jung2006

@Book{ jung2006,
	author = {Moon-Ho Jung},
	title = {Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation},
	address = {Baltimore},
	publisher = {Johns Hopkins University Press},
	year = 2006,
}

In Chapter 2, on the Civil War, Jung follows Du Bois in seeing events in the Louisiana sugar region as a “revolutionary moment” sparked by a “general strike” by enslaved people. Through rebellion and running away, Jung says, “slaves effected a radical redistribution of wealth that their forbears had imagined possible for generations” (48). But it’s less clear that the wealth was redistributed than that it simply disappeared:

On the eve of the Civil War, Louisiana’s sugar industry was valued at $200 million, more than half of that figure being the value of the enslaved labor force. By the end of the war—after the physical destruction of sugar machinery, depreciation of land prives, and, most of all, emancipation—the industry would lose approximately $193 million of its antebellum assessment (48).

On pp. 52ff, Jung details other examples of “the labor insubordination and military occupation that would overthrow slavery” and “the level of disruption and defiance” as slaves fled “en masse.”

See p. 61 for an example of a plantation in Terrebonne Parish that was abandoned by the planter, who “had taken all of his able-bodied slaves to Texas,” and left to be cultivated by a group of “old and crippled” slaves.

John Williams

To demonstrate the effect of the War on local plantations, Jung gives as an extended example the case of John Williams, who “decided to seek refuge in Texas” along with his daughter Mary Williams Pugh. Later, according to Jung, Pugh wrote to her husband Richard L. Pugh that many slaves were lost to flight along the way. “The trip had been a disaster” (51).¹

Williams later becomes important on p 118 as one of the leading promoters of Chinese labor on sugar plantations.

Question for me: Did Williams’s brief experience in Texas as a refugee, which Jung does not discuss, do anything to prepare the way for his interest in coolie labor after the War?