SUGAX A1?I> P0STA&8
Orleans—Jackson's victory over the British, Jan nary 8, 1815.
war had ended, the two nations wel'e at }>eace, but the news had not
yet reached New Orleans. If we had had the cable telegraph in
those days, this blood would not have been spilt, those lives would
not have been wasted; and better still, Jackson would probably never
have been president. We have gotten over the hai ms done ns by
the war of 1812, but not over some of those done us by Jackson's
presidency.
The Warmouth plantation covers a vast deal of ground, and the
hospitality of the Warmoutli mansion is graduated to the same large
scale. We saw steam-ploughs at woik, here, for the first time. The
traction engine travels about on its own wheels, till it reaches the
required spot; then it stands still and by means of a wire rope pulL?
the huge plough toward it&elf two or three hundred yards across the
field, between the rows of cane. TLe thing cuts down into the
black mould a foot and a half deep. The plough looks like a fore-and-
aft brace of a Hudson river steamer, inverted. Wlien the negro
steersman sits on one end of it, that end tilts down near the ground,
while the other sticks up high in air. This great see-saw goes rolling
and pitching like a ship at sea, and it is not every circus rider that
could stay on it.
The plantation contains two thousand six hundred acres; six
hundred and fifty are in cane ; and there is a fruitful orange grove of
five thousand trees. The cane is cultivated after a modern and
intricate scientific fashion, too elaborate and complex for me to
attempt to describe; but it lost j$40,QGQ last year. I forget the other
details. However, this year's crop will reach ten or twelve hundred
tons of sugar, consequently last year's loss will not matter. These
troublesome and expensive scientific methods achieve a yield of a ton
and a frplf and from that to two tons, to the acre ; which, is three or
four times what the yield of an acre was in my time,
The drainage-ditches "were everywhere alive with little crabs—
* fiddlers,' One saw them scampering sidewise in every direction
whenever they heard a disturbing noise. Expensive pests, these
crabs ; for they bore into the levees, and ruin them.
The great sugar-house was a wilderness of tubs and tanks and
vats and filters, pumps, pipes, and machinery. Tbe process of mabmg