Ruined! And forever! “No subject seems as interesting to their minds,” wrote one of Claiborne’s deputies, “as that of the importations of brute Negroes from Africa.” Nègres bruts, people recently stolen, or, as they also called them: têtes, heads. Claiborne reported that a reopened trade would “better reconcile” French residents “to the government of the United States than any other permission which could be extended”—though he worried that enslaved Africans would turn Louisiana into “another Santo Domingo.” In July 1804, however, Louisiana whites learned that Congress was also planning to ban the internal slave trade from other parts of the United States to Louisiana. New Orleans erupted. Public meetings rang with threats of secession. Community leaders besieged Claiborne: “The most respectable characters cou’d not, even in my presence suppress the Agitation of their tempers, when a check to that Trade was suggested.”28
Enterprising types rushed in before the October implementation of the slave-trade bans, not bringing the “thousands of African Negroes” that Claiborne had predicted, but 463 in six ships from Africa and 270 in three from Jamaica and Havana. But the next year, Congress passed a law raising Orleans to the same territorial status as Mississippi. The territory’s attorney general, James Brown, a Virginian who owned a German Coast sugar plantation, pounced on the loophole this law opened. Mississippi could import enslaved people from other states. Mississippi could even import African slaves transshipped from other ports. Therefore, he insisted, so could the enslavers of the Orleans Territory. Jefferson allowed the ruling on the ground to stand. Slave imports resumed.29
By ones, like the man in the iron collar, by twos, and by whole shiploads sent from Africa via Charleston, traders brought hundreds, or perhaps even thousands, of nègres bruts to New Orleans before the legal Atlantic slave trade closed at the end of 1807. In addition, enslavers—including a Tennessee judge named Andrew Jackson—were sending English-speaking enslaved people down the Mississippi River. The new flows of enslaved people into New Orleans began to meet the demands of new arrivals, refugee planters, and old Creole entrepreneurs alike. In a single year, 1804 to 1805, the number of people sold in New Orleans increased almost five times over, and average prices dropped as supplies rose (see Tables 2.2 and 2.3). Not all sellers—or buyers—were white. John Palfrey’s overseer reported that he’d bought a “negro winch” from “a Quadroon named John Chassier.” Chassier was, Palfrey noted, very persistent in collecting his debt.30
TABLE 2.2. SLAVES SOLD IN NEW ORLEANS, 1800–1819, BY HALF-DECADE INCREMENTS
Source: Hall Database, www.ibiblio.org/laslave/.
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
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
TABLE 2.4. SLAVES IMPORTED TO LOUISIANA, 1809–1811
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
The Half Has Never Been Told Page 10