Authors: Daniel Rasmussen
Fear—not some sort of divine mandate—drove American expansion in Louisiana. A need to suppress the black population, and fear of external enemies, pushed Americans to develop a new sense of who and what the country was. The federal government acted to support rogue adventurers and profit-hungry slave masters, allying with those who sought first to conquer and then to farm the American frontier. Economic development through slave-based agriculture was a top priority for the United States government—as the Spanish and the slaves quickly discovered. The story of the new alliances formed after the revolt is a microcosm of the larger definition of colonial America as a slave nation.
STRANGE AS IT MAY SEEM, WITHIN PLAIN SIGHT OF THIS SAME HOUSE, LOOKING DOWN FROM ITS COMMANDING HEIGHT UPON IT, WAS THE CAPITOL. THE VOICES OF PATRIOTIC REPRESENTATIVES BOASTING OF FREEDOM AND EQUALITY, AND THE RATTLING OF THE POOR SLAVE’S CHAINS, ALMOST COMMINGLED.
Solomon Northup
I
n May of 1811, as the bodies of the slave-rebels continued to decompose on the levees, William Claiborne called for a convention to write a constitution that would pave the way for Louisiana statehood. Louisiana statehood, Claiborne wrote, would strengthen the Union by “discouraging foreign intrigues” and “internal discontent.” By harnessing the power of the national government, Claiborne believed he could guarantee the security and expansion of the plantation economy against threats from the Spanish, the British, and the slaves themselves. Louisiana’s newfound political power would aid those who hoped to make slavery a continental system, spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific across the warm southern regions of North America. The German Coast slave revolt was the last significant challenge to the vision of a slaveholding Deep South spread from Georgia to Texas. Claiborne and the planters’ victory cleared the path for the next generation of expansionists.
Northern opposition to Louisiana statehood remained insignificant and trivial—the abolitionists and Free-Soilers had not yet risen to prominence or political power. A few northeastern newspapers and politicians spoke up. “The public will indulge what a grand acquisition the new state of Orleans (lately taken into the bosom of the Union by our good Democrats in Congress) will be to this country,” wrote a Massachusetts paper, pointing out that as Congress voted to accept Louisiana into the Union, blacks “were at that identical moment endeavoring to cut the throats of their
white fellow citizens.
” But such protests were muted and sporadic. By and large the country favored Louisiana statehood, for Louisiana statehood was the key to a new and stronger American nation that would spread its imperial tendrils across the continent.
Entering the Union during its first formative years, the new state tipped the nation’s balance toward the South, the West, and slavery. Representing the new state of Louisiana, William Claiborne, James Brown, and Jean Noël Destrehan were all, at various times, elected United States senators.
Statehood inaugurated a Deep South boom that lasted until the Civil War. The combined population of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama expanded from 400,000 in 1820 to almost 2.5 million in 1860, and New Orleans became the second largest port—and largest slave market—in the United States. Between 1776 and 1820, America became a slave country. The slave population of North America tripled between the American Revolution and 1820. As the slave population exploded, Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri entered the Union. By 1820, the course toward the inescapable conflict had been set.
In quick succession over the next several decades, the American nation would rip and roar across the Southwest, securing its own power, and the power of the slaveholders, from the British, the Spanish, the Native Americans, and the Mexicans. The American colossus would knock down these forces of opposition just as Claiborne and the planters had crushed the rebels of 1811—through violence, conquest, and powerful displays of force.
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Only four years later, the residents of New Orleans found opportunity to test their loyalty—and the effect of the military response to the 1811 uprising. In 1812, the Americans and the British went to war over shipping and trade disputes—as well as a frontier battle over British support for Native American tribes in the Ohio area. In 1813, a British navy flotilla composed of three frigates, three sloops, and ten other vessels made its way from Bermuda to Baltimore. There they landed a force of 2,500 British regulars who began the quick march toward Washington, D.C. The American militia, poorly armed and dramatically less experienced than the British, gathered at Bladensburg, Maryland, attempting to fend off the British army. The battle was a disaster for the Americans. Upon receiving news of the British success, President James Madison fled the capital for Virginia.
