American Uprising (11 page)
Authors: Daniel Rasmussen
A
s the day waned, the rebels were confronted with a new reality. They found each plantation home they came upon empty except for the slaves. The planters they had intended to surprise and kill were gone. As the chaos of insurrection had spread along the German Coast, the balance of power had shifted into the hands of the slaves. The planters no longer felt safe in their homes, in the flat, visible space between the river and the swamps. But as much as Charles, Kook, Quamana, and the rebel army reveled in the speed and efficiency of their conquest, they knew they had not heard the last of the planters. They also knew they had to strike hard and fast in order to achieve their goals. They would need an early victory against a substantial planter force in order to persuade wavering slaves to join them and to ensure ultimate victory.
The new recruits were bursting with energy, but the long walk was taking its toll on others. The slaves who had joined the rebellion at Manuel Andry’s estate were feeling the long march in their legs. But fortunately for these tired souls, Bernard Bernoudy kept a substantial collection of horses on his estate. As they marched into the plantation, the slave Augustin, a highly valued sugar worker, drove the horses toward the slave army. Horses were powerful military tools, enhancing the speed, power, and stature of the slaves. With the infusion of these new beasts of burden, about half the slaves were able to ride instead of walk, accelerating the pace of the rebels’ progress toward New Orleans and increasing their standing in the minds of the slaves they met as they proceeded further.
At the plantation of Butler and McCutcheon, the slave Simon was waiting. Simon had grown up with his family in Baltimore. But when Simon was in his late teens, his old master had sold him down south to New Orleans—forcing him to leave behind a family he would likely never see again. The twenty-year-old slave had tried to escape just months before, to flee and rejoin his family in Baltimore. But Butler and McCutcheon were well-connected slave masters, and after they placed an ad in the local newspaper, Simon was quickly apprehended and returned to the German Coast. There he was savagely beaten for the transgression of attempting to reunite with his family. Scars on his left cheek and his forehead marred his handsome features. Simon had rallied eight other young men in their twenties—Dawson, Daniel, Garrett, Mingo, Perry, Ephraim, Abraham, and Joe Wilkes. This young gang added youth and strength to the insurgent band. Between the horses and the new young faces, the rebel army was gaining a second wind.
Continuing east toward New Orleans, the insurgents passed the Red Church, where François Trépagnier would later be buried. Sparing the minister, they swept down the River Road, passing the two-story Destrehan mansion with its bold architecture and imposing presence. Here Jasmin, Chelemagne, and Gros and Petit Lindor joined the insurrection. Jean Noël Destrehan himself had long since fled for the city.
Here, finally, maroons began to join the insurrection. At the plantation of Alexandre Labranche, the longtime maroons Rubin and Coffy left the swamps and joined the revolt. Following Rubin and Coffy’s lead, a wave of swamp denizens gave up the security of their wooded retreats to fight with the rebel army.
As the maroons emerged in triumph from the swamps, the planters continued to flee for safety. Alexandre Labranche, who had waited in the swamps until he was assured the slaves had passed, sneaked through the fields and down to the river, where he took a boat to the other side. From there, he fled toward New Orleans in search of safety. He left his loyal slave François “to keep an eye on the situation”—vision, that essential element of slave discipline, was now in the eyes of the slaves themselves. François was in some sense Charles Deslondes’ mirror image—a slave driver who chose to command slaves not in service of rebellion and freedom but in service of the status quo and security. François would fight to hold the plantation world together—even as Charles and his men tore at its seams.
At points, the insurgents were not above inflicting their own punishments on fellow slaves, forcing those who wavered to join them. While several of the slaves on the Trépagnier plantation willingly joined the slave army, others obstinately refused. So Charles, Kook, Quamana, and their allies raised the stakes, threatening to kill any slaves who would not join. The rebels knew that many slaves preferred slavery and security to freedom and death, and to adjust the odds in this complex calculus they threatened violence, too.
As they moved on to New Orleans, the insurgents set fire to the home of the local doctor. Though a doctor might seem an unlikely target, doctors were often hated figures among slaves. Slave masters employed doctors to manage the health of their slaves—a position that put doctors in direct, intimate, and often objectionable relationships with slaves. These slave patients often had very different approaches to medicine and healing, involving herbal medicine and traditional practices with which they felt more comfortable. They were wary of white doctors, who clearly had in mind not their interests but those of the slaveholders. In the pouring rain, burning down a house took a lot of effort. But the slaves were willing to put in the effort to torch the home of the doctor who had violated the most intimate spaces of their bodies with white medicine.
