Louisiana was ratcheting up the restrictions because it was smuggling in and importing enslaved African-descended people as fast as the burgeoning sugar and cotton plantations could chew them up. As historian Daniel Rasmussen notes, “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
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