The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (15 page)

Along the river’s east bank above New Orleans, on the German Coast, dozens of slave labor camps stretched back from the river in French-surveyed “long lots,” narrow strips of land that ran a mile or two across cleared ground to a dense belt of forested swamps. Their pattern, still visible from
the air today, gave the maximum number of large landowners access to the Mississippi. Each holding had a slice of the incredibly rich soil that lay between the levee and the swamps. The swamps themselves were almost impassable, full
of alligators, snakes, panthers, and bears. Runaways sought refuge in the swamps, hiding from overseers and free black slave-catchers. Forty-year-old Phillip, also
known as Coles, ran away from Kenner and Henderson’s new place—John Palfrey’s old Cannes Brûlées—in early November 1810 as the sugar harvest’s intense labor began. He’d been brought down the river on a flatboat from Natchez and sold to Kenner and Henderson just that year. A few miles closer to the city was a huge labor camp that still survives as the show plantation “Ormond.” Pennsylvanian Richard
Butler and his business partner Samuel McCutcheon had recently bought dozens of new enslaved people for Ormond, one of whom was six-foot-tall John. He, too, had run to the woods in November, and he had not returned. And somewhere back there, as 1811 dawned, John Palfrey’s runaway “Cracker” still lurked.
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The sugar harvest ended at the beginning of January. For weeks, overseers and owners had
pushed the enslaved drivers, who in turn had pushed the cane cutters, the loaders, and the women who fed the mill with cane in double shifts all day and night. The sugar makers, the artisans (free or slave) who supervised the artful process of boiling, skimming, and crystallizing cane juice into sugar, had also driven their subordinates around the clock. Now some of the enslaved spent their days
loading hogsheads of sugar and molasses onto flatboats and pirogues for transport to New Orleans. Most of the thousands brought in the previous ten years from Africa and the Caribbean, local-born Louisianans, and a few from Virginia and Maryland as well labored at dreary January tasks such as digging up minefields of sharp-cut sugarcane stubble so the next crop of cane could be planted.

Had you
been out walking near midnight on Saturday, January 5, 1811, you would have heard, from the river side of the levee that protected Manuel Andry’s land from spring floods, the murmuring of men’s voices in mixed Creole French and broken English. These men were not just sitting around trading stinging pulls from a jug of tafia, the harsh raw rum made from cane juice. Nor were they simply alternating
complaints about women with ragged growls about this overseer or that slave owner. The men were planning what would become the biggest slave rebellion in the United States before the Civil War.

They hailed from many places. Based on his name, for instance, we could guess that Amar was born in the Muslim-influenced Sahel region of West Africa. The mulatto Harry, owned by William Kenner and Stephen
Henderson, was probably from the Chesapeake. Quamana, owned by territorial attorney James Brown, may have been from present-day Ghana, and had probably been pulled here by his owner’s success in opening the international slave
trade to Louisiana. As for Charles Deslondes, who would be credited and blamed as the leader and instigator of the revolt, we don’t know precisely who he was. He might have
been “Creole”—Louisiana-born, in other words. But many contemporary accounts said he was born in Saint-Domingue, and that he served as Andry’s
commandeur
, or enslaved overseer. We do know that in 1809, before leaving Santiago as a refugee, Auguste Girard had bought a man named Charles. This Charles had been born in Saint-Domingue in 1787, and was thus old enough to remember a little bit of 1791.
When Girard reached New Orleans from Cuba, he sold eleven slaves. One was Charles. Manuel Andry was the buyer. Perhaps this Charles, raised in the vortex of both slave and sugar-making revolution, was the same one to whom Andry had given the task of organizing his field slaves in the coordinated process of harvesting and refining sugarcane. Perhaps Girard’s Charles was the Charles Deslondes who
supposedly called the meeting on the levee on that night of the 5th.
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As is almost always the case with slave revolts and allegations of revolt conspiracies, we only know what we know from confessions made by some of the captured rebels. Perhaps “know” is not the right verb to use when the information comes from tortured people desperate to save their own skins. From what one can gather, however,
it seems that after the gathering under the levee, the leaders—Amar, Quamana, Harry, and others in the fraternity of
commandeurs
and sugar refiners up and down the German Coast—went back to their respective plantations to spread the word among those whom they trusted. Except for Charles—he headed down the river toward the long lot owned by Etienne Trepagnier. A mile and a half later, Charles reached
the Trepagnier place, where “his woman” lived. Charles, as a
commandeur
, would have been selected for charisma, for the strength of mind and body to impose his will on those who were supposed to follow him, for the intelligence and discretion to know when to push and when to back off from pushing. These qualities probably made him attractive to many women. These qualities also made him well suited
to lead a revolt.
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By Sunday evening, Charles and a few others were traveling, under cover of darkness, back up the river toward the Andry place. Augustin, one of Trepagnier’s slaves, later claimed that he only went with Charles because the
commandeur
held a gun on him. Perhaps Charles feared that Augustin was a traitor. Or perhaps Augustin concocted the gun story to save his own skin. Whatever
the case, most of this core group hid in the woods near the Andry place, while Charles went back to work under the nose of Manuel Andry and his adult son Gilbert. As the fugitives waited, perhaps they discussed an event they all knew something about: the revolt in the Plaine du
Nord of Saint-Domingue. That revolt had also been planned by high-status slaves like
commandeurs
. There, too, the leaders
had gathered in a nighttime ceremony. And there the rebels had also relied on amassing a powerful force from the sugar plantations in order to overwhelm the white opposition before it could coalesce.

