ed between 1830 and 1850, but in the final ante-bellum decade
it advanced only at about the rate of natural increase.[48] The sugar
output advanced to 200,000 hogsheads in 1844 and to 450,000 in 1853. Bad
seasons then reduced it to 74,000 in 1856; and the previous maximum was not
equaled in the remaining ante-bellum years.[49] The liability of the
crop to damage from drought and early frost, and to destruction from the
outpouring of the Mississippi through crevasses in the levees, explains the
fluctuations in the yield. Outside of Louisiana the industry took no grip
except on the Brazos River in Texas, where in 1858 thirty-seven plantations
produced about six thousand hogsheads.[50]

[Footnote 42: _DeBow's Review_, I, 55.]

[Footnote 43: V. Debouchel, _Histoire de la Louisiane_ (New Orleans, 1851),
pp. 151 ff.]

[Footnote 44: E.J. Forstall, _Agricultural Productions of Louisiana_ (New
Orleans, 1845).]

[Footnote 45: P.A. Champonier, _Statement of the Sugar Crop Made in
Louisiana_ (New Orleans, annual, 1848-1859).]

[Footnote 46: DeBow, in the _Compendium of the Seventh Census_, p. 94,
estimated the sugar plantation slaves at 150,000; but this is clearly an
overestimate.]

[Footnote 47: Some of these are described by Judah P. Benjamin in _DeBow's
Review_, II, 322-345.]

[Footnote 48: _I. e_. from 150,000 to 180,000.]

[Footnote 49: The crop of 1853, indeed, was not exceeded until near the
close of the nineteenth century.]

[Footnote 50: P.A. Champonier, _Statement of the Sugar Crop ... in
1858-1859_, p. 40.]

In Louisiana in the banner year 1853, with perfect weather and no
crevasses, each of some 50,000 able-bodied field hands cultivated, besides
the incidental food crops, about five acres of cane on the average and
produced about nine hogsheads of sugar and three hundred gallons of
molasses per head. On certain specially favored estates, indeed, the
product reached as much as fifteen hogsheads per hand[51]. In the total of
1407 fully equipped plantations 103 made less than one hundred hogsheads
each, while forty produced a thousand hogsheads or more. That year's
output, however, was nearly twice the size of the average crop in the
period. A dozen or more proprietors owned two or more estates each, some of
which were on the largest scale, while at the other extreme several dozen
farmers who had no mills of their own sent cane from their few acres to be
worked up in the spare time of some obliging neighbor's