* * *
Traveling through the night, the detachment of troops from New Orleans approached the plantation of Jacques Fortier around four in the morning. Soon thereafter, in the pitch-dark night, the planters discovered the slave army. “The Brigands had posted themselves within a strong picket fence, having also the advantage of two strong brick building belonging to Colonel Fortier’s Sugar works,” Wade Hampton reported. The slaves seemed to have picked a good spot to defend, well fortified and close to the city. Hampton and the planters met to arrange a plan of attack, delaying any abrupt move in favor of a well-organized strike. They knew what was at stake. “The order of attack was formed the moment the troops reached the ground, and the Infantry & Seamen so disposed as to enclose by a forward movement three Sides of the small enclosure which embraced the buildings, and the Horse at the first signal was to charge the other,” Hampton later wrote.
The infantry and the seamen crept into position; the horsemen steeled themselves for a bold cavalry charge. At the crucial moment, Hampton ordered them to attack. Horses galloped, guns fired, and soldiers shouted in the night. But no enemy returned fire.
As the soldiers penetrated the walls and fences and began to search the buildings, they found only a few unarmed slaves. The bulk of the slave army had retreated. In his report to headquarters, Hampton blamed “a few young men who had advanced so near as to discharge their pieces at them” for alarming the slaves before the troops could attack. He speculated that the slaves “were therefore upon the alert, and as the line advanced to encompass them, retired in great silence.” More likely, the slaves had left well before the military arrived, alerted not by antsy young white men but by slave spies. Though they found no rebels, the militia found ample evidence of the slaves’ presence. Fortier’s plantation showed evidence that the slaves had been there, “killing poultry, cooking, eating, drinking, and rioting.”
The planters did not know it, but they had fallen for a classic West African military ruse. Warfare practiced in the Kongo especially featured frequent advances and retreats intended to confuse the enemy. The Kongolese soldiers would watch their enemies carefully, waiting for the opportune moment to attack. This strategy allowed them to use their greater numbers to overwhelm better-armed forces.
The slaves’ ploy had worked marvelously. Hampton and his men and their horses were too tired to pursue the fugitives farther. And so as the slave army retreated into plantation territory, the American military force took a break at Jacques Fortier’s plantation.
Fooled by Charles Deslondes and the slave-rebels, the white army now faced a bleak prospect. As they marched farther into the German Coast, each plantation, each grove of cypresses, could shelter the slave army; and every black slave on every plantation was a potential spy or recruit. The soldiers did not know the terrain very well, and the population was clearly hostile. Any optimism Hampton might have had outside the Fortier plantation faded quickly as these thoughts ran through his head.
The slave army, meanwhile, was marching back upriver. They made good time, traveling about fifteen miles northwest from the Fortier plantation toward the plantation of Bernard Bernoudy. As they navigated the terrain, the slaves planned their strategy for defeating the army resting at the Fortier estate. Their chances of success seemed high—the American forces had fallen for an obvious trap and were now too exhausted to pursue them further. But perhaps they should have been thinking of something else. The slaves had killed Manuel Andry’s son, but they had allowed Andry himself to escape. They would come to regret that fateful decision. The ebb and flow of power was about to shift.
January 10, 1811
Chapter Eleven
The Battle
After Manuel Andry escaped from Charles Deslondes and his fellow rebels the night before, he had fled to the levee and taken a pirogue across to the southeastern bank of the river. The revolt had not spread across the half-mile-wide Mississippi, and a bleeding Andry headed straight for the plantation home of Charles Perret. Perret and his family owned several plantations stretching around the river bend across from Andry’s home. Perret and his family must have been shocked at the sudden apparition of a bleeding and half-dead Manuel Andry. The desperate and furious man had just watched his son murdered by his own slaves, and he had been helpless to do anything but run for his life.
