Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Articles, Letters to the Editors, etc. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Who wants Sugar at such a cost? Description An account of the resource In an article in the Baton Rouge Gazette, a Louisiana paper, headed "Sugar vs. Cotton," published in 1839, and intended to urge the more extensiv cultivation of sugar in that state, is the following remark:--"The rigorous measures about to be enforced against the African slave-trade, will probably enhance the price of slaves in the Spanish Islands, and diminish the amount of sugar annually made. The natural increase of the slaves in Cuba falls short of the demand, on account of the excessive hard labour to which they are subjected; the men being worked during eight months of the year, twenty hours out of the twenty-four, and consequently short lived. Every thing then seems to be in favour of the sugar planter, and bids him take courage!" I doublted the extent of the atrocious oppression in Cuba, indicated in this cold argument, until I met with R.R. Madden's poem, called "The Sugar Estate." Dr. Madden had abundant facilities for informing himself of Cuban slavery; and his name is high authority for whatever he asserts regarding it. The doctor makes the mayoral, or overseer of a sugar estate, to say:-- "But where, you ask me, are the poor old slaves? Where should they be, of course, but in their graves? We do not send them there before their time, But let them die, when they are past their prime. Men who are worked by night as well as day, Some how or other, live not to be grey; Sink from exhaustion---sicken--droop, and die, And leave the Count another batch to buy; There's stock abundant in the slave bazaars, Thanks to the banner of the stripes and stars! You cannot think how soon the want of sleep Breaks down their strengths, 'tis well they are so cheap! Four hours of rest in time of crop--for five Or six long months, and few indeed will thrive. With twenty hours of unremitting toil, Twelve in the field, and eight in doors, to boil Or grind the cane--believe me, few grow old. But life is cheap, and sugar, sir,--is gold. You think our interest is to use our blacks As careful owners use their costly backs; Our interest is to make the most we can, Of every negro in the shortest span!" Dr. Madden gives it as his opinion, that on sugar estates the annual mortality is about ten per cent., and on coffee estates five per cent. After this statement "That tells a tale of murder largely done," who wants to buy Havana sugar? The superintendent of the free negroes of Trinidad, persons who, during the American revolution, had escaped from bondage into the British service, and were colonized there, gave evidence to the British Parliament, more than twenty years since, as follows:--"I do not think that sugar estates could be carried on entirely by free labour, in the manner the work is done at present; making large quantities of work in a given time; in many instances, working eighteen hours out of twenty-four, which constant labour the free settler will not submit to." Happily British West India slavery has now ceased, and with it this oppressive labour. The motive which induces the holding of slaves is every where the same--the desire of wrongful gain to the holder--wrongful as taking from the holden their moral and natural rights. Under this motive, the question of how much labour may be exacted from the slave, without prejudice to his human existence, will soon degenerate into one of how much that life is worth, not to the man--but to the holder of him, and not to him in its moral, but in its productive aspects! This is the evident result of the downward tendency of a bad commencement. Hence we are not to look any where for a very different condition of the slave in similar subjects of culture, and with the spur to the extortion of labour, which commercial competition furnishes. The "law of trade" is but followed out, when men, coming to regard their fellow-beings as mere chattels, so "use them up," as to get out of them the greatest possible amount of production. It belongs especially to the coerced sugar cultivation to be prodigal of human life,--every where prodigal, yet with such variations of amount us the cost of the human implement, and other adventitious circumstancs may demand. Do we expect a system of sugar cultivation in our Southern country by slave-labour, which shall be essentially more benignant than that which we find is exerted elsewhere? Are our planters more humane than those of Cuba, Brazil, and other foreign places where slave-sugar is produced? What says for their clemency, the burning of negroes alive, and the protection given by the public sentiment, and even the courts of justice, to the perpetrators of such horrid tragedies? We err, if we expect to separate from the American system the evils which belong to universal slavery. What the true facts are of the sugar cultivation in Louisiana, the state in which it most abounds, in reference to the abridgment of human life, is stated below in the language of David Lee Child. "In 1831, the Secretary of the Treasury made a report to the House of Representatives, embracing the statements of a great number of sugar planters of Louisiana and other states, concerning the expenses and profits of their business. There was a statement by the central committee of the sugar planters of Louisiana; one by a committee of the parish [county] of Plaquemine, containing an immense table of the expenditures and products of twenty plantations in that parish; one from the Agricultural Society of Baton Rouge, and several from individuals, including J.S. Johnston, then a senator from Louisiana in the Congress of the United States. All these, with the exception of the Baton Rouge Society, set down the annual loss of slave-property, on the sugar plantations, at five per cent. That society says, "two and a half" per cent.; but this answer, in form, relates to "slave property," in general, and is not confined to the sugar estates. On the other hand, I have been informed that some sugar planters have admitted, that they "use up" seven per cent. of their hands every year. The loss to which I refer, is placed in the Secretary's report, and in the communications from Louisiana, under the heads of "risk," "decreased value," "death," and "deterioration." The chasms thus made are to be filled up with new cargoes, and c[?] from Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, &c. In order to appreciate and apply these admissions of the adversary, it is necessary to consider that the annual increase of the population of the United States is about four per cent.--in other words, the vacancies caused by death are supplied, and four per cent. net gain is added; therefore, on the sugar plantations of the South, a positive loss of "five per cent." must be added to the negative loss of four, making an outright waste of human life, or downright massacre, of nine slaves to every hundred, every year! The amount on the sugar plantations of Louisiana, to pass over those of Florida, Arkansas, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, is three thousand one hundred and fifty per annum. These are just as much murdered as if they were shot en masse, and indeed more inhumanly, inasmuch as death by torture is more terrible. In this single branch of slave employment, there is a greater destruction of human life, every year, than there was in the whole French Revolution, bloody as that has ever been deemed. Who wants to buy New Orleans sugar? P. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource P. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The Friend; a Religious and Literary Journal 16:8, p. 63 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 11.19.1842