Authors: Daniel Rasmussen
Other slaves refused to testify or submit to the juridical power of the planters. Robaine, of James Brown’s plantation, refused to accuse anyone. Joseph, of the Trépagnier estate, “confessed his guilt and did not deny the charges made against him. He did not accuse anyone.” Étienne and Nede of the Trask estate did the same. Amar, of the Charbonnet estate, “did not respond to any of the questions that were addressed to him because he had been wounded in the throat such that he had lost the ability to speak.” He had no choice but to remain silent.
The planters made no effort to distinguish between these slaves or to define their crimes on an individual basis. They simply categorized eighteen of the twenty-one slaves as guilty and dismissed entirely the diversity of the slaves’ testimony. “These rebels testified against one another, charging one another with capital crimes such as rebellion, assassination, arson, pillaging, etc., etc., etc.,” they concluded dismissively.
But beneath this façade of simplicity lay a much richer story: the story of the uprising from the slaves’ perspective. During the interrogations, the slaves identified eleven separate leaders. These leaders came from Louisiana, from the Kongo, from the Asante kingdom, and even from white fathers. Their names were French, German, Spanish, West African, and Anglo-American. The politics of the slave quarters were complex and Atlantic. There was no single ideology, nor one single leader, that defined the insurgents or their agenda—rather, the slaves counted in their ranks men from such revolutionary hotbeds as the Kongo, Haiti, and the Louisiana maroon colonies. But amid this chaos, the planters cared only to assign the descriptor “guilty.”
Justified by legal proceedings, the planters turned again to violence. Prepared to make the “GREAT EXAMPLE” favored by Andry, the tribunal announced that “in accordance with the authority conferred upon it by the law,” it “CONDEMN[ED] TO DEATH, without qualification,” eighteen enslaved rebels. Most horrifying was the next line. “The heads of the executed shall be cut off and placed atop a pole on the spot where all can see the punishment meted out for such crimes, also as a terrible example to all who would disturb the public tranquility in the future,” read the conclusion of the court.
Their judicial proceedings complete, the planters shot each of the eighteen slaves sentenced to death, and chopped off their heads and put them on pikes. These pikes they drove into the ground of the levee, “where every guilty one will undergo the just chastisement for their crimes, with the end of providing a terrible example to all the malefactors who in the future would seek to disrupt the public tranquility.” Kook’s and Quamana’s heads would be eaten by the crows as the planters returned to their labor.
* * *
In New Orleans, the planters convened a second set of trials, with the same purpose of establishing order through death. The first floor of the City Hall housed not only the guardhouse of the city guard but a prison for runaways (known as the Calaboose, from
calabozo
, the Spanish term for a vaulted dungeon). Here the captured rebel slaves were kept in irons. Some of them probably had been here before. Masters who did not want to punish their slaves could send them to City Hall, where a government official would press the slave flat on his face, binding his hands and feet to four posts before flogging the wretched man the set number of lashes. On the upper floors of the building the magistrates had their offices and courtrooms. Before their chambers, a gallery ran along the whole length of the building, with large windows airing the courtrooms where the slaves were brought for trial. Many citizens packed the courthouse to watch the trials.
Commodore Shaw was among them. “It is presumed that but few of those who have been taken will be acquitted,” he wrote as the trials unfolded in the city. Shaw was right. Only a few of those brought before the St. Louis court enjoyed their judges’ mercy. Among the favored was thirteen-year-old Jean, the slave of Madame Christien. Though Jean was found guilty of insurrection, his sentence was not death but rather to witness first the death of another slave and then to suffer thirty lashes at the hands of a public official. The court treated Gilbert with leniency, too, but his case turned on his uncle’s decision to deliver him to justice and beg for mercy from the court. The court commuted the sentence of Theodore of the Trouard estate because he gave the court valuable information on the recent insurrection.
Gilbert, Jean, and Theodore were exceptions. The New Orleans court sentenced most of the captives to death, ordering their bodies prominently displayed in public places. Within three days of their executions, the remains of John, Hector, Jerry, and Jessamine swayed on the levees in front of their masters’ plantations. Étienne and Cesar were “hung at the usual place in the City of New Orleans.” Daniel too, at least until his severed head was relocated to the lower gates of the city. Regardless of where their bodies came to rest, the sight and stench of the men’s dead flesh bore witness to American—and slaveholder—might.
