American Uprising (9 page)
Authors: Daniel Rasmussen
F
or the planters and the slaves alike, January was a time of celebration. The sixteen-hour workdays of grinding season were over, and lavish parties in the homes of the planters and in New Orleans marked the celebration of Christmas and Epiphany. January also marked the onset of Louisiana’s winter. Some time in the first few days of the month, storms from the northwest blew in a powerful rainstorm. By January 6, the roads were “half leg deep in Mud.” Rain meant even more time off work, because excessive rain flooded the soil, making movement difficult and making it nearly impossible to work the soil or haul wood from the swamps. The slaves, then, were idle—the most dangerous state, from the perspective of the slave owner.
On the night of January 8, the rain continued to come down. Water coursed along the wood roofs of the slave quarters, drowning their staccato voices with streaming, rushing noise. Twenty-five dark faces looked on as the slave driver turned rebel Charles Deslondes laid out the plan and gave some final words of encouragement. Every man assembled knew that his presence meant a near-certain death sentence if the revolt failed. No slave revolt in Louisiana had ever before been successful, and the punishment for failed rebellion was clear: torture, decapitation, and one’s head upon a pike. Yet with the planters distracted by Carnival and the American military fighting the Spanish past Baton Rouge, the slaves believed they just might have a chance.
No records survive to tell us what Charles said to his men in the final minutes before they attacked. The slaves were preparing for battle, not taking notes. But perhaps Charles acted like the leader of the 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba, who took a sharpened machete, stabbed it through a plantain, and shouted to an audience of slaves, “This is how I will run it through the stomachs of the whites.”
As the slaves made their final preparations, their planter masters, Manuel Andry and his son, Gilbert, lay asleep in their beds in their respective chambers, surrounded by family portraits and fine furniture from Europe. Lulled to sleep by the pitter-patter of rain, perhaps they now dreamed of the month of dances and parties ahead. They felt secure in a world they had created. Both leaders of the colonial militia, the two were respected men in their community. But to the slaves, they were known only for their cruelty—for the frequent whippings that left deep scars in the backs of several of the newly minted rebels and the iron collars they would fasten around the slaves’ necks.
With the clouds darkening the cane fields and the rain blotting out the noise of their approach, the slaves hastened toward the back door of the Andry mansion. Catching each other’s eyes glinting in the night, they held their cane knives and machetes with tight fists. Even in the darkness, Manuel Andry’s plantation cast a formidable shadow. A high roof soared into the sky, shielding a piazza and a broad gallery from the rain. With Charles leading the way, the slaves entered the brick-walled storage basement and made their way toward the wooden double staircase that led upstairs to the quarters where Manuel and Gilbert Andry slept.
As the slaves stormed onto the second-floor landing, Manuel Andry woke to the sight of dark forms penetrating his bedroom. As his eyes snapped open and his brain awoke with a fright, Andry caught a glimpse of Charles Deslondes, a new look on his face, ordering his fellow slaves toward Andry with an axe. One can only imagine Andry’s reaction, in the fog and panic of those first instants of awareness, to seeing Charles, his most loyal driver, his reliable assistant for over a decade, the man he had trusted to manage his plantation, now turned betrayer and potential murderer.
His mind clouded by fear and anger, Andry’s eyes fixed on Charles’s axe, a plantation tool transmuted into an icon of violent insurrection. As the slaves surged toward him, Andry leapt from his bed. The slaves stood between him and the staircase—and the staircase was his only way of escape. Andry made the decision to act, charging toward the surprised slaves.
As he rushed through the crowd of rebels, the slaves lunged at him, slicing his passing body with three long cuts. But somehow Andry made it past. He hurled himself toward the staircase, turning his head only to catch a most horrifying sight: the slaves swinging their axes into his dying son’s body.
Pursued by a pack of angry rebels, Andry could not stop. He could not turn back. With the bloodcurdling vision of his son’s death emblazoned in his mind, his adrenaline took over. He ran for his life. He sprinted through the clover fields in front of his mansion toward the water, where he knew a pirogue lay on the levee.
