Overview:

Sugar was not the most important crop in the American South, but it defined the history of the Americas. This project investigates the fortunes of the U.S. sugar industry between 1845 and 1917, and aims to analyze four historical problems: the peculiarity of the sugar sector within the slave South; the transition from slavery to freedom; the persistence of the "Old" and the novelty of the "New South"; and the variable impact of plantation ethics on the evolution of southern capitalism. It centers on Louisiana, the last of the New World sugar colonies, which-like its predecessors in the Caribbean-rested its fate on plantation agriculture, slavery, forced labor, and racial oppression. In this key location, free labor replaced slavery, civil war triggered overwhelming economic and social change, and international competition brought the industry to its knees. Utilizing a unique dataset on the annual performance of Louisiana's sugar plantations and other supporting materials, the project provides both micro-level and regional analyses of the American sugar industry, paying particular attention to shifting patterns of production, land ownership, technology, and labor.

From the era of plantation slavery to America's intervention in the First World War, agricultural economists P.A. Champomier and Alcee Bouchereau recorded plantation ownership, crop yields, and detailed information on the technology used on each sugar producing estate in Louisiana. Historians had long known about the annual Champomier and Bouchereau crop returns but the size and unwieldy nature of them prevented any individual from analyzing them in their entirety. These remarkable records provide an unbroken time series of economic and production data with which scholars can examine an entire industry; one, moreover, that underwent the enormous transition from slave to free labor in the mid nineteenth century. These annual records are combined here with decennial census records for five key sugar growing regions, adding further nuance to the portrait drawn from the annual crop data. This project makes these sources publicly available and provides users with the query functions to examine in micro and macro detail one of America's definitive plantation crops, cane sugar.

In short, Documenting Louisiana Sugar permits users to rifle through the hundred thousand data entries that Champomier and Bouchereau filed a century ago and examine the social and economic history of the American South's most industrialized and capital intensive plantation regime. Our databases provide scholars, genealogists, and members of the public with an unparalleled opportunity to examine a plantation regime in exceptional depth. The flexibly arrayed datasets allow us to study plantation life in the Old and the New South, they track persistence and change among the plantation elite and enable us to trace landholding and economic performance among smallholders. The databases additionally enable us to examine the effect of the American Civil War on the sugar industry and assess the impact of slave emancipation on Louisiana's plantation economy. But Louisiana's sugar producing parishes were also unusual; in contrast to the rest of the American South where sharecropping and tenant farming replaced the regimented gang work of plantation slavery, sugar planters in Louisiana preserved their giant plantation holdings and employed large gangs to conduct their labor needs. Although African American were now paid for this work, the prevalence of wage labor and the persistence of work gangs ensured that Louisiana's sugar region evolved in a distinct manner to that of the neighboring cotton South.

For researchers and genealogists, Documenting Louisiana Sugar provides something quite unique. No other public database detailing plantation life in this detail exists. Documenting Louisiana Sugar, however, enables all users to consider the multiple transitions in southern life during the nineteenth century and assess the enduring role of coerced labor in American history. The publications, authored by the project team, delineate these transitions and address several key issues in the history of the Old and New South, notably the maintenance of un and semi-free labor and the nature of plantation mindsets or ideologies from the 1840s-1880s.

