AMERICAN UPRISING

I have long been a serious student of African American history. It is my story. It is, perforce, my family's story, from our tribal agglomerations , through our amalgamations in the Americas, clear back into the vast indefinite verisimilitudes, and vicissitudes, of trackless time and spaces on earth. Imagine my utter surprise, then, to learn of a slave revolt, the largest in North America, in the United States of which I had no prior knowledge! I say this only after having read and taught from, over decades, the learned works of John Hope Franklin, Benjamin Quarles, Lerone Bennett, Jr, J.A. Rogers, William Wells Brown and many more extraordinarily capable scholars, without ever seeing any reference to this one 1811 Louisiana slave revolt; whitewashed from history! In AMERICAN UPRISING: THE UNTOLD STORY OF AMERICA'S LARGEST SLAVE REVOLT by Daniel Rasmussen (2011), it is written : "While Nat Turner and John Brown have become household names, Kook and Quamana, Henry Kenner, and Charles Deslondes have barely earned a footnote in American history. Though the 1811 uprising was the largest slave revolt in American history, the longest published scholarly account runs a mere twenty-four pages. "This book redresses that silence and tells the story that the planters could not and would not tell--the story of political activity among the enslaved." P.2-3, "Prologue" My ignorance of the occurrence of this our "largest" slave revolt does not undermine my assessment of our half-century later "Freedom War," 1861-1865, being the second most "successful" slave revolt in history, following only that of Saint Dominique (Haiti), 1791-1804, which inspired both our largest, our most successful, and all between!