University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER IX
THE INTRODUCTION OF COTTON AND SUGAR

THE decade following the peace of 1783 brought depression
in all the plantation districts. The tobacco industry, upon
which half of the Southern people depended in greater or
less degree, was entering upon a half century of such wellnigh
constant low prices that the opening of each new tract for its
culture was offset by the abandonment of an old one, and the export
remained stationary at a little less than half a million
hogsheads. Indigo production was decadent; and rice culture
was in painful transition to the new tide-flow system. Slave
prices everywhere, like those of most other investments, were
declining in so disquieting a manner that as late as the end of
1794 George Washington advised a friend to convert his slaves
into other forms of property, and said on his own account:
"Were it not that I am principled against selling negroes, as you
would cattle in a market, I would not in twelve months hence be
possessed of a single one as a slave. I shall be happily mistaken
if they are not found to be a very troublesome species of property
ere many years have passed over our heads."[1] But at that
very time the addition of cotton and sugar to the American
staples was on the point of transforming the slaveholders'
prospects.

For centuries cotton had been among the world's materials for
cloth, though the dearth of supply kept it in smaller use than
wool or flax. This continued to be the case even when the
original sources in the Orient were considerably supplemented
from the island of Bourbon and from the colonies of Demarara,
Berbice and Surinam which dotted the tropical South American
coast now known as Guiana. Then, in the latter half of the
eighteenth century, the great English inventions of spinning and

weaving machinery so cheapened the manufacturing process that
the world's demand for textiles was immensely stimulated.
Europe was eagerly inquiring for new fiber supplies at the very
time when the plantation states of America were under the
strongest pressure for a new source of income.

The green-seed, short-staple variety of cotton had long been
cultivated for domestic use in the colonies from New Jersey to
Georgia, but on such a petty scale that spinners occasionally
procured supplies from abroad. Thus George Washington, who
amid his many activities conducted a considerable cloth-making
establishment, wrote to his factor in 1773 that a bale of
cotton received from England had been damaged in transit.[2] The
cutting off of the foreign trade during the war for independence
forced the Americans to increase their cotton production to
supply their necessities for apparel. A little of it was even exported
at the end of the war, eight bags of which are said to
have been seized by the customs officers at Liverpool in 1784 on
the ground that since America could not produce so great a
quantity the invoice must be fraudulent. But cotton was as yet
kept far from staple rank by one great obstacle, the lack of a
gin. The fibers of the only variety at hand clung to the seed as
fast as the wool to the sheep's back. It had to be cut or torn
away; and because the seed-tufts were so small, this operation
when performed by hand was exceedingly slow and correspondingly
expensive. The preparation of a pound or two of lint a
day was all that a laborer could accomplish.

The problem of the time had two possible solutions; the invention
of a machine for cleaning the lint from the seed of the sort
already at hand, or the introduction of some different variety
whose lint was more lightly attached. Both solutions were
applied, and the latter first in point of time though not in point
of importance.

About 1786 seed of several strains was imported from as many
quarters by planters on the Georgia-Carolina coast. Experiments
with the Bourbon variety, which yielded the finest lint then in
the market, showed that the growing season was too short for

the ripening of its pods; but seed procured from the Bahama
Islands, of the sort which has ever since been known as sea-island,
not only made crops but yielded a finer fiber than they had
in their previous home. This introduction was accomplished by
the simultaneous experiments of several planters on the Georgia
coast Of these, Thomas Spaulding and Alexander Bissett
planted the seed in 1786 but saw their plants fail to ripen any
pods that year. But the ensuing winter happened to be so mild
that, although the cotton is not commonly a perennial outside
the tropics, new shoots grew from the old roots in the following
spring and yielded their crop in the fall.[3] Among those who
promptly adopted the staple was Richard Leake, who wrote from
Savannah at the end of 1788 to Tench Coxe: "I have been this
year an adventurer, and the first that has attempted on a large
scale, in the article of cotton. Several here as well as in Carolina
have followed me and tried the experiment. I shall raise
about 5000 pounds in the seed from about eight acres of land,
and the next year I expect to plant from fifty to one hundred
acres'[4]

