Daniel Rasmussen's, American Uprising: The Untold Story of America's Largest Slave
Revolt, presents a record analyzing just how slaves themselves brought about an end to slavery.
In a time prior to the Civil War, and decades before Nat Turner would lead on a slave revolt, several hundred slaves gathered weapons, dressed in uniform, and garnered any recruits along the way who would join them to rise up against their masters, burned down the plantations where they were held and march on to the city of New Orleans in defiance. Although their revolt was eventually stopped, it remains one among many actions taken up that led to the end of slavery in
America.
The author details the political strife of the time, including French sugar/sugarcane
plantation
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These rebels had already learned warfare tactics in their native Africa and thusly felt prepared to attack. At the time, the sugarcane industry was prominent for its excruciating work load and high death rate among the slaves. Yet, due to fact of its high profit return, planters/slave owners felt unaffected by their slave’s life span. Louisiana planters asserted the claim that Africans were “uniquely matched to the hot weather and tough work.” Of course, this was not true by any means. As Rasmussen says, “These colonial plantations were as close to a death camp as one could come in the late eighteenth century.”
These slaves knew that this had to be put to an end.
Eventually, the underground rebellion recruited Charles Deslondes, a light skinned mixed race slave driver, who basically served as the masters’ middleman to take their orders and deliver them to the slaves. While many of them were on the side of the masters and noted for going against a rebellion, Deslondes was all for it, (most likely due to his notoriously cruel