Authors: Daniel Rasmussen
While many other slave societies in the United States were self-reproducing, no such calculus existed in Louisiana. Sugar work was too grueling and demanding, the profits too large, and replacement slaves too easily available to worry much about natural reproduction. In 1800, one planter estimated that each plantation hand produced $285 per year, with the average hand priced at $900. Within four years, a slave had more than recouped the initial investment, rendering the need for natural reproduction less important. Planters relied first on the Atlantic slave trade and then on the internal slave trade to supply a steady stream of new workers.
Amid these horrible conditions, no individual planter had the power to stop his slaves from revolting, not when they outnumbered him fifty to one. The planter relied on slave drivers, gang leaders, and bribed or coerced informants to maintain a militaristic choke hold on the people who labored for them in these plantations. Those who complied did not go unrewarded. Charles would have been compensated for his good work and loyalty with a larger hut, nicer clothes, or gifts of money or extra food.
Other than his role as a driver, most slaves knew only one thing about Charles: his relationship with a woman on the Trépagnier estate. Drivers like Charles were trusted to travel more freely than any other slaves, and Charles took advantage of his relative freedom to leave the plantation frequently, spending nights and weekends in a small cabin with a woman far from the Andry estate. Manuel Andry himself permitted these visits, and Trépagnier sanctioned them, perhaps in the hopes that Charles would impregnate this woman and she might bear a child as loyal and hardworking as his father. But no one really kept track of Charles’s conjugal visits. Few knew much about whom he really spent time with or whom he confided in. He kept a tight circle of confidantes, but other than that he was an unknowable. To most slaves, he was simply the half-white representative of the master. And to the master, he was the half-white liaison from the slave quarters. He was the central link, the connector, and the enabler of the complex machinery of the Andry slave plantation—or so it seemed.
A
s Charles walked the few miles from the Andry plantation to the Trépagnier estate to see his woman, he passed by the plantation of James Brown. Here he must have stopped to talk with Kook and Quamana before continuing on. Perhaps as he went to New Orleans on his master’s business, he would linger beneath the shade of the cypress trees that lined the fields and speak with other slaves from other plantations.
Romance provided the perfect cover. While it was not a formal marriage, Charles had taken up with a slave on the Trépagnier plantation, whom he visited whenever he could. He did not marry this woman—whose name is lost to history—perhaps because he was not allowed to, or perhaps because he understood how unrealistic marriage was in a society where a master could rape or sell one’s spouse at his own convenience. Slave women had little control over their reproductive and sexual lives, and they were the constant victims of rape and sexual violence by every white male, from the master and his sons to neighboring planters and itinerant laborers. Relationships between slaves were vulnerable to the sexual whims of the master class, and recognizing this, men like Charles often chose to simply take up with a woman rather than cement a relationship with easily broken marriage bonds. Charles’s relationship with this woman was no doubt constrained by the tragic realities of master-slave power relationships.
As to his light skin, most everyone knew the source of that: he was the son of a white planter—a white planter who had slept with and impregnated Charles’s slave mother. Such relationships were not uncommon. The abolitionist Wendell Phillips famously condemned the antebellum South as “one great brothel,” where every slave woman lived in fear of coerced sexual activity, and where interracial sex was an obvious, though discreetly discussed, element of the landscape. And much as Charles might want to suppress thoughts of his own mother’s violation, his paternity shaped every moment of his daily life and career on the German Coast. Charles’s light skin differentiated him from the other slaves in the eyes of the planter class and of the slaves.
But as Charles went about his daily life and work, ringing the bells, whipping the slaves, driving ahead the machinery of the sugar factory, taking nights and weekends at the home of his mistress, he was not the contented slave he appeared.
In fact, he was using his authority, his relative freedom, not on behalf of his master but rather to push his own agenda. Charles, who in the eyes of the planters and his fellow slaves seemed to be the most loyal and the most privileged of all slaves, was in his spare time a plotter. He was one of the key architects of an elaborate scheme to kill off the white planters, seize power for the black slaves, and win his own freedom and that of all those laboring in chains on the German Coast. He was, in modern terminology, the ultimate “sleeper cell,” imbedded intimately close to the enemy he dreamed nightly of executing. He would begin his revolution by attacking Manuel Andry.
