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