Confrontations with U.S. military personnel and local militiamen who were sent to suppress the rebellion, combined with post-trial executions, resulted in the deaths of 95 rebels.

On January 8, between 64 and 125 enslaved people ignited a fight for freedom and marched from plantations in and near present-day LaPlace, Louisiana on the German Coast towards New Orleans.

[3] During their two-day, 20 mi (32 km)-long march, the rebels, armed mostly with improvised weapons, burned five plantations along with several sugarhouses and crop fields.

Since 1995, the African American History Alliance of Louisiana has led an annual commemoration in January of the uprising, in which they have been joined by some descendants of participants in the revolt.

[5] The sugar boom on what was known as Louisiana's German Coast (named for immigrants in the 1720s) began after the American Revolutionary War, while the area near New Orleans was still controlled by Spain.

In the 1780s, Jean Saint Malo, an escaped slave, established a colony of maroons in the swamps below New Orleans, which eventually led Spanish officials to send militia, who captured him.

[6] After the Haitian Revolution, planters attempted to establish similar lucrative sugarcane plantations on the Gulf Coast, resulting in a dense slave population.

More than half of those enslaved may have been born outside Louisiana, many in Africa, where various European nations established slave trading outposts and Kongo was ripped apart by civil wars.

President Thomas Jefferson then turned to a fellow Virginian, William C. C. Claiborne, whom he appointed on an interim basis, and who arrived in New Orleans with 350 volunteers and eighteen boats.

Claiborne was not used to a society with the number of free people of color that Louisiana had, but he worked to continue their role in the militia that had been established under Spanish rule.

Thus, by 1805, a delegation led by Jean Noël Destréhan went to Washington to complain about the "oppressive and degrading" form of the territorial government, but President Madison continued to support Claiborne, who had expressed great doubts about the planters' honesty and trustworthiness.

[13] The waterways and bayous around New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain made transportation and trade possible, but also provided easy escapes and nearly impenetrable hiding places for runaway slaves.

With the spread of ideas of freedom from the French and Haitian Revolutions, European Americans worried about slave uprisings, particularly in the Louisiana area.

"My poor son has been ferociously murdered by a horde of brigands who from my plantation to that of Mr. Fortier have committed every kind of mischief and excesses, which can be expected from a gang of atrocious bandittis of that nature.

They represented primarily lower-skilled occupations on the sugar plantations, where enslaved people labored in difficult conditions with a low life expectancy.

By sunset, General Wade Hampton I, Commodore John Shaw, and Governor Claiborne sent two companies of volunteer militia, 30 U.S. Army soldiers, and a detachment of 40 sailors from the U.S. Navy to fight the escaping slaves.

There, planter Charles Perret, under the command of the badly injured Andry and in cooperation with Judge St. Martin, had assembled a militia of about 80 men from the river's opposite side.

On January 11, militia, assisted by Native American trackers as well as hunting dogs, captured Charles Deslondes, whom Andry considered "the principal leader of the bandits."

The following day Pierre Griffee and Hans Wimprenn, who were thought the murderers of M. Thomassin and M. François Trépagnier, were captured, killed, and their heads hacked off for delivery to the Andry estate.

The Destrehan trials, overseen by Judge Pierre Bauchet St. Martin, resulted in the execution of 18 of 21 captured people by firing squad.

"[27] U.S. territorial law provided no appeal from a parish court's ruling, even in cases involving imposition of a death sentence on an enslaved individual.

[9] Fifty-six of the slaves captured on the 10th and involved in the revolt were returned to their masters, who may have punished them but wanted their valuable laborers back to work.

Thirty more escaping slaves were captured, but returned to their masters after planters determined they had been forced to join the revolt by Charles Deslondes and his men.

[33] The uprising started in present-day LaPlace and followed a twenty-mile trek on the old River Road through the present-day towns of Montz, Norco, New Sarpy, Destrehan, St. Rose and ended at much of what had once been the Kenner and Henderson Plantations and is now Rivertown and Louis Armstrong International Airport (named after prominent African American musician Louis Armstrong) in Kenner.

"[36] Since 1995, the African American History Alliance of Louisiana has led an annual commemoration at Norco in January, where they have been joined by some descendants of members of the revolt.

The museum is dedicated to the German Coast uprising and to Kid Ory, an American jazz composer, trombonist, and bandleader born there in 1886.