“Nowhere in America was slavery as exploitative, or were profits as high, as in the cane fields of Louisiana. Slaves worked longer hours, faced more brutal punishments, and lived shorter lives than any other slave society in North America.”129 Those conditions fed into the brutality of iron collars, facemasks, cowhide whips, and even a Black child held as a pet to fetch food off the master’s floor.130 Louisiana proudly epitomized “the horrors of an archaic labor system with the rapacious efficiencies of capitalism.”
