Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [126]
Then Rush began to bear down. Maple sugar, he argued, might sometimes be needed as medicine or food “by persons who refuse to be benefited even indirectly by the labour of slaves” but who enjoyed the produce of the “innocent” maple. He ended with his true hope, that maple sugar might be “the happy means of rendering the commerce and slavery of our African brethren, in the sugar Islands as unnecessary, as it has always been inhuman and unjust.”
Other abolitionists agreed. Robert B. Thomas wrote in the 1803 Farmer’s Almanack that maple sugar was “more pleasant and patriotic than that ground by the hand of slavery, and boiled down by the heat of misery.” In 1840 Walton’s Vermont Register and Farmer’s Almanac observed that “sugar made at home must possess a sweeter flavor to an independent American of the north, than that which is mingled with the groans and tears of slavery.” Writer after writer declared maple syrup to be free of the sweat, tears, and blood of slaves.
If abolitionists had succeeded in cutting deeply into the cane-sugar market, it would have been a true triumph. It’s easy to forget, given how completely the United States was shaped by African slavery, but the country was actually a (relatively speaking) minor importer of slaves—some 15 percent of all enslaved Africans came here, with most of the rest going to sugar plantations in Brazil and the West Indies. Unfortunately, maple sugar never managed to displace cane in anything like the volume hoped by Rush, and the sheer deadliness of sugarcane plantations meant a constant stream of newly kidnapped Africans up until the end of the illicit Brazilian and Cuban trades in the 1860s.
But every bit of maple sugar made did mean less slave-grown sugar bought; when a long run of sap meant a man could “make enough maple sugar to last all the year, for common every day,” that much at least did not come from slave plantations. But in the end maple syrup failed as a plantation crop on the kind of scale that might threaten sugarcane; efforts to transplant sugar maples to Germany, Russia, and even Virginia all failed (Jefferson’s trees at Monticello survived but never yielded sap). Maple syrup remained a fundamentally local food, one that might be shipped but could be made only under particular, nonnegotiable conditions.
As Rush said, private families were best equipped to make sugar because of “the scattered situation of the trees, the difficulty of carrying the sap to a great distance, . . . and the many expenses which must accrue from supporting labourers and horses in the woods in a season in which nature affords no sustenance to man or beast.” Such smallholders often used most of what they made, selling off surplus only in unusually good years. When she was sixty years old, Laura Ingalls Wilder remembered her father bursting into their Wisconsin cabin with the news that the cold snap was a sugar snow (she snuck to the door and secretly licked a bit from a nearby drift to see if it was sweet). The late, unexpected cold lengthened the spring, meaning a longer sugar season—and, for her grandfather, a welcome surplus of sugar the whole year round. It was a great occasion all through the woods, celebrated by a great communal feast and a rare dance; most of the sugar seems to have been eaten personally, and by friends and family, instead of sold.
Wilder’s grandfather was lucky, living in a section of woods where “the trees grew closer together and larger” (she may have misremembered the spacing—the best sugar bushes have well-spaced trees with high, massive crowns). Other farmers had to travel through the forest to the best groves, remaining in distant sugar camps for as long as the season lasted. They