American Uprising

by Daniel Rasmussen

  After a journey of a few months, depending on weather conditions, the slave ships arrived at the various entry ports of the New World—Charleston, Havana, or Kingston. Prior to their arrival in these slave marts, experts among the crew rubbed the slaves’ skins with oil to make them shine, gave them rum to clear their eyes and brighten their countenances, covered their sores with iron rust and gunpowder, and closed their lesions. They wanted the slaves to look as healthy as possible before sale.

  Traders would buy and sell the slaves here. Some would be bought to serve in the West Indies, others for transshipment to North America, while still others would serve for a bit in the West Indies before being sent on to North America, having either been bought for the purpose of being broken in and then resold, or simply rejected by the West Indian planters.

  Several thousand of the many slaves caught up in the New World ended up in New Orleans. Here, emerging onto the deck, the slaves would have seen a bustling waterfront—ships from all over the world, hundreds of flatboats packed densely together, stevedores loading and unloading goods, sailors shouting instructions—a cacophony of exchange conducted in half a dozen or more languages. The sailors brought the slaves on deck, then transported them in flatboats to the shore. The slave merchants took the terrified Africans from there, marching them in chains through the central square of the city, past the cathedral and the Cabildo, past the sailors’ district with its shacks, brothels, and bars, to a huge slave market advertised by hanging signs with names such as “Kenner and Henderson.” The merchants packed the slaves into pens the size of home lots surrounded by fences fifteen to twenty feet tall.

  * * *

  Sometime between May and September of 1806, the brash American James Brown drove his carriage in from his new plantation on the German Coast and parked it outside one of these slave markets, perhaps outside the full-service slave firm run by his fellow Americans William Kenner and Stephen Henderson. Kenner and Henderson had arrived flush with cash from White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, to set up a sugar plantation and merchant firm. The two operated a full-service business that shipped plantation produce to market, provided financing and insurance, bought and sold slaves, and procured building materials and other necessities for planters.

  Brown had arrived in Louisiana only a year before, buying plantation land on the German Coast just west of the noble French family the Trépagniers. He had watched the value of his plantation more than double over the course of the year, from $16,000 to over $40,000, as the price of sugar rose and his slaves converted the land for sugar production. Brown was a memorable man. A contemporary from Kentucky described him as a “towering & majestic person, very proud, austere & haughty in fact repulsive in manner, and . . . exceedingly unpopular.”

  In the hot weather of 1806, Brown was not in New Orleans to win a popularity contest. He was there to make money. Brimming with ambition, he came to the slave market that day to buy slaves who would make him rich.

  Here, for the first time, Brown set eyes on Kook and Quamana, the first a mere fifteen years old, the latter twenty-one. With finished floors and beautifully painted walls, the showroom could hold a hundred slaves. Kook and Quamana would have watched anxiously as Brown strolled through the aisles of the mart inspecting each individual slave. The slaves tried to imagine the characters of their potential owners—to gauge what their fates might be at the hands of these men. The planters dressed up to buy slaves, in full black suits or multicolored pants, stiff top hats or wide-brimmed shapes, some with ties or jewelry, others with canes or walking sticks. If James Brown was as repulsive as his white contemporaries described him, he must have cast a truly terrifying figure to the two African men quivering in the corner. That day, James Brown decided to purchase both Kook and Quamana. He paid $700 for Kook and $600 for Quamana (about $11,000 each in modern values).

  But Kook and Quamana were not fated to become stock characters in Brown’s plantation drama. Soon after their arrival in New Orleans, they chose to reject their new status as slaves and to begin plotting a ferocious rebellion—a rebellion that they hoped would bring them back into New Orleans not in chains but in triumph. Amid the swirling diversity of New World slavery, Kook and Quamana slowly began to identify and cultivate a network of like-minded slaves, a network they would have had to hone through day-to-day interactions, without attracting the notice of the keenly observant planters.

  Kook and Quamana must have taken advantage of discreet meetings in cabarets in the city, in the homes of free blacks, and in the slave quarters. Even the planters were aware of the extent of these gatherings—though they supposed they were recreational, not revolutionary. On the German Coast, the home of Joseph the Spaniard was a known location for slaves to drink and congregate on the weekends. In 1763, the Spanish attorney general had complained about illicit tavern keepers like Joseph: “While furnishing drink they incite them to pilfer and steal from the houses of their masters,” he wrote. “[The slave] would not be violent if he did not find in these secret taverns the means to satisfy his brutal passions; what hidden pernicious disorders have resulted.” The Spanish, with their long experience, knew how dangerous these uncontrolled slave activities could be.

