Introduction: the heart 7 страница

Thanks to decisions made in London and Washington, the boom didn’t last. Great Britain insisted on searching and seizing American merchant ships bound for her enemy France, often kidnapping some of the vessels’ sailors into the British navy. In 1807, Jefferson banned all foreign trade. His theory was that Britain and France would suffer so much that they would agree to respect neutral shipping and allow American vessels to carry American cargoes of tobacco, sugar, and other crops wherever they could find the best market.

For eighteen months, the government struggled to enforce Jefferson’s policy. Rampant smuggling punched holes in the embargo and undermined the presidency’s claim to authority at home and abroad. But smuggling couldn’t preserve the export-dependent economy of New Orleans, and the embargo chilled slave sales throughout 1808. Finally, three days before Jefferson left office, on March 1, 1809, Congress replaced the embargo with the Non-Intercourse Act, which attempted to ban US trade with Britain and France only.

So now we are back to May 15, 1809, with Claiborne in his office on the verge of panic because, as the letter he was writing informed his superiors in Washington, a ship from Santiago, Cuba, “with a number of French passengers and thirty-six slaves,” was near the city. Many Saint-Domingue refugees had moved to Spanish Cuba. Some of these French nationals had helped to incubate the new Cuban sugar industry. But at the beginning of 1809, when Napoleon invaded Spain, the Spanish Empire retaliated by expelling the refugees from its possessions. Now a shipload of these twice-refugees had crossed the bar at the Balize, seeking asylum. A fast messenger boat had run the news up and was waiting for instructions from the governor.

TABLE 2.3. SLAVES SOLD IN ORLEANS PARISH, 1804–1811: INDIVIDUAL SALES

	MALE SLAVES	MEAN PRICE IN DOLLARS	FEMALE SLAVES	MEAN PRICE IN DOLLARS	TOTAL NUMBER SOLD	MEAN PRICE IN DOLLARS
					1,041

Source: Hall Database, www.ibiblio.org/laslave/.

Claiborne did not know what to do. The city’s many former refugees would be deeply sympathetic to this latest wave, many of whom had left coffee plantations and sugar mills behind them in Cuba. But some brought slaves, and to welcome them in would violate federal law. And before the governor could even finish his first letter to Washington—a letter that was irrelevant, since it wouldn’t bring a response in time to solve the immediate crisis—the local French consul arrived with news that another 6,000 people were on their way. Claiborne hustled the consul back out as soon as possible, broke the seal on the first letter to Washington, and scrawled a despairing postscript: “So great and sudden an Emigration to this territory, will be a source of serious inconvenience and embarrassment to our own Citizens.”³¹

Claiborne could easily tick off the difficulties the situation presented. There was the problem of finding food, shelter, and employment for 9,000 people in a city that normally supported 15,000. There was the legal problem of bringing slaves. And then again, there was the fact that a third of the refugees were free people of color, forbidden to immigrate to the United States and unwanted by whites in New Orleans—particularly by English-speakers who preferred the ostensible clarity of their own American pattern in which all black people were assumed to be enslaved. Yet over the next few days, the white people of New Orleans held meetings and wrote petitions insisting that they wanted Claiborne to admit the refugees.³²

Sympathy drove them, but so did other forces of attraction. “I have no doubt,” the mayor of New Orleans wrote to Claiborne, carefully pressing him to admit the refugees, and their slaves, “that the result would be the settling of many new plantations, which would give large crops of cotton and other produce before three years time.” More trade, more connections with other markets, and—this was implied—more unity between white citizens, whatever their native language. Allowing slavery’s expansion, the mayor and other wealthy Louisianans insisted, made white New Orleans and white America more prosperous and more united, binding states and factions together. So Claiborne capitulated. The refugees poured up the river. Congress would (when it heard) quibble, but it backed down and consented to this post facto exception to the 1807 international slave-trade ban. The governor himself enforced only a single law. Following territorial regulations to the letter, he expelled all free males of color over the age of fifteen who had entered on the refugee ships. Women and children could stay.³³

