market from the severe depression of the early ’forties caused a strong advance in slave prices which again checked the sugar spread, while the introduction of vacuum pans and other improvements in apparatus[47] promoted further consolidations.  The number of estates accordingly diminished to 1,298 in 1859, on 987 of which the mills were steam driven, and on 52 of which the extraction and evaporation of the sugar was done by one sort or another of the newly invented devices.  The gross number of slaves in the sugar parishes was nearly doubled 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 mill.  In general the bulk of the crop was made on plantations with cane fields ranging from rather more than a hundred to somewhat less than a thousand acres, and with each acre producing in an ordinary year somewhat more than a hogshead of sugar.