|
a ACADIAN REBIRTH article
Cultures
of Acadiana |
Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, April 27, 1999
Sugar Bittersweet for Acadians on Mississippi
by Jim Bradshaw
Driving along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, a handful of magnificent mansions stand as reminder of the antebellum plantation days when cotton and sugar brought incredible wealth to south Louisiana. Many of these fine homes stand on lands once held by Acadians. But most of the Acadians were gone from the land when the homes were built. Few of the humble farmers would share in the magnificent wealth, or be able to hold onto their land when wealthy Anglos decided they wanted it.
The boll weevil and synthetic fibers eventually killed King Cotton and the Civil War erased many of the sugar fortunes. But by then, sweet sugar had brought yet another bittersweet episode in the Acadian odyssey.
Louisiana's cane country is formed by a crude triangle spreading from the Red River on the north to the Gulf of Mexico on the south and from the Mississippi River on the east to the Vermilion River on the west. Rich rivers and bayous that crisscross this area, particularly along the Mississippi. At one time, sugar estates lined the Mississippi from the Red River practically to the sea.
A 19th century novelist, Thomas P May, described this stretch of river as " an almost continuous succession of sugarhouses, with their tall chimneys, surrounded by fields of green sugar cane, undulating in the blazing sun, like the miniature waves of an emerald sea."
The first sugar mill in Louisiana was built in 1758 by Joseph Deubreuil. But he had trouble granulating the sugar into a form that could be easily shipped. Later, two Spaniards, Antonio Mendez and Josef Silis, tried their hand with out much more success. Finally, Instead of trying to making sugar, they turned out tafia, a rum-like drink that kept much of the Orleans Population stupefied.
Etienne de Boré, whose plantation in now Audubon Park in New Orleans, is credited with becoming the first planter in Louisiana to turn out granulated sugar. He didn't do it by himself. He hired Antoine Moran, who emigrated from the Caribbean sugar island of Saint-Domingue to help him.
The Successful granulation of sugar came just two years after Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, and both advanced came about the same time that steamboats began navigating the Mississippi. This created a set of lucky circumstances that made lower Louisiana rich. There was great demand for both cotton and sugar in Europe, and the Europeans were willing to pay good money for the Louisiana products.
W.C.C. Claiborne, the first American governor of Louisiana, wrote in 1806, " The facility with which the sugar planters amass wealth is almost incredible." Much of the wealth was made on what was once Acadian land.
At the beginning of the sugar boom, the Acadians owned some of the best land in Louisiana. It was rich, high and well drained, next to the river for easy transportation, and protected from flooding by well-built levees. Acadian farmers would grown cane and some of them did. But they were usually the exception.
As the sugar plantations developed along the Acadian Coast, and also along Bayou Teche and Bayou Lafourche, most Acadian landowners saw themselves slowly squeezed out. Sugar production called for a large investment. Slaves were needed to plant and harvest sugar cane and to maintain the levees protecting the huge plantations. Big tracts of land were needed to make the sort of profits that could generate the investment capital.
The Acadians did not have the capital, couldn't afford the slaves needed for a huge sugar plantation, and by the time of the sugar era, had divided and redivided. their lands among their families so that few held tracts of the size needed. They were ripe to be brought out, and most of them were.
By the time of the Civil War, most Acadian lands on the Mississippi River had been lost to the wealthier Creoles and Anglos. A map of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans drawn before the Louisiana Purchase shows hundred of small Acadian farmsteads lining the river bank. A map drawn at the time of the Civil War shows that those lands had been consolidated into 28 huge plantations on the river's west bank, and 39 of them on the east bank. Few Acadian names appear on the later map.
Historian Malcolm Comeaux points out in a essay, "Louisiana Acadians: The Environmental Impact," "Soon after the Louisiana Purchase, the second major migration of the Acadians began. This one unlike the first, was to go largely undocumented and would result from many wealthy Americans moving onto the levee lands... displacing Acadians. Areas once densely settled by (Acadians) were soon transformed into plantations occupied by a few wealthy Americains with many black slaves. This displacement process was particularly swift along the Mississippi and Bayou Lafourche. In 1802, for example, the major crop along Bayou Lafourche was cotton, but in 1828 a plantation economy based on sugar cane was dominant in most of the area.
"Of course, not all Acadians fled before the surging plantation system." Comeaux continues. "Some remained as yeomen farmers. As late as 1873, a traveler found a thickly settled community of small farmers ( on the Mississippi) two miles above Bayou Lafourche... But along Bayou Lafourche( there were only) ' magnificent plantations.' Seventy years earlier the traveler would have found the area inhabited only by small independent farmers."
Comeaux says that there were several reasons for the Acadians to sell to the Americans. They couldn't afford to maintain the levees and roads along the river; they feared debt, and would sell their land before going heavily into debt; they owned good land, and so could get a food price for it; and, finally , according to Comeaux, " these poor independent farmers were considered a bad influence on slaves. ... Planters ...often bought the land just to force the Acadians to move away."