Jonathan P. Baird lives in Wilmot.

Outside New Orleans, there is a historical site, the Whitney Plantation, dedicated to showing the history of slavery. It is an indoor and outdoor museum. For many years, the place operated as a sugar, indigo and rice plantation. There are a series of exhibits on the property showing slave trade maritime routes, a memorial honoring the over 350 enslaved people who worked the plantation between 1752-1865 and markers describing local historical events.

One striking exhibit on the walk path outside was a garden full of sculpted heads on poles commemorating leaders of the 1811 German Coast Uprising. Although it is little known, the German Coast Uprising in an area near New Orleans was the largest slave revolt in the history of the United States. The story is well told in “American Uprising,” a book by Daniel Rasmussen.

The uprising began on Jan. 8, 1811 on the plantation of Colonel Manuel Andry, who was a commander of the local militia. Over a period of months prior to the uprising, enslaved people secretly organized cells at a number of plantations over a 40 mile range. They planned an audacious scheme to capture New Orleans, free all the people enslaved there and emancipate themselves. They knew failure meant death.

On the evening of Jan. 8, 25 insurgents broke into the Andry mansion, killed Andry’s son and they took muskets and ammunition from the armory. From that plantation it was a 41 mile march to New Orleans. On the march, the insurgents burned several plantation houses, killed two planters and picked up many recruits. The number of enslaved who joined the rebellion swelled to between 200 and 500.

A number of “maroons” (enslaved people who had escaped slavery and lived in the woods) joined the march along the way. The white planters, finding out about the revolt and being massively outnumbered, deserted their plantations and fled with their families to New Orleans.

The leader of the revolt was Charles Deslondes, a Creole mulatto, who had been a plantation overseer. That position allowed him more freedom to move and surreptitiously organize. It was a position of trust from the planters but Deslondes had his own agenda. He, along with a small group of co-conspirators, meticulously planned the uprising.

Contrary to any mythology about contented slaves and benevolent masters, the chattel slavery system in Louisiana was known for brutal conditions. A sugar plantation was run like a military camp and Deslondes had operated like a general. He inflicted punishments like whipping for any infraction of the behavioral code.

Article continues after...

Yesterday's Most Read Articles

Pittsfield school superintendent Bryan Lane resigns suddenly

Old diner travels to new home in downtown Concord as part of Arts Alley

Boys’ basketball previews: Saucier takes over as Bow head coach

Why do so many students leave New Hampshire to go to college?

Historic library and former fire station sold to locals in Boscawen

State says heat, transportation, principals not required for ‘adequate’ education

Your Daily Puzzles

Cross|Word

Flipart

Typeshift

SpellTower

Really Bad Chess

Death and inhuman torture were endemic to slavery. 40 percent of those captured in Africa died before boarding slave ships. 10 percent died in the Middle Passage or shortly after arrival. Only 30 percent of slaves captured in Africa survived past the third or fourth year of laboring as slaves. The plantation work was grueling and the hours were long. Once harvest began, slaves worked 16 hours or more a day, seven days a week.

One significant problem in the German Coast Uprising was the enslaved’s inability to obtain enough weapons and ammunition. Only one half of the slave army were armed with bullets and fusils. Many had to rely on sabers, machetes, axes, and cane knives.

On Jan. 10 and 11, the planters’ militia counter-attacked. They had a great military advantage with their weaponry. They drove the insurgents into the woods. Many enslaved people were killed in battle and others fled into the swamps.

Charles Deslondes was among the slaves driven into the woods. The slaveholders used bloodhounds to track the rebels and Deslondes was caught. The militia men chopped off Deslondes’ hands, broke his thighs and shot him. They then roasted his remains on a pile of straw.

The reprisals against the insurgents were savage and unrelenting. The militia cut off heads of the slave corpses and put them on display. By the end of January, around 100 dismembered bodies appeared on pikes in the center of New Orleans. The garden at Whitney Plantation is intended to remember this atrocity.

A special tribunal presided over by prominent planters ordered summary executions. The insurgents were referred to as “brigands.” Beheadings were the prime method for injecting fear and terror in the oppressed and for putting down slave revolts.

Rasmussen writes: “The public destruction of the rebels was, in slaveholders’ minds, a necessary precondition for the safety of the plantation regime and the prevention of a ferocious revolt along the lines of Haiti.”

There can be little doubt the Haitian revolution, the first successful slave insurrection led by Toussaint L’Ouverture and fought between 1791-1804, had a profound effect on enslaved people living in the American South. The story got around and it offered inspiration that slavery could be overcome and defeated. Haiti declared its independence in 1804 after defeating three European armies, including Napoleon’s powerful military. Haiti was the first nation to permanently ban slavery.

The slaveholders did not respond to the uprising with any reconsideration of slavery. They doubled down. The Louisiana legislature compensated the slaveholders $300 (a very significant sum in those days) for each and every slave killed in the insurrection. Money was also appropriated by the state to pay the slaveholders’ damages for the mansions burnt by the enslaved.

You have to ask: why has this story been disappeared? It was the largest slave revolt in American history. I see it as a cover-up, part of the effort to minimize slavery’s history and pretend racism was not central to America’s story. The German Coast Uprising shows both the evil of slavery and the ferocious opposition it engendered. Conditions were so intolerable that the enslaved opted for violent revolution rather than the living death of slavery.

The slaveholders saw their slaves as no better than cattle. Heads on pikes was their response.

Teaching American history honestly means ending unforgivable silences around events like the German Coast Uprising. It is not a divisive concept to tell this story. It is not about making white people feel uncomfortable. Intellectual integrity demands we know about it.