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,