After burning the home of the local doctor, the rebel army arrived at the Meuillion plantation. Here, at the wealthiest and largest plantation on the German Coast, at least thirteen more slaves joined the insurgency. The rebels then laid waste to Meullion’s grand home, pillaging and destroying much of the wealth that the planter had accumulated. They also attempted to set fire to the home, but in the words of one planter, the slave Bazile “did alone fight the fire set to the main house” and “alone, prevented them from stealing many of the effects of the late Meuillion.” Half Native American (probably Natchez), Bazile might have felt less of a bond with the largely African slave insurgents.
The slaves marched on through the dark and rain. Well after nightfall, they reached Cannes Brûlées, about fifteen miles northwest of New Orleans. On a clear day, the white spires of the New Orleans cathedral and the masts of the ships assembled in the harbor would have been easily visible. There they entered the Kenner and Henderson plantation, one of the hotbeds of insurrection. Harry Kenner, a light-skinned son of a planter father and a slave mother, was one of the original plotters who had met at the home of Manuel Andry—according to other slaves, one of the “most outstanding brigands.” Harry garnered the support of over a dozen men from his plantation. Five men whom owners described variously as carters or plowmen—Peter, Croaker, Smillet, Nontoun, and Charles—laid down their tools and joined the fight. A set of skilled laborers also chose to side with the rebels. Elisha, a driver on the plantation, enlisted, as did the blacksmith Jerry, the hostler Major, the coachman Joseph, and the skilled sugar hand, Harry. Guiam, also a coachman and sugar worker, appropriated one of his owner’s horses and, armed with a saber, led all the black males on the plantation toward the nearby home of Cadet Fortier. Lindor, a coachman and carter, assisted the organization of this new charge, acting as the group’s drummer.
By this point, the band of slaves had traveled twenty-one miles, a march that would have taken probably seven to ten hours. Documentary evidence links 124 individual slaves to the revolt, while eyewitness observers estimated their numbers at between 200 and 500—rivaling the size of the American military force in the region. The rebel army was now composed almost entirely of young men between twenty and thirty who had been employed as unskilled or low-skilled workers. These men had accomplished much on the first day of the insurrection. They had set fire to the houses of Pierre Reine and Mr. Laclaverie, and killed François Trépagnier and the son of Manuel Andry. They had driven their masters into hiding and seized control of the plantations that had been the sites of their labor and captivity.
Despite their impressive numbers, some guns, and horses, the slave army was not well armed. According to later accounts, “only one half of them were armed with bullets and fusils, and the others with sabers and cane knives.” Without proper weapons or means of fighting, the slaves could be outmatched by a small group of well-armed men. However, the fear the slaves had engendered among the planters had been enough to drive the planters from their homes and send them into flight. But intimidation and rumor would only go so far. While the slave-rebels’ march had thus far met with little resistance, the white planters had been mobilizing, collecting force, and preparing for a counterattack that would strike that night.
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Traveling through the night, the detachment of troops from New Orleans approached the plantation of Jacques Fortier around four in the morning. Soon thereafter, in the pitch-dark night, the planters discovered the slave army. “The Brigands had posted themselves within a strong picket fence, having also the advantage of two strong brick building belonging to Colonel Fortier’s Sugar works,” Wade Hampton reported. The slaves seemed to have picked a good spot to defend, well fortified and close to the city. Hampton and the planters met to arrange a plan of attack, delaying any abrupt move in favor of a well-organized strike. They knew what was at stake. “The order of attack was formed the moment the troops reached the ground, and the Infantry & Seamen so disposed as to enclose by a forward movement three Sides of the small enclosure which embraced the buildings, and the Horse at the first signal was to charge the other,” Hampton later wrote.
The infantry and the seamen crept into position; the horsemen steeled themselves for a bold cavalry charge. At the crucial moment, Hampton ordered them to attack. Horses galloped, guns fired, and soldiers shouted in the night. But no enemy returned fire.
As the soldiers penetrated the walls and fences and began to search the buildings, they found only a few unarmed slaves. The bulk of the slave army had retreated. In his report to headquarters, Hampton blamed “a few young men who had advanced so near as to discharge their pieces at them” for alarming the slaves before the troops could attack. He speculated that the slaves “were therefore upon the alert, and as the line advanced to encompass them, retired in great silence.” More likely, the slaves had left well before the military arrived, alerted not by antsy young white men but by slave spies. Though they found no rebels, the militia found ample evidence of the slaves’ presence. Fortier’s plantation showed evidence that the slaves had been there, “killing poultry, cooking, eating, drinking, and rioting.”
