Charles Deslondes

Charles Deslondes was born around 1789, almost certainly in Saint-Domingue, and was transported to Louisiana with one of the waves of refugees fleeing the Haitian Revolution. He was enslaved on the Manuel Andry sugar plantation in St. John the Baptist Parish, on the German Coast — the strip of plantations along the Mississippi River north of New Orleans worked predominantly by enslaved laborers from West Africa and Saint-Domingue. He was the plantation's mulatto slave driver.

On the night of the eighth of January 1811, Deslondes led the largest slave revolt in American history. Between two hundred and five hundred enslaved people — drawn from German Coast plantations on the east bank of the Mississippi — marched along the river road toward New Orleans armed with cane knives, hoes, and a small number of firearms. They wounded Manuel Andry and killed his son. They burned three plantations. The intent was the capture of New Orleans itself, where the regular U.S. Army garrison numbered fewer than four hundred soldiers.

The uprising marched approximately twenty miles southward over two days. It was met by a hastily assembled militia of plantation owners and federal troops at the Bernoudy plantation on the tenth of January 1811. The battle that followed killed approximately forty-five of the insurgents in combat. The remainder were captured.

Deslondes was tortured to death by the planters who had recaptured him on the eleventh of January 1811. He was approximately twenty-two. A military tribunal subsequently ordered the execution of approximately eighty additional captured insurgents; their decapitated heads were displayed on poles along the river road from New Orleans north to Andry's plantation as a deterrent to other enslaved laborers.

The American press and Congressional record of 1811 substantially minimized the scale of the uprising. The 2011 bicentennial — and Daniel Rasmussen's 2011 history American Uprising — restored the German Coast Uprising to the historical record.

He is honored here as the slave driver who led the largest American slave revolt.