ng, pulling fodder,
cutting hay, and planting and harvesting corn, sweet potatoes, pumpkins,
peas and turnips. There is occasional remark upon the health of the slaves,
usually in the way of rejoicing at its excellence. Apparently no outside
help was employed except for an Irish carpenter during the construction of
a sugar house on Evergreen in 1850.[19] The slaves on Evergreen in 1850
numbered 44 between the ages of 15 and 60 years and 26 children; on
Residence, 25 between 15 and 65 years and 6 children.[20] The joint crop
in 1850, ground in the Residence mill, amounted to 312 hogsheads of brown
sugar and sold for 4-3/4 to 5 cents a pound; that of the phenomenal year
1853, when the Evergreen mill was also in commission, reached 520 hogsheads
on that plantation and 179 on Residence, but brought only 3 cents a pound.
These prices were much lower than those of white sugar at the time; but as
Valcour Aime found occasion to remark, the refining reduced the weight of
the product nearly as much as it heightened the price, so that the chief
advantage of the centrifugals lay in the speed of their process.

[Footnote 19: Diary of Dr. J.P.R. Stone. MS. in the possession of Mr. John
Stone Ware, White Castle, La. For the privilege of using the diary I
am indebted to Mr. V. Alton Moody of the University of Michigan, now
Lieutenant in the American Expeditionary Force in France.]

[Footnote 20: MS. returns in the U.S. Census Bureau, data procured through
the courtesy of the Carnegie Institution of Washington and Mr.(now
Lieutenant) V. Alton Moody.]

All of the characteristic work in the sugar plantation routine called
mainly for able-bodied laborers. Children were less used than in tobacco
and cotton production, and the men and women, like the mules, tended to be
of sturdier physique. This was the result partly of selection, partly of
the vigorous exertion required.

Among the fourteen hundred and odd sugar plantations of this period, the
average one had almost a hundred slaves of all ages, and produced average
crops of nearly three hundred hogsheads or a hundred and fifty tons. Most
of the Anglo-Americans among the planters lived about Baton Rouge and on
the Red River, where they or their fathers had settled with an initial
purpose of growing cotton. Their fellows who acquired estates in the Creole
parishes were perhaps as often as otherwise men who had been merchants and
not planters in earlier life. One of these had removed from