Why the 1811 Slave Revolt Matters

Why the 1811 Slave Revolt Matters

Adrinda Kelly

G65.1107 Global History 1: An Introduction

Professor Machado

December 15, 2006

Word Count: 7800

The 1811 Slave Revolt in Louisiana is largely a forgotten history of rebellion. Although it

was the largest slave revolt to ever happen in the United States, it has somehow been

relegated to the appendices of resistance movements in the Americas. Why has such a

pivotal moment in the history of the United States been so neglected by scholars,

teachers, and students? What does this neglect reveal about the complicity of silence and

hegemony? And, finally, what is at stake in the recovery of this history and for whom?

These questions form the starting point for this essay. My experience as a public

high school student in New Orleans taking a required course on Louisiana history in

which I never learned anything about the 1811 slave revolt, has given me a personal stake

in this exploration. Even back then I recognized that the history I was being taught told a

story that was not only incomplete, but that the absences and voids were strategic. This

essay represents my attempt to fill in those voids.

The framework(s) we use to read slave rebellion in general, and the 1811 slave

revolt in particular, is just as important as whether we can successfully reconstruct the

details of the forgotten insurrection. Because if we read the 1811 slave revolt as a simple

aberration in a shameful history of slavery relegated to the past, then, as Paul Gilroy

warns, there is the danger that “It [slavery] becomes our [blacks’] special property rather

than a part of the ethical and intellectual heritage of the West of the whole.”1 Moreover, if

we examine the revolt in local isolation, we run the risk of missing out on the “continuity

- Kelly 2 -

1 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Harvard University Press/Cambridge, 1993): 49

of the Middle Passage in today’s world of less obvious, but no less pernicious

enslavement.”2

In this essay I hope to show that the 1811 slave revolt, an event engendered by

trans-Atlantic movements of people and ideas, is best understood in an Atlantic history

framework. If Atlantic history seeks to tease out connections among people and

landmasses in order to make more visible key motors of change, then such a reading of

the 1811 slave revolt reveals historical processes at play whose continuities may be seen

in the recent events of Hurricane Katrina. This comparison is not arbitrary. New Orleans,

the geographic locus around which both events occurred, is also a place whose tenuous

belonging in the larger American fabric has consistently problematized America’s

national story of freedom and justice for all. An Atlantic history paradigm challenges us

to see the 1811 slave revolt and Hurricane Katrina as manifestations of the same

historical contingency; that contingency may be reduced to an image of a black

underclass agitating in the belly of the beast.

But certain problems immediately present themselves in this approach, and an

Atlantic reading of the 1811 the slave revolt eventually reveals disturbing ideological and

methodological limitations. These limitations suggest that an Atlantic history approach,

while laudable in its aims to place blacks’ experiences in modernity front and center, ends

up invoking the very dichotomies and boundaries it is prepared to indict. In the end, what

is suggested is not the irrelevance of Atlantic history but rather its instability; that

- Kelly 3 -

2 Joan Dayan, ‘Paul Gilroy’s slaves, ships, and routes: The middle passage as metaphor,’ Research in African Literatures, vol. 27, no. 4 (Winter, 1996) 7-14

instability provides a starting point for theorizing an alternative approach to

understanding the world’s colonial legacy.

This essay will stake its claim in the notion that the 1811 slave revolt is local

history with global relevance, and how we speak (or don’t speak) about it has

implications for how we understand and misunderstand the dual role of race and nation in

creating disposable world communities, of which the newly established Katrina diaspora

is just one.3 Undergirding this project is the idea that silence is never ambivalent and

hegemony has longevity. In the act of trying to recover the history of the 1811 slave

revolt, something else is gained that teaches us about the power of constructions of

knowledge, even as it prepares us for its failures and fallacies.

What is Atlantic history and what does it have to do with the 1811 slave revolt?

An Atlantic history framework uses the Atlantic Ocean as a unit of analysis to

“investigate the histories of the four landmasses it links.”4 Alison Games suggests that the

explanatory power of the Atlantic lies in its ability to “deepen our understanding of

transformations over time, cast old problems in an entirely new light, and illuminate

connections hitherto obscured.”5 The “old problems” being recast in the Atlantic

perspective are the problems attendant to the “discovery” of the modern world, namely

problems of slavery, colonialism, and nationhood. The Atlantic Ocean, itself a modern

- Kelly 4 -

3 Henry A. Giroux, ‘Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class and the Biopolitics of Disposability,’ College Literature, vol. 33, no.3 (Summer 2006): 171-196

4 Alison Games, ‘AHR Forum: Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,’ The American Historical Review June 2006 http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/111.3/games.html (27 Nov. 2006)

5 Games, ‘Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities’: pars 1

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/111.3/games.html


construct, provides a ready framework for discussing the movements of people, capital,

and ideals which undergirded modernity’s colonial project.

An Atlantic History framework is compelling because of its ability to focus

attention on the trans-Atlantic enterprises of slavery and colonialism, and place blacks’

experiences across the Atlantic in conversation with major themes of modernity and

nationhood. Atlantic history takes for granted the fact the world is interconnected, and as

a slice of world history, it is “simultaneously involved in transformations unique to the

Atlantic and those derived from global processes.”6 This continual movement between

the local and global when it comes to Atlantic networks and transformations, is key to our

understanding of the 1811 slave revolt as a local movement with global implications.

Atlantic history is “history without borders” and in that respect, Games warns us, “it

should also be a history without an imperial perspective.”7 These qualifications are more

problematic than they might initially seem. If an Atlantic history approach succeeds in

privileging multiple perspectives—especially the perspectives of blacks silenced in

traditional historical study—it can also lend itself to intelligibility in its efforts to cohere

many different geographies around processes that are themselves highly contextual.