* * *
It would require more than a hundred rotting bodies, however, to transform Louisiana into a cohesive part of the American union, and Governor Claiborne knew it. Seeing in the event and its grisly aftermath an opportunity to solidify his as well as the nation’s control over a new territory, he quickly dismissed both Wade Hampton’s belief that the Spanish were to blame for the uprising and the French residents’ fear that the rebellion had been a “miniature representation” of Haiti. Instead, and repeatedly—in newspaper columns, private correspondence, and official reports to Washington officials—Claiborne stripped the rebellion of revolutionary or geopolitical meaning by dismissing it as an act of base criminality. Refusing to cede to the slaves what from other perspectives and through other eyes might appear as a deeply political act, Claiborne used the events of January 8 to 11 to dramatize American civil and institutional power, portraying himself as an effective governor and representative of federal authority.
Claiborne worked hard to push a narrative of criminality. In a letter to Jean Noël Destrehan, for example, he repeatedly invoked legal language as he endorsed the planters’ spectacular violence. “It is just and I believe absolutely essential to our safety that a proper and great example should be made of the guilty.” Claiborne conflated justice and safety. His language functioned to turn rebel slaves into “the guilty,” even as Destrehan’s violence turned those “guilty” into “examples.” The construction of criminality in opposition to law functioned to assert the ubiquity and strength of American government just as it legitimized extreme violence. Claiborne sought first to criminalize, then to marginalize, the potentially revolutionary actions of the slaves. He sought to downplay the power of the insurrection, diminishing it to “mischief.” He wrote that “only” two citizens were killed, and that the major harm to the planters came from the depletion of the workforce caused by the large number of slaves killed or executed.
The court trials and Claiborne’s representations of spectacular violence as having been meted out only to the guilty served to reinforce a narrative of American control over the Orleans Territory—a narrative supported by the recent conquest of West Florida. In the nineteenth century, courts and legal jurisdiction represented the prime manifestation of American power and national identity. “There can be no stronger evidence of the possession of a country than the free and uncontrolled exercise of jurisdiction within it,” wrote a British judge describing the American system of imperial expansion. The court system of the Orleans Territory was a system of political power that served to define and make legible the actions of people, projecting a structure of laws onto the functioning of the body politic. By writing about criminality and brigandage, Claiborne was able to spin the military victory of the planters into a political victory—even though he had played little to no role in the suppression of the uprising.
Not everyone agreed with Claiborne’s narrative, however. Anglo-American citizens in New Orleans and elsewhere drew a firm line between the planters’ violence and the functioning of the American legal system. A total of twenty-one newspapers, many of them in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York, reprinted a January 14 comment from the Louisiana
Courier
that condemned the spectacular violence of the planters. “We are sorry to learn that ferocious sanguinary disposition marked the character of some of the inhabitants. Civilized man ought to remember well his standing, and never let himself sink down to the level of savage; our laws are summary enough and let them govern.” The newspaper editors who printed and reprinted this statement drew a firm line between civilization and savagery, condemning this violence as a regression from a state of civilization. But despite this opposition, Claiborne’s narrative prevailed where it counted most, among the powerful elite who governed Louisiana and the nation—and, in the centuries to follow, among historians.
Claiborne’s portrait of crime and punishment resonated with many of America’s political leaders. The news of the insurrection, derived largely from Claiborne’s reports, was greeted in Washington with no concerns about the brutality of the suppression. The
National Intelligencer
reported the story on February 19 as almost a nonevent. The paper emphasized that “no doubt exists of their total subdual,” referring to the slave insurgents, whom the paper labeled as entirely defeated. The only important element of the story was that the slaves had lost and the planters had won, with the support of the United States Army. Most significantly, Claiborne prevented the revolt from becoming a topic of formal debate in the Senate or the House of Representatives—even though the legislature devoted several weeks to the topic of Louisiana statehood at just around this time. Claiborne succeeded in preventing the uprising from becoming part of the larger political discourse—and in doing so laid the groundwork for the collective amnesia about the 1811 uprising in historical and popular memory.
