American Uprising by Daniel Rasmussen Page B

political radicalism and dedication to the cause must have proved inspirational to many other slaves, his enthusiasm as contagious as the deep anger from which it emerged. He had traveled from plantation to plantation through the dark cypress swamps on the edges of the cane fields. Posting a spy in a tall tree to watch for intruders, just as some of them had done as children in Africa, the Akan warriors in Louisiana met to organize the uprising.
    The third slave at the meeting was Harry Kenner. Originally from Virginia, he had developed a trusted core of English-speaking slaves—a dozen slaves on his plantation who would participate in the revolt. A twenty-five-year-old carpenter, Harry was a slave at the Kenner and Henderson plantation, twenty-one miles to the southeast at the end of the German Coast closest to New Orleans.
    These three men, each with different insights and abilities, had planned their insurrection and spread word of the uprising through small cells distributed up and down the coast, especially at James Brown’s plantation, the Meuillion plantation, and the Kenner and Henderson plantation.
    These cells were born out of networks of communication that tied the slaves to New Orleans and its diverse marketplace and ports. During their free time on the weekends, slaves often participated in the thriving economy of the region. They grew staple crops, raised small livestock, and collected wood and moss, and traded these products of their labors to itinerant peddlers or in the marketplaces. Black peddlers went door to door marketing goods. The River Road was full of activity, whether organized by the masters or the slaves, and these activities formed the base of the revolutionary cells.
    What did these men talk about in their secret meetings, behind the closed doors of the slave cabins or under the tall trees on the edges of the fields? They wrote nothing down and told no one. But all evidence points to a revolutionary ferment. The slaves, it seems, were growing increasingly radical in their political views—a radicalism that occasionally bubbled up into outright violence.
    Prior to the sugar boom, New Orleans was a poor, multicultural city with very few social controls. The lines between slavery and freedom were not clearly drawn, and slaves frequently escaped into the swamps to form maroon colonies. There was a history of armed resistance in these areas that drew on French, Creole, and Kongolese traditions. These insurrectionary traditions shaped the lives of the slaves and represented an alternative political culture to that of the planters.
    In the 1780s, the slave Juan Malo from the d’Arensbourg plantation on the German Coast led a thriving maroon colony in the swamps below New Orleans. St. Malo, as he named himself, was reported to have buried his axe into a tree near his colony and declared, “Woe to the white who would pass this boundary.” St. Malo and his men—reportedly numbering over 100—repeatedly repelled the raiders sent by the Spanish government who came into the swamps on pirogues armed to the teeth with guns. The maroons built extensive networks of slaves on the plantations that provided them with food and tipped them off about impending raids. Eventually, the Spanish grew so incensed by St. Malo’s independence and the threat he posed to the slave plantations that they sent a massive force of militiamen into the swamps in 1783. The militia, following the tip from a spy, came upon the unsuspecting maroons and opened fire. This time their expedition succeeded. They captured a wounded St. Malo and brought him back to New Orleans. On June 19, 1784, the Spanish hanged St. Malo in the center of New Orleans—creating a martyr and a folk hero for the German Coast slaves.
    In 1795, the Spanish discovered a massive slave conspiracy at Pointe Coupée—an area on the high grounds between New Orleans and Natchez. The conspiracy took place at the height of the French Revolution and just after the