, the
residues of slavery lingered too. From their experience of antebellum sugar, black Louisianans
understood how to contest the terms of free labor once emancipation came and they envisioned their
freedom through the lens of wage work. The relationship between capital and labor would prove to be
testy, acrimonious, and occasionally bloody yet the maintenance of the plantation regime in
7
Andrew H. Gay to Edward J. Gay, January 7, 1874, Roman Daigre to Edward J. Gay, December 26, 1871, Gay (Edward
and Family) Papers, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State
University (hereafter, LSU); April 4, 1880-May 23, 1880, Frellsen (Henry) Plantation Diaries, 1878-1884, LSU; St. James
Sentinel (Convent, La.), May 22, 1875; William H. Harris, Louisiana Products, Resources, and Attractions with a sketch of
the Parishes (New Orleans: Times-Democrat, 1881), 217.
6
Louisiana’s cane fields ensured that a substantial degree of continuity linked the Old and the New in
this particular corner of the American South.8
Like recent works by Steven Hahn and Susan O’Donovan, this paper straddles the slaveryreconstruction era, and attempts to project forward into emancipation, certain labor and mental
practices from the slave era. In short, it attempts to explore how the particularities of antebellum
slavery shaped the nature of postbellum Louisiana and how the experience of bondage in the cane
world ultimately bestowed a cultural legacy of mastery, assertive white male manhood, and
accommodation through occasional confrontation for whites and blacks alike. In so doing, I engage
with a number of a number of historiographic debates. First, the nature of post emancipation labor in
the reconstruction of plantation agriculture. Second, the overwhelming “mental and elemental” power
of mastery and its material and emotional legacy for post-emancipation Louisiana. And third, we focus
(although to a lesser extent) on how wage work ultimately contributed to what Rebecca Scott has
recently termed “a vernacular sense of the deeper meaning of freedom derived from the experience of
claiming rights and dignity even in the face of constraint.” As I suggest below, however, those rights
and precedents claimed by post emancipation cane hands were based on a long-standing and material
sense of both the wage economy and their customary rights within it.9
8
On the notion of slaveholders harboring fictitious views on their mastery, see Follett, Sugar Masters, 152-55; Young,
Domesticating Slavery, 133, 168-70, 228; Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for
Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 72-104. On the problem of ‘consistency and change in
labor relations’ see Eric Foner, Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University, 1983), 37-38; Roark, Masters Without Slaves, 156.
9
O’Donovan and Hahn approach the question of legacies of slavery in distinct ways, the former examines the damaging
‘rootedness’ of freedpeople to the mindsets of bondage while the latter outlines how freedpeople’s post-emancipation
struggles drew on aspects of pre-political practice under slavery. See, Susan E. O’Donovan, Becoming Free in the Cotton
South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 120, 267; Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political
Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to Freedom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Rebecca J. Scott,
Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 269; also see review
of Degrees of Freedom in American Historical Review 112 (February 2007): 166-167; Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman &
the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 5. The historiography on
African American reactions to free labor is exceptionally rich but see, in particular, Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s
Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From
Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860-1870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Leslie A Schwalm,
7
The “stern necessity of labor and economy” were synonymous with commercial cane sugar production
in Louisiana. From the earliest experimentation with cane farming in the 1750s until the innovation of
modern frost-resistant canes, sugar planting was a forced crop in Louisiana. Predominantly grown in the
tropics, sugar cane requires good well-drained soil, ample moisture, and a long frost-free growing
season of at least 250 days. Although southern portions of Louisiana matched this requirement, central
parts of the state struggled with a growing season that remained unconducive to commercial sugar
production. To complicate matters still further, planters in Louisiana faced the risk of perennial frost
damage. Icy winds swept down the Mississippi Valley each autumn, freezing the cane buds and still
worse, destroying the cane’s commercial value. The risk of frost damage alone imposed a rigid time
constraint on sugar production and ensured that slaves planted the canes in January and February and
harvested them from late October to December. Those who tarried longer and pitted their fortunes
against the early frosts did so at their own jeopardy, but all planters faced a potentially costly gamble
between harvesting their immature cane or risking their luck against the volatility of the Gulf climate.
Inevitably, most cane planters opted for the via-media and embarked upon a six-week-long grinding
season where speed and labor stability were held at an absolute premium.10
A Hard Fight For We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1997); Jeffery R. Kerr-Ritchie, Freedpeople in the Tobacco South, Virginia, 1860-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1999); Joseph Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central
Georgia, 1800-1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Jonathan M. Bryant, How Curious a Land:
Conflict and Change in Greene County, Georgia,1850-1885 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1996). For good
historiographic overview, see Alex Lichtenstein, “Was the Emancipated Slave a Proletarian,” Reviews in American History
26 (March 1998): 124-145; Stephen A. West, “’A General Remodeling of Every Thing: Economy and Race in the PostEmancipation South,” in Thomas J. Brown ed., Reconstructions: New Perspectives in the Postbellum United States (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 10-39.
10
Harris, Louisiana Products, 145. On cultivation, harvesting, and processing see, Richard Follett, “Slavery and
Technology in Louisiana’s Sugar Bowl,” in Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie eds., Technology, Innovation, and
Southern Industrialization (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 68-96; Sitterson, Sugar Country, 112-156;
Walter Prichard, “Routine on a Louisiana Sugar Plantation under the Slavery Regime,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review
14 (September 1927), 168-178; Glen R. Conrad and Ray F. Lucas, White Gold: A Brief History of the Louisiana Sugar
Industry, 1795-1995 (Lafayette, La.: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1995), 14-22. On
the sugar planters’ predilection for gang work and extensive hand-labor on large unitary estates in the postbellum period,
see Ralph Shlomowitz, “‘Bound’ or ‘Free’? Black Labor in Cotton and Sugarcane Farming,” Journal of Southern History
50 (November 1984): 583-584; Louis A. Ferleger, “Farm Mechanization in the Southern Sugar Sector after the Civil War,”
Louisiana History 23 (Winter 1982): 21-34.
