Charles Deslondes is a name lost to history. By design.

Born in either Haiti or Louisana around 1789, he was described on plantation records as a “Creole mulatto slave,” a “field laborer.” As a young man, he was loaned to a cruel planter, Colonel Manuel Andry, as overseer to the master’s eighty-six slaves.

Charles’s position afforded him more power and privilege, a better life than those he managed. In a ruthless system of forced labor, you’d think he’d bask in his upgraded status. But he was still enslaved. Not his own man. He never would be.

Associating with two enslaved men from West Africa, Kook and Quamana, Charles hatched a plan. They would emulate the revolt in Santo Domingo (present-day Haiti) where people of color rose up against the French, creating the world’s first nation to permanently ban slavery. The trio’s goal was to create a new nation around New Orleans that outlawed human bondage.

On Sundays, in a place called Congo Square, enslaved people congregated to bring the fruits of their small gardens to market. Drums, singing, and dancing made for festive days off. They also allowed whispers of rebellion from one person to the next, maybe even masked military training.

After days of heavy rains, the word came. On January 8, 1811, about twenty-five men led by Charles Deslondes attacked the Big House of Colonel Andry. It is said that Charles took on the owner himself while others hacked up his son, Gilbert.

I wish I could have been a proverbial fly on the wall in 1811 when a man considered his lapdog, Charles, burst into Manuel Andry’s room with an axe. What was said? But moreso, what ensued? Despite being well armed with two dozen men behind his overseer, a wounded Andry escaped Charles in relatively good health. Well enough to make his way to the Mississippi and a rickety canoe. He rowed across the river to the western side where he roused other plantation owners. He then led eighty of them back to squash the revolt. Was the man incredibly strong and wily or did fortune shine on him beyond all reason? What was Charles experiencing at the time? A dramatic scene, I feel sure.

Freedom fighters grabbed the local militia’s few weapons and uniforms stored there. Charles believed the uniforms befitted a legitimate army, proving they were more than unruly rabble. Gunpowder was found in a nearby mill.

Taking anything they felt would be useful, including some horses and liquor, they set off for New Orleans, thirty-six miles south. Kook and Quamana may have been soldiers in Africa, and they divided the followers into companies with officers, flagmen, and drummers. While a few had swords or guns that used small duck and partridge shot, most carried farm implements like cane knives, machetes, and axes.

The group swelled with other enslaved people and maroons, runaways who hid in the swamps, as they marched in formation down the River Road east of the Mississippi. They sang and chanted “On to Orleans!” and “Liberte”. Eyewitness accounts suggest a group of five hundred strong, making it the largest slave rebellion in United States history.

As they went, they burned five plantation homes, three to the ground. Only one other white person aside from Gilbert Andry was killed.

As word spread of the army’s approach, most white people ran to the supposed safety of New Orleans. One man, Francois Trepacnier, proved to be a prime candidate for the Darwin Awards*. This fool was so vile it was said he kept an enslaved boy named Gustave on a leash as a pet, throwing dinner scraps to him like a dog. A loyal slave (how?) alerted him of the danger, but he dismissed the warning. Boldly sitting on his porch with a shotgun across his lap, he waited.

It didn’t take long before the crowd appeared two hundred yards off. He blasted away with his shotgun. Which, at that distance, didn’t even come close to hitting anyone. Kook slipped around to the back of the house, crept through to the porch, and parted his hair with an axe.

Unlike other uprisings, there were no further white deaths. But the demise of many, many black people was yet to come.

By the following night, United States regular troops, dragoons, and militia commanded by Wade Hampton (he and his namesakes are the Forrest Gump of early US history!) attacked the resting rebels at Fornier Plantation. Andry’s men closed the circle around them and the rebels were defeated by the next day.

Sixty-six dead, sixteen captured, several unaccounted for. Native Americans were hired to seek out any people of color hiding in the woods to be killed or captured. Some of the slaughter was indiscriminate.

Three days later on January 13^th, a judge started the trial of twenty-seven captives. After one day of questioning seventy-five prisoners, eighteen of the enslaved were condemned to death. Each was to return to his home plantation to be shot by his master and beheaded. Piked heads dotted River Road for forty miles, ending in what is today New Orleans’s Jackson Square. Charles Deslondes’s death was much more gruesome.

Overkill? While some praised Hampton’s quelling of the danger, others, even in the South, claimed the general “indiscriminately butchered” prisoners. One wrote that “the most cruel and unusual punishment, at least in the United States, are inflicted without ceremony,” reminiscent of the massacres associated with the French Revolution.

Who or what was to blame for the uprising? Theories abounded. Americans in the area had no love for their French and Spanish neighbors whose brutality, they claimed, caused the discontent.

An early example of the myth that most enslaved people served loyally and happily, one newspaper declared “Americans, who have negroes, are under no fear; they are well treated, and their masters boast they could sleep in the huts with them and be perfectly safe.”

Governor Claiborne of Louisiana downplayed the whole event which he called “a small uprising among the slaves of several neighboring plantations that did not reflect the feelings of loyal slaves in the rest of the territory.”

The importance of this belief in cheerful, faithful slaves and kind, benevolent masters cannot be overstated. I suppose it helped the oppressors sleep at night since it was perpetrated for the next one hundred fifty years.

To such minds, Charles Deslondes and his followers were “brigands” and “banditti,” certainly exceptions to be quickly dealt with and their memory swept away. The planters’ livelihoods, based upon this flimsy defense of their “peculiar institution,” depended on it.

Today, the Andry Plantation is considered a historic resource. Many are working to keep the property open as a tribute to the courage of those who fought for freedom and human dignity. Hopefully, in the near future, the 1811 Kid Ory Historic House in LaPlace, Louisiana, will open to a public unafraid of our nation’s true history.

*The Darwin Awards are based on Charles Darwin’s theory that, in nature, the fittest survive. The awards are satirical mentions of those who’ve removed themselves from the gene pool by their own really dumb behavior.

Works Cited

Atun-Shei Films. “Freedom or Death: The Louisiana Slave Revolt of 1811.” Www.youtube.com, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zUPNtP3Yn0&t=413s. Accessed 30 Apr. 2024.

CrashCourse. “The Louisiana Rebellion of 1811: Crash Course Black American History #12.” Www.youtube.com, 6 Aug. 2021, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYOA_sS5q-A&t=551s. Accessed 30 Apr. 2024.

Fadel, Leila, and Emma Bowman. “Hundreds March in Reenactment of a Historic, but Long Forgotten Slave Rebellion.” NPR.org, 9 Nov. 2019, http://www.npr.org/2019/11/09/777810796/hundreds-march-in-reenactment-of-a-historic-but-long-forgotten-slave-rebellion. Accessed 30 Apr. 2024.

Thomas Marshall Thompson. “National Newspaper and Legislative Reactions to Louisiana’s Deslondes Slave Revolt of 1811.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, vol. 33, no. 1, 1992, pp. 5–29. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4232918. Accessed 30 Apr. 2024.

Verite, Drew Costley. “A Museum on a Former Plantation Shut Down. These Environmental Activists Want to Transform It. • Louisiana Illuminator.” Louisiana Illuminator, 2 Mar. 2024, lailluminator.com/2024/03/02/museum-plantation/. Accessed 30 Apr. 2024.

Waters, Leon. “Jan. 8, 1811: Louisiana’s Heroic Slave Revolt.” Zinn Education Project, http://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/louisianas-slave-revolt/. Accessed 30 Apr. 2024.