“To the arrivals from Cuba,” is how A. Bonamy, a Louisiana enslaver, directed his advertisement in the New Orleans newspaper Moniteur de la Louisiane. “I will hire thirty nègres de la hache ”—“slaves of the axe” might be a rough translation—“and a number of laboring negresses for long leases.” In 1809, the number of slaves sold in New Orleans surged sharply upward. Close to one-third of the slaves brought from Cuba were cashed in by enslavers who needed ready funds for a new start. As ever in histories of displacement, people who were ready and able to make profit out of distress did well. One was Christian Miltenberger, a physician of French extraction, who had been kicked out of Cuba in 1809. Right before he boarded the ship that would take him to Louisiana, he had bought a man named Pierre Louis from fellow refugee Marie François. Pierre Louis had been born a slave in Saint-Domingue and transported to Cuba when his owner fled there at some point between 1791 and 1804, during the revolution. Miltenberger sold some people once he reached New Orleans, which allowed him to restart his career as a planter, but he didn’t sell Pierre Louis. Using the cash from other slave sales, Miltenberger established a small sugar plantation, where he put Pierre Louis to hard labor.³⁴

The refugees’ arrival injected new enslaved laborers and new buyers for land in lower Louisiana. Hard times and cultural dissonance between English and French, and distance from Washington, had slowed the newest West’s incorporation into the United States. The incorporation of the refugees helped smooth over those sources of friction. The refugees’ slaves accounted for a full quarter of the growth of the Orleans Territory’s slave population, from 22,701 to over 34,000, between 1806 and 1810, and for 16 percent of the 3,000 people sold as slaves in New Orleans between 1809 and 1811 (see Table 2.4). The American empire expanded instead of devolving into a squabble between local slaveholders over scarce resources.³⁵

TABLE 2.4. SLAVES IMPORTED TO LOUISIANA, 1809–1811

ORIGIN	NUMBER LISTING AN ORIGIN POINT FOR JOURNEY*	PERCENTAGE
Louisiana		19.9
Eastern United States		28.3
Western United States (not including Louisiana)		32.4
Caribbean (not including Cuba and Saint-Domingue)		3.2
Saint-Domingue Refugees		l6.3
Totals		99.9

Source: Hall Database, www.ibiblio.org/laslave/.

* The variable used was “Via,” which records the place from or by which the seller brought the slave to New Orleans; 9,157 other sales and/or probate records contain no entry for this variable.

NOT EVERYONE IN THE Mississippi Valley was willing to cooperate. Rival empire Spain still hoped to block the growth of the United States. So did Britain. And 50,000 Native Americans, who did not plan to surrender the rich soil under their feet, still lived on the millions of acres that Yazoo companies and other speculators had successfully turned into paper on the financial exchanges of America’s northeastern cities. These conflicts were coming, and soon. Even sooner, in 1811, the enslaved people who had been brought in such diversity to the Mississippi Valley as “heads” and “slaves of the axe” would make their own attempt to change the course of things.

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.³⁶

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.³⁷

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.³⁸

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.³⁹

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.⁴⁰

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.⁴¹

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. Ye t as the rebels poured through Labranche’s sugar operation, ten joined.⁴²

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.⁴³

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.⁴⁴

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.⁴⁵

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.⁴⁶

The militia marched the captives back down the river road toward the Destrehan plantation, while a white resident of St. John the Baptist named Charles Perret marshaled a group of men on horseback who swept even farther back up the river, going from labor camp to labor camp. They ordered commandeurs who had not gone with the rebels to drive their slave forces out into the fields to work. Make them act as though nothing had happened, even as squads of militia combed the woods for fugitives, forcing those they caught to point out fellow rebels who were trying to melt back into the ranks of laborers.⁴⁷

On the 12th, Perret and his men returned to the Andry house from one such expedition, carrying the heads of rebels Pierre Griffe and Hans Wimprenn. Andry showed Perret and his troops—who included several free men of color—his own trophies. In a circle of lamplight, surrounded by a dark yard full of white men with muskets and bayonets, Andry had three men tied up: Barthelemy, who had been Trepagnier’s sugar artisan, a man called Jacques Beckneil (Jack Bucknall?), and, prize of prizes, Charles Deslondes. There were enough white landowners present for a “court,” said Perret. A US Navy man who was present reported what came next. Deslondes “had his hands chopped off” with an axe—we can imagine Andry, who had lost his son to one of these so recently, delivering the blow through the wrists, onto the chopping block. “Then shot in one thigh, and then the other, until they were both broken—then shot in the Body.” But what else to do? Quickly, before Charles bled to death, someone broke open a bale of straw. They threw the writhing man into the straw, scattered it on him, and thrust in the torches—and so Charles Deslondes died with the flames crackling his skin.⁴⁸

