Sugar War

The following article contains anti-Black racial slurs.

On November 1, 1887, Brigadier General William Pierce observed from his train the immediate effects of the most important strike in the history of rural Louisiana. An estimated 10,000 sugar plantation workers — most of whom were black, but 1,000 of whom were white — organized in the Knights of Labor (K of L), had stopped cutting and grinding sugar cane, in demand for wage increases and the abolition of scrip payments. Pierce reported that he saw "the fields in all directions full of cane, the mills idle, the stock and carts and wagons laid by and no work being done."¹ 

After more than three weeks of intense conflict, often involving General Pierce's troops, this interracial class movement degenerated into racial violence. In the small city of Thibodaux, Louisiana, at dawn on November 23, 300 armed white vigilantes murdered over 50 black people. The Thibodaux Massacre ended the strike, fatally wounded the labor movement, and initiated a racist reign of terror in the Louisiana sugar region. 

Several historians who have studied this strike have explained its failure and racist finale as a consequence of Knights of Labor ideology and tactics. Philip Foner, for example, points to the lack of assistance from the national leadership of the K of L and to the racist fears of white workers as key explanatory factors. Melton McLaurin expands on Foner's analysis, pointing to organizational inadequacies of rank-and-file leadership as an equally important cause of the strike's failure. Placing the sugar workers' strike in the context of two other strike movements led by the K of L, he writes: 

 

. . . as soon as the order had organized a relatively large segment of the work force, the new members, hoping for support from the state and national assemblies, initiated offensive strikes. They did so without local financial resources, with no method of curtailing strikebreakers, with no assurances of support from outside the local or locals involved, and with no detailed strike plan. Not surprisingly they lost.² 

 

William Ivy Hair, rather than analyzing the weakness of the labor movement, attempts to explain the ferocity of the planters' response. He cites one circumstantial factor — a frost which threatened serious harm to the cane crop — to explain the urgent necessity to end the strike. Hair then connects this climatic imperative to cut the cane to a South-wide phenomenon of increasing white racist violence. He argues that: 

 

viewed in perspective the Thibodaux blood-letting was simply a deadlier than usual example of a much broader phenomenon. The lot of the Louisiana Negro was growing harder. Indeed throughout the South, during the late 1880s and the 1890s repression and discrimination against the black race was on the rise.³ 

 

These analyses fail to explain adequately the transformation of class into race struggles. The conclusions may indeed be rephrased as questions. If white workers were "racist," why did they join the K of L, which admitted blacks and whites, and initially participate in the strike movement? Specifically, why did they change from strikers into anti-strikers? If local leadership of the strike was responsible for the defeat, why were they able to achieve partial victories? Finally, why did planters and the state government choose violent repression as a means of ending the strike? 

The answers to these questions require exploring the developing social relations of production in the sugar region and the unique roles played by planters and laborers in shaping the racism of post-Civil War Louisiana. 

 

Planters and the Labor Question 

In January 1874, less than a decade after slaves had deserted the sugar plantations en masse, black laborers along Black Bayou in Terrebonne Parish struck to resist wage cuts of $7 a month.⁴ Although the state militia and neighboring Lafourche vigilantes repressed the movement after two weeks of struggle, this strike nevertheless influenced both the development of the labor movement in Lafourche and Terrebonne and planter strategy towards "the labor question." 

Confronted with the disastrous effects of the national financial crisis of 1873, planters in Terrebonne, Lafourche, and St. Mary's Parishes attempted to create a class-based organization. They agreed to reduce wages uniformly to $13 a month and to continue aggressively recruiting workers from Southern cotton regions in order to create a surplus labor supply. 

Plantation laborers reacted to these initiatives by organizing the first union in the sugar regions: the Laboring Men's Benefit Association. When some planters failed to pay yearly wages owed for 1873, association members went on strike. This first act of organized black proletarian resistance since the Civil War fought simultaneously against wage cuts and against "the free labor system." Black laborers organized themselves to lease land in order to form production cooperatives; if planters refused to lease their lands, laborers reportedly planned to take them over.⁵ 

The laborers' union was inextricably tied to the grassroots "pure Radicals" faction in the Republican Party.* [* Historians usually consider the "Pure Radicals" to have been an urban wing of the Louisiana Republican Party in the 1860s. Although there is no doubt that the "pure Radicals," as an organized faction, no longer functioned by 1874, it is our contention that men like W.H. Keys clearly represented a continuation of that political tradition in the countryside. Future historians of the 1874 strike should take note that the black Republican Party in Terrebonne was split between "moderates" such as state legislators Marie and Murrell and Radicals like Keys and Kennedy whose conception of political action clearly went "beyond equality."] The Laborers possessed a clear understanding that successful resistance to the wage system and agricultural reform depended on a high degree of black political power on the regional and state level. For example, Republican Alfred Kennedy, arrested in January 1874, was elected parish sheriff four years later. By 1887 Kennedy had returned to plantation labor and actively participated in the Knights of Labor strike that year.⁶ Another example is State Assemblyman W.H. Keys, whom planters called "the nigger who was going to ruin Terrebonne Parish." In 1887 Keys also participated as a rank and file organizer in the K of L.⁷ 

The 1874 repression was but a Pyrrhic victory for the planters. Lafourche planters had demonstrated solidarity with their Terrebonne brothers, and the Republican state apparatus had rejected its black base to help put down the strike. But the political and economic organization of laborers, their generalized discontent with the wage system, and their aspirations for agrarian reform posed a continued threat to the planter class. During the next three years, laborers consistently sabotaged planter efforts to construct a wage system held together by force and designed to guarantee a labor supply permanently bound to plantations. 

Workers resisted the planters in several ways. Typically, they moved at the end of the year and undermined the planters' class solidarity by inducing them to compete for labor. In addition, workers constantly resisted labor discipline. Since Emancipation, workers insisted on "doing things their own way."⁸ They occasionally enforced their own labor discipline by shooting uncooperative foremen. Finally, workers strove to convert their desire for agrarian reform into immediate reality. They devoted "excessive" time to their "arpents" — .85 acres of land ceded to each worker by the planters in order to diminish costs of supporting their labor.⁹ Particularly in lower Lafourche — which had a proportionately larger white and racially mixed population than the upper region — workers also acquired small plots of land to complement their fishing and trapping activities with subsistence farming and thereby escape the lot of permanent plantation laborers. 

