A New Orleans friend of mine had recently purchased a fine sugar plantation, twenty-seven miles up the river from the city. He was going up to see how the season’s work was beginning, and I accepted his invitation to spend a day or too looking into the details of sugar culture.

Steaming up the lower Mississippi is about the dreariest form of traveling. Within is the same round of novel-reading, card-playing, eating ill-cooked meals, and swilling bad liquors at the bar, under penalty of offending every chance acquaintance who insists upon extending the hospitalities of the occasion. Without, you catch glimpses, occasionally, of the roofs of old Creole houses peering above the levees. These, and the stretches of reclaimed swamps on either hand, running back to the cypress brakes which invariably shut in the view, constitute the scenery.

But we left New Orleans at nearly sunset, and the night was brilliant with starlight. Word had been sent up the day before of our intended visit. As we approached the plantation, a great fire was seen on the levee, built to guide the pilot in making the landing. Grouped about it were two or three negroes and a couple of white men; the light from the burning logs casting its fantastic shadows over them. The boat’s bow struck the bank, we leaped off and a couple of negroes caught our traveling-bags. The boat rebounded by its own elasticity, the off-wheel gave a backward revolution, the captain shouted, “Good night,” to us from the hurricane-deck, and the vessel was already under headway, again up the stream, as we turned to receive the greetings of the old Creole overseer and the new proprietor’s agent.

From the landing, a wagon-road led across the levee and behind it up the river for a few yards, till we entered an old-fashioned garden, laid out in the stiff Dutch flower-bed style, and stood in front of the “mansion.” It was a fine old country house, built in the French style, with only dining-room, pantry, ice-closets and the like, back of the row of round brick-stuccoed columns below. Stair-cases ascended at the diagonal corners from the pavement to the second story gallery, which encircled the building, and from which glass doors opened into the parlors and bed-chambers. The floors, posts, and in fact nearly all parts of the wood-work were constructed of the best red cypress, and looked as if they might yet last for half-a-dozen generations. The lower story had a tesselated marble pavement; and outside the lower gallery a pavement of brick extended for a yard or two out from the house on all sides. Even with these precautions, the lower story was damp, and to live in it (or to live in the lower story of any house on the coast^[66]) would, in the estimation of the inhabitants, be almost certain death.

“Once it vas very fine house,” said the French overseer, with a shrug of his shoulders; “but des soldats; dey vas so had as you see nevare. Dey pasture deir horses on our flowers and stable dem on dis marble pavement. I am désolée,” he continued, “to have not ze power to entertain you as I should like, but dey took all our liqueurs, and drank our champagnes—sacre—as if dey tought is vas lager beer. Dey broke all our dishes; and Monsieur Paine, he buried ze silver to save it, and found it again nevare.”

Still, the old place disclosed unexpected treasures of claret, which it gladdened the heart of the Creole to see us taste; and the house servants succeeded in making the spacious but half-furnished bed-chambers comparatively comfortable.

Next morning, while the new proprietor was looking into the arrangements made in accordance with his orders, for stocking the place and beginning operations, I busied myself with explorations. From the front gallery, into which the glass-door of my bed-room opened, I looked out upon a broad, brick pavement, running through the garden to the public road which, here, as for hundreds of miles up the Mississippi, everywhere, skirts the levee. In the middle of it was a brick column, three or four feet high, serving as a pedestal for a leaden sun-dial, which had formerly been set with accurate care in mortar on its top. During the military occupation, the soldiers had amused themselves by firing from the gallery at this dial, and one too good shot had struck it fairly in the center leaving its deep indentation, and breaking the whole dial loose from its bed in the mortar.

The garden had evidently taken much of the time and no small share of the profits of the former proprietor. Even yet, notwithstanding the destruction by the troops and the neglect during the war, many of the rarest shrubs and flowers were in luxuriant growth. It was still January. I had left Washington in the midst of a heavy snow storm, and the telegraph brought accounts of continued cold weather; but in this deserted garden we plucked bouquets of rare flowers, growing in the open air, which scarcely a green-house in Washington could have equalled. Fig and banana trees were of course abundant. Oranges had been served at breakfast which had been plucked from the trees last fall; and, in the edge of the garden, we now found others on which the oranges were still hanging in spite of the winter’s frosts. Most of these were wild; but several trees, bearing fruit that after all its exposure was still pleasant to the taste, had escaped the gathering of the soldiers and the after-gleaning of the negroes. China trees, filled with mocking birds, formed a short avenue in front of the house; and in a corner of the garden was one of the rarities, which the Creole overseer delighted to exhibit, a cork tree, already quite large, which in a few years might furnish all the corks they wanted for bottling their own wines from the wood. The green-house was in utter ruin. The soldiers had amused themselves by shattering its glass-roof; and the shelves, on which the potted plants had been placed, were rotted away and broken down.

