# The largest revolt  
Charles Deslondes, a native Louisianan and his two lieutenants, Quamana and Kook of the Akan people, launched what has been labelled the largest slave revolt in American history, on the night of 8 January 1811, on the German Coast, 36 miles northwest of New Orleans, an area where enslaved people were 60 per cent of the population. It was the largest in number of actual participants, two to three hundred. It also counted the highest number of black victims, estimated at over one hundred. However, because the number of white people killed - two - was low, the episode did not get the same kind of attention as Nat Turner's uprising later would. The Louisiana insurgents were representatives of a large swath of the enslaved population. They were men, women, Africans, Creoles, people displaced by the domestic slave trade, field hands, artisans, drivers and domestics. Native Americans were brought in to track them down and a numerically superior force that included the United States Army outgunned them. What followed was a massacre with people mutilated, tortured, slaughtered and hanged. Deslondes' hands were severed; he was shot in both thighs, then through the body, before being burned alive.  
Following the uprising, 29 men were tried. They were killed, and several had their bodies or heads exposed on piques. The repression was so savage that even the Louisiana Gazette deplored it, 'We are sorry to learn that a ferocious sanguinary disposition marked the character of some of the inhabitants'. The newspaper continued that 'civilized man' should never let himself sink down to the level of a savage. Evidence of the continued fear that the Haitian revolution inspired, the 'spectre' of Saint-Domingue had hung over the incident from the  
start: the rumour had circulated that Deslondes was from the island and the insurrection was described as 'a miniature representation of the horrors of St. Domingo'(Paquette, 2009, pp. 72-96).