The rebellion was crushed. Turner hid in the swamp for six weeks before being captured, tried, and hanged. But the aftermath is where the paths of Toni Sweets and Nat Turner inextricably cross. News of the rebellion reached New Orleans by steamboat within three weeks. The reaction in the sugar parishes was immediate and violent. If the "respectable" slaveholders of Virginia could be butchered in their sleep, what was to stop the 100,000 enslaved people in Louisiana—outnumbering whites three to one in some sugar districts—from doing the same?
The "Toni Sweets" brand lasted only a generation. By 1860, most of the original sugar dynasties had consolidated into giants like the American Sugar Refining Company. The smiling slave on the barrel was replaced by a staid corporate seal. toni sweets a brief american history with nat turner
In the decade following Turner’s death, the internal slave trade to the sugar houses of Louisiana reached its zenith. Over 100,000 Virginians were sold "down the river" to places like Toni Sweets. They were worked literally to death. The sugar bowl of America became, in historian Walter Johnson’s phrase, "a charnel house of capitalism." Today, there is no "Toni Sweets" company. The name remains a ghost, an allegory. But the sweet tooth of America remains. When you spoon white sugar into your coffee, you are partaking in a legacy that Nat Turner tried to burn to the ground. The rebellion was crushed
The answer, for planters like the fictional owners of Toni Sweets, was a new, permanent state of siege. News of the rebellion reached New Orleans by