Louisiana Museum Shows Horrors of Slavery

(Letter)

14 March 2015

To the Editor,

Readers of WV may have recently seen an article in the February 26 New York Times Magazine, “Building the First Slavery Museum in America” about the newly opened Whitney Plantation/The Story of Slavery here in Louisiana, 50 miles upriver from New Orleans.

Before the Whitney even opened, there was a sneering article disingenuously titled “Slavery Museum Faces Skeptics—Some Say Exhibit in Louisiana Seeks More to Elicit Emotions Than Impart Facts” (Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2014). In it, the official voice of American finance capital interviewed various naysayers who had not set foot on the site and likely would not be caught dead there.

Also before the Whitney ever opened, the local voice of capital, the New Orleans City Business called it “Selling Slavery” in oversized type on the front page (December 11, 2014). They quoted another party who hadn’t been to the museum, opining that it would only attract those looking for the “bleak version of history.” It was remarkable how these 2 bourgeois papers went out of their way to cover the planned opening of an otherwise little-known museum, a reflection of their anger to this day about the smashing of slavery in the Civil War.

So I went to visit the Whitney Plantation, which is on the old River Road along the Mississippi, once home to dozens of big sugar cane plantations, the most labor- and profit-intense plantation system in the south. Slave labor here was the hardest and the punishments most brutal, captured in the fearful phrase being “sold down the river.”

Considerably more than a 4-walls museum, the Whitney includes the renovated plantation home, 7 reconstructed slave houses, a slave jail, a memorial garden of granite panels inscribed with the words of former slaves recorded by the WPA Project in the 1930s describing life under slavery, and a Field of Angels naming thousands of infants born into slavery in Louisiana who died before the age of 3.

Dedicated to telling the story of the slaves, rather than the slaveowners, the Whitney contrasts with its neighbors like the iconic Oak Alley Plantation. Oak Alley is representative of those plantation owners’ homes that were renovated in the 1960s and ’70s, operating as B&Bs, wedding rental sites, and tourist attractions. Hoop-skirted tour guides lead tourists about these finely furnished houses and well-kept grounds, telling tales of antebellum “Gone with the Wind” grandeur, and—until now—disappearing slavery almost entirely from the story.

The Whitney, and the nearby Destrehan and River Road plantations are literally scenes of the crime of human slavery. They are located right at the center of the little-known slave uprising of January 1811, the largest in American history. Between 200 and 500 slaves, inspired by the successful Saint-Domingue/Haitian revolt of 1791-1804, took up arms, set fire to plantation houses, chased out the slaveowners and marched toward New Orleans fully intending to destroy the planter class, smash slavery and establish a black republic.

They were met and repulsed by a makeshift military scant miles from New Orleans and driven back up toward the river road. Many of the rebel slaves were killed in the brutal suppression of the uprising. The survivors were tried and executed by a hastily convened tribunal of plantation owners at Destrehan Plantation. The executed were decapitated and their heads mounted on pikes at Destrehan and all along the river road to terrorize the other slaves into submission.

Partisans of the working class who honor these rebel slaves will appreciate seeing the Whitney and Destrehan Plantation exhibits and learning the history of the 1811 revolt (available in Daniel Rasmussen’s 2011 book American Uprising).

For finishing the Civil War,
Ruth
New Orleans, LA