| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 51

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

John C. Rodrigue, Reconstruction in the Cane Fields: From Slavery to Free Labor in Louisiana's Sugar Parishes: 1862–1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001)

SET IN SOUTHERN Louisiana, John C. Rodrigue's Reconstruction in the Cane Fields traces the social, political, and economic consequences of emancipation and its role in the creation of a wage-labour system. Before freedom, Rodrigue argues, sugar production "transformed southern Louisiana from a society with slaves into a slave society," which helped create both a slaveholding élite as well as a large slave community that became a Black majority on the eve of the Civil War. (10) After the Union victory, the specialized knowledge, agricultural skills, and work routines that made sugar plantations profitable for planters before the war allowed former slaves to negotiate the meaning of freedom.	1
Freedpeople "rejected masterism," Rodrigue argues, "but they repudiated neither sugar production nor its plantation regimen." (41) Former slaves who stayed on sugar plantations after freedom understood the realities of sugar production — that a short growing season required careful timing of planting, harvesting, and processing or else the entire crop could be ruined — and used this understanding as a tool to improve their work conditions, drive up wages, and negotiate payment schedules. So long as "planters did not think of and treat them as slaves," freedpeople consented to gang labour, performed arduous tasks, and adhered to the strict timing needed to produce a good crop of sugar. (41)	2
Although freedpeople worked within labour structures rooted in slavery, they used their new status as well as the emerging market ideology to repudiate some of slavery's lingering assumptions. For example, freedpeople refused to dig canals and patch levees in the snake-infested cypress swamps, demanded extra pay for chopping the wood that fueled sugar production, and insisted on time off on Saturday afternoon and Sunday. When planters equivocated or refused to honour their demands, freedmen frequently staged work slowdowns and small strikes or simply quit.	3
Planters adjusted to wage-labour and emancipation reluctantly, yet, according to Rodrigue, with considerable equanimity. "Rather than continue an exercise in futility," Rodrigue points out, planters "reconciled themselves to the new order and determined to make the most of it." (65) This seems hard to believe, considering planters' efforts to reestablish mastery after Emancipation by enacting the Black Codes; and, after Radical Reconstruction, restricting mobility, enforcing labour contracts, withholding wages, and inflicting violence or the very real threat of violence. Freedpeople carved out some autonomy on sugar plantations by forcing planters to deal with them, but planters did not negotiate as "putative equals," as Rodrigue asserts. (69) Planters showed a remarkable willingness to risk losing their crops and even their property rather than negotiate with Black labourers and compromise the status and power rooted in an ideology of White supremacy.	4
Rodrigue is unsettlingly silent on the planters' use of violence, force, and fraud, and downplays their ability to limit and control freedpeople's lives. While Rodrigue repeatedly argues that "labour" and "capital" met on equal ground and that free Blacks cowed White planters into accepting their demands, he alludes to planters' "scorched earth policies" and "strong-arm tactics." When those failed, he concedes, "planters and white Louisianans resorted to stronger methods." (38, 95, and 100) Rodrigue admits that White planters sometimes led terror campaigns that "witnessed unparalleled brutality," yet fails to cite detailed examples. (100) Although Rodrigue describes a riot in St. Bernard Parish in 1868 in which "sixty people, mostly freemen, died in politically motivated violence," he says little else, leaving the reader to wonder what actually happened. (101) Did Whites kill the freedmen in an effort to force others to vote Democratic? Did Blacks fight back?	5
Rodrigue's silences may rest on his sympathy for the planters; he argues that "demands on the planter, if qualitatively different from those placed on slaves (and freedmen) were also exacting." (16) Excuses and exclamations of how hard life was for sugar planters after the Civil War make their way into too many of Rodrigue's arguments. Consider the following: "The perils of sugar production had caused planters enough anxiety before emancipation; now they had to bargain with laborers who were free to leave"; "As if the planters did not face enough challenges, Louisiana Unionists approved a state constitution ... that formally abolished slavery"; "With much of their capital investment wiped out and almost forced to beg for loans, planters faced a bleak future"; and "As though their labor problems were not enough, planters would soon reap an equally bitter political harvest." (50, 53, 60, and 94) Nobody knows the trouble they saw.	6
Rodrigue's strongest chapter, where he recounts the Thibodaux Massacre, is his last. On 3 November 1887 prominent sugar planters, led by Judge Taylor Beattie, led a campaign of terror and violence that destroyed one of the largest and best organized strikes by Black cane workers, rescued White Louisiana from Radical Reconstruction, and left over 30 Blacks dead and thousands more homeless. Mary W. Pugh, wife of a prominent Louisiana planter, hoped the "Thibodaux Massacre" would finally "settle the question of who is to rule: the nigger or the White man for the next fifty years." (Quoted on 183) Rodrigue's account of the Thibodaux Massacre is riveting and is an excellent account of the bitter race and class struggles between Black labourers and White planters during Reconstruction and finally, Redemption.	7
The Thibodaux Massacre, Rodrigue argues, was an unfortunate yet "all but inevitable ... epilogue to the story of emancipation." (190–91) If the Thibodaux Massacre served as an inevitable ending to the decades of struggle by freedpeople after emancipation, then Rodrigue's main argument — that the exigencies of sugar production in Louisiana provided freedpeople powerful tools used to secure advantages and autonomy within a developing free-labour market — loses its punch. Violence was decisive but not inevitable. In fact, he argues in earlier chapters that Redemption was not foreordained, but only possible after Republicans began to slowly lose their seats to planter-friendly Democrats in the mid-1870's, who bolstered planter power with the coercive power of the state. Inconsistencies like these weaken Rodrigue's argument in the long run and point to areas that ought to be explored more fully.	8
Ultimately, Rodrigue falls short of his promise to "place slaves and freedmen at the center of the story" by failing to engage sources that speak to the experiences of Black sugar workers. (3) Too often, the author relies on planter diaries and outdated secondary sources that filter Black experiences, motives, and aspirations through White fears and anxieties. Certainly Rodrigue could have utilized the recent scholarship on freedpeople, especially freedwomen — who are virtually invisible in this account — to investigate freedpeople's efforts to carve out their own meaning of freedom. By focusing on planters more than freedpeople, Rodrigue provides an unbalanced and sometimes inconsistent account of the transformation from slavery to free labour in Louisiana's sugar fields. Still, the story Rodrigue tells is important and interesting and ought to expand scholarship that investigates the complex contest between Black freedom and Southern free-labour.	9
Danielle McGuire Rutgers University

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