As the slaves hacked Gilbert Andry into pieces, Charles decided that it would be fruitless to send men chasing after Manuel. His ambitions were greater than killing one planter—even a planter he hated so personally. He sought liberation and conquest on a greater scale. He did not think Manuel Andry would make it too far—and even if he did, a wounded middle-aged planter posed little threat to his slave army. Or so Charles thought.
In Charles’s mind, the tide had finally turned. Baptized with the blood of his former master, Charles and his men broke into the stores in the basement of Andry’s mansion, taking muskets and militia uniforms, stockpiled in case of domestic insurrection. Many of the slaves had learned to shoot muskets in African civil wars, while others would fight more effectively with the cane knives and axes they had learned to wield in the hot Louisiana sun. As his men gathered weapons and shoved ammunition into bags, Charles and several of his fellow slaves cast off the distinctive cheap cotton slave clothes and put on Andry’s militia uniforms. Charles knew that the uniforms would lend the revolt authority, wedding their struggle with the imagery of the Haitian revolution, whose leaders had famously adopted European military garb. As they sought to rally other men to their cause, he must have hoped the uniforms would reassure the doubters of the legitimacy of their plan and their organization. If the revolt were to succeed, he would need numbers.
Amid the rainstorm, Charles shouted orders to his fellow slaves. They assembled in the clover field in front of Andry’s plantation, falling into line behind Charles, who was now mounted on horseback. They were familiar with military discipline: their work on Andry’s sugar plantation had taught them to follow orders with alacrity. But now they were motivated not by fear of the lash, but by the hope of freedom. They were forty-one miles from the gates of New Orleans, which they hoped to conquer in two days’ time. Asked later why he had left the Andry plantation that night, the rebel Jupiter replied that he wanted to go to the city to kill whites.
Charles and his men began to march. Charles shouted, “On to New Orleans!” and the newly formed rebel army shouted it right back. The revolt had begun. As the twenty-five rebels gathered guns, knives, and horses on the Andry plantation, rumors of the insurrection’s inception flashed like lightning through the German Coast. In those dark early-morning moments, the slave quarters for miles around erupted. Slaves ran from door to door, whispering the news, and small conferences gathered in tight quarters as men and women weighed their options: to risk death and join Charles and his men or stay behind in safety.
Charles and his fellow leaders had planted the seeds for the revolt well over the past few months. In cautious conversations on the edges of the sugar fields, in the Spanish taverns along the levees, and at the weekly Sunday dances, Charles had built a strong organization. Inspired by the stories of the Haitian revolution and flush with the philosophies of the French Revolution, the diverse band of slaves that joined insurrectionary cells believed they could secure freedom, equality, and independence through violent rebellion. As the heads of the whites rolled through the streets, they could form a new republic—a black outpost on the Mississippi, guaranteed by force.
Armed with plantation tools and primed by revolutionary ideals, roughly one-quarter of the slaves on the plantations along the River Road gathered on the levee to meet the marching rebels and join the insurrection. In those predawn hours, the slaves shivered with cold and anticipation, the rain soaking their cotton clothes. In military formation, the slaves marched along completely flat land on a well-trodden road toward New Orleans.
To the right, the rough waters of the Mississippi surged by past the four-foot-high levees. To their left stood the plantation mansions. Live oaks, trimmed to regular shapes, young orange trees, deciduous Pride of China trees with bursting yellow flowers, and other tropical trees and bushes decorated the plantation lawns. Side roads marked by avenues of laurel trees cut into pyramids led to the mansion houses that adorned each plantation. Behind the mostly two-story-high mansions, with their piazzas and covered galleries, stood the slave cabins—and behind the slave cabins, the sugar fields stretched for a mile before finally giving way to the marshy cypress swamps.
In front of them lay the road they would take on the two-day journey to the city gates. Wooden bridges covered the worst spots, the ditches that provided irrigation for the fields. But in many places the road was almost knee-deep in mud. As the road wound its way toward New Orleans, it passed dozens of plantations in quick succession.
