American Uprising by Daniel Rasmussen

Author:Daniel Rasmussen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-12-24T00:31:20+00:00

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In New Orleans, the planters convened a second set of trials, with the same purpose of establishing order through death. The first floor of the City Hall housed not only the guardhouse of the city guard but a prison for runaways (known as the Calaboose, from calabozo, the Spanish term for a vaulted dungeon). Here the captured rebel slaves were kept in irons. Some of them probably had been here before. Masters who did not want to punish their slaves could send them to City Hall, where a government official would press the slave flat on his face, binding his hands and feet to four posts before flogging the wretched man the set number of lashes. On the upper floors of the building the magistrates had their offices and courtrooms. Before their chambers, a gallery ran along the whole length of the building, with large windows airing the courtrooms where the slaves were brought for trial. Many citizens packed the courthouse to watch the trials.

Commodore Shaw was among them. “It is presumed that but few of those who have been taken will be acquitted,” he wrote as the trials unfolded in the city. Shaw was right. Only a few of those brought before the St. Louis court enjoyed their judges’ mercy. Among the favored was thirteen-year-old Jean, the slave of Madame Christien. Though Jean was found guilty of insurrection, his sentence was not death but rather to witness first the death of another slave and then to suffer thirty lashes at the hands of a public official. The court treated Gilbert with leniency, too, but his case turned on his uncle’s decision to deliver him to justice and beg for mercy from the court. The court commuted the sentence of Theodore of the Trouard estate because he gave the court valuable information on the recent insurrection.

Gilbert, Jean, and Theodore were exceptions. The New Orleans court sentenced most of the captives to death, ordering their bodies prominently displayed in public places. Within three days of their executions, the remains of John, Hector, Jerry, and Jessamine swayed on the levees in front of their masters’ plantations. Étienne and Cesar were “hung at the usual place in the City of New Orleans.” Daniel too, at least until his severed head was relocated to the lower gates of the city. Regardless of where their bodies came to rest, the sight and stench of the men’s dead flesh bore witness to American—and slaveholder—might.

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