Join the 1st slave revolt

Photo credit: OzarksRazorback

By 1790, plantations flanked the Mississippi River from below New Orleans all the way to Natchez and above. Few of the grand mansions remain, however, most having fallen into disrepair after the Civil War, caught fire or been demolished by the Union Army and/or neglect.

One very significant plantation just 25 miles upriver from New Orleans was preserved, however. Destrehan Plantation, built 1787-90, which was in ruins 40 years ago, has been carefully restored by local preservationists in The River Road Historical Society. The site is located in Larose, just a short distance from Louis Armstrong, heading away from New Orleans.

Jean Baptiste Honore d’Estrehan, Sieur de Peaupre (1716-1765), was the son of the councilor of Louis XIV in Paris. His father Jean Baptiste arrived in New Orleans in 1730, shortly after the city’s founding, and was appointed as the colony’s treasurer. When his son Jean Noel d’Estrehan married Catherine de Gauvry about 1745, the couple moved into her family’s home, where they had eight children. Their home, named Destrehan Plantation, a former indigo and sugar cane plantation, still stands.

Not only is this plantation significant for its proximity to New Orleans and for its classical French colonial architecture, but because it is the site where U.S. troops halted the country’s most successful slave revolt, the 1811 German Coast Uprising.

On the night of January 8, amid Mardi Gras celebrations, the revolutionary leader Charles Deslondes, a trusted mule driver, organized more than 200 enslaved workers from 10 plantations to march downriver from the plantation owned by Manuel Andry in present day LaPlace to New Orleans, gathering enslaved people along the way, with the intent of demanding that Gov. William C. C. Claiborne abolish slavery in Louisiana. Up to 500 enslaved people ended up killing two plantation owners and torching buildings en route.

Two days later, federal troops under the leadership of Gen. Wade Hampton were called and a well armed citizens’ militia formed to stop the march at Fortier Plantation. The military and plantation owners shot and killed 100 rebels and captured 20. The rest escaped into the swamps.

A mock trial held at Destrehan Plantation sentenced the leaders to be executed. Jean Noel Destrehan took charge of one of the three tribunals. Many participants were beheaded and their heads mounted on poles along 60 miles of River Road as a warning against further revolts. The 1811 uprising was the first of several, large-scale revolts across the South leading up to the Civil War and Emancipation.

In addition to seeing furnishings and portraits inside the manor, historic colonial documents and slave cabins, cooper shop, blacksmith shop and dry-goods store, there are also demonstrations of open-hearth cooking, indigo dyeing, bousillage (mud brick and wood timber construction), sugar cane production, carpentry, weaving and African American herbal remedies and gris-gris.

Since the 1811 rebellion anniversary, you can drive the route and hear an audio tour of the trail from the Manuel Andry Plantation, following much of the same journey those first, brave participants took.