The key of the plotters’ 1811 strategy was a march straight on to New Orleans. They apparently believed that they outnumbered whites by enough on the German Coast to sweep all before them. Then they
could take the city, the hinge of slaveholder power in the southwestern United States, and hold it as the heart of a slave coast in revolt. Some of the
commandeurs
and house servants would have understood that 1811 was a particularly propitious moment because of Louisiana’s confrontation with Spain on the borders of “West Florida,” the land from Mobile in Alabama to the north shore of Lake Ponchartrain.
The United States claimed that this was actually its property. Governor Claiborne had ordered General Wade Hampton—the same Hampton who had bought Charles Ball in South Carolina, now seeking to gain both glory and access to new land as a recently mobilized officer of the US Army—to march his troops away from their usual post in New Orleans and plant the US flag in West Florida. On January
6, however, someone—whether premature rebels or a runaway—attacked a mail coach. Hearing this news, Claiborne ordered Hampton to delay his scheduled march toward West Florida. Late on Monday the 7th, he sent another note to Hampton describing what he knew “relative to the movements of the Insurgents” and ordering Hampton to keep his troops near the city.
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The sun rose and set on Tuesday, January
8. Upriver, behind the Andry barracks, Charles gathered the enslaved people who would follow him. At midnight they marched to Manuel Andry’s front door. They hewed it down with an axe and burst in. They searched for Manuel, the man who called himself their master. His son blocked the way, so they cut the young man down. A glancing axe stroke pursued the father as he hurled himself out the window,
but he hit the ground running and reached a boat by the levee. Andry cast out into the river for the west bank of the Mississippi, where he planned to raise the alarm.
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On the east, the rebels were already moving toward New Orleans by the river road. At each property they passed, recruits joined them. On Andry’s place, Jupiter was among the first. Why? Later he would say he wanted “to go to
the city to kill whites.” Two parishes lay in between them and the city, a little more than fifty miles as the river bends. Next, the rebels stormed onto the land of parish judge Achille Trouard, who had heard them coming. He
hid in the cane fields with his nieces as the band swept by. As the sun rose, the rebels pushed into St. Charles Parish and through plantation after plantation: Picou, Kenner
and Henderson, Trepagnier, and Delhomme.
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At 6:30 on the morning of January 9, the
commandeur
Pierre woke up his enslaver Hermogène Labranche. Slaves from the Delhomme place just up the river had told Pierre that a rebel army was marching. Later, Pierre would say the messengers had fled the rebels, but they could have been scouts who wanted to know if Pierre would have the residents prepared
to join when the “brigands” appeared at Labranche’s slave quarters. Pierre chose instead to alert Labranche, who leapt out of bed and fled to the woods with his wife and a slave named François. Yet as the rebels poured through Labranche’s sugar operation, ten joined.
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They marched on. Lindor (owned by Kenner and Henderson) strode in front playing the drum. Mathurin, claimed by the Broussards,
held his sword like an officer. So did Dagobert, the
commandeur
from Joseph Delhomme’s cane fields. Hyppolite found a horse and mounted it. Raimond, who joined at Labranche’s, carried a musket. Others bound cane knives on long poles, like pikes. Some improvised banners. Born in Louisiana, Kentucky, Saint-Domingue, Jamaica, the Congo, Ibo villages east of the Niger delta, and Virginia, the five
hundred rebels marched downriver out of a cloud of smoke rising from burning houses and cane sheds.