“Jim,” the sugar-maker, called me from the flowers to see the sugar-house. He was a middle-aged, shrewd looking negro, who had been sold here by one of the Virginia patriarchs at a very early day. He could remember learning a trade in Virginia; “but I’s been heah so long I dunno much ’bout de ole place. I’d like to go back to see it, for pears like it was mity fine place to live; but I wouldn’t stay dare now. Dis is my home.”

To the right of the house stood the “quarters,” a double row of dilapidated frame cabins, each containing two rooms, with a porch in front, covered by the projecting roof. Each room was supposed to furnish accommodations for five adults. If they were all in one family, very well; if not, two or three families must go together. For these five persons there was, in the single room, space for a couple of bedsteads, a little table, two or three chests, and as many chairs. Each had a fire-place, a door and a hole in the wall opposite, closed by a wooden shutter, which they called a window. “These quarters ought to be whitewashed,” said the proprietor. “Wait till the niggers all get back and they’ll do it themselves, and we’ll save that expense,” replied the agent.

Beyond the quarters, in a large field well-set in Bermuda grass, stood the sugar-house. Everything about it seemed damp and soggy. We approached it over ground yielding to our tread from the moisture, and ascended to the door by a wooden stair case, covered with a slimy growth of fungus, and half-rotted away.

Within stood a fine engine, which “Jim” exhibited with pride. “Eberything dar, sah. Dem brasses you see gone, I done locked up to keep de niggers from stealing ’em. De pipes and de valves, all locked up safe, sah. I ken set her a runnin in a day, sah, and you don’t need to send to Orleans once for nuffin.” Near the engine were the boiling pans, and in a long “L” of the building was the wide trough into which the fluid was run off for cooling and crystallization. Everything here seemed scrupulously neat, although the fact that the negroes had worked the place by themselves, last year would not generally have been taken as a guaranty for cleanliness.

“Jim” was greatly disgusted with his last year’s effort to make the niggers work. “I sposed, now we’s all free, dey’d jump into de work keen, to make all de money dey could. But it was juss no work at all. I got so ’scouraged sometimes I’s ready to gib it all up, and tell ’em to starve if dey wanted to. Why, sah, after I’d ring de bell in the mornin’ ’twould be hour, or hour ’n half ’fore a man’d get into de fiel’. Den dey’d work along maybe an hour, maybe half hour more; and den dey’d say Jim, aint it time to quit? I say, ‘No, you lazy dog, taint ten o’clock,’ Den dey’d say, ‘Jim, I’s mighty tired,’ and next thing I’d know, dey’d be pokin’ off to de quarters. When I scold and swear at ’em, dey say, ‘we’s free now, and we’s not work unless we pleases.’ Sah, I got so sick of deir wuflessness dat I sometimes almost wished it was old slavery times again.”

“How did they live, Jim? If they wouldn’t work, I don’t see what they had to live on.”

“Well, the trufe is, sah, dey stole eberyting dey could lay deir han’s on.”

It ought to be added that the negroes all complained that “Jim” was a hard task-master, and that he was “harder on them than white folks.” His old master, Mr. Payne, on the other hand, pronounced him invaluable; said he was one of the most intelligent and skillful slaves he ever saw, and declared his determination, if he ever went to planting again, to hunt “Jim” up and hire him.

There were not more than half-a-dozen negro families on the plantation at the time of our visit. The agent of the new proprietor had been attempting, through the past week, to hire them, but they had refused to enter into any contract which he thought admissible. They all wanted special privileges of one sort or another. Many wanted considerable tracts of land set off to them on the plantation, which they could cultivate on their own account. Some thought they ought to have two or three acres to plant in cotton. Nearly all wanted to grow corn. “Let ’em have an acre of either,” said the agent (and the Creole overseer fully agreed with him), “and they would pick more than you would get from any half-dozen acres you’ve got. Give them the slightest opening for growing the same crops you grow, and you’ve opened the flood-gates of unlimited stealing. You have no sort of check on them.”

One fellow wanted permission to keep on the plantation two horses, a mule, and a cow, besides hogs, chickens, and goats innumerable. “How could he feed them?” innocently asked the proprietor. “Feed them? Out of your corn-crib, of course. You couldn’t put a lock on it he wouldn’t pick the first dark night. He would steal the corn you fed your mules with at dinner, out of the very trough from which the mules were eating it. Haven’t I caught them at such tricks, again and again?”

