Heritage of Resistance: Reenactment to Honor Slave Rebellion

Against the modern backdrop of oil refineries, strip malls and gated communities, hundreds of reenactors will gather Friday in southeastern Louisiana to remember a time when slavery flourished as a blight on America and some enslaved people fought back.

They plan to reenact the largest slave rebellion in American history.

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“Seeing hundreds of black folk with machetes and muskets and sickles and sabers, flags flying, chanting to traditional African drumming, is going be an amazing moment. And people would be like, ‘What am I looking at? This doesn’t make sense,’” he said. “It will be an area where people can learn a lot and think a lot.”

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Finishing touches are being applied to the hundreds of costumes and props that will be used to recreate the German Coast Uprising of 1811, the largest slave revolt in U.S. history.

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Slaves across a stretch of plantations organized for months before launching their rebellion on Jan. 8, 1811. Over two days the group grew to an estimated 200 to 500 people, according to Daniel Rasmussen’s book “American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt.”

Their goal was to march on New Orleans and establish a free republic. The rebellion was inspired in part by the Haitian revolution but conceived by people born in Louisiana and Africa, said Dr. Ibrahima Seck, the director of research at the Whitney Plantation and a historical advisor to the reenactment.

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“You can’t actually understand American society if you don’t understand slavery, and you can’t understand slavery if you don’t understand slave revolts,” he said.

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Organizers have taken precautions. They’ll have law enforcement and private security, and reenactors are advised not to engage with anyone along the route who might harass them.

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After a climactic battle between the slaves and planters, the rebellion was crushed. Rasmussen describes how the planters chopped the heads off the slaves’ corpses — about 100 altogether — and displayed them along the road going from New Orleans into the plantation country.

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