Louisiana sugar cultivation demanded skilled, disciplined labor from enslaved children

Evidence

These were some of the most skilled laborers, doing some of the most dangerous agricultural and industrial work in the United States. Some enslaved workers mastered the technical skills of distillation, turning cane juice into raw sugar and molasses under intense time pressure, to ensure no spoilage and maximum yields. In the mills, alongside adults, children toiled like factory workers with assembly-line precision and discipline under the constant threat of boiling-hot kettles, open furnaces, and grinding rollers. “All along the endless carrier are ranged slave children, whose business it is to place the cane upon it, when it is conveyed through the shed into the main building,” wrote the free-born upstate New Yorker Solomon Northup in Twelve Years a Slave, his 1853 memoir of being kidnapped while visiting Washington, D.C., and forced into slavery on Louisiana plantations. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 297

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts with the ‘unskilled-labor’ stereotype of slavery; relevant to reframing how American development depended on skilled Black labor.