WYTS: New Orleans Saints. https://defector.com/why-your-team-sucks-2026-new-orleans-saints?commentID=97a4e527-8c86-448c-9904-723bed0316b2Original post here.
(Artwork by Lorraine Gendron.)
In the 1780s, the French colony of Saint-Domingue was the most
profitable colony in the world. Growing sugar cane and processing it into refined sugar made the colony the jewel in the crown for Ancien Régime France. In
1791, everything changed. Saint-Domingue saw the largest slave rebellion
in the history of the Americas, and the most successful. These
guerrillas defeated all comers, include an army sent by Emperor Napolean to re-enslave them. Soon
enough the colony of Saint-Domingue would become the free nation of
Haiti. It was but a single Black, free state, all alone in the world, surrounded by white settler
powers. In the years that followed, nearly every colony in the Caribbean
had a slave uprising. There were dozens Cuba alone. In 1811, it was
Louisiana’s turn, with the German Coast Uprising.
Slave
revolts are not the most popular subjects in history. Even in this
field, the two-day failed revolution on the German Coast, a little
stretch of the Mississippi River north of New Orleans, is very obscure.
This uprising is listed by historians as the largest slave rebellion in
American history, larger than Nat Turner, larger than John Brown, yet for some reason it seems to have been remarkably under-reported at the
time. Wikipedia’s citations are mostly from the 1940s or 1950s, not a
good sign if you want modern scholarship on the subject. They heavily cite a
2011 book by a Harvard undergrad, Daniel Rasmussen, which is
probably the secondary source everybody else online is working off of. The
historians do have written primary accounts, but also there's a lot of folklore
and myth, which I hope I’m not repeating.
I
have theories as to why the German Coast Uprising was so obscure.
Number one is that Louisiana was not yet a state, it had only become
part of the US in 1803. A lot of the people in this battle, white or Black, did not speak English or were illiterate. (In some parts of Louisiana, French or Creole were still the dominant languages well into the 20th
century.) The only reports we have from the slaves themselves come from trials after the fact, a history written by the victors. The slavers class were not in much hurry to spread any liberatory message. Also, slavery was just different here at this time than in say,
Virginia. The American-style racial caste system is a pure binary: white and Black. One
drop of Black blood means you’re in the out-group. In Latin American
slavery, there were levels to the racial castes. “Pure” Europeans were
at the top of course, but if you had one white parent, it made a huge
difference. Freed Mulatto groups are a very important part of the
Haitian Revolution, who are distinct from the fully African slaves. The gradations are important here too.
The
slaves in the German Coast were engaged in the sugar industry, just as
in Haiti. And if you know your Haitian history, you’ll know turning
sugarcane into sugar was a very labor-intensive, very violent practice,
that depending on a lot of torture. These places imported a lot of
slaves and expected at least half of the labor force to die out, either
to exhaustion or disease. Sugar plantations were some of the worst
places to be at any time in history. Meanwhile, the planters were living
in the heights of continental European luxury just a few feet away.
On
January 8th, 1811, rumors were already passing along the Mississippi of
a planned revolt. The leader, it seems, was Charles Deslondes, probably
about twenty years old, born a Mulatto slave on Haiti just before the
revolution. He was brought to Louisiana in roughly 1793, with many
“refugees” of the revolution. He worked on the white Deslondes family's plantation, who gave him their surname, but he was not one of them. Charles Deslondes would go on to become a Slave Driver for
Colonel Manuel Andry on a neighboring farm. That meant he was one of the
slaves who were middle management for the bosses, and by management, I
mean torturer and brutalizer. The whites at the top did not even do
their own dirty work. It did give Deslondes some freedom to organize and
plan, and that night he made his move.
One
night like any other, on a rainy January evening, Andry’s family was
attacked by their own slaves. Col. Andry took one blow from an ax but
ran out of the house. His adult son Gilbert did not escape the wrath of
their human property. He was butchered in his bed. The Colonel fled north.
Deslondes
and his band began to march, plantation by plantation, burning many of
them on their way, towards New Orleans, about thirty miles away. We do
not know their ultimate goal. There’s some talk from the captured slaves
of a grand conspiracy from around the world, which has to be fantasy. Possibly they were just telling their torturers what they wanted to hear. We think they planned to turn Louisiana into another Haiti,
ruled by free blacks. If they had any grand geopolitical strategy, maybe between Spanish, British, and American designs on the mouth of the Mississippi, they could play the great powers off against each other like the Haitians had.
Only one other slave
owner, Francois Trepagnier, was killed. (Can’t say I feel all that sorry
for him, he is reported to have treated his slaves literally like
dogs.) The small army of slaves, somewhere between 200 and 500 in total,
armed mostly with their agricultural tools and axes, but with a few muskets and horses,
advanced fifteen miles that night and morning. Only a small portion of
the slaves they met joined the revolt. Many others stayed in their homes,
several even fled to warn their masters. The slave army had some
semblance of military order, drums for the march, maybe uniforms. Opposing their
route to the city were a few dozen American soldiers. If you know your
War of 1812 history, you’d know that the American military at this time
was in a miserable, hilariously corrupt state. Deslondes’ army could
have caused a lot of chaos and built a larger movement if luck was on
their side.
Luck was not on their side.
Unfortunately
for Deslondes, his master Col. Andry was not just alive but also an
energetic leader. He quickly gathered up a white militia of his
neighbors from the north and out-flanked the few hundred slaves. By
January 9th, the slaves were surrounded, with enemies coming from north and south. A final battle took place at
the plantation of Bernard Bernoudy, where the fleeing slaves fought for a
few minutes, losing 45 men, and they were routed. The slaves fled in
all directions, but they did not get far. By January 11th, Deslondes had
been captured, dragged out by dogs. He was tortured horribly and then
killed. I’ll spare you the gruesome details.
Throughout
the rest of January, the militia and army carried out swift justice.
Trials were held, where scores of men and women were treated as bandits
and executed. Reportedly one hundred heads on pikes decorated the road
from Andry’s plantation to New Orleans. Louisiana became a state in 1812,
and the slave economy of sugar lasted until the end of the Civil War.
White power would be re-asserted several more times with severe
violence, including the New Orleans Massacre of 1866 during
Reconstruction.
Today, I’m sure, racial
harmony has finally been achieved in Louisiana and we should stop
worrying about all this ugly history. Seems like an anti-social
un-American thing to do, remembering this stuff.
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