In 1795, enslaved people conspired to rebel against Louisiana’s slave regime. The investigation of the conspiracy, named the Pointe Coupée Conspiracy after its location, revealed the worst fears of Louisiana’s elites: the revolutionary events then roiling the Atlantic World had helped inspire the conspirators.[1]
Sixteen years later, in 1811, enslaved people again conspired against Louisiana’s slave regime, this time rising in the largest slave rebellion ever to take place in North America, the German Coast Insurrection. Due to poor documentation, the motives behind the 1811 revolt are less clear. However, considering the events of the previous decades, at least some rebels were likely inspired by revolutionary events and ideals.[2]
In both 1795 and 1811, elites violently crushed the conspirators and rebels, killing dozens and displaying bodies and body parts. However, the broader aftermaths of the two events were quite different. In 1795, the uncovering of the conspiracy led to elite panic over the future of the region’s slave system. In 1811, in contrast, the crushing of the rebellion led to elite boasting and the propelling forward of the slave system to ever greater heights. As these differing reactions suggest, Louisiana dramatically transformed during the middle years of the Age of Revolutions.
In the early 1790s, after decades of stagnating as a colonial project, Louisiana entered an acute crisis.[3] Elites felt besieged by revolutionary currents entering the largely francophone colony through its connections with France and the French West Indies. In response, Louisiana’s Spanish governor published a pamphlet in 1794 appealing to the colony’s residents to unite to defend the colony from “American brigands” and “French emigres” who, led by “monsters escaped from the Cape” (a reference to Haiti) threatened to descend upon the Mississippi River to bring “[looting], the loss of your properties; the massacre of your families; the repetition of all the disasters which have devastated St. Domingue.”[4]
A year later, the investigation of the Pointe Coupée Conspiracy ratified these fears of revolutionary upheaval. While the conspiracy would have been motivated by the violence and demands enslaved people faced from their enslavers as well as a desire for freedom, the revolutionary moment also influenced the conspirators by making freedom seem attainable. Enslaved suspects testified that whites and other enslaved people informed them that they were already free by royal decree or soon to be freed by the French, who had abolished slavery in the French Empire the year before. Some even urged them to follow the example of the Haitian Revolution and violently seize their liberty.[5]
To add to the sense of crisis, the two main export crops of the region, tobacco and indigo, collapsed in the early 1790s. Tobacco collapsed largely due to the ending of Spanish government purchases to supply Mexico’s tobacco market, purchases that had bolstered the tobacco industry throughout the 1780s. Indigo collapsed largely due to adverse weather conditions and pests. [6] As fears of revolution – particularly revolution undertaken by their enslaved workers – proliferated, Louisiana planters and farmers entered severe economic crisis.