Louisiana, 1811 America’s Forgotten Slave Insurrection

Workers Vanguard No. 1113	2 June 2017

Louisiana, 1811

America’s Forgotten Slave Insurrection

The monuments and statues we would build are those that honor fighters for liberation, not least the men and women who fought to destroy the slavocracy: the abolitionists; the Civil War soldiers, including 200,000 black troops, who crushed the Confederacy; those who rose up against the slave order. Among the latter are the hundreds who fought for their freedom in the January 1811 uprising in Louisiana—the largest, though largely unknown, slave insurrection in U.S. history.

From 8 to 10 January, 1811, an army of 500 slaves spread terror against the slaveowners on the German Coast of Louisiana. They killed two slave masters, burned plantations and marched toward New Orleans armed with axes, sugarcane knives and a few guns. Chanting “Freedom or Death,” they aimed to establish a black republic. The suppression of this insurrection was instrumental in consolidating Louisiana’s French planters into the U.S., including recent émigrés from France’s former colony of Saint-Domingue. It extended the reach and power of the slavocracy, which would finally be shattered by the Civil War.

The foundation for the 1811 uprising was the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue (Haiti), which began in 1791 and ended with the withdrawal of French troops in 1803 and the establishment of a black republic on 1 January 1804. The Haitian Revolution both inspired the insurrectionists, among them transplants from Saint-Domingue, and haunted the slave masters who feared its replication on North American soil.

In turn, the Haitian Revolution was inspired by the French Revolution. Under the banner “liberty, equality, fraternity” the masses rose up beginning in 1789, destroying the entrenched aristocratic and feudal order. In 1792, the French Republic was proclaimed, followed shortly by the execution of King Louis XVI in January 1793. However, France’s new bourgeois rulers brutally fought to maintain slavery in Haiti, which at the time of the 1791 uprising accounted for 60 percent of France’s export trade. In the face of continuing black revolt, and with England threatening to attack France’s most lucrative colony, the radical Jacobin regime in Paris, which came to power in 1793, abolished slavery in Saint-Domingue in 1794. Five years later, Napoleon Bonaparte took power in a coup, reinstated slavery and in January 1802 dispatched an armada and 20,000 French troops to reconquer the colony—only to be driven out the following year.

With the loss of his Saint-Domingue cash cow, Napoleon saw little use for his other major New World colony, the Louisiana Territory. In 1803, he sold it for a song to the U.S., an acquisition that nearly doubled U.S. territory. By 1810, slaves made up more than 75 percent of the total population of the region—a greater proportion than any other slave society in North America. The brutal conditions they faced working Louisiana’s sugarcane fields were matched by the huge profits their labor generated.

The architect of the 1811 rebellion was Charles Deslondes, whose position as a trusted slave driver on the plantation of Manuel Andry enabled him to move through the sugar fields without suspicion. Deslondes spread word through small cells scattered up and down the coast. On the night of January 8, the uprising began with an incursion on the mansion of Deslondes’ master. After wounding Andry and killing his son Gilbert, the group armed themselves with muskets and ammunition from the basement. They then started a two-day march down River Road toward New Orleans, which was 40 miles away. Groups of slaves joined them as they passed other plantations. Later, maroons (escaped slaves) left the security of their wooded retreats to fight alongside the rebel army. Terrified white residents either fled to New Orleans or hid out in the backwoods near their plantations.

Fearing that the city’s majority black population (including many free blacks) would join the rebellion, Louisiana governor William Claiborne ordered New Orleans sealed and a 6 p.m. curfew for black people. General Wade Hampton, a South Carolina slaveowner, mobilized two companies of volunteer militia, 30 regular troops and a detachment of 40 seamen who halted the slaves’ advance 15 miles from the city. A second militia of 80 planters formed by Andry unwittingly flanked the slave army on the morning of January 10. Though outnumbering their pursuers, the slaves were outgunned. After quickly running out of ammunition, they were brutally routed. Sixty-six fighters were killed and many others captured. Shortly after, the planter militias, supported by the U.S. military, captured Deslondes, chopped off his hands, broke his thighs, shot him dead and then roasted his body on a pile of straw.

Over the next few weeks, more than 100 slaves were executed. Their heads were put on poles and their dismembered corpses were publicly displayed as a warning to others. The federal troops called in to suppress the uprising and secure New Orleans were drawn from those defending the bogus Republic of West Florida that U.S. settlers seized from Spain in 1810, foreshadowing the grab of Texas from Mexico two decades later. Extending from Baton Rouge on the southwest to Natchez on the northwest and Mobile on the east, this “republic” gave the U.S. control over the Mississippi River and eliminated a haven for escaped slaves and native tribes, while securing commerce on the river.

Louisiana’s French planters, who had been contemptuous of the Anglo government in D.C. and indifferent to West Florida’s annexation, now became advocates of a strong U.S. military presence. One year after the uprising, Louisiana was admitted as a slave state, as other regions of the Louisiana Territory were later—Missouri (1821) and Arkansas (1836). The Mississippi Territory, which had been ceded by Spain in 1797, was divided into Mississippi and Alabama; they were admitted as slave states in 1817 and 1819. Between 1820 and 1860, the population of the Deep South slave states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama grew over 600 percent to almost 2.5 million. New Orleans became America’s second-largest port—and largest slave market. This confluence of events, of which the suppression of the Louisiana rebellion played no small part, consolidated the bulk of what would become the Confederacy.

We hail Charles Deslondes and his comrades. We seek to honor their memory by finishing the Civil War through a working-class socialist revolution.