The planters did not know it, but they had fallen for a classic West African military ruse. Warfare practiced in the Kongo especially featured frequent advances and retreats intended to confuse the enemy. The Kongolese soldiers would watch their enemies carefully, waiting for the opportune moment to attack. This strategy allowed them to use their greater numbers to overwhelm better-armed forces.
The slaves’ ploy had worked marvelously. Hampton and his men and their horses were too tired to pursue the fugitives farther. And so as the slave army retreated into plantation territory, the American military force took a break at Jacques Fortier’s plantation.
Fooled by Charles Deslondes and the slave-rebels, the white army now faced a bleak prospect. As they marched farther into the German Coast, each plantation, each grove of cypresses, could shelter the slave army; and every black slave on every plantation was a potential spy or recruit. The soldiers did not know the terrain very well, and the population was clearly hostile. Any optimism Hampton might have had outside the Fortier plantation faded quickly as these thoughts ran through his head.
The slave army, meanwhile, was marching back upriver. They made good time, traveling about fifteen miles northwest from the Fortier plantation toward the plantation of Bernard Bernoudy. As they navigated the terrain, the slaves planned their strategy for defeating the army resting at the Fortier estate. Their chances of success seemed high—the American forces had fallen for an obvious trap and were now too exhausted to pursue them further. But perhaps they should have been thinking of something else. The slaves had killed Manuel Andry’s son, but they had allowed Andry himself to escape. They would come to regret that fateful decision. The ebb and flow of power was about to shift.
A
fter Manuel Andry escaped from Charles Deslondes and his fellow rebels the night before, he had fled to the levee and taken a pirogue across to the southeastern bank of the river. The revolt had not spread across the half-mile-wide Mississippi, and a bleeding Andry headed straight for the plantation home of Charles Perret. Perret and his family owned several plantations stretching around the river bend across from Andry’s home. Perret and his family must have been shocked at the sudden apparition of a bleeding and half-dead Manuel Andry. The desperate and furious man had just watched his son murdered by his own slaves, and he had been helpless to do anything but run for his life.
The Perrets listened with shock and horror to Andry’s alarming reports—their worst nightmare had become reality. “My poor son has been ferociously murdered by a hord of brigands,” Andry reported, who “have committed every kind of mischeif and excesses, which can be expected from a gang of atrocious bandittis of that nature.” Andry was not sure exactly what atrocities the so-called brigands might by now have completed, but after watching them kill his son, he expected the worst. And so did the Perrets.
But Charles Perret was a clear-headed young man. He knew what to do. As his family bandaged Andry’s wounds, Perret set off on horseback to alert his neighbors. Within hours, the males of all the major families—the d’Arensbourgs, the St. Martins, the Hotards, the Zamoras, the Rixners, the Troxlers, the Dorvins, and the Delerys—assembled together in conference. They knew their livelihood, their way of life, was at risk. They did not trust the American military to do the job, and they were livid at the story of Gilbert Andry’s death. The now-bandaged wounds on Andry’s body served as a vivid reminder of the consequences of slave revolt.
Watching their own slaves carefully, the planters decided to cross the river and risk their lives to attack the rebel army and “halt the progress of the revolt.” They were outnumbered, but, like François Trépagnier before them, they were willing to take a gamble.
Under Perret and Andry’s command, eighty planters armed themselves to the teeth and assembled on the levee. With the slave army nowhere to be seen, the planters packed themselves into small pirogues and paddled as quickly as they could across the turbulent and blustery river, navigating the Mississippi’s fast currents with a deftness born of long experience. By the time they arrived at the other side of the river, it was about eight in the morning.
The small force marched downriver, hoping to soon encounter the slave army. At about nine in the morning, this second militia discovered the slaves moving by “forced march” toward the high ground on the Bernoudy estate. “We saw the enemy at a very short distance, numbering about 200 men, as many mounted as on foot,” wrote Perret.
The planters had unwittingly flanked the slave army. Expecting the only resistance to emerge from New Orleans, the slaves had not anticipated such a rearguard action. They had neither taken a defensive position nor steeled themselves for combat. The planters led by Perret and Andry had come upon them by surprise.
Though the rebels formed a force more than double the size of his detachment, Perret decided to attack. If his planter militia could not defeat the slave army, he believed all would be lost. The planters’ wives and children would die at the hands of a ferocious slave army, and everything they had worked to build would burn at the torch. It was a dire thought. Summoning his men, Perret called, “Let those who are willing follow me, and let’s move out!” He spurred his men in a forward march toward the slave army.
