The Sugar King: Leon Godchaux: A New Orleans Legend, His Creole Slave, and His Jewish Roots

A penniless, illiterate, Jewish thirteen year old from Alsace-Lorraine crosses the Atlantic alone. He lands in raucous, polyglot, disease-infested New Orleans in 1837, the third largest city in America. He remains unable to read or to write in English or in French his entire life. Nevertheless, by the end of his intrigue-filled career, Leon Godchaux is the owner of fourteen plantations, the largest tax-payer in the state – the acknowledged “Sugar King of Louisiana.” He refuses to enter the sugar business until the end of slavery. Unsympathetic to the Lost Cause, caught up in the Civil War, and negotiating through Reconstruction and Jim Crow, he simultaneously builds a clothing empire and becomes known as “Th e Duke of Clothing.”. Godchaux relies on the accomplishments of two Black men: Joachim Tassin, a slave whose birth status both men conceal, and Norbert Rillieux, a free man of color whose overlooked ingenious invention enables Godchaux to build his sugar empire.