  Yet these officials did not ban the dances—nor could they restrict the constant movements of slaves between plantations and around New Orleans. Slaves served as messengers and deliverymen, and they were responsible for relaying goods and news from plantation to plantation at their masters’ behest. They traveled into New Orleans to their masters’ town houses, and they traveled to the marketplace to sell goods. Slaves were also allowed to travel for family reasons. Many male slaves had wives at other plantations, whom they were allowed to visit on the weekends. It was unusual for a slave to spend his or her entire life on one plantation. The masters frequently rented out their slaves to other planters for a fixed sum of money. Whenever a planter died or a son became old enough to start a plantation, slaves would be redistributed, moving from place to place around the German Coast. And as they moved, they built contacts and relationships—a network of acquaintances and trusted friends they could use to spread gossip, news, political ideologies, and, in the months leading up to January 1811, a plan for revolt.

  And there was nowhere better to build a revolutionary organization than the dances in New Orleans. Here slaves like Kook and Quamana could talk away from the watchful eyes and listening ears of the white planter class. Though the Americans and French showed no understanding of the possibilities of these dances, the Spanish were well aware of this danger. “Nothing is more dreaded than to see the negroes assemble together on Sundays,” wrote a Spanish historian in 1774. “In these likewise they plot their rebellions.” In some African cultures, dancing was about more than celebrating. Dancing could double as military training, developing individuals into fit and cohesive groups. In fact, this form of military training was common enough that the Kongolese used the phrase “dancing a war dance” as a synonym for declaring war.

  Slaves in the New World were quick to take advantage of festivals and celebrations, using their masters’ carelessness and inebriation to plot and often carry out rebellions. In 1812, for example, a group of Akan slaves organized a rebellion in nearby Cuba. The slaves organized the rebellion between Christmas and the Day of the Kings on January 6. The leaders met at taverns, festivals, and other small gatherings, using travel passes and visitation rights to move without being noticed by their masters. At one meeting, the slave José proclaimed that “if they were to be captured, it would not be alive, but dead.”

  But while the festivals provided the cover for the final meetings, revolts did not crop up overnight. Rather, organizing a successful revolt in the face of tremendous odds and suspicious planters required secrecy, organizational skill, persistence, and above all, trust. No record survives of just what Kook and Quamana said or how they plotted their uprising, but another revolt led by Akan people in New York in 1741 gives us a picture of how they might have operated; as in Ne
w York, the 1811 uprising involved a wide diversity of African peoples, drawn from all over the Atlantic world, and of many different languages and nationalities.

  An inner circle of “headmen” was responsible for organizing specific communities into insurrectionary cells—for “recruitment, discipline, and solidarity.” With the rewards for betraying a revolt extremely high, headmen like Kook and Quamana had to be extremely careful about whom they spoke with; they had to be sure they could be trusted. In New York, headmen had focused on organizing within specific national groups. Slaves were “not to open the conspiracy to any but those that were of their own country,” wrote a participant in the New York revolt, since “they are brought from different parts of Africa and might be supposed best to know the temper and disposition of each other.” They addressed each other as “countrymen” and used a coded language to feel out other slaves’ beliefs and politics. New recruits swore a war oath when they joined an insurrectionary cell. These military oaths were widespread across West Africa and invoked the “primal powers of thunder and lightening” to ensure utmost secrecy and violent camaraderie.

  Fortunately for Kook and Quamana, there had been a significant change in New World slavery since the New York uprising. Before 1800, no slave revolt had ever been successful. But in the first years of the new century, a group of slaves on a French island in the Caribbean launched a massive revolution meant to overturn European power and establish a black republic in the heart of the Atlantic. The stories of this daring gambit were well known to Louisiana slaves. The links to revolutionary Haiti were far closer than the planters would have liked. And there is little doubt that Kook and Quamana used the stories of this revolution to inspire and cajole their fellow slaves into joining their planned insurrection.

  Chapter Three

  A Revolutionary Forge

  Twelve hundred nautical miles east-southeast from New Orleans, the verdant 6,000-foot peaks of the island of Saint Domingue (now Haiti) jut out from the ocean. Freshwater streams flow down from the mountain peaks, forming rivers that fertilize the valleys and plains that lie beneath. The weather of the tropics adds lushness and fertility to the air—greenery bursts out of every crevasse, from under every banana tree, beneath the cloudless blue skies. Mango, orange, and coffee trees grow naturally here. The year was 1791, and the farmland on this tropical island was perhaps the single most valuable property on earth.

  Though Haiti is now a very poor country, then the soil of the island yielded untold riches. In 1767 alone, the French colony of Saint Domingue exported 123 million pounds of sugar, two million pounds of cotton, a million pounds of indigo, and vast quantities of hides, molasses, cocoa, and rum. And that was only the start of the island’s agricultural boom. Not even 11,000 square miles, the tiny island was a hub of an Atlantic commerce—the jewel in the crown of the French empire.

