American Uprising

by Daniel Rasmussen

  January 12–21, 1811

  Chapter Twelve

  Heads on Poles

  THERE IT WAS, BLACK, DRIED, SUNKEN, WITH CLOSED EYELIDS—A HEAD THAT SEEMED TO SLEEP AT THE TOP OF THAT POLE, AND, WITH THE SHRUNKEN DRY LIPS SHOWING A NARROW WHITE LINE OF THE TEETH, WAS SMILING, TOO, SMILING CONTINUOUSLY AT SOME ENDLESS AND JOCOSE DREAM OF THAT ETERNAL SLUMBER. . . THESE HEADS WERE THE HEADS OF REBELS . . . THERE HAD BEEN ENEMIES, CRIMINALS, WORKERS—AND THESE WERE REBELS. THOSE REBELLIOUS HEADS LOOKED VERY SUBDUED TO ME ON THEIR STICKS.

  Joseph Conrad

  Whether they killed the insurgent slaves immediately upon encountering them, after slow torture, or following a court trial, the planters performed the same spectacular violent ritual. Obsessively, collectively, they chopped off the heads of the slave corpses and put them on display. By the end of January, around 100 dismembered bodies decorated the levee from the Place d’Armes in the center of New Orleans forty miles along the River Road into the heart of the plantation district.

  “They were brung here for the sake of their Heads, which decorate our Levee, all the way up the coast,” wrote planter Samuel Hambleton. “They look like crows sitting on long poles.” Along the course of the revolt, from the plantation of Manuel Andry down the River Road through the gates of New Orleans and into the center of the city, the decomposing heads of slave corpses reminded everyone with a nose, ears, and eyes where power resided. The plantation masters (two of them future U.S. senators), the slaves on the plantations, the boatmen traveling up and down the river, the U.S. military forces in the region, and everyone else who passed through the German Coast in early 1811 traversed a world of rotting bodies. Those passersby no doubt saw themselves in the bodies of the dead, registering, if only subconsciously, the awesome power of a state in the making.

  The volunteer militias on the field of battle were the first to practice this ritual—but they only began the bloodletting. From the plantations to the city center, planters, government officials, and military officers—French and American—reenacted the same rite of violence. Ritual, they understood intuitively, imposed coherency, and through coherency, control.

  What motivated this savagery? Most likely fear. Commodore Shaw expressed it best. “Had not the most prompt and energetic measures been thus taken, the whole coast would have exhibited a general sense of devastation; every description of property would have been consumed; and the country laid waste by the Rioters,” he explained. 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.

  Psychologically, killing another human being is difficult—unless some circumstance makes it possible to dismiss the humanity of the murdered. In this case, a powerful racist ideology that characterized black slaves as little better than cattle, coupled with a rage inspired by a violation of the racial order, provided ample justification. The planters considered the slaves brutal savages hell-bent on wreaking unspeakable atrocities on them and their families. In an area full of planters with strong ties to Haiti, such atrocities were not difficult to imagine.

  In committing these atrocities, the planters were using savagery to fight what they understood as savagery. They saw the imagery of heads on pikes as a language that their slaves could understand—corpses represented a lingua franca in interactions between the colonists and the colonized, the masters and the slaves. Planters wanted to make sure that anyone who might empathize with the revolutionaries, anyone who wanted to see the dead as martyrs, would have to reckon with the image of rotting corpses. In the words of Manuel Andry, the planters wanted to “make a GREAT EXAMPLE.”

  This brutal ceremony was not a new idea, however. The planters were drawing on a long tradition of spectacular violence in service of slavery and colonialism. This was not just a French, African, Spanish, American, Haitian, Native American, or British ritual, but an Atlantic ritual—a ritual that flowed across the trade links that connected America to the Caribbean and to Africa. In the previous fifty years, beheadings had become the prime method for putting down slave revolts. From 1760 to the early years of the nineteenth century, plots and revolts surfaced with increasing frequency, affecting British, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Danish territories. Both the insurrectionaries and their suppressors used beheadings as a means of discourse. The Coromantee slave Tacky led the first great revolt of this new age of revolution in 1760. The British colonists quickly suppressed his plot, capturing Tacky, decapitating him, and posting his rotting head on a pole. Beheading sanctified the suppression of the uprising. When slaves rebelled in Haiti, the decapitation and public exposure of corpses overwhelmed the island. Both blacks and whites decorated their encampments by hanging corpses from the trees or placing decapitated heads on stakes.

