American Uprising

Review by Lucas A. Powe, Jr.

As long as there was slavery in North America there were fears of slave uprisings. These fears (and hopes for those enslaved) were heightened after the brutal but successful uprising in Santo Domingo. The major slave conspiracies in the United States—always known by the leader’s names: Gabriel (1800), Denmark Vesey (1822), Nat Turner (1831)—were, in the first two cases, suppressed before they began and with Nat Turner quickly put down. Yet the largest slave uprising in the United States was, until publication of American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt by Daniel Rasmussen, virtually unknown. (I had never heard of it.)

American Uprising is the story of a revolt, plotted over several years and encompassing many plantations, outside of New Orleans lasting three days in January 1811. It encompassed 500 slaves, and in its aftermath 30 slaves were executed—often savagely. Many found their heads severed and left as examples. Because they were tipped off by other slaves believing that their future freedom was more likely to come from aiding their masters, most whites successfully fled and only two were killed. The revolt ended in a pitched battle where the planters’ militia routed the slaves without the loss of any white lives. (Nat Turner’s two-day revolt saw about 60 slaves killing a like number of whites.)

Without minimizing the horrors of slavery, some slaves worked in better conditions than others. Being transported to the sugar plantations in the Caribbean guaranteed an early death. In the United States being “sold South” was never good. The rice plantations of South Carolina and the sugar plantations of Louisiana exemplified particularly harsh conditions of heat, humidity and disease. (The Louisiana plantations were bounded by the Mississippi on the east and swamps on the west.) The Louisiana planters enjoyed the yields from the most profitable cash crop in the hemisphere.

American Uprising is more than a narrative of the January 1811 revolt and its bloody aftermath. There is a discussion of how slavery operated in the cane fields. It offers a good history of how the slaves arrived in Louisiana and their background in Africa. And the story is set within the social and political split between the French planter class and the new American governor, a split that was healed after the uprising was put down. The governor created a narrative that minimized the organization of the revolt and treated those involved as common criminals. Subsequent white authors accepted the narrative and hence the largest uprising in American history was lost to American history.

A final observation about American Uprising is in order. This is a first book, and I know from experience how hard writing a first book is. Yet Daniel Rasmussen is a 2009 summa cum laude graduate of Harvard College. His is a name that is likely to be around for a long time and let’s hope there are many more books in his unlimited future.