American Uprising

by Daniel Rasmussen

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Cover-Up

  The plane cuts low over the flat Mississippi floodplains. From the window, the Mississippi looks brown and placid, passing through the farmland and industrial tracts north of the city. Large tankers and cargo ships seem fixed as the plane swoops in toward Louis Armstrong Airport, which sits on the site of the former Kenner and Henderson plantation.

  Though city authorities renamed the airport after a prominent African American, Louis Armstrong, the names of the surrounding towns and streets date back much further. The old River Road sweeps past the poor, primarily black town of Destrehan, before entering the town of Kenner, where the airport is located. The River Road becomes Third Street, then Jefferson Highway, and finally South Claiborne Ave.

  Don’t bother looking for Charles Deslondes Boulevard or Quamana Avenue. And don’t spend much time looking for historical markers of the 1811 revolt. There’s only one, across the street from a McDonald’s in Norco, nearly forty miles outside of the city center.

  Driving along the path of the revolt today, you will pass huge chemical refineries, the sugar plantations of the current day. Overshadowed by these chemical plants, though, the history of older days still survives.

  Many residents can trace their ancestry back to sugar slaves from this same area. Slave burial plots, cemeteries full of Civil War–era headstones, and even several remaining plantation homes still keep watch over the German Coast’s old ghosts.

  The Destrehan plantation is open now for tours—and weddings or parties, if you’re interested. A group of prominent white families converted the Destrehan plantation into a museum, seeking to preserve their heritage and remember their own past.

  The tour focuses on the lifestyles, family histories, and architectural accomplishments of the planter class. The tour is rich with descriptions of the planters’ meals, their parties, and their elaborate family dramas. The architecture is a special emphasis of the tour.

  When it comes to slavery, the tour guides describe a system of “Creole slavery” that was generous and fair to the slaves. Slavery was not as bad under the French as it became under the Americans, the tour guides suggest. “Everyone worked, from family members to slaves, because life on a plantation was not easy,” reads the plantation brochure. “It has been documented that slaves at Destrehan Plantation were treated with fairness and their health needs provided for.”

  But even the relatives of Jean Noël Destrehan cannot deny the events of January 1811. In a converted slave cabin not featured on the standard tour, the tour guides have constructed a museum to the 1811 uprising. With brief descriptions of the major events, the cabin features folk paintings that imagine what the event would have looked like. Just as in the history books, the story of slave politics is compartmentalized away from the central narrative of American history.

  Though the world of the German Coast seems to have avoided confronting its past, one man has led a group to force New Orleans to do just that. Leon Waters, a sixty-year-old activist who has been involved with radical political causes since the Vietnam War, now provides tours of the uprising to curious student groups and tourists from out of town. “Hidden History Tours provides authentic presentations of history that are not well known,” promises Waters’s Web site. “We take you to the places, acquaint you with the people, and share their struggles that are rich and varied. These struggles have been made by Africans, African-Americans, Labor and Women. For too long their stories have been kept hush hush. But not anymore!”

  A participant in the Black Workers Congress, Waters devoted his early life to organizing factories, even moving to Detroit to head up an effort to create a national struggle against wage slavery. During the past twenty-five years, he has worked for the Afro-American History Society of New Orleans, fighting to restore a “scientific” perspective to the history of the area.

  For Waters, the tour represents a way to keep alive the memory of the uprising and the memory of the tradition of “revolutionary struggle” in America. He sees the 1811 uprising as the intellectual antecedent of the American civil rights movement. Aside from delivering tours, he works to fight police brutality and generally promote political discourse among African Americans in New Orleans. Waters has organized several commemorative celebrations of the uprising, featuring marches, reenactments, and speeches.

  Though virtually unknown outside of his community, Waters is perhaps the most knowledgeable man in the country about the 1811 revolt. Growing up in the area, he remembered hearing stories from his great-aunt about the revolt. In the early 1990s, he decided to see if there was any truth behind the oral legends of his upbringing.

  Waters formed the Afro-American Historical Society of New Orleans, and he set out to uncover history. He and his friends traveled to libraries, courthouses, and archives, where they were often met with obfuscation and racist comments. But they continued their search—and it soon began to bear fruit.

  By 1996, they had assembled 168 pages of documents collected from archives all over the country, some of which they had translated from French by a scholar with Haitian roots. Waters arranged for an independent scholar named Albert Thrasher to write up a description of the events, and the group published the results of their research in 1996 at an independent press in New Orleans. The book, On to New Orleans!, provides a history of the “revolutionary struggle” of African Americans from 1500 through Reconstruction, devoting twenty-four pages to the uprising and its suppression. In an account defined by Marxist ideology, Thrasher fit the uprising within a long contextual history of revolutionary struggle. The book described the goal of the uprising as to “overthrow their oppressors, to destroy the power of the ‘white’ rulers.”

  In addition to compiling a near-authoritative collection of documents related to the revolt, the book drew extensively on oral history from Louisiana. The oral history suggested that the black marchers had two chants, “On to New Orleans” and “Freedom or death,” which they shouted as they moved toward the city. Thrasher speculated that Claiborne’s account of only two white casualties was “patently in contradiction with the truth” and cited several sources from much later periods that argued for a larger body count.