Labor resistance directly threatened the planters' prosperity, especially those "advanced" planters who were attempting to expand their operations and modernize their processing mills. Post- Reconstruction planters as a group were threatened by the development of a New York-based sugar trust which increasingly turned to cheap imports for its raw sugar. This trust further undermined the planters' economic power by producing a refined white sugar which by the mid-1880s was virtually the only type consumed in the U.S. The majority of Louisiana planters could only produce kettle-made brown sugars for sale to refineries. More than half of Louisiana's medium- and large-scale planters thus found themselves subject to the price dictates of the New York trust. 

An emerging planter elite hoped to compete with the trust by developing their own highly mechanized sugar refineries. But to compete adequately, these "advanced" planter-manufacturers needed to process far more cane than they grew on their individual plantations; they had to expand their holdings or convert smaller planters, who were diverting a portion of their harvest to the making of molasses and brown sugar, into mere cane growers. 

As we shall see, the evolving structural antagonism between elite and nonelite planters generated increasing tensions between "advanced" planters in various parts of the cane-growing parishes and the "backward" planters of other areas. It also fueled an anti-monopoly ideological discourse which conditioned the emergence of an interracial labor movement but which planters generally tried to turn to their advantage by focusing attention on the evils of the New York trust, New Orleans banks, and the railroads, which victimized the entire region. 

From the elite planters' perspective, the development of local sugar refineries substantially minimized labor costs and dramatically increased the production of sugar per ton of cane by 50 percent during the 1870s and 1880s. But the production of cane was only slightly less labor-intensive than it had been during the ante-bellum period. Total labor costs for the production of refined sugar varied between one-half and two-thirds of the total business costs, with at least 75 percent of the wage bill devoted to agricultural labor. The efficient use and maximized productivity of field labor was thus a fundamental, if not determinant, precondition for achieving the transition to a fully modern sugar industry under elite control. A free labor market, regulated by supply and demand, seemed unable to guarantee such a precondition. 

The incipient planter class organization of 1873-74 foiled to halt labor unrest or to establish itself on a permanent basis. In 1877 Donelson Caffery, an elite St. Mary's planter (and later U.S. senator) issued the following call for planter unity: 

 

There are occurrences of recent date and ills of long standing which required prompt and combined action on the part of the planters of St. Mary. Quite recently a deliberate attempt was made to burn down in one night four large sugar houses. . . . The labor question is also very serious. The destruction consequent upon the ruinous policy of competition among the planters, though not so immediate, is considerably surer than by fire. We may guard against the attempts of the incendiary, but how as to curbing our appetite for our neighbor's servant? . . We can observe the laws of supply and demand. A serious question for them [the planters] to consider is the matter of strikes. From the monthly payment of wages in full and the execrable system of job work largely obtaining all over the parish, the labor has been spasmodic, unreliable and [discontent] on the rise this whole season. . . .¹⁰ 

 

The New Orleans Daily Picayune firmly supported Caffery's position, calling the labor question "the most important subject to be considered . . . at this time." In October, a month after Caffery's call, the Louisiana Sugar Planters Associations (LSPA) formed and proposed a program which would modify the free market wage system in order to ensure a successful transition to modem industry.* [* It should be understood that many aspects of what we call the "program" of LSPA and Caffery were not formalized as such, nor did it burst forth in 1874 or 1877. Rather, scrip payments and wage withholdings had been objects of planter-laborer struggle since the war. Finally, the uneven development of the entire sugar region, posed one more difficulty for elite planters in the implementation of a coherent strategy.] First, the planter elite, as we have seen, proposed to unify wage scales, thus eliminating planter competition for laborers. Second, they sought to establish a uniform wage withholding system. Eighty percent of the wages would be withheld monthly.¹¹ On large plantations, scrip payments coerced workers into buying commodities at company stores. These stores sometimes charged 100 percent more than market prices.¹² The scrip and wage withholding system fostered laborer indebtedness, which in turn guaranteed a dependent labor supply. 

Third, planters struggled to supplant the "job system," whereby a laborer would contract for a specific job such as hoeing, ploughing, woodchopping, or ditch-digging. Laborers strongly preferred this system, but planters, not surprisingly, found it incompatible with the military-like discipline necessary to run a modernizing sugar plantation. 

Finally, planters attempted gradually to replace black male laborers with a cheaper and more docile labor force. Depending on the demographic and geographic characteristics of the region*, planters proposed white immigration or the use of female black labor as a way of eliminating "undesirable" black male labor. [* In the Teche Region (Upper St. Mary's and New Iberia), planters continually organized and called for white immigration, due to the low population density and the availability of arable lands. The racial incidents (for example in New Iberia in 1884) and the considerable racist demagoguery in this region is probably not unrelated to the strategic possibility of supplanting black labor. In Lafourche, on the contrary, where cultivable land was defined by closely settled narrow bayous, it is not surprising that planters opposed immigration: "There are thousands of small farmers, swampers, ditchers, etc, who always come out to save those crops, men who are here all year round" (The Sentinel, August 20, 1885).] Since Emancipation, black women had withdrawn themselves from the permanent plantation labor force, but in the late 1870s and 1880s planters strove to re-integrate them. By 1887 elite planters had created a sexual division of labor wherein female labor often exclusively planted and cut the cane. Planters paid women 25 to 40 percent less than males for the same work.¹³ The strategic creation of a sexual division of labor to complement the racial division not only created another cleavage in the work force but also tended to depress wage levels in general. Planters assumed that they were supplanting "unreliable" with "docile" labor.* [* This point deserves more research. As for female labor "docility," the evidence is scanty and conflicting. On the one hand, many of the strikebreakers were indeed women, but no significant quantitative analysis can be made to render the statement meaningful. On the other hand, many black women in Thibodaux were clearly militant. Whether they were plantation laborers or not is unclear, although the documented desire of the latter to affiliate with the K of L gives credence to such an interpretation. It is, however, beyond doubt that planters sought to depress wages through greater reliance on female labor, and that the K of L fought for the principle of "equal work-equal wages" in the sugar region.]

