Sugarcane plantation

“ Cannon, which he will have cleared, grubbed and planted in orange and lemon trees this year.
In ante bellum times, the present Patten plantation was known first as the Gamble, and afterward as the Cofield and Davis plantation, and was the largest and most thoroughly equipped sugar plantation in the State of Florida. The owners worked 200 hands, and had 1,400 acres of sugar-cane in one field. Their sugar-mill and refinery contained all the modern appliances, and, at the commencement of the war, was worth half a million dollars. ”

“ The sugar plantation is no grove, or garden, or orchard. It is not the home of the pride and affections of the planter's family. It is not a coveted, indeed, hardly a desirable residence. Such families as would like to remain on these plantations are driven off for want of neighboring society. Thus the estates, largely abandoned by the families of the planters, suffer the evils of absenteeism, while the owners live in the suburbs of Havana and Matanzas, and in the Fifth Avenue of New York. The slave system loses its patriarchal character. ”

“ A sugar-plantation is doubtless one of the most difficult species of property to manage in a proper manner. The numerous persons employed upon it, their divers avocations, and the continual change of occupation, give to the owner or his manager constant motives for exertion, innumerable opportunities of displaying his activity. A plantation ought to possess within itself all the tradesmen which are required for the proper furtherance of its concerns ”

“ The aspect of the sugar plantation is remarkably fine, and an occasional glimpse of the surrounding hills, bathed in the sunlight, imparts a sublimity that at once arrests the attention, the crags rising in close proximity, and appearing much more precipitous and inaccessible than they are in reality. ”

“ When there is a sudden rise in the prices of sugar, a certain amount of labor in a given time is of more consequence to the owner of a plantation than the price of several slaves; he can well afford to waste a few lives. This is no idle hypothesis—such calculations are gravely and openly made by planters. Hence, it is the slave's prayer that sugars may be cheap. When the negro is old, or feeble from incurable disease, is it his master's interest to feed him well, and clothe him comfortably? ”

“ There are several extensive cotton plantations on the island. The overseer of the plantation on that part of the island where I resided was a Georgian—a man of stern character, and at times cruelly abusive to his slaves. I have often been witness of the abuse of his power. In South Carolina and Georgia, on the low lands, the cultivation is chiefly of rice. The land where it is raised is often inundated, and the labor of preparing it, and raising a crop, is very arduous. Men and women are in the field from earliest dawn to dark—often without hats, and up to their arm-pits in mud and water. ”

“ In days of slavery it required an immense capital to establish a sugar plantation, as well as a large annual expenditure to carry on the affairs of the estate when established. Perhaps a sugar estate had a gang of two hundred slaves upon it, yet out of this large number possibly there might not be more than sixty or seventy efficient negroes, the surplus being composed of helpless old men and women, children and infants, and emaciated and cureless invalids. ”

“ Marc, still the people do not evince any disposition to cultivate the land. Scarcely a sugar plantation is to be seen until you approach Gonaives [280] or its vicinity, and those established in that quarter are not worthy of the designation; they are mere patches visible on an extended surface, and from the elevations around them have only the appearance of detached spots cultivated as gardens. There is nothing like an extensive scene of cultivation, nor can such be found throughout the whole of the republic. ”

“ It was Ramon who was calling.
"Say, Maria, what shall we do to-day while father and mother are gone to church? Let's go over to the plantation. You know we've been invited ever so many times, and it is such fun watching the men at work."
"All right," said Maria, "but there's no hurry. We will wait till after the folks have gone before we start."
Just beyond the home of the Diaz children [38] was an immense sugar plantation. It covered at least a square mile of land. The rich planter who owned it employed more than a hundred black men. ”

“ Thus the whole management of the plantation is left to the overseer, who as an encouragement to make the most of the crops, has a certain portion as his wages, but not having any interest in the negroes, any further than their labour, he drives and whips them about, and works them beyond their strength, and sometimes till they expire; he feels no loss in their death, he knows the plantation must be supplied, and his humanity is estimated by his interest, which rises always above freezing point. ”

“ There is yet, however, another aspect of the question, which is, that it is sometimes clearly not the interest of the owner to prolong the life of his slaves; as in the case of inferior or superannuated labourers, or the very notorious instance in which some of the owners of sugar plantations stated that they found it better worth their while to work off (i.e. kill with labour) a certain proportion, of their force, and replace them by new hands every seven years, than work them less severely and maintain them in diminished efficiency for an indefinite length of time. ”

“ Lambert’s sugar plantation contains 2000 acres of land, but of course only a part of this is planted each year. He has 600 laborers, who are engaged for seven months in the year in the field, and during the other five in getting in the crop and boiling it. ”

“ This experience left Kingsley undaunted in his belief that liberalism and profit-sharing were the soundest basis for the plantation régime. To support this contention further he cited an experiment by a South Carolinian who established four or five plantations in a group on Broad River, with a slave foreman on each and a single overseer with very limited functions over the whole. The cotton crop was the master's, while the hogs, corn and other produce belonged to the slaves for their sustenance and the sale of any surplus. ”

“ Only the very old and worthless servants remained. The owners of the place on which we were living had three other sugar plantations in the valley, from one of which alone 2,300 hogsheads of sugar were shipped in one season, and at the approach of the army 500 able-bodied negroes were sent into Texas. Eliza described the decamping of the owner of the plantation thus, "Oh, Miss Libbie, the war made a [51] mighty scatter." The poor creatures left were in desperate straits. One, a bed-ridden woman, having been a house-servant, was intelligent for one of her race. ”

