Within forty-eight hours, local militia and federal troops suppressed the rebellion. Many of the rebels were slaughtered on site, decapitated and their heads posted on stakes that lined the levee as a warning to other enslaved people that this was the price of rebellion. Naval officer Samuel Hambleton wrote: “They were brung here for the sake of their Heads, which decorate our Levee, all the way up the coast. I am told they look like crows sitting on long poles.”
Deslondes briefly escaped the initial wave of slaughter by hiding in the swamp, but he was quickly captured and executed—his hands were chopped off, the femur bone in his leg was shattered by bullets, and he was burned atop a bale of straw.
Compared to other rebellions, like those of Nat Turner and John Brown, the 1811 slave revolt has received little historical attention. There are no notes of what was said between the co-conspirators, little that gives us insight into what Charles may have been thinking. But what is undoubtedly true is that each of the people assembled that evening knew the risk of their involvement.
In the immediate aftermath of the uprising, now that slave owners’ worst fears had come to fruition, the backlash was brutal. Alarmed slaveholders in Louisiana invested resources in training local militia, and slave patrols began surveying slave quarters with increasing frequency and violence. Commodore John Shaw captured the planters’ sense of fear that pushed them to respond with such violence against those who participated in the insurrection, and make them an example to the larger enslaved population: “Had not the most prompt and energetic measures been thus taken, the whole coast would have exhibited a general sense of devastation; every description of property would have been consumed; and the country laid waste by Rioters.”
Meanwhile, the federal government committed to defending the institution of slavery by officially granting Louisiana statehood, as a slave state, in 1812. Louisiana remained a state until 1861, when it seceded from the Union. In a speech at the time, Louisiana’s commissioner made the state’s priorities clear: “Louisiana looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery.”
My mind wanders back to the exhibit in front of me. I look at Charles’s floating head and imagine the smell of his charred flesh lacing the air, the cackle of dissolving skin melting into the earth. The wind blows, and I can almost taste the mingling of burned flesh and scorched soil, the mix of sweat and swamp water that lathered his body before he was captured by the bloodhounds who chased him down. I look at the rest of the bodiless figurines, observing the ridges in their tortured faces and adjusting my feet along the uneven brick path to find comfort where none would be found.
1814–1819
QUEER SEXUALITY
Raquel Willis
To be Black and to be a gender or sexual minority is to carry a mixture of identities that have been chronicled historically in a piecemeal manner. This makes it difficult to acquire records that clearly reveal the existence of queer identities and experiences in the United States during the nineteenth century. After all, terms like gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer did not exist then or weren’t being used in the manner they are used today.
But by examining the history of queerness in West and Central Africa, uncovering the dominant cisgender and heterosexual mores of the time (and why that social order needed to be maintained), and exploring the concepts of fugitivity and surveillance, we can surmise a great deal about queer Blackness during this era.
First, in attempting to uncover the lives of Black queer folks in the 1810s, we must look to the origin cultures of their groups. Between 1720 and 1770, while the North American colonies received shipments of enslaved Africans from at least eight coastal regions of the continent, at least 60 percent came from West and Central Africa. Another snapshot figure of shipments of enslaved Africans from the first decade of the nineteenth century reveals that at least 35 percent were still coming from West and Central Africa. In examining the existence of queer behaviors and identities in these African regions, we may find that early examples of Black queerness were also imported into the United States.
As Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe assert, “African homosexuality is neither random nor incidental—it is a consistent and logical feature of African societies and belief systems.” Going further, they share documentation, from as early as the 1600s to the early twentieth century, of what by today’s standards Western cultures would refer to as queerness. In West Africa, there was the traditionally feminine dress and sexual behavior of young men of Sudan’s Mossi tribe’s royal court, and homosexual behavior among enslaved millet farmers in present-day Mali. The Dagara society of southern Burkina Faso had a role for gender-nonconforming mediation. Homosexual behaviors are documented within both Hausa and Yoruba communities, and interviews and local lore describe multigendered societal roles and sexually fluid behaviors in Central Africa, especially in present-day Congo and Sudan.
Even with limited documentation of their potential origin cultures and the cultural aspects that later evolved in the same regions, enslaved Africans could have brought hidden alternative gender and sexual behaviors and identities with them to the United States. In the absence of first-person accounts from the antebellum period, it may be useful to employ the approach of historians like Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris: examining runaway advertisements for evidence of how enslaved people’s intimate relationships thrived and survived. They also offer a definition of sexuality to ground their understanding of it: “the range of emotional and physical practices that have grown up around human reproduction and non-reproductive intimate expression, practices rooted in cultural beliefs and reflective and expressive of love but also of oppressive power.”
Berry and Harris’s volume emphasizes the importance of the documentation of enslaved people running away from their enslaved circumstances, as a viable means to preserve relationships and “evade capture and to subvert capitalistic control over their bodies.” Those who ran away employed other methods, such as masquerading as a different class or even as another person, to evade capture. In the Raleigh Register’s September 9, 1814, issue, an enslaver, Laurence Battle, shared that an enslaved man he owned named Spencer had the “intention to pass for a free man, and may perhaps change his clothes and alter his name; and may have procured from some villain a free pass.” Historian Sharon Block deduces that this method could be used by runaways to “transcend their laboring status” and more freely navigate society undetected.
Runaway advertisements are not the only sources that offer a glimpse into the lives of enslaved fugitives, and by proxy, gender and sexual minorities whose status would have been criminalized in American society. However, most documentation of these individuals deemed society’s undesirables would have been connected to attempts to reprimand them punitively. “One of the unfortunate things is that a lot of the ways queer and trans bodies appear in the archives is through surveillance and moments of institutional crisis due to their identities,” said Jessica Marie Johnson, a Johns Hopkins University historian. Run-ins with the law offer some of the few markers of their lives.