Tainted with Blood

BRIAN: If you’re just joining us, this is BackStory. Today on the show, a history of sugar in America.

FEMALE SPEAKER: One more health study I need to tell you about this afternoon. This one related to almost everyone’s favorite ingredient, sugar. It turns out added sugar raises the risk of deadly heart problems.

BRIAN: This is CNN earlier this week reporting on what’s been called the biggest study of its kind. It’s hot off the presses of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The study draws a direct connection between the amount of sugar in most Americans diets and a much higher risk of fatal heart disease.

But if we rewind about 250 years, sugar’s dark side looked a little different. The problem wasn’t consumption. It was production. Back then, almost all the sugar that sweetened Americans’ diets came from the West Indies. And those West Indian cane plantations ran off of a particularly deadly form of slavery.

Historian Alan Taylor has written about one group of people especially troubled by the link between sugar and slavery, Quaker abolitionists. In the 1780s he says some wealthy Philadelphia Quakers banded together in a novel if ultimately unsuccessful attempt to do something about it.

ALAN TAYLOR: This Quaker network was looking for some alternative source of sugar that would be made within the United States by free people rather than in the West Indies by slaves.

BRIAN: I have I guess where they looked.

ALAN TAYLOR: Well, they are looking at maple sugar trees, and the man who calls their attention to these maple sugar trees is William Cooper, who is a land speculator who has a prime chunk of real estate with thousands of maple sugar trees on it. And these trees are on a tract called Oswego in what’s now Oswego County, New York, which is around the town that Cooper founded and named for himself, Cooperstown, New York.

When you’re a land speculator, you need some paying commodity, something that these settlers can bring to your store that you can take on to the wider world and sell. And so he hoped that maple sugar would be that commodity that would enable these settlers to prosper. And they will all be doing good because the sugar will be made by free people and their families here in the United States rather than being made by slaves in the West Indies.

BRIAN: Now how strong was this desire to counter slavery in his motivations?

ALAN TAYLOR: He like most people was a complicated person, so he owned slaves.

BRIAN: Uh-huh.

ALAN TAYLOR: He is in New York state, and at that time slavery was perfectly legal in New York. They were domestic servants. They weren’t farm workers, and eventually he would free them.

We might be tempted to say, well, he’s a hypocrite for having slaves but preaching that people should buy his sugar because it was not made by slaves. But people were involved in all sorts of moral complications in that time if anybody had slaves.

BRIAN: So what goes wrong Alan?

ALAN TAYLOR: What goes wrong is that maple sugar production is highly volatile, depending upon weather conditions in March and April. So the quality and the quantity of the sugar that they are bringing into Cooper’s store is highly variable. And then the transportation problem is one the Cooper doesn’t solve because Cooperstown is a pretty long schlep to get to Philadelphia. And along the way, these barrels are exposed to rain, and the rain seeps in, and it destroys the sugar.

BRIAN: So what’s does he do when he’s faced with all this failure after so much optimism?

ALAN TAYLOR: Well, he will try again for a second year. The first attempt they make is in the spring of 1790. And that’s the one that gets all this publicity. And then it turns out there wasn’t a lot of production behind the publicity.

He tries again in 1791, and he gets the production up a little bit better. But by that point, people are skeptical. So he doesn’t get as much publicity. So he tries a third year, and this year the climate conditions were even worse, and the production is just a fraction of what he produced in the first two years.

And at that point, he just throws up his hands and says, I’m out of this. I’m not to lose money on this. So when push comes to shove, William Cooper’s has got to make some money, and it’s not his principles which are prime really driving that.

BRIAN: So what happens to this enterprise that he’d mobilize so many of his neighbors into, turning to sugar production and the cooperage, so to speak, and the transportation and all that, what happens to it all?

ALAN TAYLOR: Well, he has procured all of these iron kettles that are used to boiled this sap down into syrup. Then there are these molds that are used to crystallize the sugar in. So all of those have being dispersed out to all these farmers.

And I think a lot of them kept this and continued to produce this maple sugar for their own household consumption and maybe to barter locally. But he’s not able to connect this to a wider market in a way that will compete with cane sugar. But when Cooper was pitching this at his peak of enthusiasm in 1789 and ’90, he said one of the great benefits is this will preserve the maple trees.

It’s a beautiful tree. They were big. There were a lot of them. They’re productive. And so he’s expressing a conservationist ideal, which is that these are too valuable in the long run to be sacrificed in the short run by burning them. Because you can also burn these trees to make a product called potash, which was widely used in various industrial processes at that time.

And this is a time when the Industrial Revolution is getting going, so there is a pretty voracious demand for potash, particularly in England. But once maple sugar turns out to be disappointing, William Cooper does a 180, and he starts to promote potash production. He flip-flops. All right. Suddenly he becomes the guy who wants to burn up the American forest.

BRIAN: Wow.

ALAN TAYLOR: He tried maple sugar, and it didn’t work. So number two is potash, and it does work in a big way, and it helps him to achieve his primary goal, which is to sell land and to develop the settlement around Cooperstown.

ED: Alan Taylor is a historian at the University of Virginia. His story about William Cooper appears in his William Cooper’s Town, Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic.

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