From 1877 through 1887 laborers struggled intensely against the implementation of the LSPA program. In 1880 workers in five parishes along the Mississippi River struck in demand of 50 percent wage increases. The relatively mild repression of these movements, which involved hundreds of workers in each locality, in no way dampened the spirit of black proletarian resistance. Not a grinding season passed between 1881 and 1886 without reports of strikes in the sugar region. In October 1886 a strike of 250 cane cutters in Plaquemines announced another harvest of discontent. In January 1887, in upper Lafourche, 15 allegedly armed blacks organized a strike on three major plantations. A sheriff's posse apprehended eight of the militants. The Thibodawc Sentinel commented on the incident: "Un signe des temps."¹⁴ 

Strikes and strike threats were not the only means of worker resistance in the 1880s. The daily struggle against labor discipline — in the case of elite plantations, the militaristic control over the labor process in the fields — was intense and violent. In 1880 a planter in St. Mary's underscored the gravity of these struggles: 

 

They [blacks]are becoming more and more unmanageable. By degree they are bringing the planter to their way of thinking in regard to how they should work and no telling at what moment there will be a serious move to compel the planter to comply with any request. . . ."¹⁵ 

 

Foremen killed workers occasionally in order to set a disciplinary example. Similarly, foremen were the immediate target of the workers' resistance to discipline. On November 16, 1880, for example, an assistant overseer murdered a laborer in the fields. On January 30, 1886, to cite one of numerous cases, laborer Albert Williams killed the overseer on W.H. Minor's Southdown Plantation in Terrebonne with a hoe. Revolvers proved a more common method of fighting the daily class war in the fields. The Sentinel commented succinctly, "Notre contre [sic] est toujours la terre classique du revolver." (Our wars are always fought with revolvers.)¹⁶ 

From 1874 to 1887, in a largely unorganized fashion, workers fought against militarized discipline and economic coercion, and for above-subsistence wages. When the laborers organized themselves into the K of L, their tactical goals synthesized previous struggles and threatened the very core of the elite planters' transitional program towards a "modern sugar industry." First, the organization of the K of L amounted to a formalized counterpower in the fields and mills. Second, organized workers demanded the elimination of the mechanisms which the planter considered essential to maintain a stable, dependent, and docile labor force. The workers demanded that payments in scrip instead of cash be abolished, that cash payments be made at short intervals rather than withheld for long periods, and that wages be increased to above subsistence levels. Their further demand for a unified wage category — $1.25 a day and $.60 a night for all workers — directly subverted planter efforts to depress the wages of male laborers, if not to replace them completely with lower-paid female workers. Finally, the cooperativist and anti-monopolist ideology of K of L militants threatened the planter elite's hegemony in land ownership. 

 

The Knights Organize 

Inspired by national railroad strikes organized or supported by the K of L, white railroad workers in Morgan City organized the first local assembly in the sugar region in the fall of 1885.¹⁷ The role these workers played in the February 1886 New Orleans-organized strike on the Morgan Line is unclear, but it was at that moment that they surfaced publicly. On February 22, 1886, the Morgan City Free Press greeted this development: 

 

The Free Press notes with pleasure the organization of the laborers of Morgan City; it is something that should have been done years ago, for in no locality has labor been more imposed upon than here. Every effort has been made by the railroad monopoly to destroy the independence of its employees. They were not expected to have opinions of their own. If the Morgan Line considered that a certain storekeeper was unfriendly, the employees were given to understand that he was not to receive their trade, and woe be to him who failed to understand. . . . We would advise every laborer to join the association . . . to insist that the laborer is to work so many hours, to receive so much money and to spend that money when and where he pleases.¹⁸ 

 

The unique conditions of this company town (population 2,500) organized around Charles Morgan's Railroad and Steamship Company provided fertile ground for the K of L organization. By July 1886 black railroad workers had organized a 150-member local which acted in concert with the white local. Within a year a total of seven locals, ranging from 50 to 150 members and including clothing and domestic workers, were functioning in the Morgan City area. At least 80 percent of the work force belonged to the K of L. This precocious organizational development would have profound consequences for the labor movement in the sugar region.¹⁹ 

The concentration of district leadership in the hands of white railroad workers spurred the development of the K of L along the railroad lines; however, outside of its connection through railroads and steamboats, K of L district leadership was isolated from its base in the plantation zones of St. Mary's, Terrebonne, and Lafourche parishes. Moreover, the railroad-based organizational network tended to preclude the unification into the Knights local organization, District Assembly (DA) 194, of such parishes as St. James, St. John the Baptist, and St. Charles, which were areas of intense strike activity in 1880. Thus thousands of potential militants were excluded from DA 194, and from any role in the 1887 strike.* [* Many of these Mississippi Parish workers belonged to DA 102, based in New Orleans. There was no apparent coordination between the two DAs, perhaps owing to the fact that DA 102 began organizing the River parishes only in October 1877.]

The K of L domination of Morgan City also had direct political consequences. Anti-monopolism, as typified by the Free Press editorial, was an ideological perspective which appealed to nearly the entire population. In politics and economics, specific conditions supported an interclass alliance, which middle-class elements dominated. The municipal elections of January 1887 resulted in a sweep for K of L candidates. Four out of five of the elected officers were white merchants and physicians.²⁰ This election served as a model for similar interclass district assembly organizations in Franklin and in the Lafourche Parish seat of Thibodaux. 

Small planters, farmers, urban workers, artisans, and small merchants all suffered at the hands of banks and railroad monopolies. Anti-monopolism oriented these social groups for self-defense against financial, commercial, and transportation interests which threatened to submerge them in a sea of foreclosures, bankruptcy, unemployment, and inflation. For the elite planters, the New York "Trust," New Orleans banks, and sugar factors (agents) provided a clear focus for development of an anti-monopolist discourse which could unify, under elite control, distinct social groups in the sugar region. But such a cohesive ideology was rendered problematic by the very monopolistic tendencies inherent in the elite planters' movement toward centralizing the local manufacturing process and dominating the primary producers. Trapped between a nascent anti-monopolist alliance on the one side and continual plantation laborer unrest on the other, the planter elite in the 1880s had to make important ideological and political concessions to the alliance. But these very concessions on the one flank would debilitate elite defenses against labor. 