The agent had accordingly set his face as a flint against all these special claims preferred by the negroes. He would give them the wages then customary along the Coast (ten dollars a month, with clothing, lodging, food and medical attendance), would give them Saturday afternoons and Sundays for themselves, would give plenty of land for gardens, and mules and plows to cultivate it; and that was all he would give. The negroes might enter into contract on these terms or leave. They didn’t want to do either. They wouldn’t contract, but they made themselves comfortable in the houses and evidently considered themselves at home, contract or no contract. Thereupon the agent brought matters to a crisis by telling them that he gave them till Saturday morning to contract, if by that time they had made no engagement they must shift for themselves. Saturday morning came; and not more than half-a-dozen besides the two drivers had signed the contract.

“They thought, by standing out, they could force me to terms about their mules and cotton. But I soon undeceived them. I rigged up the carts, packed their traps into them, and sent them bag and baggage off the place. They went down to a sort of free-nigger settlement a few miles below. Now they’re sneaking back every day and asking leave to enter into contract.”^[67]

The Creole thought they worked so badly last year that it didn’t make much difference whether they returned or not.

“But dey’ll do better, sah, wid you. Dey wants a white man to gib orders. Dey wouldn’t min’ me las’ yeah, ’cause I’s nigger like demselves. I tink dey do better dis yeah.” Such was “Jim’s” view of the case.

“Jim” spoke English—such as it was. This he owed to his Virginia birth. All the rest of the negroes spoke French exclusively. They had been quite as successful in forming an unintelligible patois from that, as other plantation negroes have been with their English. Some of our party spoke French fluently, but they could make nothing out of the talk of the negroes. The Creole overseer gave his laughing explanation. “It’s nigger French, zey speak, sare; of course you can not it understand.” And with that he broke into a volley of gibberish, the words coming like chain-shot, in couples, to which the negroes at once responded. “Jim,” in addressing them, made use of the same mongrel French; he had learned it from his long residence among them. Now and then one could catch a pure French word; and the general sound was similar to the French; but it had been so distorted, the overseer told us, as to constitute a distinct dialect, which must be learned by all who undertake the control of the Coast negroes.

Exaggerate four-fold the peremptory style in which military officers generally think it necessary to deliver their commands, and project the words with a rapidity which nobody but a Frenchman could conceive, and you have the manner in which our Creole constantly spoke to the negroes. The words came from his lips with a rasping, spasmodic sort of energy, that really seemed to infuse a little life in the slow-motioned creatures; though I observed that most of the energy inspired by his tones seemed to be expended in the quaint patois of the replies. Directions to hitch up an enormous, broad-tired, inconceivably clumsy sugar cart, required an amount of shouting that would have sufficed for a western barn-raising; and I feel sure that fully an hour was spent by two able-bodied negroes in the process of harnessing the mules to the shafts, tandem-fashion. A similar storm of “nigger French,” brought us, in the process of time, a number of horses sufficient for the party; and, under the guidance of an old head-negro, pleasantly named “Voisin,” we set out for a ride over the plantation.

Voisin was the plow-driver. Over every foot of the twelve hundred acres he had maneuvered his gang of plows, as a military officer would maneuver his battalion, and he was ready to pour into the ear of the proprietor all the traditions of the plantation; that this land was too wet for cane and ought to be left in grass; that all on this side of the leading ditch had been used for corn from time immemorial; that the finest cane always grew on this side of that levee by the cross-ditch; that that back-land was too stiff for anything, and he’d better not attempt to plow it if he didn’t want to kill off his mules; that cotton ought not to be grown at all; but, if it must be, this land nearest the front levee was the best for it; and so on interminably.

When we rode out of the inclosures around the quarters, sugar-house, and stables, we were in the one field which comprised the entire plantation. From the levee by the river bank it stretched in an unbroken flatness, gradually descending, back to the cypress swamp that bounded the arable land in the rear, and shut in the view. The field was cut by two deep leading ditches, one running down the middle to the swamp, and the other leading from side to side of the place, intersecting the first about midway between the river and the swamp. Into each of these smaller ones emptied, at distances of thirty to sixty yards, and the entire field was thus intersected by a network of open ditches; the water from all of which flowed back to the swamp until it met the obstruction of the back levee.

To understand the object of this, and the nature of the difficulties which the Louisiana sugar-planter has encountered, it must be remembered that all this land bordering on the river was originally a swamp. Successive overflows naturally deposited the most of their sediment near the river banks. Thus the land became highest at the river, and the drainage, instead of inclining in the natural direction, went backward to the swamp. Thenceforward there was a double trouble confronting the adventurous planter who sought to utilize this amazingly fertile soil. The river in his front was dangerous; but the swamp behind him was worse. His levees might protect him from the Mississippi itself; but crevasses, hundreds of miles above, might overflow the back country, or the back streams themselves might do it; and presently, while he was watching the flood at his door, the water from the swamp behind him was creeping up over his land and ruining his prospects for the year.