8
To overcome these climatic and meteorological hazards, Louisiana’s slaveholding planters introduced
new technologies to prevail over the environmental constraints, they increased productivity, profited
from economies of scale, and utilized modern business practices. But above all, they redoubled their
commitment to gang labor where regimented supervision, organizational coherency, and “industrial
discipline” reached its apogee.11 This was necessary, not only for the annual planting and harvesting of
cane sugar, but additionally to maintain the network of drainage ditches and sluice gates throughout the
alluvial plantation belt. Sugar planters who thus watched Federal troops invade the swampy bayous in
the summer of 1862 did so with trepidation. Although formally exempted from the terms of the
Emancipation Proclamation, slaves in the sugar parishes nevertheless struck for freedom and asserted
their power over production to maximum effect. On Magnolia Plantation, slaves downed tools as the
harvest season approached and they held out for a “handsome present” of improved food and clothing
from their master, Effingham Lawrence. Demanding $10 a month for their labor, the cane workers
pressed home their advantage and erected a gallows in the quarters while others on neighboring estates
prepared to leave or wreaked vengeance against their enslavers. Conditions deteriorated gravely and in
January 1863, General Nathaniel Banks established a rudimentary government managed free labor
regime where former slaves returned to the plantations in return for “food, clothing, proper treatment
and just [waged] compensation.” Banks’ orders inscribed the narrowest and most fragmentary promise
of freedom, but set a forbidding agenda in the sugar country. Former slaves would labor in gangs much
as they had done under slavery and for completing their annual contracts, they received cash wages and
11
"Where supervision was at a premium," as on the sugar estates, Philip Morgan contends that, "gang systems seem to have
arisen." Pointing to sugar as the most industrialized of the plantation staples, Morgan argues that "there was no betterbrigaded, better supervised form of labor," than on the Caribbean sugar estates. Robert Fogel similarly maintains that “the
industrial discipline, so difficult to bring about in the factories of free England and free New England, was achieved on
sugar plantations more than a century earlier.” Philip D. Morgan, “Task and Gang Systems: The Organization of Labor on
New World Plantations,” in Stephen Innes ed., Work and Labor in Early America (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1988), 210, 193; Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York:
W.W. Norton, 1989), 25-26.
9
payment in kind. Although some African Americans toiled in collective ‘labor companies’ to raise
food crops, the prevailing logic of Republican free labor ideology ensured work-place stability, staple
production, and the contractual sale of the freedperson’s labor.12
Republican dogma and its practical application, however, led to a familiar compromise that echoed the
slave era. In 1864, General Banks appealed for the allocation of provision grounds to the freedpeople,
a compromise that “will strengthen all the advantages which capital derives labor, and enable the
laborer to take care of himself.” Much as with slavery, African Americans would be encouraged to
raise food crops for themselves and for sale within a fragmentary and extraordinarily confined internal
economy.
Domestic production defrayed the planters’ annual costs and the maintenance and
withdrawal of the garden-plot privileges proved an effective incentive for diligent labor while also
adding a paternalistic polish to the planter-freedman negotiations. The provision of estate based
medical care and “comfortable clothing, quarters, [and] fuel,” within Banks’ strictures to the planting
community embedded paternalistic practices still further within the hybrid social relations of
emancipation Louisiana. The very hybridity of the wartime labor system nonetheless fitted perfectly
with the compelling logic of sugar production. Planters required labor stability over the agricultural
year though additionally, they sought time-worn tools of persuasion, negotiation, and coercion to
compel their workers to toil through the long harvest season. Banks’ orders fulfilled these provisions
and through wages, force, and perquisites, planters accommodated the Republican clamor for contract
while re-asserting their command over the means of production. The radical black New Orleans
12
Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen, 23; Rodrigue, Reconstruction 121-127; James D. Schmidt, Free to Work: Labor, Law, and
Reconstruction, 1815-1880 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 94-106; Paul K. Eiss, “A Share in the Land:
Freedpeople and the Government of Labour in Southern Louisiana, 1862-1865,” Slavery and Abolition 19 (April 1998): 55.
On free labor ideology, see especially Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the
Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 35-59.
10
Tribune lambasted Banks as a false prophet and his labor system as “mitigated bondage” for “mock
freedom.” The “old organs of the slavery system,” they pointedly observed, “remain in position.”13
Looking down the other end of the telescope, the sugar magnates of the antebellum past watched with
anger, resentment, and despondency as the “old organs” gave way. One planter’s daughter summed up
the collective indignation of her class: “we are such miserable dogs, we deserve to be slaves. It would
have been better to have fought until we were exterminated than live to endure such ills as are put upon
us. The hardest thing for one to realize is the freedom of the negroes.” She was not alone in her
incredulity. The physical and psychological power of mastery had slipped, and a new order beckoned.
As C. Ward, editor of the Plaquemine Iberville South warned his readers: “the power of absolute
control over their laborers has passed away and compels employers to deal with their employees in
matters of business--as equals.” Most planters reviled at the thought of equality and sought to reestablish their authority through familiar forms of highly personal labor management. William Minor
was among those planters who experienced the almost complete collapse of his rule during the war
years, yet even while he fumed that “the wish of the Negro is now the white man’s law,” Minor could
not divorce himself from his antebellum roots, nor his predilection for highly intimate management or a
showy display of his mastery. Despite introducing a regimented labor order that complied with the
wage-earning provisions of Republican policy, Minor orchestrated his largesse and provided
13
General Order 23, Headquarters, Department of the Gulf, 3 February, 1864 in Ira Berlin, Thavolia Glymph, Stephen F.
Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, Leslie S. Rowland, Julie Saville, Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867.
Series I: Volume III-The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), 512-517; Eric Arnesen, Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863-1923 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1991), 18; Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen, 75. On the transition to free labor, also see William F.
Messner, Freedmen and the Ideology of Free Labor: Louisiana 1862-1865 (Lafayette, La.: University of Southwestern
Louisiana, 1978).
11
perquisites of land, food, and clothing much as he had just a few years earlier. As far as Minor was
concerned, “they [the slaves] must be got back to the old way of doing business by degrees.”14
Yet for all the negotiation, Minor could not turn the clock back. Gang work—on which sugar farming
hinged—advanced sporadically with former slaves exerting their power over the means of production,
halting work to attend political meetings, or as Minor scornfully noted, “running about spending their
money.” Perhaps most startling for Minor was the collapse of his mastery as his work gangs became
visibly more unruly as 1863 advanced. Despite paying wages, work began late in the morning, women
frequently absented themselves from work (claiming Friday and the weekend for themselves), others
proved insolent, theft increased, runaways fled the plantation, and worse still, the skilled sugar hands
refused to reserve a portion of cane for seeding next year’s crop. Instead, they wanted to make all the
cane into sugar, maximize the yield, and claim their share of one-twentieth of the entire sugar and
molasses crop. Minor should not have been surprised by these demands. During the less decade of the
antebellum era, the practice of giving slaves a cash payment commensurate to the size of the crop was
relatively common on many sugar estates. Masters had tended to favor these bonuses as they bound the
bondspeoples’ material interests to those of the planter and his crop. Slaveholders further believed that
the enslaved worked harder, and in all probability self-policed themselves by exerting pressure on
laggards, when given a cash incentive to labor. As one postbellum planter simply put it, freedmen work
without supervision “when they have a share of the crop; the idea of working for themselves stimulates
them.” Like many African Americans in the cane parishes, Minor’s slaves had converted such
incentives into customary practice and now in the midst of civil war, with the planter class firmly on
the back foot, they strove to exploit the pre-war incentive to the maximum. Minor was both livid and
perplexed; the very basis of his mastery was under siege while the withdrawal of black labor struck the
14
Julia Johnson to William F. Weeks, November 10, 1865, Weeks (David and Family) Papers, LSU; The Weekly Iberville
South, September 19, 1868; J. Carlyle Sitterson, “The Transition from Slave to Free Economy on the William J. Minor
12
sugar lord as an unacceptable reversal of the logic of wage work. As he fumed in his diary, the slaves
labored only four hours a day, yet they expect food, housing, clothing, clean water, wood, and medical
care “and are very violent if told they do not work enough.” Seething that “a man had as well burn in
purgatory as attempt to work a sugar plantation under present circumstances,” Minor faced still further
set-backs over the course of the following year as his waged laborers slowed their work, and on
occasion stopped completely.15
By early March 1865, Minor’s experimentation with the free-labor system was faltering; on some of his
estates hands received wages while on others he returned to the logic of antebellum slave management.
