Book Review

Canada and the United States

In this book, John C. Rodrigue undertakes to persuade readers that the former slaves of Louisiana's sugar parishes had unique opportunities to shape the economic and politics of their postemancipation world. Compounding the challenge, Rodrigue pins much of his analysis to a reconception of plantation gang work, archenemy of freedpeople in other crop regions. He argues that sugar workers derived power from centralized plantation routines and gang work. Rodrigue offers important information about the sugar region on the way to a conclusion that finally falls short of being fully persuasive.	1
He argues, first, that the realities of sugar production in Louisiana gave freedpeople powerful tools that they used to make steady marginal improvements in their circumstances. Sugar plantations did not break up into small, tenanted farms, because sugar processing could not be done piecemeal. Planters and freedpeople collaborated to maintain large centralized communities of laborers, working in gangs and collecting wages. Rodrigue argues that living in tightly connected groups enabled sugar workers to sustain job actions and organize politically more easily than their dispersed counterparts in other regions.	2
Louisiana's short growing season also required careful timing of planting, harvesting, and processing. Workers could and did readily threaten planters' tight schedules with small actions. As Rodrigue shows, workers used their leverage to drive wages up, secure additional pay for non-crop work, and resist planters' desire to hold wages back until the end of the year.	3
Moreover, Rodrigue argues, planters rarely unleashed retaliatory violence against workers. Planters feared "demoralizing" their workforce because they needed committed, energetic laborers every year during the rolling season. A successful rolling season, when cane was crushed and the syrup boiled and crystalized, required extraordinary investments of physical strength and management ability, as well as considerable intelligence about sugar's ornery chemistry. Poor productivity at the mill could negate the profitability of even the finest crop.	4
Finally, sugar planters supported the Republican Party's tariff policy, to protect themselves from Caribbean sugar. Their sympathies with the Republican Party created a divided planter class, making it somewhat easier for black Republicans to survive and operate actively in Louisiana. Rodrigue asserts that this combination of large worker communities, leverage on wage and job issues, and sustained access to political influence made Reconstruction in the sugar parishes uniquely promising for the freedpeople.	5
Rodrigue's analysis tests of some of the settled assumptions of postbellum labor history against a less-studied crop system and shows how freedpeople participated actively and creatively in designing the postwar world. He also provides a fresh and interesting chapter on technological innovation in sugar production. But he is not able to establish that Reconstruction in the sugar parishes was distinct, let alone unique, except perhaps in some details of tactics and timing. As recent scholarship has made clear, every Reconstruction labor system offered freedpeople some degree of leverage, and freedpeople generally fought hard and creatively for their vision of free labor. And despite Rodrigue's repeated contention that the exigencies of sugar production forced planters to make concessions, his planters prove repeatedly willing to risk the loss of their crops and even their lands rather than compromise their claims to propertied and racial power.	. . .