More Gather to Fight For Freedom

Charles Deslondes was a slave driver who worked for Manuel Andry but belonged to a neighbor, the widow Marguerite Deslondes. Historians correct the old claim that he was a free man from Haiti. As the column moved south along the levee road it gathered recruits from other plantations, some forced. In St. Charles Parish it stopped to plunder several estates. Jean Francois Trepagnier took up a shotgun to defend his family's plantation and was killed. Whether the march aimed at New Orleans or at a way out toward Haiti, the evidence does not settle.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Destrehan Plantation — 3.8 mi
  A River Road house begun in 1787 where, in January 1811, a tribunal of five slaveholders tried people who had risen on the German Coast, and where an exhibit now tells the revolt.
• Whitney Plantation — 15 mi
  A museum on a former sugar plantation along the River Road that tells its story through the people who were enslaved there, with memorials to 107,000 enslaved Louisianans and 2,200 children.
• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 19 mi
  The Garden District's 1833 cemetery of about 1,100 family tombs, closed to visitors in 2019 and reopened on October 1, 2026 for small guided tours run by the Preservation Resource Center.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 20 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.

More markers nearby

• Thomas J. Sellers — 0.9 mi
• Slave Revolt — 0.9 mi
• Trepagnier Plantation — 0.9 mi
• Prospect Plantation (1815-1920) — 0.9 mi