There, he paid the laborers one-third of the net product of the estate though in return, he was to feed,
clothe, and extend the antebellum tradition of giving slaves provision grounds with which to cultivate
food and cash crops. Even on the plantations where wages were paid--on a sliding scale related to age,
gender, and strength--Minor combined aspects of free-labor with familiar elements of antebellum
management. Freedpeople received food rations, housing, medical care, provision grounds, and wages
in return for laboring six 10-hour days per week and regular timed watches during the harvest season.
All time lost was to be docked from wages but perhaps most significantly, Minor barred his employees
from leaving the estate without permission, he prohibited gambling and alcohol from the quarters, he
further declared that anyone not laboring would have to abandon their slave cabins (unless given
special permission), and deductions would be made to all wages for disobedience, insolence, or
idleness. Minor’s hybrid labor system was, of course, borne of necessity; the freedpeople neither had
the capital to free themselves physically from the regimented order of the quarters, nor did they have
more than the slimmest range of alternate employment opportunities. Minor in turn needed his
Plantations,” Agricultural History 17 (October 1943): 219.
15
Vol. 36 Plantation Diary, 1863-68, January 3, 1863, February 26, 1863, March 4, 1863, September, 1863, October 7,
1863, November 5, 1863, November 14, 1863, November 27, 1863, Minor (William J. and Family) Papers, LSU;
Trowbridge, A Picture of the Desolated States, 392. On the nature of antebellum labor management, see Follett, The Sugar
Masters, 151-173.
13
plantation worked. But both parties also remained wedded to the power of antebellum mindsets and
although their wage labor system was fought over--with plenty of venom on both sides--the
psychological impact of enslavement and slaveholding held a firm grip over all parties; neither group
envisioned freedom outside of a relatively narrow frame and both groups wrestled with the legacy of
slavery and mastery.16
The scenes on Minor’s Hollywood and Southdown plantations were replicated throughout the sugar
country where landlords and wage workers sketched out the terms of free labor. For white Louisianans,
those terms necessitated cheap, abundant labor, gang work, and above all, the maintenance of the
plantation system and with that, labor control. Like many postbellum landlords, men of Minor’s stripe
longed for the power to compel their erstwhile bondspeople. And when they engaged with the labor
market, as Matthew Pratt Guterl recently observed, they frequently understood black intransigence over
waged labor relations to be evidence that African Americans were infact incapable of understanding
either free labor or the complexities of the wage system. This was palpably not the case but white
southerners chose to see it differently. They assumed that strike action or workplace protest was
evidence of the freedman’s feckless character, his idleness, and immorality. These conspicuous
shortcomings, planters concluded, were proof positive that the ‘guiding hand’ of the master was
necessary even to navigate the free-labor system. These highly prescriptive terms Demetrius Eudell
reminds us, contributed to a politicized language that not only determined how white society viewed
black Americans but also how planters fundamentally understood broader labor relations too.
Freedmen, of course, described their actions more candidly, explaining workplace resistance as part of
16
On provision grounds in Louisiana, see Follett, Sugar Masters, 195-218; Roderick McDonald, Economy and Material
Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University, 1993); Damian Alan Pargas, “‘Various Means of Providing for their Own Tables’: Comparing Slave Family
Economies in the Antebellum South,” American Nineteenth Century History 7 (September 2006): 361-387. The
psychological legacy of mastery is the topic of “Psychologies of Slavery: Plantation Identities and the Problem of
Emancipation,” in Richard Follett, Eric Foner, Walter Johnson, Latitudes of Freedom (forthcoming, Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press); Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37 (2003): 116.
14
their defiance to the intrusive nature of white plantation rule. “Give us the opportunity to do what we
can do, and do it for ourselves,” exclaimed one freedmen, “all we ask, all I want for my people, is to be
rid for ever of MASTERISM.”17
Masterism, however, was precisely what men like Minor sought to impose. They could neither accept
the challenge to their mastery implied by strike action nor could they fundamentally understand
anything resembling equality in labor relations. They saw any aspect of back labor activism as
insurgency or as demonstrable proof of the freedman’s inability to cope with wage relations and they
condemned it as such. The freedmen, of course, were no innocents; their defiance in the cane fields, the
temporary retraction of their labor, and the “skulking about” that planters decried was primed to irritate
the landlords. Yet despite the very obvious mutual antagonism, planters did not break with their
commitment to gang labor or necessarily black workers, although they feverishly began to consider
alternate labor supplies. As the Baton Rouge Advocate announced: “with the laboring force now under
our control--and it is the last generation of negroes that will ever do field work--much may yet be done
to redeem our fine plantations from the desert waste into which may of them have fallen.” The
Advocate, of course, was wrong on the future of African American labor. Further generations of black
Louisianans would, and still do, toil among the sugar canes and within racially stratified production
facilities, but the editors were justified in their guarded optimism for the industry. Despite the difficulty
in recruiting laborers and effecting “a regular organization of labor,” production levels began to
recover. After producing just 18,070 hogsheads of sugar in 1865, by 1868 almost 700 planters
manufactured 85,000 hogsheads of sugar. By 1871, over 1100 sugar plantations operated throughout
the state, producing some 145,000 hogsheads of sugar. To be sure, the bumper 1861 crop dwarfed this
17
Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2008), 122-123; Demetrius L. Eudell, The Political Languages of Emancipation in the British Caribbean
and the U.S. South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 55; A.J.H. Duganne, Camps and Prisons:
Twenty Months in the Department of the Gulf (New York: J.B. Robens, 1865), 36.
15
figure but sugar production five years after the guns fell silent had once again surpassed the output
levels of the 1840s and suggested that the industry was on the road to recovery. Sugar production edged
forward still further during the 1870s and 1880s, breaking the 200,000 hogshead ceiling in 1878, but it
would not be until 1893 before the Louisiana crop matched that of 1861.18
Given the gradual, if slow, recovery of the industry to pre-war levels, it is not surprising that planters
eulogized the past when order and compulsion reigned, or that they doggedly defended gang labor.
