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SUGAR, ENSLAVEMENT, AND THE TRANSATLANTIC ECONOMY
Sugar cane was first cultivated in New Guinea around 8,000 BCE, and over centuries it spread to the Philippines, India, the Middle East, North Africa, and the Mediterranean. Sugar was introduced to Europe during the Crusades around 1100, and Christopher Columbus famously carried sugar cane stalks from the Spanish Canary Islands to Hispaniola (modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic) on his second voyage to the New World in 1493.
Theodor de Bry (German, 1528-1598).
Nigritae exhaustis venis metallicis conficiendo saccharo operam dare debent, in Girolamo Benzoni, Americae pars quinta nobilis & admiratione plena Hieronymi Bezoni Mediolanensis. Francofurti ad Moenum, 1595. Image courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia.
Representing the Spanish Empire, Columbus immediately enslaved the Island’s Indigenous Taíno people. Countless men, women, and children were killed by disease, starvation, and violent conflict in a short period of time. Millions of Africans were thus abducted and ruthlessly trafficked across the Atlantic, away from their families, languages, religions, and cultures, to the growing number of sugar plantations established throughout the European colonies in the West Indies and the Americas. By many accounts, the average working lifespan of an enslaved person laboring on a sugar plantation was only seven years because of brutal and dangerous conditions, designed by colonizers to maximize profit no matter the human cost.
Image courtesy of Garry Walton Illustration
A global economic trade network between Europe, Africa, and North and South America expanded exponentially between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Europeans inhumanely transported enslaved people from West Africa to their colonies in the West Indies and the Americas; raw materials such as sugar, molasses, salt, and cotton were shipped from the West Indies and Americas to Europe; and manufactured goods including arms, ammunition, textiles, and rum were shipped from Europe to Africa, often as payment in exchange for enslaved people.
Once called “White Gold” because of its rarity and expense, sugar was initially used as a medicine, a spice, or to create tabletop sculptures. However, a global mass market for sugar was well established by the middle of the eighteenth century. At this time, British and French plantations in the West Indies, built upon the lives and labor of enslaved Africans, produced most of the world’s sugar, which was exported to consumers, merchants, and refineries in Europe and the eastern coastal ports of the United States. Refined and raw sugar first made its way to Kentucky by way of the Ohio River and rudimentary roads and was initially traded and purchased by those who could afford its high cost.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, The New York Public Library. “Cutting sugar cane in Louisiana.” New York Public Library Digital Collections.
After sugar cane was successfully granulated in the semitropical climate of Louisiana in 1795, sugar plantations also populated lands along the Mississippi River. Scores of French planters and expert sugar workers, many fleeing the Revolution in Haiti, poured into the region. The opening of the Mississippi after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803—previously controlled by the Spanish and the French—precipitated a steady movement of sugar and enslaved people to and from Kentucky.
Interested in further reading/research?
Published, Nonfiction Works
Abbott, Elizabeth. Sugar: A Bittersweet History. London and New York: Duckworth Overlook, 2009.
Follett, Richard J. The Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World, 1820-1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.
James, C. L. R., and David Scott. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage Books, 2023.
Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin, 1985.
Parker, Matthew. The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies. New York: Walker, 2011.
Silkenat, David. Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.
Websites:
The Transatlantic Slave Trade: Report by the Equal Justice Initiative
Explore the Origins and Forced Relocations of Enslaved Africans Across the Atlantic World
Built upon the grounds of a former sugar plantation, The Whitney Institute, and the Whitney Plantation, is a non-profit museum dedicated to educating the public about the history and legacies of slavery in the United States:
https://www.whitneyplantation.org
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8DQOhf8n9I
NARRATIVES OF FORMERLY ENSLAVED PEOPLE
“And withal, the fear of being pursued with guns and bloodhounds, and of being killed, or captured and taken to the extreme South, to linger out my days in hopeless bondage on some cotton or sugar plantation, all combined to deter me. But I had counted the cost, and was fully prepared to make the sacrifice. The time for fulfilling my pledge was then at hand. I must forsake friends and neighbors, wife and child, or consent to live and die a slave.” -Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself. New York, 1849.
Published, Nonfiction Works
Bibb, Henry. The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself, with an Introduction by Lucius C. Matlack. New York: Published by the Author, 1849.
Douglass, Frederick. My Bondage and My Freedom: Part I, Life as a Slave. Part II, Life as a Freeman. New York: Miller, Orton & Mulligan, 1855.
Federal Writers’ Project, George P. Rawick, Federal Writers’ Project, and United States. Work Projects Administration (Washington, D.C.). The American Slave : A Composite Autobiography. of Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies, No. 11. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1972.
Fedric, Francis. Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky; or, Fifty Years of Slavery in the Southern States of America. London: Wertheim, Macintosh, and Hunt, 1863.
Northup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave: Authoritative Text: Contexts, 2013 Film Adaptation: Criticism, Reviews, Interviews. Edited by Henry Louis Gates and Kevin M. Burke. First ed. of A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017.
PEOPLE, SUGAR, AND GOODS: THE KENTUCKY CONNECTION
Early Kentuckians could grow and produce most of the food items that they required, with the exception of sugar and spices. Enslaved workers tapped maple syrup from trees in “sugar camps,” which they boiled to make “country sugar.” Desirable cane sugar, however, was imported from the West Indies and Louisiana. Enormous barrels filled with granulated sugar were shipped to refineries and merchants on the East Coast via ocean vessels.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in cities such as Baltimore and Philadelphia, Kentucky merchants purchased imported sugar and other items, including tea, fabric, and ceramics, which they carried back to Kentucky on flatboats down the Ohio River to the port village of Maysville. Here, travelers and merchants disembarked and journeyed in wagons down the hazardous Maysville Road—named Alanantowamiowee by Kentucky’s Native American people—to Lexington.
