The Daily Grind of Slave Labor on
Louisiana’s Sugarcane Plantations

A seemingly endless cycle involving planting, hoeing, weeding, harvesting and grinding occurred on southern Louisiana’s plantations during the 19 century. Slaves often worked in gangs under the direction of drivers, who were typically fellow slaves that supervised work in the fields. Cane was cut by these gangs of slave laborers, who worked in tandem cutting, stacking and then loading cane stalks onto mule-drawn carts. These carts traveled to the cane mill, where the loads of cut cane were brought to be processed.

During the harvesting and processing season in the fall months, work on the sugarcane plantations in southern Louisiana was particularly labor intensive. Mills operated around the clock processing sugarcane. On some plantations slaves worked in eight-hour shifts, called ‘watches,’ and adult slaves worked two such shifts each day during grinding season.

After the cut cane stalks were crushed between rotating steel rollers, processing the extracted juice involved clarification, where bits of pith and other debris were removed. The next stage of processing was the evaporation of excess water through boiling. Cane juice was boiled until it reached the point of crystallization in a series of large, open kettles, often referred to as a “Jamaica train.” Slaves had the dangerous job of working close to the open kettles during the boiling process, and skilled workers were chosen for this work.

Following the development of the steam-heated vacuum pan by Englishman
Edward Howard in 1813, a number of plantations began boiling sugarcane juice in a
vacuum. This new technology had the advantage of being a more controlled method of boiling, where lower temperatures were required and less fliel was needed. Thirty years later in 1843 Norbert Rilileux, a Free Person of Color from New Orleans, developed his superior “double effect” vacuum pan. On the eve of the Civil War, most sugarcane plantations in Louisiana used vacuum pans to produce unrefined crystalized sugar.

Granulated, raw (unrefined) sugar was packed into ‘hogsheads,’ wooden barrels that held roughly 1000 lbs. of granulated sugar. Hogsheads of sugar were transported down the Mississippi River to New Orleans and onto other markets. Much of the sugar produced on Louisiana’s plantations was consumed in such East Coast cities as New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore.

Many of the slave laborers on plantations in the South worked in the fields, either as plough hands, carters, ditchers or woodcutters, among others. A number of slaves, however, were specialized workers. At Evergreen Plantation, Pierre Clidamont Becnel purchased slaves that were skilled workers. Ai 1835 document lists a total of 54 slaves at the plantation. Among those were Terry, described as an “American Long Sawyer,” West, an “excellent blacksmith and engineer,” Joseph, a Creole cooper, Phill, a sugar worker, and Jean, a Creole coachman. Establishing a new plantation required workers with certain capabilities and expertise, and it is likely that each of these slaves was chosen specifically by Becnel to perform the types of work for which they were described.

This was made possible by a grant from the Louisiana Endowment of the Humanities administered through the Cultural Resource Management Program at Southeastern Louisiana University.