sitterson1953

@Book{ sitterson1953,
	author = {J. Carlyle Sitterson},
	title = {Sugar Country: The Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1753-1950},
	address = {Lexington},
	publisher = {University of Kentucky Press},
	year = 1953,
}

Chapter 10 describes the Civil War as the “end of an era”: “Four years of fighting were to produce a change so drastic, so devastating, as to make a complete description impossible, an exaggeration difficult” (206).

Sitterson notes the flight of Refugees to Texas and Refugeed Slaves from Teche:

In the fall of 1862 and the spring of 1863, almost a mass exodus of planters and Negroes took place from the Teche region to Texas. Once in Texas, planters sought to put their slaves to work at whatever occupations were at hand in order to earn their sustenance. Some planters used their Negroes, carts, and teams to haul supplies for the Confederate government between Texas and North Louisiana at $10 per day for each cart with driver. Others hired their Negroes out at a variety of occupations (215).

The paragraph relies on same sources I have seen about Weeks Family, but he also introduces John H. Randolph and Franklin A. Hudson of Iberville Parish as illustrative of the same patterns. In early 1864, they had “their jointly owned 53 Negroes, 7 carts, 2 yoke of oxen, and 2 wagons established on rented land in Washington County,” from where they hired out slaves and hauled cotton and produce. Slaves grew provision crops and also made “beer tubs” to exchange with an R. W. Rutherford for whiskey; in fall 1865 they then traded many of their crops to get specie and stock to carry them back to Louisiana. Although there is “no record of how these two planters fared financially in their Texas ventures, … keeping their labor force together and earning their sustenance was no small achievement in the chaotic condition of the times” (216).