Book Review: American Uprising

Daniel Rasmussen has written a very good book about an obscure event in early American history. The subtitle tells it best: The Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt.

The setting is the plantation coast of New Orleans, along the Mississippi river - today Natchez. He tells of the burgeoning sugar (cane) industry and the voracious appetite it held for the bodies and souls of African laborers. The French aristocracy had been consumed by the rapidly expanding American nation in the Louisiana Purchase. A determined federal official was appointed to oversee the assimilation of the defiant French planters into the style of governance preferred by union planners.

Amid the political volleys occupying French land holders and federal officials, including a conspiracy to undermine claims by the Spanish Crown to land in Florida and Louisiana, three men, were plotting the liberation of their people from a virulent soul-crushing bondage devoid of humanity.

The 1811 insurrection of black slaves of New Orleans -- the largest in history -- is a story that explains the deliberate attempt of African people to free themselves from slavery despite the known risks of unforgiving and brutal reprisal. Rasmussen writes a compelling account of how, despite their failure to achieve freedom, this little known slave revolt exemplifies the realities of United States expansionist history, and the many paradoxes of what we have come to recognize as the American brand: freedom, justice and equality.