User:Danielrasmussen/1811GermanCoastInsurrection

1811 German Coast Insurrection

'''Summary'

In January 1811, between 64 and 500 enslaved men began to march from the sugar plantations on the German Coast down the River Road towards the city of New Orleans. During their two-day, twenty-mile march, individuals involved managed to burn down several sugarhouses and to kill two white plantation masters. The white men took dramatic action, forming militia companies to hunt down and kill those involved. Over the next two weeks, white planters and officials tried and condemned forty-four slaves to death, either by hanging or by decapacitation. In a gruesome spectacle, white officials left exposed the bodies of many of those convicted, while putting the heads of others on pikes that were stuck into the ground on plantations. The court in New Orleans ordered many of the slaves executed in front of their families.

The slaves involved left behind no statement of purpose, no description of their intentions, no histories or narratives. The closest historians can ever come to the slaves’ side of the story is the testimony given by slaves during court interrogations or the descriptions by white men of what they say they heard the slaves say. Without first person voices, historians must be very careful about how they describe the purposes or nature of a slave uprising.

Slave uprisings are fraught with conflict and violence, and it is incredibly difficult to say who participated of their own accord and who was forced to participate. Though social theorists especially often desire to group and categorize people, that grouping and categorizing often obscures the nature of actual events. The reality is that many slaves also worked actively against the uprising, knowing that substantial rewards – often freedom – awaited such behavior.

Rebellion

A group of conspirators met on the January 6, 1811. “The black Quamana, owned by Mr. Brown, and the mulatto Harry,  owned by Messrs. Kenner & Henderson, were at the home of Manuel Andry on the night of Saturday-Sunday of the current month in order to deliberate with the mulatto Charles Deslondes, chief of the brigands,” testified the planter James Brown in the weeks afterward. The plantations these slaves came from were located strategically at distant points along the coast. Kook, the most radical revolutionary and violent actor of the uprising, came from James Brown’s plantation, which was located ten plantations down from the Andry estate. Henry was from the far distant Kenner and Henderson plantation, at the far end of the German Coast. While there is little more evidence of any sort of plot, it seemed the leaders planned their insurrection and spread word of the uprising through small insurrectionary cells distributed up and down the coast – and that these small bands, linked through existing networks of communication, formed the core groups of revolutionaries.

The revolution started at Andry’s plantation, where the meeting between Quamana, Harry, and Charles Deslondes had taken place just days before. “An attempt was made to assassinate me by the stroke of an axe,” wrote the planter Manuel Andry. After striking and badly wounding Andry the slaves attacked Andry’s son. “My poor son has been ferociously murdered by a hord of brigands who from my plantation to that of Mr. Fortier have committed every kind of mischeif and excesses, which can be expected from a gang of atrocious bandittis of that nature,” he wrote.

The revolution gained momentum quickly. The 15 or so slaves at the Andry plantation, 30 or so miles up river from New Orleans, joined with another eight slaves from the next-door plantation of the widows of Jacques and George Deslonde. This was the home plantation of the notorious Charles Deslonde, who the slave Cupidon described in the interrogations as the "principal chief of the brigands." As would be the pattern, small groups of slaves joined at every plantation, usually about 10 to 25 percent of any individual plantation’s slave population, never more.

At the plantation of James Brown, Kook, one of the most active participants and key figures in the story of the uprising, joined the insurrection. At the next plantation down, Kook attacked and killed Francois Trepagnier with an axe. Trepagnier was the last planter the slaves caught still at home. In the “torrent of rain and the frigid cold,” the planters had left their homes to flee for safety. By this point, most of the masters were either well on their way to New Orleans, hiding out in the forests, or on the other side of the river, where no insurrection was taking place.

After the band of slaves passed the Labranche plantation, they stopped at the home of the local doctor. Finding the doctor gone, Kook, the radical slave owned by James Brown, set his house on fire.

A huge band of slaves joined the insurrection at the Meuillion plantation – the wealthiest and largest plantation on the German Coast. The rebels laid waste to Meullion’s home, pillaging and destroying much of the wealth that the planter had accumulated. They also attempted to set fire to the home, but the loyal slave Bazile fought the fire and saved the house. “The heirs declared the slave Bazile (griffe, 36) did alone fight the fire set to the main house of this plantation by the slaves of the recent uprising,” testified members of the family. “Moreover, he, alone, prevented them from stealing many of the effects of the late Meuillion.”

