Authors: Daniel Rasmussen
Inspired by Kook’s and Quamana’s silver tongues and fiery passion, half of James Brown’s slaves chose to join the seventy-five rebels who arrived soon after their master’s departure. Kook, Quamana, and their men formed a new, more radical core to the slave insurgency. At over six feet tall, with the etchings of an Akan warrior inscribed in his face, Kook towered above his fellow slaves. At the time, the average height of African males was 5 feet 3 1/2 inches, so Kook must have stood out as a giant. His rippling biceps, swollen from years of swinging a machete in the cane fields, made him a force to be reckoned with. He commanded easy and instant respect, even among the most hardened and rebellious slaves.
The slaves on the Brown plantation would have known Kook and Quamana both for their Asante heritage and their political fervor. In 1806, the same year Kook and Quamana were sold into slavery, the Danish governor of the region wrote, “The Assianthes, with sword and fire murder and destroy everything they meet with . . . A great battle was lost in the ninth of this month, at which four towns were laid in ashes and many thousands of people, not shot in battle, but murdered in cold blood.” Perhaps Kook and Quamana told their fellow slaves of these great battles, assuring them that New Orleans would soon burn like the defeated towns of subdued African tribes.
With the addition of Kook and Quamana’s detachment of Akan warriors, the slave army now numbered well over a hundred men. Beating drums and shouting with the joy of freedom, they urged each other on. They were a motley crew. Drawn in small groups from over a dozen plantations, the slave army boasted men from Virginia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Cuba, Senegambia, the Asante kingdom, and Kongo. Eleven separate leaders rode on horseback, each representing a different ethnic faction: the Muslim Senegambians, the Akans, the Sierra Leonians, the French Louisianans, and the Anglo-Americans were all involved.
With the evacuation of most white planters, the slaves had met few serious tests of their resolve. Charles and his fellow leaders must have worried that when faced with armed white men, their army might melt away. They must have hoped the uniforms, the disciplined regiments, the flags, and the drums would add confidence, but they were in uncharted waters.
The slave army had another problem as well—continuing betrayals. The slave Dominique, who belonged to Bernard Bernoudy, was staying at the Trépagnier estate with his wife. Hearing of the revolt from slaves who lived near his wife, he saw an opportunity to enhance his own status among the planters. Dominique rushed to tell François Trépagnier that “there was a large number of rebel slaves moving down the river, pillaging the farms and killing whites.” After warning Trépagnier, Dominique departed, ostensibly to warn Bernard Bernoudy of the impending danger. On his way to Bernoudy’s plantation, Dominique passed through the plantations of Delhommes Rilleaux, James Brown, Pierre Pain, and Alexandre Labranche, where he passed the word directly or through enslaved intermediaries. When Dominique arrived back at Bernard Bernoudy’s plantation, Bernoudy sent Dominique to New Orleans, who alerted whites along the way. Most would choose to flee.
But despite Dominique’s warning, François Trépagnier made the decision to stand his ground in the face of men he considered little better than canines. His contempt for his slaves was well known. Local legend had it that he kept a slave boy named Gustave as a house pet. As Trépagnier ate, he would toss food from the table onto the floor, where Gustave would pick it up and eat it. Other men had dogs, went the story, but Trépagnier had a black child.
Trépagnier did not think the slave-rebels would pose much of a threat. His wife and children begged him to accompany them into the swamps to hide, but he refused. Sending them off, he resolutely loaded his fowling pieces with buckshot. Amid the bitter chill of January rain, he locked his doors and took up a position on the second-floor gallery. There he waited for the slaves to arrive.
Trépagnier did not have to wait long. In the morning light, he could see the smoke from four or five burning plantations curling into the sky. He could hear the ominous beat of the African drums, pounding and pounding. But Trépagnier was not afraid. He had heard similar drums at slave dances, and he imagined he would be more than a match for a ragtag band of slaves. Quickened by the shouts and calls of the rebels, Trépagnier did not expect to see what he saw next.
