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Attacking Slavery from the Dark Fens of the Great Dismal

“For freedom we want and will have, for we have served this cruel land long enuff, and we are full able to conquer by any means.”

—Correspondence between slaves in Greene County, Georgia, and Martin County, North Carolina, eighteenth century

“Like one of the Patriarchs, I have my Flocks and my Herds, my Bond-men and Bond-women, and every Soart of Trade amongst my own Servants, so that I live in a kind of Independence on everyone but Providence. However this Soart of Life is attended with a great deal of trouble. I must take care to keep all my people to their Duty, to set all the Springs in motion and make every one draw his equal Share to carry the Machine forward. But then ’tis an amusement in this silent Country and a continual exercise of our Patience and Economy.”

—William Byrd II, wealthy seventeenth century planter, writer, and explorer

“Do not take me by my looks, I could kill a white man as free as eat.”

—Jacob,

a slave involved in Gabriel’s Uprising

From 1790 to 1810, the Tidewater region of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina experienced perhaps the most turbulent, constant, and ambitious series of conspiracies and insurrections ever faced by the institution of American chattel slavery. The product of over 150 years of autonomous activity by slaves, servants, fugitives, and Natives in the area, this period of rebellion forever changed the scope of insurrectionary activity under slavery.

The majority of day-to-day slave resistance and planning was unreported and remains unknown, but even a very brief survey of this time period presents an incredible outgrowth of rebellious activity:

May 1792 A conspiracy of nine hundred armed slaves, coordinated across multiple cities with plans to attack Norfolk, Virginia, is uncovered in a letter intercepted by slave-owners.

Summer 1792 Rumors of rebellion by slaves in Newbern, North Carolina, are reported in newspapers.

November 1792 An armed band of outlawed fugitives assassinates a plantation overseer in Charles City County, Virginia.

Summer 1793 Another conspiracy, allegedly involving as many as six thousand slaves, is discovered by slave-owners in a letter between fugitives in Richmond and Norfolk.

1795 A plantation overseer is murdered by fugitives or slaves in Wilmington, North Carolina.

1797 A group of fugitive slaves resist search by a white patrol in Prince William County, Virginia, killing four whites.

1799 Two whites are killed in Southampton County, Virginia when a group of slaves forcefully resist their transfer to Georgia.

August 1800 The famous Gabriel’s Conspiracy erupts, in which one thousand armed slaves from across the state attempt to march upon and attack Richmond.

1800–1801 A conspiracy started by slaves in Petersburg, Virginia, which plans an attack on Norfolk, spreads to the interior.

1801–1802 Reported slave conspiracies increase in counties across northeastern North Carolina.

June 1802 Fugitives and outlaws stage an armed attack on the Elizabeth County Jail in order to free slaves arrested for conspiracy.

1805, 1808, and 1810 Insurrectionary activity is reported in Isle of Wight, Norfolk, and Chowan counties, on both sides of the North Carolina–Virginia border. Arson attacks and cattle raids become increasingly common throughout this period, and newspapers warn white people not to spread news about the attacks for fear of their contagion.5

Whenever and wherever there has been slavery, there has been resistance. This period, however, is unique in comparison to earlier times due to the increase of coordinated and large-scale conspiracies attempting, not just to alter immediate conditions, but to fundamentally overthrow bondage. The individual endeavor of escape took on more conspiratorial and collective forms as revolt changed in both frequency and content.

Historians have attempted to explain the exponential increase in rebellious activity in a number of ways: a contributing factor was the concurrent spread of revolt in the Caribbean and across South America, including the massive revolution that began in the French colony of Saint Domingue (Haiti) in 1791. Others have pointed to the growth of bourgeois revolutionary ideas and natural-rights philosophy at the time, and their possible introduction into slave circles.6 Though this last theory remains untenable for a number of reasons, it does make sense that internal tension among the ruling class was an opportunity that was exploited by insurrectionaries at the time. Certainly it is true that word of rebellions in the Caribbean had spread to North American slave communities, and it’s reasonable to assume that these revolts, in turn, may have influenced the timing of several conspiracies.

The questions remain, however: what could explain the geographic conglomeration of this period of revolt around the counties adjacent to the eastern North Carolina–Virginia border, and how were these attempted revolts coordinated on a larger scale than their predecessors?

An early colonial governor of Virginia, Alexander Spotswood helped to consolidate the English Empire’s control over the mid-Atlantic by breaking up the original Albemarle Settlement and destroying the Tuscarora Confederacy. Charles Bridge Collection (portrait)

Between the cracks of contemporary historical studies on slave revolt—and in the personal letters, General Assembly notes, and newspaper clippings of the time—a tentative answer starts to emerge: this period and territory of revolt can be seen as the direct product of the Great Dismal Swamp maroons, who were part of a series of permanent, overlapping communities made up, at any given time, of around two thousand plantation fugitives. Nearly all of the aforementioned rebellions or conspiracies took place in areas that bordered or encompassed parts of the swamp, a massive piece of land that originally included an estimated 1,500–2,000 square miles, and stretched from Norfolk, Virginia to Edenton, North Carolina.

These maroons, who were of Native, European, and West African descent, built and held long-term communities in various parts of the swamp roughly from the end of the Tuscarora Wars in 1714 to the end of the Civil War in 1865. For 150 years these multi-ethnic rebels mixed and shared the diverse cultural and religious forms of the Tuscarora, Irish, English, and West Africans.7 Forced to flee above-ground life as debt fugitives, runaway slaves, or refugees from the brutal wars waged on Indians, the maroons established a permanent life in the swamp while waging a long-term, unceasing guerilla war against plantation society in the form of arson, cattle rustling, crop theft, encouraging slave escapes, and coordinating insurrections throughout the area. At times, the maroons and related slaves allied themselves with larger political forces—affiliating themselves, for example, with the British to attack American slave-owners during the Revolutionary War, and forming autonomous forces to fight the Confederacy ninety years later.

The swamp was a key site of social organization behind multiple waves of rebellion, demonstrating that individual escape could, in the right circumstances, transform into a practice of collective attack. Always intersecting with this dynamic interplay was a diverse and, at times, bizarre mixture of cultural and religious practices, blending everything from Tuscarora rites of passage, heretical Christian thought, and self-described witchcraft to the serpent-centered spiritual and political councils of West African conjure men and women.

The Sink of America, the Refuge of Our Renegades

No history of the Great Dismal Swamp maroons would be complete without a brief mention of their predecessors: the fugitives, who were escaped bond-laborers of both European and African descent, pirates, landless paupers, and religious and political radicals who formed the semi-autonomous Roanoke Settlement of North Carolina’s Albemarle Sound.8

Beginning in the 1640s, individuals and bands of escapees and rebels fled the plantation life of South Carolina and Virginia to what is now northeastern North Carolina, for the protection of the militarily powerful Tuscarora Confederacy.9 Eventually this multi-ethnic population coalesced into its own settlement, which by all known accounts was a successful experiment in cooperation between neighbors of vastly different cultural backgrounds. The community of several thousand maintained itself by way of subsistence farming, hunting and gathering, mutual aid, and small trade with the larger Tuscarora communities. No orthodox church was allowed to establish itself, with the settlers militantly preferring an anticlerical version of Quakerism that emphasized “inner light” and “liberty of conscience,” as well as adopting the practices of the Tuscaroras themselves.10 As early as 1675 the settlers called for the abolition of slavery, and one of the few declarations or laws they passed established a kind of jubilee for fugitives fleeing bondage elsewhere:

Noe person transporting themselves into this County after the date hereof shall be lyable to be sued during the terme and space of five yeares after their arrival for any debt contracted or cause of action given without the County and that noe person liveing in this County shall on any pretence whatsoever receive any letter of Atturney Bill or account to recover any debt within the time above mentioned of a Debtor liveing here with out the said Debtor freely consent to it.11

To no one’s surprise, the managers of profit and discipline in Virginia and South Carolina recognized the threat of such an appealing alternative that was ever present at their own borders. Virginia was physically separated from the Albemarle Sound by the dense and difficult Great Dismal Swamp, but since the very beginning of the colony, laborers had chosen to risk escape over the possible death and certain misery of enslavement on a plantation. Spelling out perfectly the early capitalist position on these settlers, the governor of Virginia wrote, “As regards our neighbours, North Carolina is and always was the sink of America, the refuge of our renegades: and till in better order it is a danger to us.”12

Efforts to put the Roanoke Settlement and its Tuscarora neighbors in “better order” were soon to come. Trouble first erupted in 1677, when the Lords Proprietors—aristocrats appointed by the crown to exact fees and manage the territory—attempted to impose new restrictions on the inhabitants. Thirty or forty armed settlers seized the customs records and imprisoned the acting governor, along with several other officials. A group of West African and European fugitives from servitude in Virginia also managed to escape and join the rebellion at the same time. The Lords Proprietors backed down and replaced the governor. The conflict came to be called Culpeper’s Rebellion, after the radical inhabitant John Culpeper, who had been involved in seditious activities from Charleston to Virginia and New England while “endeavoring to sett the poore people to plunder the rich.”13

A new, larger conflict involving similar tensions rose to the surface in 1704. This time, the governor began requiring a swearing of allegiance to the crown for all offices, a practice harshly opposed by the dissident settlers, who physically removed him from office. A tense calm held, but by 1711 the “Quaker War” had broken out, pitting those who desired to maintain their non-plantation way of life against wealthier newcomers, who sought to turn North Carolina into a profitable, well-governed monocultural agrarian economy. The stakes were clear: either the Albemarle Sound would remain a free territory—multi-ethnic and with a cooperative basis for interactions between settlers and Indians—or slavery would reign supreme.

The stakes of the conflict extended well beyond the single settlement and had broader consequences for English imperial and economic aims: the vast majority of settlers brought to Virginia in the late-seventeenth century were bond-laborers of one kind or another, and from the moment of setting foot in the wilderness of this new world, many of these commoners sought an immediate escape from—if not the destruction of—the world from which they came. Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia understood this threat well. A clever statesman, Spotswood was more in tune with long-term, imperial, and capitalist strategy than many of his contemporaries. He had long manipulated and intimidated various Indian tribes into paying tribute to Virginia, and it was these tribes that in part helped to prevent the creation of permanent maroon settlements on the colony’s western front in the Blue Ridge Mountains.14

Despite the overwhelming force of the English empire, the Roanoke inhabitants fought well. Aided in particular by the renowned skill of West African sailors in navigating the area’s difficult waterways, the men and women built an impressive fort and won their first battle. After three years of large battles and small guerilla skirmishes, however, the combined forces of Spotswood’s Virginia militia and the English Royal Marines forced the settlers to either surrender or retreat into the nearby swamps.

After the defeat of the Roanoke Settlement, there was one final obstacle in the path of English imperial and economic strategy in North Carolina: only a few months after the Quaker War ended, forces from England, South Carolina, and Virginia waged a brutal campaign of extermination against the northern Tuscarora Confederacy. The Tuscaroras were more numerous and powerful than the Roanoke settlers, though, and were assisted by individual fugitive-fighters of African and European descent who were fleeing their own recent defeat in the Albemarle Sound. Thanks in part to the help of a brilliant fort-builder, engineer, and escaped “militant against slavery” known to us only as Harry, the Tuscaroras held off enormous European forces until 1713.15 That spring, South Carolinian militia finally defeated the Tuscaroras’ Fort Hancock, massacring nine hundred men, women, and children, and enslaving the rest.

Many of the surviving members of the Tuscarora Confederacy left the territory, fleeing as far north as Pennsylvania and New York. Some guer­illa bands continued the fight as late as 1718, while others sought to create a life in the wilderness alongside the European and West African fugitive-rebels who had fought in the Quaker War. Many of these latter groups of Tuscaroras formed the nucleus of the first Great Dismal Swamp maroons, as not just isolated warriors but politically and socially unified communities. They were joined by more maroons from Virginia, in particular from the Powhatan Confederacy and Chowan Nation, and within a generation would form large communities capable of attacking and destabilizing one of the most profitable regional economies in the world.

A Bald Cypress emerges from the edge of Lake Drummond in the center of the Great Dismal. US Fish and Wildlife Service

The period of this mass escape represents a confluence of historically relevant developments. The decade in which power was consolidated by North Carolina’s emerging planter class saw the end of the Roanoke Settlement and Tuscarora Confederacy and the beginning of the swamp maroons, and was pivotal in the larger history of Atlantic capitalism and English empire. For England and the colonies under English power, this period finalized

the establishment of the limited monarchy, England’s entry into continental European politics, the development of a bureaucracy, the rise of executive government, the emergence of high finance and public credit, the birth of tariff protection, the union with Scotland, the end of religious struggles, convulsions in the landowning sector of the economy, and rapid acceleration in the advance of the business and professional interest.16

All these changes were a distinct transition, a modernization of political and economic forces that coincided precisely with the end of a certain phase of primitive accumulation in the colonies.17 For fugitive debtors, servants, and slaves, the living dream of an egalitarian and libertarian way of life, which had briefly taken root in Albemarle, was wiped out and replaced by the forced exodus, enslavement, and extermination of Indians; the forced labor of the poor; and the establishment of a violently maintained racial hierarchy. Though their struggle would seriously challenge the plantation system and inspire countless thousands to rebellion, the later swamp maroons emerged less as a lived alternative to this reality than as a fierce attack upon it.

Fleeing to the Swamp

The impassibility of the Great Dismal Swamp and the mythology that surrounded it provided protection to these early maroons, making their recapture cost-prohibitive and dangerous. Augustine Herrman, an early mapmaker, described the area in 1670 as “Low Suncken Swampy Land not well passable but with great difficulty. And herein harbours Tiggers Bears and other Devouring Creatures.” In 1728, William Byrd II—slave-owner, aristocrat, and credited founder of Richmond—was tasked with surveying the boundary line between North Carolina and Virginia, in part to help with jurisdictional conflict that had erupted between the states over the recapture of slaves.18 After his difficult trek through the swamp, Byrd wrote, “The ground of this swamp is a mere quagmire, trembling under the feet of those that walk upon it.”19

Poets who had never set foot in the area wrote of the territory as a metaphor for the darkness and hidden nature of the soul. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow mythologized the swamp in his poem “The Slave in the Dismal Swamp”:

Dark fens of Dismal Swamp…

Where will-o-wisps and glow worms shine,

In bulrush and brake:

Where waving mosses shroud the pine,

And cedar grows and the poisonous vine,

Is spotted like the snake.