Thus in contrast to the cotton South where a decentralized system of sharecropping, tenancy, and estate
subdivision defined landholding, sugar planters held resolutely to their faith in unitary plantations and
massed factory like crews. Even Northerners who purchased plantations in the years immediately
following the war, but whom came to planting without the ideological inheritance of slavery and
mastery, found themselves converts to the order and structure of plantation labor. Unlike the “old
proslavery idea planters” who Samuel Cranwill derided as being unequal to the new order, even the
most progressive of investors concluded that the particular constraints of sugar farming in Louisiana
required a labor regime with “proper direction, proper management, and proper treatment.” The sugar
elite would differ over the terms ‘proper’ or appropriate treatment, but most investors quickly learnt-often from business partners or overseers (whose investment and experience dated back to the slavery
era)--that to plant and tend the crop efficiently, harvest it swiftly, and process the sugar in a timely
fashion necessitated gang labor and the maintenance of large single estates. Some landlords certainly
experimented with shares and tenancy, but most agreed with one commentator in the Louisiana Sugar
Bowl that the “successful culture of sugar cane and the share system are incompatible and either one or
the other must be abandoned.” The debate over tenancy would continue unabated until the 1890s when
18
The Sugar Planter (Port Allen, La) April 3, 1869; Baton Rouge Advocate quoted in The Sugar Planter, December 5,
1868; Louis Bouchereau, Statement of the Sugar and Rice Crops Made in Louisiana in 1868-1869 (New Orleans: Young,
Bright & Co, 1869), vii.. On production levels see Follett & Halpern, Documenting Louisiana Sugar, 1845-1917
www.sussex.ac.uk/louisianasugar
16
the steep costs of commercial sugar production triggered a rise in small-holding tenancy and the
centralized grinding of cane. In the aftermath of the Civil War, however, most planters largely rejected
sharecropping and tenancy agreements with African Americans in particular. Not only did the division
of labor (and the separation of the cultivation and production of cane sugar) implicit in small-farm
tenancy rest uneasily with the planter class and their predilection to master every aspect of plantation
life, but as one correspondent noted, tenancy could only work with “economical and industrious”
laborers and only whites of North-Western European extraction deserved such classification, most
planters concluded. Black labor, by contrast, was “improvident and naturally wanting in energy.” Only
the drill and coercion of waged gang work and the ready eye of white management, most landlords
deduced, could inspire most African Americans or indeed ensure adequate productivity per hand.19
Black Louisianans were not alone in being tarnished by such proscriptive terms or condemned within
the racial imagining of their white neighbors. Cooly labor was also aptly suited for gang work and
implicitly for mastery too. They would, planters hoped, “labor faithfully & satisfactorily” in the cane
fields; “it is the only species of labor that can ever produce our staples with profit” one landlord
announced. Others predicted vaingloriously that Louisiana “will be far more prosperous than in the
days of slavery” if coolies were recruited as cane workers. The elision of slavery and Chinese labor was
no mistake. Planters hoped that like their former bonded property, coolies would labor in regimented,
brigaded work crews toiling at the metered cadence of the overseer’s command. This wholly fictitious
image of slavery, of course, bore little resemblance to the reality of bondage but it reflected the
19
Samuel Cranwill to Edward J. Gay, May 13, 1873, George C. Taylor to Edward J. Gay, February 6, 1874, Gay (Edward
and Family) Papers, LSU; Louisiana Sugar Bowl (New Iberia, La), December 24, 1874; Pioneer of Assumption, August 18,
1877; Daniel Dennett, Louisiana As It Is (New Orleans: Eureka Press, 1876); 154-170; Vol 1. Minutes, 1877-1891, Dec 13,
1883, Louisiana Sugar Planters Association Papers, LSU; Weekly Iberville South, November 2, 1867. On Northern masters,
see Lawrence N. Powell, New Masters: Northern Planters During the Civil War and Reconstruction (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1980); Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields, 109-114. On the southern critique of the share
system, see Gerald David Haynes, Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South,
1862-1882 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 242-243; Bryant, How Curious A Land, 151-162.
17
planters’ myopic memory of the past and their yearning for authority in postbellum labor relations.
Despite their hopes, Chinese workers never quite solved the planters’ labor problem, nor were they
particularly willing to submit to the regimen of Louisiana’s cane lords. Nevertheless, planters were
intrigued by the possibility that the Chinese might help tighten control over the African American
workforce. Indeed, several commented pointedly on the way in which the newcomers might help put
blacks back in their place, create competition in the labor market, and generate “a spirit of emulation
among the negroes.” In the end though, the Chinese experiment failed, throwing planters back upon
black labor. As the Louisiana Sugar Bowl observed, there “have been many conspicuous successes
with free negroes, and not a solitary one with any other.” Planters continued to experiment with
immigrant workers, hiring Dutch, Scandinavian, Italian, Portuguese, Irish, and other Europeans but as
each group failed in turn, landlords returned to the mantra of gang work and the centrality of the black
body to it. The problem, however, was one of supply. Like their antebellum predecessors, planters
corresponded with neighbors in northern and central parts of the state to contract any spare hands for
the harvest but when this supply proved wanting, planters renewed their interest in the inter-regional
trade of black Virginian laborers to the sugar country. Indeed, in what was a striking replication of
antebellum precedent where slave traders had mined the Upper South to satiate the demand of the sugar
elite, landlords hired recruitment agents to acquire Virginia hands. Eagerly expecting a thousand
Virginians to travel south to work in the cane fields, the Planters’ Banner gleefully declared: “[Bayou]
Teche will soon be Africanized again!” Yet just as they ultimately abandoned other ethnic groups,
planters like Edward Gay, who had also recruited Chinese and Danish workers, ultimately found that
the cost of recruiting and transporting Virginians was unworkable, particularly because “they are so
uncertain after you get them.” Having tested other laborers and found them wanting, the sugar elite
18
renewed their enduring interest in black Louisiana labor and its social and economic corollary,
disciplined gang work.20
The commitment to black labor, however, was not especially new. As early as February 1867, residents
of Plaquemine, in the heart of Louisiana’s sugar bowl read: “It behoves us to make the best of the negro
since he will probably be always a feature of our country”. Constitutionally acclimated to the rigors of
the south Louisiana swamps, the Weekly Iberville South intoned, the freedman’s labor, “especially on
our alluvial lands, will never be supplanted.” Most planters came to agree with this conclusion over the
course of the next half-decade. Indeed, with black women tending to withdraw (though not entirely)
from field work, planters renewed their longstanding conviction that African American men should
serve as the primary, if not sole, workforce in the region’s cane fields. Sugar had always been an
overwhelmingly male occupation in Louisiana and this tendency was exaggerated in the post-war era as
planters recruited largely male gangs and relegated women to essential, though third-tier, gender
defined, crews. Coarsely imposed constructions and categorizations of African American labor once
again fused with longstanding gender discrimination within the planters’ psyche to re-cast and
ultimately re-imagine the ideal body for free-labor sugar. Much as under slavery, muscle, sinew, and an
allegedly apt “constitution” for the travails of sugar once again defined the contours of the black male
within the white mind.21
20
Jung, Coolies and Cane, 162; The Weekly Iberville South, April 13, 1867; The Sugar Planter, June 12, 1869; Louisiana
Sugar Bowl, July 6, 1871; Lucy M. Cohen, Chinese in the Post-Civil War South: A People without a History (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press. 1984), 95-101; Gutterl, American Meditterranean, 158-166. There are many examples of
hired European labor but see, for instance, Vol 4. Journal 1870-1872, April 13, 1871, May 20, 1871, September 4, 1871,
Feb 25, 1872, Pugh-Williams-Mayes Family Papers, LSU; Nancy C. Dymond to John Dymond, September 26, 1881,
Dymond Family Papers, HNOC. On the Virginia trade, see The Planter’s Banner (Franklin), January 19, 1870; Andrew H.
