Blood and Sugar

After dark Tuesday, January 8, 1811, rain was general along a section of the Mississippi River called the German Coast. At the 1,900-acre Andry sugar cane plantation, 41 miles upriver from the port of New Orleans, proprietor Manuel Andry and his wife Marianne were asleep upstairs in their 4,000-square foot home, a Creole-style residence raised off the ground on 14-inch cypress beams. Son Gilbert Andry, 24, and his pregnant wife Marie lay asleep down the hall. Sometime in the night Manuel Andry, 54, suddenly woke to encounter a familiar but unexpected face. Charles Deslondes, the mulatto slave in charge of driving the plantation’s 80-plus bondsmen in the cane fields and at the sugar mill, was standing over his master holding an ax. Andry leaped for his life. Making for the double staircase, he and Marianne encountered more armed Black men, some of whom slashed at the planter, leaving three long cuts on his torso. The Andrys raced downstairs, out the front door, and across a field of clover to a dock on the Mississippi, where the family kept canoe-like boats called pirogues. As attackers were hacking Gilbert Andry to death—they spared his wife—the elder Andrys were paddling across the Mississippi to the Perret plantation on the far bank.

The assailants descended to the ground floor of the big house where Deslondes knew Andry stored militia gear. About 25 slaves, including men named Valentin, Janvier, and Jupiter, selected muskets and battle drums. Joined by women, some of the slaves