After the Panic of 1819, the plantations of Louisiana experienced enormous growth sustained by a thriving banking system. A steady supply of slave labour coming from the Upper South and improvements to sugar production techniques made Louisiana's planters ever wealthier. Two years before statehood, the Territory of Orleans was home to nearly 35,000 enslaved individuals. By 1860, over 331,000 enslaved people lived in Louisiana (Miller and Smith 1988, p. 414). According to Follett (2005, p. 24):  
Steam power profoundly shaped the sugar industry, but its economic success rested primarily on the mass importation of African American bondspeople to Louisiana.
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The seasonal nature of sugar production imposed a forbidding regime on the slaves [...] gravely affected slave women's capacity to bear children, and it left an appalling legacy of death in its wake.  
On 8 January 1811, hundreds of enslaved people on the German Coast rose up and marched downriver toward New Orleans. They were armed with rifles, sabres or simply their tools. They killed two white men and caused considerable damage to the plantations they crossed. The local militia, backed by federal troops, was unable to stop them until three days later. Many were killed in action or escaped and became maroons in the swamps. Those who were captured were brought before special courts on the German Coast and in New Orleans. At least 60 insurgents were sentenced to death and executed in front of the  
plantations to which they belonged. Their heads were then cut off and planted on poles (Thrasher, 1996; Rasmussen 2011).