Around the bend of the levee came a veritable army. Divided into companies, each under an officer, black men in militia uniforms advanced toward his plantation. Marching along the levee, they shook their fists and their weapons in the air. At the sight of the slaves, Trépagnier leveled his double-barreled gun and began to fire. The smoke of his weapon engulfed the second-floor gallery that skirted his mansion. Buckshot was notoriously inaccurate, and the smoke obscured the shooter’s visibility. But Trépagnier hoped the slaves would be intimidated by his presence and turn back.
Trépagnier’s estimation of the slaves’ strength and his decision to stay behind proved dead wrong. Kook led a party behind the plantation house, up to the second story. As other slaves lit fire to the foundations, Kook took his axe and hacked François Trépagnier to pieces. Local legend has it that Gustave too swung an axe, exacting final vengeance for years of patronizing mistreatment.
The rebel army had passed its first test. They had annihilated one of the most hated men on the German Coast. But Charles and Kook and all the others knew they needed more blood to baptize their incipient revolution. The slave army knew that the obstacles remained extreme. The leaders of the revolt knew the stories of prior acts of resistance—and their consequences. They knew what was at stake. No white man, no American official, no French planter, would brook the survival of a black army anywhere near white power centers. Slavery was too intertwined with the political economy of the Atlantic world to allow for any sort of black political existence.
Only through extermination and extreme violence could they earn the right to form a separate political community—to be recognized as men rather than slaves. Violence was simply the price they had to pay for freedom, and Gilbert Andry and François Trépagnier were the down payment.
Charles, Kook, Quamana, and their compatriots hoped that their swelling army would grow exponentially as they neared the dense and rich plantation zone right around New Orleans, and their aim was to conquer the city from the weak American military force there, forming a base to which slaves from far and near could flock. Inspired by the Haitians’ victory over Napoleon’s army, the rebel leaders were not unreasonable in imagining that they could defeat the Americans’ small colonial army.
They had driven their masters into hiding and thrown down a bloody gauntlet to the authority of the sugar masters, burning down several sugar plantations. Now, with an army several hundred strong and buoyed by victory, the slaves continued their march toward New Orleans. As the sun began to light up the fields from behind the storm clouds, a fearsome rebel army stood just outside the most densely populated plantation region in North America. In just a few miles, the slaves would arrive at the Red Church, then the Destrehan plantation, and then the new American plantations erected just outside of the city, with their huge populations of recently purchased Africans. Fear, rage, and violation lay as deep as the January mud, and the clash between the incipient forces loomed imminent on the horizon.
M
orning came slowly in the city. In a driving rain, the sun could only slowly illuminate the dirt streets and brick sidewalks of New Orleans on the morning of January 9. The white spires of the cathedral and tall masts of the ships crowding the harbor topped the center of the city. In the dense neighborhood around the Place d’Armes, small brick houses two or three stories high clustered about grand old Spanish houses. Once a palisade and a ditch ran around the center of the city, forming a parallelogram with the river. Four redoubts stood at the corners to protect the city’s inhabitants—though all but the fort at the entrance of Faubourg Marigny had since been demolished. Since the American acquisition, the ditch had been filled up and planted with trees, leaving a ring of open space between the city and the suburbs. A boulevard called Rue de Rampart ran where the ancient town wall used to stand. Parallel to the river, roads lined with reflecting lamps passed from the center of the city out toward the plantation zone to the northeast. Here the old houses of the present-day Garden District gave way slowly and almost indistinguishably to the rich sugar plantations of the German Coast.
The black slaves of New Orleans were the first to arise on January 9. As their masters slept, the slaves began preparing for the day: readying the horses, lighting the fires, and cleaning the houses. Slaves formed the great underclass of the city, serving as laundrywomen, delivery boys, cleaners, construction workers, carriage drivers, cooks, peddlers, stevedores, boatmen, and manual laborers of all sorts. Slaves walked hurriedly along the city’s brick sidewalks. The rain had washed out the roads, leaving prodigious quantities of mud and large puddles where hard-packed dirt usually lay. In crossing these watery streets, the slaves faced a difficult task. They could either search for stones properly placed for jumping or risk sticking fast in the mud as they waded from one side to the other. Few of these early risers knew just what the day ahead would hold.
