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