he Mississippi,"
wherein the brave deeds of the army, white and colored, are hailed in
French verse, lame and halting, it may be in places, but impartial in
its tribute.

The close of the Revolutionary war found the colony partially paralyzed as
to industry. During the Spanish domination the indigo industry declined,
tobacco was difficult to raise, and the production of cotton was not then
profitable. Sugar raising was the only other industry to which they could
turn. In 1751 the Jesuit fathers had received their first seed, or rather
layers, from Santo Domingo and from that time sugar-cane had been grown
with more or less success. But it was a strictly local industry. The
Louisianians were poor sugar-makers. The stuff was badly granulated and
very moist, and when in 1765 an effort was made to export some of the sugar
to France, it was so wet that half of the cargo leaked out of the ship
before it could make port. It was just at this psychological moment, in
1791 to 1794, when the planters of the lower Delta saw ruin staring them in
the face, that there came to the rescue of the colony a man of color, one
of the refugees from Santo Domingo, where the blacks had risen in 1791.
From the failure of this abortive attempt to emulate the spirit of the
white man, refugees flew in every direction, and Louisiana welcomed them,
if not exactly with open arms, at least with more indifference than other
colonies. And these black refugees were her saviors. For they had been
prosperous sugar-makers, and the efforts to make marketable sugar in
Louisiana, which had ceased for nearly twenty-five years, were revived. Two
Spaniards, Mendez and Solis, erected on the outskirts of New Orleans, the
one a distillery, the other a battery of sugar-kettles, and manufactured
rum and syrup. Still, the efforts were not entirely successful, until
Etienne de Bore appeared. Face to face with ruin because of the failure of
the indigo crop, he staked his all on the granulation of sugar. He enlisted
the services of these successful Santo Dominicans, and went to work. In all
American history there can be fewer scenes more dramatic than the one
described by careful historians of Louisiana, the day when the final test
was made and there was passed around the electrical word, "It
granulates!"[36]

That year de Bore marketed $12,000 worth of super or sugar. The agriculture
of the Delta was revolutionized; seven years afterwards New Orleans
marketed 2,000,000 g