Authors: Daniel Rasmussen
For the men who served in the military, the experience of fighting against the slaveholders, of becoming liberators, was a powerful and decisive moment. One soldier, Spotswood Rice, wrote to his mistress, a former slave, from his army encampment to warn her of the new social reality. “We are now making up a bout one thoughsand blacke troops to Come up tharough and wont to come through Glasgow and when we come wo be to Copperhood rabbels and to the slaveholding rebels for we don’t expect to leave them there root neor branch,” he wrote. Rice, like many of his fellow soldiers, took advantage of the presence of the Union army to push for new social and political relations.
The planters took note of this dramatic change in social relations. A white man in St. Bernard Parish wrote to the Union army to complain of the impact of black soldiers on the labor force. He wrote that black members of the First Louisiana Native Guard “visited plantations of loyal & peaceable men, putting guards over their houses, threatening to shoot any white person attempting to leave the houses, and then seizing the horses carts & mules for the purpose of transporting men women & children from the plantations to the city of New Orleans.” The black soldiers rallied a group of seventy-five, who, he wrote “went singing, shouting & marauding through the Parish.” They even had the temerity to show up to one planter’s doors with muskets to demand “some colored women whom they called their wives.” The tides had turned, and the bottom rail was now top.
By 1865, black men and women had won themselves a new place in the Union. Half a million slaves had escaped slavery and forced the Union army, and eventually the president of the United States, to declare them legally free. Two hundred thousand black men had fought for the Union army, helping liberate tens of thousands of slaves.
When the Civil War began, no branch of the U.S. government—not the legislature, not the executive, not the judicial—expressed any intention of abolishing slavery. In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln had expressed his support for a constitutional amendment to ensure that “the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the states.” He had, he declared, “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.” The Republican Party, then in control of both houses of Congress, had taken a similar stance. “Never on earth did the Republican Party propose to abolish Slavery,” wrote Horace Greeley, a Republican spokesman. “Its object with respect to Slavery is simply, nakedly, avowedly, its restriction to the existing states.” In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in the
Dred Scott
case that any attempt to prohibit the spread of slavery was unconstitutional and that African Americans had no right to U.S. citizenship. Chief Justice Robert Taney wrote that blacks “were so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that [all blacks] might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery.”
Black slaves accomplished their own emancipation through brave and decisive action. The actions of black men in hundreds of military engagements proved integral to the Union war effort, forcing the U.S. government to recognize them as equal citizens. In the two years following the end of the war and black people’s exemplary wartime service, the United States passed three constitutional amendments abolishing slavery, establishing black people as citizens, and declaring equality under the law. Fifty years after crows devoured the rotting, decapitated heads of the slave-rebels of 1811, the dream of black political power on the North American continent finally became reality.
T
he plane cuts low over the flat Mississippi floodplains. From the window, the Mississippi looks brown and placid, passing through the farmland and industrial tracts north of the city. Large tankers and cargo ships seem fixed as the plane swoops in toward Louis Armstrong Airport, which sits on the site of the former Kenner and Henderson plantation.
Though city authorities renamed the airport after a prominent African American, Louis Armstrong, the names of the surrounding towns and streets date back much further. The old River Road sweeps past the poor, primarily black town of Destrehan, before entering the town of Kenner, where the airport is located. The River Road becomes Third Street, then Jefferson Highway, and finally South Claiborne Ave.
Don’t bother looking for Charles Deslondes Boulevard or Quamana Avenue. And don’t spend much time looking for historical markers of the 1811 revolt. There’s only one, across the street from a McDonald’s in Norco, nearly forty miles outside of the city center.
Driving along the path of the revolt today, you will pass huge chemical refineries, the sugar plantations of the current day. Overshadowed by these chemical plants, though, the history of older days still survives.
Many residents can trace their ancestry back to sugar slaves from this same area. Slave burial plots, cemeteries full of Civil War–era headstones, and even several remaining plantation homes still keep watch over the German Coast’s old ghosts.
The Destrehan plantation is open now for tours—and weddings or parties, if you’re interested. A group of prominent white families converted the Destrehan plantation into a museum, seeking to preserve their heritage and remember their own past.
The tour focuses on the lifestyles, family histories, and architectural accomplishments of the planter class. The tour is rich with descriptions of the planters’ meals, their parties, and their elaborate family dramas. The architecture is a special emphasis of the tour.
When it comes to slavery, the tour guides describe a system of “Creole slavery” that was generous and fair to the slaves. Slavery was not as bad under the French as it became under the Americans, the tour guides suggest. “Everyone worked, from family members to slaves, because life on a plantation was not easy,” reads the plantation brochure. “It has been documented that slaves at Destrehan Plantation were treated with fairness and their health needs provided for.”
But even the relatives of Jean Noël Destrehan cannot deny the events of January 1811. In a converted slave cabin not featured on the standard tour, the tour guides have constructed a museum to the 1811 uprising. With brief descriptions of the major events, the cabin features folk paintings that imagine what the event would have looked like. Just as in the history books, the story of slave politics is compartmentalized away from the central narrative of American history.
