The Richmond Examiner says:

“A gentleman who has just returned from extensive rambles in Louisiana and Texas, says the sugar planters are feeding their molasses to their hogs, and are going to raise meat from the cane, and that none of the planters are making any attempt to raise crops of cotton. Very few of the plantations have overseers, most of them having gone to the war.”

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, April 26, 1862, p. 3