New York in the
eighteenth century and had thriven in miscellaneous trade at Pensacola and
on the Mississippi. In 1821 he bought for $140,000 a plantation and its
complement of slaves on Bayou Lafourche, and he afterward acquired a second
one in Plaquemines Parish. In the conduct of his plantation business he
shrewdly bought blankets by the bale in Philadelphia, and he enlarged his
gang by commissioning agents to buy negroes in Virginia and Maryland. The
nature of the instructions he gave may be gathered from the results, for
there duly arrived in several parcels between 1828 and 1832, fully covered
by marine insurance for the coastwise voyage, fifty slaves, male and
female, virtually all of whom ranged between the ages of ten and
twenty-five years.[21] This planter prospered, and his children after him;
and while he may have had a rugged nature, his descendants to-day are among
the gentlest of Louisianians. Another was Duncan F. Kenner, who was long a
slave trader with headquarters at New Orleans before he became a planter in
Ascension Parish on a rapidly increasing scale. His crop advanced from 580
hogsheads in 1849 to 1,370 hogsheads in 1853 and 2,002 hogsheads in 1858
when he was operating two mills, one equipped with vacuum pans and the
other with Rillieux apparatus.[22] A third example was John Burnside, who
emigrated from the North of Ireland in his youth rose rapidly from grocery
clerk in upland Virginia to millionaire merchant in New Orleans, and then
in the fifties turned his talents to sugar growing. He bought the three
contiguous plantations of Col. J.S. Preston lying opposite Donaldsonville,
and soon added a fourth one to the group. In 1858 his aggregate crop was
3,701 hogsheads; and in 1861 his fields were described by William H.
Russell as exhibiting six thousand acres of cane in an unbroken tract. By
employing squads of immigrant Irishmen for ditching and other severe
work he kept his literally precious negroes, well housed and fed, in
fit condition for effective routine under his well selected staff of
overseers.[23] Even after the war Burnside kept on acquiring plantations,
and with free negro labor kept on making large sugar crops. At the end of
his long life, spent frugally as a bachelor and somewhat of a recluse,
he was doubtless by far the richest man in all the South. The number of
planters who had been merchants and the frequency of partnerships and
corporations operating sugar estates, as well as t