“I am sitting in the gallery of a building two hundred and fifty feet long. This gallery was made expressly for the white overseer, and overlooks all that is going on in the main building. There is a sleeping-room in each end of it, and a large open space in the middle which serves as a dining-room; here I am writing. In the opposite end of the building I can see the engine which carries all the machinery; just this side of it are the great rollers that crush the cane, and the apron, or feed-carrier, that carries the cane from the shed outside up to the crushers.
“Just this side of the crushers are four large vats that receive the juice. From these it is carried into two large kettles, where the lime is put in, and the juice is raised to the boiling-point, and then skimmed. From these kettles the juice is transferred by means of a bucket attached to a long pole, to the next kettle, where it is worked to the right consistency for clarifying.
“This done, it is conveyed, by means of a steam-pump, to the filtering room, where it is passed into large vats filled with burnt bones, called bone black, through which it is filtered, and thus freed from all impurities. From these filters it is run off into a large cistern, and pumped up by the same steam-pump into tanks, where, by means of faucets, it is drawn into the sugaring-off pan. In this pan it is heated by means of a coil of pipe that winds round and round till it fills the bottom of the pans and carries the steam which, in from fifteen to twenty minutes, finishes the boiling process. From this pan it is let off into a box car, set on a railroad track which runs up and down between the coolers, which are ranged along each side of this end of the building, like pews in a church.
“The Creoles along the coast have looked with amazement all summer upon our success with free black laborers, and have been obliged to acknowledge that they never saw a more cheerful, industrious set of laborers in all their experience. ‘But wait till sugar-making comes,’ they have said, ‘and then see if you can get off your crop without the old system of compulsion. Your niggers will flare up when you get off your ten-hour system. They are not going to work night and day, and you cannot get off the crop unless they do.’
“White sugar-makers presented themselves, telling us, in all sobriety, ‘Niggers cannot be trusted to make sugar,’ and offering, with great magnanimity, to oversee the matter for five hundred dollars. J—— declined all such friendly offers, and last Monday morning commenced grinding cane. The colored men and women went to work with a will,—no shirking or flinching. The cutters pushed the handlers, the handlers pushed the haulers, and so on, night and day, each gang taking their respective watches, and all moving on with the regularity of clock-work.
“And so the business went on with black engineers, black crushers, black filterers, black sugar-makers,—all black throughout,—but the sugar came out splendid in quantity and quality. Sixty hogsheads of sugar, finished by Saturday night, and things in readiness for the Sabbath’s rest, is acknowledged by old planters to be the largest run ever made in this sugar-house for the first week of the sugar season. So they gape and stare, and wonder that humanity and justice can bring forth more profitable results than the driver’s whip.”
Louisiana has been the great sugar-growing State of the Union. For several years before the war, the annual crop varied from 100,000 to 450,000 hogsheads. In 1864 less than nine thousand hogsheads were produced. In 1865 the crop amounted to between sixteen and seventeen thousand hogsheads, less than was raised in 1860 on four plantations!
Attempts were being made to introduce white laborers into Louisiana. While I was there, one hundred Germans, who had been hired in New York for a sugar plantation, were landed in New Orleans. Within twenty-four hours thirty of them deserted for higher wages; by which trifling circumstance planters, who had hoped to exchange black for white labor, were very much disgusted.
CHAPTER LVIII.
THE BATTLE OF MOBILE BAY.
Leaving New Orleans for Mobile at half-past four o’clock, by the usual route, I reached Lake Ponchartrain by railroad in time to take the steamer and be off at sunset.