For the past decade, white men had been hustling “heads” through the streets of New Orleans in strings of
nègres bruts
. Now the roles had changed. By afternoon, most of the whites of the German Coast had either fled or were fleeing. When one stubborn enslaver—Jean-François Trepagnier, Etienne’s
relative—stayed put, one of his own house slaves, a young man named Cook, chopped off his head with an axe. The rebels threw the body over the levee and kept moving. By the time night closed in they had overrun the Destrehan property just west of the town that today bears the same name. They made camp at the Jacques Fortier place just over the Jefferson Parish line, less than twenty miles from the
one spot on earth that both they and the United States needed to control.
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The first panicked rider had galloped into the streets of New Orleans at 10 a.m. on January 9. Throwing down his reins in the Place d’Armes, he ran up the stairs of the Cabildo, banged on Claiborne’s door, and poured out his news. The governor immediately ordered a 6 p.m. curfew, closed the gates of the French Quarter,
and shuttered the arsenal—today the site of the US Mint museum. (One Louisiana historian argues that Claiborne did so because city-based allies of the rebels had made an attempt to break in and seize its
weapons.) Claiborne also dispatched several different groups of armed men up the River Road toward the rebel army.

January 10, early morning, before dawn. The rebels’ camp was cold. Fires lit
early in the evening had been extinguished earlier, when a few shots rang out in the middle of the night. For the rest of the night the rebels lay behind a picket fence that enclosed Fortier’s sugar house and storage buildings. But now a louder rustling told Charles and his men to prepare: noise from the river road, but now also from the levee, and from the north. Men peered over the fence. In the
gathering light they saw, advancing up the road, Wade Hampton’s regulars and “volunteers” from New Orleans. From the levee on the right, seamen on foot, and from the swamp to the left, more volunteers. From behind, they suddenly heard horses snorting, hooves clopping. They were caught in a trap. Obeying a command or a previously made plan, the rebels rose from behind the fence. A few who had horses
mounted up. The rest turned and ran, thundering full speed but without a shout back up the river road. Shots rang wildly, and the mounted cavalry from the west bank scattered as the rebels passed through them and disappeared into the mist.
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Embarrassed, the cavalry tried to regroup. Hampton’s infantrymen were already marching in pursuit of the rebels. They had come more than fifteen miles, tramping
all night, but he was determined to end this rebellion before it could spread. The bands of soldiers set off up the road, stomping past a body that lay in front of Fortier’s house: it was Télémacque, a
vieux nègre
(old Negro), who had been enslaved by Destrehan until he had joined the rebellion the previous afternoon.
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Fifteen miles the rebels ran, stumbled, walked, and ran again over the next
four hours. Some slipped off across ragged fields and headed for the swamps, but strays risked being run down by the horse-mounted rulers of the German Coast who bayed at their heels. Far behind the rebels and the harassing horsemen tramped Hampton and his men: armed (unlike many of the rebels, who had thrown aside their pikes), trained, and determined.

At last, the cavalry came riding back to
Hampton with news. The rebels, too tired to run anymore, were making a stand in a grove of trees at Bernard Bernoudy’s plantation. Only about one hundred were left. The rest were hiding, caught, or lying dead along the road. Hampton’s troops quickened their pace. Soon they were at Bernoudy’s. They formed up next to the cavalry and then charged the rebels’ improvised line. The rebels scattered, dodging
saber blows and bullets. Cracker, the longtime Ibo runaway; Dawson, who was Butler and McCutcheon’s sugar refiner; and a dozen more fell. Others surrendered—some the whites killed on the spot, others they bound. They
prodded Amar into line with the rest. He had survived the militia charge, but he had been slashed across the throat.
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