* * *
The military scouts at the western gates of the city were the first to hear the news. The warning came from galloping horsemen who notified the garrison of the revolt. But they could not say how close the slaves might be or just what was unfolding. Within hours, fleeing refugees in carts and carriages crowded the road into the city, forming a traffic jam nine miles long.
Recalling the scene a few days later on January 17, a correspondent to the Louisiana
Gazette
described a road that “for two or three leagues was crowded with carriage and carts full of people, making their escape from the ravages of the banditti—negroes, half naked, up to their knees in mud with large packages on their heads driving along toward the city.” Rumors ran rampant through the city. “The accounts we received were various. Fear and panic had seized those making their escape and it was not possible to estimate the force of the brigands.”
Fresh memories of Haiti fueled panic and terror among the city’s white inhabitants. They had heard the stories of the Haitian revolution, when rebel slaves strapped white planters to racks and cut them in pieces, raped their daughters and wives, and decapitated men, women, and children alike. They feared that the German Coast had become, as one resident put it, a “miniature representation of the horrors of St. Domingo.” Women and children fled through the streets toward the redoubt at Faubourg Marigny to take shelter with the small garrison located there.
Sometime before noon, Governor Claiborne heard the news from his top general Wade Hampton, who had arrived a mere two days earlier to help with an ongoing war with the Spanish over West Florida. His first thought was for the safety of the city. He feared not only that the rebel army would arrive before his troops could prepare, but also that there might already exist some communications between the rebels and the urban slaves and free black people. In a city where the majority of the population was black, he feared the opening of a second front. If the rapidly closing rebel army were able to take advantage of an urban slave riot, Claiborne knew white New Orleans would stand little chance of survival.
Holed up with the mayor and other officials in the government buildings surrounding the Place d’Armes, Claiborne dispatched orders to the militia and the military to seal the city. His first terse writings on January 9 were to General Hampton: “Sir, I pray you to have the goodness to order, a Guard to the Bayou Bridge, with instructions to the Officer to permit no Negroes to pass or repass the same.” He wanted to prevent the flow of information from the black residents of the German Coast to the black residents of New Orleans, to quarantine the city from the contagion of revolt.
After securing the bridges, Claiborne targeted the taverns next. “All the Cabarets in the City and Suburbs of New Orleans are ordered to be immediately closed,” he decreed from his headquarters. Claiborne feared such halls of entertainment provided sites not just for the mixing of the lower classes, but also for the spread of revolutionary ideas. He was not the first to make this connection. A 1781 Spanish report detailed the troubles caused by black men during the Carnival season. “People of color, both free and slaves, were taking advantage of carnival,” wrote the Spanish official, to go about “disguised, mingling with the carnival throngs in the streets, seeking entrance to the masquerade balls, both society balls and those charging admission, and threatening the public peace by introducing enemies of the king into assemblies under mask,” and even committing robberies.
Claiborne put the city into lockdown. “No male Negro is permitted to pass the streets after 6 o’clock,” he ordered. The city garrison would fire a gun at dusk—the final warning to any black man still in the streets. The gun shot left little to the imagination of what would happen to any male slave found outdoors at night.
With these orders in place, Claiborne set his sights on the slave army now approaching his city. As reports of atrocities spread through the city, Claiborne turned to General Hampton. As Hampton later recalled, “about 12 O’Clock on the Morning of the 9th the governor came to me with the unpleasant information that a formidable insurrection had commenced among the blacks, on the left bank of the river, about 40 Miles above this city, which was rapidly advancing toward it, and carrying in it’s train fire, Murder, & pillage. The regular force in the City was inconsiderable, and as there was nothing like an organized Militia, the confusion was great beyond description.” Over the next six hours, Hampton scrambled to respond to Claiborne’s request for help. By six o’clock he had marshaled two companies of volunteer militia and thirty regular troops to meet the rebels. With the exception of a small garrison at the fort, this small force was the extent of American military power in New Orleans. The company set out after sunset along the River Road to face what some of them feared was a slave army of equal ferocity to the revolutionaries of Haiti.