The first success in South Carolina appears to have been attained
by William Elliott, on Hilton Head near Beaufort, in 1790.
He bought five and a half bushels of seed in Charleston at 14S
per bushel, and sold his crop at 101/2d per pound. In the next
year John Screven of St. Luke's parish planted thirty or forty
acres, and sold his yield at from 1s. 2d. to 1s. 6d. sterling per
pound. Many other planters on the islands and the adjacent
mainland now joined the movement. Some of them encountered
failure, among them General Moultrie of Revolutionary fame who
planted one hundred and fifty acres in St. John's Berkeley in 1793
and reaped virtually nothing.[5]

The English market came promptly to esteem the long, strong,
silky sea-island fiber as the finest of all cottons; and the prices

at Liverpool rose before the end of the century to as high as five
shillings a pound. This brought fortunes in South Carolina.
Captain James Sinkler from a crop of three hundred acres on his
plantation, "Belvedere," in 1794 gathered 216 pounds to the acre,
which at prices ranging from fifty to seventy-five cents a pound
brought him a gross return of $509 per laborer employed.[6] Peter
Gaillard of St. John's Berkeley received for his crop of the same
year an average of $340 per hand; and William Brisbane of St.
Paul's earned so much in the three years from 1796 to 1798 that
he found himself rich enough to retire from work and spend several
years in travel at the North and abroad. He sold his plantation
to William Seabrook at a price which the neighbors thought
ruinously high, but Seabrook recouped the whole of it from the
proceeds of two years' crops.[7]

The methods of tillage were quickly systematized. Instead of
being planted, as at first, in separate holes, the seed came to be
drilled and plants grown at intervals of one or two feet on ridges
five or six feet apart; and the number of hoeings was increased.
But the thinner fruiting of this variety prevented the planters
from attaining generally more than about half the output per acre
which their upland colleagues came to reap from their crops of
the shorter staple. A hundred and fifty pounds to the acre and
three or four acres to the hand was esteemed a reasonable crop on
the seaboard.[8] The exports of the sea-island staple rose by 1805
to nearly nine million pounds, but no further expansion occurred
until 1819 when an increase carried the exports for a decade to
about eleven million pounds a year. In the course of the 'twenties
Kinsey Burden and Hugh Wilson, both of St. John's Colleton
began breeding superfine fiber through seed selection, with
such success that the latter sold two of his bales in 1828 at the
unequaled price of two dollars a pound. The practice of raising
fancy grades became fairly common after 1830, with the result,

however, that for the following decade the exports fell again to
about eight million pounds a year.[9]

Sea-island cotton, with its fibers often measuring more than
two inches in length, had the advantages of easy detachment from
its' glossy black seed by squeezing it between a pair of simple rollers,
and of a price for even its common grades ranging usually
more than twice that of the upland staple. The disadvantages
were the slowness of the harvesting, caused by the failure of the
bolls to open wide; the smallness of the yield; and the necessity
of careful handling at all stages in preparing the lint for market.
Climatic requirements, furthermore, confined its culture within a
strip thirty or forty miles wide along the coast of South Carolina
and Georgia. In the first flush of the movement some of the rice
fields were converted to cotton;[10] but experience taught the community
ere long that the labor expense in the new industry absorbed
too much of the gross return for it to displace rice from its
primacy in the district

In the Carolina-Georgia uplands the industrial and social developments
of the eighteenth century had been in marked contrast
with those on the seaboard. These uplands, locally known
as the Piedmont, were separated from the tide-water tract by a
flat and sandy region, the "pine barrens," a hundred miles or more
in breadth, where the soil was generally too light for prosperous
agriculture before the time when commercial fertilizers came
into use. The Piedmont itself is a rolling country, extending
without a break from Virginia to Alabama and from the mountains
of the Blue Ridge to the line of the lowest falls on the rivers.
The soil of mingled clay and sand was originally covered
with rich forest mold. The climate was moderately suited to
a great variety of crops; but nothing was found for which it had
a marked superiority until short-staple cotton was made available.
In the second half of the eighteenth century this region had
come to be occupied in scattered homesteads by migrants moving
overland from Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia, extending
their régime of frontier farms until the stubborn Creek and