The German Coast uprising had raised serious questions in the Orleans Territory about the strength of American power, the extent of the Spanish threat, the possibility of a Haitian-style revolution on American soil, and the character of America’s newly acquired citizens. The planters realized the urgency of these questions and answered them with 100 dismembered corpses and a set of show trials intended to speak to the local slave population and to all who passed along the Mississippi River. Claiborne spoke to a much larger audience, however, as he represented the main channel of communication to the lawmakers of Washington, D.C. In his reports and published letters, Claiborne took responsibility for the actions of the planters, telling a story of the suppression of the uprising that emphasized the flexing of American military muscle; he wrote the Spanish into oblivion, and excluded the slaves from any sort of political discourse. The governor of a territory whose statehood was being discussed at that very moment in Congress, Claiborne felt the necessity of trivializing the slaves’ actions and exaggerating a narrative of government control. Claiborne believed firmly that such violence would forever remain a footnote in the face of a grander narrative of the successes of American empire—that the end of promoting American authority justified most any means.
If heads on poles were symbols of American authority, they were also symbols of the costs of Americanization. If heads on poles were symbols of control, they were also symbols of the ritual violence that was the constant underlying element of Louisiana society. This was the world Claiborne and the planters made. This was the world they sought to integrate into America. This was New Orleans, and the German Coast, in 1811: a land of death; a land of spectacular violence; a land of sugar, slaves, and violent visions.
THE UNITED STATES SHALL GUARANTEE TO EVERY STATE IN THIS UNION A REPUBLICAN FORM OF GOVERNMENT, AND SHALL PROTECT EACH OF THEM AGAINST INVASION; AND ON APPLICATION OF THE LEGISLATURE, OR OF THE EXECUTIVE (WHEN THE LEGISLATURE CANNOT BE CONVENED) AGAINST DOMESTIC VIOLENCE.
United States Constitution, Article IV, Section 4
F
rom 1804 to 1811, Claiborne fought a long, hard, patient struggle to Americanize Louisiana—one that never seemed to gain much traction with the French aristocrats of New Orleans. But in the weeks following the 1811 revolt, Claiborne was able to take a new tone with the sugar masters. He informed them that he would not have time to travel out to the German Coast. He would not survey the burned buildings or see the heads on pikes. He would not stop in at the planters’ manors to reassure them. He knew that he did not have to.
Instead, the planters came to him. The once-condescending French aristocrats got in their carriages and, one by one, came into the city to the Cabildo, the seat of American power. They had come to express gratitude and beg for favors—a new position for the German Coast’s wealthy elite.
On Tuesday, three weeks after the revolt, both houses of the legislative body of the Orleans Territory filed into the Cabildo to hear Claiborne speak. Americans, Frenchmen, and Spaniards in their most formal clothes sat shoulder to shoulder in the high-ceilinged main hall. Overlooking the Place d’Armes, where slave corpses still rotted in the air, the Cabildo boasted an impressive set of attendees, from Jean Noël Destrehan, the president of the legislative council, to James Brown, the former territorial secretary. The men whispered to each other, eager to hear what Claiborne would say to reassure the residents of their safety.
Calling the assembly to order, Claiborne stood erect with a look of calm and self-possession—even certitude—on his face. By all accounts, Claiborne could be a moving speaker. “It seemed to be a spontaneous effort,” wrote a listener to another of Claiborne’s speeches. “It had passion and feeling in every sentence, but it was the passion of the heart; satisfied he was right, he was bent on the conviction of others.”
All present expected Claiborne to address what was on everyone’s mind—the German Coast revolt—but Claiborne began instead by tendering his “warmest congratulations” to those present on the addition of large stretches of West Florida to American control. He proudly sketched out the extent of the new possessions, and he encouraged the residents of New Orleans to make the new citizens feel at home and to facilitate the imposition of American authority. Though he did not mention it, Claiborne believed American expansion should extend beyond Florida into the Caribbean and Central and South America, as well as to British possessions in the Caribbean and Canada. The war in West Florida had not been popular with the French planters, but they now sat silently acceptant, for they were starting to realize the value of a strong American presence in the region.
Finally Claiborne turned to the German Coast revolt. “The late daring and unfortunate Insurrection,” Claiborne said as the planters sat up straighter in their chairs, “does not appear to have been of extensive combination; but the result only of previous concert between the slaves of a few neighboring plantations.”