We will never know what motivated this fateful decision, what factors Charles weighed as he chose to give up the security and privilege of his position and independently plot the overthrow of a system from which he benefitted. Perhaps Charles’s mother whispered to him the story of her own rape, or inculcated in him a sense of rage and resentment toward the white planter class. Perhaps the sons and brothers of the Trépagnier family had Charles’s woman for sport. Perhaps Charles could no longer consent to savagely beating his fellow slaves. Perhaps he could not bear the resentment, jealousy, and bitterness of all those who labored eighteen hours a day in the field under his command and management.
Whatever motivated him, Charles kept his rage and his plot as secret as possible. Had even the slightest hint of his plans for betrayal leaked out, Charles would have faced instant execution—such was the price of insurrection. He had to lie to both his white master and his slave subordinates on the plantation, letting both groups think that he was a contented and successful driver.
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As the white planters celebrated Epiphany and prepared for the night’s celebrations in New Orleans, the planter James Brown took mental note of a meeting between three slaves from three of the wealthiest plantations on the German Coast. Thinking that no one had noticed their absence amid the festivals, the three men gathered on the plantation of Manuel Andry, forty-one miles northwest of New Orleans. Cramped into the small space of a dilapidated shack behind the mansion house, the three men talked in hushed voices. Charles Deslondes gazed nervously out the window. His eyes looked to the second-story piazza of the large Spanish Colonial mansion as he instinctively checked for the presence of Andry. These two coconspirators were some of the only ones he could trust to know his secret purpose.
Now he listened intently to the African rhythms of Quamana’s speech. Quamana’s face bore the blood markings of the Akan—he was an intimidating man. Captured and brought across the Atlantic Ocean a mere five years before, he was Kook’s best friend and close associate. Sick of the brutal work of sugar planting, Quamana perhaps now talked of what one slave would later describe as the goal of the uprising: to kill all the whites. Charles had heard this talk before, having met with Kook and Quamana frequently on his trips to the Trépagnier estate.
Twenty-six-year-old Quamana was a slave at James Brown’s plantation, located ten plantations downriver from the Andry estate. His political radicalism and dedication to the cause must have proved inspirational to many other slaves, his enthusiasm as contagious as the deep anger from which it emerged. He had traveled from plantation to plantation through the dark cypress swamps on the edges of the cane fields. Posting a spy in a tall tree to watch for intruders, just as some of them had done as children in Africa, the Akan warriors in Louisiana met to organize the uprising.
The third slave at the meeting was Harry Kenner. Originally from Virginia, he had developed a trusted core of English-speaking slaves—a dozen slaves on his plantation who would participate in the revolt. A twenty-five-year-old carpenter, Harry was a slave at the Kenner and Henderson plantation, twenty-one miles to the southeast at the end of the German Coast closest to New Orleans.
These three men, each with different insights and abilities, had planned their insurrection and spread word of the uprising through small cells distributed up and down the coast, especially at James Brown’s plantation, the Meuillion plantation, and the Kenner and Henderson plantation.
These cells were born out of networks of communication that tied the slaves to New Orleans and its diverse marketplace and ports. During their free time on the weekends, slaves often participated in the thriving economy of the region. They grew staple crops, raised small livestock, and collected wood and moss, and traded these products of their labors to itinerant peddlers or in the marketplaces. Black peddlers went door to door marketing goods. The River Road was full of activity, whether organized by the masters or the slaves, and these activities formed the base of the revolutionary cells.
What did these men talk about in their secret meetings, behind the closed doors of the slave cabins or under the tall trees on the edges of the fields? They wrote nothing down and told no one. But all evidence points to a revolutionary ferment. The slaves, it seems, were growing increasingly radical in their political views—a radicalism that occasionally bubbled up into outright violence.
Prior to the sugar boom, New Orleans was a poor, multicultural city with very few social controls. The lines between slavery and freedom were not clearly drawn, and slaves frequently escaped into the swamps to form maroon colonies. There was a history of armed resistance in these areas that drew on French, Creole, and Kongolese traditions. These insurrectionary traditions shaped the lives of the slaves and represented an alternative political culture to that of the planters.
