Enslaved Army That Marched on New Orleans

On a rainy January night in 1811, an enslaved driver named Charles Deslondes led a small band of men into the house of a militia commander on a Louisiana sugar plantation. By dawn they had seized the parish's guns and uniforms. Within a day, several hundred enslaved men were marching down the River Road toward New Orleans under improvised flags, drums beating, gathering recruits at every plantation they passed. It was the largest armed revolt of enslaved people in American history, and for nearly two centuries almost no one remembered it.This narrative history follows the rising from the cane fields of the German Coast to the battle at Bernoudy's plantation, the planters' tribunals, and the sixty miles of severed heads raised along the levee. It reaches back to the Rhineland settlers who founded the coast, the African kingdoms its captives came from, and the revolution in Saint-Domingue that haunted every master on the river. It reaches forward to Louisiana's statehood, the slave empire of the Deep South, and the long fight to recover what the planters worked to erase.Grounded in the trial records and the latest scholarship, it is the story of men who tried to take a city, and of the silence that buried them.