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