Cherokee Indian tribes barred further progress. Later corners
from the same northeastward sources, some of them bringing a
few slaves, had gradually thickened the settlement without
changing materially its primitive system of life. Not many recruits
had entered from the rice coast in colonial times, for the
régime there was not such as to produce pioneers for the interior.
The planters, unlike those of Maryland and Virginia, had
never imported appreciable numbers of indentured servants to
become in after years yeomen and fathers of yeomen, the slaves
begat slaves alone to continue at their masters' bidding; and the
planters themselves had for the time being little inducement to
forsake the lowlands. The coast and the Piedmont were unassociated
except by a trickle of trade by wagon and primitive
river-boat across the barrens. The capture of Savannah and
Charleston by the British during the War for Independence, however,
doubtless caused a number of the nearby inhabitants to move
into the Piedmont as refugees, carrying their slaves with them.

The commercial demands of the early settlers embraced hardly
anything beyond salt, ammunition and a little hardware. The
forest and their half-cleared fields furnished meat and bread;
workers in the households provided rude furniture and homespun;
and luxuries, except home-made liquors, were unknown.
But the time soon came when zealous industry yielded more grain
and cattle than each family needed for its own supply. The surplus
required a market, which the seaboard was glad to furnish.
The road and river traffic increased, and the procurement of miscellaneous
goods from the ports removed the need of extreme diversity
in each family's work. This freeing of energy led in
turn to a search for more profitable market crops. Flax and
hemp were tried, and tobacco with some success. Several new
villages were founded, indeed, on the upper courses of the rivers
to serve as stations for the inspection and shipment of tobacco;
but their budding hopes of prosperity from that staple were
promptly blighted. The product was of inferior grade, the price
was low, and the cost of freightage high. The export from
Charleston rose from 2680 hogsheads in 1784 to 9646 in 1799,
but rapidly declined thereafter. Tobacco, never more than a

makeshift staple, was gladly abandoned for cotton at the first
opportunity.[11]

At the time of the federal census of 1790 there were in the
main group of upland counties of South Carolina, comprised then
in the two "districts" of Camden and Ninety-six, a total of 91,704
white inhabitants, divided into 15,652 families. Of these 3787
held slaves to the number of 19,934—an average of 5 1/4 slaves
in each holding. No more than five of these parcels comprised
as many as one hundred slaves each, and only 156 masters, about
four per cent, of the whole, had as many as twenty each. These
larger holdings, along with the 335 other parcels ranging from
ten to nineteen slaves each, were of course grouped mainly in the
river counties in the lower part of the Piedmont, while the smallest
holdings were scattered far and wide. That is to say, there
was already discoverable a tendency toward a plantation régime
in the localities most accessible to market, while among the farmers
about one in four had one or more slaves to aid in the family's
work. The Georgia Piedmont, for which the returns of the
early censuses have been lost, probably had a somewhat smaller
proportion of slaves by reason of its closer proximity to the Indian
frontier.

A sprinkling of slaves was enough to whet the community's appetite
for opportunities to employ them with effect and to buy
more slaves with the proceeds. It is said that in 1792 some two
or three million pounds of short-staple cotton was gathered in
the Piedmont,[12] perhaps in anticipation of a practicable gin, and
that the state of Georgia had appointed a commission to promote
the desired invention.[13] It is certain that many of the citizens
were discussing the problem when in the spring of 1793 young
Eli Whitney, after graduating at Yale College, left his home in
Massachusetts intending to teach school in the South. While
making a visit at the home of General Greene's widow, near Savannah,
he listened to a conversation on the subject by visitors