Anti-monopolism as championed by the Knights of Labor in the countryside had two concrete meanings for laborers. First, it meant resistance to those aspects of plantation wage labor which coerced them into remaining under planter domination: subsistence wages, scrip payment, and wage withholdings. Second, the K of L prescription for a new system based on cooperative production meshed perfectly with traditional desires for agrarian reform. 

The Knights program attracted skilled workers, laborers, shop owners, several white newspaper editors, and black schoolteachers involved in the local Republican Party who opposed plantation domination of politics. On August 12, 1886, the first local assembly of sugar workers was organized in the town of Schriever, which was little more than a railroad depot located in the midst of the most productive and modernized sector of the Terrebonne sugar industry. A year later, LA 8404 had over 300 members. Originally composed exclusively of black workers, it grew to become the first integrated branch of the K of L, and it is probable that this local initiated the plans to make wage demands on the Planters Association in 1887.²¹ 

Other locals sprang up throughout the sugar region, in both the upper "advanced" and lower "backward" areas; some were segregated by race and trade, others were mixed, and most were exclusively dominated by male middle-class and working-class leaders. 

 

The Strike 

In August 1887 the leaders of DA 194 proposed negotiations with the St. Mary's branch of the LSPA, citing the universal predictions of a bumper crop and expressing the desire to avoid a "misunderstanding" between employer and employee. The LSPA politely refused the proposed negotiations.²² At that moment, the DA 194 leadership sought to increase its leverage by incorporating Terrebonne and Lafourche assemblies into its radius of action. Constant communication about organizational growth, brief work-stoppages, and economic distress undoubtedly conditioned this decision. At the time, the leadership did not anticipate the necessity of engaging in strike activity to obtain wage increases and the abolition of the scrip system. Nevertheless, they felt that if necessary a strike would triumph, given the solidarity of railroad and steamboat workers who would block attempts to bring in scabs (probably convict laborers). 

Curiously, K of L leaders did not anticipate the use of the state militia to protect strikebreakers.²³ The union had several militant members in the militia, and the railroad men may have supposed that because the militia consisted of $2.50-a-day "mechanics" like themselves, class solidarity would prevail. Although several white railroad workers had conquered their own racism to the point of being tireless organizers of black workers, the K of L also failed to recognize that other white workers were not as committed to the Knight's doctrine of interracial solidarity. Nor did the K of L see the weakness in allowing middle-class merchants, craftsmen, and professionals to take positions of leadership over a working-class agenda. Indeed, as St. Mary's planters met during October to devise strike-breaking tactics, they received the collaboration of the white middle-class-dominated assembly in Franklin. 

The full extent of the internal weaknesses of the Knights had not yet emerged, and on October 19 delegates from DA 194's three parishes met and in a militant mood adopted three demands: 

1. wage increases from $1 to $1.25 per 12-hour day shift and from $.50 to $.60 for the six-hour night shift ("watch"); 

2. elimination of scrip; 

3. payment every two weeks for the day shift and every week for obligatory night work. 

The delegates resolved to strike on November 1 if the planters did not agree to their demands. K of L leaders in Lafourche let it be known that they would compromise if the demands were considered "exorbitant." The planters in Thibodaux, on the other hand, left no doubt about their position. Comforted by the knowledge that 11 artillery companies and two cavalry detachments were ready to occupy the sugar district, Republican judge Taylor Beattie and Democratic state senator E. A. O'Sullivan, in a nonpartisan gesture, organized a meeting of planters on Saturday, October 30. The planters and other "influential people" refused to recognize the K of L or any of its demands, pledged to blacklist any discharged employees, and promised the lawful eviction of any strikers on the plantation. 

Lafourche planters awoke the next morning to find that virtually no laborers had reported to work. Planter morale, however, was uplifted by the 4:00 p.m. arrival at the train depot of two companies of the state militia composed of 48 men equipped with a Gatling gun, which they installed in front of the courthouse. A crowd of 500 black and white strikers peaceably gathered in the town square facing the troops and their Gatling gun. Inside the courthouse, Judge Beattie presided over a hastily called meeting of planters from the Thibodaux area. 

Beattie and the planters briefed the militia's Brigadier General Pierce on the situation in Lafourche. The strike was practically general throughout the parish. Planters in lower Lafourche had already given in to the strikers' demands, setting a precedent which threatened planter solidarity. Moreover, bringing in strikebreakers to upper Lafourche would prove difficult. Already the laborers had refused to vacate their cabins when ordered to do so by the planters. General Pierce listened patiently, and then strongly suggested that the strikers had to be evicted immediately. Judge Beattie and Judge Knoblock (an ex-planter who was both a district judge and lieutenant governor) issued warrants for the arrest of over a dozen strikers. The planters promised to defray all state expenses and to board and lodge all militiamen. 

On Wednesday, November 2, the situation in Thibodaux became more strained as evicted strikers from neighboring plantations moved their possessions into the black and mulatto areas of town. A sheriff's posse supported by state troops arrested several workers who refused to vacate their cabins. Local K of L leaders posted bond and obtained their release. 

Late in the afternoon, General Pierce met with Judge Beattie and Lieutenant-Governor Knoblock. Beattie and Knoblock believed the strike would be settled in "two or three days, but the General was impatient." He urged the militia to commence "heroic and vigorous action" to enforce the eviction of all strikers (the majority still remained) from their plantation-owned homes. As if sent by fate to win the general's argument, C.S. Mathews, a prosperous Lockport planter, burst into the courthouse and declared that in lower Lafourche "scenes of depredations and bloodshed were imminent" on both sides of the bayou in the Lockport area. He asked for a company of militia to go to the region, inaccessible by rail or telegraph. On Thursday, one militia battalion journeyed by train to Raceland and then made the seven-mile march to the Mathews place. 

In Thibodaux, the K of L local leadership foresaw the mounting problems caused by the state's armed presence and control of the railroads: they would have to sustain and discipline an increasing Thibodaux population of evicted strikers. Negotiations for goals short of total victory were thus imperative, and were apparently going on with Beattie's group of elite planters. Indeed, on the third day of the strike, a negotiated settlement seemed a distinct possibility. However, the news that planter Rochard Foret had been shot on his Lockport plantation in self-defense by a K of L militant, Moses Pugh, aborted the possibility of a negotiated settlement. 