The next day, the 13th, German Coast enslavers convened a more organized mechanism of judgment at the Destrehan plantation. Over the next forty-eight hours, they brought thirty-two captured rebels one by one to stand before them on the brick floor. Some tried to defend themselves as part of a large group—so large that it would surely be impossible to execute them all. Guiau, once owned by John Palfrey, now by Kenner and Henderson, was implicated by others, who said he stole a horse and led others off the plantation; he deflected blame by saying that “all the negroes... of Kenner and Henderson had followed the brigands.” The message from those who sat in judgment was clear: sell out other rebels, name their names, and thus save your life. Some talked. Cupidon, owned by the Labranche brothers, and Louis, of Trepagnier, implicated dozens of men, some dead and some alive.

Once Cupidon and Louis had pointed at so many of those in custody, others had less to sell.

A final group played their last cards very differently. Quamana stood before the tribunal on the 14th. According to the tribunal’s notes, he “avowed that he had figured in a remarkable manner in the insurrection.” What it meant for him to “avow” is unclear. Did he confess voluntarily? Wa s he tortured? Did he say something else, and did the judges simply write what they wanted? Only one thing is definitive: “Il n’a denoncé personne.” He named no one. Nor did Robin, nor Harry, Hyppolite, Cook, Ned, or Etienne. Then the judges had Amar brought out before them. They accused him of being a “chief of the brigands, denounced by many.” He said nothing in response. Perhaps he couldn’t speak, even had he tried. Perhaps nothing would come from him but the wind whistling through the hole in his throat as he struggled for breath.⁴⁹

On the morning of the 15th, the judges pronounced the sentences. Twenty would die. Even Cupidon and Louis did not save themselves. They, too, were to be executed, just like the silent ones. Death was to come by firing squad. Each convicted rebel was to be taken to his respective home plantation, to be executed in front of all the gathered slaves. Over the next day or so, the militia carried out the sentences, shooting the condemned and decapitating their corpses while silent crowds watched. In New Orleans, meanwhile, eight were hanged for alleged complicity in the insurrection. Another seven, including Charles Deslondes, had already been executed by the “court” convened at Andry’s. Enslavers claimed compensation for at least ten others executed, making at least forty-five condemned and killed by the state. Together with the people killed during and after the battles of January 10, at least sixty-six, and probably close to one hundred, enslaved people lost their lives. Gilbert Andry and Jean-François Trepagnier may have been the only whites killed by the rebels.⁵⁰

Both the 1811 rebellion and the Haitian Revolution began as conspiracies organized by a few commandeurs in the most densely cultivated area of the sugar district. Both were launched at a time when the enslavers were divided and facing internal and external threats. Yet despite the high cost they paid in lives, the 1811 rebels had failed to capture New Orleans or seriously threaten US or slaveholder rule in the Lower Mississippi Valley. And they failed for reasons that prophesied much about the second great era of slavery in the history of the modern world, an era that not only would be very different from the first, but would shape a different, wider, more modern world.⁵¹

The swift and ruthless response to the 1811 rebellion tells us that enslavers in the southwestern United States were different from those in the Caribbean. They were wiser in their power, for they had been taught by many lessons: those of the Haitian Revolution, seen from afar by most (though some of the enslavers in Louisiana had been there); those of the American Revolution, which still was not that long ago; and those of the seemingly endless wars against Native Americans. They were more numerous than their island counterparts, and they were better at war. They were more clever in their cruelty. They were more ruthless and decisive in a crisis. And whites in the most slavery-dominated districts could call on two key elements of force that Saint-Domingue whites had lacked. The first was a white majority in the regional and national theaters. Even though enslaved people outnumbered free whites in many plantation districts in the United States—such as in the German Coast, where they had a 70 percent majority—they never formed the 90 percent supermajorities common on the sugar islands. The second was a federal government dominated by enslavers that was committed to putting down slaves’ collective resistance. Federal troops were the key to suppressing the 1811 revolt. The government protected the enslavers’ enterprises, and they, in turn, extended the power of the American state by occupying and developing territory.⁵²

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