Authors: Daniel Rasmussen
As Claiborne ordered the majority of the troops under his command toward Baton Rouge and West Florida, he did not even consider the defenseless state of New Orleans. As far as he was concerned, Spain—and the anarchy in West Florida—posed the main threat to American authority in the territory. Caught up in his expansionist agenda, he did not even notice the unusual beat of the African drums in the marketplace or suspect the threat bubbling up beneath the placid surface of the plantation region outside the city.
FOR IT IS THE SAME WITH THE BLACK AS WITH THE WHITE MAN. ASSEMBLE TOGETHER FOR THE FIRST TIME TWENTY OR FIFTEEN . . . MEN . . . AND WITHIN FORTY-EIGHT HOURS AFTER BEING BROUGHT TOGETHER, THOUGH STRANGERS TO EACH OTHER, THE GREAT MAJORITY WILL PLACE THEIR EYES ON CERTAIN MEN AMONG THEM, FOR THEIR WISDOM, COURAGE, AND VIRTUE, TO WHOM THEY, UNKNOWINGLY TO ONE ANOTHER, DETERMINE TO LOOK UP, AS LEADERS OR CHIEFS, TO CONDUCT, COUNSEL, AND ADVISE THEM.
Louisiana sugar planter John McDonogh
F
orty-one miles northwest of New Orleans, set back a short distance from the Mississippi River, behind a field of clover, stood Manuel Andry’s elegant two-story-high mansion. The house boasted a colonnaded porch and broad galleries that wrapped around the main structure. Large curtains extended from the pillars to defend the house from the heat of the summer sun. The front of the house looked out along manicured gardens and oaks dangling with Spanish moss toward a small ridge, four to six feet high, that ran along the near horizon.
This small ridge was the levee, thirty to forty yards beyond which the wild Mississippi roiled and turned as it flushed downward toward New Orleans. Six to nine feet wide, these levees protected the plantation from flooding, while also providing a convenient footpath for travelers and traders. Docks situated on the river connected the plantation to the river’s transportation systems.
The fields ran from the levee along the river to the swamps, where another levee had been constructed. Property lines extended from the levee back into the dark swamps. Irrigation ditches and paths divided up the fields into gridded rectangles. The Mississippi River fertilized the rich soil mix of clay, sand, and vegetable mold. From this land grew the riches that allowed the rest of this world to be built: the sugar cane that was like white gold.
The planters structured their lands as sugar factories, creating soil and irrigation patterns suitable for the plants to grow and field patterns suitable for the proper supervision of enslaved laborers. Though an uneducated visitor might simply see fields and trees and structures, each indent in the land, each row of the cane, each building was positioned with skill and art to turn this land into a sugar-producing factory. And it was in these strange lands that the planters and the slaves interacted on a daily basis.
As was standard on German Coast sugar plantations, the main plantation house stood by the river, with a road leading back to the sugar house near the back of the plantation. The slave quarters were positioned along the road. The slaves lived in small two-room brick cabins with a central fireplace. Each house held an entire family. The parents slept in the main room, while the children climbed into the attic. The brick residences were drafty and cool. While the plantation owners ate five-course meals, the forty or fifty slaves on each plantation ate stew or jambalaya, just enough to survive and work.
The planters planned every part of their plantations to harness land and labor in the most efficient manner. The very landscape of the plantation functioned to enable and maximize the efficacy of labor. The geometric rows and rectangles of the fields, similar to a military camp, enabled the master to see everything that went on in the plantation. A former slave from the region described this system of control. The overseer, “whether actually in the field or not, had his eyes pretty generally upon us,” wrote Solomon Northup, a free Northerner who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Louisiana. “From the piazza, from behind some adjacent tree, or other concealed point of observation, he was perpetually on the watch.” By keeping constant watch over their slaves, the masters asserted control over their actions.
The land between the river and the swamps was the domain of the planter—the central zone of power and profit. But the master could not watch and manage every daily task and activity. Rather, he depended on slaves to do the watching, the supervision, and the daily direction of labor on the plantation. The system of slavery rested on coercing or bribing a portion of slaves into betraying their compatriots and becoming loyal tools of the planter elite.