In order to overcome this difficulty, Atlantic approaches must focus on people

“who moved freely between cultures and who played important roles in mediating the

moments when mutually incomprehensible societies conflicted or engaged in any number

of ways.”8 This emphasis on tracing networks of people, commodities, and ideas that

- Kelly 5 -




moved across the oceanic space is a trademark of Atlantic history, and provides a point of

entry for identifying key continuities. Catherine Hall’s Civilizing Subjects and Paul

Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic demonstrate two of the most tenable approaches to applying

an Atlantic lens to colonial history. In Civilizing Subjects, Hall proffers an exhaustively

researched study of the events surrounding the Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica and

Britain’s Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 in order to show that “colony and metropole are

terms which can only be understood in relation to each other.”9 Paul Gilroy’s Black

Atlantic focuses on the ways in which highly mobile cultural forms that constantly

reenact memories of slavery helped create a black Atlantic defined by rapport with

death.10 Both analyses are concerned with investigating the relationship between

“colonizer” and “colonized” via Atlantic networks. Their approaches provide a

methodology for reconstructing trans-Atlantic movements of bodies, commodities, and

ideas.

If slavery, ships, and the Middle Passage are at the center of Atlantic history, then

slave rebellion deserves special attention as a moment of trauma which throws into stark

relief the dichotomy between colonizer and colonized. For Gilroy, the black Atlantic,

“continually crisscrossed by the movements of black people—not only as commodities

but engaged in various struggles toward emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship—

provides a means to reexamine the problems of nationality, location, identity, and

historical memory.”11 The resistance movements which occurred in and around the

- Kelly 6 -

9 Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002): 12

10 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: 63


Atlantic ocean—St. Domingue, Morant Bay, New Orleans—helped transform the

emerging rhetoric of modernity, and raised “profound questions about the universality of

citizenship and civil rights.”12 The notions of inclusion and exclusion that were debated

as a result of these resistance movements helped form the ideas of race and nationality

that are so problematic today.

Therefore, microhistorical study of resistance movements can lend a better

understanding of the networks which helped construct an Atlantic world; it can also

reveal “how the rulers of empire reexamined their own hegemony and altered their

visions when faced with cleavages within their own camp and challenges from the people

they were trying to rule.”13 What emerges is a new vision of colonial rule in which

“Europe was made by its imperial project, as much as colonial conflicts were shaped by

conflicts within Europe itself.”14 In this formulation, the colonial project is not a simple

traumatic encounter in which European ideas of power, race, nation, and culture is

diffused in a one-way exchange, but is a series of negotiations in which neither metropole

nor colony emerges unmolested. The study of slave rebellion in an Atlantic history

framework illustrates these “tensions of empire” beautifully.

The symbolic importance of St. Domingue

- Kelly 7 -

12 Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Between Metropole and Colony’ in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds.) Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley/ Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press, 1997): 1-56

13 Cooper and Stoler, ‘Between Metropole and Colony’: 23, 6

14 Cooper and Stoler, ‘Between Metropole and Colony’:1

No discussion of slave rebellion in the Americas is complete without an

appreciation of the potent symbolism of the world’s first black republic. We have C.L.R.

James to thank for his exhaustively researched account of the events of the St.

Dominguan revolution. James’ work lends insight into the processes by which French

revolutionary ideals were reconstituted in the colonial encounter. The trans-Atlantic

economic networks which brought France and St. Domingue in such close synthesis—

C.L.R. James is just one of many historians to point out that the French Revolution was

funded by bourgeois enterprises in the West Indies—also bounded these spaces

ideologically. The result was that “the nation-state was being transcended as it was being

born” and “the universe to which the rights of man applied was extended even as those

rights were being specified.”15

To understand the mechanisms behind this symbiotic relationship, it may be

helpful to outline the facts of the revolution in brief. Following the storming of the

Bastille and the National Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man, members of the

white planter class in St. Dominigue began agitating for their right for political

representation. In doing so, “they unwittingly opened the door for the tensions and

contradictions embedded in the colony’s caste and racial structure to be exposed fully.”16

St. Dominigue was unique in that its population of free people of color nearly equaled

that of the colony’s whites, and they owned one-third of the colony’s plantations and a

quarter of its real estate and slaves. Many of them had been educated in France, and their

- Kelly 8 -

15 Frederick Cooper, ‘What is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian’s Perspective,’ African Affairs, 100 (2001) 189-213

16 Carolyn Fick, ‘The French Revolution in Saint Dominigue,’ in David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus (eds.) A Turbulent Time (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997): 51-75

demographic and economic presence in the colony was undeniable.17 The National

Assembly knew that any discussion of the planters’ rights would open the door for a

discussion of the rights of St. Domingue’s free people of color. After a March 8 decree

that was deliberately vague on the definition of “persons” to whom it granted the vote, a

group of Mulattos agitated to claim the rights they believed were granted to them, and the

first seeds of revolution were sown.

The armed rebellion by the colony’s mulattos, led by Vincent Ogé, was quickly

suppressed. But Pandora’s box had been opened. When news of the abortive mulatto

rebellion reached France, the issue of mulatto rights was brought before the National

Assembly, and Robespierre led the rhetorical flourishings which determined that the

“Rights of Man” did indeed apply to St. Domingue’s mulattos.18 But while everyone was

focused on the issue of mulatto rights and how to preserve the revolution’s ideals while

still protecting the bourgeoisie’s economic interests in the colony, the slaves in St.

Domingue’s north province were preparing to surprise everyone with a totally

unanticipated rebellion.