In the 1780s, the slave Juan Malo from the d’Arensbourg plantation on the German Coast led a thriving maroon colony in the swamps below New Orleans. St. Malo, as he named himself, was reported to have buried his axe into a tree near his colony and declared, “Woe to the white who would pass this boundary.” St. Malo and his men—reportedly numbering over 100—repeatedly repelled the raiders sent by the Spanish government who came into the swamps on pirogues armed to the teeth with guns. The maroons built extensive networks of slaves on the plantations that provided them with food and tipped them off about impending raids. Eventually, the Spanish grew so incensed by St. Malo’s independence and the threat he posed to the slave plantations that they sent a massive force of militiamen into the swamps in 1783. The militia, following the tip from a spy, came upon the unsuspecting maroons and opened fire. This time their expedition succeeded. They captured a wounded St. Malo and brought him back to New Orleans. On June 19, 1784, the Spanish hanged St. Malo in the center of New Orleans—creating a martyr and a folk hero for the German Coast slaves.
In 1795, the Spanish discovered a massive slave conspiracy at Pointe Coupée—an area on the high grounds between New Orleans and Natchez. The conspiracy took place at the height of the French Revolution and just after the slaves in Saint Domingue had forced France to abolish slavery. The planters discovered the book
Théorie de l’impôt
, including the Declaration of the Rights of Man, in the cabin of one of the slaves (the Declaration, adopted by the French national assembly in 1789, declared that all men are born free and equal and maintained the rights of “liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression”). Several slaves reported hearing rumors that the slaves had been freed in the colonies—one even specifically mentioned Saint Domingue. The slaves planned their uprising at church during the Easter holidays and Holy Week. They also held meetings at the slave quarters of different plantations and in the marketplaces. The plot was discovered, however, before it ever came to fruition. The planters hanged twenty-three slaves, decapitated them, and nailed their heads to posts. They flogged thirty-one additional slaves and sent them to hard labor at Spanish outposts in Mexico, Florida, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. By the time of the Pointe Coupée uprising, the revolutionary fervor of the age had reached the River Road, inspiring the slaves to Jacobinism and an assertion of their rights to freedom.
In 1805, after two years of American control, there were rumors of another slave conspiracy. The residents of New Orleans were alarmed to discover a traveling Frenchman preaching the revolutionary philosophy of liberty, equality, and fraternity to the French-speaking slaves of Louisiana. The government promptly arrested this dangerous man, bringing great relief to the planters. The planters knew they had much to fear from such loose talk of revolution.
While French and Creole maroon influences were strong in the Orleans Territory, there was also a huge influx of Africans to the area. Slave traders brought around 20,000 African slaves to New Orleans between 1790 and 1810. These immigrants brought with them their own violent history. Kongo, the source of over 10 percent of these slaves, was going through revolutionary contortions just as France and Britain were. Kongo had been ripped apart by civil wars, producing thousands of veterans trained in military practice and willing to use force to obtain political ends. Many of these well-trained war veterans were sold off into slavery and spread throughout the New World, disseminating their warrior knowledge. The Kongolese had developed their own style of warfare, a form of guerilla tactics, that involved spreading out over space, quickly retreating in the face of threats, and using ambushes and terrain advantages to the best of their abilities. They used flags and drums to rally the troops and communicate in the field of battle.
Charles and the other slaves on the German Coast were well armed with revolutionary ideology, and some with military training. They were conversant in the doctrines of the French Revolution, and aware of the powerful example of the Haitian revolutionaries. They drew on significant Kongolese and Akan populations trained in guerilla warfare and experienced in the use of violence for political ends. The sporadic rebellions of the last few years were like the beat of a drum slowly building to crescendo. And it seemed that the only ones who hadn’t heard the music were the planters. Though terrified by Haiti, the planters refused to acknowledge or try to understand the political logic behind the slaves’ actions. Their racial ideology and pride in their own accomplishments led them to miss all the warning signals of the impending revolt.
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As Charles, Quamana, and Harry met on that Sunday in 1811, they came well armed for battle with a powerful set of revolutionary political ideas, well-honed skills, and a complex organization of insurrectionary cells prepared to attack as soon as they gave the word. And by all accounts, they gave the word that day. Thursday would be their moment to strike. And on that Thursday, this diverse group of slaves would mount the greatest challenge to planter sovereignty in the history of North America. On January 8, 1811, they would turn their world upside down.