The African Americans

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  With the Gabriel conspiracy in mind, Jefferson refused to recognize the new Haitian government, fearing the anger of fellow slave owners and the possibility of American slaves emulating their Haitian brothers and sisters, just as Gabriel had done. Although at first he saw benefit in the rebel Louverture checking French aggrandizement in the Caribbean, in fact, lurking behind Jefferson’s understandable anti-European diplomacy was racial fear, pure and simple. Since the 1780s, despite whatever nascent antislavery sentiments he harbored, Jefferson anticipated that emancipation, even gradual, would spark a war that could not end “but in the extermination of the one or the other race.”49

  While the American race war that Jefferson anticipated never took place, Haitian independence did—and reverberated through American history straight to the Civil War. In 1862, about a year after the events at Fort Sumter, the great Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips spoke in the lecture hall of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. His stunning lecture “Toussaint L’Ouverture” must have struck that Southern city with all the force of a hurricane. In the midst of our own Civil War, sparked by the terrors of slavery and racial hate, Phillips drew public attention to the earlier war in the Caribbean that was a “war of races and a war of nations,” words that must have been painfully familiar to his audience.

  He took the opportunity to disabuse Americans of the idea that black men were incompetent and cowardly. “Some doubt the courage of the negro,” he declared, undoubtedly thinking about the federal government’s refusal at that time to recruit black soldiers to fight the slaveholders’ rebellion. “Go to Hayti, and stand on those fifty thousand graves of the best soldiers France ever had, and ask them what they think of the negro’s sword.” But when he praised Louverture as a hero, greater than Cromwell, Napoleon, and George Washington, the audience must have heard in those words the metaphorical report of a howitzer.50 Phillips’s remarks testify to the inspiration fired throughout the hemisphere by the Haitian Revolution, and in the hands of African Americans even after Gabriel’s ill-fated plan, the results could prove explosive.

  In January 1811, about 40 miles north of New Orleans, Charles Deslondes, a mulatto slave driver—and likely a former Haitian slave—on the Andry sugar plantation, took volatile inspiration from the Haitian Revolution. Gabriel’s fate probably would have mirrored that of Deslondes if the weather had been different 11 years earlier in Virginia. Deslondes, like Gabriel, had built a network of slaves, including recent arrivals from Africa and Saint-Domingue, and with these forces, he led the German Coast uprising, possibly the largest slave revolt in American history. Although little known, the insurrection involved a small army of at least 100 men and women who sang Creole protest songs while pillaging plantations and murdering whites. The Haitian Revolution, in fact, hung over the entire episode, encouraging blacks and terrorizing whites.

  In many ways, Louisiana was ripe territory for violence. The region experienced enormous growth in slave importations in the period leading up to the revolt, as was the case in South Carolina in the time leading up to the Stono Rebellion in 1739. By 1808, when the legal slave trade ended, somewhere between 20,000 and 29,000 slaves had landed in Louisiana, most after 1803 when the United States took possession of the Louisiana territory from France. In 1809, the number of free black people in New Orleans increased by 3,110, and the number of black slaves there increased by 3,226, because Saint-Domingue exiles who had fled the wrath of the former slaves and found sanctuary in Cuba (where slavery remained legal until 1886) were suddenly forced to vacate the island as a consequence of the Napoleonic wars, when Napoleon imposed his brother as the monarch of Spain. Nothing reveals more marvelously the inextricably intertwined connections within the early-19th-century Black Atlantic world—here specifically defined as the relations among Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Santiago de Cuba, Cuba; and New Orleans, Louisiana—than this migration, which transpired between May 1809 and January 1810. In fact, by the time of Deslondes’s revolt, “Saint-Domingue slaves represented almost a third of the 1810 slave population of New Orleans and its precincts (10,824) and 10 percent of the slaves of Orleans Territory (34,660).”51

  This was not the first time Louisiana blacks planned to resist their enslavement. In 1795, when Spain ruled the territory, authorities uncovered a conspiracy near New Orleans. Spanish officials even found a copy of France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man in one slave’s cabin. What became known as the Pointe Coupée conspiracy ended horrifically for 23 slaves. With no affection for revolutionary ideology from either the United States or France, Spanish authorities quickly hanged the conspirators, severed their heads, and then placed them on poles for all to see.52

  More than a decade later, Deslondes, sickened by the arrogance of whites and his own role in having to enforce their will, plotted an end to the oppression that he and other people of African descent endured in the insufferable cane fields of Louisiana. After communicating his intentions to slaves on the Andry plantation and in nearby areas, on the rainy evening of January 8, 1811—just seven years after Haiti became independent—Deslondes and about 25 slaves rose up and attacked the plantation’s owner and family. They hacked to death one of the owner’s sons, but carelessly allowed the master to escape. Deslondes and his men wisely chose the Andry plantation to begin their revolution, because it served as a warehouse for the local militia. The 25 men broke open the stores and seized uniforms, guns, and ammunition. As they moved toward New Orleans, intending to capture the city, their numbers swelled. Some estimated the force as large as 300, but Deslondes’s army probably did not exceed 124.