The Kentucky Gazette, April 19, 1788
With the expansion of the steamboat trade beginning around 1815, Maysville, Kentucky exploded as a commercial and cultural crossroads and was a main port for exporting Kentucky produce, wares, and people—both free and enslaved—down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans. Countless enslaved men, women, and children, treated as commodities sold for profit, were trafficked from ports in Kentucky via steamboats to New Orleans, and forced to work on sugar and cotton plantations in Louisiana and beyond. These same steamboats often carried sugar back upriver to Kentucky.
Certified Partial List of 63 Slaves arrived from Louisville aboard Steamboat Hibernia, November 18, 1831. Courtesy of the Louisiana State Museum, Historical Center, Gift of J.C. Moiton, 09541.
The Courier-Journal, February 17, 1831
Interested in further reading/research?
Published, Nonfiction Works
Ackermann, Daniel. “Becoming Kentucky: Cultural Confluence and Middle Ground in the Material Culture of the Trans-Appalachian West.” PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 2019.
Bogert, Pen. “Sold for My Account: The Early Slave Trade Between Kentucky and the Lower Mississippi Valley.” Ohio Valley History 2, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 3-16.
Friend, Craig Thompson. Along the Maysville Road: the Early American Republic in the Trans-Appalachian West. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005.
Jones, William D. “Beyond New Orleans: Forced Migrations To, From, and In Louisiana, 1820–1860.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 62, no. 4 (2021): 429–68.
Klotter, James C., and Daniel Rowland. Bluegrass Renaissance: The History and Culture of Central Kentucky, 1792-1852. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012.
Klotter, James C., and Craig Thompson Friend. A New History of Kentucky. Second ed. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018.
Perkins, Elizabeth A. “The Consumer Frontier: Household Consumption in Early Kentucky.” The Journal of American History 78, no. 2 (1991): 486–510.
Salafia, Matthew. Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage along the Ohio River. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.
Hammond, John Craig. “Slavery, Settlement, and Empire: The Expansion and Growth of Slavery in the Interior of the North American Continent, 1770-1820.” Journal of the Early Republic 32, no. 2 (2012): 175–206.
Websites:
Other:
Kentucky Digital Newspaper Program
KENTUCKY SUGAR FURNITURE
American, probably Bourbon County, Kentucky
Sugar Desk, about 1810
Cherry, poplar, other woods
Gift of Mrs. Hattie Bishop Speed, by exchange
1994.1
Kentuckians often purchased sugar in large quantities because of its geographic location, situated at the edge of the frontier. The purchase of sugar—imported to Kentucky and sold by local merchants—created the need for specialized furniture made to store and safeguard its contents.
Kentucky sugar chests were constructed with hidden, divided interior storage compartments designed to protect both granulated brown sugar, and the more expensive cone-shaped loaves of refined white sugar. Equipped with locks, sugar chests also stored other valuable items such as imported tea, spices, and coffee beans. Sugar furniture was fashionable in urban households until about the 1830s, and was prominently displayed in a house’s public rooms to exhibit wealth and status.
With the rapid growth of the domestic sugar industry and the expansion of the steamboat trade after about 1815, cane sugar became more accessible and readily available to Kentuckians. Sugar chests continued to appear in household inventories in more rural areas until the 1850s.
Interested in further reading/research?
Published, Nonfiction Works
Lacer, Genevieve Baird, Libby Turner Howard, and Bill Roughen. Collecting Kentucky, 1790-1860. Louisville: Cherry Valley Publications LLC, 2013.
McPherson, Anne Shelton. “The Article of Household Furniture Peculiar to Earlier Days in the South: Sugar Chests in Middle Tennessee and Central Kentucky, 1800-1835.” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts (Winter 1997): pp. 1-65.
Perkins, Elizabeth A. “The Consumer Frontier: Household Consumption in Early Kentucky.” The Journal of American History 78, no. 2 (1991): 486–510.
Websites
Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts Research Center
KARA WALKER AND THE MARVELOUS SUGAR BABY
Using diverse media including cut-paper silhouettes, New York-based artist Kara Walker explores themes of race, gender, sexuality, violence, and identity in her work. Her monumental 2014 installation project at the Old Domino Sugar Factory Warehouse in Brooklyn was entitled “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.” It was a creative and critical exploration of enslavement, power, and how each relates to our centuries-old desire for sweetness.
Interested in further reading/research?
Procter, Alice. The Whole Picture: The Colonial Story of Art in our Museums & Why We Need to Talk About it. London: Cassell Publishing, 2020.
Smith, Roberta. Sugar? Sure, but Salted with Meaning, The New York Times, May 11, 2014
Cornish, Audie. Artist Kara Walker Draws Us into Bitter History with Something Sweet, NPR, May 16, 2014
A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, commissioned by Creative Time, 2014, Courtesy of Art21
SUGAR: A BITTERSWEET LEGACY
Once called “White Gold” and treated as a status symbol afforded by a privileged few, sugar is available in dangerous abundance today. It is a source of devastating health effects, including heart disease and diabetes. Our modern-day culture of overconsumption has culminated in health crises across communities. The American Diabetes Association reports that members of underserved communities who experience food insecurity or lack equal access to healthy food options, healthcare, and transportation are affected the most.
According to the American Heart Association, American Adults consume an average of seventeen teaspoons of added sugar per day, which adds up to about sixty pounds of added sugar consumed annually. Relatively, children consume even more added sugar, approximately fifty-three pounds per year. Processed foods and sweetened beverages, staples in the everyday diet of many, are the largest culprits.
For more information:
Kentucky Diabetes Prevention and Control Program