from upland Georgia, and he was urged by Phineas Miller, the
manager of the Greene estate, to apply his Yankee ingenuity to
the solution. When Miller offered to bear the expenses of the
project, Whitney set to work, and within ten days made a model
which met the essential requirements. This comprised a box
with a slatted side against which a wooden cylinder studded with
wire points was made to play. When seed cotton was fed into
the box and the cylinder was revolved, the sharp wires passing
between the slats would engage the lint and pull it through as they
passed out in the further revolution of the cylinder. The seed,
which were too large to pass through the grating, would stay
within the hopper until virtually all the wool was torn off, whereupon
they would fall through a crevice on the further side. The
minor problem which now remained of freeing the cylinder's
teeth from their congestion of lint found a solution in Mrs.
Greene's stroke with a hearth-broom. Whitney, seizing the
principle, equipped his machine with a second cylinder studded
with brushes, set parallel to the first but revolving in an opposite
direction and at a greater speed. This would sweep the teeth
clean as fast as they emerged lint-laden from the hopper. Thus
was the famous cotton-gin devised.[14]

Miller, who now married Mrs. Greene, promptly entered into
partnership with Whitney not only to manufacture gins but also
to monopolize the business of operating them, charging one-third
of the cotton as toll. They even ventured into the buying and
selling of the staple on a large scale. Miller wrote Whitney in
1797, for example, that he was trying to raise money for the purchase
of thirty or forty thousand pounds of seed cotton at the
prevailing price of three cents, and was projecting a trade in the
lint to far-off Tennessee.[15] By this time the partners had as
many as thirty gins in operation at various points in Georgia;
but misfortune had already begun to pursue them. Their shop
on the Greene plantation had been forced by a mob even before
their patent was procured in 1793, and Jesse Bull, Charles M.

Lin and Edward Lyons, collaborating near Wrightsboro, soon
put forth an improved gin in which saw-toothed iron discs replaced
the wire points of the Whitney model.[16] Whitney had
now returned to New Haven to establish a gin factory, and Miller
wrote him in 1794 urging prompt shipments and saying:
"The people of the country are running mad for them, and much
can be said to justify their importunity. When the present crop
is harvested there will be a real property of at least fifty thousand
dollars lying useless unless we can enable the holders to bring it
to market." But an epidemic prostrated Whitney's workmen
that year, and a fire destroyed his factory in 1795. Meanwhile
rival machines were appearing in the market, and Whitney and
Miller were beginning their long involvement in lawsuits. Their
overreaching policy of monopolizing the operation of their gins
turned public sentiment against them and inclined the juries,
particularly in Georgia, to decide in favor of their opponents.
Not until 1807, when their patent was on the point of expiring
did they procure a vindication in the Georgia courts. Meanwhile
a grant of $50,000 from the legislature of South Carolina
to extinguish the patent right in that state, and smaller grants
from North Carolina and Tennessee did little more than counterbalance
expenses.[17] A petition which Whitney presented to Congress
in 1812 for a renewal of his expired patent was denied,
and Whitney turned his talents to the manufacture of muskets.

In Georgia the contest of lawyers in the courts was paralleled
by a battle of advertisers in the newspapers. Thomas Spaulding
offered to supply Joseph Eve's gins from the Bahama Islands at
fifty guineas each;[18] and Eve himself shortly immigrated to Augusta
to contend for his patent rights on roller-gins, for some of
his workmen had changed his model in such a way as to increase
the speed, and had put their rival gins upon the market.[19] Among
these may have been John Currie, who offered exclusive county
rights at $100 each for the making, using and vending of his

type of gins,[20] also William Longstreet of Augusta who offered
to sell gins of his own devising at $150 each,[21] and Robert Watkins
of the short-lived town of Petersburg, Georgia, who denounced
Longstreet as an infringer of his patent and advertised
local non-exclusive rights for making and using his own style of
gins at the bargain rate of sixty dollars.[22] All of these were described
as roller gins; but all were warranted to gin upland as
well as sea-island cotton.[23] By the year 1800 Miller and Whitney
had also adopted the practice of selling licenses in Georgia, as is
indicated by an advertisement from their agent at Augusta.
Meanwhile ginners were calling for negro boys and girls ten or
twelve years old on hire to help at the machines;[24] and were offering
to gin for a toll of one-fifth of the cotton.[25] As years
passed the rates were still further lowered. At Augusta in 1809,
for example, cotton was ginned and packed in square bales of
350 pounds at a cost of $1 .50 per hundredweight.[26]

