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New Orleans: Printed by Cook, Young & Co., 1860. 12mo (7.375” x 4.25”), original yellow printed wrappers. [10], 46 pp. CONDITION: Good+, lower third of wrapper perished at spine, wrappers lightly rubbed and soiled, twine binding beginning to come unthreaded.

The 1860 edition of this groundbreaking annual statistical record of the burgeoning Louisiana sugar industry, published just a year before its peak at the dawn of the Civil War.

Pierre Antoine Champomier was born in France in 1794, “just one year before Etienne Bore successfully granulated sugar in New Orleans” (Follett). He became a merchant in New Orleans, and for eighteen years—between 1844 and 1862—published an influential annual report on the sugar production of his adopted state, including parish by parish data on the number of “hogsheads” of sugar produced by each plantation, the technology (horse or steam power) used, and the name and owners of the plantations. The introduction—written in both English and French, though the rest of the volume is in English—also notes climatic conditions affecting the crop over the course of the year. The volume offered here, covering the 1859–1860 season, attributes the deficient yield and quality of the year’s sugar to, among other factors, “a very severe drought…so severe in fact, that some plantations were seven months without a drop of rain to moisten the parched grounds.” However, Champomier correctly notes the “prospect of a good crop before us”: the 1860–61 season would, indeed, be the high-water mark of the Louisiana sugar industry—not only due to favorable weather, but to the ensuing disruption of plantation labor caused by the Civil War. Although apparently neutral on the subject of slavery, Champomier’s “regimented managerial accounting” of the sugar industry “provided planters, merchants, and regional boosters with the detailed business information to promote the sugar interests and defend the productive capacity of both plantation slavery and the contribution of slaveholding sugar planters to the wealth and development of the United States…When the Civil War eventually came to Louisiana in April 1862 (the sugar parishes were among the first to be occupied by Federal troops), Champomier earnestly reported on ‘the disasters attending the war,’ chief among them was the disruption to the cane-growing country by indiscipline among the enslaved and the mass departure of African Americans from the plantation belt” (Follett).

REFERENCES: Follett, Richard. “Documenting Louisiana Sugar 1845-1917,” University of Sussex online.

Item #8679

Price: $675.00