  The island accounted for over 60 percent of France’s export trade, and more ships docked in its ports than in Marseilles or any other smaller French port. As French ships brought Caribbean sugar and other cash crops to Europe, they brought back with them the processed goods of Europe—salted cod and other meats, brandy and wine, flour and all manner of refined goods. This valuable colony drove a period of rapid economic growth in France and in Europe more broadly, a period of economic growth that laid the groundwork for the Industrial Revolution. Whole factories—whole towns—grew up to serve this vast New World trade. And as the tall-masted ships sailed back and forth across the Atlantic, Europeans watched their coffers fill with gold and the benefits of trade lift large swathes of the population from peasantry into the middle class.

  Yet beneath this story of wealth and riches, behind this tale of progress, lay darker realities. Sugar, cotton, and coffee don’t grow themselves. They demand backbreaking, intolerable labor—labor to which no free man would choose to submit. The task of raising cane in the fields of Saint Domingue and harvesting the lush crops of the island fell on the backs of the Enlightenment’s greatest and most productive laboring class—African slaves.

  After decimating the native population, Europeans imported around half a million slaves from the coasts of Africa to this tiny island over the course of just a few decades. In the process of ripping these men and women from their native homes and transporting them by force to a New World where most died within seven years, this Atlantic trade fueled wars across the African continent, cost untold millions of lives, and, of course, brought unprecedented prosperity to the slave traders and the planters and merchants who depended on them.

  That raising crops could be so profitable seems very foreign to the modern eye, but in that day and age the production of sugar was the most profitable form of agriculture. Consider the famed Gallifet plantation, where 808 slaves worked to harvest the New World’s most lucrative crop. The master of the plantation once asked, “How can we make a lot of sugar when we work only sixteen hours [per day]?” The answer, he concluded, was “by consuming men and animals.” And indeed, the Gallifet plantation did consume men, quite quickly and efficiently. These colonial plantations were as close to a death camp as one could come in the late eighteenth century. Overseers carried swords and whips to punish recalcitrant slaves. Few slaves lived past forty and most died within a few years of starting plantation work.

  But as these complex economic relationships played out on the Atlantic, creating a vast network of death and profit, other forces too were at work—forces not amenable to empire or capitalism. Try as they might, the slave owners could not turn people into machines—and people do not submit easily to cruelty and exploitation. One liberal traveler on the island noted the judgment and resentment that the slaves expressed when by themselves. “One has to hear with what warmth and what volubility, and at the same time with what precision of ideas and accuracy of judgment, this creature, heavy and taciturn all day, now squatting before his fire, tells stories, talks, gesticulates, argues, passes opinions, approves or condemns both his master and everyone who surrounds him,” the traveler wrote.

  Had this traveler been an African, he might have discovered much more. He might have known the meaning of the African chant “Eh! Eh! Bomba! Heu! Heu! Canga bafio te! Canga, moune de la! Canga do ki la! Canga, li!” or, in English, “We swear to destroy the whites and all that they possess; let us die rather than fail to keep this vow.” That same traveler, had he been an African, might also have been invited to join certain congresses held late at nights in the woods away from the plantations. For in August of 1791, the slaves were plotting to make their chant a reality. In furtive conversations held far from the planters’ watchful eyes, the slaves decided that this would be their last summer on French-owned plantations. They would start “a war to the death against the whites.” Given all they had suffered, perhaps it was only time.

  On the night of August 21, a band of slaves rose up in arms. The first victim was a refiner’s apprentice. They caught him in the sugar factory and cut him into pieces with cutlasses. When his screams awoke the overseer, the slave-rebels shot the overseer dead too, before proceeding to the apartment of the refiner, whom they killed in his bed. From there, they traveled from plantation to plantation, raising a force of nearly 2,000 slaves, setting fire to the cane fields, killing white women and men, and burning houses. The fires were visible for miles and miles. Their attacks, reported one planter, “spread like a torrent.”

  The group of slaves who began this revolt must have known the punishment for a suspected rebel: ritual torture and death, combined with dismemberment to ensure that their souls could not pass into the afterworld. But perhaps they also knew that staying and working in the fields would lead to death just the same—though in a few years rather than a few days, and by exhaustion and malnutrition, not violence. But those who made Saint Domingue’s sugar were strong and had inspiring leaders.

  The most visible organizer was a coach driver and former slave driver named Boukman, a man known as a religious leader. In the first days of the revolt, Boukman gat
hered a band of slaves in the woods at a place called Bois-Caiman, where he led the slaves in a religious ceremony. A woman—variously described as having “strange eyes and bristling hair” or having green eyes and being of mixed race—presided with him. “The god of the white man calls him to commit crimes; our god asks only good works of us. But this god who is so good orders revenge,” declared Boukman. “He will direct our hands; he will aid us. Throw away the image of the god of the whites who thirsts for our tears and listen to the voice of liberty that speaks in the hearts of all of us.” The conspirators then took an oath of secrecy and revenge, an oath sealed by drinking the blood of a black pig they offered in sacrifice. The revolt had begun.