The upland people of Georgia and the two Carolinas made
prompt response to the new opportunity. By 1800 even Tennessee
had joined the movement, and a gin of such excellence was
erected near Nashville that the proprietors exacted fees from visitors
wishing to view it;[27] and by 1802 not only were consignments
being shipped to New Orleans for the European market,
but part of the crop was beginning to be peddled in wagons to
Kentucky and in pole-boats on the Ohio as far as Pittsburg, for
the domestic making of homespun.[28] In 1805 John Baird advertised
at Nashville that, having received a commission from
correspondents at Baltimore, he was ready to buy as much as
one hundred thousand pounds of lint at fifteen cents a
pound.[29] In the settlements about Vicksburg in the Mississippi
Territory, cotton was not only the staple product by 1809, but was

also for the time being the medium of exchange, while in Arkansas
the squatters were debarred from the new venture only by the
poverty which precluded them from getting gins.[30] In Virginia
also, in such of the southerly counties as had summers long
enough for the crop to ripen in moderate security, cotton growing
became popular. But for the time being these were merely an
out-lying fringe of cotton's principality. The great rush to cotton
growing prior to the war of 1812 occurred in the Carolina-Georgia
Piedmont, with its trend of intensity soon pointing
south-westward.

A shrewd contemporary observer found special reason to rejoice
that the new staple required no large capital and involved
no exposure to disease. Rice and indigo, said he, had offered
the poorer whites, except the few employed as overseers, no
livelihood "without the degradation of working with slaves"; but
cotton, stimulating and elevating these people into the rank of
substantial farmers, tended "to fill the country with an independent
industrious yeomanry."[31] True as this was, it did not mean
that producers on a plantation scale were at a disadvantage.
Settlers of every type, in fact, adopted the crop as rapidly as
they could get seed and ginning facilities, and newcomers poured
in apace to share the prosperity.

The exports mounted swiftly, but the world's market readily
absorbed them at rising prices until 1801 when the short-staple
output was about forty million pounds and the price at the ports
about forty-four cents a pound. A trade in slaves promptly
arose to meet the eager demand for labor; and migrants coming
from the northward and the rice coast brought additional slaves
in their train. General Wade Hampton was the first conspicuous
one of these. With the masterful resolution which always
characterized him, he carried his great gang from the seaboard
to the neighborhood of Columbia and there in 1799 raised six
hundred of the relatively light weight bales of that day on as

many acres.[32] His crop was reckoned to have a value of some
ninety thousand dollars.[33]

The general run of the upland cultivators, however, continued
as always to operate on a minor scale; and the high cost of transportation
caused them generally to continue producing miscellaneous
goods to meet their domestic needs. The diversified
régime is pictured in Michaux's description of a North Carolina
plantation in 1802: "In eight hundred acres of which it is composed,
a hundred and fifty are cultivated in cotton, Indian corn,
wheat and oats, and dunged annually, which is a great degree of
perfection in the present state of agriculture in this part of the
country. Independent of this [the proprietor] has built in his
yard several machines that the same current of water puts in
motion; they consist of a corn mill, a saw mill, another to separate
the cotton seeds, a tan-house, a tan-mill, a distillery to make
peach brandy, and a small forge where the inhabitants of the
country go to have their horses shod. Seven or eight negro
slaves are employed in the different departments, some of which
are only occupied at certain periods of the year. Their wives
are employed under the direction of the mistress in manufacturing
cotton and linen for the use of the family."[34]

The speed of the change to a general slaveholding régime in
the uplands may easily be exaggerated. In those counties of
South Carolina which lay wholly within the Piedmont the fifteen
thousand slaves on hand in 1790 formed slightly less than one-fifth
of the gross population there. By 1800 the number of
slaves increased by seventy per cent., and formed nearly one-fourth
of the gross; in the following decade they increased by
ninety per cent., until they comprised one-third of the whole;
from 1810 to 1820 their number grew at the smaller rate of fifty
per cent. and reached two-fifths of the whole; and by 1830, with
a further increase of forty per cent., the number of slaves almost
overtook that of the whites. The slaves were then counted
at 101,982, the whites at 115,318, and the free negroes at 2,115.