The Perrets listened with shock and horror to Andry’s alarming reports—their worst nightmare had become reality. “My poor son has been ferociously murdered by a hord of brigands,” Andry reported, who “have committed every kind of mischeif and excesses, which can be expected from a gang of atrocious bandittis of that nature.” Andry was not sure exactly what atrocities the so-called brigands might by now have completed, but after watching them kill his son, he expected the worst. And so did the Perrets.
But Charles Perret was a clear-headed young man. He knew what to do. As his family bandaged Andry’s wounds, Perret set off on horseback to alert his neighbors. Within hours, the males of all the major families—the d’Arensbourgs, the St. Martins, the Hotards, the Zamoras, the Rixners, the Troxlers, the Dorvins, and the Delerys—assembled together in conference. They knew their livelihood, their way of life, was at risk. They did not trust the American military to do the job, and they were livid at the story of Gilbert Andry’s death. The now-bandaged wounds on Andry’s body served as a vivid reminder of the consequences of slave revolt.
Watching their own slaves carefully, the planters decided to cross the river and risk their lives to attack the rebel army and “halt the progress of the revolt.” They were outnumbered, but, like François Trépagnier before them, they were willing to take a gamble.
Under Perret and Andry’s command, eighty planters armed themselves to the teeth and assembled on the levee. With the slave army nowhere to be seen, the planters packed themselves into small pirogues and paddled as quickly as they could across the turbulent and blustery river, navigating the Mississippi’s fast currents with a deftness born of long experience. By the time they arrived at the other side of the river, it was about eight in the morning.
The small force marched downriver, hoping to soon encounter the slave army. At about nine in the morning, this second militia discovered the slaves moving by “forced march” toward the high ground on the Bernoudy estate. “We saw the enemy at a very short distance, numbering about 200 men, as many mounted as on foot,” wrote Perret.
The planters had unwittingly flanked the slave army. Expecting the only resistance to emerge from New Orleans, the slaves had not anticipated such a rearguard action. They had neither taken a defensive position nor steeled themselves for combat. The planters led by Perret and Andry had come upon them by surprise.
Though the rebels formed a force more than double the size of his detachment, Perret decided to attack. If his planter militia could not defeat the slave army, he believed all would be lost. The planters’ wives and children would die at the hands of a ferocious slave army, and everything they had worked to build would burn at the torch. It was a dire thought. Summoning his men, Perret called, “Let those who are willing follow me, and let’s move out!” He spurred his men in a forward march toward the slave army.
The slave army slowly formed into a line of battle. They then waited, watching as the planter militia approached slowly across the cane fields. The muskets the slaves carried were only accurate at short distances, so proper military tactics dictated that both sides must close to within 500 feet before firing a single shot. If the slaves discharged their weapons before the planters came that close, they would lose any hope of hitting the target. “In action not one shot out of 100 hit an extended object as high as the head of a horse, at three hundred feet distance,” read an 1814 U.S. infantry manual. Fighting an effective battle meant waiting until the enemy was incredibly close, dangerously close, before firing.
We can never know the thoughts that went through the slaves’ heads as they took their stand. The two options before them were freedom or death. Fifty
years later, a free black man fighting with a regiment of French-speaking ex-slaves from Louisiana described their emotions upon entering battle with the Union army. “We are now fighting, and ask no more glorious death than to die for [freedom],” he wrote. “But for our race to go back into bondage again, to be hunted by dogs through the swamps and cane-brakes, to be set up on the block and sold for gold and silver . . . no never, gladly we would die first.” Most likely, the slave-rebels felt the same way.
Both sides faced advantages and disadvantages. The geography favored the white planters. The cane fields formed a wide, flat, open space with good visibility. Most battles in North America were fought in a mix of woods and open space—lending an advantage to guerilla tactics like those the slaves would likely employ. But an open field favored the sort of large-scale infantry movements popular among well-drilled armies. The weather, however, favored the slaves. The pouring rain meant that the white militia had been unable to bring in artillery, either by river or along the muddy River Road. The white planters and their American military allies would not have the benefits of grapeshot or cannon fire as they attacked the slave army. Both sides would fight with muskets.
