Wade Hampton of South Carolina responded in 1811 by carrying a large force of his slaves to establish a sugar estate of his own at the head of Bayou Lafourche, and a few others followed his example.

The radical difference of the industrial methods in sugar from those in the other staples, however, together with the predominance of the French language, the Catholic religion and a Creole social regime in the district most favorable for sugar, made Anglo-Americans chary of the enterprise; and the revival of cotton prices after 1815 strengthened the tendency of migrating planters to stay within the cotton latitudes.

Many of those who settled about Baton Rouge and on the Red River with cotton as their initial concern shifted to sugar at the end of the 'twenties, however, in response to the tariff of 1828 which heightened sugar prices at a time when the cotton market was depressed.
This was in response, also, to the introduction of ribbon cane which matured earlier than the previously used Malabar and Otaheite varieties and could accordingly be grown in a somewhat higher latitude.
The territorial spread was mainly responsible for the sudden advance of the number of sugar estates from 308 operating in 1827, estimated as employing 21,000 able-bodied slaves and having a gross value of $34,000,000, to 691 plantations in 1830,[42] with some 36,000 working slaves and a gross value of $50,000,000.

At this time the output was at the rate of about 75,000 hogsheads containing 1,000 pounds of sugar each, together with some forty or fifty gallons of molasses per hogshead as a by-product.

Louisiana was at this time supplying about half of the whole country's consumption of sugar and bade fair to meet the whole demand ere long.[43] The reduction of protective tariff rates, coming simultaneously with a rise of cotton prices, then checked the spread of the sugar industry, and the substitution of steam engines for horse power in grinding the cane caused some consolidation of estates.