In Georgia the slave proportion grew more rapidly than this because
it was much smaller at the outset; in North Carolina, on
the other hand, the rise was less marked because cotton never
throve there so greatly.

In its industrial requirements cotton was much closer, to tobacco
than to rice or sugar. There was no vital need for large
units of production. On soils of the same quality the farmer
with a single plow, if his family did the hoeing and picking,
was on a similar footing with the greatest planter as to the output
per hand, and in similar case as to cost of production per bale.
The scale of cotton-belt slaveholdings rose not because free labor
was unsuited to the industry but because slaveholders from the
outside moved in to share the opportunity and because every
prospering non-slaveholder and small slaveholder was eager to
enlarge his personal scale of operations. Those who could save
generally bought slaves with their savings; those who could not,
generally continued to raise cotton nevertheless.

The gross cotton output, in which the upland crop greatly and
increasingly outweighed that of the sea-island staple, rapidly advanced
from about forty-eight million pounds in 1801 to about
eighty million in 1806; then it was kept stationary by the embargo
and the war of 1812, until the return of peace and open
trade sent it up by leaps and bounds again. The price dropped
abruptly from an average of forty-four cents in the New York
market in 1801 to nineteen cents in 1802, but there was no further
decline until the beginning of the war with Great
Britain.[35]

Cotton's absorption of the people's energies already tended to
become excessive. In 1790 South Carolina had sent abroad a
surplus of corn from the back country measuring well over a
hundred thousand bushels. But by 1804 corn brought in brigs
was being advertised in Savannah to meet the local deficit;[36] and
in the spring of 1807 there seems to have been a dearth of grain
in the Piedmont itself. At that time an editorial in the Augusta
Chronicle ran as follows: "A correspondent would recommend

to the planters of Georgia, now the season is opening, to raise
more corn and less cotton. . . . The dear bought experience of
the present season should teach us to be more provident for the
future."[37] Under the conditions of the time this excess at the
expense of grain was likely to correct itself at once, for men and
their draught animals must eat to work, and in the prevailing
lack of transportation facilities food could not be brought from
a distance at a price within reach. The systematic basis of industry
was the production, whether by planters or farmers, of
such food as was locally needed and such supplies of cloth together
with such other outfit as it was economical to make at
home, and the devotion of all further efforts to the making of
cotton.

Coincident with the rise of cotton culture in the Atlantic states
was that of sugar in the delta lands of southeastern Louisiana.
In this triangular district, whose apex is the junction of the Red
and Mississippi rivers, the country is even more amphibious than
the rice coast. Everywhere in fact the soil is too waterlogged for
tillage except close along the Father of Waters himself and his
present or aforetime outlets. Settlement must, therefore, take the
form of strings of plantations and farms on these elevated
riparian strips, with the homesteads fronting the streams and the
fields stretching a few hundred or at most a few thousand yards
to the rear; and every new establishment required its own levee
against the flood. So long as there were great areas of unrestricted
flood-plain above Vicksburg to impound the freshets and
lower their crests, the levees below required no great height or
strength; but the tasks of reclamation were at best arduous enough
to make rapid expansion depend upon the spur of great expectations.

The original colony of the French, whose descendants called
themselves Creoles, was clustered about the town of New Orleans.
A short distance up stream the river banks in the parishes
of St. Charles and St. John the Baptist were settled at an
early period by German immigrants; thence the settlements were
extended after the middle of the eighteenth century, first by

French, exiles from Acadia, next by Creole planters, and finally
by Anglo-Americans who took their locations mostly above Baton
Rouge. As to the westerly bayous, the initial settlers were in
general Acadian small farmers. Negro slaves were gradually
Introduced into all these districts, though the Creoles, who were
the most vigorous of the Latin elements, were the chief importers
of them. Their numbers at the close of the colonial period
equalled those of the whites, and more than a tenth of them had
been emancipated.