There was no resource save to fight the water on all sides. Each plantation was therefore protected by front and back levees, and resembled in shape a huge dish; which, but for the energy of its owners, would become a lake. A fresh difficulty was then encountered. The land, being below the surface of the water on both sides of it, was kept constantly soaked by infiltration. Ditches might drain this water back to the swamp, but here the levee met them. A pumping machine thus became necessary; and during the wet season the water was to be fought with levees, before and behind, and that which filtered in was to be pumped out into the swamp.

We found the back levee cut open, and water from the ditches was flowing out through the gap. Voisin explained that as soon as the water in the swamp began to rise, the levee must be closed again, and the pump put in operation.

To Northern eyes, the “swamp” began far enough inside of the swamp levee. Voisin assured us that in old times there was no better land on the plantation; but, riding along the beaten road by the main ditch, over which all the wood used for the engine and at the house was drawn, and along which the cattle were daily driven, our horses sank over their knees in the alluvial mud. On either hand the water stood in small pools over the entire surface of the “back cuts.” A New Englander would have declared it fit for nothing but cranberries. Some of the planters insisted that such land was then in the very best condition for plowing—“it turned over so much easier when it had water standing on it!”

The supply of cypress in the swamp was inexhaustible. Nothing prevented it from being far more profitable than the sugar grown under such difficulties, except the expense of hauling it out, to the river. Sugar-planters generally make little or no account of their swamp land. They reckon their “leveed” land, fronting on the river, and give little attention to the depth back into the swamp the surveyors may have given them. Probably not half of them have ever seen their back lines.

This plantation, only twenty-seven miles from New Orleans, considered among the best on the west side of the river, with its sugar-house and the expensive machinery attached in a condition to be used, with residence comparatively uninjured, quarters for all the hands, good levees, and some cane, sold at auction on terms which represented a cash investment of about fifty-five thousand dollars! I know cotton plantations, further up, which rented, acre for acre, for over two-thirds of this sum! The title was perfect, and there was nothing to prevent the plantation from making as high an average yield as it ever did, as soon as the cane should be reset, unless the free labor system should fail. Other places along the river have since sold at higher figures; but I believe that any one who is willing to devote two or three months to watching for an opportunity, may make equally favorable purchases any time within the next two years.

Extravagant living left nearly every planter enormously in debt when the war came. Since then their affairs have gone from bad to worse. Many are now making desperate efforts to retrieve themselves, and some will succeed. The sheriff will close out the rest, and bargains await the watchful capitalists. “By gare,” said the Creole, “le proprietuer of zis place, before Monsieur Payne, lived as you vould nevare beleive. He had over seexty slaves for house servants. Seex carriages stood tere in ze carriage house, for ze use of ze family, beside buggies, saddles horses, et tout cela! He had four demoiselles; every one moost have tree slaves to vait on her! And ze dinnares, and ze trips to New Orleans! Den, sare, let me explain to you; ze jardin himself cost ovare seexty tousand dollare.”

This family, of course, had gone to the insolvent’s court. The next proprietor was caught by the war; and now Mr. A. C. Graham was trying to revive the neglected culture. He had bought a quantity of plant-cane from the Dick Taylor place, lying immediately below; had secured mules, by sharp bargaining, at a hundred and sixty-two dollars a head; and, if he could only be sure of laborers, had a fair prospect for a hundred and fifty hogsheads of sugar and twice as many barrels of molasses in the fall. Some cotton had to be planted, although there was small hope, in this heavy sugar soil, of its doing much more than paying expenses; and corn and hay enough would be grown to make the plantation self-sustaining for next year’s operations.

We rode over to the Dick Taylor place to look at the plant-cane. This was cane which had been cut from last year’s crop, and instead of being ground for sugar, had been buried in “mattresses” for planting in the spring.^[68] We could see only a confused mass of dry blades, not unlike the blades of Indian corn. Voisin dug into the mattress and brought out fine large canes, fresh and moist. They had been buried thus, overlapping each other, with the ends of each layer in the ground, and had been preserved through the winter without injury from the frost.