The British commanders marched in triumph into Washington, D.C. Down the city’s grand avenues the troops paraded, arriving at the President’s House before nightfall. There the British commanders ate the supper that had been prepared for Madison—before burning down the mansion, the treasury, and several other public buildings. The militia of the nation’s capital had proven incompetent in the face of the British army—and America had suffered an embarrassing defeat.
When British troops landed on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana a year later, few observers believed New Orleans stood a chance. But most observers also did not realize the impact of the 1811 revolt—and the military force the planters employed on a day-to-day basis to keep their slaves in check.
As the British threatened to “liberate” Louisiana and called on the French planters to come to the British side, General Andrew Jackson arrived in New Orleans. Denouncing the “perfidious Britons” and their attempts to rally an “incongruous horde of Indian and negro assassins,” Jackson issued a call for the planters instead to support the American government. The British, he wrote, threaten “to prostrate the holy temple of our liberty. Can Louisianans, can Frenchmen, can Americans, ever stoop to be the slaves or allies of Britons?” Jackson demanded that the residents of New Orleans “rally around the Eagle of Columbia, secure it from impending danger, or nobly die in the last ditch in its defense.” But it was ultimately not Jackson’s words that rallied the planters to the American cause, but rather the fear of slave insurrection by “negro assassins” like Charles Deslondes, Kook, and Quamana.
Claiborne reported to the local populace that “the officer Commanding the English Fleet now on this Coast menaces us (in the course of the winter) with black troops.” One American in New Orleans warned James Madison that the British might build “a powerful savage and negro army, joined by the slaves of the country . . . [to] carry fire and sword thro’ that devoted country.” Thinking of 1811, this Cassandra knew fire and sword when he saw it. The British did in reality have a regiment of black troops, and they consciously discussed using them in Louisiana. Reaching out to native tribes and slaves seemed an excellent strategy to upset American control of the Gulf Coast and allow for unchecked British advance. The British had offered freedom to slaves who fought on their side, and some did and won their freedom. And Jean Lafitte’s pirates and slave smugglers fought on the United States side, earning pardons from the government.
In January of 1815, over a thousand Louisianans rallied to support Jackson and defend the city. Gathering just downriver of the city in a battlefield amid the cane fields, the militia joined the motley crew Jackson had assembled. On January 8—the four-year anniversary of the great slave revolt—the militia proved its mettle, defeating the most advanced and effective army in the world. The English captain reported that his troops had fallen “like blades of grass beneath the scythe of the mower; brigades dispersed like dust before the whirlwind.” In the famous Battle of New Orleans, the Americans won the only real victory of the War of 1812. And the residents of New Orleans proved their loyalty, demonstrating military prowess far superior to the weak detachments that protected Washington, D.C.
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The next step in America’s imperial project began just after Andrew Jackson’s victory at the Battle of New Orleans. Fear of another German Coast uprising became a major justification for further American imperialism in the parts of Florida still controlled by Spain. When the British evacuated Spanish Florida after the War of 1812, they left behind a well-armed garrison of free black soldiers at a British fort at Prospect Bluff. The fort was essentially a safe haven for refugees fleeing slavery in Georgia and Louisiana, including about 300 black men, women, and children. Against the backdrop of the 1811 revolt, General Jackson saw the presence of these armed free blacks just sixty miles away from the American border as a terrible danger, even though these people had given no indication of aggressive intentions. “I have little doubt of the fact that this fort has been established by some villains for the purpose of rapine and plunder, and that it ought to be blown up, regardless of the ground on which it stands,” he wrote to his commander.
In July of 1815, Jackson invaded, sending two gunboats and a battery of cannons to Prospect Bluff. These cannons open fired on the fort, and before long, a heated ball hit the principal magazine and exploded, instantly killing 273 of the occupants within the fort and injuring sixty more. The living blacks were returned to American territory and reenslaved. To Jackson, free black people were necessarily “stolen negroes” and slavery was the only suitable place for them in America.
In fact, Jackson used the fear of slave revolts as one of the justifications for his continuing encroachments on Spanish territory. The Spanish controlled all of present-day Florida and parts of Alabama and Mississippi (other than West Florida, the section Claiborne had conquered several years earlier), and they allowed escaped slaves, as well as Native American tribes, to take shelter in exchange for agreeing to side with the Spanish should war with the Americans come. So Andrew Jackson, in direct violation of international law, began a series of violent military and paramilitary cross-border expeditions. His illegal gallivants culminated in 1818, when his armies stormed through Florida to wipe out the remaining Native American tribes and capture escaped slaves. When the Spanish governor at Pensacola protested that Jackson’s invasion was illegal and threatened to expel him from Spanish territory, Jackson simply invaded Pensacola.