Charles Deslondes was one of these slaves. A light-skinned black man, he served as a slave driver, a member of the slave elite. Slave drivers were a notoriously conservative group with a bad reputation as traitors to the slave cause. “It is fair to say that these slaves, intermediary links, who would fasten in some way the chain of servitude to that of despotism and would find a malicious pleasure in overburdening others with work and vexation, combined the baseness of their condition with the insolence of their authority,” wrote the novelist Victor Hugo in a novel about a revolt on a sugar plantation. Drivers were infamous for their roles in whipping other slaves; some were even thought of as “human bloodhounds.” In some cases, drivers would participate in the hunts for fugitive slaves, following the dogs that pursued those who ran away into the swamps.
Charles Deslondes had quickly risen through the ranks, driven by ambition, success, and a light skin tone that made him seem more trustworthy than the many Africans imported into the area. Born on the Deslondes plantation on the German Coast, Charles served as the driver for the Spaniard Manuel Andry, a planter known for his cruelty toward his slaves. As driver, Charles served as Andry’s right-hand man, running the day-to-day operations of the sugar plantation.
This was no easy job, and it required intelligence, strength, and an ability to command and control large numbers of men. The process of cultivating sugar cane is more complicated than most agricultural enterprises. It requires sophisticated organization, time discipline, and strict scheduling. Each stalk of cane bursts with thick, rich juice. Slaves had to grind and boil the chopped cane to obtain this juice—a complex process that required industrial expertise on a level with that of Northern factories. Slaves developed complex skill sets, and they learned to work under military-style discipline.
Charles supervised all of this on behalf of Andry. Charles rang the bell that woke his fellow slaves for work every day. Charles monitored each slave’s performance, whipping or otherwise punishing the lazy and the slackers. He broke in the new African slaves, forcing them to adapt to the rough rhythms of daily work. He carried the keys to all doors—including those behind which unruly slaves were kept. He communicated daily with his master, sharing information, planning the work calendar, and discussing the sugar crop—that great dominant force in the lives of the masters and the slaves. He was the right-hand man of the master, with his feet in the worlds of whites and blacks. Day after day, year after year, he managed the complex rhythms of sugar growing and harvesting, gaining status and better treatment for himself and untold riches for his master.
The process of growing sugar cane started in the cold of January, when the slaves plowed the fields to open up furrows for the year’s seed. By February, the planting was complete. The planters assigned the slaves to tend the crop, weeding and irrigating, and guarding against insects and other dangers. During the hot summer months, they turned their attention to the wide range of other plantation tasks: repairing levees, making bricks, mending roads and fences, growing provisions, gathering wood for fuel, and getting ready for the fall harvest.
This work was nothing, however, compared to the most trying and essential part of the crop cycle: the fall grinding season. During this season, the slaves raced against time to harvest the entire crop before the first frost. Planters delayed the harvest as long as possible because the longer the cane stayed in the ground, the richer and more valuable it became. Once the harvest began, the slaves worked sixteen or more hours per day, seven days a week.
To organize this labor, most planters divided the slaves into three gangs, each led by a slave who would report directly to a driver like Charles. The first gang, made up of the strongest and most powerful young men, used fifteen-inch-long knives to cut the mature eight-foot-tall cane. Sugar cane is essentially a tall grass, with sweet, juicy stalks that can grow as thick as two inches, and as high as fifteen feet. This gang proceeded down the rows of cane, with one slave leading the cutting, one cutting to the left, and the other to the right, depositing the sugar cane in the middle of the row. The second gang was made up mostly of younger slaves and women. These slaves loaded the cane into carts, hauled by mules, and took the cane to the sugar mill. The third gang, highly skilled laborers who knew the intricacies of cane sugar, ran the sugar mill. Working round the clock—feeding wood into the fires, watching the boiling kettles, and moving sugar through the process of granulation and purification—this last gang kept the mill going constantly from mid-October through Christmas and often into January. According to a French official, the system had been pioneered by the planter Jean Noël Destrehan, who “by a wise distribution of hours, doubled the work of forty to fifty workers without overworking any of them.”