Rather than seeing slave emancipation as the watershed event, each essay assesses ideological persistence and examines the impact of plantation ethics on the development of this peculiarly capital-rich agro-industry. The core ideological values of independence and personal mastery, principles inculcated by slaveholding, ultimately shaped the nature of economic and social progress in the sugar country. In business organization, investment, and marketing, for instance, sugar planters demonstrated the cultural dominance of individualism by articulating a relatively narrow definition of economic evolution, one that directed commercial progress toward private investment though away from business collaboration. The planters' fixation with mastering land, labor, and capital, however, did not preclude experimentation with aspects of wage labor under slavery. Slaveholding agrarians were thus relatively well equipped to address the changes wrought by emancipation. Yet in mastering the wage economy, planters additionally sought to combine it with familiar vestiges of plantation rule. In particular, they strove to retain ideological and psychological control over their former slaves through the practice and discourse of market paternalism. White and black Louisianans contested the terms of market paternalism in the 1870s and 1880s, but the dominance of plantation ideology profoundly compromised the meaning and terms of freedom. Through managerial and ideological control, based on coercion and paternalism, planters rtherefore eordered the terms of labor and reaffirmed their class and racial power. To be sure, African Americans challenged, occasionally violently, the edifice of white plantation power and like their enslaved predecessors, they attempted to lay claim to the best wages and negotiate the terms of their work and pay. This ability increased after emancipation, but the balance of power remained with the planter class. It is a depressing story to be sure, but an important counterpoint to the often idealistic image of the plantation in the public imagination.

Articles:

Richard Follett & Rick 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, 2004), 135-156.

Rick Halpern, "'Solving the Labour Problem': Race, Work, and the State in the Sugar Industries of Louisiana and Natal, 1870-1910," Journal of South African Studies 30 (March 2004): 19-40.

Richard Follett, "'Give to the Labor of America, the Market of America': Marketing the Old South's Sugar Crop, 1800-1860," Revista de Indias LXV, 233 (January-April 2005): 117-147.

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.

Richard Follett, Rick Halpern, Alison Bambridge, Alex Lichtenstein, "Documenting the Louisiana Sugar Economy, 1845-1917: An on-line Database Project," Journal of Peasant Studies 35 (November 2008):

Richard Follett, "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, 2010).

Presentations:

"Documenting Louisiana Sugar, 1845-1917: An On-Line Database Project Workshop," Louisiana Historical Association Annual Meeting, Monroe, LA, March 2009.

"Psychologies of Slavery: Plantation Identities and the Problem of Emancipation," Marcus Cunliffe Lecture, University of Sussex, March 2009.

"The Persistence of Paternalism--Planter Ideologies in the Era of Reconstruction," Wiles Colloquium, Rethinking Reconstruction: Race, Labor and Politics after the American Civil War. Queens University, Belfast, Oct 2008.

"The Meaning of Freedom for Emancipation-Era African-Americans," Chasing Freedom Conference, Royal Naval Museum, Portsmouth, Oct 2007.

"Database Design and Southern Plantation Economies," Agricultural History Society Annual Meeting, ISU, Ames, Iowa, Jun 2007.

"Freedom and Unfree Labor: Black Americans under Slavery and Emancipation, 1840-1900," Peking University, Beijing, China, May 2007.

"Documenting Louisiana Sugar: A Database Workshop," Gulf South Historical Association Annual Meeting, Pensacola, Oct 2006.

"Race, Labor, and Tradition, and Change--Louisiana's Sugar Industry," Agricultural History Society Annual Meeting, MIT, Cambridge, Mass., Jun 2006.

"Unfree Labor after emancipation: anomaly or necessity? The case of Louisiana's Sugar Workers," Institute of Historical Research, University of London, Mar 2006.

"Race, Labor, and Technology in the Cane Fields: Documenting the Louisiana Sugar Harvest, 1844-1917," Second International Conference on Technology, Knowledge and Society, Hyderabad, India, Dec 2005.

"Tradition and Modernity: Louisiana's Antebellum Sugar Elite," Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting, Atlanta, Nov 2005.

"Technology and Traditionalism in Louisiana's Cane World, 1840-1890," Social Science History Association, Chicago, Nov 2004.

"Documenting the Louisiana Sugar Harvest, 1844-1917," European Social Science History Association Annual Conference, Berlin, Apr 2004 (delivered in my absence).

"Race, Labor, and Technology in the Cane Fields: Documenting the Louisiana Sugar Harvest, 1844-1917," Society for the History of Technology Annual Meeting, Atlanta, Oct 2003.