What prompted these slaves, so removed from these discussions of the rights of

man and to whom they applied, to desert their plantations and initiate the revolution that

led to the establishment of the world’s first black republic? James suggests that the

French soldiers sent to St. Domingue in 1791 to mediate the growing tension between the

colony’s royalist and patriot factions, “on landing at Port-au-Prince, had given the

- Kelly 9 -

17Fick, ‘The French Revolution in Saint Dominigue’: 57

18 C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, 2nd edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1989): 76-77 and Fick, ‘The French Revolution in Saint Dominigue’: 61

fraternal embrace to all Mulattos and all Negroes, telling them that the Assembly in

France had declared all men free and equal.”19 This suggests that soldier-sailor networks

were key to spreading the ideologies of France’s revolution among St. Domingue’s

enslaved blacks. Although it was in the planters’ best interests to think to the contrary,

slaves were not deaf or dumb, and when news of the revolution in France first reached

them via sailors and soldiers disembarking in St. Domingue, “they construed it in their

own image: the white slaves in France had risen, and killed their masters, and were now

enjoying the fruits of the earth.”20

It is important to note that while news of the revolution may have accelerated the

slaves’ first deadly strike, their ardor for freedom was not initiated by the appearance of

these sailor-soldiers. As early as 1789, there were uprisings in Guadeloupe and

Martinique, and there had long been signs of unrest apparent on St. Dominguan

plantations.21 The spirit of what was happening in France combined with locally-born

anger over decades of abuses alternately mediated and engendered by France’s Code

Noir, caught hold of the blacks in St. Domingue and prompted them to full scale revolt in

1791.22

These facts do little to sketch out the complex set of events that led to the creation

of Haiti in 1804. What is readily apparent, however, is that “the danger that black

Jacobins might demand to be included in an expanding version of citizenship in European

- Kelly 10 -

19 James, The Black Jacobins: 83

20 James, The Black Jacobins: 81

21 Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004): 91

22 James, The Black Jacobins: 81-84

empires—as well as the danger that African rebels or creole nationalists might seek to opt

out of European civilization—raised profound questions about the universality of

citizenship and civil rights in Europe.”23 The St. Dominguan revolution forced France to

confront the contradictions inherent in its universalist pretensions, and helped shape the

emerging republic’s notion of nation and citizenship. And, as Fick rightly points out,

“without the French Revolution there would have been no talk of liberty and equality, no

counterrevolution, [and] no ready access to allies and arms for the slaves.”24 In this way,

the revolution is a prototype of the Cooper and Stoler hypothesis that metropole and

colony are mutually constituted, and provides an essential point of reference for

examining other metropole-colony relationships.

Yet there were other, more immediate and material consequences of the St.

Dominguan rebellion. For the European empires jockeying for power in the Atlantic,

Haiti became a “scepter” calling into question “the idea that slavery could remain a

normal part of global commerce.”25 For the enslaved blacks scattered around the Atlantic,

Haiti became a dangerous and powerful symbol of the phenomenal potential of black

agency, and this symbolism was not lost on Louisiana’s antebellum blacks—both free and

enslaved.

Events in Louisiana leading up to the 1811 revolt

- Kelly 11 -

23 Cooper and Stoler, ‘Between Metropole and Colony’: 2

24 Fick, ‘The French Revolution in Saint Dominigue’: 70


The events leading up to the 1811 slave revolt in New Orleans cannot be understood

without locating them in the broad networks—soldiers, sailors, and slaves—forged in the

cosmopolitan exchanges of European colonial rule, and intensified by the events of the

St. Domingue revolution. David Geggus has rightfully said of the Caribbean: “There was

an interconnectedness about this entire region, in which networks of trade and mobility of

the free and enslaved populations made it possible for news to spread from one corner to

another and to produce results that could clearly transcend national, linguistic, and

geographic boundaries.” 26 As a major port city and former French and Spanish colony

before it became an American territory, New Orleans was a satellite and conduit of a

cross-section of revolutionary movements happening in the British colonies, Latin

America, and the Caribbean. Described by President Hamilton’s Federalists as a

“howling wilderness” full of foreigners incapable of self-government, from the very

beginning New Orleans was viewed as an extremely problematic anomaly in the new

American republic.27 Most troubling was the city’s large population of free people of

color, who, at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, comprised almost 25% of the city’s

total population. In this respect, the territory’s similarity to St. Dominigue was not lost on

the American government.

While their role in the 1811 slave revolt is ambiguous at best, the very mobility and

fluidity of free people of color in trans-Atlantic trade, maritime, and military networks

helped create an ideological context out of which the 1811 revolutionaries were able to

- Kelly 12 -

26 David Gaspar and David Geggus, ‘Introduction’ in David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus (eds.) A Turbulent Time (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997): vii – xiii

27 Robert Paquette, ‘Revolutionary Saint Domingue in the Making of Territorial Louisiana’ in David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus (eds.) A Turbulent Time (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997): 204-225

mount their rebellion. Caryn Cosse Bell has argued that a “Latin European religious ethic,

an unbalanced sex ratio, and a shortage of skilled laborers and soldiers contributed to the

city’s fluid milieu.”28 Whatever the causal factors were that tended to propagate the city’s

population of free coloreds, the fact that such a population did exist, and tended to be

called upon to fill important roles in the city’s colonial infrastructure is the point here.