The slave army slowly formed into a line of battle. They then waited, watching as the planter militia approached slowly across the cane fields. The muskets the slaves carried were only accurate at short distances, so proper military tactics dictated that both sides must close to within 500 feet before firing a single shot. If the slaves discharged their weapons before the planters came that close, they would lose any hope of hitting the target. “In action not one shot out of 100 hit an extended object as high as the head of a horse, at three hundred feet distance,” read an 1814 U.S. infantry manual. Fighting an effective battle meant waiting until the enemy was incredibly close, dangerously close, before firing.
We can never know the thoughts that went through the slaves’ heads as they took their stand. The two options before them were freedom or death. Fifty years later, a free black man fighting with a regiment of French-speaking ex-slaves from Louisiana described their emotions upon entering battle with the Union army. “We are now fighting, and ask no more glorious death than to die for [freedom],” he wrote. “But for our race to go back into bondage again, to be hunted by dogs through the swamps and cane-brakes, to be set up on the block and sold for gold and silver . . . no never, gladly we would die first.” Most likely, the slave-rebels felt the same way.
Both sides faced advantages and disadvantages. The geography favored the white planters. The cane fields formed a wide, flat, open space with good visibility. Most battles in North America were fought in a mix of woods and open space—lending an advantage to guerilla tactics like those the slaves would likely employ. But an open field favored the sort of large-scale infantry movements popular among well-drilled armies. The weather, however, favored the slaves. The pouring rain meant that the white militia had been unable to bring in artillery, either by river or along the muddy River Road. The white planters and their American military allies would not have the benefits of grapeshot or cannon fire as they attacked the slave army. Both sides would fight with muskets.
Staring into the face of death, the slave army did not blink. “The blacks were not intimidated by this army and formed themselves in line,” wrote a Spanish agent in New Orleans. Then, in an instant, the first shots rang out.
Recover arms, open pan, handle cartridge, prime, shut pan, load, draw ramrod, ram down, return ramrod, make ready, aim, fire
, went the soldiers with their muskets
.
The African drums beat war rhythms and the leaders called out to the slaves to encourage them. As the first soldiers on both sides fired their muskets, clouds of smoke would have quickly poured down on them, hiding everything but the flash of enemy guns.
Guns roared. Muskets crashed and burst. Bullets zipped and hissed through the air. The slaves could only have felt the unease and terror of confronting a danger that they could neither see nor comprehend. The slaves at first might not have recognized the noise of bullets, which could sound like fast-moving bees or birds. Amid the smoke and chaos, men began to drop. Their deaths would have seemed strangely disconnected from the cacophony of noise: the bullets themselves were invisible. The leaders of the slave army watched through the smoke as their men began to fall, as bullets opened gaping wounds in the bulging muscles of the sugar workers.
Perhaps the slaves discharged their weapons too early; perhaps the white planters were simply better trained and disciplined in modern warfare. But within a few minutes, the slaves had discharged all of their ammunition—and the planters kept firing. The slaves watched as corpses proliferated. Their hair still wet from the recent rain, rebel slaves lay dead on the ground, their eyes glazed, their lips blue, and their last expressions fixed forever in their faces. It was a horrifying sight.
A Spanish spy reported that the slave line broke as soon as their ammunition began to peter out. And then the planter militia, some on horseback, charged into the fray as the slaves ran for the relative protection of the cypress swamp. Angered white soldiers poured over the slave lines, shooting and bayoneting the slaves who put up resistance. “Fifteen or twenty of them were killed and fifty prisoners were taken including three of their leaders with uniforms and epaulets,” wrote the Spanish spy in New Orleans. “The rest fled quickly into the woods.” As the slaves ran for the swamps, they would have heard the desperate cries of the wounded, who knew that they would soon be chopped up by furious white planters. A strange silence settled, pierced only by the shrieks and groans of the wounded. A massacre was under way.
Kook and Quamana were among those captured. These two leaders were ordered sent to the Destrehan plantation, where they would be tried as an example to the other slaves.
The planter Charles Perret glowingly reported that the white forces “left 40 to 45 men on the field of battle, among whom were several chiefs.” Most likely the planters killed those survivors immediately after the battle. Only about twenty-five prisoners—including Kook and Quamana—survived to trial. After killing the slaves, the planter militia began a barbaric practice: chopping off the heads of the dead rebels as souvenirs and warnings for other slaves. The blood of the wounded, the dead, and the decapitated soaked into the cane fields. The result, Manuel Andry observed later, was a “considerable slaughter.” According to the planters, not a single white soldier fell to the slaves’ muskets.
