Authors: Daniel Rasmussen
The slave traders brought the slaves from the beach to the slave ships in canoes that tossed and turned in the waves, upsetting the stomachs of African men and women little accustomed to the sea. The traders bound the slaves’ ankles together with iron rods and loaded them two by two into the cramped semidarkness of the slave ship’s hold. But the newly enslaved did not give in easily to these new oppressions. As countless captains’ logs, sailors’ stories, and voyage records suggest, slave ships were notoriously explosive places.
The captains of the slave ship
Diligent
left detailed records that provide a window into life aboard a slaver—and the constant warfare between the traders and the slaves. The first moments with a new cargo of slaves were an incredibly tense time for the crew, who knew that slave revolts were most likely to occur in sight of land. The captain posted a rotating set of sentinels to guard the hatchway to the slave quarters twenty-four hours a day. The crew kept arms stocked on deck and kept the swivel guns on the quarterdeck trained at the main deck near the hatchway. Mealtimes, when the slaves were brought on deck, were the moments of highest tension—the entire crew would turn out with guns loaded to help keep order, preventing both revolt and suicide. Tensions ran high.
The crew saw rebellion in every dark face, fearing constantly lest their ship erupt into violence. Traders knew that children could carry messages and use their sharp eyes to discover loose nails and other potential weapons, that women could use their greater freedom to spy and survey the opportunities for revolt. In fact, studies suggest that slave rebellions were more likely when there were more women on board. The slaves did more than just plot revolt; they also shared valuable information, established networks of communication, and laid the groundwork for the pan-African slave culture of the New World. The informal networks that would sustain these men and women in captivity began to form in the dark holds of the ships. The slaves shared their histories, established bonds of trust and affection, and speculated constantly on what might await them at their destination.
Slave traders made examples of those who did choose to attempt escape or revolt. When one slave on the
Diligent
bit a fellow slave in order to try to spark a revolt, the captain brought the entire cargo of slaves onto the deck. He ordered sailors to tie a rope around the man’s chest and hoist him up high into the air. A firing squad then unleashed a volley of shots as the man screamed with anger and agony. His blood spattered onto the faces of the slave onlookers. The captain wrote in his journal that he did this “to teach a lesson to all the others.” As the Africans transitioned into their new roles as slaves, they would witness many such lessons.
Once the slave ship reached open ocean, the traders worked to try to keep the slaves in a semblance of health, lest they lose too much of their cargo. The profit was in delivering laborers—not half-dead corpses—to New World markets. Killing and maiming the cargo was really the last thing wanted by ship captains and their sponsors; that they did it anyway demonstrates the violence and fear prevalent on these journeys. To keep the slaves’ muscles in shape, the sailors would bring the slaves onto the deck and have them dance. As one sailor played the accordion or guitar, other crew members prodded the shackled men to jump up and down in unison on the pitching deck of the vessel. “It was usual to make them dance in order that they might exercise their limbs and preserve their health,” explained one British surgeon on a slave ship in 1789. “This was done by means of a Cat of Nine Tails with which they were driven about one among the other, one of their country drums beating at the same time. On these occasions they were compelled to sing, the Cat being brandished at them for that purpose . . . The men could only jump up and rattle their chains, but the women . . . were driven among one another.” They had other plans for the women. The sailors would strip them completely naked and have them dance unshackled for the amusement of the crew. At nights, the officers went down to the quarters and raped women at will.
After a journey of a few months, depending on weather conditions, the slave ships arrived at the various entry ports of the New World—Charleston, Havana, or Kingston. Prior to their arrival in these slave marts, experts among the crew rubbed the slaves’ skins with oil to make them shine, gave them rum to clear their eyes and brighten their countenances, covered their sores with iron rust and gunpowder, and closed their lesions. They wanted the slaves to look as healthy as possible before sale.
