The 1811 rising on Louisiana's German Coast survives, Rasmussen argues, mainly as the planters' account of itself. Governor Claiborne and the sugar planters turned a rebellion into a story about their own politics, and the historians who followed kept that framing: those who diminished the insurgents' agency and the Marxists who reversed the tone told substantially the same story.

Working from court records, plantation ledgers, reimbursement claims, newspapers and letters, several newly translated and some never used before, the study reads against the grain to recover what the enslaved were doing and why. It moves from the geography of the Mississippi and the sugar economy that made New Orleans, through the conditions of plantation labour, to the march itself and its suppression.

Considerable attention goes to the aftermath: the systematic beheadings, the heads mounted on poles along the river road, and the ritual of terror by which order was restored.