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