Gay to Edward J. Gay, August 13, 1870, Roman Daigre to Edward J. Gay, December 26, 1871, Gay (Edward and Family)
Papers, LSU; Vol. 5. Plantation Diary, 1869-1870, March 5, 1870, Vol. 12, Memorandum Book 1870-71, De Clouet
(Alexandre E.) and Family Papers, LSU.
21
The Weekly Iberville South, February 23, 1867. On the balance of male: female cane workers, see Follett, Sugar Masters,
48-66; Richard Follett, “‘Gloomy Melancholy’: Sexual Reproduction among Louisiana Slave Women, 1840-60,” in Gwyn
Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller eds., Women and Slavery: The Modern Atlantic (Athens: Ohio University
Press, 2008), 54-75; Payrolls for Manchac Plantation 1865-1868 2.325/V28, James N. Brown Papers, Center for American
19
The planters’ insistence on strict labor control, however, predictably bred tension over wage contracts,
pay rates, and free time. African Americans, as I’ve argued here and elsewhere, fully understood both
the power of their labor and the emerging waged economy of the late antebellum and postemancipation world. As John Rodrigue demonstrates in his study of African American activism in the
cane belt, freedmen in southern Louisiana converted gang work into an avenue for autonomy as they
collectively orchestrated the terms of labor to wrest augmented wages and better conditions from the
landlords. In part, this derived from the relatively attractive wage rates offered by the sugar planters
who competed with one another for the pool of experienced cane hands. Job opportunities in nearby
New Orleans and the neighboring cotton South lured many former cane hands from the region, forcing
sugar planters to pay higher rates of remuneration than in other sectors of the southern economy.
Pressing home their advantage in a comparatively tight labor market and exercising their collective
leverage in the workplace, black Louisianans rapidly learnt the lessons and discourse of free labor,
employed their political power in Parish courthouses, and for almost twenty years, Rodrigue concludes,
“kept capital subordinate to its whims.”22
History, University of Texas at Austin; “Wages paid to Laborers, 1870-1872,” Benjamin Turead and Family Papers, LSU;
“Report of Work on Highland in January 1873,” Labor Lists, Notes, Receipts 1873, Pugh Family Papers, UT. On the racial
imagining of the “body,” see Follett, Sugar Masters, 48-56, Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave
Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Ariela J. Gross, Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the
Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 122-152.
The literature on black activism in Louisiana’s cane industry is now quite extensive but see, Follett & Halpern, “From
Slavery to Freedom in Louisiana’s Sugar Country: Changing Labor Systems and Workers’ Power,” in Moitt ed. Sugar,
Slavery, and Society, 135-156; Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields, 133, 139; Rebecca J. Scott, “Fault Lines, Color
Lines, and Party Lines: Race, Labor, and Collective Action in Louisiana and Cuba, 1862-1912,” in Frederick Cooper,
Thomas C. Holt, Rebecca J. Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation
Societies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 67-69; Rebecca J. Scott, “‘Stubborn and Disposed to
Stand their Ground’: Black Militia, Sugar Workers and the Dynamics of Collective Action in the Louisiana Sugar Bowl,
1863-1887,” in Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, eds., From Slavery to Emancipation in the Atlantic World (London: Frank
Cass, 1999), 104-109; Scott, Degrees of Freedom, 30-60. Rodrigue offers a good synthesis on black activism in John C.
Rodrigue, “Black Agency after Slavery,” in Brown ed., Reconstructions, 40-65.
22
20
Planters like Robert Campbell Martin would perhaps have disagreed. When faced by hired hands who
failed to show up at work, Martin docked their wages and snarled, “I will not be trifled with, by white
or black.” His dominance challenged, albeit it temporarily, Martin like others responded with
predictable force. Without the familiarity of the coiled whip at the side, masters may well have felt a
sense of powerlessness, but it did not appear to curtail Paul DeClouet’s management style. When
Raphael was apparently impertinent to the master, DeClouet punched him to the ground, the freedman
leaving the estate that same day. Freedmen like Raphael may well have preferred to quit work than face
DeClouet’s masterism, but the balance of power was far from equitably shared in this fight and
countless others As one blunt speaking overseer put it in the midst of a dispute with free workers in
January 1887, “the hands would not turn out yesterday . . . but I do not anticipate any trouble there or
anywhere. Want of food will compel all hands to turn out soon. So I will just let them stew in their own
juice until they are thoroughly done for.” William Porcher Miles dealt with strikers in not dissimilar
manner--when he faced a walkout over pay on his Orange Grove estate, Miles directed his overseer to
enforce the pay rate with dispatch or evict the strikers from his property within twenty-four hours. The
following day, Miles intervened personally and the strike was over. Waged work was indeed an avenue
for black economic aspiration, though as these tough estate supervisors knew, it was also a powerful
tool in the hands of white managers too.23
Men of Martin and Miles’ stamp wielded their authority with alarming ease. They understood that
mastery necessitated highly personal forms of force, authority, and supervision and they knew full well
that the “load of responsibility” rested upon the planter. Yet despite their wishful thinking, most
landlords appreciated that commercial success rested on compromise and stability, rather than conflict
23
Robert C. Martin to Robert C. Martin, Jr., November 9, 1875, Martin-Pugh Papers, Ellender Memorial Library, Nicholls
State University, Thibodaux (hereafter NSU); Vol 1. Plantation Diary, October 18, 1866, DeClouet (Alexandre E. and
Family) Papers; Vol. 21, Jan 12, 1887 William Porcher Miles Volumes, UNC; Vol 22. Jan 30/31, 1888, William Porcher
Miles Volumes, UNC.
21
and egregious acts of authoritarianism. The sugar trade was simply too unstable and labor relations too
insecure for the plantation elite to lord their authority like an idealized antebellum grandee. They
grumbled about the price of labor, scorned that “the negroes are the only ones who have made a living
since the War,” and they worried constantly about the state of their crops and the price of their crop.
The fickle nature of the Louisiana climate proved a perennial concern, particularly as the annual
harvest approached, but their overriding concern was to assure labor stability, particularly during the
grinding season. To this end, planters offered annual contracts, but whether those laborers would
remain at their posts throughout the year was an uncertain gamble and one that inevitably led most
frequently led to workplace compromises and occasional “pay offs” in case of difficulty or disturbance.
Above all, estate managers needed to remain “calm and noncommittal” planter Edward Gay observed
when faced by pay disputes. “The crop must not be endangered,” Gay strenuously underlined, the “best
course is to take matters quietly and make the best compromise you can.” Compromise, of course, was
prudent management but Gay was not willing to compromise away his entire authority. The day after
he counseled his estate manager to compromise whatever “your neighbors think or say,” the veteran
grandee decided to hire a “sensible, shrewd, firm man” to visit his plantations, enforce his command,
and to resolve any eventualities. This is a matter of “prudence and judgment” Gay barked as he strove
to protect his crop, maximize his yield, and assure his authority over every aspect of his business.