Though the world of the German Coast seems to have avoided confronting its past, one man has led a group to force New Orleans to do just that. Leon Waters, a sixty-year-old activist who has been involved with radical political causes since the Vietnam War, now provides tours of the uprising to curious student groups and tourists from out of town. “Hidden History Tours provides authentic presentations of history that are not well known,” promises Waters’s Web site. “We take you to the places, acquaint you with the people, and share their struggles that are rich and varied. These struggles have been made by Africans, African-Americans, Labor and Women. For too long their stories have been kept hush hush. But not anymore!”
A participant in the Black Workers Congress, Waters devoted his early life to organizing factories, even moving to Detroit to head up an effort to create a national struggle against wage slavery. During the past twenty-five years, he has worked for the Afro-American History Society of New Orleans, fighting to restore a “scientific” perspective to the history of the area.
For Waters, the tour represents a way to keep alive the memory of the uprising and the memory of the tradition of “revolutionary struggle” in America. He sees the 1811 uprising as the intellectual antecedent of the American civil rights movement. Aside from delivering tours, he works to fight police brutality and generally promote political discourse among African Americans in New Orleans. Waters has organized several commemorative celebrations of the uprising, featuring marches, reenactments, and speeches.
Though virtually unknown outside of his community, Waters is perhaps the most knowledgeable man in the country about the 1811 revolt. Growing up in the area, he remembered hearing stories from his great-aunt about the revolt. In the early 1990s, he decided to see if there was any truth behind the oral legends of his upbringing.
Waters formed the Afro-American Historical Society of New Orleans, and he set out to uncover history. He and his friends traveled to libraries, courthouses, and archives, where they were often met with obfuscation and racist comments. But they continued their search—and it soon began to bear fruit.
By 1996, they had assembled 168 pages of documents collected from archives all over the country, some of which they had translated from French by a scholar with Haitian roots. Waters arranged for an independent scholar named Albert Thrasher to write up a description of the events, and the group published the results of their research in 1996 at an independent press in New Orleans. The book,
On to New Orleans!
, provides a history of the “revolutionary struggle” of African Americans from 1500 through Reconstruction, devoting twenty-four pages to the uprising and its suppression. In an account defined by Marxist ideology, Thrasher fit the uprising within a long contextual history of revolutionary struggle. The book described the goal of the uprising as to “overthrow their oppressors, to destroy the power of the ‘white’ rulers.”
In addition to compiling a near-authoritative collection of documents related to the revolt, the book drew extensively on oral history from Louisiana. The oral history suggested that the black marchers had two chants, “On to New Orleans” and “Freedom or death,” which they shouted as they moved toward the city. Thrasher speculated that Claiborne’s account of only two white casualties was “patently in contradiction with the truth” and cited several sources from much later periods that argued for a larger body count.
Thrasher argued that while the revolt was tactically a failure, strategically it was hugely successful. “This revolt stimulated a whole range of revolutionary actions among the African slaves in the U.S.A. in subsequent years,” he wrote. “It continued and invigorated the tradition of revolutionary struggle among the African slaves in the Territory of Orleans that would never abate.” Though the book is full of Marxist-Leninist language denouncing the “sham” U.S. democracy and the “capitalist moneybags,” the book nevertheless provides a substantial account of the event itself.
Few outside of academia and the local community have ever seen the few copies of this book that exist. In fact, there is a vast collective amnesia in New Orleans and the United States more broadly about the massive bloodletting of January 1811.
How did the 1811 uprising become lost in the footnotes of history? How did historians overlook it for 200 years? And why has no one ever bothered to tell the story of the enslaved men who lost their lives fighting for their own freedom? The answers to these questions lie in America’s complicated racial politics.
Claiborne wrote the first draft of history—and he wrote it with the goal of covering up the revolt and saving face before an anxious nation. He wrote the slave-rebels out of history, believing that all that was important was the rise of American power in the Southwest. Swallowing Claiborne’s interpretation, most historians have portrayed the slave-rebels not as political revolutionaries but as common criminals. Up until World War II, most of these historians advocated or supported the control of white men over the political institutions of the South, conflating the idea of the law with the idea of white supremacy. Examining the revolt from this perspective, they heartily agreed with Claiborne’s interpretations and the planters’ violent actions.
The Communist movement represented the first challenge to Claiborne’s political agenda. After World War II, a wave of activist historians revisited the history of slave revolts in an effort to narrate a history of violent resistance and class struggle that would support their present-day efforts to organize opposition to Jim Crow rule in the South. But while these historians changed the tone of the commentary on slave revolts, they nevertheless kept the basics of the story untouched. Many of these men saw the slaves as mere gears in the great machinery of class struggle, and they saw little need to explore the politics of the enslaved.
