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.