Elsewhere, planters extolled the stability of the post-war labor relation though most estate managers
understood, like Gay, that negotiation and concession were fundamental attributes even if they
harbored more punitive designs. On Ellendale plantation, just a few miles from Houma in the rich
Lafourche region for instance, Edmund McCollam reflected, perhaps somewhat apocryphally, on the
gradual and relatively peaceful adjustment to the wage labor order, writing: “everything is moving in a
manner that I think would please you . . . the Negroes all appear to be satisfied, and are working well.”
New marriages and separations complicated pre-emancipation kinship ties, but “those slight ripples on
22
the surface,” Edmund advised his father, “seldom disturb the even current of plantation life you
know.”24
Although wage negotiation lay at the axis of post emancipation labor relations, McCollam’s sanguine
and perhaps wholly mythic account belied an acrimonious conflict where African Americans seized
political power and ratified a state constitution that categorically reversed segregation and
discrimination. Street disturbances fuelled white anxieties still further as groups of freedmen
“swaggered” through towns, the Franklin Planters’ Banner reported, armed with “shot-guns, fiveshooters, and clubs.” Other freedmen began to meet and drill, converting the planters’ sugar houses into
barracks, while some others, the local press trumpeted in alarm, attempted to kill estate managers. “It is
a Radical hell,” one correspondent observed, “and they have their Radical satans there.” Be it on the
streets of Franklin, or within Republican columns, black insurgency and worker intransigence in the
cane fields struck alarm into even the hardest of the planters and placed Louisiana’s sugar elite firmly
at odds with their employees. They squared off on election days but it was on the plantation where
white and black expectations jarred most frequently. The former seeking to restore “the even current”
of plantation life and its corollary—social, racial, and labor control; the latter, wishing to secure a
decent wage, fend off the worst excesses of ‘masterism,’ and wrestle free from the surveillance of the
planter class. Breaking free was no easy task, however. Schooled in the logic and compulsion of
slaveholding, masters would never cede much ground to their former property and whatever terrain
they yielded was fought for, inch by inch. Thus even when the strict rule of pre-war years dissipated,
former slaveholders remained wholly committed to regimen, order, and discipline. As one landlord
24
Vol. 3, Letter Copy Book, December 13, 1873, Joseph Lancaster Brent Papers, LSU; New Iberia Enterprise (New Iberia,
La), March 21, 1885; W. P. Flowers to Thomas B. Pugh, January 8, 1874, Pugh (Colonel W.W. and Family) Papers, LSU;
Vol. 36 Plantation Diary, 1863-1868, September 4, 1865, William J. Minor Papers, LSU; Edward J. Gay to Samuel
Crichlow, October 7, 1874, Samuel Cranwill to Edward J. Gay, October 8, 1874, Edward J. Gay to Samuel Hollingsworth,
October 31, 1874, Gay (Edward and Family) Papers, LSU; Vol 4. Donelson Caffery Letter Book, Bethia R. Caffery to
Donelson Caffery August 20, 1877, Caffery (Donelson and Family) Papers, LSU; J. Carlyle Sitterson, “The McCollams: A
23
noted, “the planter who employs laborers of any kind, especially negroes . . . should be with them
constantly enforcing and directing their work. The eye of the owner,” this agrarian tellingly warned his
readers, “is worth more than the labor of his hands.”25
Nowhere was this compulsion for mastery more apparent than in plantation topography where planters
sought to physically restore white supremacy and retain former quarters and provision grounds. By
ensuring that their workforce resided in the very same cabins that slaves had occupied (again in
contrast to much of the cotton south where share-tenancy led to the dispersal of residencies), landlords
like Andrew and Edmund McCollam optimized the organization of labor and perpetuated the
“dependent social relations” that slave housing deliberately sought to inculcate. Even the nomenclature
of the plantation outhouses—or in planting discourse “dependencies”—reflected the landlords’ firm
sense of social hierarchy, or at the very least, their self-image as masters and lords. Arrayed along
recti-linear plantation streets, these clapboard shacks stood as “bare geometric expressions” of the
planters’ sway. The quarters extended this rationalism in its plain and indeterminate uniformity. The
striking contrast between the Spartan simplicity of the identical wooden cabins and the elegant
balustrades, ornate colonnades, and elliptical arches of the big house served the same ideological
function in ante and postbellum Louisiana. They inscribed the hierarchical order of southern society
onto the visual landscape and—as the photograph of William Weeks’ Grand Cote estate indicates—
reminded those in the quarters that power led in only one direction. Power was not only uni-linear, it
was monochrome too. The physical marking and fencing off of a definitively black quarter from white
Planter Family of the Old and New South,” Journal of Southern History 6 (August 1940): 361; Louis A. Ferleger, “The
Problem of ‘Labor’ in the Post-Reconstruction Louisiana Sugar Industry,” Agricultural History 72 (Spring 1998): 140-158.
25
The Planters’ Banner (Franklin), December 28, 1867, September 8, 1869, August 28, 1868; The Weekly Iberville South,
September 19, 1868. On the logic of compulsion see, Pete Daniel, “The Metamorphosis of Slavery, 1865-1900,” Journal of
American History 66 (June 1979): 91-92; Guterl, American Mediterranean, 122-15. On popular protest and Republican
activism, see Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet, 163-215; Wilbert L. Jenkins, Seizing the New Day: African Americans in Post
Civil War Charleston (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 133-152; Michael W. Fitzgerald, Urban
Emancipation: Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile 1860-1890 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2002), 86131; Saville, Work of Reconstruction, 144-151; Brian Kelly, “Labor and Place: The Contours of Freedpeoples’ Mobilization
24
housing, engraved an intentional inferiority line onto the plantation landscape. African Americans
subverted the planter’s notional and ideologically constructed landscape and created, as Anthony Kaye
has recently argued, a vibrant sense of “neighborhood” with goods purchased from local traders and the
estate commissary, but whether neat or dilapidated, these wooden cabins served to propagate feelings
of dependency and symbolize the power of the master and the subordination of the worker to their
employer.26
Louisiana’s freedpeople envisioned their liberty through a very different lens and viewed their cabins
as part of a customary remunerative package that included wage payment, provision ground rights, and
in Reconstruction Era South Carolina,” in ‘Rethinking Agrarian Labor in the US South,’ ed., Alex Lichtenstein, Journal of
Peasant Studies (forthcoming).
