The planters and government officials, having suppressed…
January 1811 CE
Those captured are interrogated.
Officials conducted three tribunals, one at Destrehan Plantation owned by Jean Noel Destréhan (St. Charles Parish), one in St. John the Baptist Parish, and the third in New Orleans (Orleans Parish).
The Destrehan trial, overseen by Judge Pierre Bauchet St. Martin, results in the execution of at least eighteen slaves by firing squad, whose heads are put on pikes.
The plantation displays the bodies of the dead rebels to intimidate other slaves.
The trials in New Orleans, also in the local court, result in the conviction and summary executions of eleven more slaves.
Three of these men are publicly hanged in the Place d'Armes, now Jackson Square.
U.S. territorial law provides no appeal from a parish court's ruling, even in cases involving imposition of a death sentence on an enslaved individual.
Governor Claiborne, recognizing that fact, writes to the judges of each court that he is willing to extend executive clemency (“in all cases where circumstances suggest the exercise of mercy a recommendation to that effect from the Court and Jury, will induce the Governor to extend to the convict a pardon.”)
In fact, Governor Claiborne does commute two death sentences, those of Henry, and of Theodore, each referred by the Orleans Parish court.
No record has been found of any referral from the court in St. Charles Parish, or of any refusal by the Governor of any application for clemency.
Militias kill about ninety-five slaves at the time of the insurrection, as well as by execution after trials.
From the trial records, most of the leaders appear to have been mixed-race Creoles or mulattoes, although numerous slaves in the group are native-born Africans.
Fifty-six of the slaves captured on the 10th and involved in the revolt are returned to their masters, who may have punished them but wanted their valuable laborers back to work.
Thirty more slaves are captured, but the whites determine they had been forced to join the revolt by Charles Deslondes and his men, and return them to their masters.
The heirs of Meuillon petitioned the legislature for permission to free the mulatto slave Bazile, who had worked to preserve his master's plantation.
Not all the slaves support insurrection, knowing the trouble it can bring and not wanting to see their homes and communities destroyed.
As is typical of American slave insurrections, the uprising is short-lived and quickly crushed by local authorities.
It lasts only a couple of days and does not overcome the local Government.
Showing planter influence, the legislature of the Territory of Orleans approves compensation of three hundred dollars to planters for each slave killed or executed.
The Territory accepts the continued presence of US military troops after the revolt, as they are grateful for their presence.
The insurrection is covered by national press, with Northerners seeing it arising out of the wrongs suffered under slavery.
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