President Monroe supported Jackson’s efforts, refusing to back down in conversations with Spanish diplomats. In his 1818 State of the Union message, President James Monroe discarded Spain’s control over Florida as a relic of the past, a figment of maps and treaties but no longer of reality. He declared that the border between the United States and Spanish Florida was nothing more than “an imaginary line in the woods.” Spain’s inability to transform Florida’s “woods” into agricultural settlements protected by military fortifications proved to Monroe that Spanish control over its colonial possessions was exclusively “imaginary” and should no longer have any effect on the actions of American citizens or government agents. At the time, this was a shocking and bold statement for the young—and still weak—American nation to make about its border with the possession of a European imperial nation. Monroe was dismissing the colonial authority of a major international power by asserting that America’s form of economic development—based on Thomas Jefferson’s vision of homogenous white agrarian settlements—was the only form of settlement that justified political control over land on the American continent. Slave-based agriculture and political control were, in this view, synonymous.
In 1819, recognizing the precariousness of their hold on Florida, the Spanish decided to give up in the face of overwhelming military threats. The United States signed the Adams-Onis Treaty with Spain, renouncing America’s claims to Texas in exchange for Florida. Ten years after Mexico gained independence, it too ratified the Adams-Onis Treaty.
In 1828, Jackson—who earned his reputation on the battlefield of New Orleans in the War of 1812, was the nation’s most celebrated killer of Native Americans, known for subjugation of the Creek Indians, his subsequent crushing of the Seminoles, and finally his elimination of the Spanish presence in Florida and conquest of that territory for the United States—was elected to the nation’s highest office. As president, Jackson presided over one of the most notorious episodes in American history: the Indian Removal of 1830. Veiling his true purposes with humanitarian and patriarchal language, Jackson used federal troops to force all Native Americans to move west of the Mississippi. Jackson firmly believed that the Native American presence east of the Mississippi was unacceptable and intolerable, and so he removed them, cloaking murder, fraud, and rapine under the name “Indian Removal.”
The United States did not let legalities stop its expansion. Slave-owning immigrants from the southern states declared Texas independent in 1836 and requested annexation to the United States. In 1845, after a long debate about the dangers of letting another slave state into the Union, the United States annexed Texas, violating the Adams-Onis Treaty. American delegates simultaneously traveled to Mexico City to offer to purchase California and New Mexico, but negotiations failed. The next year, after troops he had stationed on the Texas-Mexico border were attacked during an illegal excursion into Mexico, President James K. Polk declared war. “The invasion [of Texas by Mexican forces] was threatened solely because Texas had determined, in accordance with a solemn resolution of the Congress of the United States, to annex herself to our Union, and under these circumstances it was plainly our duty to extend our protection over her citizens and soil,” wrote Polk in his war message. “Mexico has passed the boundary of the United States, has invaded our territory and shed American blood upon American soil.”
American troops crushed the fledgling Mexican army, and in the treaty that ended the war, Mexico ceded to the United States California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, and Wyoming, and formally acknowledged American possession of Texas.
Louisiana’s entrance into the Union thus ushered in an age of expansion and imperial violence. Claiborne, like Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, shared a vision for just what America would be and how it would look. All these Virginians shared a commitment to an agrarian republic, an empire for liberty controlled and governed by yeoman farmers. Yet the word “farmers” is perhaps the most twisted word in the American political vocabulary: for Jefferson, as for Claiborne, these farmers were more often large slaveholders than independent freeholders. And so by working to expand America’s farms, these men took on the task of expanding America’s plantation zone, from its origins in Virginia and the Carolinas eventually all the way to Mexico. From 1803 to 1860, slave owners expanded their hold on the North American continent, churning through new land and bringing slaves from the older states to the newer through a vast new domestic slave trade. New Orleans, perfectly positioned as a gateway to the new Southwest, became the nation’s largest hub for slave trading—playing a pivotal role in the expansion of American slavery.