“ We see at the bottom of the valley of Carquacahua the first sugar plantation. An old Indian, with hoe in hand, is leading the snowy waters of the Andes between rows of sugar plants, which are now two feet high, with rich, yellow leaves. Man seems to suffer like the plant from the heat of the sun ”

“ The self-interest of the planter in the efficiency of his labor does not necessarily lead him to see the highest interests either of the negro race or of the South, under the present industrial system, which makes a plantation a workshop rather than a farm. The ownership of rich cotton lands only means wealth if you can find negro laborers and keep them at work. ”

“ In the Constitutional Convention of South Carolina, a colored man said: “One of the greatest of slavery bulwarks was the infernal plantation system, one man owning his thousand, another his twenty, another fifty thousands acres of land. This is the only way by which we will break up that system, and I maintain that our freedom will be of no effect if we allow it to continue. What is the main cause of the prosperity of the North. It is because every man has his own farm and is free and independent. Let the lands of the South be similarly divided. ”

“ Such an average scale and such a prevalence of absenteeism never prevailed in any other Anglo-American plantation community, largely because none of the other staples required so much manufacturing as sugar did in preparing the crops for market. As Bryan Edwards wrote in 1793: "the business of sugar planting is a sort of adventure in which the man that engages must engage deeply.... ”

“ Nothing can differ more than does the usage of the slaves in different plantations. The overseer, Mr Handy, on Watson's plantation, he whom I had just left, was a brutal person, almost constantly under the excitement or reaction of rum, and his slaves were constantly beaten and ill used in every way; whereas the Hillside slaves were allowed all possible indulgences, and really seemed quite happy. They used to go about, on the fine Jamaica evenings, singing, dancing, and playing upon instruments, visiting and returning visits, and enjoying all the happiness of which their state was susceptible. ”

“ The Indian plantation is no orderly market-garden. To begin with, the women have nothing but the roughest wooden implement, a wedge-shaped stake, with which to dig, and rake, and hoe. The ground is always uneven and broken; the charred remnants of the original vegetation are left to crumble beside the young growth, and the cultivated seedlings have to struggle for space and air with quick-growing wild things, forest growths and creepers that encroach on every side, and would speedily reclaim any cleared portions of the unconquerable bush were it not for the incessant diligence of the women. ”

“ Again, the threat of shooting the laborers, so frequently made by the planters, is very unwise, and usually has the effect of causing a general stampede from the plantation where the threat was made. The fact that the body of a negro was seen hanging from a tree in Texas, near the Louisiana line; and of the murder in cold blood, in the northern part of the parish of Caddo, of Mary, a colored woman, by John Johnson, the son of the proprietor of the plantation where the woman worked ”

“ It began in a sugar plantation of the admiral Don Diego, where about twenty slaves, joined by an equal number from a neighboring plantation, got possession of arms, rose on their superintendents, massacred them, and sallied forth upon the country. It was their intention to pillage certain plantations, to kill the whites, reinforce themselves by freeing their countrymen, and either to possess themselves of the town of Agua, or to escape to the mountains. ”

“ Even many Southerners have very hazy ideas about the subdivisions of plantation laborers; and do not distinguish between the renters and croppers, who are tenant farmers in their way, and the wage hands who are less ambitious and not so steady. There is complaint on many plantations that negro families do not finish their contracts, though the main outcry is against the day laborer ”

“ Near this was another plantation, abandoned by its Rebel owners, and occupied by lessees from the United States. The absence of responsible proprietors could be everywhere read in the dilapidated buildings and the general air of neglect. Still there was a fair crop of cane and cotton, and the negroes seemed to be working tolerably well for their Northern employers. ”

“ In the case at bar the thing leased is a sugar plantation, with the buildings, mules, and implements necessary for the cultivation and making of sugar, and the growing crop of sugar-cane. This crop is not sold to the lessee absolutely, with the right to use and consume it as he pleases, but it is leased to him as part of the plantation, and to be replanted on the plantation as seed cane; and he expressly binds himself to do this, as well as, by way of reimbursing the lessor for this cane, to leave a certain amount of growing cane on the plantation at the end of the lease. ”

“ By the beginning of the eighteenth century the prevailing industrial system in Virginia and Maryland was these small plantations or farms where Negro slaves gradually took the place of white redemptioners and the prevailing staple was tobacco. About the end of the seventeenth century the Jamaican or West Indian type of plantation was introduced on the coast region around Charleston. It consisted of larger estates cultivated by thirty or more slaves, with few or no white laborers, the master and his family often being the only whites present the year around. ”

“ Testimony was introduced to the effect that upwards of 3,000 acres of the tract were suitable for growing cane, and would produce an average of 70 to 75 tons of sugar cane to the acre, from which could be extracted eight or nine tons of sugar to the acre; and that the contour of the land was favorable to irrigation, and its general condition such as to make it adaptable to the purposes of a sugar plantation. Petitioners offered to prove that they had been for many years negotiating for the development of a sugar plantation on the land ”

“ A plantation with a kindly master was basis for generalizing about all plantations, of whatever type, in whatever sections. A pampered house-servant, who refuses uncertain freedom for a comparatively easy place, becomes the Negro slave; a poor unemployed wretch becomes the freedman.
The intractable, the ironic, the abused Negro is nowhere on these plantations. Congressmen might deplore in legislative halls the injuries done the South by the Underground Railroad, and southern newspapers might be filled with descriptions of runaways, some second offenders with branded scars on their faces. ”