Claiborne’s attempt to minimize the scope of the revolt did not fool Destrehan and the other planters who had confronted it themselves. They knew that the revolt had been highly organized, extending across plantations thirty miles apart and mobilizing between 200 and 500 slaves. They had interviewed the leaders and put their heads on poles.
Never giving any recognition to the strength and organization of the rebels, Claiborne focused solely on the heroic role white men had played in protecting and defending the city. In particular, he praised the militia and the volunteers who, he said, “made an impression, that will not for a length of time be effaced.” The white elite had reestablished their supremacy and beaten back their worst nightmares. This was not a time for questioning, but a time for rejoicing, Claiborne emphasized. As far as the planters and merchants of New Orleans were concerned, Claiborne was right.
In the wake of the revolt and even amid legislative discussions, no government official, legislator, planter, or merchant ever publicly expressed any doubts about the institution of slavery itself. Unlike Virginians after the Nat Turner uprising, the citizens of the Orleans Territory held no debates about emancipation or colonization. Slavery was simply an unquestionable fact of life, no more controversial than the use of currency. And so, as they described and reacted to the uprising, the white elite focused not on changing the base of their society—slavery—but on strengthening the mechanisms that ordered that society—martial law. And with the main military power in the area being the American government, Claiborne sought to channel a desire for improved security into calls for a more robust, and more American, state—a state secure from the Spanish and from the slaves. In the minds of Claiborne and the planters, the proper response to African American political activity was violent suppression backed by the full force of the U.S. government.
To that end, Claiborne turned his speech to the need to militarize Louisiana society. From the beginning of his administration, Claiborne had sought to promote the militia as an important civic institution. Believing, in the words of the Second Amendment, that a well-regulated militia was “necessary to the security of a free State,” Claiborne had tried unsuccessfully to rally the planters into militia service under the American government. The planters preferred their own volunteer corps—the same volunteer corps that had defeated Charles Deslondes and the rebel army.
But Claiborne believed now was the time to push the Frenchmen into finally participating responsibly in the American militia. “I could not avail myself of an occasion as favorable as the present, to renew my entreaties for a more energetic Militia System,” he intoned. In particular, Claiborne proposed a new militia law that would set times for muster, increase fines for absenteeism, and give the officers the power to imprison or fine those who disobeyed their orders. Claiborne envisioned the participation of every citizen in this new military body—the arming and militarizing of the entire population. “The faithful Citizens cannot but approve such a course,” he warned ominously. “They are aware of the many
casualties, internal and external
to which the Territory is exposed, and must be sensible of the importance of a well-regulated Militia.”
From the mayor to the president of the legislative council, the city swelled in support of the increased militarization of society and the empowering of armed forces. In nearly one voice, government officials and slaveholder spokesmen declared, “our Security depends on the order and discipline of the Militia.” Even Jean Noël Destrehan agreed, arguing that the “late unfortunate Insurrection among the slaves and the untimely end of some of our fellow Citizens, by the unhallowed hands of the desperadoes, and the loss of property to Individuals . . . proves to us the imperious necessity of a prompt organization and discipline of the Militia.” A columnist for the Louisiana
Gazette
wrote that New Orleans had learned an “awful lesson” from the revolt and “the time may not be distant when we shall be called . . . against a more formidable foe than the banditti lately quelled.” The militarization happened quickly. The militia—once a largely decorative organization—began to meet weekly to train and organize.
The expansion of the militia was only one component of the military reaction to the 1811 revolt. At Claiborne’s request, the territorial legislature submitted a petition to President James Madison on February 11, 1811, asking that a regiment of regular troops be stationed permanently in New Orleans. Given “the state of the population,” which lay “scattered over a large extent of country along the river—the situation of this defenseless town—the dangers which we have to dread from external hostilities, and from internal insurrections—the difficulties by which the establishment of a convenient system of militia is attended, and several other weighty considerations,” they firmly believed that their future existence depended on federal intervention.
