The former slave and memoirist Jacob Stroyer wrote in the 19th century that enslaved people saw Louisiana as “a place of slaughter.” When a train lurched out of a South Carolina station carrying slaves to Louisiana, Stroyer wrote, “The colored people cried out with one voice as though the heavens and earth were coming together, and it was so pitiful that those hardhearted white men who had been accustomed to driving slaves all their lives shed tears like children.”

As the historian Richard Follett shows in his book “The Sugar Masters,” growers were in the vanguard of mechanization, using steam-powered rollers to crush sugar cane into juice that was then boiled and rendered into sugar. Mechanization sped up the tempo across the plantation, making it harder for slaves who cut the cane by hand to keep up with the demands of the mill.

Taken together, haste and fatigue and lengthening work hours heightened the risk of accident already endemic on the plantations. Unlike cane workers today, who wear heavy, protective clothing, the enslaved workers were vulnerable to being gouged and cut by the lacerating leaves of the plant.

The fiery boiling house — where the cane was pressed into juice that was then heated and crystallized into the coveted sweetener — had what the writer Adam Hochschild describes as a “satanic ring .” Men and women who were scalded found themselves unable to shed the sticky burning substance that clung to their skins.

Bone-tired slaves — who fed the cane stalks into the mechanical rollers that pressed them into juice — lost hands or were pulled into the rollers and dismembered. This outcome was common enough that a slave was often stationed nearby with a sword to sever the mill feeder’s arm before she could be pulled to her death in the rollers. The death rates on such plantations were compounded by malnutrition and disease, and were so obscenely high that the ranks of the enslaved needed constant replenishment.