26
Vol 8. Daily Journal, 1876-1883, September 16, 1881, October 21, 1882, Maunsel White Papers, UNC; N. Tachtor to
William F. Weeks, June 17, 1879, Weeks (David and Family) Papers, LSU; Florence Dymond, drafts of “Yesteryear on a
Louisiana Sugar Plantation,” Dymond Family Papers, HNOC; A, Ferry to Samuel Cranwill, July 24, 1871, Gay (Edward
and Family) Papers, LSU. On dependency in housing, see Rebecca J. Scott, “Defining the Boundaries of Freedom in the
World of Cane: Cuba, Brazil, and Louisiana after Emancipation,” American Historical Review 99 (February 1994), 76. On
buildings as emblematic symbols of power and identity, see Mike Parker Pearson and Colin Richards, “Ordering the World:
Perceptions of Architecture, Space, and Time,” in idem, eds., Architecture and Order: Approaches to Social Spaces
(London; Routledge, 1994), 5-9 also Matthew H. Johnson, “Ordering Houses, Creating Narratives,” in Pearson and
Richards, eds., Architecture and Order, 170-177; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in
North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 97. On the social significance of the plantation
quarter see, Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina, 2007); John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1993), xiv, 1-12; also his “Not Mansions . . . But Good Enough: Slave Quarters as BiCultural Expression,” in Ted Ownby, ed., Black and White Cultural Interaction in the Antebellum South (Jackson:
University of Mississippi Press, 1993), 89-114. On the physical dimensions of the slave community in Louisiana, see John
Rehder, Delta Sugar: Louisiana’s Vanishing Plantation Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) and
25
occasionally medical care. As landlords and workers pressed upon each other for supremacy, they
forged—Joseph Reidy observes—“a radically new society;” one which combined agro-industrial
progress and contract freedom within the context of social stability and paternal hierarchy. Agrarian
capitalism advanced, Reidy continues, but with “very pronounced paternalistic overtones.” Above all,
planters--much like their predecessors--sought to mask raw economic incentive and payment with a
patina of seeming benevolence, munificence, and clemency. Generosity, of course, that derived from
the particular compassion of the master. Housing slotted precisely into this broader structure of “market
paternalism,” a plantation mindset that developed in the latter years of antebellum slavery but whose
echoes were readily audible in the decades following emancipation. Market paternalism served, albeit
from the masters’ blinkered perspective, to mask labor relations with idealized notions of mastery. By
casting themselves as benevolent stewards who doled out Christmas bonuses, called in medics, or
allotted cabins to families and individuals, planters sought to legitmize their authority and consign the
African American to perpetual dependence. Plantation management accordingly hinged on the planters
efforts to “handcraft [their] social authority link by link” and maximize this dependence through gifts,
Christmas rewards, acts of apparent charity, and both practical and symbolic rituals. It was a façade to
be sure, though one that concealed the commercially oriented nature of the employment contract
behind the illusion of idealized mastery. The enslaved and the emancipated understood the relationship
differently, of course. To them, payment, housing, and rewards were part of customary practice and
grounds to be hotly contested, if the planter class failed to meet established norms in labor relations. 27
Laurie A. Wilkie, Creating Freedom: Material Culture and African American Identity at Oakley Plantation, Louisiana,
1840-1950 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), 85-94. Image from: http://www.shadowsontheteche.org/
27
Joseph P. Reidy, “Mules and Machines and Men: Field Labor on Louisiana Sugar Plantations, 1887-1915,” Agricultural
History 72 (Spring 1998): 184, 191; Follett, Sugar Masters, 150-194; Daniel, “Metamorphosis,” 91; Jaynes, Branches
Without Roots, 107-108; James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1985), 308. The economics of paternalism are well established, be it in the Postbellum South or Brazilian
Sugar Plantations where paternalism—Harry Hutchinson observed as late as 1957—remained a “major factor in the
complicated organizational hierarchy [and effective running] of plantation life.” See Harry William Hutchinson, Village
and Plantation Life in Northeastern Brazil (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1957), 69-71; Lee J. Alston and Joseph
P. Ferrie, Southern Paternalism and the American Welfare State: Economics, Politics, and Institutions in the South, 18651965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 23-28; Douglas Flamming, Creating the Modern South: Masters and
Millhands in Dalton, Georgia, 1884-1894 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 120-141.
26
For decades, planters, slaves, and freedmen had haggled over the terms of ‘overwork’ payment and
about the produce of the provision grounds. Under slavery, planters paid the bondspeople for the
produce of their garden plots and compensated the slaves, with cash or credit at the plantation
commissary, for any additional labor conducted in the evenings or on Sundays. Most notably, planters
paid wages for collecting timber (the principal fuel for the steam-powered sugar mills), for additional
work on the plantation or in the sugar house, and for skilled roles such as engineer or sugar makers.
These payment systems, of course, were double edged; slaves received payment but in so doing they
raised their own food and their material interests were linked to the success of the plantation, the
importance of which should not be underestimated. Slaveholders, moreover, reserved the right to limit
the bondspeoples experience of the free-market to the plantation commissary where they could
exchange credit earned for various consumables. As a number of historians have now indicated, slaves
gained materially from these payment systems but perhaps most significantly, they developed
expectations about property and the nature of waged work and contract freedom through the experience
gained from overwork and the sale of farm products.28
As slavery gave way to emancipation in Louisiana’s cane belt, neither freedpeople nor planters
detached themselves from the practice of overwork, paying for the produce of provision grounds, or
indeed from the logic of market paternalism. On Ellendale and Houmas Plantation where the practice
of paid overwork dated back to the 1840s, planters Andrew and Ellen McCollam and Benjamin
The literature on the slaves’ internal economy is extensive but see fn 16; Dylan Penningroth, “My People, My People: The
Dynamics of Community in Southern Slavery,” in Edward E. Baptist and Stephanie M.H. Camp ed., New Studies in the History
of American Slavery (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 166-176; Penningroth, “Slavery, Freedom, and Social Claims
to Property among African Americans in Liberty County, Georgia, 1850-1880,” Journal of American History 84 (March 1997):
405-435; Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, “Introduction: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas,” in idem eds.,
Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1993), 25-45; Larry E. Hudson, Jr., To Have and to Hold: Slave Work and Family in Antebellum South Carolina (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1997), 32-78.
