It was estimated that there were at least fifty thousand Northern men in Louisiana. Some were in the lumber business, which had been stimulated to great activity throughout the South. Many were working cotton plantations with every prospect of success; a few had purchased, others were paying a fixed rent, while some were furnishing capital to be refunded by the crop, of which they were to have a third or a half.
Occasionally I heard of one who had taken a sugar plantation. Mr. ——, a merchant of New York, told me he had for two years been working the Buena Vista plantation, in St. James Parish. He employed an agent, and visited the place himself once a year. There were twelve hundred acres under cultivation, for which he paid an annual rent of sixteen thousand dollars. There was one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of machinery on the plantation. He employed sixty freedmen. They worked faithfully and well, but needed careful management. During the past year but one had deserted, while two had been discharged. They received one third of their wages monthly, and the remainder at the end of the year. “If they were paid in full as fast as their work was done, when sugar-making season comes they would be apt to quit, the labor is so hard,—though we pay them then fifty cents a night extra.”
I inquired concerning profits. “The first year we lost money. This year we have made it up, and more. Next year we shall be in full blast.”
It takes three years from the start to get a sugar plantation going; and in two years, if neglected, the cane will run out. This is the case in Louisiana,—although I was told that in the West Indies some kinds of cane would yield twenty or thirty successive crops, without replanting. In some parts of the State, where the soil is too dry, or the climate too cold for the most profitable cultivation, it requires replanting every year for the subsequent year’s crop.
The majority of the plantations in Lower Louisiana, said to be good for little else but sugar and sweet potatoes, were waste and unavailable. St. Mary’s Parish had been almost entirely abandoned. The cane had run out; seed-cane was not to be had; and to recommence the culture an outlay of capital was necessary, from which no such immediate, bountiful returns could be anticipated as from the culture of cotton.
The sugar region and the cotton belt overlap each other. Cane may be cultivated to some extent as far north as 34°, while cotton ranges as far south as 30°, although it can scarcely be considered a safe or profitable crop much below 31°. In 1850 there were in Louisiana 4205 cotton and 1558 sugar plantations. This year cotton is not only king, but a usurper, holding with uncertain tenure much of the special province of sugar.
Good cotton plantations in Louisiana yield a bale (of five hundred pounds) to the acre. The sugar crop varies from five hundred to thirty-five hundred pounds, according to the fitness of the soil, the length of the season, and the mode of culture. A hogshead of eleven hundred and fifty pounds to the acre, is about an average crop.
Five different varieties of cane are used by the planters of Louisiana. The cuttings from which it is propagated are called “seed-cane.” They are cut in September, and laid in “mats,”—a sort of stack adapted to protect them from frost. Cane is usually planted between the months of October and March. Two or three stalks are laid together in prepared rows seven feet apart, and covered by five or six inches of soil. This is called the “mother-cane.” In cold soil it rots, and is eaten by vermin. The first year’s growth is called “plant-cane,” and is ploughed and hoed like corn. On being cut, new stalks spring up from the roots. These subsequent year’s stalks are called rattoons,—a West Indian word, derived from the Spanish retonó, (retoñar, to sprout again,) which was probably imported into Louisiana, together with the Creole cane, by the refugees from St. Domingo, in 1794.
“There’s nothing handsomer,” said my friend Dick P——, the overseer, “than a field of cane on the first of June, high as your head, all green, a thousand acres, waving and shining in the wind.” It is a lively scene when a gang of fifty or sixty negroes, armed with knives, enter such a field in the fall, and the cutting begins.
I was desirous of seeing a sugar-mill in operation, but could hear of none within convenient visiting distance. The scene is thus described in a letter written by a Northern lady whose husband was last year working a Louisiana plantation:—