A New Labor Force

BRIAN: Seventy years after William Cooper’s failed experiment, virtually all the sugar Americans consumed was still being produced by slaves, but now these were American slaves. And they were working in the cane fields of Louisiana. On the eve of the Civil War, Louisiana’s sugar industry was booming.

It was an industrial power that in today’s terms was worth $4 billion, but by the end of the war, its value had plummeted to just a small fraction of that amount. Plantations were devastated. And the enslaved workers who’d driven the sugar economy were now free to escape from the cane fields. Few had any desire to stay there.

MOON-HO JUNG: So Louisiana planters begin thinking about other possibilities.

ED: This is Moon-Ho Jung, a historian at the University of Washington. He says these planters were especially interested in what had already happened in the British West Indies. Slavery there had been abolished in 1838, and so Caribbean sugar planters had imported indentured servants from Asia to take the place of their former slaves. The laborers were known as coolies, and the Americans thought coolies might be the solution to their labor problems as well.

MOON-HO JUNG: So in 1869, there was a fairly big convention in Memphis organized to try to set up a company to recruit workers directly from southern China to Louisiana. They are very explicit in terms of what kind of labor they want. One of the persons at the convention is Nathan Bedford Forrest, a founder of the Ku Klux Klan.

And he is arguing for a new South which is very much related to the old South. It’s about the resurgence of white supremacy. It’s about the resurgence of the plantation economy. And the call for Chinese workers becomes a part of this movement in terms of what kind of labor they want.

So if I could give you a quote. This is one of the speakers in Memphis in 1869. This person says the West Indian plantations quote, “Now employee a coerce labor and again blossom like the rose. Who’s labor is it that has done this? India and China answers. Asiatic labor supply in place of that stricken down by emancipation. Shall we not profit by its for example?”

ED: You can’t really believe that people just say so explicitly what they me. Would it be great if we had coerced labor?

MOON-HO JUNG: Yeah.

ED: 1869, a quick calculations suggests it’s not that far from when slavery had been declared illegal in the United States. How did they navigate that legal landscape as well as that vast geographic landscape?

MOON-HO JUNG: In 1862, right in the middle of the Civil War, the US Congress passed a law prohibiting Americans from participating in the so-called coolie trade. US consuls supposedly would be able to tell the difference between a coolie who represented slavery and a voluntary Chinese immigrant. But the problem was all Chinese workers were represented as coolies.

So they became very confused as to whether to certify these shipments of recruits, Chinese labor recruits to Louisiana as either voluntary or as coolies. And so some of these consuls wrote to their superiors in Washington, DC, to ask very explicitly, what it is a coolie? How do you define a coolie.

And when southern recruiters end up in China, they begin arguing these are voluntary immigrants. These are not coolie. And by and large, federal officials allow them to recruit these workers.

ED: Does this Asian labor then become an enduring part of Louisiana sugar plantation society?

MOON-HO JUNG: Not to a great extent. I would say that many of these Chinese workers in Louisiana decide that this is not the life that they had hoped for, and they escape Louisiana as fast as they can.

ED: So it sounds as if the larger political consequence of this importation of Asian labor into the sugar districts may have lain elsewhere because I think a lot of people would know that in the 20 years after this that the United States as a whole begins to exclude immigrants from China to the United States. Can you explain what connection there might be between these two episodes?

MOON-HO JUNG: Yes. There is a deep connection that really goes back to the 1830s when American newspapers began writing about Chinese and Indian workers in the Caribbean as a new form of slavery. And so in the debates over Chinese exclusion in the 1870s and 1880s, many of the folks behind the exclusion movement begin proclaiming that excluding the Chinese would be an anti-slavery measure. That is it would be a vote for freedom.

So in the debates leading up to the exclusion of the Chinese, this is what a California senator said, a vote against Chinese exclusion quote, “Is to commission under the broad seal of the United States all the speculators in human labor, all of the traffickers in human flesh to ply their infamous trade without impediment under the protection of the American flag and empty but teeming, seething slave pens of China up on the soil of California.”

And so the people that really pressed for Chinese exclusion begin arguing that this is not an anti-immigration measure, but in fact it’s a pro-immigration measure. It’s an anti-slavery measure because they were not prohibiting real immigrants from the United States they were prohibiting coolie or slaves, whereas legitimate immigrants came from Europe and they were white.

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BRIAN: Moon-Ho Jung is a historian at the University of Washington. His book is Coolie and Cane, Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation. It’s time for another quick break. When we get back, an illicit trade in molasses fuels colonial New England’s economy and its revolutionary furor.

ED: You’re listening to BackStory story. We’ll be back in a minute.