A generation later, Harriet Beecher Stowe explicitly acknowledged the Great Dismal as a harbor for escaped slaves in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Though she would have little grasp of the extent of cultural and political development held within its bogs and fens, Stowe presented the land as a symbol of the moral stagnation of white southern civilization. Her portrayal of the environment also perfectly suited the “dark” racial stereotypes she used in her writing.20

Many of these descriptions were designed to sell papers or books, or in Byrd’s case, to garner a large paycheck from the English crown. The swamp was hardly the desert that early explorers described; though pits and peat bogs were dangerous to careless strangers, it was and remains a beautiful, biodiverse wilderness filled to the brim with otters, bobcats, deer, over two hundred species of birds, as well as a large lake, and juniper, gum, cypress, and southern white cedar trees. Islands between the fens and peat bogs made it possible to grow crops and raise livestock, and game was plentiful.21

Observers projected their own anxieties or affinities onto the mythology and ecology of the swamp depending on their position in plantation society. For example, the area around Lake Drummond at the center of the wilderness was long held to be of spiritual importance to swamp dwellers, who reported the existence of lights hovering over the water. While maroons and slaves viewed the phenomenon as “soft lights … used by the Gods to guide us lost slaves,” well-to-do white people outside the swamp referred to the lights as “the terrible people of the mist.”22

Even the natural foods of the area bore a contested political significance, depending on one’s position in the plantation order. Blue lupine, a plant that grows there wild, was considered devilish by proper society, but was consumed enthusiastically as a cereal grain by maroons, who credited its introduction to Grace Sherwood, a famous African herb doctor and witch of Currituck County.23

An 1867 map of the Great Dismal Canal portrays the Albemarle Sound and the counties surrounding the swamp on both sides of the Virginia-North Carolina dividing line. D.S. Walton/Hosford & Sons

The emergence of white supremacy, new divisions of labor, new forms of misogyny, and a paranoid fear of magic and witchcraft all intersected with a fear of the wild.

This mythology about the natural world, paired with the very real dangers of the swamp, created a place the “better” sort of people tried to avoid—in other words, a perfect environment for the formation of hidden, yet permanent large-scale maroon communities, otherwise more common to the Caribbean than North America.

Some of the earliest known activities of these maroons included attacks on Virginia’s cattle industry. Planters would guide their herds to the healthy grasslands west and north of the swampland, where, unbeknownst to them, they were vulnerable to cattle rustling by maroons.24 Even before larger-scale settlement in the swamp, slaves could use the territory as a sort of backup plan: in 1709, for example, a slave insurrection planned jointly by Indians and Africans took place in Isle of Wight County, on the edge of the swamp, and when it was stamped out by the Royal Governor of Virginia, one of the leaders, an African named Captain Peter, eluded capture by fleeing to the relative safety of the swamp.25

As word of these efforts spread through the slave and servants’ quarters of the Tidewater region, and conflicts over the future of North Carolina ended, the population of the swamp grew rapidly, and the establishment of real settlements was possible. This process started with larger, unified groups of Tuscarora Indians, who provided a cultural and organizational foundation, and who were soon joined by the formerly European (and some formerly African) settlers of Roanoke. Some of the earliest fugitives to enter the area, likely from the Virginia side, were Irish, as evidenced by early Celtic trail names like the Shallalah and Ballaback roads, and by the continued use of words like “shanty” (from the Irish shan tigh, meaning old house) among African Americans into the early-nineteenth century.26

Many of the inhabitants of the Great Dismal were known to temporarily leave the swamp to do small jobs, either for trade or petty cash. In particular the maroons were known as excellent shingle-makers; nearby settlers would often turn a blind eye to their illegal status in return for help harvesting wood for roofs. One runaway slave who spent some time in the swamp, and was interviewed after he escaped to Canada, had this to say about the inhabitants’ hospitality:

I boarded wit a man what giv me two dollars a month for de first un. Arter dat I made shingles for myself. Dar are heaps ob folks in dar to work: Most on ’em are fugitives, or else hirin’ dar time. Dreadful ’commodatin’ in dare to one anudder. De each like de ’vantage ob de odder one’s ’tection. Ye see dey’s united togedder in’ividually wit same interest at stake. Never hearn one speak disinspectively to anutter one: all ’gree as if ’dey had only one head and one heart, with hunder Legs and hunder hands. Dey’s more ’commadatin’ dan any folks I’s ever seed afore or since. Da Lend me dar saws, so I might he ’pared to spit shingles; and den day turn right ’bout and ’commodate demsels.27

An early print of the blacksmith Gabriel Prosser that appeared in white newspapers.

The earliest known settlement, named Scratch Hall, was founded in the 1730s as the Tuscarora’s numerical and cultural dominance subsided. The wild cousins of the poor whites of the southern countryside, the Scratch Hall folk were tawny or tan-skinned descendants of the Roanoke Old Settlers, and probably had a good deal of Tuscarora ancestry as well.28 They lived in the mixed swampland and pine barrens of the southern edge of the swamp. Guerilla raids on plantations that began in the area with the Tuscarora were continued by the Scratch Hall people, who harassed plantations by capturing horses, rustling cattle, and “committing other enormities.” They were helped in these endeavors by reportedly ferocious dogs called the Scratch Hall breed, which they bred and trained with the specific purpose of hunting and herding animals like cattle and horses.29

Images like this one appeared in white newspapers and journals after conspiracies like Gabriel’s Insurrection, galvanizing white fear and hatred.

Colonial and, later, American newspapers often did not recognize these tawny maroons as properly white. Groups of white vigilantes attacking similarly multi-ethnic maroon settlements in South Carolina reported frustration at not being able to tell “who was a negro.”30 Laws against intermarrying between races, unheard of in the non-plantation-based Roanoke Settlement, can be understood to have emerged in this period not as the product of “prejudice” but rather as an attempt to biologically police boundaries that governed the social divisions of labor, wealth, and power in society. In this context the definition of race was clearly political, with whiteness seen as a social—rather than biological—inheritance of privilege and power, rooted in the plantation order and concretized by the loyalty one did or did not express to the economic system. In his surveying the border between North Carolina and Virginia, Byrd hinted at this distinction: “Most of the North Carolina whites were poor, but did not belong to the ‘poor white’ class, which was held in contempt even by many of the slaves. The term ‘poor white’ connoted more than poverty.”31 It is further telling that, over 130 years after the establishment of Scratch Hall, the maroons of European descent were considered “colored” by the Union Army and fought in tawny companies in Black regiments during the Civil War.32

The attacks on plantations and aid to escaped slaves that characterized early maroon resistance continued throughout the eighteenth century, despite efforts by both North Carolina and Virginia governments to stop them. During this period, the African presence in the swamp grew remarkably, reflecting changing demographics in the labor force and an increased colonial dependence on chattel slavery.

The West African men and women who were brought to North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and who would have contributed their numbers to the swamp maroons, came from a variety of territories along the western coast of the continent, kidnapped from tribal populations in what is today the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, Morocco, Senegal, and Gambia, among others. In particular, notable tribes like the Coromantee from the Gold Coast, who had lived communally in Africa, were fierce warriors, and often played central roles in slave revolts in the New World.33 Many of these slaves passed through the Caribbean first, and their experiences opposing bondage there made them especially dangerous to the ruling class of the North American colonies. Recognizing this danger, the New York Assembly went as far as to impose a special tax on Africans imported indirectly via the Caribbean in order to discourage the practice.34

In the Great Dismal, a kind of division of labor evolved: Maroon settlements in the middle and northern areas of the swamp—which were constituted mainly by those of African descent, attacked plantations on the Virginia side—while tawny settlements attacked those on the North Carolina side. These guerilla struggles only intensified during the Revolutionary War.

In 1775, Lord Dunmore, the last Royal Governor of Virginia, cynically switched Virginia’s traditional position on slavery and issued an emancipation proclamation that promised freedom to any slaves or indentured servants who would fight for the king. It was an early experiment with a policy that Britain later universalized across the continent when the Revolutionary War grew in scope. Maroon fighters answered the call, joining a band of six hundred ex–field hands and poor whites to successfully attack an American militia in Princess Anne County in 1775, and expropriating seventy-seven pieces of field artillery from American-held villages that autumn. Black crowds started gathering in Norfolk, which bordered the swamp, where they held meetings and created “disturbances.” Throughout Dunmore’s campaign in the Tidewater region, Black guerillas and white “Ragamuffins” (as they were termed by the American press) wreaked havoc on the plantation economy, expropriating livestock and crops, freeing slaves, and killing planters.

Spelling out quite clearly the extent to which their new natural-rights theory and revolutionary rhetoric extended to slaves and other laborers, the American State Legislature in North Carolina responded to these developments by forbidding the manumission of slaves by their owners in a law titled “An Act to Prevent Domestic Insurrection.” Repressive legislation of this nature did not cease after the war. Though they changed their target from Loyalist slave-owners to Quakers and others considered subversive, the slave-owning American patriots remained extremely anxious about rebellion by this motley crew of maroons, slaves, and poor whites. The motivations of the American property-owning class remained consistent from before the War for Independence to long after the departure of the last British ship.

It is worth noting that on other parts of the continent, groups similar to the early swamp maroons played a key role in instigating action against British authorities rather than on their behalf. One particular example is that of Black and white sailors in New England, who engaged frequently in strikes and sabotage in response to the British policy of pressing sailors into service against their will. For twenty-five years before the Revolutionary War, seamen in Boston led constant, militant riots against impressment by British officials, beginning in 1741 when a mob attacked a sheriff. Events ramped up over the course of that year and three hundred sailors—armed with “axes, clubs, and cutlasses”—attacked the commanding officer of a ship. Later that same year, a multiracial conspiracy by domestic workers and sailors, organized in taverns along the waterfront, threatened to destroy a British naval fort and burn down all of New York City.35

Nevertheless, efforts to “reclaim” the Revolutionary War, by pointing to its supposedly proletarian roots, or to the influence of Enlightenment philosophy on slave insurrections, are sharply contradicted by the guerilla bands of maroons, slaves, and servants attacking their “revolutionary” masters farther south. We mention this period not to take sides in a war between governments in which both sides deserve utter contempt, but to highlight the social war that was constantly taking place beneath the surface. That this other war manifested itself sometimes in favor of the British, and at other times the Americans, matters less than the deeper patterns of cross-ethnic alliance, revolt, and experimentation by the dispossessed at this time. The struggles of both the sailors and their maroon counterparts represent a liberatory self-activity, autonomously driven, that continued long after the American War for Independence was over.

Little changed after the war, then, for the classes of people driven to maroon themselves in the Great Dismal Swamp. The communities of the swamp continued to grow and develop their own ways of life, including their own unique cultural and religious practices. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the swamp was home to around two thousand people—mostly of African descent but with sizable tawny and Indian populations—grouped in numerous, overlapping settlements throughout the roughly 1,500 square miles of swampland.36 Though a canal was constructed by developers, which connected the Intercoastal Waterway to a lake in the center of the swamp, efforts by the likes of George Washington and Patrick Henry to turn the wilderness into fertile farmland failed utterly.37 Attacks on plantation society continued uninterrupted up to the turn of the century, when the rebels began to coordinate themselves across larger and larger geographic areas, seeking not just the immediate relief of individual escape from slavery, but the destruction of the entire economic order.

To No Longer Bear What They Had Borne

Rustling cattle, burning plantation property, liberating slaves, and stealing crops were frequent features of maroon life throughout the eighteenth century. As slaves were also engaging in similar activities, and because some slaves would escape for only short periods of time before being returned to the plantation, it is difficult to distinguish in the historical record between acts committed by true maroons and those by those still held in bondage.38

Regardless, new patterns of rebellion—distinct from the smaller and less “ambitious” raids of earlier decades—began to emerge around 1790. Coinciding with a huge period of unrest and maroon-driven revolution across the Caribbean, insurrectionary activity in the Tidewater region of Virginia and North Carolina began to take on a new character, as rebels sought to expand and coordinate attacks over larger and larger geographic territories, and as they directly targeted not just plantation production but also white-controlled cities and political centers.

Between 1790 and 1810, attacks on the plantation economy occurred in nearly every season of every year, and any number of conspiracies and revolts could serve to demonstrate the changing focus of target. The three highlighted below were specifically chosen because they demonstrate the coordinating and encouraging role of the Great Dismal Swamp and its inhabitants.

Early Insurrection Attempts: 1792–1800

The first of these insurrectionary attempts began in May 1792, and involved over nine hundred slaves and maroons on the eastern shore of Virginia. As reported in the Boston Gazette, “about two weeks ago, the Negroes in that part of the State, to the amount of about 900, assembled in different parts, armed with muskets, spears, clubs, and committed several outrages upon the inhabitants.”39 Under the command of a leader known as Celeb, the slaves communicated with slave communities on the Dismal Swamp and Norfolk side of the bay, and secretly made weapons with the help of a blacksmith. Their intent was to cross the bay, join others on the mainland at the border of the swamp, and attack the arsenal at Norfolk, but their plans were discovered and the planters requested extra military supplies from the mainland.40

Conspiracies and underground organizing in the area continued however, as evidenced by one intercepted letter found in Yorktown, Virginia in August 1793:

Dear Friend—The great secret that has been so long in being with our own color has come nearly to a head that some in our Town has told of it but in such a slight manner it is not believed, we have got about five hundred guns aplenty of lead but not much powder.… I am full satisfied we shall be in full possession of the [w]hole country in a few weeks, since I wrote you last I got a letter from our friend in Charleston he tells me he has listed near six thousand men.…

Secret Keeper Richmond to Secret Keeper Norfolk.41

Another letter was found addressed from Portsmouth, also in the Dismal Swamp region. The conspiracies failed to come to fruition, partly due to the intercepted communications and the shipment of arms from the mainland, but were notable for their size and ambition, and for their early attempts to communicate across vast areas. Their letters would have necessitated travel through territory either covered by the Great Dismal Swamp or bordering it.

Even the mist that rose off the surface of the swamp's Lake Drummond invited conflict, with whites fearing demonic spirits while slaves and fugitives found spiritual guidance and power. US Fish and Wildlife Service

In comparison, earlier known efforts at spectacular, collective resistance, like South Carolina’s Stono Rebellion, appeared more as an effort at joint escape and involved hardly more than a hundred participants. Not surprisingly then, word of this significantly larger attempted rebellion sent shockwaves through both slave and planter circles. Despite the insurrection’s failure, fear spread through white communities in the Tidewater region and beyond, and other slaves were encouraged to act. A letter sent one month after the failed conspiracy from Newbern, North Carolina confirms whites’ fears:

The negroes in this town and neighbourhood have stirred a rumour of their having contemplation to rise against their masters and to procure themselves their liberty; the inhabitants have been alarmed and keep a strict watch to prevent their procuring arms.42

The conspiratorial wave seemed to have a rippling effect: several months later, a group of armed maroons murdered an overseer on a plantation in Charles City County, also bordering the swamp.

Gabriel’s Uprising: 1800–1801

The second major insurrectionary attempt of this period was Gabriel’s Uprising. One of the most famous slave rebellions in North American history, the uprising involved an attempted attack on Richmond in 1800, and was coordinated over a huge territory. The conspiracy was led by siblings Gabriel, Nanny, Solomon, and Martin Prosser, among others, and participants were recruited from all over Virginia, including Gloucester, Cumberland, Henrico, Luisa, Chesterfield, Hanover, and Caroline counties. Martin Prosser was the rebellion’s sword maker, and bitterly opposed any delay of the rebellion; according to a fellow conspirator, “before he would any longer bear what he had borne, he would turn out and fight with his stick.” The intention was to march on Richmond, and as one group set fire to the warehouse district as diversion, others would capture arms, the capitol building, and the governor. Frenchmen, Methodists, Quakers, and other whites sympathetic to the cause were to be spared.43

The insurrection involved thousands. Secrecy was maintained for a time, but due to planning delays, word of it eventually reached Virginia’s Governor Monroe, who, on April 22, wrote to Thomas Jefferson of the threat.

No immediate action was taken by the government, however, and the slaves continued to produce bayonets, swords, and ammunition through the spring and summer. Secrecy was mostly kept, though by August 9 word of a planned revolt appears in a letter between two whites of Petersburg and Richmond. The letter was intercepted and passed on, and military authorities were informed. Further word of the rebellion was provided to the governor by a slave-owner named Moseby Shepard, who “had just received advice from two slaves that the negroes in the neighborhood of Thomas H. Prosser intended to rise that night, kill their masters, and proceed to Richmond where they would be joined by the negroes of the city.”44 Monroe finally acted, posting cannons outside of Richmond, informing militia commanders around Virginia, and calling into service 650 local soldiers.

At this exact moment, on the evening of August 30 an enormous rain began to fall, referred to later by whites as a “providential” downpour. The territory between the conspirators’ rendezvous point and Richmond was separated by a torn bridge, and the flash flooding made crossing the waterway impossible. Despite the rain, one thousand slaves met at the agreed location, six miles outside the city, armed with hundreds of homemade weapons. Unfortunately, the attack was made impossible, and they were forced to disband. The following day the entire military apparatus of Virginia was aroused, and scores of conspirators and insurrectionaries across the State were arrested. Gabriel Prosser managed to escape on a ship in Norfolk at the swamp’s border, but was recognized and betrayed by two slaves on board. He was taken to Richmond, and after refusing to give any significant information about the conspiracy, hanged on October 7.

At least thirty-four other conspirators were hanged as well, while one committed suicide and four managed to escape from jail and were never recaptured. Two of these escapes were the result of a mob action by Black maroons besieging the Hanover County courthouse, wherein they released the prisoners, charged the guard, “knocked him down” and “stamped on him,” and ran away. According to one slave-owner, the break was planned throughout the previous week when slaves visited the prisoners, “under the pretence of a preaching.”45 A wave of repression and white paranoia erupted after Gabriel’s Uprising, especially in Virginia but extending well beyond its borders. Arrests and hangings continued throughout the winter of 1800–1801.

Insurrections of 1800–1810

Almost as soon as Gabriel Prosser’s body was in the ground, a third wave of conspiracy and insurrection occurred. Beginning in late 1800 in Petersburg, Virginia, by December unrest had spread to Norfolk on the northeastern border of the Great Dismal. The goal was again a coordinated attack on Norfolk, and word spread from the coast to the interior of the region. Plans were shared throughout the following year, as is demonstrated by a letter dated January 1802, which was intercepted on its way to Powhatan. It stated, “Our friend has got ten thousand in readiness to the night.” Small attacks and gatherings increased; on April 3, “four unknown men made an attack with bricks upon the sentinel at the Capitol, and were fired upon.” Repression spread as well. Hangings and arrests occurred in Halifax, Hanover, and Princess Anne counties as well as in Norfolk. A letter from Richmond mentions that, “convicted slaves confined in the Penitentiary house [had] become so numerous as to render their maintenance burthensome [sic] and their safe keeping inconvenient.”46

News of the planned uprisings traveled south to eastern North Carolina, where conspiracies were reported in May. Newspapers attributed these to the influence of a spiritual leader named Tom Copper, a maroon who, according to the Raleigh Register, had “a camp in one of the swamps” near Elizabeth City. Newspapers grew reluctant to report on the conspiracies, and silence took the place of their usual paranoia in an effort to prevent the spread of rebellion. At this time, large numbers of slaves or fugitives were executed or punished in counties adjacent to the swamp territory where Copper was headquartered and thought to be organizing (Camden, Bertie, Currituck, Martin, Halifax, and Pasquotank counties). In retaliation for this repression, in early June 1802, six maroons on horseback fought a battle with Pasquotank militia in a failed effort to liberate comrades being held in the Elizabeth City jail.

Historian Herbert Aptheker writes of the significant multiracial element in this period of revolt:

A striking feature of the Virginia conspiracies of 1802 is that evidence of white participation is fairly good. Thus, a Mr. John B. Scott, while informing the Governor on April 23 of the trial and execution of slaves in Halifax, stated, “I have just received information that three white persons are concerned in the plot; and they have arms and ammunition concealed under their houses, and were to give aid when the negroes should begin.” One slave witness, Lewis, twice declared that whites, “that is, the common run of poor white people” were involved.47

The presence and participation of the Great Dismal Swamp maroons becomes most clear in this third insurrectionary period of 1800–1802, when unrest spread across the state’s border and involvement by whites as well as Blacks became explicit. Counties surrounding the swamp, three in Virginia and six in North Carolina, all saw increased guerilla raids in this time. War bands on the North Carolina side, led by Tom Copper, were multiracial and originated just east of the Scratch Hall maroon settlement.

Insurrectionary activity continued to occur over the next decade, with specific reports coming from counties that bordered the swamp in 1805, 1808, and 1810. Throughout the period, planters reported “distressing apprehensions of fire and other casualties.” In 1808, the planter citizens of Edenton in Chowan County, North Carolina, established a Black Code to protect “our wives and children [who are] surrounded by desperadoes, white and Black.” By no coincidence, Chowan County was the area most adjacent to Scratch Hall.48

The Influence of the Maroons on Slave Insurrection

The period between 1790 and 1810, and in particular the three insurrectionary eras discussed here, represent a tremendously inspiring yet difficult time in African American and labor history, with slaves facing as much repression and consolidation of white power as they did opportunities for rebellion. Compared with strategies of individual escape, these attempts at revolt often presented great risk and little immediate benefit for those participating. But on a systemic level, the increasing frequency, violence, and regional coordination of revolt at this time seriously destabilized the plantation economy. This social turbulence cost a tremendous amount of money in lost production and significant levels of anxiety and paranoia for white populations who, if we are to believe their newspapers, were in near-constant fear for their lives.

This fear spread like a virus. The increasing ungovernability of the plantation system in the Tidewater region did not go unobserved by the rest of the country. The specter of massive Black or even multiracial rebellion entered the consciousness of affluent white families, newspapers, and state assemblies up and down the East Coast, and can be directly tied to a number of important changes: First, by 1804 all states north of the Mason-Dixon line had either abolished slavery or passed laws planning for its gradual abolition. Second, in 1808, US and British law banned the international slave trade. Both of these things made the institution of slavery and the plantation system more vulnerable to attack.

The timing of both of these developments directly points to the increased unrest by slaves and their co-conspirators in the mid-Atlantic and the Caribbean regions. The slave trade and the plantation system it thrived upon were immensely profitable; these new legal constraints should not be understood as casual, insignificant, or inevitable. While certainly a variety of factors contributed to the political context in which these two developments occurred, we would argue that fear, rather than humanitarianism, was their driving force. Beyond catalyzing these policy shifts, we would point to the sense of pride and dignity that slaves across the United States could take in these rebellions. In lifting the sense of what was possible, this period forever changed the scope of insurrection from the local to the regional and national, from the individual relief of escape to a collective revolt directed at the destruction of the existing economic order.

Three factors help to explain the increasing size and ambition of the insurrectionary activity of this period. Already mentioned was the influential role of massive slave rebellions in the French Caribbean, specifically the revolution beginning in Saint Domingue in 1791.49 Geography as well as timing would have played a role here, as Norfolk and Portsmouth were two important ports from which news of the Haitian revolution would have spread. These cities both lie near the edge of the Great Dismal; news of the slave takeovers in the Caribbean, carried north by the servants and domestic slaves of Frenchmen fleeing the islands, could have easily traveled by maroon from the port cities to any number of counties on both the North Carolina and Virginia sides of the swamp.

Government officials were well aware of the potential disaster if revolt spread from Haiti to the mid-Atlantic coast. It was documented by officials that a Black steward of the trade ship Minerva introduced insurrectionary literature from the Caribbean in 1809 in Charleston, which was read aloud to fellow slaves by Denmark Vesey. Shortly before the 1820 uprising that carries Vesey’s name, South Carolina banned the import of such literature.50 Though Charleston is far south of the Great Dismal, one can infer that similar processes played out in port cities like Norfolk on the swamp’s border.

The second factor can be found in the demographics of the states in question. From 1790–1800, the Black population of North Carolina increased by 32 percent, while the white population increased by only 17 percent. In Virginia, a similar shift took place when one factors in the free Black population, and in particular when one focuses on the Tidewater region. Increasing ratios of Blacks to whites would have made autonomous travel, communication, education, and planning easier.51

Thirdly, and most significantly, lies the role of the maroon communities of the Great Dismal Swamp in encouraging and coordinating rebellion across the Tidewater region. Newspaper reports, letters between family members, and the counties in which revolt so consistently occurred, all point to the importance of the maroons in this period. The existence of a liberated frontier like the swamp would have been a tremendous encouragement for slaves considering escape or revolt in this period. In addition to providing refuge for would-be insurrectionaries, the maroons were mobile, offered rare military experience, and played a key role in coordinating revolt by way of spiritual leaders.

An important figure in this last element was General Peter II, a maroon leader who sought to more formally establish bonds with slave insurrectionists on the surrounding plantations.52 In referring to this coordination, one supporter of Peter II was overheard saying, “there would be an earthquake here [as well as in North Carolina] in the same night.”53

Though Black spiritual leaders traveled from plantation to plantation in the Tidewater area, their headquarters were in the swamp, and many of them reported to a central spiritual council. As Leaming writes on the subject,

These “slave preachers,” chosen by their fellows in bondage, unrecognized by any white church, often unknown and generally disapproved of by the slaveholders, preached a faith and worship very different from those of Anglo-Saxon Christianity. Also in the society of the enslaved there were conjure men and women, sorcerers or folk psychotherapists who helped the sick to uncross or cast off their spells of depression, hysteria, or obsession.54

The spiritual messengers were an opaque force, unregistered and unmarked by plantation society, but highly respected by slaves and maroons alike. Their religious orientation varied greatly, ranging from Christian Methodism to a variety of traditional West African folk spiritual practices and magic. These practices had evolved for over a hundred years in the Great Dismal Swamp, resulting in the blending of the strange mixture of Quaker ideas and Indian religion that had come earlier, with the spiritism and mysticism of more recent Black maroons. At his trial, for example, one of the leaders of Gabriel’s Uprising remarked that he was sent south to recruit with the “outlandish people” who were “supposed to deal with witches and wizards,” and therefore would be useful to the efforts of their army.55

Though religious figures’ involvement in slave coordination started much earlier, the recognized central council of conjure men and women, known as “the Head,” emerged sometime around the end of the eighteenth century, during or after Gabriel’s Uprising. What we know about this institution comes largely from the writings of an early Black nationalist named Martin Delany, who wrote a novel fictionalizing the travels of an escaped slave throughout the southern United States, Cuba, and Central America, documenting Delany’s vision for Black liberation and his role in revolutionary Black politics. Delany wrote specifically about the conjure councils of the Great Dismal Swamp and, as his observations greatly reflect known West African practices of the time, is understood to be credible.

According to Delany, the Head was made up of seven leading conjure men and women, drawn from the plantation, town, and maroon communities, and known as the “seven-finger high-glisters.”56 The glisters held a permanent location in a cave in the swamp, where they housed supplies, performed rituals, and kept their most sacred symbol, a large living serpent, considered a holy object in many West African practices and often used to represent the religions of African spiritism.

In addition to performing collective rituals, the Head’s primary function was the ordaining and coordination of the many underground spiritual figures across the region. In order to be ordained as conjure men or women, non-maroons were forced to (at least temporarily) escape their bondage and find the council. As spiritual leaders returned to their fields and towns from the swamp, a link was established between the swamp maroons and aboveground plantation society, connecting slave communities to an underground council that had contacts all over the Tidewater region and beyond. As Leaming writes:

The social impact must have been tremendous. Knowledge that such a council existed and was perpetually engaged in such ceremonies could only have been of inestimable value in the preservation of hope and the encouragement of struggle for those African Americans in bondage who believed. Above all else … the Head, like the conjure person of the plantations, considered themselves to be the chaplains corps of the war on slavery. The Head deeply revered the memory of Nat Turner, and claimed to have been associated with his effort. As young conjure men they had fought alongside General Gabriel and took pride in that action forty years later.57

Baptist and Methodist ministers were involved in spreading word of slave insurrection and maintaining morale as well, though their level of coordination with the Head is less known. Many of the Black spiritual leaders of this time would have fallen somewhere in between the gospel Christianity of the Methodist preacher and the spirits-worshipping mysticism of the seven-finger high-glisters, mixing the two variably to suit the occasion. What resulted from the maroon experience and its influence on slave organization was not a religious or political orthodoxy, but a vast spectrum of spiritual, communal, and insurrectionary practices, the inheritance of over a hundred years of life among diverse co-conspirators in the wilderness.

The impact of these practices, whether in the swamps or in the fields, was no less than the development of an oppositional, pan-African identity. Slaves just arriving from the Caribbean or West Africa got off the boat speaking different languages and possessing markedly different cultural backgrounds; in short, they arrived as Akan, Coromantee, Asante, Malagasay, Igbo, or Papa.58 It was the law, science, labor, and economy of the plantation, and the pan-cultural resistance to these things, that made these men and women “Black.”

The maroon role in spreading the insurrectionary fires of the Tidewater region continued after the concentrated period of uprisings to which we draw attention here. Both isolated and coordinated expropriations of cattle and other plantation property remained common, and the settlers of the swamp remained active in coordinating this revolt. Though rebellious activity erupted throughout the southeast in the nineteenth century, it continued to disproportionately appear in areas bordering this swampland, and newspapers often reported the surprising presence of lighter-skinned people in the groups responsible.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, the maroons and the many slaves they helped to liberate autonomously attacked Confederate forces and plantation property and generally destabilized the economic production that was so desperately necessary for the South to remain in the war. For example, the Richmond Daily Examiner reported on January 14, 1864, that a group of 500–600 Black “banditti” was ravaging the countryside in Camden and Currituck counties, both of which closely bordered the Great Dismal Swamp on the North Carolina side. The paper argued, “This present theater of guerilla warfare has, at this time, a most important interest for our authorities. It is described as a rich country … and one of the most important sources of meat supplies that is now accessible to our army.”59

Sometimes considered 'the grandfather of black nationalism,' Martin Delany was active against slavery, advocated for resettling former slaves outside the United States, and wrote the first novel published by a Black man in the United States, which highlighted the spiritual systems of maroons in the Great Dismal.

Alongside their tawny comrades, some of these autonomous maroon forces eventually joined Black regiments in the Union Army, while others continued guerilla activity and the liberation of the enslaved. Most of the maroon settlements voluntarily returned to life outside the swamps after Union victory, hopeful for the effects of emancipation, but the Great Dismal Swamp continued to be a major spiritual and political center for Black life long after. Though either forgotten or ignored by many twentieth century historians, the legacy of this territory and the resistance it enabled lives on in the memory of the communities to whom it provided refuge.

The Promise of Escape and the Practice of Attack

The history of maroon settlements and guerilla struggle in the Tidewater region covers a long stretch of time and cultural development. From the early 1600s to the end of the Civil War, an ongoing, nearly uninterrupted war on early capitalism and its processes of primitive accumulation was waged by successive groups of maroons, fugitives, slaves, and Indians (who are included in the former groups as well). These were not conflicts that could be easily ignored by the dominant colonial and planter forces; maroon and fugitive existence consistently undermined English imperial strategy and later destabilized the consolidation of labor power needed for the development of early American agrarian capitalism, so much so that slave revolt ultimately helped to catalyze a civil war and force agrarian capitalism’s transition from chattel slavery to wage labor. As subsequent chapters will demonstrate, the adoption of wages represents not a victory over or departure from the forces behind slavery, but a continuation of that method in new forms.

The early development of capitalist wealth and power was thus not a “natural” or tranquil process but one enacted through constant violence against populations of the dispossessed. These communities and individuals resisted such processes with their lives. Every period of primitive accumulation—from the European theft of the commons to the earliest theft of Native lands—required bloody wars and ever-larger state apparatuses for enforcement. Always bubbling beneath the surface of such wars was the forced rewriting of daily social life on the bodies of the oppressed, the whole remaking of spiritual, communal, ethnic, and gender norms. The very existence of whiteness as a political and social category finds its origins in this period. Laborers of European descent became white as they were subjected to the various forces of democracy, divisions of labor, nationalism, and war.

In providing a commons beyond the boundaries of capitalist life, the role of wilderness was fundamental to the resistance of the swamp maroons. By the early 1800s, however, this wilderness was an island surrounded on all sides by a well-consolidated state and economic system. What had begun in part as an open, highly experimental mixture of radical cultural elements and ideas—European, Native, West African—evolved into a network of hidden, strictly oppositional, mostly Black settlements.

In all the phases of this evolution, radical and unpredictable religious forms played a key role—providing everything from a coordinating military role to a defense of women’s reproductive autonomy and their leadership in social and political life.60 A cross-Atlantic similarity can be noted here, as revolts by laborers in Europe were also marked by the magical, the irrational, the heretical, and the supernatural. By no coincidence, it was the same rationalist institutional forces that sought to govern Roanoke, enslave the Tuscarora, and drain the Great Dismal Swamp, and that sought to murder ungovernable women and stamp out uncontrollable spiritual practices in Europe.61 It is worth remembering that the quasi­-atheist Deism of Thomas Jefferson, the man who ran Monticello like a well-oiled machine, was that of a slaveholder and politician.

Another theme emerges from the story of the Great Dismal, at what we might call the beginning of an anarchist history of the American South: that true affinity between differently racialized communities can only be found in a context of revolutionary violence. Even the process of forming the earliest Roanoke settlement must be understood in this way: the escape of fugitive servants and debtors was by legal definition an act of theft, and the constitution of the multi-ethnic settlement itself was made possible only by successive armed engagements with the English crown and an alliance with Tuscarora fighters. For the maroons of the Great Dismal, only through constant conflict with the plantation system was it possible to carve out settlements in which the racial order of the surrounding world could begin to erode. It was through acts of war with plantation society that various maroons could begin to approach each other as equals; only through the destruction of plantation society could that project have been completed.

Departing from the feel-good clichés and whitewashing of subjects like the Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman that one finds in high school textbooks, this history broadly affirms that the promise of escape is only fulfilled by the practice of attack. It reminds us why Tubman carried a handgun on her at all times, why many escaped slaves did not flee to the North but instead remained South, stealing from the economy that stole them, liberating their former coworkers, and attacking their former bosses.

Ultimately, these efforts forced American elites to reconsider slavery as the most stable and profitable system of agricultural production. The Civil War that resulted brought together competing visions for agrarian and industrial capitalism alongside new practices of exploitation and control, but it also opened new doors for resistance by the South’s angriest and most dispossessed. An equally violent social war continued underneath the formal national and racial divisions of the Civil War itself, with the poorest and most oppressed finding their own victories and defeats as one system of exploitation was replaced by another.

Endnotes

5 Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1943), 209–243; Hugo Prosper Leaming, Hidden Americans: Maroons of Virginia and the Carolinas (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1995), 252–253.

6 It is true that some slaves may have interacted with these ideas secondhand, but when slaves and maroons took up arms during the Revolutionary War, they often fought against the “revolutionary” forefathers, sometimes even the very same elite who contributed to Enlightenment thought. This pokes a fairly giant hole in the idea that the revolutionary ideologies of Jefferson, Paine, and the like had much to do with slave insurrections. More to the point, it is patronizing and absurd to imply that slaves needed the white bourgeoisie to tell them that freedom was worth fighting for, or what that freedom should look like. The effort to characterize slave organizing as an outgrowth of bourgeois philosophical sentiment seems to have less to do with fact and more to do with absolving the slave-owning founding fathers of some level of guilt.

7 “West Africans” of course includes a huge number of differing tribes and societies; there is little information on the specific origins of many of those who ended up as swamp maroons, though we do go into more detail later as to from where these men and women likely came.

8 We use “indentured servant” and “bond-laborer” interchangeably; such a worker, who was unpaid and could be sold between owners like credit, was purchased with the owner paying the worker’s travel cost or debts. Bond-laborers could be worked for a period of years or a lifetime, were often worked to death, and might be of West African, Irish, or English decsent.

9 A surviving expression hints at this early history, poking fun at South Carolina and Virginia by describing North Carolina as “a valley of humility between two hills of conceit.”

10 Their version of “Quakerism” was nontraditional. Settlers did not build an official church, few adopted pacifism, and their practice as a whole may not have necessarily even been Christian. At least some Roanoke settlers were also adopted as members of the Tuscarora tribe, being given different names and instructed in local religious rituals and cultural practices. (Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic [Boston: Beacon Press, 2000], 138–139.)

11 “Acts of the Assembly of Albemarle Ratified and Confirmed by the Proprietors the 20th Jan 1669 (–70),” Colonial and State Records of North Carolina (CRNC), vol. 1: 183–184.

12 “Lord Culpeper to Lords of Trade and Plantations” (December 12, 1681), in Calendar State Papers, Colonial Series, vol. II, America and West Indies, 1681–1685 (HM Public Record Office, 1898), 155.

13 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 151–152.

