The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (16 page)

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.
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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.
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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 personne.” 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 New 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.
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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
.”

Thomas Jefferson had known a younger Andrew Jackson during the latter’s brief term as senator, and had noted that Jackson’s passion controlled him: “He could never speak on account of the rashness of his feelings. I have seen him attempt
it repeatedly, and as often choke with rage.” Some of Jackson’s ferocity came from mysterious sources within. Some came from the rage generated in 1781, when a British sweep of backcountry South Carolina guerrilla strongholds ended in the capture of fourteen-year-old Andrew and his older brother Robert. Andrew was beaten with the flat of a cavalry saber for refusing to clean a British officer’s
boots like a slave, and Robert died in prison. But Andrew had survived. And he grew. Now he wielded his anger as a disciplined weapon. Jackson’s habit of command was also reinforced by his ownership of dozens of enslaved African Americans on his labor camp outside of Nashville. Their toil had made Jackson’s fortune and raised him to the prominence that won him election as the head of Tennessee’s
militia. He now bore a regular army commission and was the US government’s only hope for protecting the Gulf Coast against invasion in the third year of a war that had gone remarkably poorly.
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