The people in the later eighteenth century were drawing their
livelihoods variously from hunting, fishing, cattle raising and Indian
trading, from the growing of grain and vegetables for sale
to the boatmen and townsmen, and from the production of indigo
on a somewhat narrow margin of profit as the principal export
crop. Attempts at sugar production had been made in 1725 and
again in 1762, but the occurrence of winter frosts before the cane
was fully ripe discouraged the enterprise; and in most years no
more cane was raised than would meet the local demand for
sirup and rum. In the closing decades of the century, however,
worm pests devoured the indigo leaves with such thoroughness
as to make harvesting futile; and thereby the planters were driven
to seek an alternative staple. Projects of cotton were baffled by
the lack of a gin, and recourse was once more had to sugar. A
Spaniard named Solis had built a small mill below New Orleans
in 1791 and was making sugar with indifferent success when, in
1794–1795, Etienne de Boré, a prominent Creole whose estate
lay just above the town, bought a supply of seed cane from
Solis, planted a large field with it, engaged a professional sugar
maker, and installed grinding and boiling apparatus against the
time of harvest. The day set for the test brought a throng of
onlookers whose joy broke, forth at the sight of crystals in the
cooling fluid—for the good fortune of Boré, who received some
$12,000 for his crop of 1796, was an earnest of general prosperity.

Other men of enterprise followed the resort to sugar when opportunity
permitted them to get seed cane, mills and cauldrons.
In spite of a dearth of both capital and labor and in spite of wartime
restrictions on maritime commerce, the sugar estates within

nine years reached the number of eighty-one, a good many of
which were doubtless the property of San Domingan refugees who
were now pouring into the province with whatever slaves and
other movables they had been able to snatch from the black revolution.
Some of these had fled first to Cuba and after a sojourn
there, during which they found the Spanish government oppressive,
removed afresh to Louisiana. As late as 1809 the year's
immigration from the two islands was reported by the mayor of
New Orleans to the governor of Louisiana at 2,731 whites and
3,102 free persons of color, together with 3,226 slaves warranted
as the property of the free immigrants.[38] The volume of the
San Domingan influx from first to last was great enough to
double the French-speaking population. The newcomers settled
mainly in the New Orleans neighborhood, the whites among
them promptly merging themselves with the original Creole population.
By reason of their previous familiarity with sugar culture
they gave additional stimulus to that industry.

Meanwhile the purchase of Louisiana by the United States in
1803 had transformed the political destinies of the community
and considerably changed its economic prospects. After prohibiting
in 1804 the importation into the territory of any slaves
who had been brought from Africa since 1798, Congress passed
a new act in 1805 which, though probably intended to continue
the prohibition, was interpreted by the attorney-general to permit
the inhabitants to bring in any slaves whatever from any
place within the United States.[39] This news was published with
delight by the New Orleans newspapers at the end of February,
1806;[40] and from that time until the end of the following year
their columns bristled with advertisements of slaves from African
cargoes "just arrived from Charleston." Of these the following,
issued by the firm of Kenner and Henderson, June 24, 1806,
is an example: "The subscribers offer for sale 74 prime slaves
of the Fantee nation on board the schooner Reliance, I. Potter

master, from Charleston, now lying opposite this city. The sales
will commence on the 25th. inst. at 9 o'clock A.M., and will continue
from day to day until the whole is sold.[41] Good endorsed
notes will be taken in payment, payable the 1st. of January, 1807.
Also [for sale] the above mentioned schooner Reliance, burthen
about 60 tons, completely fitted for an African voyage."

Upon the prohibition of the African trade at large in 1808, the
slave demand of the sugar parishes was diverted to the Atlantic
plantation states where it served to advertise the Louisiana boom.
Wade Hampton of South Carolina responded in 1811 by carrying
a large force of his slaves to establish a sugar estate of his
own at the head of Bayou Lafourche, and a few others followed
his example. The radical difference of the industrial methods
in sugar from those in the other staples, however, together with
the predominance of the French language, the Catholic religion
and a Creole social régime in the district most favorable for sugar,
made Anglo-Americans chary of the enterprise; and the revival
of cotton prices after 1815 strengthened the tendency of migrating
planters to stay within the cotton latitudes. Many of those
who settled about Baton Rouge and on the Red River with cotton
as their initial concern shifted to sugar at the end of the
'twenties, however, in response to the tariff of 1828 which heightened
sugar prices at a time when the cotton market was depressed.
This was in response, also, to the introduction of ribbon cane
which matured earlier than the previously used Malabar and
Otaheite varieties and could accordingly be grown in a somewhat
higher latitude.