Commodore John Shaw, the naval commander of the fleet at New Orleans, expressed skepticism of General Hampton’s force, calling it a “weak detachment.” Shaw feared that the insurgents might triumph over Hampton’s troops, that “the whole coast [would exhibit] a general sense of devastation; every description of property [would be consumed]; and the country laid waste by the Rioters.” The vulnerability of New Orleans contributed to the sense of panic. The majority of the American military force (in particular the highly effective dragoons) were in West Florida. With the departure of the soldiers, the volunteer militia, and the seamen, New Orleans was left virtually defenseless. “All were on the alert . . . General confusion and dismay . . . prevailed throughout the city,” Shaw wrote. “Scarcely a single person in it possessed a musket for the protection of himself and property.” The slave-rebels had forced the utter evacuation of military power from New Orleans. And now they faced the sum total of the military might of the Orleans Territory—at this time a mere sixty-eight regular troops.
Driving wind and a steady rain prevented armed ships from moving up the river. Bur Commodore Shaw made the quick decision to arm the sailors and send them in support. He lost no time in attacking by land. He sent his lieutenants Charles Thompson and Harvey Carter to lead a detachment of forty seamen on the expedition. The combined force now reckoned about 100 men—barely 20 percent of the size of the slave army. Moreover, they had little sense of the terrain, having come recently from the East Coast. This small detachment seemed to have little chance of success.
With the fate of the city in the hands of the army and the navy, Claiborne sat down as night was falling to draft his official reports. Claiborne knew he was in danger of losing control over the city he had governed since 1804. But the matter was out of his hands; he would have to rely on Hampton and Shaw to defend the city. Religion was his last resort. “I pray God that the force sent from this City may soon meet the Brigands and arrest them in their murdering career,” he wrote late on the night of January 9. With the white residents of the area clustered behind the city gates and the black slaves marching from the fields, it seemed all Claiborne could do was pray.
* * *
While Claiborne took frantic action to secure the city, his soldiers began to encounter frightened fugitive planters. But to the soldiers’ surprise, some planters chose to fight rather then flee. As they met the American army, they turned their horses around, facing back now toward their homes and the slave-rebels. Though lacking leadership, the planters formed a party of volunteer cavalry and agreed to join in the attack. Not waiting for Hampton’s troops, the horsemen led the way along the River Road and into what was now enemy territory. Many of these men were from families who had built New Orleans; they were patriots and lovers of their homeland. And now, in the face of perhaps the city’s greatest challenge, they rode out to defend it. In their minds, the slave-rebels were not freedom fighters but terrorists. As they passed scores of refugees heading toward safety through the pouring rain, they soon had to answer the questions posed by the revolt—and the changed world, post–Gilbert Andry and François Trépagnier’s deaths.
Riding along the River Road, the planters heard the clip-clop of a lone horse heading toward them at a fast clip. Suspecting the rider might be another escaping planter, Jean Noël Destrehan, Alexandre Labranche, and René Trudeau rode out in front of the troops to greet and debrief with the comrade they expected to emerge. But as the rider approached closer, they realized the horseman was black. Taking out their guns, they ordered the black rider to slow his horse. With no other clear option as he rode into an army of white planters, the slave brought his horse up next to the planters. He was unarmed. René Trudeau, recognizing his own slave Jacob, “stopped near the said negro, and said jokingly: ‘As brigand are you not at the head of the negroes?’ ” It was a loaded question—Jacob’s answer would make the difference between life and death. Jacob sought to defuse the charge. “My master, you know me, that I am not capable of such a thing,” he responded. Jacob’s choice of phrases was deft, born of long experience with the charged pleasantries and lies of plantation life. He had emphasized his state of servility by addressing Trudeau as “my master.” Jacob next asserted his familiarity, saying, “you know me,” relying on a mutual acknowledgment of good intentions, on a reputation for loyalty that he had presumably built up with Trudeau. Finally, Jacob denied that he would ever participate in a revolt. “I am not capable of such a thing,” he told Trudeau. What he implied, however, was not merely that he could not possibly fathom revolting, but that he lacked the facility or agency to do this. Having heard Jacob’s response, Trudeau decided to spare his life, to merely imprison Jacob until the revolt was over and a trial could be held to determine what exactly Jacob was doing. With Jacob in chains, the planters continued their ride toward the chaos of the German Coast. Their encounter with Jacob left them again feeling in control—as though the rebels they would soon face were just the same slaves they had known for years.