Traders would buy and sell the slaves here. Some would be bought to serve in the West Indies, others for transshipment to North America, while still others would serve for a bit in the West Indies before being sent on to North America, having either been bought for the purpose of being broken in and then resold, or simply rejected by the West Indian planters.
Several thousand of the many slaves caught up in the New World ended up in New Orleans. Here, emerging onto the deck, the slaves would have seen a bustling waterfront—ships from all over the world, hundreds of flatboats packed densely together, stevedores loading and unloading goods, sailors shouting instructions—a cacophony of exchange conducted in half a dozen or more languages. The sailors brought the slaves on deck, then transported them in flatboats to the shore. The slave merchants took the terrified Africans from there, marching them in chains through the central square of the city, past the cathedral and the Cabildo, past the sailors’ district with its shacks, brothels, and bars, to a huge slave market advertised by hanging signs with names such as “Kenner and Henderson.” The merchants packed the slaves into pens the size of home lots surrounded by fences fifteen to twenty feet tall.
* * *
Sometime between May and September of 1806, the brash American James Brown drove his carriage in from his new plantation on the German Coast and parked it outside one of these slave markets, perhaps outside the full-service slave firm run by his fellow Americans William Kenner and Stephen Henderson. Kenner and Henderson had arrived flush with cash from White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, to set up a sugar plantation and merchant firm. The two operated a full-service business that shipped plantation produce to market, provided financing and insurance, bought and sold slaves, and procured building materials and other necessities for planters.
Brown had arrived in Louisiana only a year before, buying plantation land on the German Coast just west of the noble French family the Trépagniers. He had watched the value of his plantation more than double over the course of the year, from $16,000 to over $40,000, as the price of sugar rose and his slaves converted the land for sugar production. Brown was a memorable man. A contemporary from Kentucky described him as a “towering & majestic person, very proud, austere & haughty in fact repulsive in manner, and . . . exceedingly unpopular.”
In the hot weather of 1806, Brown was not in New Orleans to win a popularity contest. He was there to make money. Brimming with ambition, he came to the slave market that day to buy slaves who would make him rich.
Here, for the first time, Brown set eyes on Kook and Quamana, the first a mere fifteen years old, the latter twenty-one. With finished floors and beautifully painted walls, the showroom could hold a hundred slaves. Kook and Quamana would have watched anxiously as Brown strolled through the aisles of the mart inspecting each individual slave. The slaves tried to imagine the characters of their potential owners—to gauge what their fates might be at the hands of these men. The planters dressed up to buy slaves, in full black suits or multicolored pants, stiff top hats or wide-brimmed shapes, some with ties or jewelry, others with canes or walking sticks. If James Brown was as repulsive as his white contemporaries described him, he must have cast a truly terrifying figure to the two African men quivering in the corner. That day, James Brown decided to purchase both Kook and Quamana. He paid $700 for Kook and $600 for Quamana (about $11,000 each in modern values).
But Kook and Quamana were not fated to become stock characters in Brown’s plantation drama. Soon after their arrival in New Orleans, they chose to reject their new status as slaves and to begin plotting a ferocious rebellion—a rebellion that they hoped would bring them back into New Orleans not in chains but in triumph. Amid the swirling diversity of New World slavery, Kook and Quamana slowly began to identify and cultivate a network of like-minded slaves, a network they would have had to hone through day-to-day interactions, without attracting the notice of the keenly observant planters.
Kook and Quamana must have taken advantage of discreet meetings in cabarets in the city, in the homes of free blacks, and in the slave quarters. Even the planters were aware of the extent of these gatherings—though they supposed they were recreational, not revolutionary. On the German Coast, the home of Joseph the Spaniard was a known location for slaves to drink and congregate on the weekends. In 1763, the Spanish attorney general had complained about illicit tavern keepers like Joseph: “While furnishing drink they incite them to pilfer and steal from the houses of their masters,” he wrote. “[The slave] would not be violent if he did not find in these secret taverns the means to satisfy his brutal passions; what hidden pernicious disorders have resulted.” The Spanish, with their long experience, knew how dangerous these uncontrolled slave activities could be.