Free blacks in New Orleans worked as artisans, slave foremen, masons, and

metalworkers. Due to high rates of desertion and death, the French colonial regime in

Louisiana routinely strengthened its forces with enslaved soldiers and laborers, and

military service became a means of manumission for slaves. Free black militia flourished

under Spanish rule, and became a mark of high status in the free black community, as

well as a political pawn for Spanish colonial administrators seeking to counteract planter

power.29 And the notorious privateer settlement at Barataria outside New Orleans,

became an important conduit net for free blacks who were denied entry into the Louisiana

territory in the wake of the St. Dominguan rebellion.30

The events in Louisiana leading up to the 1811 revolt tended to implicate the

city’s free black population as a destabilizing presence, causing white creoles to believe

that “free blacks sympathized with slaves and were likely to foment a rebellion.”31 In

fact, these fears were not entirely unfounded. As a former French colony, many

Louisianians were intimately invested in that country’s revolution, and this was true of

- Kelly 13 -

28 Caryn Cosse Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana 1718-1868 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1997): 11

29 Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition: 15-17, 29

30 Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition: 42

31Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition: 38

both white and black creoles. In 1793, after the colony had been ceded to Spain, the

French revolutionary government “dispatched Jacobin agents to the New World to spread

the ideals of the revolution. Having declared war on England and Spain, the Convention

endeavored to inspire rebellions in enemy territory.”32 They were successful. In 1795,

slaves on the Poydras plantation in Point Coupee managed to set fire to several

plantations before their uprising was quickly suppressed. A subsequent investigation into

the insurrection revealed that the unrest may have been fueled by outside agitators,

circulating inflammatory propaganda from France and St. Dominigue.33 While it is

unlikely that slaves would have read this material, it is not unlikely that they would have

interacted with free, ostensibly literate, men of color working on or around the plantation,

who could have spread news of the revolution and the possibility for black freedom it

encoded.

Tensions surrounding New Orleans’ community of free blacks were exacerbated

after the American take over. The free black militia was of concern to the new American

government and attempts to disband it was one of the first acts of the territorial

administration. Free people of color from both New Orleans and St. Dominigue had

fought alongside the colonists in the American revolutionary war, and like the St.

Dominguan revolutionaries who claimed the Rights of Man, these free blacks pointed to

American revolutionary ideals as a basis for their demand for political rights.34 Governor

Claiborne—in office during the transition of Louisiana to an American territory following

- Kelly 14 -



34 Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition: 11, 31, 44

the Louisiana purchase—famously declared that “this quarter of the Union must (I fear)

experience in some degree, the Misfortunes of St. Domingo.”35 For Claiborne, the

volatile conditions he was so wary of hinged on the presence of a class of free people of

color who were an integral part of the social, economic, and military milieu of territorial

Louisiana. This would prove to be too simple a reading. In fact, it was the free blacks’

ability to act as connective tissue linking slaves to key trans-Atlantic networks that

helped create the conditions for black slave rebellion, and not necessarily their own

agitations as a social class.

It must be remembered that the many of the members of the free black militia in

Louisiana were veterans of the French Republican army, or had fought in the American

Revolution. Others had joined the Mexican insurgents just across the border in present-

day Texas. They kept the democratic idealism of the revolutionary spirit alive.36 These

free blacks had had family members who were still enslaved, worked alongside slaves

unloading ships docked in the city’s port, provided services to the plantocracy, and in

some cases held slaves themselves. These points of contact helped transport news of the

revolutions happening around the Atlantic, and likely prompted the slaves to interpret the

possibilities these movements posed. This is not to suggest that freedom from slavery was

inconceivable before news of revolution, or that black-free black contact was a

precondition for slave rebellion. However, as in St. Domingue, networks of sailors and

soldiers helped transfer the ideologies which, when combined with local contingencies,

helped provide the conditions for mass rebellion.

- Kelly 15 -



After the St. Dominigue revolution was over, Louisiana saw an influx of white

radicals and free people of color from the former French colony. These émigrés were

viewed by the American regime as a dangerous and inflammatory presence. “Inhabitants

of Bayou La Fourche complained of a visit by twelve black Haitians from a passing

vessel who threatened them with many ‘insulting and menacing expressions'. . .boasting

of what they had seen and done in St. Domingo.”37 In 1805 a white Frenchman was

arrested for trying to incite revolt among free blacks and slaves in New Orleans, and was

accused of having been involved in a similar plot in St. Domingue.38 In an attempt to

curtail these dangerous elements, the 1806 legislature passed a law forbidding free black

males to enter Louisiana. Free blacks, upset by the legislature’s refusal to recognize the

free black corps, conspired to overthrow the American regime with the aid of Spanish

force. One of the aims was to free the slaves.39

Such were the volatile conditions Claiborne had feared. Further complicating matters

were the maneuverings of Louisiana’s still-loyal French creole population. In an effort to

strengthen Louisiana’s French community and offset American interests, white, French

Louisianians petitioned the legislature to relax immigration restrictions, allowing “a large

and potentially dangerous class of West Indian slaves” into the territory.40 Between 1809

and 1810, over 10,000 St. Dominguan refugees entered Louisiana, and these included St.

Domingue refugees who, before their banishment from Cuba, operated key privateering

- Kelly 16 -


38 Paquette, ‘Revolutionary Saint Domingue in the Making of Territorial Louisiana’: 216



bases in the Caribbean. By 1810, they “had shifted their bases to Barataria, a Louisiana

settlement just west of the mouth of the Mississippi.”41 These privateer-refugees were

concerned with more than just contraband. They remained committed to the revolutionary

cause and continued to aid insurgents attempting to establish independent republics in

Latin America.”42 St. Domingue free men of color who had fought in the Haitian

revolution, and who were forbidden by Louisiana immigration laws to enter the territory

found refuge in the privateer settlement. These refugees proved to be a deciding causal

agent in the 1811 slave revolt. It is to that event that we now turn our attention.

