A forgotten story : Edward James Gay and the Chinese labor experiment in reconstructed Louisiana

• Main Author: Garipoglu, Melis
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2013
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/43882

In the summer of 1870, sugar planter Edward James Gay was at a loss for what was to be done about the perpetual labor shortages on his Iberville Parish, Louisiana plantation. He had already begun to hire workers, mostly ex-slaves, from outside Iberville Parish, and outside of the state also, but still, Gay and his colleagues longed for a more permanent solution. By August 1870, the men settled on a potential answer: they would hire Chinese workers from San Francisco. Indeed, with the assistance of his brother, William Gay, and his business associates, Major L.L. Butler and Samuel Cranwill, Edward Gay successfully brought 52 Chinese workers from San Francisco to work on his sugar estate in the fall of 1870. The men and their new workers became a part of a campaign that ultimately brought several thousand Chinese men and women into the Reconstructed South between the late-1860s and early-1870s. The essay is an examination of this process, telling the story of Edward Gay’s efforts to recruit and employ Chinese workers. It seeks to understand the motivation of Edward Gay and planters like him, and to further understand the consequences of a labor experiment that has largely gone neglected within Southern history. Ultimately, Gay’s records challenge the widely held notion that planters sought Chinese workers as a more cost-efficient labor source, suggesting instead that Chinese workers were, in fact, more expensive and that planters were aware of these costs. Gay was indeed mindful that it would cost him more to hire Chinese workers, but he pursued these workers nevertheless, I argue, because he hoped Chinese workers would prove less “troublesome” than freedmen. This, the essay will reveal, did not prove to be the case, and in fact, Gay’s experiment with Chinese workers lasted less than one year. The consequences of Gay’s experiment and those of his fellow planters, the essay ultimately suggests, worked to transform Louisiana into what historians have come to recognize as a “borderlands” region.