  Alarm coursed through the region as Manuel Andry, Deslondes’s owner, managed to arouse whites with his tale of black butchery and warnings about the Haitian-style revolution to come. The territorial governor assigned Wade Hampton, the South Carolina congressman, slave master, and Indian fighter, the task of suppressing the insurrection. Hampton had accepted a military commission in 1808 and the following year took over military command of New Orleans. Hampton quickly threw together a force of militia and about 30 regular U.S. Army soldiers to confront the slaves.

  About 20 miles from New Orleans on January 10, 1811, the combined militia and Army force stopped the rebels. They fought a pitched battle that halted only when the slaves ran out of ammunition. The soldiers then charged, led by mounted militia, which sent the slaves into a panic. The rebel line broke and a slaughter commenced. When the slaves surrendered, about 20 lay dead, another 50 became prisoners, and the remainder fled into the swamps. The whites suffered no casualties, which revealed the lack of military skill on the part of the slaves. By the end of the month, whites rounded up 50 more of the insurgents. About 100 survivors were summarily executed, their heads severed and placed along the road that led to New Orleans. As one planter noted, they looked “like crows sitting on long poles.”53

  FOR GENERATIONS, STANDARD AMERICAN HISTORIES DOWNPLAYED THE IMPORTANCE OF THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION AND ITS RELATIONSHIP BOTH TO AFRICAN AMERICANS, slave and free, and to the institution of slavery in the United States. Although once a footnote to the era of revolutions, we now understand its enormous significance much differently. Contemporaries, however, possessed no ambivalence on the subject. For most Americans, it was a cataclysmic event, a foreshadowing of what whites could expect if the slave regime was weakened either from within, by a lapse of rigorous enforcement and supervision, or from without, by the abolitionist “fanatics” of the North. As one commentator remarked, “The scenes of horror which were witnessed in St. Domingo [Saint-Domingue] under the leadership of the ghoul Toussaint long since became by-words for everything that is cruel and infamous.” White Louisianans did not doubt the meaning of the Haitian Revolution, and even contended that Deslondes was in Haiti at the time of the revolt and brought his beastly plans back home with him to the north.54 While the 1811 insurrection was quickly suppressed—and largely ignored even by the popular press at the time—its historical importance can hardly be overlooked today.<
br />
  The Haitian Revolution rippled through American history, from Gabriel Prosser’s Richmond right to Wendell Phillips’s stirring evocation of Toussaint Louverture’s heroism in the very first year of the Civil War. Even during the Missouri Compromise crisis, which began just eight years after the Deslondes revolt, the fires of the revolution still burned brightly in American slaveholders’ imagination. Thomas Cobb of Virginia warned that attempts to stifle the spread of slavery would only encourage America’s own “ghoulish” Toussaints and ignite a conflagration that “all the waters of the ocean cannot put out, which seas of blood can only extinguish.” When the debates over slavery’s extension in Missouri wrenched the country and sparked impassioned speeches in the halls of Congress against slavery as “contrary to the law of nature, which is the law of God,” defenders of the “peculiar institution” recoiled in horror. The speaker of Virginia’s House of Delegates warned that such rhetoric “would sound the tocsin of freedom to every Negro of the South and we may have to see the tragical events of St. Domingo repeated in our own land.”55

  Thus, for whites and blacks, Haiti became a source of powerful symbolism for revolution. Most whites, however, saw only the savagery of murderous, bloodthirsty, avenging slaves, while African Americans and their white abolitionist allies saw courage and models of resistance that would fire antislavery imaginations for the next six decades. Black sailors transported news about the Haitian Revolution and the fortunes of the new republic from Haiti to ports north, ranging from New Orleans, St. Augustine, Savannah, and Charleston, all the way to New York and Boston. From these cities, word spread to slave communities throughout the South, through books, pamphlets, and newspapers, which were sometimes even sewn into the sailors’ clothing (as was the 1829 revolutionary pamphlet of the Boston clothier, Freemason, and black abolitionist David Walker). Slaves and free women and men who detested slavery drew strength from this unprecedented example of freedom born in the Black Atlantic world as they continued to build their lives, their social institutions, their families, and, ultimately, their own cosmopolitan culture and sense of their place in the world.

  It would take three-quarters of a century for America to absorb the lessons learned in Saint-Domingue about the fate of the institution of slavery. This culminating moment in the story of slavery in the French part of the Black Atlantic represented a challenge—and an opportunity—that the divided American nation and its conflicted economic interests could not meet. While the American Revolutionary era would, both directly and indirectly, propel some black people to freedom, technological advances in the cultivation and harvesting of cotton—especially the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, ironically the same year in which slavery would first be abolished in Saint-Domingue—would usher in at least 75 years of captivity for the vast majority of African Americans that would turn out to be worse than anything that had come before.