The slaves reached Cannes-Brulees, or the Land of the Burnt Canes., which was located about 15 miles northwest of New Orleans well after nightfall. By this point, the band of slaves had traveled between 14 and 22 miles, a march that would have taken probably seven to ten hours. By some accounts, they numbered between 64 and 124. By other accounts, they were as many as 500. The insurrectionary slaves were almost entirely young men, between the ages of 20-30, emerging in small groups from various plantations, primarily from lower skilled occupations on the sugar plantations. It was a formidable force, probably equivalent or greater in terms of numbers than the entire American military force in the Orleans territory.

The slaves had accomplished much on the first day of the insurrection. They had set fire to the houses of Pierre Reine and Mr. Laclaverie, they had killed Francois Trepagnier and the son of Manuel Andry. They had driven their masters into hiding and flight, and mounted a significant challenge to the authority of the sugar masters.

Suppression

By midday on Wednesday, January 9, the residents of New Orleans had heard of the insurrection on the German Coast. Over the next six hours, General Wade Hampton, Commodore John Shaw, and Governor William C.C. Claiborne sent two companies of volunteer militia and 30 regular troops as well as a detachment of 40 seamen to fight the rebels.

By about four in the morning, the detachment of troops arrived at the plantation of Jacques Fortier, where Hampton thought that the slaves had encamped for the night. But the slaves had already departed from Fortier’s plantation.

After leaving Fortier’s place hours before Hampton’s arrival, the slaves started marching back upriver. They traveled about 15 miles back up the coast over the next few hours, nearing the plantation of Bernard Bernoudy. There, planter Charles Perret, under the command of a “badly wounded” Manuel Andry and in cooperation with Judge Saint Martin, had assembled a troop of about 80 men from the opposite side of the river.

At about 9 a.m., this second militia discovered the slaves moving by “forced march” towards the high ground on the Bernoudy estate. Perret ordered the men to cross the Bernard Bernoudy estate and attack the slaves. “We saw the enemy at a very short distance, numbering about 200 men, as many mounted as on foot,” wrote Perret. It seemed like a formidable and well-organized force. Manuel Andry remarked that they met the “brigands… colors displayed and full of arrogance.”  The mix of mounted and foot soldiers, led in an organized fashion by a set of chiefs, had chosen to display colors, to fly a flag.

The battle was brief. “We vigorously attacked them, and within half an hour, they fled in a complete rout; we pursued them into the woods, leaving 40 to 45 men on the field of battle, among whom were several chiefs.”   They had made, as Manuel Andry observed, “considerable slaughter.”    But Perret and Andry’s militia turned this militarized force, this black army, into a more familiar and manageable danger. The war was now a war against maroons – against the fugitives who had fled into the woods and the swamps to hide.

On January 11, the volunteers captured Charles Deslonde, whom Andry considered “the principal leader of the bandits.” The militia men did not save Deslonde for trial or interrogation – they took immediate action. Samuel Hambleton described Deslonde’s fate. “Charles [Deslondes] had his Hands chopped off then shot in one thigh & then the other, until they were both broken – then shot in the Body and before he had expired was put into a bundle of straw and roasted!”

Trials

Having used military force to suppress the insurrection, the planters and government officials conducted two sets of trials – one on the plantation of Jean Noel Destrehan and one in the city of New Orleans. The Destrehan trial resulted in the execution of 18 slaves, whose heads were then put on pikes. The trials in New Orleans resulted in the executions of several more slaves. The plantation exposed the corpses of the dead insurrectionaries. One observer wrote, “Their Heads… decorate our Levee, all the way up the coast, I am told they look like crows sitting on long poles.”

Sources

John Shaw to Paul Hamilton, New Orleans, 18 January 1811, National Archives.

Slavery, ed. Stanley Engerman, Seymour Drescher, and Robert Paquette (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 324-26.

Samuel Hambleton to David Porter, January 15, 1811, Papers of David Porter, Library of Congress in Slavery, ed. Stanley Engerman, Seymour Drescher, and Robert Paquette (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 326.

Conrad, Glenn R. ed. The German Coast: Abstracts of the Civil Records of St. Charles and St. John the Baptist Parishes, 1804-1812. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1981.

Thrasher, Albert, ed. On to New Orleans! Louisiana's Heroic 1811 Slave Revolt. 2nd ed. New Orleans: Cypress Press, 1996.

Sitterson, J. Carlyle. Sugar Country; the Cane Sugar Industry in the South, 1753-1950. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1953.