The 1811 Slave Revolt

Laurent Dubois has written: “Within the official geography of plantations and

ports, with its economic ordering based on production for export to France and its social

ordering based on racial hierarchy, lay another geography. It was made up of complex

interconnections and hidden networks that existed among gens de couleur, whites, and

the enslaved who struggled for survival, autonomy, and liberty.”43 While Dubois was

speaking specifically of Guadeloupe, his comments may also be applied to territorial

Louisiana. The “hidden networks” that were actualized by the 1811 revolutionaries were

soldier, sailor, and slave networks, in which free people of color played a key role. Their

activity within these networks helped create the social and ideological conditions which

enabled the 1811 revolutionaries to mount the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history.

- Kelly 17 -



43 Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: 84

Here’s what we know happened: It began late in the evening of January 8, 1811 in

the river parishes Saint Charles and Saint John the Baptist along the German Coast (also

the site of the Point Coupee rebellion almost fifteen years earlier). Close to five hundred

slaves rose up on the Andry sugar plantation, 40 miles away from New Orleans,

wounding Michael Andry and killing one of his sons. The insurgents armed themselves

with knives, axes, hoes, and a few small arms, and advanced toward New Orleans

moving south along River Road, burning plantations and destroying property along the

way. White residents in their path, upon hearing of the uprising, fled en masse to New

Orleans. New Orleans officials, fearing communication between the city’s free people of

color and the German coast slaves, armed visiting sailors with guns and swords.44

The leader of the revolt was Charles Deslondes, a St. Dominguan slave who had

come to Louisiana as the property of a St. Dominguan émigré in the wake of the

revolution. Louisiana historian James Dormon suggests that after the initial group rose up

on the Andry plantation, Deslondes and his followers met up with a group of maroons in

a prearranged rendezvous before continuing down River Road. Here’s where the details

get sketchy. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the slaves chanted “On to New Orleans”

and “Freedom or Death” as the moved down River Road. If this is true, then what Gilroy

describes as one of the key reconstitutions of modernity—the slave’s active preference

for death—is readily revealed here.45

- Kelly 18 -

44 See James Dormon, ‘The Persistent Scepter: Slave Rebellion in Territorial Louisiana,’ Louisiana History, vol. 18, no. 4 (Fall 1997): 389-404 and Paquette, ‘Revolutionary Saint Domingue in the Making of Territorial Louisiana’: 218-129 for details of the revolt.

45 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: tk

Dormon proffers two conflicting reports of the slaves’ capture; in one account

written by one of the militia men used to suppress the revolt, the insurgents were finally

captured two days later on the Fortier Plantation, where they “had commenced killing

poultry, cooking, eating, drinking, and rioting.” 46 But the elder Andry, who had survived

the slaves’ initial attack, painted a different picture: “the rebels stood their ground and,

‘colors displayed and full of arrogance,’ their leaders mounted and in some cases

uniformed.”47 This would seem to suggest that the insurrectionists were organized, and

may have even included former soldiers in their ranks.

Within 24-hours of the initial attack, 80 local militia had been organized by

Manual Andry to suppress the rebellion. Andry petitioned Governor Claiborne for troops

to help suppress the rebellion, and the fortuitous arrival of the commander-in-chief of

U.S. troops in the Southern region, meant that they were readily available. By the time

Hampton’s troops arrived at the scene of the fighting, the battle was over. Sixty-six blacks

were killed in the fray, 17 were missing, and 16 were taken captive and held for trial.48

The trial began two days later, and of the 30 accused, most admitted their guilt, some

accused others, and many refused to implicate anyone other than themselves. Those

found guilty were executed and beheaded, their heads placed on poles along the German

Coast as an example to other slaves.49 In the aftermath of the revolt, local whites by turns

- Kelly 19 -

46 Dormon, ‘The Persistent Scepter: Slave Rebellion in Territorial Louisiana’: 395




blamed the territory’s émigrés, the Spanish, and Barataria privateers for inciting the

rebellion.50

Certainly, what Watts has termed “notification fear” in his study of diseased

diasporas was at play in the aftermath of the 1811 slave revolt. It was in the interests of

the territorial authorities in Louisiana to downplay the events of the insurrectionists—

they had their political and economic interests in the slave system to protect and the

image of white supremacy to nurture.51 So formulations of the 1811-slave revolt became

predictably benign: only a few slaves, on a few plantations, wholly unorganized and

quickly put down. While records of the physical damage caused by the insurgents are

scant, one local merchant writing to a client in Mississippi said: “A little disturbance

among the Negroes up the coast, has put a stop for the moment to all kinds of business.”52

Moreover, Governor Claiborne’s appropriation of federal dollars to reimburse “the great

and serious loss of property” to the affected planters, suggests that the effects of the

rebellion were far-reaching.53 Whatever really occurred, the fact remains that the history

of the largest slave rebellion to happen in the United States remains curiously absented

out of the national consciousness and regional history. How do we recover this history

and what are the challenges inherent in the process of recovery?

- Kelly 20 -





Problematizing the Atlantic

Thus far I have tried to show that the possibilities opened up by an Atlantic

framework enable us to see the 1811 slave revolt as part of a larger connected history of

sailors, soldiers, and slaves moving around the Atlantic. These networks enable us to

attempt a reading of the revolt as not merely reactionary, but negotiated within,

transformed by, and inseparable from trans-Atlantic conversations of race and nation. The

St. Dominguan revolution offers a prototype of how these conversations are transported

and transformed in Atlantic networks. The 1811 Slave Revolt, in its close proximity to the

revolutionary ideals being traded across the Louisiana territory is another apt candidate to

trace this dynamic at work. But something falls apart in the attempt. I suggest that the

failure of the 1811 slave revolt to offer us more than a fuzzy picture of rebellion fomented

in Atlantic networks, has implications for the limitations of an Atlantic history paradigm

as a whole. In an Atlantic history framework, the 1811 Slave Revolt loses its potency and

specific local references. This limitation may have less to do with the aims of Atlantic

History than its methods.

