Rasmussen's Harvard honours thesis reconstructs the slave uprising that began on Louisiana's German Coast in January 1811, when several hundred enslaved people marched in formation down the Mississippi toward New Orleans, and the massacre that answered it, with severed heads set on poles for forty miles of river road. The suppression continued on paper. Governor Claiborne and the planters filed reimbursement claims for lost property, called the rising criminal mischief, and never asked why it happened, which kept debate away from slavery itself in the new American territory. Later historians from Ulrich Phillips to Herbert Aptheker inherited that framing and reversed its tone without recovering the rebels' politics. Using court records, denunciations, plantation ledgers, newspapers and a database of individual enslaved people compiled by the author, the thesis recovers the organisation and intent behind an insurrection larger than Vesey's or Turner's.