Read the two passages from Sugar Changed the World.England had begun talking about ending slavery, but then it saw the chaos in France and sent an army to try to defeat the Haitians. Now Napoleon's France followed in the footsteps of the English.Napoleon's 35,000-man army was led by his brother-in-law and soon scored an amazing success: They captured Toussaint in 1802 and brought him to France, where he died in prison in 1803. But the former slaves fought on. In two years of fighting, nearly 50,000 French soldiers died. And on January 1, 1804, the victorious Republic of Haiti was born. Fighting for freedom, the former slaves defeated the armies of first England, then France: Europe's two most powerful nations.Haiti was born free; human rights won over property rights.In 1807 a bill to ban all English involvement in slave trading passed the House of Commons, then the House of Lords. At precisely noon on March 25, King George III signed the law. We should mark that date, honor it, to this day. For while no slaves were freed by the bill, it marked a great change in the world. More slaves from Africa had been shipped by the British than by any other nation. That part of the grim history of sugar and slavery was over. Indeed, that very same year Congress passed a law forbidding Americans from being involved in importing slaves. In the great contest over whether a human, any human, could ever be property; the tide was turning.
Read the two passages from Sugar Changed the World.By the late 1700s, Saint Domingue (what is now Haiti) was the world center of sugar. So many sugar plantations dotted the landscape that slaves called commanders managed other slaves. On the night of August 14, 1791, commanders from the richest sugar plantations in Saint Domingue gathered in a place called Alligator Woods and swore a solemn oath. They would rise up against their white owners, "and listen to the voice of liberty which speaks in the hearts of all of us." That voice told them to destroy everything related to sugar. Sugar made the Africans slaves, so sugar must be wiped off the island, now a vast sugar factory to the world.By the end of August, the French colony was in flames. So many cane fields were on fire that the air was filled with "a rain of fire composed of burning bits of cane-straw which whirled like thick snow." Smashing mills, destroying warehouses, setting fields on fire, the freedom fighters demolished some one thousand plantations—and that was just in the first two months of their revolution. The fight against sugar and chains soon had a leader, Toussaint, who called himself "L’Ouverture”—the opening. Toussaint was making a space, an opening, for people to be free.When the Haitians defeated the French armies, Napoleon lost control of the world's most productive sugar islands and with it his dream of great sugar profits. As a result, Napoleon had no use for the land in North America he had so recently obtained from Spain. Napoleon did, though, need money to pay for his wars. That is why he sold the vast Louisiana Territory to Jefferson for the bargain price of just fifteen million dollars. What textbooks call the Louisiana Purchase should really be named the Sugar Purchase. Americans obtained the middle part of what would become their nation because the Haitians achieved their freedom.
What is an author's claim?
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.In every single American slave state, the population of enslaved people kept rising even after the slave trade was abolished. That was because enough enslaved children were born, lived, and grew to become adults. There was just one exception to this rule: Louisiana, where the native-born enslaved population kept dropping. Sugar was a killer.Unlike the Caribbean, Louisiana has cold snaps. That put an additional pressure on the sugar harvest. Not only did the slaves need to harvest the cane in perfect rhythm with the grinding mills, but the entire crop had to be cut down between mid-October and December. This pace only increased when growers installed improved, steam-powered mills. People needed to work faster than the weather and to keep pace with machines.
Which historical events do the authors include to support the claim in this passage? Select two options.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.Knowing that their slaves were likely to die by the time they reached their thirties, Louisiana sugar planters were extremely selective—they bought only healthy-looking young men in their late teens. On average, the men purchased in Louisiana were an inch taller than the people bought in the other slave states. Those teenagers made up seven to eight out of every ten slaves brought to America's sugar Hell. The others were younger teenage girls, around fifteen to sixteen years old. Their job, for the rest of their short lives, was to have children. Elizabeth Ross Hite knew that, for sure, "all de master wanted was fo' dem wimmen to hav children." Enslaved children would be put to work or sold. The overseer S.B. Raby explained, "Rachel had a 'fine boy' last Sunday. Our crop of negroes will I think make up any deficiencies there may be in the cane crop." That is, a master could sell any slaves who managed to live, if he needed more money than he could make from sugar.Jazz was born in Louisiana. Could it be that a population of teenagers, almost all of them male, were inspired to develop their own music as a way to speak, to compete, to announce who they were to the world? Bomba in Puerto Rico, Maculelê in Brazil, jazz in Louisiana—all gave people a chance to be alive, to be human, to have ideas, and dreams, and passions when their owners claimed they were just cogs in machinery built to produce sugar.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.The English public, now consuming some eighteen pounds of sugar a year, knew little about the lives of the enslaved Africans whose labor sweetened their meals. Worse yet, every Englishman who hammered the wood, sewed the sails, manufactured the rope for slave ships, or built the barrels to hold slave-harvested sugar made his money from the slave trade. The English were getting richer because Africans were being turned into property. Clarkson and others who believed as he did, who in the coming decades would be called abolitionists, realized that while that link gave the English a stake in slavery, it also gave the antislavery forces an opportunity. If they could reverse the flow—make the horrors of slavery visible to those who benefited from it—they might be able to end the vile practice forever.The abolitionists were brilliant. They created the most effective public relations campaign in history, inventing techniques that we use to this day. When he spoke, Clarkson brandished whips and handcuffs used on slaves; he published testimonials from sailors and ship doctors who described the atrocities and punishments on slave ships. When Olaudah Equiano published his memoir, he educated his readers about the horrors of the slave trade. And then, when the English began to understand what slavery really was, Clarkson and others organized what we would call a boycott of "the blood-sweetened beverage."
Which details do the authors include to support the claim in this passage? Select three options.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.You could date a great change in the world to a visit one Madame Villeneuve made to France in 1714. That year, Pauline, an enslaved woman from the Caribbean, arrived in France as the personal servant of her mistress. When Madame Villeneuve set off from the coast to visit Paris, she left Pauline in a convent. The young woman spent her time studying with the nuns and went so far in her training that she asked to become a nun herself and remain in the convent. The nuns agreed, which enraged Madame Villeneuve. She rushed to a judge, demanding to have her property back. Was Pauline a free woman, a bride of Christ, or an item to be bought, sold, and warehoused when she was not in use?Twenty-three years earlier, King Louis XIV had issued a set of rules that defined slavery as legal in the French sugar islands. But when two slaves managed to reach France, he freed them—saying they became free "as soon as they [touched] the soil" of France. The judges sided with Pauline—she was real to them, human, not a piece of property. For Pauline's judges, as for King Louis, slavery far off across the seas was completely different from enslaved individuals in France.
How do the authors use historical evidence to support their claim? Select two options.
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