How does an Atlantic History paradigm accomplish its goal of “cast[ing] old

problems in an entirely new light, and illuminat[ing] connections hitherto obscured?”54

Catherine Hall’s book, Civilizing Subjects, is a wonderful example of the great potential

of an Atlantic history study. Her resources are British colonial records, Baptist missionary

records, and various other primary sources. I mention Hall because she zeroes in on

- Kelly 21 -


moments of rebellion (in her study, Morant Bay in Jamaica) as worthy of careful attention

because those moments represent “[rare] times when the collective identity of the

colonizer or colonized overrode all other distinctions.”55 Certainly we can see this at play

in the aftermath of the 1811 slave revolt, informing—to borrow another term from Watts

—an 1811 “construct” in which white Louisianians closed ranks in the face of a common

enemy. But in the case of the 1811 slave revolt, at least, we can also imagine some

dissonances that problematize the colonizer-colonized dichotomy. For example, if we

turn to the official sources that are available, then the 1811 slave revolt emerges as a

minor rebellion that other slaves and free blacks help put down. Accounts of faithful

“house slaves” being manumitted after warning their masters about the revolt, and of free

blacks who helped defeat the rebel slaves, suggest a much less stark relationship between

“colonizer” and “colonized,” even in a moment of crisis when these distinctions were

forcefully invoked.56 The slippage of these terms—colonized and colonizer—is not

immaterial, and reflects the larger problem of terminology that an Atlantic history

approach presents.57 The ill-fit of these terms when talking about the 1811 slave revolt,

begs the question of whether an Atlantic history framework can accommodate the

dynamic that emerges when the colony and metropole are in the same place.

A separate, but related, issue is the problem of sources. When studying slave

rebellion in the Atlantic, do we ever really get a view from the other side? What records

are available to examine the insurrectionist’s version of events? Even James Dormon, a

- Kelly 22 -

55 Hall, Civilizing Subjects: 16

56 Dorman, ‘The Persistent Scepter: Slave Rebellion in Territorial Louisiana’: 402


white historian writing of the 1811 slave revolt more than a century later, recognized the

far reaching problems posed by the lack of slave accounts:

“Most of what is known about any specific episode, be it actual insurrection, conspiracy to rebel, or just rumor is known from white sources only, and the whites living among substantial numbers of slaves tended to harbor extremely complex and confused attitudes towards the threat of rebellion. . .White sources simply cannot be read at face value on the matter, not the least reason for which being that they are inevitably inconsistent and frequently contradictory. With such acute problems bedeviling the study of slave rebellion then, there is little reason to wonder at the confused state of scholarship on the subject.”58

Hall’s project represents is an impressive effort to overcome the “confused scholarship”

in order to reveal the ways in which colonial rebellion forces a rereading of empire. But I

don’t think it would be a stretch to say that even when these histories of rebellion are

reconstructed, they are reconstructed from a one-sided point of view. The Atlantic

paradigm’s emphasis on trade networks means that the reconstructive efforts are largely

guided by the availability of official records along certain routes. Detours that may have

taken a black Jacobin from St. Dominigue to Cuba to New Orleans to Mexico, are

inevitably neglected and nearly impossible to reconstruct using empirical methods. So

what emerges are accounts of the metropole-colony dynamic unfolding along a few

privileged routes that continually absent out the slaves’ perspective, while remaining

faithful to imperial borders. And here, Laurent Dubois was speaking of Guadeloupe, but

the same questions could be asked of the 1811 (or any) rebellion:

“In a modern survey of slave revolts in Guadeloupe during the revolutionary period, the event was briefly mentioned as a case involving ‘slaves under the command of political forces they did not understand.’ Yet, as a moment of bloody conflict that pitted slaves against masters and blacks against whites, its presence

- Kelly 23 -


still lingers in the town. What role can the stories of these mostly forgotten deaths, of unexpected allegiances and betrayals, play in a Guadeloupe whose simultaneous assimilation and exclusion from the French nation remains a constant cultural and political concern”59

Dubois is not only asking how we recover those stories, but also what role those stories

might play in mobilizing a political sensibility among present-day black Guadeloupans.

This question might be recast as “What role might stories of the 1811 Slave Revolt play

in New Orleans, a city whose population is marginalized by race and class, in forcing the

United States to be held accountable for its global hegemony?”

Gilroy’s cultural studies approach to the Atlantic also brings with it its own set of

problems. Gilroy’s analysis starts with the image of the ship as a “living, micro-cultural,

micro-political system in motion,” immediately focusing attention on the Middle Passage

in a way which meets Games’ injunction to restore Africa to the Atlantic.60 In Gilroy, the

Enlightenment project implicated, and modern ideals of truth and rationality as universal

concepts are said to be recast by slaves’ experiences in modernity. What’s at stake in the

reconstitution of modernity is a “new ethics of freedom” and a “new concept of selfhood”

marked by rapport with death and a near-constant condition of being in pain. 61 While

Gilroy paints a convincing picture of slaves’ role in recasting these ideals, his analysis

operates on the theoretical level and seems to lose its political urgency. And while slave

stories are central to Gilroy’s discussion, those stories seem curiously disconnected from

the present, operating in the art/culture plane, but not the socio-political. Joan Dayan, in

- Kelly 24 -

59 Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: 126


61 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: 56, 63, 203

her critique of Gilroy, zeroes in on this disconnect: “For the idea of slavery, so central to

his argument (and so necessary to our understanding of what he calls the enlightened

‘complicity of reason and terror’) becomes nothing more than a metaphor.”62

If Not Atlantic, Then What?

