(now
Lieutenant) V. Alton Moody.]
All of the characteristic work in the sugar plantation routine called
mainly for able-bodied laborers. Children were less used than in tobacco
and cotton production, and the men and women, like the mules, tended to be
of sturdier physique. This was the result partly of selection, partly of
the vigorous exertion required.
Among the fourteen hundred and odd sugar plantations of this period, the
average one had almost a hundred slaves of all ages, and produced average
crops of nearly three hundred hogsheads or a hundred and fifty tons. Most
of the Anglo-Americans among the planters lived about Baton Rouge and on
the Red River, where they or their fathers had settled with an initial
purpose of growing cotton. Their fellows who acquired estates in the Creole
parishes were perhaps as often as otherwise men who had been merchants and
not planters in earlier life. One of these had removed from New York in the
eighteenth century and had thriven in miscellaneous trade at Pensacola and
on the Mississippi. In 1821 he bought for $140,000 a plantation and its
complement of slaves on Bayou Lafourche, and he afterward acquired a second
one in Plaquemines Parish.
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