The African American Experience in Louisiana

them because the fire required to cook the cane posed a constant fire risk. These buildings could
be as much as three hundred feet long to accommodate boilers, engines, rollers and evaporators
and the smoke and team they exuded is said to have given them the appearance of New England
factories. 58 Risk of injury to workers was somewhat reduced by the multiple-effect evaporation
system patented by Free Man of Color, Nobert Rillieux in 1843. By 1850, it is estimated there
were 1,495 sugarhouses in Louisiana, 907 of which were powered by steam. 59
Where cotton, rather than sugar was the dominant cash crop, the cotton gin and press
were the center of agricultural processing on the plantation. The processing requirements of
cotton were less complicated and dangerous than those of sugar, and the gin house was likewise
a less complicated structure. It was typically a large wood frame building, looking much like an
ordinary barn, but with a distinctively large roof structure to accommodate the gin.
While field laborers harvested and processed agricultural products, house servants
worked in and close-to the big house. Enslaved cooks labored in sweltering kitchens that stood
away from the big house to reduce the risk of fire to the latter. Though typically a one room
building, kitchens occasionally had a second room for laundry that shared the central chimney
and sometimes the second room might provide the cook’s living quarters. 60
In some cases, still other buildings were erected to serve the spiritual and medical needs
of the enslaved population. It was not uncommon for larger plantations to have hospitals. These
buildings took different forms, but were usually large enough to contain multiple rooms and
were sometimes two-stories. Much rarer than hospitals were purpose-built chapels. Religious
instruction for enslaved people varied by era and by slave owner. Like other circumstances of
enslavement, religion among the enslaved was layered with many meanings for both the
enslaved and the slave owner. It had been required by the Code Noir, though it likely occurred
with little regularity in colonial days. In the nineteenth century, slaves had opportunities to
worship in white Catholic and Protestant churches and planters sometimes hired preachers to
come to their plantations. In these circumstances, preaching could attempt to indoctrinate the
enslaved by espousing the virtues of submissive behavior and condemning rebellion. 61 At the
same time, however, the gathering of slaves for any purpose could be very threatening to the
enslaver, particularly after slave insurrections. Revolts such as Nat Turner’s of 1831 in Virginia
had a serious impact on how slave masters viewed religion among the enslaved. The scholar of
Louisiana slavery, J. Carlyle Sitterson, felt that slave owners showed “little inclination” after this
event to “approve religious activities” and the slave-owning philanthropist, John McDonogh
wrote to a reverend in 1835 that he knew of no one actively supporting religion among the
enslaved. 62 But by 1840, the sentiment among the Presbyterian owners of Live Oaks Plantation
58 Vlach, 11, 128.
59 John Burkhardt Rehder, “Sugar Plantation Settlements of Southern Louisiana: A Cultural Geography,” PhD
dissertation (Louisiana State University, 1971), 205, 199, cited in Poesch and Bacot, 165.
60 Poecsh and Bacot, 133.
61 Thomas J. Durant, Jr., “The Enduring Legacy of an African-American Plantation Church,” The Journal of Negro
History 80, no. 2 (Spring, 1995), 81-95.
62 J. Carlyle Sitterson, Sugar Country: The Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1753-1950 (Lexington, Ky., 1953),
101 and John McDonogh to Reverend Charles Colcock Jones, January 26, 1835, McDonough Papers, in Judith
Kelleher Schafer,”The Immediate Impact of Nat Turner’s Insurrection on New Orleans,” in The African American
Experience in Louisiana: Part A, ed. Charles Vincent (Lafayette: University of Southwestern, LA, 1999), 360, first
published in Louisiana History, 21 (1980): 361-76.
Page 15 of 123