Accompanied by a deputy sheriff's posse, General Pierce made a four-and-a- half-hour journey by buggy from Thibodaux to Lockport. When the general arrived, he found Foret's condition satisfactory. A large crowd of blacks "hooted and used violent language, the women waving shirts on poles, and jeering," when the battalion arrested Pugh. K of L delegates Gustave Antoine and Julius Allen were also arrested on charges of obstructing justice. Three black small farmers — the Goff brothers and Henry Franklin — posted bail. 

The violence in Lockport, in southern Lafourche, undoubtedly hardened Pierce's militancy. The Lafourche Planters' Association met the next day, on Saturday, November 4, to assess the situation which seemed to be shifting in their favor. In upper Lafourche perhaps 20 percent of the labor force (mostly women) had returned that morning to work, hungry and intimidated by the troops. The planters organized massive shipments of strikebreakers from the now terminated cotton harvests in Mississippi. Moreover, they had succeeded in driving a wedge through the K of L leadership in Thibodaux. When Delphin Monnier, a white small former and K of L delegate, was beaten for protesting the arrests of two fellow white strikers in Laurel Valley, he switched sides from being a "dangerous anarchist" to join L.G. Aubert, the K of L building contractor, in a public condemnation of the strike. Given these favorable developments, the planters believed, negotiations with the strikers had lost their urgency. The association lodged a formal request with General Pierce to maintain the state forces in Thibodaux until the strikebreakers were safely at work. 

Events in St. Mary's further augmented the Lafourche planters' power. Military occupation of the railroads effectively isolated the DA 194 leadership in Morgan City. Pattersonville, a predominantly black town, became the focus of strike activity during the first week of November, as hundreds of evicted strikers moved there. On November 5, a sheriff's posse led by K of L white delegate A.J. Frere and supported by a battalion of state militia marched into the town and massacred between five and 20 residents. Donelson Caffery, the elite planter who had issued the call for planter unity a decade earlier, described himself as a reluctant participant in the massacre, and a week later wrote: 

 

I think I will make 3 or 4 thousand if I can save my crop. The strike is effectually squelched. It was necessary to apply a strong remedy. The negroes are quiet and with few exceptions have gone to work. A few bad white men ought to be harshly dealt with and then there will be no more. 

 

One black K of L leader wrote during that fateful week: "The planters and Government are trying to crush our Order out of existence . . . but they only strengthen our resolve." Nevertheless, this labor militant substantiated Caffery's and newspaper assertions that the St. Mary's strike movement was mortally weakened by the racist violence. He ended his letter by stating that his 377-member black local had leased a large plantation which they planned to work as a cooperative, thus indicating he recognized that a strike victory was unlikely. 

The weakening of the strike movement in Terrebonne Parish further isolated Lafourche workers from any potential solidarity. The Terrebonne workers struck one week earlier than the Lafourche laborers; elite planters there placed orders for Mississippi white and black strikebreakers, and by November 10, 800 were working the Terrebonne plantation. State militia aggressively protected the welfare of the strikebreakers. Local authorities, backed by militia, arrested at least 50 strikers in a "modern" section of Terrebonne. In the rest of the parish at least 11 of the less prominent planters, in zones where whites formed a significant part of the work force, had acceded to the strike demands. A visit from a national K of L organizer and the continued support of the Terrebonne Times apparently stimulated a second wave of strike activity in the Houma-Schreiver area between November 15 and 20. During this period, a militant laborer wrote from Terrebonne: 

 

The cane being ripe, the planters must either come to terms or lose their crops. The many companies of the state militia cannot harvest the crops nor drive the united laborers to do so at starvation prices. 

 

By November 20, however, the strike had ended in the modern sector of Terrebonne. The militia and a planter-organized vigilante committee guaranteed the right to work for strikebreakers and demoralized laborers. The plantations where the strikers had triumphed had no practical effect on the parish's sugar plantations as a whole. The black and white workers of Canal Belanger, a "backward" zone, maintained the only pocket of resistance, but they were by November 20 alone and cut off from all communications. 

The failure of the strike in St. Mary's and Terrebonne, at the very least, made it clear to upper Lafourche K of L militants that they would have to continue the fight alone. Moreover, since the first week of November the DA 194 leadership had not communicated with Lafourche militants. New Orleans DA 102's gesture of solidarity — a blistering condemnation of Governor McEnery's military intervention in general and the Pattersonville massacre in particular, as well as an appeal to the nation's working class to work for the repeal of the sugar tariff to "bring the planters to a sense of justice" — had served only to strengthen the planters' position. Elite planters who backed McEnery's opponent in the December Democratic primary* could not help but close ranks with the other planters in support of the governor and his military agent, General Pierce. [* Governor McEnery and ex-Governor Nicholls, the "reformist," campaigned through the fell for the Democratic primary election, to be held in December. Nicholls had important support among elite planters. McEnery waged his campaign with vigorous racist demagoguery.] Republican Judge Beattie of course was thrilled that the troops had named their site "Camp Beattie," and the K of L manifesto had snapped the last bond of sympathy he may have felt towards his former black Republican allies. Moreover, the white population of Thibodaux, including many former K of L supporters, seemed to be turning against the strikers. After all, a repeal of the sugar tariff would destroy the town more thoroughly than the newly circulating rumor of a plot by black strikers to burn the town. 

Although the Thibodaux K of L leaders protested that they maintained a strict discipline in Thibodaux and that no violence had occurred since the strike began, they could not deny that unknown people had shot into several sugar mills in upper Lafourche, where small groups of local white workers processed the cane cut by the reduced crew of strikebreakers. 

The foreman on the Leighton place was wounded the night of November 16. On November 17, Judge Beattie, accompanied by a small armed entourage of local residents, walked into the K of L's office in the St. Charles Street area. His visit was brief. He did not wish to talk, and stated only that "the shooting and burning must cease. You will be personally held responsible . . . the community must begin to look to their lives and property and protect themselves." The committee left before the K of L leaders could protest their innocence. Beattie and his group went back to the Hotel de Ville and began a very serious discussion. 