28
27
Tureaud embedded antebellum practices into postbellum labor relations. On both estates, the practice
of paying for time beyond the working day continued as did the almost exact same structure of
recording overtime work and crediting and debiting accounts at the plantation store. At Houmas, in the
1850s as in the 1870s, most freedpeople earned additional income but perhaps more significantly, the
same group of men who had been at the forefront of the overwork system in the years preceding the
Civil War, continued to prosper a decade later. Aaron Butcher and James Mitchell, for instance, who
had sold their corn crops to Tureaud under slavery earned cash for ditching, shaving pickets, and for
extra time served during the postbellum harvest. Jack Lockett who spent much of the 1850s cutting
wood and trading his credit at the commissary for cloth, food, and farm implements similarly remained
busily engaged at the same occupations fifteen years later. These men were not uncommon, nor were
they especially remarkable; they traded their labor for a price and they spent their money on making
their lives and that of their families a little better. That they should continue to work in ways that had
been remunerative in the past should not surprise either. Perhaps more significant is that fact that
antebellum structures persevered quite resiliently into freedom. Household production assisted credit
accumulation and as Nancy Bercaw concludes, the maintenance of customary garden plot privileges
enabled freedopople to secure “a degree of independence.” It was, in short, Sharon Holt observes, a
“channel for independent aspiration” and a vital “’escape clause’ in [the] freedpeople’s agreement to
till the white man’s land.” Few would disagree with these scholars over the material and ethical value
of the household economy, but the very maintenance and coexistence of overwork and household
production alongside the gang labor regime and the regimented order of the quarters ensured that the
intrusive world of ‘masterism’ continued its grip over the free community. Tureaud and McCollam
persisted in their antebellum traditions of limiting the freedpeople’s transactions to the estate
commissary and like their planter neighbors throughout the sugar country, they retained the discretion
to terminate or curtail overwork or “jobbing” as it became better known in the 1870s. Planters
appreciated that the withdrawal of these established payment traditions would likely trigger protest, but
28
much like the masters of the slave past, postbellum sugar lords keenly preserved the right of bestowal,
denial, and clemency. Intrusive management, of this type, left the freedpeople with an object lesson in
the confined market relations of the sugar world and a painful reminder of the master’s power and
sway.29
As this paper suggests, the cultural and economic resiliency of mastery, albeit within waged labor
relations, maintained a powerful hold over those who owned the soils and those who labored them in
the decades following emancipation. Despite the very substantial changes occasioned by
Reconstruction, Louisiana’s sugar planting elite held firmly to a social, racial, and economic agenda
where black labor stability lay at the axis of their business success and class position. They masked
bare-faced incentives with a paternalistic sheen, exercised force and authority over the freedpeople, and
like their plantation antecedents, they combined wage and forced labor for profit. African Americans
challenged the insidious nature of postbellum mastery, but they ultimately accommodated the wagegang order and continued to farm in ways that would have been familiar to their enslaved antecedents.
For black and white Louisianans, waged-gang work provided a via media, one that provided just
enough remuneration for the freedpeople but one too that sustained large scale commercial agriculture
for the planters. To reduce the conflict over wage-labor to just cash or harvest production, however,
would fundamentally divorce the lives of these contemporaries from the cultural milieu that surrounded
the transition from slavery to freedom in the cane world. Although historians John Rodrigue and
Rebecca Scott have explored the social meaning of freedom and gang work for emancipated African
Americans, this essay, by contrast, has largely focused on the landlords and the legacies of antebellum
Vol. 46, Plantation Ledger, 1858-1872, “Wages Paid to Laborers, 1870,” Benjamin Tureaud Family Papers, LSU; Diary
of E.E. McCollam of Ellendale Plantation, 15, 29 August 1847, 18 November 1848, Vol. 13 Account Book, 1882-1883,
Andrew McCollam Papers, UNC; Florence Dymond, drafts of “Yesteryear on a Louisiana Sugar Plantation,” Dymond
Family Papers, HNOC; Robert C. Martin to Robert C. Martin Jr., December 28, 1869, Martin-Pugh Papers, NSU; Vol 5.
Plantation Diary, January 1, 1878, William A. Shaffer Papers, UNC; Charles Nordhoff, The Cotton States in the Spring and
Summer of 1875 (New York: D. Appleton, 1876), 68-73; Nancy D. Bercaw, Gendered Freedoms: Race, Rights, and the
Politics of the Delta, 1861-1875 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 122; Sharon Ann Holt, Making Freedom
Pay: North Carolina Freedpeopek Working for Themselves, 1865-1900 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 2.
29
29
masterism. In no small measure, it posits points of consistency in labor relations under slavery and
freedom and suggests that both masters and slaves emerged from bondage relatively well equipped to
deal with the waged economy. What white Louisianans could not cope with, however, was the loss of
mastery that emancipation era wage relations unleashed. As we have seen, the planter class would not
surrender their cultural, class, or psychological authority irrespective of the revolutionary changes to
their lives. Be it over wages, the terms and condition of labor, jobbing, or residential living patterns, the
planter class clung onto their perception of mastery, literally by their finger tips. Indeed, the very
divergent (and sometimes contradictory) responses from the planter elite reflected their pell-mell search
for familiarity in a sea of racial, business, and political change. For these men and women, the language
and discourse of mastery—however objectionable though it was—served as the basis of their class and
racial identity and they battled to sustain it. To be sure, black agency drove planters onto the defensive
for a while, but slavery and masterism were not wholly relegated to the past; in Louisiana’s sugar
country (if not the rest of the south) where gang labor and plantation agriculture held firm, the legacies
of slavery and the cult of mastery lingered.30
Despite the return of Bourbon rule some two years earlier, 1879 was not a good year for the sugar
masters. They noted with alarm that “Kansas Fever” was on the march. Planter William Shaffer
confided his fears to his diary. “I suppose our labor system will be seriously interfered with,” he
penned as he and his fellow sugar magnates watched their laborers strike west in the hope of
independent proprietorship far from the watchful eyes of the sugar lords. The exodus of cane hands
alarmed, but by the summer of 1880, local newspapermen jeered as the migrants returned to the cane
world. The Mardi Gras celebrations that year struck directly at the theme of black failure in Kansas and
the restoration of white rule over the land and laborers of the sugar country. The not insignificantly
30
On the relegation of slavery as a premise and concept in postbellum social relations, see Roark, Masters without Slaves,
208.
30
named Komical Klan of Komus orchestrated the gala day in the dusty village of Plaquemine. The skies
above were overcast but the parade began early in the morning with the Captain of the krewe before
seventy odd horsemen parading as the Knights of the Klan galloped through the streets, their hooves
kicking up dust into the leaden air. Next came a “man monkey” to entertain the crowds. In the space of
a few minutes, the Klan was giving vent to a panoply of white racial stereotypes, not only about the
masked horsemen, but of the child-like, impish monkey who served the “fat boys” who marched with
him. But the biggest cheer was met by the next group, a tableau entitled “the colored couple on their
return from Kansas.” Drawing a dilapidated uncovered buggy was an old nearly starved to death mule.
Stuffed into the tumble-down carriage was a broken clothes chest, tied with rope, while at the rear, two
starved curs scampered along. Behind this dilapidated scene shuffled the man and women, clothed in
old, faded garments, returning home to Louisiana after their failed attempt in the West. The retuning
couple prompted “more comment than anything else in the procession” as white Louisianans mused on
the scene before them. The entire procession, of course, was an orchestrated reflection of white racial
imagination; the impish monkey who required strict control, the “valiant” Knights who paraded nobly,
and the ramshackle couple who should have known better than to leave the protection guaranteed by
the sugar elite. The couple of course had struck out, in every sense of the word, and they had returned
to the cane world and all that implied. The parade was unexceptional on one level, but in its stylized
orchestration, it crudely symbolized the planters’ notions of idealized labor relations in the sugar
country. On the streets of Plaquemine, as in the white mind, black power and autonomy was
minimized, wage work in the cane fields was lauded as superior to independent farming, though above
all, the planters were exalted for their mastery. Freedpeople may well have winced at the tableau before
them, but the scene reflected the planters’ ghastly obsession with mastery and the psychological legacy
of slaveholding in the sugar country.31
31
Vol 6. Plantation Diary, June 25, 1879, William A. Shaffer Papers, UNC; The Iberville South, February 14, 1880. On
Kansas, see Nell I. Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: W.W. Norton, 1977);
31
John C. Willis, Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 2000), 48-49.
32