  Thrasher argued that while the revolt was tactically a failure, strategically it was hugely successful. “This revolt stimulated a whole range of revolutionary actions among the African slaves in the U.S.A. in subsequent years,” he wrote. “It continued and invigorated the tradition of revolutionary struggle among the African slaves in the Territory of Orleans that would never abate.” Though the book is full of Marxist-Leninist language denouncing the “sham” U.S. democracy and the “capitalist moneybags,” the book nevertheless provides a substantial account of the event itself.

  Few outside of academia and the local community have ever seen the few copies of this book that exist. In fact, there is a vast collective amnesia in New Orleans and the United States more broadly about the massive bloodletting of January 1811.

  How did the 1811 uprising become lost in the footnotes of history? How did historians overlook it for 200 years? And why has no one ever bothered to tell the story of the enslaved men who lost their lives fighting for their own freedom? The answers to these questions lie in America’s complicated racial politics.

  Claiborne wrote the first draft of history—and he wrote it with the goal of covering up the revolt and saving face before an anxious nation. He wrote the slave-rebels out of history, believing that all that was important was the rise of American power in the Southwest. Swallowing Claiborne’s interpretation, most historians have portrayed the slave-rebels not as political revolutionaries but as common criminals. Up until World War II, most of these historians advocated or supported the control of white men over the political institutions of the South, conflating the idea of the law with the idea of white supremacy. Examining the revolt from this perspective, they heartily agreed with Claiborne’s interpretations and the planters’ violent actions.

&nb
sp; The Communist movement represented the first challenge to Claiborne’s political agenda. After World War II, a wave of activist historians revisited the history of slave revolts in an effort to narrate a history of violent resistance and class struggle that would support their present-day efforts to organize opposition to Jim Crow rule in the South. But while these historians changed the tone of the commentary on slave revolts, they nevertheless kept the basics of the story untouched. Many of these men saw the slaves as mere gears in the great machinery of class struggle, and they saw little need to explore the politics of the enslaved.

  * * *

  The first historical account of the 1811 uprising emerged amid the political turmoil of Reconstruction, a time when newly emancipated African Americans were agitating for more rights and more control over the terms of their labor. Horrified by this turn of events, a sixty-one-year-old ex-Confederate named Charles Gayarré published an account of the uprising in the final volume of his series on the history of Louisiana. Gayarré believed strongly in the propriety of terror, and the rights of white planters over ex-slaves. “This incident, among many others, shows how little that population is to be dreaded, when confronted by the superior race to whose care Providence has intrusted their protection and gradual civilization,” Gayarré wrote in 1866. “The misguided negroes . . . had been deluded into this foolish attempt at gaining a position in society, which, for the welfare of their own race, will ever be denied to it in the Southern States of North America, as long as their white population is not annihilated or subjugated.” Gayarré, like Claiborne, endorsed the force that the planters used to suppress the uprising. Like Claiborne, he saw planter violence as both necessary and just.

  To bolster his argument, Gayarré added an apocryphal story about François Trépagnier. According to Gayarré, Trépagnier heard about the uprising from his slaves but decided to remain on his plantation to protect his property. From here, Gayarré embellished, Trépagnier took a stand on the “high circular gallery which belted his house, and from which he could see at a distance” and “waited calmly the coming of his foes.” Trépagnier heard the “Bacchanalian shouts” of the slaves, and he readied himself for battle. “But at the sight of the double-barreled gun which was leveled at them, and which they knew to be in the hands of a most expert shot, they wavered, lacked self-sacrificing devotion to accomplish their end, and finally passed on, after having vented their disappointed wrath in fearful shrieks and demoniacal gesticulations,” wrote Gayarré. “Shaking at the planter their fists, and whatever weapons they had, they swore soon to come back for the purpose of cutting his throat. They were about five hundred, and one single man, well armed, kept them at bay.” The origins of this story are unclear. Perhaps Gayarré was drawing on oral history, or perhaps he invented this story himself. Perhaps Gayarré had never been out to the Red Church on the German Coast, where Trépagnier is buried beneath a gravestone that reads in French, “François Trépagnier, Killed by Insurgent Slaves on 10 January 1811.”

  Gayarré was just the first historian to accept uncritically Claiborne and the planters’ reading of the revolt. In 1918, prominent Yale historian Ulrich B. Phillips devoted a sentence in his book American Negro Slavery to the uprising. Phillips included this sentence in a chapter on “slave crime,” pursuing the same narrative of criminality that Claiborne and Andry had so cleverly adopted. Interestingly, Phillips included the Haitian revolution in this chapter as well. The slaves, he wrote, “were largely deprived of that incentive to conformity which under normal conditions the hope of individual advancement so strongly gives.” Slaves committed crimes out of backwardness and a lack of civilization, and their “lawbreaking had few distinctive characteristics.” Phillips saw revolt as fundamentally apolitical, producing disquiet but little else. Phillips, like Claiborne, saw Southern society as synonymous with white society. Phillips argued that the South was defined by a commitment to racial superiority and to a specific form of social order. “It is a land with unity despite its diversity, with a people having common joys and common sorrows, and, above all, as to the white folk a people with a common resolve indomitably maintained—that it shall be and remain a white man’s country,” he wrote.

