Sites tell tale of how slavery key to New Orleans’ riches
Like any first-time visitor to New Orleans, I went prepared to be charmed: the boozy French Quarter, smoky, sticky jazz clubs, rows of shotgun houses, bright colors — this is the stuff the Big Easy’s many legends are made from.
We had every expectation of being able to dive right into the heart of the city and bask in its famously louche lifestyle.
But our local tour guide had a different way of introducing newcomers. “To understand how New Orleans came to be what it is today, you have to understand what was going on here 300 years ago,” said our guide, Leon Waters, as he hustled us from Louis Armstrong Airport into one of his “Hidden History” tours (hiddenhistory. us).
For that, we had to quickly grasp the basics of the dominant business that turned New Orleans into a global trading powerhouse — sugarcane production, all done on formerly sprawling plantations.
To start, Waters whisked us away for a personalized tour of his favorite overlooked New Orleans narrative — the 1811 slave revolt.
“Contrary to popular opinion, the enslaved population here didn’t just meekly go along with things,” Waters told us, as we drove to the spot in St. Charles and St. John the Baptist parishes where the rebellion kicked off.
The aim of the 500 Africans, from 50 different nations with 50 different languages who risked everything for a chance at liberty, was to get to New Orleans. There, they planned to take over the armory where the militia weapons were stored and overthrow the slave-owning and ruling class.
“This was a very well organized, well-planned military campaign,” Waters explained. “They got together and elected their leaders and some of them were women.”
Waters points out stately old mansions — some in ruins, some in private hands, some now backdrops to petrochemical plants — as he recounts the daring dash. “They marched along here past all the plantations, calling out to other slaves to join them and fight,” he said.
The slaves’ desperate crusade came to an unfortunate and gruesome end — a brutal putdown by the local military, with horrific punishments for the leaders as a warning to others not to rebel. But still, the story of the 1811 slave revolt was whispered from generation to generation for the next 100 years, and the descendants of some of those rebels became soldiers who fought for the North in the Civil War, Waters said.
The tour went late into the night, and the next day, inspired by the powerful glimpse Waters had given us into the region’s knotty past, we took his advice and skipped the city once again. Instead, we followed the River Road — the old highway that mimics the curve of the Mississippi River that was once the main thoroughfare for the region — north to the Whitney Plantation museum.
Once a former working sugarcane plantation powered by unpaid labor, the Whitney is now a museum dedicated to preserving and educating people about the system of slavery. The Whitney tours showcase living history — giving visitors the names, stories and even sometimes the faces of the actual women, men and children who lived and worked its extensive lands.
It was there we learned about “grinding season” — aka the time to “get on the grind” — the grueling fall months when the sugarcane fields ripened in a fast-moving wave. The enslaved workers had only a matter of days to collect it before it rotted, working 18 hours at a stretch.
The gentle walking tours offered by the Whitney Museum put the slave experience frontand-center — and they do a great deal to bring home to visitors the depth of suffering endured.
But it was another plantation just down River Road that opened our eyes to the true scope of unimaginable prosperity enjoyed by plantation families — Oak Alley, the dazzling Greek Revival mansion that was used to film “Interview With the Vampire.”
The array of pomp and splendor enjoyed by the Roman family — which leveraged itself into stratospheric wealth off the sugarcane farming of its enslaved labor — rivals anything on display by the richest American dynasties today. We toured the vast house with a costumed guide, who explained every fascinating detail of pre-Civil War life — and the destruction that soon followed when the South lost the war.
There was still more to see on River Road, in the historic town of Donaldsonville. Tiny and off the beaten path, it contains one of the finest