Staring into the face of death, the slave army did not blink. “The blacks were not intimidated by this army and formed themselves in line,” wrote a Spanish agent in New Orleans. Then, in an instant, the first shots rang out. Recover arms, open pan, handle cartridge, prime, shut pan, load, draw ramrod, ram down, return ramrod, make ready, aim, fire, went the soldiers with their muskets. The African drums beat war rhythms and the leaders called out to the slaves to encourage them. As the first soldiers on both sides fired their muskets, clouds of smoke would have quickly poured down on them, hiding everything but the flash of enemy guns.
Guns roared. Muskets crashed and burst. Bullets zipped and hissed through the air. The slaves could only have felt the unease and terror of confronting a danger that they could neither see nor comprehend. The slaves at first might not have recognized the noise of bullets, which could sound like fast-moving bees or birds. Amid the smoke and chaos, men began to drop. Their deaths would have seemed strangely disconnected from the cacophony of noise: the bullets themselves were invisible. The leaders of the slave army watched through the smoke as their men began to fall, as bullets opened gaping wounds in the bulging muscles of the sugar workers.
Perhaps the slaves discharged their weapons too early; perhaps the white planters were simply better trained and disciplined in modern warfare. But within a few minutes, the slaves had discharged all of their ammunition—and the planters kept firing. The slaves watched as corpses proliferated. Their hair still wet from the recent rain, rebel slaves lay dead on the ground, their eyes glazed, their lips blue, and their last expressions fixed forever in their faces. It was a horrifying sight.
A Spanish spy reported that the slave line broke as soon as their ammunition began to peter out. And then the planter militia, some on horseback, charged into the fray as the slaves ran for the relative protection of the cypress swamp. Angered white soldiers poured over the slave lines, shooting and bayoneting the slaves who put up resistance. “Fifteen or twenty of them were killed and fifty prisoners were taken including three of their leaders with uniforms and epaulets,” wrote the Spanish spy in New Orleans. “The rest fled quickly into the woods.” As the slaves ran for the swamps, they would have heard the desperate cries of the wounded, who knew that they would soon be chopped up by furious white planters. A strange silence settled, pierced only by the shrieks and groans of the wounded. A massacre was under way.
Kook and Quamana were among those captured. These two leaders were ordered sent to the Destrehan plantation, where they would be tried as an example to the other slaves.
The planter Charles Perret glowingly reported that the white forces “left 40 to 45 men on the field of battle, among whom were several chiefs.” Most likely the planters killed those survivors immediately after the battle. Only about twenty-five prisoners—including Kook and Quamana—survived to trial. After killing the slaves, the planter militia began a barbaric practice: chopping off the heads of the dead rebels as souvenirs and warnings for other slaves. The blood of the wounded, the dead, and the decapitated soaked into the cane fields. The result, Manuel Andry observed later, was a “considerable slaughter.” According to the planters, not a single white soldier fell to the slaves’ muskets.
Charles Deslondes was among the slaves who fled to the swamps. Solomon Northup, who worked on a nearby plantation, described the experience of running away into the swamps. “I was desolate, but thankful,” he wrote. “Thankful that my life was spared,—desolate and discouraged with the prospect before me.”
The fleeing rebels did not have much of a lead. Enlisting the assistance of a party of Native Americans—a strategy that had been used by slaveholders during Louisiana’s maroon wars—the militia headed into the swamps, led by packs of bloodhounds trained to chase runaway slaves. “I left with 25 volunteers to beat the bushes, to harass the enemy, and to make contact with those who had fled,” Charles Perret reported.
In the silence of the swamps, the escaping slaves could hear the howl of the dogs—dogs they knew to be trained to attack black slaves. “I never knew a slave escaping with his life from Bayou Boeuf,” Northup wrote. “In their flight they can go in no direction but a little way without coming to a bayou, when the inevitable alternative is presented, of being drowned or overtaken by the dogs.” In the swamps, cypresses gave way to palmetto trees, their heavy leaves darkening the swamps. Moccasin snakes and alligators made the swamps all the more dangerous. Footing was uneven.