Plows were already starting to prepare the land. As soon as possible, these canes would be laid in the furrows, two or three side by side, across the whole field, and buried with the fresh earth. When the young canes are sprouted up from the joints, they would be seen stretching across the plantation like rows of Indian corn. Then would begin the battle with the grass and weeds, to last without a day’s intermission until June or July. In mid-summer the cane would be “laid by,” and a three month’s interval would follow, corresponding to the winter’s leisure of the Northern farmer. During this time cypress would be cut and hauled for the engines, the fences would be repaired, and every preparation for sugar-boiling made in advance. Meantime the luxuriant cane, arching from row to row, would by its own shadow keep down all weeds and leave the furrows clean to act as ditches in carrying off the flooding summer rains.

Early in October an army of cutters would attack the field, armed with a broad-hooked knife, with which they would sever each stalk, close to the ground, strip it of its blades, and cut off its top at the uppermost joint. Some day Yankees will invent machinery to do all this; but now, the unequal length of the stalks and the necessity for cutting each one at the upper joint to exclude the injurious juices of the top, are supposed to require this slow labor-consuming process. Great “broad-tread” carts, with a stout mule hitched in the shafts and a pair of lighter ones in front, are used to haul the cane to the mill. There the fires never go out, and the mill never stops, day or night, for the ensuing three months. The negroes are arranged in sections to relieve each other; and every man on the plantation is expected to do eighteen hours of work daily. Abundant rations of whisky, presents of tobacco, free draughts of the sweet syrup, and extra pay, carry them through. The expressed juice is boiled in vacuum-pans till nearly all the water is driven off; then, when it is run out to cool, the sugar crystallizes, (with the aid of lime and bone-black to purify it) and the residuum is drawn off in the shape of crude molasses.

The machinery for all this is expensive. Sugar-mills, with all the appurtenances, cost from twenty up to one hundred and fifty thousand dollars; and the more costly ones are by far the more economical. This statement at once discloses the great difficulty of adapting the free-labor system to the culture of sugar. A freeman naturally looks forward to the time when he can own the soil he cultivates. But for a negro, or for a Northern farmer without capital, to attempt the sugar culture on a small scale, would, as matters now stand, be utter folly. Perhaps, in time, we shall have large sugar-mills erected here as flour-mills are at the North; every man’s growth of cane to be manufactured for a fixed toll, or sold to the miller at current rates; but till then, the growth of cane for sugar must be left to men of capital.

Two hundred miles further north, the owners of these amazingly fertile swamps may yet find more formidable rivals than the Cubans. Every cotton-planter requires large quantities of molasses for the use of his negroes. Yankees will not grow cotton long till they begin growing the sorghum to manufacture their own molasses. And Yankees will not continue many years manufacturing the base of sugar, without forcing the secret of sorghum, and finding how to crystallize its syrup into sugar. Already the negroes, who have once tasted the sorghum molasses, insist on being furnished with it in preference to that made from cane. Demand will not long exist here, among the new elements of this changing population, without creating a supply.

Meantime the sugar-culture along the coast must, at any rate, revive slowly. Even if the capital were all ready to be invested, so complete has been the neglect of the plantations, that a full crop can not be made short of three to four years. The crop of 1861 was four hundred and forty-seven thousand nine hundred and fifty-eight hogsheads, from twenty-four parishes of Louisiana. In 1865 it had dwindled to six thousand seven hundred fifty-five hogsheads. In 1861 there were one thousand two hundred and ninety-one sugar-plantations under cultivation in these parishes. There are now one hundred and seventy-five. These figures tell their own story.

On the Payne plantation, the negroes about the quarters were pounding out rice in a little wooden mortar. Large stacks of rice stood near the stables. A little mill was pointed out as having been formerly used to hull rice sufficient for the use of the hands; and back toward the swamp, we were told, were excellent rice lands; on which, in old times, fine crops had always been made.

While the place was being slowly reset in cane, it would doubtless be profitable to grow rice; but the negroes were unwilling to undertake it. Here, as in the rice lands of South Carolina and Georgia, there was every prospect that free labor would prove absolutely fatal to the culture. Men would not work in rice swamps except under compulsion. There is a species of rice, which grows like wheat, on uplands; but it only yields about one-fourth of a crop. On good rice lands the yield per acre varies from thirty-five to fifty bushels. Exceptional crops have run up as high as ninety bushels. With good cultivation on good soil, one might reasonably hope for an average of forty bushels, or eighteen hundred pounds per acre—worth (with rice ranging from nine and a half to twelve cents per pound) about one hundred and eighty dollars. This is much more lucrative than cotton at twenty-five cents a pound; nearly as much so as cotton at fifty cents.

It is a golden opening—but the free laborers decline to step into it. Five years ago the rice crop of the United States was about a quarter of a million casks. Last year it was seven thousand!