The Thibodaux-area planters were truly amazed at the determination and resourcefulness of the strikers. Not one of the more than 500 newcomers was having to sleep outdoors. Somehow the newcomers were bringing in food to the strikers, probably with the help of black farmers from the Lockport area. (Down there the strike was basically over. The planters had given in, with the exception of Mathews, who was allowed to work half a crew unmolested. The old eccentric planter Godchaux had his force back at work on the strikers' terms. He was getting richer every day, a bad precedent for planter unity.) Beattie admitted that the general had assessed the situation correctly at every juncture. Pierce had indeed been right to force the eviction issue with "heroic and vigorous" action. But this had worked better in Terrebonne where the planters had not counted on an early settlement and had brought in a sufficient quantity of strikebreakers. In the Thibodaux area, two Laurel Valley planters had already lost half of their crops and the weather was getting colder; a freeze would wreak more damage and the Thibodaux strikers showed no signs of weakening. Even the "arrogance" of the local black women — mostly their own domestic workers — was beginning to grate on the planters. The general had long argued that the planters take bolder steps on their own and in the last few days he suggested that "the troops were . . . in the road of an early settlement of the strike." Now the committee accepted his argument for local-based repression. They petitioned him to maintain the Shreveport Guards in town until Monday, November 21. By then the planters would have organized their "self-defense." 

On Sunday afternoon, November 20, Rhody DeZauche, the barrel maker, was giving a speech to a large group of black strikers on the south side of the Thibodaux canal. A sheriff's posse grouped on the other side of the canal. The sheriff thought he heard DeZauche call for the burning of Thibodaux, and the predominantly black crowd responded with loud cheers. The heavily armed white men crossed the bridge and grabbed DeZauche. The sheriff arrested him on charges of conspiracy to commit murder. 

Mary Pugh, the adult daughter of a prominent planter family from Assumption parish, wrote to her son that she was wondering aloud, as she walked out of church, if the congregation would be allowed to celebrate Thanksgiving. News from the canal interrupted her meditation. Many armed whites raced towards the south side. As she started walking home, she became terrified by the spectacle of three black men walking down the other side of the street, armed with double-barreled shot guns. A black woman leaned out a window and shouted: "Fight yes! Fight! We'll be there." 

On Sunday evening a crowd of 300 white men gathered to hear speeches by town officials and elite planters. They were urged to constitute themselves as a local militia, deputized to guard every "entrance and inlet" to the town. The speakers claimed that there were strong indications that blacks planned to invade Thibodaux, aided by the strikers who had stockpiled arms on St. Charles Street. From Sunday night until Wednesday at dawn, over 300 "pickets" — Thibodaux residents and white volunteers from neighboring parishes — thoroughly guarded the town day and night. No black person could enter or leave the town without the written permission of Judge Beattie. 

Monday morning two K of L delegates went to see the mayor. They protested vehemently that rumors of impending black violence were totally unfounded, and that the few arms in black hands were shotguns for self-defense. They urged the re-opening of negotiations. 

On Monday night a group of armed white men walked into Henry Franklin's crowded barroom. Two shots exploded. Two black men staggered out of the bar onto Jackson Street. One fell down. The other walked for a block and dropped dead. 

Tuesday morning the planters announced that they were engaged in fruitful negotiations with the strikers. K of L leaders Henry and George Cox were then arrested on charges of making incendiary speeches. Later, Beattie would call the charges misdemeanors. Throughout the night, vigilantes rode through the St. Charles area shooting into the air. 

Between 4:00 and 5:00 a.m. Wednesday morning, Joseph Molaison, the son of a dry goods store owner, and Henry Gorman, a co-proprietor of a foundry, were warming their freezing hands over a fire by a "picket" station on St. Charles Street. Unidentified people, most probably blacks trying to escape from Thibodaux, fired two shots. One bullet grazed Molaison's leg. Another bullet entered Gorman's head, just below his bushy eyebrows. Miraculously the bullet emerged out of his bloody mouth. The shots snapped groggy deputies to attention. The impulse for retribution propelled them from Beattie's courthouse to St. Charles Street, where pickets were already storming a large brick building which housed many strikers' families. 

Every shot which pierced the cold dawn air made Mary Pugh thankful that her husband had left town. She saw crowds of armed white men leading blacks along with the English carpenter Foote, a K of L leader, towards the commons. Then the noise became deafening, like that of a battle. 

She looked across the canal and saw elite planter Andrew Price lead a group of men into a house. They emerged dragging a black man with them. The group crossed the bridge over the canal and walked right past Mary Pugh's side gate. She, along with a few neighbors, followed. She thought they were headed to the jail, but: 

 

Instead they walked with one over to the lumber yard where they told him to "run for his life" — gave the order to fire — all raised their rifles and shot him dead. This was the worst sight I saw, but I tell you we have had a horrible three days — and Wednesday excelled anything I ever saw even during the War. I am sick with the horror of it — but I know it had to be else we would have been murdered before a great while — I think this will settle the question of who is to rule the nigger or the white man for the next fifty years. 

 

Aftermath 

Mary Pugh estimated that over 50 black people were massacred on the morning of November 23, 1887.²⁴ Others estimated the death toll at from 30 to 300. Judge Beattie released the Cox brothers from prison later that morning and told them to run for their lives. Solomon Williams sought official protection, but instead was marched to the bayou. All three K of L leaders were most likely assassinated. Ten months later a band of white vigilantes — a common sight in post-November Lafourche — broke into Gustave Antoine's house, dragged him to a tree, tied him up, and riddled his body with bullets. Earlier in the year a similar group "expropriated" the black farming cooperative in Antoine's neighborhood. 

In Terrebonne, the end of the strike initiated a period of terror directed principally against black people. "Regulators" drove most militants from the parish. The editor of the Terrebonne Times, Dr. H.M. Wallis, a K of L supporter in Houma, wrote: 

 

The record of crime growing out of our labor trouble is now complete, blood has been shed and the moloch of vengeance has been satiated with the sacrifice of human life. And who is to blame for this state of affairs? We answer unhesitatingly the intelligent though not over scrupulous planter. In his bullheadedness he has over shot the mark and is answerable for his recklessness. Either through his inspiration or disloyalty to the mandates of the civil law and the rights of others, there has sprung into the existence a mushroom crop of bull-dozers all over the troubled section, who are exercising unauthorized vengeance upon the unarmed negroes — such a sight sickens sympathy and destroys all regard for law. . . . The object of these intimidators seems to be twofold; first to break up the lodges of the Knights of Labor and scatter its membership, and secondly to make use of intimidation for political effect. 

