Sugar and Slavery

1
Sugar and Slavery

• Sugar-- Before 1500s no sugar in the diet-- the
  only sweetener available was honey. When
  Europeans learned about sugar there was an
  insatiable demand for the tropical crop. Learned
  of it from the Muslims-- growing it on Cyprus,
  Crete, and Southern Spain.
• Difficult places to grow sugar-- need lots of
  irrigation as the summer is long and dry. Sugar
  itself requires a great deal of labor.
• Spaniards into it for the money-- GOLD.
  Portuguese ended up with Brazil-- no known gold
  (yet). Planted sugar using indigineous labor.
  Failed--

2
West African Islands

• Sao Tome-- tropical island between 1520-1570
  became the worlds largest sugar producer.
  Italians bankrolled it, Portuguese used African
  slaves. Very close to Akan gold fields-- slave
  supply. Angola-- and especially the Kingdom of
  the Kongo-- worked out a deal whereby they would
  buy a certain number of slaves (limited).
• Luanda-- island where sugar spread to in order to
  avoid limitations and increase sugar acreage.
  (1570s)

3
Dutch Expansion

• Organized Dutch East India Company trading
  company to bring spices from Asia then
  established Dutch West India Company-- seized
  everything the Portuguese had in Africa-- Soa
  Tome, Angola, Brazil.
• Eventually expelled from Brazil but had learned
  how to grow sugar and had access to slaves.
  Expand to British island of Barbados.

4
Caribbean
5
Sugar Plantations

• Plant the cane, weed and fertilize, cut all the
  cane during a very short harvest season, run
  through a roller, squeeze juice out, boil juice
  into molasses, and then make sugar.

6
Hoeing Cane
William Clark, Ten Views In the Island of
Antigua, in Which are Represented the Process of
Sugar Making.... From Drawings Made by William
Clark, During a Residence of Three Years in the
West Indies (London,1823).
7
Cutting Cane
Richard Bridgens, West India Scenery...from
sketches taken during a voyage to, and residence
of seven years in ... Trinidad (London, 1836),
plate 9.
8
Sugar Mill
DeBry, Americae.... (COMPLETE, 1590), part 5,
plate 2
9
Antigua Mill Yard, 1823
Aquatint by William Clark, from his Ten Views In
the Island of Antigua, in Which are Represented
the Process of Sugar Making.... From Drawings
Made by William Clark, During a Residence of
Three Years in the West Indies (London,1823).
10
Boiling House
The Illustrated London News (June 9, 1849), vol.
14, p. 388 see also Ballous Pictorial (Feb. 10,
1855), pp. 84-85.
11
Slave Market, Pernambuco
Maria Graham, Journal of a Voyage to Brazil, and
Residence there during . . . 1821, 1822, 1823
(London, 1824), opposite p. 107 also, Library of
Congress, LC-USZ62-97202.
12
Brazil

• Difficult to enslave people close to home
  (escape/rebellion)
• European diseases-- no immunity-- 90 of Native
  Americans populations in 1492 died 100 yeas
  later.
• Africans expensive-- 25-30 death rate in
  transport.
• But in 1580s searing drought in Angola creating
  massive slave market.
• Short distance to Brazil from Africa. Allowed
  transport of slaves across the Atlantic to work
  in sugar fields.

13
Barbados

• Cotton and Indigo the main crops. Offered then
  slaves on credit-- within a few years to an
  island not unlike Virginia to the first Caribbean
  sugar island- a few hundred owners with 80,000
  slaves.
• Brought the English into the trade. 1670s Royal
  African Company. Extended sugar growing from
  Barbados to Jamaica (by 1700s the world largest
  producer-- competing even with Brazil).

14
Numbers

• 11-14 million Africans taken from Africa to the
  new World
• Outright depopulation of major areas of West
  Africa
• More men than women sold.
• Africans likely kept more slaves than they sold
  (recasting the socio-political mileau)

15
North American Colonies
Henry Popple, Map of the British Empire in
America with the French and Spanish Settlements
(London, 1733). Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave
Life in the Americas
16
North America

• Three main areas Chesapeake, South Carolina,
  Louisiana
• Indigo, Tobacco, Rice, and Short Staple Cotton
• Only 6 of slaves from the Atlantic Slave Trade
  to North America (mostly through the Caribbean).

17
Indigo Plantation
Jean Baptiste DuTertre, Histoire Générale des
Antilles Habitées par les Francois (Paris, 1667),
vol. 2, p. 107
18
Tobacco Label
Published in Barbara C. Smith, After the
Revolution (Washington, D.C., 1985), p. 93
original in George Arents Collection, New York
Public Library
19
Gullah Basket
20
Rice Winnowing
21
Pounding Rice
22
Planting Rice
23
Poster Announcing Slave Auction
24
New Orleans Auction
James Buckingham, The Slave States of America
(London, 1842).
25
Slave Auction
Lewis Miller, Sketchbook of Landscapes in the
State of Virginia, 1853-1867 (p. 49, bottom)
26
The Plantation

• Plantations were complex places. They consisted
  of fields, pastures, gardens, work spaces, and
  numerous buildings. They were distinctive signs
  of southern agriculture and ultimately became
  prime markers of regional identity.
• Designed to be vast growing "machines" that
  produced a single crop for export -- tons of
  cotton, rice, sugar, or tobacco -- plantations
  are best understood as cultural landscapes, as
  human environments inscribed with the competing
  cultural scripts of their owners and the African
  Americans who were forced to work there.
• Successful cultivation of a crop required an
  array of structures including barns, stables,
  sheds, storehouses, and different types of
  production machinery.

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Greenhill Plantation, Virginia
28
Slave Quarters
29
A Little Town

• The Gaillard plantation quarters was a little
  town laid out with streets wide enough for a
  wagon to pass through. Houses was on each side of
  the street. A well and church was in the center
  of the town. There was a gin-house, barns,
  stables, cowpen and a big bell on top of a high
  pole at the barn gate. -- Ned Walker,
  former slave on a
• plantation in Fairfield County, SC

30
Baptist Church