At first, the planters found only the wounded, who were unable to run. They discovered one plantation mistress, a Madame Clapion, hiding in the midst of the forests shivering with cold and terror. But before too long, the bloodhounds caught a scent. They did not know it yet, but Charles Deslondes was running just a few hundred feet ahead.
Charles’s experience was probably similar to Northup’s. The dogs’ “long, savage yells announced they were on my track,” Northup wrote. “Fear gave me strength, and I exerted it to the utmost.” The yelping dogs were gaining, running faster than any man could run. With each howl, Charles would have sensed their imminent approach. “Each moment I expected they would sink into my back—expected to feel their long teeth sinking into my flesh,” wrote Northup. The dogs would tear a man to pieces in minutes, unless called back by their masters—something the enraged planters were unlikely to do.
Charles did not escape. The dogs got to him first, dragging him down and ferociously biting his sweating flesh. The planters, recognizing Charles as “the principal leader of the bandits,” brought him back into the cane fields to make a public demonstration. According to one witness, the militiamen chopped off Charles’s hands, broke his thighs, shot him dead, and then roasted his remains on a pile of straw. Charles died a martyr for his cause, his death cries a stirring message to the escaped slaves still cowering in the marshes.
* * *
Reprisals continued unabated on Saturday as the militia came upon a band of rebels hiding out in the woods. Flushed out by two detachments of cavalry, the soldiers captured “Pierre Griffe, murderer of M. Thomassin, and Hans Wimprenn, murderer of M. François Trépagnier, and pressed them closely that they came upon M. Deslondes’ picket and were killed.” The militiamen did more than murder. They hacked off the men’s heads and delivered them to the Andry estate.
As the militia hunted down the remaining slaves, federal reinforcements called in by Claiborne converged on the German Coast. Commanding a force of artillery and dragoons, Major Milton arrived Friday morning from Baton Rouge. In the days prior to the insurrection, Milton had been leading his dragoons north around Lake Pontchartrain in order to fight the Spanish in West Florida. Milton had heard the news at about midday on Thursday, and he had traveled about fifteen miles down the river to the German Coast on an emergency mission to give aid to the militia. Grateful for the
extra assistance, Hampton posted Milton and his men in the neighborhood with instructions “to protect and Give Countenance to the Various Companies of the Citizens that are Scouring the Country in Every direction.” Hampton concluded that the planters “have had an Opportunity of feeling their physical force [and were] equal to the protection of their own property.” Nevertheless, Hampton feared new revolts along the coast, and he ordered Milton to ensure that such insurrections did not occur. “I have Judged it expedient to Order down a Company of L’Artillery and one of Dragoons to Descend from Baton Rouge & to touch at Every Settlement of Consequence, and to Crush any disturbances that May have taken place higher Up.”
Hampton was taking no chances, because he did not think the slaves had acted alone. Hampton linked the insurgents with the ongoing war with the Spanish for control of the Gulf. “The [slaves’] plan is unquestionably of Spanish Origin, & has had an extensive Combination,” he wrote. “The Chiefs of the party that took the field are both taken, but there is Without doubt Others behind the Curtain Still More formidable.” He saw the slave insurrection as a Spanish counterattack on American authority, which was not all that far-fetched.
While Hampton pondered the military and political nature of the uprising, the slaveholders crept out of hiding, called forward by the militia who wanted to secure a familiar kind of peace. Perret ordered the “proprietors to return to their properties” and “all the drivers to carry out the accustomed work at the usual hours.” These actions were necessary, the militiaman later explained, “so as to maintain order.” For Perret, as for many other slaveholders, “order” meant the reinvigoration of the production of sugar. And so as the planters attempted to pick up the pieces and reestablish that order, they turned to tried-and-true methods of ensuring slave compliance. Only this time, their violence was on a much larger scale.
American Uprising Page 10
