American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt
by Daniel Rasmussen
New York, NY: Harper Perennial, 2012
288 pp. $27
American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt tells the two-century-suppressed story of a mass uprising of slaves, on French-owned plantations near New Orleans, Louisiana, on January 8-9, 1811. A Harvard University undergraduate thesis, developed into a full-scale history, published on the bicentennial of the insurrection, Daniel Rasmussen’s research reminds us that slaves were never as passive or as happy as the propagandists of Dixie pastoralism enjoy imagining. Instead, they resisted their oppression in every way that they could: “By aborting their own children, poisoning livestock, lighting fires, and escaping […], the slaves struggled to dilute, deflect, and if possible demolish slaveholders’ authority.”
Their ultimate rejection of slavery took the form of rebellion, from the successful, mass insurgency (1791-1804) that eventually founded Haiti as the world’s first black republic to much smaller and unsuccessful revolts such as that led by Nat Turner, in Virginia, in 1831. Apologists for slavery – from Nova Scotia’s Thomas Chandler Haliburton to U.S. historians like Ulrich B. Phillips – have found it essential to caricature slaves as “stupid, negligent, docile, inconstant, dilatory, and ‘by racial quality submissive,’” for the simple reason that, as Rasmussen suggests, African slavery in the Americas was the philosophical engine of the Enlightenment, the political instrument of American and European imperialism, and the economic propellant of the Industrial Revolution. Truth: Slavery benefitted too many people, empires, and nations to be depicted as tyrannous and slaves as unhappy, never mind that, for instance, “Sugar, cotton and coffee don’t grow themselves. They demand backbreaking, intolerable labor – labor to which no free man would choose to submit.”
Rasmussen’s clear and here-and-there poetic narrative establishes that a multicultural coalition of Lousiana slaves – with leaders from Louisiana, the Kongo, the Asante kingdom, and with “French, German, Spanish, West African, and Anglo-American” names – numbering between 200 and 500 souls, partly armed and partly horsed, marched some twenty miles to within sight of the church spires of New Orleans, planning to massacre whites and liberate blacks. That was on January 8, 1811. The next day, a smaller force of scared, but well-armed planters routed the rebel band. Next came torture, executions, and the terrorist planting of lopped-off black heads on poles and posts – all along the Mississippi – for crows to feast upon. (Nova Scotian, William Stairs perpetrated similar beheadings in the Congo, 1887-92.). Too, the rebellion was recast as criminal banditry, and expunged from history.
Nevertheless, Rasmussen persuades one that the insurrection had consequences, including the annexations of Florida, Texas, and other adjacent territories, in concord with a policy of “Economic development through slave-based agriculture,” i.e., the further expansion of an “agrarian republic,” whose “farmers” were really slaves. One other result of the brief – but mass rebellion – was the learning of the lesson, by slaves, that one needs weapons if one wants liberty. Thus, during the U.S. Civil War, blacks flocked to Union lines and, once they were permitted to do so, joined Union forces, and fought – with discipline and ferocity – against their former masters.
I turn from Rasmussen’s fine history to Stephen Spielberg’s latest, history-based film, Lincoln (2012), which narrates the backroom skulduggery necessary to ensure the passage of an anti-slavery amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The movie is more about political battles than military battles. I wager that this drama is intended as a compliment to U.S. President Barack Obama. I think that Spielberg is asking Americans to see Obama’s struggles to achieve health care and economic “fairness” – in the face of recalcitrant courts and wealthy (and sometimes racist) opponents – as mirroring Lincoln’s struggles to entrench anti-slavery. Perhaps like Lincoln, Obama believed too much in compromise in his first term. Now, as with Lincoln in regard to the 13th Amendment, the message is, “No more Mr. Nice Guy.”
