This Day in Labor History: January 8, 1811. The German Coast slave rebellion, largest in US history, starts in Louisiana. Let's talk about this little known history and the centrality of slavery to American labor history,
Louisiana had developed a different slavery tradition than the U.S. The intensity of sugar cultivation required gang labor, often driven with great brutality. The real $$ was always in sugar.
Thus, Louisiana slavery looked a lot like the Caribbean, with very wealthy planters and great concentrations of slaves. The German Coast of Louisiana was probably 5:1 black to white population ratio.
Some of the Louisiana slaveholders had moved there from Haiti and were freaked out about more slave rebellions.
Of course, the U.S. had purchased Louisiana in 1803. There were a lot of issues between the government and the white people of Louisiana.
Even though Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were francophiles, they expressed pretty terrible thoughts toward Louisiana, believed them not worthy of self-government, sent administrators who couldn't even speak French.
The Louisiana elite was insulted by this of course and expressed great displeasure.
Moreover, white Americans were very uncomfortable with the relative freedom urban slaves had, the amount of racial mixing, and the wealth of free blacks in New Orleans.
For a very long time, white Americans had a lust/hate relationship with New Orleans, fascinated and repelled by the opportunities for interracial sex.
But different slave traditions had different slave hierarchies and different ideas about race and racism. If anything, the 1-drop U.S. model was the exception in the Americas. And Americans couldn't deal with people who didn't fall into that model.
Now, we don't know quite why the German Coast rebellion started. But by January 6, after the conclusion of the brutal sugar harvest, plans were clearly underway.
The leader seems to have been Charles Deslondes, with men named Quamana and Harry also playing major roles. Quamana and another slave named Kook were Asantes, evidently warriors, who had been imported from Africa around 1806.
Deslondes summed up the fear of race mixing and the French system of slavery for American whites, a green-eyed man with greater education and access to the world than the average slave. He was the son of a white planter and black slave and evidently was used as a slave driver.
The revolt began at the home of Manuel André, a plantation owner about 35 miles from New Orleans. They wounded him and chopped his son to death.
Moving from plantation to plantation, they began attracting followers. Originally, estimates are between 64-125 rebels. But up to 500 joined eventually.
Probably between 10-25% of slaves on plantations the rebels visited joined the rebellion, usually young men without children.
They marched 20 miles toward New Orleans in two days. They may have knew about the Haitian Rebellion. Some of the rebels had military experience in Africa and created a fairly effective fighting force.
It seems that Delondes wanted to conquer New Orleans. After his capture, he told another slave that he was driven by a desire to kill white people.
Unfortunately, the campaign to end this rebellion was incredibly brutal. The US military and Louisiana planters came together to kill these rebellious slaves. In fact, this event helped smooth over the earlier tensions between them.
Not for the last time, American white people of different ethnicities could unite over killing people of color.
The German Coast rebels were finally crushed at a plantation on land currently occupied by the Waterford 3 Nuclear Power Plant near Norco, Louisiana.
Whites hunted down the escaped slaves as they freed. About 95 were killed. They then cut off the heads, placed them on pikes, and lined the road to New Orleans with them. An act of unimaginable grotesque brutality.
This is a fairly recent book on this little known but critically important event. Haven't read it myself.
amazon.com/American-Upris…
amazon.com/American-Upris…
It's also important to center these stories of slavery and rebellion as part of labor history.
What was the fundamental reason for slavery? To create a permanent labor force. Slavery was a labor system. Too often, the role of work gets downplayed in our discussions of slavery. But labor and racism and brutality cannot be separated. And we shouldn't want to separate them.
The entire history of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction is fundamentally a series of conflicts about what labor would look like in the United States.
So when we think about our famous strikes, we think of Haymarket, Pullman, IWW, etc. But we should also think of Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Stono, and German Coast.
OK, back to real work now! More labor history soon!