  This was not the first time New Orleans had seen such violence, either. In 1795, a group of slaves were tried for conspiring to travel from plantation to plantation, chopping off the planters’ heads with their axes. In response to this threat of decapitation by axe (the conspiracy never became realized), the planters struck swiftly and violently. By June 2, the planters had hanged twenty-three slaves and nailed their heads to posts along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Pointe Coupée. Decapitation and the display of bodies was a well-worn trope of servile insurrections in the Atlantic.

  The dishonoring of corpses functioned not only to terrify the slaves but also to reassure white planters of the power of the order they had established. “Condemnation and execution by hanging and beheading are going daily; our citizens appear to be again at ease, and in short, tranquility is in a fair way of being again established,” Commodore Shaw wrote. In Shaw’s mind, there seemed to be a direct cause-and-effect relationship between conviction, execution, the restoration of order, and the “ease” of the citizens. Witnesses to these spectacles become participants in the restoration of sovereignty, their gazes and their politics co-opted by death, dismemberment, and public decay. At least that is what the planters hoped.

  * * *

  Kook and Quamana survived the initial bloodletting in the cane fields–turned–killing fields of Bernard Bernoudy. The planters had a special plan for these two men, whose formal military dress no doubt betrayed their leadership role in the uprising. They would try Kook and Quamana, along with several others, in a court of law.

  They dragged Kook and Quamana back along the route of their erstwhile uprising, past the haunting site of beheaded corpses, past the burnt mansions and the sites of the previous day’s successes, to the heart of the plantation world: the mansion of Jean Noël Destrehan. Perhaps they beat them and tore off their uniforms or perhaps they left them unmolested; few details survive.

  When they arrived at the Destrehan plantation, the planters threw Kook and Quamana and nineteen other slaves into a tiny white-washed washhouse just behind the manor. They bolted the wooden door and windows, leaving the slaves huddled on the brick floor of a room barely big enough to fit a table—a cramped space reminiscent of the slave ships that had brought many of them to this world in the first place. The rebels, wrote one planter, were “awaiting the stroke of law, which will be meted out without any kind of delay, especially given the present circumstance, urgent as it is, where it is the question of suppressing a revolt that could assume a serious character, if the chiefs and principal leaders are not promptly destroyed.”

  As the slaves sat trembling in fear in their makeshift prison, anticipating what brutal tortures might next come their way, Pierre Bauchet St. Martin, the judge of St. Charles Parish, convened a tribunal of slaveholders on Jean Noël Destrehan’s plantation. St. Martin fought alongside Andry and Perret—he had been part of the initial bloodbath. The planters—five of them—gathered on the second floor of Destrehan’s grand manor, turning the family’s ornate parlor into the state’s space.

  The planters intended their tribunal to legitimize their violence and to help reestablish the boundari
es between the civilized and the savage—boundaries ironically blurred by the ritualistic beheadings. They intended the tribunals to swiftly approve the murder of all slaves involved in the uprising so that society could be reestablished to meet the planters’ visions. The tribunals were necessary, they explained, “to judge the rebel slaves . . . with the shortest possible delay, particularly in view of the seriousness of the present situation in which it is necessary to suppress a revolt which could take on a ferocious character if the chiefs and principal accomplices are not promptly destroyed.”

  These trials were not meant for the benefit of the slaves, but rather to present the powerful as legitimately, ethically, and rightfully powerful. They sought to legitimize death by refracting it through the language of legality. While not particularly interested in the slaves’ side of the story, the tribunals nevertheless began their work by interrogating the surviving captives. As Manuel Andry had put it days before, the planters “perfectly knew” who the culprits were. The planters needed from their prisoners only admissions of guilt and assertions of the guilt of others. In some senses, the answers the slaves gave were irrelevant; the only purpose of the questioning was as the preamble to a trial whose end was clear from the beginning: the quick execution of all slaves involved in the insurrection.

  Back in the washhouse, the slaves remained literally in the dark about what was going on outside. But before long, they heard the bolts pushed from the door and the planters entered. They wanted Cupidon first. Grabbing him from among his fellow captives, they marched him along the path, up the stairs, and into the parlor where they had assembled.

  The planters wanted to know one thing: who was guilty and who was not. The planters left no details about how they treated the captured rebels, but the records of other slave tribunals leave little doubt. “The confessions were extracted by means calculated to excite the fear of present death in the firmest mind,” read one such trial, held for insurgent slaves in South Carolina. “The prisoners were in irons . . . One strikes [a slave captive] in the face, and threatens to kill him ‘if he don’t tell all about it’; another says to [another captive] ‘tell about it, they will hang you if you don’t,’ and there ‘they’ stood—an infuriated crowd.”

  Whatever they did, they made Cupidon talk. As he spoke of the events of the last few days, he began to denounce his fellow rebels. Charles Deslondes, he began, was “principal chief of the brigands.” He also denounced three other slaves from the Andry plantation, one, named Zenon, as a “principal brigand.” The slave Mathurin, he claimed, had “commanded, armed with a saber.” Cupidon confessed that Harry of the Kenner and Henderson estate also played a key role in the uprising. Before long, Cupidon began to talk even of the other slaves locked in the washhouse. He told the assembled planters that “the black Koock (owned by Mr. James Brown)” had “struck Mr. François Trépagnier with an axe . . . leaving him for dead.”

  The slave Dagobert was next. He too confessed to participating in the revolt and fingered several other slaves as participants—including Cupidon. And he added to the charges against Kook. Kook, he told the assembled planters, had “set fire to the house of Mr. Laclaverie as well as to that of Mr. Reine, the older.”

  The final interview of the day was with Harry of the Kenner estate, who had been one of those who met with Charles on the Sunday before the revolt. Harry, unlike Cupidon and Dagobert, refused to speak or to confess. The planters sentenced him guilty on the spot. With the first few interrogations complete, the planters took their rest; they would begin the trials again the next day.

  On the morning of January 14, after several other slaves had been interrogated, the planters called next for Kook. Kook refused to denounce any other slaves, and he would not tell the planters who participated and who did not. But he did proudly confess to one thing—“he admitted that he was the one who struck Mr. François Trépagnier with an axe.” Kook had confirmed his own death sentence. Later in the day, Quamana too would take the same course. “Quamana acknowledged guilt and that he had figured in a notable manner in the insurrection. He did not denounce anyone,” read the transcript. The two warriors stayed true to their oaths.

  Marched from the makeshift jail to the parlor of the Destrehan manor, many of the accused conformed their words to their owners’ scripts. As the slaveholders began their interrogations, they confronted an overwhelming multiplicity of stories. The politics of the washhouse was every bit as complicated as the politics of the mansion.

  Some slaves, like Dagobert and Cupidon, were free in their denunciations—and the planters acted on their words. Dagobert, for example, denounced nine of the slaves in the washhouse, all of whom the tribunal later found guilty and sentenced to death. Cupidon denounced ten of his fellow slaves, six of whom would likewise die. But as Cupidon’s case suggests, the tribunal weighed rebels’ words, and for reasons they kept to themselves, the court refused to act on a number of the slaves’ accusations. For example, when Eugene of the Labranche plantation denounced eighteen slaves, the planters sentenced to death only seven of the men he named. The tribunal evidently found Louis of the Trépagnier estate and Gros Lindor of the Destrehan place even less trustworthy, with planters executing only six of the twenty-six men Louis named and two of the fifteen identified by Gros Lindor. The record reveals nothing about why Louis, Gros Lindor, and others denounced the men they did. But it is clear that the planters shared a different opinion.

  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.