  _____________________________

  1 The estimates are from the Slave Trade Database: http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces; by far and away the best work on blacks in colonial Florida is Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

  2 Peter Charles Hoffer, Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River Slave Rebellion of 1739 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 26.

  3 “The Negroes have a wonderfull Art of communicating Intelligence among themselves. It will run severall hundreds of Miles in a Week or Fortnight.” Adams’s diary remarks are at http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/aea/cfm/doc.cfm?id=D24.

  4 Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 23–25.

  5 Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 25–26; William L. Ramsey, “‘Something Cloudy in Their Looks’: The Origins of the Yamasee War,” Journal of American History 90 (June 2003): 44–75; http://www.nchistoricsites.org/bath/tuscarora.htm.

  6 Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 25–26; Philip D. Morgan and Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, “Arming Slaves in the American Revolution,” in Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age, eds. Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 181; Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 125–30.

  7 Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 26–28.

  8 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 22–23.

  9 The best account remains Wood, Black Majority, 285–326; also see Hoffer, Cry Liberty.

  10 John K. Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684–1706 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 210–13; Hoffer, Cry Liberty, 18–21, 72–74.

  11 Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 35, 38.

  12 Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1969), 18–20; Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 75–76.

  13 See Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 47–63, 180, 187, 188, 190.

  14 Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris, eds., Slavery in New York (New York: The New Press and the New-York Historical Society, 2005), 3–10, 31–56.

  15 Berlin and Harris, Slavery in New York, 63, 78–80; Gates, Life Upon These Shores, 18–19.

  16 Berlin and Harris, Slavery in New York, 70; Gates, Life Upon These Shores, 20–21.

  17 Berlin and Harris, Slavery in New York, 62–89; Eliga H. Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” American Historical Review 112 (June 2007): 764–86; Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 174–210.

  18 Berlin and Harris, Slavery in New York, 83–89.

  19 Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny: An Answer to the Resolution and Address of the American Congress (London: Printed for T. Cadell, 1775), http://www.samueljohnson.com/tnt.html#top.

  20 Edward Ayers, “Anti-Slavery Sentiment Emerges in Pre-Revolutionary America,” http://www.historyisfun.org/antislavery-sentiment.htm; Thomas Paine, “Justice and Humanity” and “To Americans,” Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advertiser (March 8, 1775), http://www.constitution.org/tp/afri.htm.

  21 Ayers, “Anti-Slavery Sentiment Emerges,” http://www.historyisfun.org/antislavery-sentiment.htm; Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States from Colonial Times Through the Civil War (New York: Citadel Press, 1962), 7.

  22 Gary Nash, “Introduction,” to The Negro in the American Revolution, by Benjamin Quarles (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), xiii–xxvi; George Quintal, Jr., comp., Patriots of Color: A Peculiar Beauty and Merit (Boston: Boston National Historical Park, 2004), 21.

  23 William C. Nell, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Boston: Robert F. Wallcut, 1855); Nash, “Introduction,” xviii–xx.

  24 Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), quoted 118.

  25 Jane G. Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 25, 26–27; Sylvia R. Frey, “Between Slavery and Freedom: Virginia Blacks in the American Revolution,” Journal of Southern History 49 (August 1983): 376.

  26 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2h42t.html; Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution, 16–18, 19–32; Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 224–38; Alan Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fightin
g for Emancipation in the War for Independence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 66–84.

  27 Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), 70–71.

  28 Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 22–23, 44–45, 48–49, 53, 60, 71; Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists, 205–06; Schama, Rough Crossings, 8–9.

  29 http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/documents/will/slavelist.html.

  30 Wiencek, An Imperfect God, 131–33; e-mail to authors from William M. Ferraro, associate editor, the Papers of George Washington, December 6, 2012.

  31 Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 3–6; Washington owned many slaves named Harry, and Pybus confused a slave that Washington put to work on the Dismal Swamp project with a house slave bearing the same name.

  32 Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 71; Wiencek, An Imperfect God, 251.

  33 http://gwpapers.virginia.edu/documents/revolution/martha.html; Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom, 12, 16, 19–20, 218; Wiencek, An Imperfect God, 251, 259; A. B. C. Sibthorpe, The History of Sierra Leone (New York: Humanities Press, 1971), 47.

  34 Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 104–05; Arthur Zilversmit, “Quok Walker, Mumbet, and the Abolition of Slavery in Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 25 (October 1968): 617–24.

  35 Massachusetts Constitution, http://www.nhinet.org/ccs/docs/ma-1780.htm.

  36 Egerton, Death or Liberty, 94; also see Zilversmit, “Quok Walker,” 614–24; and Emily Blanck, “Seventeen Eighty-Three: The Turning Point in the Law of Slavery and Freedom in Massachusetts,” New England Quarterly 75 (March 2002): 24–51. Quok Walker’s name was spelled a variety of ways.