  While Phillips only mentioned the uprising in passing, historians in New Orleans wrote more extensive narratives. In 1939, New Orleans journalist-turned-professor John Kendall wrote an article about slavery in Louisiana that depicted black people as casting a “shadow over the city.” Kendall argued that the fear inspired by the 1811 revolt was one of the central elements of the New Orleans mentality. In his essay, Kendall wrote a three-page account of the event—an account that remained for many years the most significant and definitive account of the uprising. Kendall depicted the slaves as animals, using words like “growling” and “howling” to describe the “savages” involved with the rebellion. Like Gayarré, Kendall saw this story as a moral tableau. “One must hold the reins tight over the blacks,” Kendall wrote. “They must know who were their masters.” Rich with overtones about class and race, Kendall’s story was meant consciously to generate a certain arrangement of power.

  Claiborne wrote the first draft of the history of the uprising; historians like Phillips, Kendall, and Gayarré helped enshrine that draft as the conventional story. Like Claiborne, these men lived in a society where the rule of law and the rule of white men were synonymous. But that vision of society was under pressure. A new movement for racial and political equality was gaining steam through the work of Communist activists. This movement resonated in academia. The same year that John Kendall published “Shadow over the City,” a young academic named Herbert Aptheker joined the Communist Party of the United States. Aptheker had been studying at Columbia University, where he became involved with Marxist efforts to organize Southern tenant farmers into unions. White and Jewish, Aptheker saw two purposes to his alignment with the Communists. According to the New York Times, he “saw [Communism] as an anti-fascist force and a progressive voice for race relations.” These two motives were fundamentally interconnected. With Hitler gaining power in Germany, many Jews in the United States became worried about the clear overlaps between white supremacy in the South and Nazism. They feared that racist laws could provide a slippery slope into anti-Semitic laws, and that Jewish activism on behalf of African Americans was the best bulwark against the spread of such dangerous ideologies. Aptheker was challenging the Nazis and Jim Crow.

  But Aptheker was more than an organizer; he was also an avid writer who, in 1943, published a book that would turn the scholarship of Gayarré, Phillips, and Kendall upside down. His book, American Negro Slave Revolts, with a title that consciously imitated Phillips’s, forever shattered the myth of the contented slave and forced a reevaluation of the nature of slave revolts. In his introduction, Aptheker attacked Phillips, laying down the gauntlet between Communists and white supremacists. “Ulrich B. Phillips, who is generally considered the outstanding authority on the institution of American Negro slavery, expressed it as his opinion that ‘slave revolts and plots very seldom occurred in the United States,’ ” wrote Aptheker. “This conclusion coincided with, indeed, was necessary for the maintenance of, Professor Phillips’s racialistic notions that led him to describe the Negro as suffering from ‘inherited ineptitude,’ and as being stupid, negligent, docile, inconstant, dilatory, and ‘by racial quality submissive.’ ” It was a bold move for a twenty-eight-year-old newly minted PhD to attack so openly the established leader in his field, a much-lauded Yale professor, but Aptheker did not refrain from labeling Phillips a racist. However, he devoted little time or attention to the German Coast. Aptheker devoted a short paragraph to the 1811 uprising, describing its size and location, but offered no more details than Phillips. Aptheker’s grand political and historical agenda overshadowed the details and the individuals involved.

  Tossed from white supremacists to Marxist activists, the actual history of the 1811 uprising fell by the wayside among ideological battles over race and
politics. More than fifty years since Aptheker’s book was published, the number of historians who have seriously examined the uprising can be counted on one hand. With the notable exception of Hamilton professor Robert Paquette and a few others, most have shied away from attempting to decipher or interpret this complex event—preferring instead to rely on the earlier biased accounts from writers with clear white supremacist or Marxist ideologies. With little attention from scholars, North America’s largest antebellum slave revolt has languished in the footnotes of history for 200 years. While historians jostled to write about Nat Turner, who had mobilized fewer than 100 slaves, this diverse band of Louisiana slaves has been remembered only by a few.

  But despite its absence from textbooks, the story of the 1811 uprising is central to the history of this country. This is a story about American expansion and the foundations of American authority. Most important, however, this is the story of a revolution organized by enslaved men. These men saw violence as the means to ends they never realized. But their failure to achieve those goals does not mean they did not have goals, or that the sum total of this story was that of the quick and violent suppression of a horde of brigands. Rather, 200 years later, historians must reckon with the politics of the enslaved, with the world the slaves made, and with the humanity of those who fought against slave power. Only through understanding their stories can we begin to comprehend the true history of Louisiana, and with it, the nation.

  Epilogue

  In the summer of 1957, things were heating up in the small town of Monroe, North Carolina. The problem was simple: the only pool in the area was barred to blacks, and several black children had drowned swimming in unsafe swimming holes. The president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a man named Robert F. Williams, decided that the best solution would be for the pool to desegregate in accordance with the recent Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision.