“American Uprising: The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt” by Daniel Rasmussen (Harper, 276 pgs., $26.99)

“It is a fact of notoriety,” proclaimed William Claiborne, governor of Louisiana in January 1811, “that negroes are of Character the most desperate and conduct the most infamous.” Although they were often deemed indolent and ignorant, Claiborne knew that slaves were willing — and able — to risk their lives, rise up and revolt against their masters.

A few weeks earlier, in fact, heavily armed slaves from plantations near New Orleans had set out to conquer the city. Their march, according to Daniel Rasmussen, was “the largest act of armed resistance against slavery in the history of the United States.”

In “American Uprising,” which began as an undergraduate thesis at Harvard, Rasmussen tells their long-forgotten story. Rasmussen is a superb stylist. He sets the scene well, vividly describing early 19th-century New Orleans; the revolution in Haiti, which served as the inspiration for the uprising in Louisiana; and the politics of a territory coveted by Spain, France and the United States.

And Rasmussen brings to life the leaders of the plot. Charles Deslondes, a light-skinned slave driver on Manuel Andry’s sugar plantation, planned the work calendar, carried the keys to all doors, whipped slackers and made unsupervised conjugal visits to a neighboring plantation, he writes, and was “in modern terminology, the ultimate ‘sleeper cell,’ imbedded intimately close to the enemy he dreamed nightly of executing.”

Rasmussen asserts that the rebellion was a defining moment for New Orleans and the United States and “the greatest challenge to planter sovereignty in the history of North America.”

These claims are difficult to sustain, given a paucity of primary sources related to the incident. This forces Rasmussen to speculate about matters small and large. His guess that the rebel army may have reached 500 men appears as a fact on the book jacket. Kook and Quamana, two of the plotters, he indicates, were gifted with “silver tongues and fiery passion.”

When the rebels faced the white militiamen, Rasmussen explains, a bit condescendingly, they “could only have felt the unease and terror of confronting a danger they could neither see nor comprehend. The slaves at first might not have recognized the noise of bullets, which could sound like fast-moving bees or birds.”

Although the slave-rebels seem to have been defeated rather easily — Claiborne claimed that two whites were killed — Rasmussen insists that it was “not unreasonable” for their leaders to have imagined that they could recruit men “from near and far,” rout the small American military force and take New Orleans. And yet he recognizes, somewhat contradictorily, that “no white man, no American official, no French planter would brook the survival of a black army anywhere near white power centers.”

In the aftermath of the uprising, the whites further limited slave liberties. They tried, convicted and executed scores of rebels. They prohibited blacks from purchasing ammunition, renting rooms in New Orleans or congregating except at funerals and Sunday dances.

It worked. For a time. Louisiana’s slaves never forgot the rebellion, however, passing down stories to the next generation. The deaths of Charles Deslondes, Kook and Quamana, Rasmussen suggests, remained “a stark reminder that revolution was always a possibility.”

But, alas, it would take the Civil War to end human bondage, America’s original sin.