Gross proceeds running into the tens of thousands of dollars were indeed fairly common then and afterward among Louisiana sugar planters, for the conditions of their industry conduced strongly to a largeness of plantation scale.  Had railroad facilities been abundant a multitude of small cultivators might have shipped their cane to central mills for manufacture, but as things were the weight and the perishableness of the cane made milling within the reach of easy cartage imperative.  It was inexpedient even for two or more adjacent estates to establish a joint mill, for the imminence of frost in the harvest season would make wrangles over the questions of precedence in the grinding almost inevitable.  As a rule, therefore, every unit in cane culture was also a unit in sugar manufacture.  Exceptions were confined to the scattering instances where some small farm lay alongside a plantation which had a mill of excess capacity available for custom grinding on slack days.

The type of plantation organization in the sugar bowl was much like that which has been previously described for Jamaica.  Mules were used as draught animals instead of oxen, however, on account of their greater strength and speed, and all the seeding and most of the cultivation was done with deep-running plows.  Steam was used increasingly as years passed for driving the mills, railways were laid on some of the greater estates for hauling the cane, more suitable varieties of cane were introduced, guano was imported soon after its discovery to make the rich fields yet more fertile, and each new invention of improved mill apparatus was readily adopted for the sake of reducing expenses.  In consequence the acreage cultivated per hand came to be several times greater than that which had prevailed in Jamaica’s heyday.  But the brevity of the growing season kept the saccharine content of the canes below that in the tropics, and together with the mounting price of labor made prosperity depend in some degree upon protective tariffs.  The dearth of land available kept the sugar output well below the domestic demand, though the molasses market was sometimes glutted.

A typical prosperous estate of which a description and a diary are extant[16] was that owned by Valcour Aime, lying on the right bank of the Mississippi about sixty miles above New Orleans.  Of the 15,000 acres which it comprised in 1852, 800 were in cane, 300 in corn, 150 in crops belonging to the slaves, and most of the rest in swampy forest from which two or three thousand cords of wood were cut each year as fuel for the sugar mill and the boiling house.  The slaves that year numbered 215 of all ages, half of them field hands,[17] and the mules 64.  The negroes were well housed, clothed and fed; the hospital and the nursery were capacious, and the stables likewise.  The mill was driven by an eighty-horse-power steam engine, and the vacuum pans and the centrifugals were of the latest types.  The fields were elaborately