The Half Has Never Been Told

by Edward E. Baptist

  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. Yet 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? Was 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 pers
onne.” 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

  By reputation, slaveholders were stubborn traditionalists who forgot nothing and learned nothing; in reality, they continued to learn and adapt to promote their own interests. But after the 1811 revolt, they increased their regulation and surveillance of the slave population, taking them to new heights. Local militia trained more intensely. Patrols swept slave quarters with new regularity. Claiborne, anxious as ever, now put the area on alert whenever he heard a rumor of revolt—like the one that came to his ears right before Christmas in 1811. Louisiana’s state government rewarded informers with freedom. Free people of color in the United States were always a tiny minority who sided with the white majority during crises, in contrast to Saint-Domingue, where many had joined the rebellion.53

  Supporters of Louisiana statehood in Congress used the insurrection as an argument for their cause, suggesting that a territory that was exposed to peculiar dangers but that produced great wealth for the nation should have a sovereign voice in the councils of the republic. As a few northern congressmen warned, this meant that the entire nation was now more compelled than ever to defend slavery in Louisiana. But Congress agreed to take on the responsibility, and Louisiana became a state in 1812. This step, like all the measures taken and lessons learned, would be of crucial importance in the next few years.

  Violence in Saint-Domingue had won the Mississippi Valley for the United States and for the new, dynamic form of slavery whose expansion would in turn drive the nation’s growth. Violence, marching down the road toward New Orleans, had been the climax of threats from within to the dreams of the new entrepreneurs of a transformed slavery. Violence from without was about to challenge enslavers and their allies once again.54

  THE MILITIA STOOD AMAR up in the yard at the Widow Charbonnet’s place. Herded into an audience, the men, women, and children who knew him had to watch. The white men took aim and made Amar’s body dance with a volley of lead. In his head, as he slumped and fell, were 50 billion neurons. They held the secrets of turning sugarcane sap into white crystals, they held the memories that made him smile at just such a joke, they held the cunning with which he sought out his lover’s desires, they held the names of all the people who stood circled in silence. His cheek pressed on earth that his own feet had helped to pack, his mouth slackly coursing out blood, as gunpowder smoke gathered in a cloud and blew east. A white officer’s sideways boots strode toward him. The dancing electrons in Amar’s brain caressed forty-five years of words, pictures, feelings, the village imam with his old book, his mother calling him from the door of a mud-brick house. The memory of a slave ship or maybe more than one, the rumor of Saint-Domingue—all this was there, was him—but his cells were cascading into sudden death. One last involuntary wheeze as a soldier raised an axe sharpened by recent practice and severed Amar’s head from his body.

  Six weeks later, a merchant drifting down the river on a flatboat spied strange fruit growing. “Along between Cantrell and the Red Church I saw a number of Negro Heads sticking on Poles on the Levee,” he wrote. On the pike, Amar’s face stared out over the water. The buzzards and the crows had already taken what they could. Slowly, as his jaw became unstrung, his mouth gaped. In terror of what would happen if they were caught taking him down, in fear of his unquiet spirit, his people left him up there. Perhaps some thought he had done wrong, that his choices, and those of dozens of others whose heads now stretched up and down the levee for fifty miles, had brought disaster upon themselves and their people. Perhaps others thought him a martyr, an avatar of revolution, of pride and resistance.

  Amar had done no more than answer the call that came to him, to choose when he had a choice. And half a century would pass before anyone like him would face such an opportunity to choose again. By that time, his skull had long since crumbled in the sun. Yet before they turned to dust, Amar’s empty sockets may have gazed on another school of flatboats, which came down the river in the last weeks of 1814. The vessels were packed to the gunwales not with the usual cargo of pork, tobacco, and corn, but with an army of white men from Tennessee, a force eight times as large as the one that had followed commandeurs to defeat.

  Already, on December 1, Andrew Jackson, commander of US army forces in the southwestern region, had ridden into New Orleans on the old Chef Menteur Road that went out along the Gulf Coast toward Biloxi. He had come from Mobile in ten days of forced marches, with 1,000 soldiers and a long string of victories trailing him. As he entered a city that stood again as the contested prize of impending mass violence, young boys, black and white, ran shouting the news that General Jackson was here at last.

  In the Place d’Armes, where Cesar, Daniel Garret, and Jerry had all been hanged for participating in the 1811 insurrection, white N
ew Orleans residents gathered again—this time called more by fear than by spectacle. After Claiborne (who had been reconfirmed as governor by the voters after Louisiana achieved statehood) said a few words, Jackson stepped forward, attended by the wily politician Edward Livingston—who stood ready to translate the general’s remarks into the French still preferred by most of the people in the city.55

  The blue uniform with its golden epaulets seemed to fit the tall man in ways beyond measurements and cut, but not because he was handsome. He was not. Jackson’s hatchet face—the Creek Indians called him “Sharp Knife”—was topped with a shock of once-red, now gray hair. He was tall for the time at 6'1", but extremely thin—140 pounds in the prime of his life, and less now. Jackson had spent the past eighteen months on the warpath, and along the way he had contracted a terrible case of dysentery. Days still passed when he felt too sick to eat. Street fights and duels had left pistol balls embedded in his flesh. Pieces of his bullet-shattered humerus had worked themselves out through the wiry fibers of his bicep a few months earlier.

  Physically, Jackson was a wreck. But an incredible will to dominate, which Jackson channeled into a determination to defeat everyone whom he saw as an enemy, kept him standing straight as a spear. Not a shred of doubt floated in Jackson’s eyes. In one anecdote from his time as a judge in Tennessee, a criminal had refused to come into the courtroom to face his charges, and then cowed a posse that Jackson sent out into the street after him. At last Jackson stepped down from the bench and came out himself. He stared down the man, a giant of a village bully, who then meekly entered the courtroom. Why? the defendant was later asked. Because, he replied, “when I looked him in the eyes, I saw shoot.”