So what now? The 1811 slave revolt makes a convincing case for Atlantic

connections and networks, but neither Hall’s emphasis on reconstructing networks of

people and commodities, nor Gilroy’s emphasis on tracing the cultural forms that

emerged out of blacks’ remembrance of slavery seems sufficient for drawing out the

revolt’s political exigency and present-day relevance. How does the problem of records,

the ill-fit of the colonizer-colonized dichotomy, and the curious neutralization of the

rebellion that surfaces when trying to place this history in an Atlantic paradigm point

toward a larger problem with the methodology of Atlantic history and the viability of

metropoles and colonies in general?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but one problem might be the fact

that 1811 slave revolt was an American rebellion largely fomented in Caribbean and

European networks. That these national distinctions are largely meaningless is the point.

The 1811 slave revolt resists an easy reading as a reconstitution of American

revolutionary ideals by “colonized” blacks. These terms simply don’t fit when describing

the American situation. In America, much more so than the European metropoles as a

whole, the boundaries between colonizer and colonized aren’t so clear, largely because

- Kelly 25 -

62 Dayan, ‘Paul Gilroy’s slaves, ships, and routes: The middle passage as metaphor’: 7

the metropole and colony are in the same geographic space. This leads to an inside/

outside problem that may be thought of as Europe’s mulatto problem times 1000—the

result of the “other” being inside you, geographically and otherwise.

Another complication is that New Orleans was an American territory “full of

foreigners,” and the sentiments being debated, discussed, and defended in this territory

were staked in European allegiances. We’ve again reverted back to nation-speak, but the

point is important: How do we talk about metropole-colony when the dynamics at play

are staked in more than one metropole?

Games has warned us that an Atlantic history paradigm has the propensity to “slip

into the language of imperial dynamics.”63 Imperial language reifies borders and

boundaries, and prevents us from seeing how “colonial dichotomies of ruler and ruled,

white and black, colonizer and colonized only reflected part of the reality in which people

lived.”64 This isn’t to say that Atlantic history is insensitive to the problems posed by

these categories, but that it unwittingly and perhaps inevitably invokes them when

confronted with the methodological constraints discussed earlier of studying a particular

metropole’s records and routes in relation to a particular colonized.

Fred Cooper suggests that “colonial historiography has been so nationally bound

that it has blinded us to those circuits of knowledge and communication that took other

routes than those shaped by the metropole-colony axis alone.”65 The alternative routes

Cooper suggests might enable us to see the 1811 slave revolt, the St. Dominigue

- Kelly 26 -


64 Cooper and Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony’: 34


revolution, and the events of Hurricane Katrina as incarnations of the same imperial

culture.66 If there is such a thing as an “imperial culture” what are its devices, and how

can an Atlantic framework capture this dynamic? Can a more global framework account

for the political exigency of the 1811 slave revolt or are we thinking in the wrong

direction? The fact is, there are ships/passages that get talked about in Atlantic history,

and ships/passages that don’t. There are slave stories that never get recovered in

reconstructive efforts, and modern-day agendas that never get implicated in the process of

looking back. Yes, the metropole and colony were mutually constituted. . .and so what?

But to go beyond colony and metropole, to “understand how the complexities of colonial

history might prompt us to question other recent assessments of racism” is the more

urgent concern.67 What is the latest construct to make “ethnocentric claims in universalist

language” and who is made vulnerable because of it?68

A Katrina diaspora in the Atlantic

All of these themes—race, nation, empire, rebellion—are relevant for our understanding

of the events of Hurricane Katrina. When C.L.R. James wrote of the slaves at Le

Cap--“[They] destroyed tirelessly. . .they were seeking their salvation in the most obvious

way, the destruction of what they knew was the cause of their sufferings; and if they

destroyed much it was because they had suffered much.”—he could have been describing

the 1811 revolutionaries making their way down River Road just as readily as the

- Kelly 27 -




stranded blacks looting Walmarts in the hurricane’s aftermath. The fact is that Katrina

was nothing if not a modern-day slave revolt. The networks in place here were not

soldier, sailor, or slave networks, but their modern-day equivalents: police, media, and the

city’s black poor.

We know that Katrina represented a pivotal moment in race relations in America. The

question most relevant for this essay however, is how to read Katrina alongside the 1811

rebellion, and better understand both in reference to Atlantic networks, Atlantic

methodologies, and the ideological insufficiencies suggested by the metropole-colony

dichotomy. Like the soldiers in 1811—soldiers who could have been insurrectionists and

soldiers who were most certainly enlisted to suppress the rebellion—the soldiers and

police who were authorized to “shoot to kill” by Louisiana’s Governor Kathleen Blanco

were “simultaneously coerced and coercing.”69 How do we read their actions in light of

the steadily rising number of American casualties in Iraq? When Brigadier General Gary

Jones said that the National Guard would launch a combat operation against the

“insurgency” in New Orleans was he conflating the black bodies there with similarly

disposable brown bodies in Iraq?70

What about the media and its conflicted portrayal of New Orleans’ looter-victims?