The rainstorm could not drown out the feelings of pride and power the rebels felt as they looked in front and back of them and saw the ranks of the committed swell. The beating of an African drum keyed the men to excitement. About five miles down the road, as they rounded another turn of the Mississippi River, the rebel army saw a heartening sight through the fields where only a month before sugar cane had stood higher than a man’s head. A group of ten slaves stood under the tall oaks fronting the plantation of the local judge, Achille Trouard. The slave Mathurin now sat on one of Trouard’s horses, commanding a group of about ten slaves. Waving his saber in the air, Mathurin pledged his troops to Charles’s cause. The two leaders formed the heart of the incipient cavalry—leaders on horseback that would snowball into a full-blown troop as the men proceeded closer to New Orleans.
Over the sound of the horses’ hoofs, Mathurin shouted some bad news. Achille Trouard, his master, had heard about the revolt before he and his men could attack. Led by a loyal house slave, Trouard and his two nieces had fled into the swamps to hide. The rebels had made their first moves, but they were not the only players.
* * *
The slave Pierre awoke Alexandre Labranche around dawn, not to kill him, but to save his life. Another slave, François, rushed in a few moments later, advising Labranche to “flee immediately into the woods back of [the] farm.”
François had heard about the revolt just as many newly minted insurgents had—through the grapevine telegraph of news and information that coursed through the slave quarters. But François had made a different calculus from his more hot-headed comrades. He chose to betray the revolt, most likely not for any love of the planters or of being a slave, but out of pragmatism. All the odds were against the slave-rebels, and François knew well that his best chance of survival amid the brutal work of sugar planting came from siding with the powerful and pledging allegiance to the white men who controlled the entire world as he knew it, from the slave ships that picked him up in Africa to the great city of New Orleans to the small worlds of the plantations.
François was not alone. The majority of slaves chose not to fight. All knew that the clearest path to freedom was not to join a revolution but to betray one; the planters had made that much clear. In the face of such might, most slaves decided that rebelling was simply not worth the cause, and some sought to profit by betraying the rebels they believed were making a foolish and wrongheaded decision. So François chose to tell his master, Alexandre Labranche—a decision that might even mean the reward of freedom if Labranche survived.
In a panic, Labranche awoke his wife and children and gathered a few key possessions—a musket, some warm clothes, and a few biscuits. Then they hurried downstairs to meet François. Casting backward glances to the levee and the River Road, François and the Labranches hurried through the fields toward the cypress swamps, and the dark trees that would hide them until the revolt had passed. The planter family and their black guide fled in terror along paths first blazed by escaping slaves.
Other planters did the same. In what one planter described as a “torrent of rain and the frigid cold,” the white elite of the German Coast flew on horseback to New Orleans, concealed themselves in the swamps, or took boats to the other side of the river where order still prevailed. Hermogène Labranche (Alexandre’s brother) and his family holed up in the woods until the slave-rebels passed. They then took a boat to the other side of the river. Adelard Fortier escaped to New Orleans. As they left their plantations, the planters handed over authority to black slaves they trusted to be loyal—ordering these men to guard their mansions and prevent the slave army from wreaking destruction on their stockpiles of sugar.
* * *
The planters’ decisions to flee emboldened the rebels. The slaves were not used to seeing black men using violence to control white men—and the effect was intoxicating. “Freedom or death,” they shouted. Impressed slaves rallied to the rebel flags.
Nowhere was this new-felt power more evident than on the plantation of James Brown, only a few miles southeast along the river from the Andry plantation. Here the Akan warriors Kook and Quamana watched as their master mounted his horse and spurred it along the road toward New Orleans. As his figure vanished into the rain and mist, Kook and Quamana must have spoken of a government of black men, the execution of the white planter class, and the impact their weapons would have on the Mississippi River colony of New Orleans. This was not the first time these slaves had heard such talk, but Brown’s departure reassured the wavering that this might be their great opportunity to finally realize what only days before had seemed to be mere wild dreams.