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Ω 2 Ω “Eternal Vigilance” The Insurrectionary Menace and Vigilante Response T he belief in nearly omnipresent insurrectionary plots instigated by “outside agitators,” coupled with the blazing rhetoric of secessionist fire-eaters, led to predictable and understandable fear in the hearts and minds of white Southern planters. The rhetoric that reached its zenith in 1859, 1860, and 1861 may have been extreme, but it was nothing new. Any detailed examination of events during the summer of 1863 in northeastern Louisiana must take into account an understanding of the depth and breadth of this fear, and its likely and violent outcomes. Periodic outbreaks of insurrectionary panic shivered the South all during the time of slavery. Civilians and statesmen in Louisiana and Mississippi had their own reasons to fear. Both states had seen their share of uprisings and rebellions and knew such threats were not to be taken lightly. The Haitian Revolution sixty years earlier still had a strong hold on the Southern imagination . Repeatedly in pro-slavery speeches and writings throughout the antebellum period, St. Domingue was invoked to demonstrate the need for strict control over slaves, including brutal punishments, and to justify the continuation of slavery. To abolish it would mean death to those whites who had so “benevolently” provided for the “ignorant African” in a mission of Christian charity, who clothed and fed them, and who oversaw their lives with the heart of a patient and beneficent father. Or so Southerners believed. Historian George M. Frederickson puts it succinctly: “As a slave he was lovable, but as a freedman he would be a monster.”1 Jefferson Davis, in his last days as a U.S. senator in January of 1861, questioned the growing hostility of the North toward the South and invoked the specter of St. Domingue. There, government intervention from distant France had provoked a revolution. There were no “black heroes,” Davis asserted. Only when the slave masters were arrested on charges of treason and removed from the scene did the Negroes rise in insurrection. Indeed, he declared, there “Eternal Vigilance” 13 never had been a true case of “negro insurrection” anywhere, at any time. Those instances in the United States, as well as Haiti, commonly termed “insurrections ” were in fact rebellions led by “bad men” among an “ignorant and credulous people.” Negroes did not have the wherewithal to plan, lead, or take such actions of their own accord. Only when they were led and provoked by others, in the absence of their masters, would they rise up, burn, and kill.2 The legacy of St. Domingue loomed large over Louisiana in particular. Thousands of refugees, black and white, free and slave, had fled to New Orleans in the period from 1797 to 1809. Sixty years later, nearly three hundred individuals in Louisiana, most still in Orleans Parish, listed their birthplace as Haiti or Santo Domingo. More than one thousand in the state at the time were born in the West Indies, including those born in Haiti.3 Shortly after the Haitian Revolution, in 1811, five hundred Negroes had plotted rebellion in St. John the Baptist Parish. They marched down the River Road in a martial display with flags and drums, burned homes and storehouses, and killed a few whites. White troops from New Orleans quickly moved to put down the rebellion, militia forces were called out of Baton Rouge, and planters from the west bank of the Mississippi crossed over to assist. Sixty-six blacks were killed; another sixteen were captured, taken to New Orleans, tried, and executed.4 Another scare originated near Natchez, Mississippi, in 1835, and fear raced up and down the Mississippi River, reaching as far south as Jefferson Parish in Louisiana. The alleged conspirators were quickly executed. Two years later, several slaves were put to death, without trial, for their supposed role in an insurrectionary plot in Rapides Parish. Later decades were also punctuated by rumors of insurrections. In 1842, planters in the cotton parishes along the west bank of the Mississippi in northern Louisiana feared the uprising of nearly three hundred slaves, with the result that twenty were arrested and a few hanged. In 1856, panic again gripped the entire state, but no evidence was found of an actual plot.5 John Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry galvanized the South and prompted the largest insurrectionary scare in the years immediately preceding the Civil War. Shortly after Brown’s execution, the Monroe Register in Louisiana carried a report of an insurrection plot in Dardanelle...

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