 

Only two K of L assemblies functioned in Lafourche and Terrebonne Parishes in November 1888. These were LA 1043 at Canal Belanger and LA 10943 at Harangville, precisely the less technologically advanced and racially more open zones where the K of L had won at least partial victories. 

On February 21, 1888, Donelson Caffery, the elite planter and politician, wrote to his wife: "I went to Pattersonville on Sunday and organized a branch of the 'law and order league.' They are very enthusiastic down there to have a white man's government." Caffery, along with other "progressive" planters, had at last found a political solution to the "labor question" which had plagued them throughout the decade. The smashing of the labor movement and the establishment of racist political rule in the region shaped the transition to modem industry. 

The immediate effect of the union defeat on Lafourche and Terrebonne laborers, beyond generalized terrorism, is hard to ascertain. Reports from neighboring parishes, however, make it clear that the planter elite used their consolidated power to solidify mechanisms designed to maintain a submissive and stable work force. By September 1888 scrip payments equivalent to subsistence wages prevailed throughout the region. A laborer in St. John's wrote: "If members of a family be more than two it costs more for living than the present wages can afford." In addition, in many cases planters began to charge rent for cabins and to deny laborers' right to farm an arpent. Thus as the elite tied laborers to the plantations through scrip they turned into monetary terms every social relationship within their domain, thereby further deepening the workers' dependency and bondage through indebtedness. 

By 1894 over half of the sugar mills operating in 1887 had ceased to grind cane. Former small manufacturers became cane farmers, supplying the elite central factories. During the same brief period sugar production increased over 100 percent. By 1900 the organization of production in the sugar region only vaguely resembled the system prevalent in the 1880s: production was almost entirely concentrated in a handful of fully modernized central factories, operated almost exclusively by white labor. On the greatly expanded elite plantations in the leading sugar parishes of St. Mary's, Terrebonne, and Lafourche, many new white tenants closely supervised small groups of black laborers (often female), who worked in the fields from dawn to dusk, under conditions approximating slavery. 

 

The Planters' Solution 

The socio-geographic development of the strike significantly shaped its outcome. Although the K of L organized locals in upper and lower Lafourche, the strike did not develop similarly in the two regions. Planters in lower Lafourche who manufactured brown sugar inefficiently with the open kettle process literally could not afford to lose production. Burdened by increasing debts to New Orleans bankers and factors, with no immediate prospects of increasing production through modernization, many lower Lafourche planters might have lost their mills and land as a result of a prolonged strike.²⁵ "Lower" planters confronted a visibly unified multiracial movement, materially supported by the black and white small formers of lower Lafourche. Moreover, it is highly doubtful that "lower" planters, geographically and culturally isolated from elite "upper" planters, felt much class solidarity with the planter-manufacturers who seemed determined to subjugate the southern area's sugar production to their needs. 

Lower Lafourche demography and the primitive level of the productive forces shaped the labor movement. In contrast to upper Lafourche, proportionately more whites worked as permanent and seasonal laborers. A large mulatto population, in part the result of postwar miscegenation, probably eased racial tensions on the plantations. Moreover, the open kettle process of sugar manufacture provided no technical basis for a racial division of labor. Previously, slaves had performed all tasks in open kettle manufacturing. Following Emancipation whites and blacks worked as threshers, cane loaders, and as highly skilled sugar boilers during the grinding season. Just as no technical division existed between skilled and unskilled workers, similarly plantation labor and mill labor was essentially undifferentiated. Typically, a black, white, or racially-mixed lower Lafourche laborer alternated between field and mill tasks, regardless of skill level.²⁶ Thus the low level of development of the productive forces did not permit a technical differentiation among mill worker or between industrial and agricultural laborers, which in turn would have provided the basis for a racial division of labor. Such a division of labor, a technical basis for white supremacist ideology, would have allowed lower Lafourche planters to pit white against black workers. Instead the planters confronted a unified multiracial movement buttressed by the material support of black and white small farmers. 

In contrast to lower Lafourche, large fully modernized plantation-refineries dominated the economy of the area north of Lockport and enforced an increasingly clear racial division of labor. Blacks made up the overwhelming majority of permanent field laborers and participated in the manufacturing sector as unskilled laborers. Whites, often small farmers and urban residents, worked as seasonal field laborers and as skilled and semi-skilled mill hands. The emergence of the modern sugar industry involved the creation of new relations of production, which, in turn, conditioned the development of a racial division of labor in the sugar region. The introduction of vacuum pans, shredders, and centrifugals confronted planters with the task of training new operatives. These new tasks were not necessarily more skilled — that is, they did not involve more mental and manual dexterity — than open kettle mill work. But planters chose not to retrain black mill workers. Whites, often urban residents, became the new skilled workers in the modern sector. Although our data are insufficient, it appears certain that these workers received salaries at least twice those of unskilled workers.²⁷ 

The process of racial and technical division of labor was concomitant with the development of modem industry. By 1911 cane production and sugar processing were totally separate entities. No field workers participated in sugar production. Blacks worked the fields at subsistence wages while substantially higher-paid whites labored in the mills.²⁸ 

Such a clear racial separation between field and factory workers was still an incipient tendency in 1887. Elite planters in Upper Lafourche, however, such as Beattie, Price, and Warmold, had succeeded in organizing production along racial lines. The structural racial division on these elite plantations seriously undermined the labor movement and clearly played a key role in the combination of class and race struggle. 

