In contrast, there were six male children and fifteen female children. With sixty-seven adult male slaves and twenty-nine adult female slaves, the sex ratio on the plantation was still skewed in favor of women. ![]() Nearly three decades later, Magdelaine’s great-grandson, Lezin Becnel, and his brother Michel were operating the plantation, which now had a work force of ninety-six adult slaves and twenty-one slave children, for a total of 117 enslaved individuals. This child, whose name was omitted in place of the classification “orphan,” was estimated with his father, indicating that they would remain together as a family unit. Usually slave children were inventoried with their mothers and when a mother was absent due to sale or death, the child was listed alone as an orphan. Magdelaine’s estate inventory contained another aberration: Sam, a thirty-year-old American griffe listed with his two-year-old child, together worth 400 piastres. Perhaps she was physically or mentally handicapped, considered defiant, or a habitual runaway. Of special interest is Sally, a thirty-year-old American negresse who was “good for nothing” and worth only 5 piastres, the lowest priced slave under the age of sixty. This detail may have been mentioned to entice buyers to pay more for them, as Creole slaves often fetched higher prices than American. Several American male field hands were listed as being “fourteen years in the country” or “eight years in the country,” suggesting that they were familiar with the labor associated with a sugar cane plantation and had adapted to life in Creole Louisiana. Some of the slaves were afflicted with entropied limbs, including Albert and Lenhem, whose right hands were damaged, and Cloe, whose feet did not function. While most of the men worked in the cane fields as carters, plough hands, or laborers, most of the women functioned as domestics, serving as cooks, children’s nurses, washerwomen, and maids. With twenty-seven female slaves and sixty-seven male slaves on the plantation, the sex ratio was severely skewed. Upon Magdelaine’s death in 1830, a significant portion of her inventoried estate consisted of ninety-four slaves. There were ten children of each gender, and ten women over forty-five as compared with only five men over forty-five. Thirty of the fifty women on the plantation and twenty-five of the forty men there were between the ages of twenty-six and forty-five. In the 1820 census, she appeared as “Widow Becnel and Son,” indicating that she had made her son a partner in a plantation that included ninety slaves, seventy-three of whom were engaged in agricultural labor. John the Baptist parish census of 1810, Magdelaine Becnel owned forty slaves, making her the largest slaveholder of the parish’s twenty-five households headed by women. ![]() Four shared the Mande dialect or language, while the other four spoke another West African language.īy 1810, Magdelaine Becnel significantly increased her wealth through sugarcane production, a burgeoning new crop due to Etienne de Bore’s successful crystallization of sugar on a commercial scale in 1795. Two were Bambara, two Fulbe/Pular, and the rest of various African groups, including Mandingo, Moor, Soso, and Konkomba. None of the men were Creole, or born in the colony. All possessed French names, with the exception of Tetemac, and ranged from twenty to thirty years of age. Eight male slaves were included in the inventory, valued at a total of 2850 piastres. As ordered by the Code Noir, Marie Joseph and her children were inventoried together and could not be sold separately, as the children appeared to be under the age of ten. The Becnels’ also had a family group of slaves, including a mother, Marie Joseph, and her two sons and two daughters, worth together 650 piastres. By 1790, Indian slavery was illegal and was nearing an end in practice. Though worth 350 piastres, Therese was “granted her freedom by the authority of a judge due to her Indian heritage,” in keeping with Spanish laws of the time. All of the Becnels’ slaves were described as negroes (black) with the exception of twenty-six year old Therese, listed as a metis, or of an indeterminate mixture of European and Native American ancestry. ![]() Surviving records document a total of fourteen slaves. An inventory was made of the Becnels’ property. In 1790, upon the death of her husband Pierre, Magdelaine Haydel Becnel opened his succession. Evergreen Plantation provides an excellent model of the evolution of Louisiana’s slave society from the colonial era into the early national and then antebellum periods.
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