The territorial spread was mainly responsible for the sudden
advance of the number of sugar estates from 308 operating in
1827, estimated as employing 21,000 able-bodied slaves and having
a gross value of $34,000,000, to 691 plantations in 1803,[42] with
some 36,000 working slaves and a gross value of $50,000,000.
At this time the output was at the rate of about 75,000 hogsheads
containing 1,000 pounds of sugar each, together with some forty
or fifty gallons of molasses per hogshead as a by-product Louisiana

was at this time supplying about half of the whole country's
consumption of sugar and bade fair to meet the whole demand
ere long.[43] The reduction of protective tariff rates, coming
simultaneously with a rise of cotton prices, then checked the
spread of the sugar industry, and the substitution of steam engines
for horse power in grinding the cane caused some consolidation
of estates. In 1842 accordingly, when the slaves numbered
50,740 and the sugar crop filled 140,000 hogsheads, the
plantations were but 668.[44] The raising of the tariff anew in
that year increased the plantations to 762 in 1845 and they
reached their maximum number of 1,536 in 1849, when more
than half of their mills were driven by steam[45] and their slaves
numbered probably somewhat more than a hundred thousand of
all ages.[46] Thereafter the recovery of the cotton market front
the severe depression of the early 'forties caused a strong advance
in slave prices which again checked the sugar spread, while
the introduction of vacuum pans and other improvements in apparatus.[47]
promoted further consolidations. The number of esstates
accordingly diminished to 1,298 in 1859, on 987 of which
the mills were steam driven, and on 52 of which the extraction
and evaporation of the sugar was done by one sort or another
of the newly invented devices. The gross number of slaves in
the sugar parishes was nearly doubled between 1830 and 1850,
but in the final ante-bellum decade it advanced only at about the
rate of natural increase.[48] The sugar output advanced to 200,000
hogsheads in 1844 and to 450,000 in 1853. Bad seasons then
reduced it to 74,000 in 1856; and the previous maximum was not
equaled in the remaining ante-bellum years.[49] The liability of
the crop to damage from drought and early frost, and to destruction
from the outpouring of the Mississippi through crevasses
in the levees, explains the fluctuations in the yield. Outside
of Louisiana the industry took no grip except on the Brazos
River in Texas, where in 1858 thirty-seven plantations produced
about six thousand hogsheads.[50]

In Louisiana in the banner year 1853, with perfect weather and
no crevasses, each of some 50,000 able-bodied field hands cultivated,
besides the incidental food crops, about five acres of cane
on the average and produced about nine hogsheads of sugar and
three hundred gallons of molasses per head. On certain specially
favored estates, indeed, the product reached as much as fifteen
hogsheads per hand.[51] In the total of 1407 fully equipped
plantations 103 made less than one hundred hogsheads each, while
forty produced a thousand hogsheads or more. That year's output
however, was nearly twice the size of the average crop in
the period. A dozen or more proprietors owned two or more estates
each, some of which were on the largest scale, while at the
other extreme several dozen farmers who had no mills of their
own sent cane from their few acres to be worked up in the spare
time of some obliging neighbor's mill. In general the bulk of
the crop was made on plantations with cane fields ranging from
rather more than a hundred to somewhat less than a thousand
acres, and with each acre producing in an ordinary year somewhat
more than a hogshead of sugar.

Until about 1850 the sugar district as well as the cotton belt
Was calling for labor from whatever source it might be had; but
Whereas the uplands had work for people of both races and all
conditions, the demand of the delta lands, to which the sugar
crop was confined, was almost wholly for negro slaves. The
only notable increase in the rural white population of the district
came through the fecundity of the small-farming Acadians who
had little to do with sugar culture.