DESTREHAN PLANTATION, La —
You could not ask for a more evocative scene than this — one day and 202 years after the largest slave revolt in this country began near here.
A misty fog makes the sky moss-green, and the ground is puddled with yesterday’s rain. Live oaks the size of grain silos frame a levee that holds at bay the Mississippi River. A few miles from the New Orleans airport, this place is a world away from the city’s siren bray and hustle.
The big house here was built and most probably designed in 1787 by a slave, Charles Paquet, who not only bought his freedom with the construction, but afterward was rewarded with a slave of his own. Human life might not have been cheap, but it was for purchase.
Slaves along the Great River Road plantations — the so-called German Coast — presumably had heard about the successful slave coup in Haiti in 1804 and carefully, over several years, planned one of their own. On Jan. 8, 1811, the time must have seemed right.
With the drumbeat of freedom in their heads, the slaves began their doomed march. Historians say eventually the army was anywhere from 150 to 500 strong, men and women, led by a rebel slave driver named Charles. Some believe he originally was from Haiti, where his inspiration gelled.
The determined group first attacked a planter, Manuel Andry, and killed his son. The insurgents had heard that the Louisiana Militia had weapons stored at the Andry Plantation, thus the tactical choice.
But that cache had been moved, so the marauding slaves armed themselves with whatever crude weapons they could muster and marched on toward New Orleans and the seat of territorial government.
Word spread. Houses and property were pillaged and burned. There was panic in the white community, with many planters fleeing to New Orleans. But the rebellion that began with bloody bluster quickly was squashed. Within 48 hours, better-armed militia troops from both Baton Rouge and New Orleans had ended the feeble slave effort.
Two whites were killed. About 100 blacks. One report has 66 killed in battle and 18 executed after summary trials, one held right here Jan. 13 — five days after the revolt began — at Destrehan. Nobody knows for sure how many slaves were killed, but many of their corpses were mutilated. Documents show the executed had “their heads harvested” and displayed on poles along the levee.
The piked heads of their fellow slaves would serve to keep others in line. Or so went planter reasoning.
An economy that depended on the enslaved to harvest its sugar cane crops would not show mercy. Destrehan documents said execution and the grotesque display of human heads was “necessary to suppress a revolt which could take on a ferocious character if the chiefs and principal accomplices are not promptly destroyed.”
Today, a few primitive art paintings depict the bloody rebellion and are displayed in an outbuilding on the Destrehan property. The imagination has to do the rest.
In the world of plantation tours — endless petticoat mirrors, shoo-fly fans and four-poster beds — this one may hold the most important history lesson of all.
(To find out more about Rheta Grimsley Johnson and her books, visit www.rhetagrimsleyjohnsonbooks.com.)
Opinion
More than a petticoat mirror
- Opinion
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Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.” -
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist
Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.
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VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008. -
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists
When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”
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Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing. -
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered. -
1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun
The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral. -
Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.
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Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.
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Multiculturalism is not rational
By Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist
Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley. - More Opinion Headlines
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