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They were badly outnumbered and outgunned. Through courage and wile, the rebels managed to resist or elude attacks by white militias, but were finally caught by the Army and local vigilantes in an open field the next morning. And along the way, to the sound of rhythmic drumming and chants of “Freedom or death,” their numbers grew rapidly as they attacked other sugar plantations and liberated enslaved people. Undaunted, Deslondes and his fellow rebels began a long, nighttime march through Louisiana’s German Coast toward New Orleans, where they hoped to take over the local armory. But no big cache of guns was discovered, and although Andry’s son was killed, the father somehow got away. Deslondes had targeted Manuel Andry, head of the local planters militia, on the assumption that his property would house plentiful weaponry the insurgents could co-opt. 8, 1811, a mixed-race man named Charles Deslondes led a group of people in an attack on a plantation owner in lower Louisiana that became the largest uprising of enslaved people in American history, and the first that required the intervention of the U.S.