Charles Deslondes was among the slaves who fled to the swamps. Solomon Northup, who worked on a nearby plantation, described the experience of running away into the swamps. “I was desolate, but thankful,” he wrote. “Thankful that my life was spared,—desolate and discouraged with the prospect before me.”
The fleeing rebels did not have much of a lead. Enlisting the assistance of a party of Native Americans—a strategy that had been used by slaveholders during Louisiana’s maroon wars—the militia headed into the swamps, led by packs of bloodhounds trained to chase runaway slaves. “I left with 25 volunteers to beat the bushes, to harass the enemy, and to make contact with those who had fled,” Charles Perret reported.
In the silence of the swamps, the escaping slaves could hear the howl of the dogs—dogs they knew to be trained to attack black slaves. “I never knew a slave escaping with his life from Bayou Boeuf,” Northup wrote. “In their flight they can go in no direction but a little way without coming to a bayou, when the inevitable alternative is presented, of being drowned or overtaken by the dogs.” In the swamps, cypresses gave way to palmetto trees, their heavy leaves darkening the swamps. Moccasin snakes and alligators made the swamps all the more dangerous. Footing was uneven.
At first, the planters found only the wounded, who were unable to run. They discovered one plantation mistress, a Madame Clapion, hiding in the midst of the forests shivering with cold and terror. But before too long, the bloodhounds caught a scent. They did not know it yet, but Charles Deslondes was running just a few hundred feet ahead.
Charles’s experience was probably similar to Northup’s. The dogs’ “long, savage yells announced they were on my track,” Northup wrote. “Fear gave me strength, and I exerted it to the utmost.” The yelping dogs were gaining, running faster than any man could run. With each howl, Charles would have sensed their imminent approach. “Each moment I expected they would sink into my back—expected to feel their long teeth sinking into my flesh,” wrote Northup. The dogs would tear a man to pieces in minutes, unless called back by their masters—something the enraged planters were unlikely to do.
Charles did not escape. The dogs got to him first, dragging him down and ferociously biting his sweating flesh. The planters, recognizing Charles as “the principal leader of the bandits,” brought him back into the cane fields to make a public demonstration. According to one witness, the militiamen chopped off Charles’s hands, broke his thighs, shot him dead, and then roasted his remains on a pile of straw. Charles died a martyr for his cause, his death cries a stirring message to the escaped slaves still cowering in the marshes.
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Reprisals continued unabated on Saturday as the militia came upon a band of rebels hiding out in the woods. Flushed out by two detachments of cavalry, the soldiers captured “Pierre Griffe, murderer of M. Thomassin, and Hans Wimprenn, murderer of M. François Trépagnier, and pressed them closely that they came upon M. Deslondes’ picket and were killed.” The militiamen did more than murder. They hacked off the men’s heads and delivered them to the Andry estate.
As the militia hunted down the remaining slaves, federal reinforcements called in by Claiborne converged on the German Coast. Commanding a force of artillery and dragoons, Major Milton arrived Friday morning from Baton Rouge. In the days prior to the insurrection, Milton had been leading his dragoons north around Lake Pontchartrain in order to fight the Spanish in West Florida. Milton had heard the news at about midday on Thursday, and he had traveled about fifteen miles down the river to the German Coast on an emergency mission to give aid to the militia. Grateful for the extra assistance, Hampton posted Milton and his men in the neighborhood with instructions “to protect and Give Countenance to the Various Companies of the Citizens that are Scouring the Country in Every direction.” Hampton concluded that the planters “have had an Opportunity of feeling their physical force [and were] equal to the protection of their own property.” Nevertheless, Hampton feared new revolts along the coast, and he ordered Milton to ensure that such insurrections did not occur. “I have Judged it expedient to Order down a Company of L’Artillery and one of Dragoons to Descend from Baton Rouge & to touch at Every Settlement of Consequence, and to Crush any disturbances that May have taken place higher Up.”
Hampton was taking no chances, because he did not think the slaves had acted alone. Hampton linked the insurgents with the ongoing war with the Spanish for control of the Gulf. “The [slaves’] plan is unquestionably of Spanish Origin, & has had an extensive Combination,” he wrote. “The Chiefs of the party that took the field are both taken, but there is Without doubt Others behind the Curtain Still More formidable.” He saw the slave insurrection as a Spanish counterattack on American authority, which was not all that far-fetched.