Everything is in Great Confusion: The Civil War in Sugar Country (Part I)
In January 1861, the harvesting of the 1860 sugar crop on Grand Cote neared completion and planting of the 1861 crop began. Meanwhile, John Moore was off in Baton Rouge, sitting on a committee to draft the Ordinance of Secession. Before the month was out, Louisiana seceded from the Union.
In February, William Frederick Weeks directed enslaved field hands in cane planting, cleaning drainage ditches, and chopping wood from the swamps. At the same time, his mother, Mary Weeks Moore, sat by the fire in the Shadows parlor reading every newspaper sent by her husband in order to determine what states would join the Confederacy. “I do hope the border states [Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas] will Join or we will look & be insignificant to other nations.”
While Mary anxiously traced developments in the secession movement, her grandson David Weeks Magill, along with many of his classmates at school near Petersburg, Virginia, became caught up in the political excitement, and pleaded to leave school to join the army. “David writes that he wants to come home and fight…. So many young men are making the state of the country an excuse for comeing [sic] home.”
Originally published in Harper’s Weekly on April 27, 1861, this print shows Confederate soldiers firing cannons from an artillery battery, bombarding Fort Sumter in the distance. Library of Congress 2013646579.
On April 13, 1861, Fort Sumter fell to the Confederate Army. In St. Mary and St. Martin Parishes, cultivation of the new cane crop was underway with plowing, hoeing, and repairing drainage ditches to ensure a good crop. Grandmother Mary’s fears about David were realized as Mr. Worsham’s school was closed, and David answered the call to arms made by Louisiana governor Thomas Moore.
Meanwhile, the plantation’s annual work cycle continued: peas and potatoes were planted in May, followed by a final round of plowing and hoeing the cane fields in June. By July, the crops were “laid by” meaning weeding the furrows was no longer necessary.
Throughout the summer, the enslaved people at Grand Cote kept busy getting ready for what had the appearance of being a good harvest. Alfred the cooper was busy making hogsheads for sugar and barrels for the molasses, while Henry the blacksmith made sure the cane knives, mill rollers and gears, etc. were in good working order for the grinding season ahead. Other enslaved hands cut and hauled wood to provide the large amount of fuel needed for the sugar mill.
As it turns out, the cane crop of 1861 was the best Louisiana had to that date, producing 459,410 hogsheads of sugar. [White Gold p. 32] The plantation at Grand Cote had a great year. In early January 1862, Mary, busy at the Shadows tending to her sick grandson David Magill who was home from Camp Moore for the Christmas holidays, wrote to her husband, again away on state business. “They have near or quite nine hundred [hogsheads of sugar] at the Island.” 1862 was a year of anxiety for planters in the Teche country. In March, the Federal fleet sat off the Louisiana coast. By May, General Butler and Federal troops occupied New Orleans, and John was back home in New Iberia, whether in response to his wife’s complaints or because of the Federal invasion is not known. Travel was becoming difficult. Mary was stranded at her sister Frances Conrad Harding’s near Franklin because boats on the Bayou Teche were no longer reliable. “The Boat does not go to N. Iberia even if she comes to Franklin.”
By June 1862, the reality of the war was even closer to home. Allie Weeks Meade writes to her stepfather John Moore asking for his help. She has heard the Confederate Army plan to “establish a camp, & plant cannon for the purpose of making resistance should the enemy attempt to come up” the bayou. Unfortunately for Allie, the chosen site for filling in the bayou and setting up camp was directly in front of her house. “In that case of course my dwelling house, trees & in fact everything would be torn and shattered to pieces…If you see gen’l Pratt I wish you would try and find out if it is so, & try & get the location moved…I do not relish the idea of having a lot of troops quartered here & having my home destroyed.”
Sugar planters along the Bayou Teche had more to worry about than the Confederate or Union forces. June 1862 brought sickness and flooding to the plantations, threatening the sugar crop. Measles and fever reduced the enslaved labor force drastically, and heavy rains brought devasting flood waters covering corn and cane fields.
Other problems faced by planters because of the war were lack of food to feed their work force and lack of non-enslaved laborers for a variety of jobs. Overseers, blacksmiths, carpenters, and other skilled laborers previously relied on by planters were requesting leave to join the Confederate Army.
As they were cut off from the pre-war source of plantation supplies, planters had to find food for themselves and their enslaved people. John Moore’s son-in-law J. F. Leigh went into Texas on a “foraging” expedition in October 1862 looking to buy hogs and beef cattle. The hogs, “so poor they could not be driven,” cost the “enormous figures 8 to 10 dollars per head and the poorest objects I ever beheld.” Leigh attempted to buy a herd of cattle but there were no available men to hire to drive the cattle back to Louisiana.
The sickness experienced on the plantations during the summer extended on into the fall holding up grinding season. “I shall commence to grind as soon as the negroes get well. So many are Sick that I could not make a watch at night,” wrote William F. Weeks from Grand Cote on October 22, 1862, explaining that he did not have enough enslaved hands physically able to work the extra shifts demanded once the sugar mill was started.
By late summer 1862, news of the Union troops’ actions on Bayou Lafourche reached Mary who read of the alarming “robbing” and destruction of plantations. By late October, fearing a similar invasion up the Bayou Teche, planters began to pack their valuables and prepare to send off their families.
The decision to pack and leave was not an easy one as is evident from one of Allie’s letters written that fall. “Carts loaded are passing all the time,…I can neither eat nor sleep…I am at a perfect loss what to do about my negroes, some say leave and some say take them. It is a serious matter to move a number of poor slaves without food or shelter. Everything is in great confusion…. What to do I don’t know.”
[Continue Reading for Part II]
Originally published in the Shadows Service League newsletter (Vol. 17, No. 6), June 1995.
Citations
Conrad, Glenn R., and Ray F. Lucas. White Gold: A Brief History of the Louisiana Sugar Industry, 1795–1995. Lafayette, LA: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1995.