Although it is unclear whether the K of L organized skilled white workers in modern mills, there exists no doubt that many of these workers acted as strike-breakers. Indeed, the modern mills in Upper Lafourche operated, by the second week of the strike, with nuclei of white workers. These strikebreakers, working at night, became the obvious target for spontaneous acts of striker resistance. Strikers shot at skilled white strikebreakers on several different occasions. These actions not only provided a pretext for planter and state repression but also helped make a plausible argument for racial struggle. The settlement of the strike in isolated lower Lafourche deprived workers in the more technologically advanced areas of visible solidarity with white workers which would have belied the planters' propaganda about racial conflict. And the eviction of upper Lafourche plantation workers from their cabins meant that between 500 and 1,000 mostly black strikers flooded into Thibodaux and turned the town, in the eyes of many whites, into a hostile black ghetto. 

Some courageous white workers fought alongside blacks even after November 20. But the manipulation of a labor struggle into an apparent racial power struggle by that date clearly shaped the racist terror which began at dawn on November 23. While non-elite whites were probably swayed to the planters' side by racial appeals, it is doubtful that racism alone conditioned the planters' response. Rather, Judge Beattie and Andrew Price came to the realization that the continued progress of their industry, based on exploitation of workers beyond that which would have occurred without violence and terror, hinged on the elimination of all manifestations of workers' autonomy. In this sense, the blood shed in November 1887 fertilized the ground on which modem industry could grow. This, indeed, was the solution to the planters' "labor problem." 

 

NOTES 

1. General William Pierce, Report to the Adjutant General (Baton Rouge, 1888), p. 4. 

2. Philip Foner, Organized Labor and the Black Worker 1619-1972 (New York, 1973), p. 61; Melton McLaurin, The Knights of Labor in the South (Westport, CT, 1978), p. 61. 

3. William Ivy Hair, Bourbonism and Agrarian Protest (Baton Rouge, 1969), p. 185. 

4. "Report of Special Commission," January 22, 1874, Journal of House of Representatives (Baton Rouge, 1874), p. 62; New Orleans Daily Picayune, January 22, 1874. 

5. "Report of Special Commission;" Daily Picayune, January 22, 1874; Black Republican 14, January 22, 1874. 

6. On Kennedy's election as sheriff, see "House Investigations on Louisiana 1878 election," Miscellaneous House Documents vol. 1, no. 12, 2nd session of 41st Congress, 1880; on arrest as labor militant, Criminal Docket, Terrebonne Parish, November 16, 1880. 

7. Black Republican, January 22, 1874; Criminal Docket, Terrebonne Parish, December 1887; both Kennedy and Keys are listed as laborers in Census, 1880. 

8. J. Carlye Sitterson, "The Transition from Slave to Free Economy on the W.J. Minor Plantations," Agricultural History XVII (1943), p. 220. 

9. Ibid.; "History of Glenwild Plantation," in Pharo Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, L.S.U. Clearly, more work needs to be done on the "arpent." Slaves had the right to a "garden patch," but not to an "arpent." 

10. Daily Picayune, September 30, 1877. 

11. This was more of a goal than an actual uniform policy. Yearly withholdings were less frequent in 1887 than in 1880. Statement based on examination of other papers cited here; see also letter by W.W. Pugh in Daily Picayune, November 20, 1887. 

12. Journal of United Labor, October 4, 1888. Estimate based on comparison of plantation store prices and wholesale prices. Also see letter by W.B. Merchant published in Weekly Pelican, November 19, 1887. 

13. In addition to other sources cited here, see particularly Journal citations for wage differential rate. 

14. Louisiana Sugar Bowl April 28, 1881; Report of the Grand Jury, St. John the Baptist Parish, 1882, 1883; Donaldsonville Chief, Assumption Pioneer, Sidney Kessler, "The Negro in Labor Strikes," Midwest Journal, Summer 1954; Thibodaux Sentinel, January 22, 1887. 

15. Louisiana Sugar Bowl, July 15, 1880. 

16. Ibid., November 14, 1880; Sentinel, January 30, 1886 and February 27, 1886. 

17. Powderly Papers, letter from D.B. Allison and Edward Gallagher to Powderly, July 7, 1886. 

18. Ibid. 

19. Morgan City Free Press, February 22, 1886; Journal of United Labor, February 1887. 

20. John Swinton's Paper December 12, 1886; Daily Picayune, January 4, 1887; Manuscript Census, 1880. 

21. Journal of United Labor, April 30, 1887. 22. The following description of the strike is based on a number of manuscript and newspaper sources, including: New Orleans Daily Picayune, October 29, 1887 — December 3, 1887; Journal of United Labor, September 17, 1887; the Manuscript Census for Lafourche Parish; Thibodaux Sentinel for September 5, 1887 — December 3, 1887; "Report to the Adjutant General;" The Criminal Docket for Lafourche Parish for 1887-1888; Terrebonne Times, November 12, 1887; New Orleans Times-Democrat, November 8, 1887; Assumption Pioneer, November 12, 1887 and November 26, 1887; Weekly Pelican, November 19, 1887 and November 26, 1887; The Daily States, November 15, 1887; Southwest Christian Advocate, November 19, 1887 — December 15, 1887; The Caffery Papers and the Pugh Papers in the LSU Manuscript and Archives; Covington Woods, "Conflict in the Sugar Fields," manuscript reprinted in Philip Foner and Ronald Lewis, eds., The Black Workers During the Era of the Knights of Labor (Philadelphia, 1978). 

23. 20 members of the Morgan City Knights were members of the militia. This may have influenced DA 194 leadership myopia. 

24. The events following the strike are based primarily on these sources: Daily Picayune, November 24, 25, 26, 1887; The Daily States, November 15 and 24, 1887; Southwest Christian Advocate, December 1 1887 and December 15, 1887; Weekly Pelican, November 26, 1887; Louisiana Standard, September 1, 1887; Thibodaux Sentinel, March 30, 1888; Journal of United Labor, June 2, 1888 and October 4, 1888; Pugh Papers, Hayes Papers, and Caffery Papers in LSU Manuscripts and Archives; Covington Woods, "Conflict." 

25. Covington Woods, "Conflict," Pioneer, November 26, 1887. 

26. Manuscript Census, 1880; Ibid.; Sentinel, August 20, 1885. 

27. Journal of United Labor, May 30, 1887 and August 13, 1887; lower mechanic/laborer wage ratio offered for Plaqumines: October 29, 1887. 

28. Sugar Industry (1913), pp. 28, 84-86.