* * *
The first historical account of the 1811 uprising emerged amid the political turmoil of Reconstruction, a time when newly emancipated African Americans were agitating for more rights and more control over the terms of their labor. Horrified by this turn of events, a sixty-one-year-old ex-Confederate named Charles Gayarré published an account of the uprising in the final volume of his series on the history of Louisiana. Gayarré believed strongly in the propriety of terror, and the rights of white planters over ex-slaves. “This incident, among many others, shows how little that population is to be dreaded, when confronted by the superior race to whose care Providence has intrusted their protection and gradual civilization,” Gayarré wrote in 1866. “The misguided negroes . . . had been deluded into this foolish attempt at gaining a position in society, which, for the welfare of their own race, will ever be denied to it in the Southern States of North America, as long as their white population is not annihilated or subjugated.” Gayarré, like Claiborne, endorsed the force that the planters used to suppress the uprising. Like Claiborne, he saw planter violence as both necessary and just.
To bolster his argument, Gayarré added an apocryphal story about François Trépagnier. According to Gayarré, Trépagnier heard about the uprising from his slaves but decided to remain on his plantation to protect his property. From here, Gayarré embellished, Trépagnier took a stand on the “high circular gallery which belted his house, and from which he could see at a distance” and “waited calmly the coming of his foes.” Trépagnier heard the “Bacchanalian shouts” of the slaves, and he readied himself for battle. “But at the sight of the double-barreled gun which was leveled at them, and which they knew to be in the hands of a most expert shot, they wavered, lacked self-sacrificing devotion to accomplish their end, and finally passed on, after having vented their disappointed wrath in fearful shrieks and demoniacal gesticulations,” wrote Gayarré. “Shaking at the planter their fists, and whatever weapons they had, they swore soon to come back for the purpose of cutting his throat. They were about five hundred, and one single man, well armed, kept them at bay.” The origins of this story are unclear. Perhaps Gayarré was drawing on oral history, or perhaps he invented this story himself. Perhaps Gayarré had never been out to the Red Church on the German Coast, where Trépagnier is buried beneath a gravestone that reads in French, “François Trépagnier, Killed by Insurgent Slaves on 10 January 1811.”
Gayarré was just the first historian to accept uncritically Claiborne and the planters’ reading of the revolt. In 1918, prominent Yale historian Ulrich B. Phillips devoted a sentence in his book
American Negro Slavery
to the uprising. Phillips included this sentence in a chapter on “slave crime,” pursuing the same narrative of criminality that Claiborne and Andry had so cleverly adopted. Interestingly, Phillips included the Haitian revolution in this chapter as well. The slaves, he wrote, “were largely deprived of that incentive to conformity which under normal conditions the hope of individual advancement so strongly gives.” Slaves committed crimes out of backwardness and a lack of civilization, and their “lawbreaking had few distinctive characteristics.” Phillips saw revolt as fundamentally apolitical, producing disquiet but little else. Phillips, like Claiborne, saw Southern society as synonymous with white society. Phillips argued that the South was defined by a commitment to racial superiority and to a specific form of social order. “It is a land with unity despite its diversity, with a people having common joys and common sorrows, and, above all, as to the white folk a people with a common resolve indomitably maintained—that it shall be and remain a white man’s country,” he wrote.
While Phillips only mentioned the uprising in passing, historians in New Orleans wrote more extensive narratives. In 1939, New Orleans journalist-turned-professor John Kendall wrote an article about slavery in Louisiana that depicted black people as casting a “shadow over the city.” Kendall argued that the fear inspired by the 1811 revolt was one of the central elements of the New Orleans mentality. In his essay, Kendall wrote a three-page account of the event—an account that remained for many years the most significant and definitive account of the uprising. Kendall depicted the slaves as animals, using words like “growling” and “howling” to describe the “savages” involved with the rebellion. Like Gayarré, Kendall saw this story as a moral tableau. “One must hold the reins tight over the blacks,” Kendall wrote. “They must know who were their masters.” Rich with overtones about class and race, Kendall’s story was meant consciously to generate a certain arrangement of power.
Claiborne wrote the first draft of the history of the uprising; historians like Phillips, Kendall, and Gayarré helped enshrine that draft as the conventional story. Like Claiborne, these men lived in a society where the rule of law and the rule of white men were synonymous. But that vision of society was under pressure. A new movement for racial and political equality was gaining steam through the work of Communist activists. This movement resonated in academia. The same year that John Kendall published “Shadow over the City,” a young academic named Herbert Aptheker joined the Communist Party of the United States. Aptheker had been studying at Columbia University, where he became involved with Marxist efforts to organize Southern tenant farmers into unions. White and Jewish, Aptheker saw two purposes to his alignment with the Communists. According to the
New York Times,
he “saw [Communism] as an anti-fascist force and a progressive voice for race relations.” These two motives were fundamentally interconnected. With Hitler gaining power in Germany, many Jews in the United States became worried about the clear overlaps between white supremacy in the South and Nazism. They feared that racist laws could provide a slippery slope into anti-Semitic laws, and that Jewish activism on behalf of African Americans was the best bulwark against the spread of such dangerous ideologies. Aptheker was challenging the Nazis and Jim Crow.