Slaves had to deal not only with hard work but also with a difficult natural environment. The heat in the summer months was unrelenting, and the swamps made the environment particularly dangerous. Many slaves fell prey to tropical disease. For much of the year, mosquitoes made being outdoors unbearable. “From June to the middle of October or beginning of November, their swarms are incredible,” architect Benjamin Latrobe wrote in 1819. “The muskitoes are so important a body of enemies that they furnish a considerable part of the conversation of every day and of everybody; they regulate many family arrangements, they prescribe the employment and distribution of time, and most essentially affect the comforts and enjoyments of every individual in the country.” Mosquitoes were not just pests; they were vectors of malaria and other tropical diseases, and they represented one of the greatest challenges to keeping slaves alive long enough to make a profit from their labor. Sugar plantations were deadly places.
Planters like Andry relied on drivers like Charles to listen to their slaves, to understand their problems, and to keep an ear open for discontent. More often than not, drivers fulfilled the function of diminishing tensions between whites and blacks, keeping the machinery of the slave plantation going. The Louisiana slave Solomon Northup recalled the frequency of talk of insurrection in the slave quarters—and his own conservatism. “More than once I have joined in serious consultation, when the subject has been discussed, and there have been times when a word from me would have placed hundreds of my fellow-bondsmen in an attitude of defiance without arms or ammunition, or even with them,” he wrote. “I saw such a step would result in certain defeat, disaster, and death, and always raised my voice against it.” Most drivers, it seemed, used their place on the middle ground to quell, rather than fan, the fires of rage and violence omnipresent in slave society.
They were also responsible for administering the brutally violent punishments that functioned to keep order on the plantation. A sugar plantation was like a military camp, and Charles was the general. The complexity and intensity of sugar farming demanded militaristic management styles. The simple goal of the driver was to turn these subordinate slaves into sugar-producing machines. “The feelings of humanity remain inert when it comes to the slaves,” wrote a traveler passing through in 1803. “The purpose of slavery is only to tie down the blacks so that they work the land like oxes or mules. To insure this result, there exists an organized hierarchy of drivers, chiefs, and overseers, always whips in hand.” Charles carried that whip.
A first punishment for a more minor transgression might be imprisonment. Charles had full authority to chain up or lock away any disobedient or discontented slave. Each plantation had a place to imprison, detain, or chain up recalcitrant slaves. Jean Noël Destrehan, for example, used the small washhouse behind his mansion as a dungeon for recalcitrant slaves.
But the next, and perhaps most common, punishment was the whip. Charles might lick the back of a slow-moving harvester, or take aside a slave who talked back to him. But for the more serious punishments, the whipping became a public demonstration of cruelty and power. One Louisiana overseer described the process:
Three stakes is drove into the ground in a triangular manner, about 6 feet apart. the culprit is told to lie down, (which they will do without a murmur), flat on the belly. the Arms is then extended out, side ways, and each hand tied to a stake hard and fast. The feet is both tied to the third stake, all stretched tight, the overseer, or driver then steps back 7, 8, or ten feet and with a raw hide whip about 7 feet long well plaited, fixed to a handle about 18 inches long, lays on with great force and address across the Buttocks, and if they please to assert themselves, they cut 7 or 8 inches long at every stroke.
This inhuman torture reminded slaves of their inferior position—and their less-than-human status.
For some of the worst and most recalcitrant offenders, the French planters designed torture devices that would constantly remind the offender of his or her actions. Collars, metal masks, and other such devices were far from uncommon. One common device featured a neck collar with inward-pointing spikes that prevented the victim from lying down and resting his or her head.
Behind all of these punishments lay a force greater than the whip or the spiked collar, a force which ultimately provided the backing for the master’s rule on the plantation—death. Violence and the threat of death were the essential elements of the commoditization and enslavement of people. However, death was a card slaveholders were reluctant to play, and slaves understood and knew that reluctance. The corrective forms of discipline were means of organizing labor and maximizing efficiency without recourse to that ultimate form of violence. Violent punishment and slave resistance were in constant dialogue—two sides of the same coin. The planters understood the danger that slave resistance posed to their livelihoods.