Historic Louisiana

plantation operated on the Creole plan. In
1803, Pierre Clément de Laussat found
Madame Destrehan, with her four daughters,
supervising the salting and preserving of beef.
Destrehan himself took time out from grinding
to give Laussat a tour of his plantation. They
began in the quarters, where the slaves worked
on the “Creole” plan. Laussat observed that
each slave had his own garden plot, which he
was encouraged to cultivate. He also noticed
that Destrehan did not give clothing to his
slaves; he sold it to them at wholesale prices.
Under the Creole plan, slaves worked either in
their own gardens on their own time and sold
the produce for cash, or worked for others
for cash. Since it was grinding season, most
slaves were working in the sugar mill. But they
did not work around the clock, as at many
plantations. Laussat noticed that Destrehan
employed the workers on “three-quarter
watches,” consisting of tours of duty of six
hours each. Normally, slaves on the Creole
plan had to provide their own food, but
during grinding Destrehan provided the food.
He was told that slaves took the opportunity to
fatten up. He also learned that under
Destrehan’s plan slaves were better clothed
and did not run away.
At Oakland Plantation near Natchitoches
slaves owned their own cattle. In one list of
cattle in 1839, six slaves owned four heifers
and seven bulls. The slaves raised corn for
their own account. In the winter months they
often worked for the masters cutting wood in
the swamps. An entire gang would depart
under their own supervision and return in a
month with shingles and lumber.
The Creole plan could have paved the way
for gradual emancipation, a road out of the
dead end of slavery. But in the following
decades American rule gradually snuffed out
the idea that slaves could organize and work
on their own. New England landscape architect
Frederick Law Olmstead toured the South
in the 1850s. In New Orleans, he found it
awful that unskilled Irishmen labored for
skilled black masons. In that same decade
white and black cotton screwmen became the
aristocrats of the New Orleans riverfront.
These were the men who loaded the ships
with cotton bales and then operated screw
presses in the ships’ holds to maximize the
cargo. They first organized in 1851. They
struck successfully in 1854 and 1858. In
1866 they got their pay above $5 a day. A visitor
reported seeing the strikers as they
“marched up the levee in a long procession,
white and black together.”
The pluralistic Creole system was significant
because it was utterly unacceptable to the
American racial system in place across the South
and struggling for dominance in Louisiana.
Nineteenth and twentieth century racial
segregation suppressed Louisiana’s racially
variegated society. But it did not destroy it.
✧
Left: Lafcadio Hearn, an Irishman and a
reporter, spent ten years in New Orleans.
An early marriage to a Creole of color
ended quickly in divorce, but his sensibility
for Louisiana was acute. He published
Chita: A Memory of Last Island in 1889.
After his death his Creole sketches were
issued. He was a member of the early
Louisiana literary blossoming which
consisted of writers such as George Cable,
Adrien Rouguette, Grace King, Rudolph
Matas, and Elizabeth Bisland.
COURTESY OF SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, TULANE UNIVERSITY.
Below: A miniature of Madame Marigny
Livaudais, c. 1812.
COURTESY OF THE LOUISIANA STATE MUSEUM.
CHAPTER II
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