The federal government was receptive. The Union, as it was designed in the Constitution, stood firmly committed to protecting planters from the dangers intrinsic in their slave-based society—in fact, such protection was a foundational element of the United States of America. In 1776, the Declaration of Independence prominently showcased black politics—and not in the section about the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Rather, Thomas Jefferson’s final and most significant grievance with the British government was the British crown’s threat to incite a slave revolt if the colonists did not fall in line. “[The King] has excited domestic insurrections amongst us,” wrote a fearful and angry Jefferson, using the same language of “domestic insurrection” that the French planters of New Orleans would employ thirty-five years later. And when representatives from the colonies arrived by carriage in Philadelphia to draft the Constitution, the fear of slave revolt again took center stage. The authors of the Constitution agreed to guarantee protection to any state facing such “domestic insurrections”—a promise central to convincing southern states to join the Union.
Slave revolts were not just some vague threat to American government: black people across the nation were constantly speaking about, planning, and in many cases executing revolts that threatened white power centers—though never on the scale of the German Coast uprising—and pushed American politicians to shape their government in very specific ways. The residents of New Orleans could have asked for no better government than the American one when it came to protections of slavery.
Recognizing the necessity of federal support for slave-based agriculture, the Speaker of the House of Representatives gave Claiborne’s initiative his full support. “Feeling that our destiny is interwoven with theirs, that a common fate awaits us, we shall cherish the Union with a sincere, cordial, and permanent attachment,” he declared. “We shall cling to it as the Ark of safety.” The federal government reacted with alacrity, dispatching three additional gunboats to New Orleans in the wake of the revolt. The American government, in the face of slave revolts and the military forces of other empires, was the only force capable of guaranteeing the planters safety—and now, more than ever, they realized and accepted that reality.
* * *
Militarization was not the only response to the revolt, however. Claiborne and the legislature worked together on a set of further reforms meant to stabilize the city and crack down on rebellious slaves. The mayor of New Orleans acted quickly to limit slave liberties and to tax the planters for the dangers posed by their slaves. In late January, the mayor sent a message to the city council asking it to prevent the sale of ammunition to black people, to prevent slaves from renting rooms in the city or occupying dwelling places there, and to prevent the slaves from congregating except at funerals and the Sunday dances. The mayor also asked the council to hold slaveholders more accountable for the behavior of their slaves by levying a tax on the planters’ most dangerous property. “I believe, Gentlemen, that in fixing the rates of taxes, you should endeavor to place them in preference upon the male negroes,” he announced to the territory’s planters. “If there is any danger for the public safety, it is the great number of these negroes [that] are responsible.” The mayor wanted to hold the planters liable, at least in part, for the behavior of their slaves. Claiborne disagreed. He knew that he finally had the planters’ support and he wanted to solidify that support, not anger the planters by taxing them. He wanted to compensate the planters for their losses and provide them with a financial incentive to support the United States government.
On April 25, the government decided to act on Claiborne’s recommendation—spending federal money to compensate planters whose slaves had died in the insurrection. They passed an “Act providing for the payment of slaves killed and executed on account of the late insurrection in this Territory.” The act provided $300 per slave killed to each planter, and it also provided one-third of the appraised value of any other property destroyed in the insurrection. The editors of the Louisiana
Gazette,
the same paper responsible for printing Claiborne’s letters and declarations, believed the act would have a further effect of promoting social cohesion. If compensation were not offered, the paper feared dire consequences. “[The average resident] will not embody for general defence, he will carefully attend to securing and preserving his own property, and finally will not deliver up his culprit slaves into the hands of justice; the evil arising from such a state of things would be incalculable, and would serve to unhinge the strongest tye that unites society.” In the months following the insurrection, planters filed claims for about a third of the slaves lost in the insurrection.
Believing that many of the key rebels were of foreign origin, Claiborne also moved to place restrictions on the importation of slaves—restrictions he had been pursuing since 1803. “It is a fact of notoriety that negroes are of Character the most desperate and conduct the most infamous. Convicts pardoned on condition of transportation, the refuse of jails, are frequently introduced into this territory,” Claiborne said in a speech to both houses of the legislative body. “The consequences which from a continuance of this traffic are likely to result may be easily anticipated.” This was the closest any white resident of New Orleans came to calling the system of slavery into question—and it went over very poorly with the planters. No action was taken, and the importation of slaves surged over the next few years, buoyed by rising sugar prices and an internal slave trade that brought thousands of slaves from all over the country and smuggled in by pirates raiding Atlantic slave trade ships headed for Cuba to the markets of New Orleans.