Louisiana - Whitney Plantation

The Whitney Plantation, Edgard

This inscription is near the entrance to the museum and helps explain why this museum, alone of all the plantations in Louisiana, spotlights the experience of the enslaved people who lived here, rather than those who owned them.

Directly inside the front door are exhibits that give background to slavery in the US (such as the trans-Atlantic slave trade), information about the family that owned this plantation, and explanation of the sugar cane crop grown and processed here.

Alternatives to African slaves:

The African slave trade began in central Africa by Africans:

Thus, Europeans tapped into the African slave market to find workers to help build a new country.


The story of this plantation:

Ambrose Haydel (or Heidel or Aidle) was 18 when he left Germany for Louisiana, arriving in 1721.  He bought this plantation in 1752, first growing foodstuffs to use and to sell, then switching to indigo as a solid cash crop.

the indigo crop

a quote from Voltaire; the demise of indigo

The transition from indigo to sugar didn't take long and it soon became the dominant crop in Atlantic slave societies.  70% of the enslaved people who were shipped from Africa came to the sugar plantations in the New World (which is a pretty staggering statistic).

beginning the sugar industry

sugar cane grows to 12' tall; the edges of leaves are sharp;
workers easily got sliced open

When the cane plants were growing, the workers had to tend them.  Cane needs water to grow, and the rows between the plants had standing water - in which the workers also had to stand for up to 16 hours/day.  They often got trench foot, a condition associated with trench warfare in WWI, but that existed long before.  There were also such natural hazards as rattlesnakes, cottonmouth snakes and alligators.  Workers were seldom given shoes, so had to deal with these conditions barefoot.

processing the sugar cane crop

a medium-size kettle

a large kettle

Once harvested, the cane was ground between millstones that operated continuously and were powerful enough that if a worker got a limb caught in them, they'd suck in his entire body before anyone could help.

Workers extracted cane juice from the milled cane plants and boiled out impurities, using kettles shown in these photos (above).  The juice went first into the largest kettle where it was boiled, then ladled into a smaller kettle and boiled, then into an even smaller kettle and boiled, and finally into the smallest kettle.  There it was let to settle and crystallize, producing unrefined sugar.  An enslaved worker had to stand between the metal kettles sitting on fires and ladle the boiling juice from one pot to another.  (That all this happened in October-January in no way means they were glad to be so close to the fires.)

In the plantation's best year, it produced 400,000 pounds of unrefined sugar.

This photo is the field next door to where the tour was held.  It was planted with sugar cane last month and will grow until October.  The day was dismal so the green of the field doesn't show up well in my photo.

A few of the original buildings are still on the grounds, though the slave quarters are not among them.  What we saw were slave quarters moved here from other plantations because they're identical to those that were here.

slave quarters

overseer's house

kitchen for the master's food -
our tour guide is on the left

the main house

The main house was built in 1790 and is an excellent example of a raised Creole cottage, as this style is called.  Although there are rooms on the ground floor, the family kept few valued items down there but instead primarily used the upper floor.  This plantation sits directly across the street from the dike along the Mississippi River, and since the dike wasn't built back then, they had frequent flooding to contend with.

If you want to enlarge that photo of the big house, you might be able to see that the upper floor looks like it's made of marble.  Instead, it's cypress boards painted to mimic marble.  Our guide said the house has begun to sink into the Mississippi's mud and cracks are beginning to show.  They haven't yet figured out how to handle the problem.

Although the levee was built by the US Corps of Engineers, the foundations were laid long before that by enslaved workers because, except in cities, early levees were left to adjoining landowners to deal with.


Slave revolts:

Because a myth persists that the enslaved people were happy with their lot in life, the museum has several exhibits that describe various revolts, beginning with those enslaved in Africa.

300+ revolts in 340 years is almost 1/year

Experiences of the enslaved:

By far the majority of the plantation and of the tour was devoted to the true stories of those who had been enslaved.  As part of FDR's WPA during the Depression, the Federal Writers Project interviewed former slaves.  This was in 1936, 70 years after the Civil War, so most people interviewed had been young when they were living as slaves.  There were many more stories than I had time to photograph, but I'm including what I have here.

Women were sold as "breeders" to make more slave stock

The stories are as varied as the individuals who lived them.  Some people remember being treated well, while others quite clearly don't have such pleasant memories.

And thanks to a belief in white supremacy and the power struggle that continued far beyond the Civil War, the institution of slavery was able to mutate into different forms.  One of those was convict labor.

There was, of course, a great deal more information about the workers, the system of slavery, and the history of the US at the museum.  I've focused on only part of what's available there.  Despite the very high price of admission, I can certainly recommend the tour to anyone who's able to stand on their feet for 90 minutes or more, though I think it's handicap-accessible also - there just wasn't any place to sit and rest.