For Years, Wikipedia Pages on Slaveholders Have Gone Untouched. It’s Time to Change That.Pages on Slaveholders

My fourth great-grandfather Valcour Aime was hailed as a philanthropist, agricultural pioneer, and “the very model of a Louisiana grand seigneur.” And that’s just his Wikipedia <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valcour_Aime#cite_note-4" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">entry</a>. In the decades prior to the Civil War, Aime was the largest sugar producer in the world. The “Louis XIV of Louisiana,” as he was known, erected a massive plantation and English garden on land swapped out with his brother-in-law Jacques Roman, modestly dubbing it Petit Versailles. What that Wikipedia hagiography did not mention was that my ancestor was also the largest slaveholder in Louisiana. His fortune was built by 233 enslaved people who labored on Petit Versailles to harvest cane under punishing conditions, while Valcour enjoyed the life of a “feudal lord,” as one author wrote. Sugar production in Louisiana was an unrelenting year-round process that <a href="http://sugar%20production%20in%20louisiana%20was%20a%20"barbaric"%20year-round%20process%20that%20drove%20the%20slave%20trade%20in%20america./" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">fueled the slave trade</a> in America. According to one study, the life expectancy of a worker on a sugar plantation was <a href="https://sandpointreader.com/americas-largest-slave-rebellion-and-the-mutilation-of-louisiana-cane-cutters/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">seven years,</a> so Aime literally worked people to death. <a href="https://medium.com/@kennabarrett18/for-years-wikipedia-pages-on-slave-owners-have-gone-untouched-its-time-to-change-that-f91dfaa767f">Click Here</a>