Enslaved sugar workers died faster than they reproduced, unlike cotton slaves

Evidence

Louisiana led the nation in destroying the lives of Black people in the name of economic efficiency. The historian Michael Tadman found that Louisiana sugar parishes had a pattern of “deaths greatly exceed[ing] births.” Backbreaking labor and “inadequate net nutrition meant that enslaved people working on sugar plantations were, compared with other working-age enslaved people in the United States, far less able to resist the common and life-threatening diseases of dirt and poverty,” wrote Tadman in a 2000 study published in The American Historical Review. Life expectancy was lower than on a cotton plantation and closer to that of a Jamaican cane field, where the most overworked and abused could drop dead after seven years of labor. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 300

Categorization

• XREF: The death-exceeds-birth pattern is exactly the kind of specific empirical claim (Tadman, AHR 2000) that grounds the foundational-vs-peripheral case study the reader is building.
• DEEPTHINKING: The sugar/cotton/Jamaica mortality comparison shows how one crop regime could be measurably more lethal than another within the same system — a fine-grained distinction in the larger reframing argument.