14 Most famously, in 1712, Spotswood took the children of native tribes from these mountains as hostages, forcing them to speak English and adopt Christianity while interned at the College of William and Mary. The children were to be killed if their tribes refused to assist in the colony’s war against fugitives; Anthony S. Parent, Jr., Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660–1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 163.

15 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 197–199.

16 Ibid., 197–201.

17 “Primitive accumulation” is a term commonly used to describe the initial processes of development and forceful dispossession that laid the groundwork for capitalist economies around the world. As Marx wrote, “This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in theology.” We would caution the reader to understand this accumulation not as a singular event that occurs at the dawn of capitalism, but rather as an element consistently present in every era: Just as the wars on peasant heretics and witches in Europe, and their maroon counterparts in America were a part of primitive accumulation in their time, so too were the later wars of imperial ambition of the twentieth century, along with the neoliberal reforms, structural adjustment programs, and prison industries of the twenty-first; Karl Marx, “Volume One: Capital,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978), 431.

18 For a healthy reminder of the political and personal ethics of our country’s early founders, we strongly encourage our readers to check out Byrd’s diaries. His own accounts of perpetrating sexual assaults on domestic workers and slaves are written with bone-chilling nonchalance.

19 Jack Olsen, “The Cursed Swamp,” Sports Illustrated 17, no. 22 (November 26, 1962): 68.

20 In Dred, Stowe describes the radical slave protagonist: “The large eyes had that peculiar and solemn effect of unfathomable Blackness and darkness which is often a striking characteristic of the African eye. But there burned in them, like tongues of flame in a Black pool of naphtha, a subtle and restless fire, that betokened habitual excitement to the verge of insanity” (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp [New York: Penguin, 1995], 241).

21 Olsen, “The Cursed Swamp,” 68.

22 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 340.

23 Ibid., 344–346.

24 These cattle were brought back to the swamps and bred as livestock to sustain the maroon communities, while others were allowed to re-wild in the swampland, eventually evolving into a mixed breed that observers have called Swamp Buffalos.

25 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 225.

26 Ibid., 224.

27 James Redpath, Roving Editor: Or Talks with Slaves in the Southern States, 243.

28 We shift here to using more conventional “racial” rather than national designations (e.g., white instead of European) for these protagonists, in part because their own society was doing so at the time. “White” and “Black”—as terms that are used for categories of labor, power, rights, privilege, and conduct—emerge and concretize in this period, though the maroons themselves may have had very different ways of thinking about their own ethnic and cultural loyalties. “Black” as a category and identity can partly be understood as the product of chattel slavery and its legal and moral justifications, but is equally a product of the pan-African cultures of resistance that developed in places like the Great Dismal.

29 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 229.

30 John Tidwell, “Maroons: North America’s Hidden History,” August 26, 2002, 3. http://www.freewebs.com/midnightsea/maroons.pdf.

31 Political prisoner and ex–Black Panther Russell “Maroon” Shoatz has written about this distinction as well, arguing specifically that the origins of the term “white trash” lies in a derogatory reference to the class of “poor whites” who committed the ultimate act of race treason by marooning themselves with other servants, slaves, and Indians to attack the plantation order (“The Real Resistance to Slavery in North America,” in Maroon the Implacable: The Collected Writings of Russell Maroon Shoatz, eds. Fred Ho and Quincy Saul [Oakland: PM Press, 2013], 131–156). A similar history could be ascribed to the word “redneck,” which, though it was embraced proudly by the men it was given to, was initially a derogatory term invented by the media for the armed miners who fought to unionize in the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921. “White” functions not just as a designation of racial loyalty and privilege but as a pledge of allegiance to capital itself (William Byrd, William Byrd’s Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina [Raleigh: North Carolina Historical Commission, 1929]).

32 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 225.

33 In 1733, for example, a group of about 150 mostly Coromantee slaves, armed only with knives, took over a Danish fort on the island of St. John and held their ground for over seven months (Rediker and Linebaugh, The Many Headed Hydra, 201–202).

34 Ibid.

35 Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, “The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century,” in Gone to Croatan, eds. Ron Sakolsky and Richard Koehnline (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1993), 135; Rediker and Linebaugh, The Many Headed Hydra,174–193.

36 In comparison, the neighboring port city of Norfolk had roughly seven thousand residents in 1800.

37 In spite of the failed drainage efforts led by these founding fathers, massive logging and development made possible by the canal and later railroad construction have unfortunately reduced the swamp to roughly one-tenth of its original size. This reduction of habitat for would-be insurrectionaries and fugitives offers further insight into how private development and industrial attacks on the land have themselves functioned as part of a state strategy to discipline rebellious populations. The remaining portion of the swamp was turned into a wildlife refuge in 1974.

38 In Louisiana this clever tactic of temporary escape was explicitly acknowledged with a name: petit marronage. It described the common tactic by which slaves, in lieu of the possibility of permanent escape, would leave their work en masse for a week or two at a time until certain demands were granted by the owner (John Tidwell, “Maroons: North America’s Hidden History.” August 26, 2002, 5). The similarity with the later tactic of the labor strike is remarkable, and likewise brings to mind the early labor movement’s characterization of work under capitalism as “wage slavery.” Without diminishing the unique brutality and indignity of chattel slavery, this evolution of tactics offers one further reminder that slavery and wage work are not divided by some fundamental ethical/political boundary, but occupy one long, continuous development of bonded and exploited labor.

39 Boston Gazette and the Country Journal, June 18, 1792. In Leaming, Hidden Americans, 367.

40 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 366.

41 William F. Cheek, Black Resistance Before the Civil War (Beverly Hills: Glencoe Press, 1970), 101–102.

42 Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 213.

43 Ibid., 220, 224.

44 One of these informant slaves was named “Pharaoh” (Cheek, Black Resistance Before the Civil War, 108).

45 Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 154.

46 Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 229.

47 Ibid., 233.

48 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 250–253.

49 Maroons played a leading role in the Haitian rebellion as well, initiating revolutionary activity in the early period and continuing to carry it forward after Toussaint L’Ouverture and his army had agreed to play the role of French puppet. As Russell Shoatz writes in “The Dragon and the Hydra,” “Consequently, we witness the decentralized hydra elements [the maroon bands] launching the revolution, being displaced by Toussaint’s army—the dragon—only to resume their leadership roles during a crisis that saw the dragon capitulate to the French, thus showing [the maroons] as the most indispensable weapon the revolutionaries developed” (Shoatz, “The Dragon and the Hydra,” in Maroon the Implacable, 121).

50 Peter Linebaugh, “Jubilating, or How the Atlantic Working Class Used the Biblical Jubilee Against Capitalism, to Some Success,” The New Enclosures: Midnight Notes 10 (1990): 94.

51 Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 209–210.

52 This Peter bore the same name as the insurrectionary maroon leader of exactly one hundred years before, and was headquartered in the same county. Leaming hints at a possibly spiritual explanation for the name, in the common West African belief in the supernatural possession of a living figure by a beloved, deceased hero (Leaming, Hidden Americans, 255).

53 Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 246.

54 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 253.

55 Mullin, Flight and Rebellion, 154.

56 “Glister” is an older word for “glitter.” Delany uses it to refer to the highest level of conjure-men and women of the swamp; how he came to use this word is unknown.

57 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 258–259.

58 Rediker and Linebaugh, The Many Headed Hydra, 184–185.

59 Herbert Aptheker, “Maroons Within the Present Limits of the United States,” in Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, ed. Richard Price (Garden City, NJ: Anchor Books, 1973), 165.

60 Leaming, Hidden Americans.

61 Federici, Caliban and the Witch.