Yet these officials did not ban the dances—nor could they restrict the constant movements of slaves between plantations and around New Orleans. Slaves served as messengers and deliverymen, and they were responsible for relaying goods and news from plantation to plantation at their masters’ behest. They traveled into New Orleans to their masters’ town houses, and they traveled to the marketplace to sell goods. Slaves were also allowed to travel for family reasons. Many male slaves had wives at other plantations, whom they were allowed to visit on the weekends. It was unusual for a slave to spend his or her entire life on one plantation. The masters frequently rented out their slaves to other planters for a fixed sum of money. Whenever a planter died or a son became old enough to start a plantation, slaves would be redistributed, moving from place to place around the German Coast. And as they moved, they built contacts and relationships—a network of acquaintances and trusted friends they could use to spread gossip, news, political ideologies, and, in the months leading up to January 1811, a plan for revolt.
And there was nowhere better to build a revolutionary organization than the dances in New Orleans. Here slaves like Kook and Quamana could talk away from the watchful eyes and listening ears of the white planter class. Though the Americans and French showed no understanding of the possibilities of these dances, the Spanish were well aware of this danger. “Nothing is more dreaded than to see the negroes assemble together on Sundays,” wrote a Spanish historian in 1774. “In these likewise they plot their rebellions.” In some African cultures, dancing was about more than celebrating. Dancing could double as military training, developing individuals into fit and cohesive groups. In fact, this form of military training was common enough that the Kongolese used the phrase “dancing a war dance” as a synonym for declaring war.
Slaves in the New World were quick to take advantage of festivals and celebrations, using their masters’ carelessness and inebriation to plot and often carry out rebellions. In 1812, for example, a group of Akan slaves organized a rebellion in nearby Cuba. The slaves organized the rebellion between Christmas and the Day of the Kings on January 6. The leaders met at taverns, festivals, and other small gatherings, using travel passes and visitation rights to move without being noticed by their masters. At one meeting, the slave José proclaimed that “if they were to be captured, it would not be alive, but dead.”
But while the festivals provided the cover for the final meetings, revolts did not crop up overnight. Rather, organizing a successful revolt in the face of tremendous odds and suspicious planters required secrecy, organizational skill, persistence, and above all, trust. No record survives of just what Kook and Quamana said or how they plotted their uprising, but another revolt led by Akan people in New York in 1741 gives us a picture of how they might have operated; as in New York, the 1811 uprising involved a wide diversity of African peoples, drawn from all over the Atlantic world, and of many different languages and nationalities.
An inner circle of “headmen” was responsible for organizing specific communities into insurrectionary cells—for “recruitment, discipline, and solidarity.” With the rewards for betraying a revolt extremely high, headmen like Kook and Quamana had to be extremely careful about whom they spoke with; they had to be sure they could be trusted. In New York, headmen had focused on organizing within specific national groups. Slaves were “not to open the conspiracy to any but those that were of their own country,” wrote a participant in the New York revolt, since “they are brought from different parts of Africa and might be supposed best to know the temper and disposition of each other.” They addressed each other as “countrymen” and used a coded language to feel out other slaves’ beliefs and politics. New recruits swore a war oath when they joined an insurrectionary cell. These military oaths were widespread across West Africa and invoked the “primal powers of thunder and lightening” to ensure utmost secrecy and violent camaraderie.
Fortunately for Kook and Quamana, there had been a significant change in New World slavery since the New York uprising. Before 1800, no slave revolt had ever been successful. But in the first years of the new century, a group of slaves on a French island in the Caribbean launched a massive revolution meant to overturn European power and establish a black republic in the heart of the Atlantic. The stories of this daring gambit were well known to Louisiana slaves. The links to revolutionary Haiti were far closer than the planters would have liked. And there is little doubt that Kook and Quamana used the stories of this revolution to inspire and cajole their fellow slaves into joining their planned insurrection.