What actually happened at the Convention Center and why are the cold, hard facts less

important than the “looter-rapist” construct which emerged to validate the government’s

militaristic response (and where have we seen this before)? In fact, the personal stories,

- Kelly 28 -


70 Clyde Woods, ‘Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans: Katrina, Trap Economics, and the Rebirth of the Blues,’ American Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 4 (December 2005): 1005-1018

myths, lies, and unspeakable truths which spun a tale for those looking anon, may tell a

national story as loaded as the silence which enshrouds the history of the 1811 slave

revolt. And what about nation? As cultural historian Henry Giroux correctly observes,

“Hurricane Katrina made it abundantly clear that only the government had the power,

resources, and authority to address complex undertakings such as dealing with the totality

of the economic, environmental, cultural, and social destruction that impacted the Gulf

Coast.”71 So while the “myth of continents” and the fallacies of national boundaries

might be an academic truth, on the day-to-day “who knows but on the lower frequencies I

speak for you” level, nation is not yet dispensable.72

Giroux has argued that Katrina revealed a new kind of social death of a very

different tenor than the black Atlantic’s “rapport with death” in which the constant

condition of being in pain is almost made sublime.73 Social death as revealed by Katrina

has not had a chance to be historicized, romanticized, or remixed by the black diaspora’s

genius for the tragi-comic. Katrina showed us that the state’s own disadvantaged citizens

“are already seen as dead within a transnational economic and political framework.”

Katrina revealed that the social death engendered by the nation’s neglect of its

disadvantaged citizens reverberates in the diaspora—in the Sudan, in Darfur, in Port au

Prince. 74

- Kelly 29 -

71 Henry Giroux, ‘Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability’: 174-175

72 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 2ed (New York: Vintage Books, 1995): 581


74Woods, ‘Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans: 1006

Hurricane Katrina resulted in the creation of a new network for the black Atlantic.

Just like some of the other networks at play in the 1811 slave revolt, the Katrina network

of hundreds of thousands of working class blacks dispersed across 44 states reveals

America’s inside-out problem, once again implicating the problem of the “other” at

home. No real boundaries or sustained closing of ranks has been enabled. As Clyde

Woods points out, “The arrival of desperate African Americans in large towns and small

cities has often been accompanied by both an outpouring of sympathy and surging gun

sales.”75 What, if anything, does this ambivalence tell us about Atlantic history?

St. Domingue, the 1811 Slave Revolt, and Katrina leave us face to face with the

need to find a need to remember slavery in ways that cross national, temporal, and

methodological boundaries. Henry Giroux tells us that “there is more at stake here than

the resurgence of old-style racism; there is the recognition that some groups have the

power to protect themselves from such stereotypes and others do not, and for those who

do not—especially poor blacks—racist myths have a way of producing precise, if not

deadly, material consequences.”76 An Atlantic history paradigm teaches us how to trace

those myths in the calibration of the modern world even as it has the propensity to

neutralize them as metaphors in political discourse. What is needed in this new imperial

moment is a collective identity that can mobilize in acts of resistance against the new

hegemony whose methods—insidious, contradictory, and self-propelling—impoverish

whole diasporas, shrinking the global world while the disconnected get disposed of by

diseases, natural disasters, and wars. Wendy Walters has suggested that literature offers

- Kelly 30 -

75 Woods, ‘Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans’: 1008

76 Giroux, ‘Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability’: 176-177

an alternative lens through which to view strategies of resistance.77 If this is true, then in

the very act of recording and inventing history, there is the possibility to engender

change. How will Katrina’s black voices be recorded? Who will claim the “persistence of

memory” and speak the slave stories silenced in 1811?78 If we could just start there,

maybe we could find a way out of this imploding Atlantic.

- Kelly 31 -

77 Wendy Walters, ‘Writing the Diaspora in Black International Literature,’ in Michael A. Gomez (ed.), Diasporic Africa: A Reader (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006): 273

78 Jermaine Archer, ‘Bitter Herbs and a Lock of Hair: Recollections of Africa in Slave Narratives of the Garrisonian Era,’ in Michael A. Gomez (ed.), Diasporic Africa: A Reader (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006): 85

Bibliography

Caryn Cosse Bell, Revolution, Romanticism, and the Afro-Creole Protest Tradition in Louisiana 1718-1868 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1997):

W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seaman in the Age of Sail (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1997)

Frederick Cooper, ‘What is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian’s Perspective,’ African Affairs, 100 (2001) 189-213

David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus (eds.) A Turbulent Time (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997)

Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Between Metropole and Colony’ in Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds.) Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley/ Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press, 1997)

Joan Dayan, ‘Paul Gilroy’s slaves, ships, and routes: The middle passage as metaphor,’ Research in African Literatures, vol. 27, no. 4 (Winter, 1996): 7-14

James Dormon, ‘The Persistent Scepter: Slave Rebellion in Territorial Louisiana,’ Louisiana History, vol. 18, no. 4 (Fall 1997): 389-404

Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 2ed (New York: Vintage Books, 1995)

Alison Games, ‘AHR Forum: Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,’ The American Historical Review June 2006 http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/111.3/games.html (27 Nov. 2006)

David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus (eds.) A Turbulent Time (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997)

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Harvard University Press/Cambridge, 1993)

Henry A. Giroux, ‘Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class and the Biopolitics of Disposability,’ College Literature, vol. 33, no.3 (Summer 2006): 171-196

- Kelly 32 -





Michael A. Gomez (ed.), Diasporic Africa: A Reader (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006)Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2002)

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, 2nd edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1989)

Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1982)

Putnam, Lara, “To Study the Fragments/Whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Social History, 39 (Spring 2006), 615-30.

Rebecca Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba After Slavery (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2005)

Clyde Woods, ‘Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans: Katrina, Trap Economics, and the Rebirth of the Blues,’ American Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 4 (December 2005): 1005-1018

- Kelly 33 -

Why the 1811 Slave Revolt Matters

Documents

Transcript of Why the 1811 Slave Revolt Matters