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target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_4b9979d4-b5bd-5e54-bff2-9c0f99ec7c4b">28 We shift here to using more conventional “racial” rather than national designations (e.g., white instead of European) for these protagonists, in part because their own society was doing so at the time. “White” and “Black”—as terms that are used for categories of labor, power, rights, privilege, and conduct—emerge and concretize in this period, though the maroons themselves may have had very different ways of thinking about their own ethnic and cultural loyalties. “Black” as a category and identity can partly be understood as the product of chattel slavery and its legal and moral justifications, but is equally a product of the pan-African cultures of resistance that developed in places like the Great Dismal.

29 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 229.

30 John Tidwell, “Maroons: North America’s Hidden History,” August 26, 2002, 3. http://www.freewebs.com/midnightsea/maroons.pdf.

31 Political prisoner and ex–Black Panther Russell “Maroon” Shoatz has written about this distinction as well, arguing specifically that the origins of the term “white trash” lies in a derogatory reference to the class of “poor whites” who committed the ultimate act of race treason by marooning themselves with other servants, slaves, and Indians to attack the plantation order (“The Real Resistance to Slavery in North America,” in Maroon the Implacable: The Collected Writings of Russell Maroon Shoatz, eds. Fred Ho and Quincy Saul [Oakland: PM Press, 2013], 131–156). A similar history could be ascribed to the word “redneck,” which, though it was embraced proudly by the men it was given to, was initially a derogatory term invented by the media for the armed miners who fought to unionize in the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921. “White” functions not just as a designation of racial loyalty and privilege but as a pledge of allegiance to capital itself (William Byrd, William Byrd’s Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina [Raleigh: North Carolina Historical Commission, 1929]).

32 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 225.

33 In 1733, for example, a group of about 150 mostly Coromantee slaves, armed only with knives, took over a Danish fort on the island of St. John and held their ground for over seven months (Rediker and Linebaugh, The Many Headed Hydra, 201–202).

34 Ibid.

35 Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, “The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century,” in Gone to Croatan, eds. Ron Sakolsky and Richard Koehnline (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1993), 135; Rediker and Linebaugh, The Many Headed Hydra,174–193.

36 In comparison, the neighboring port city of Norfolk had roughly seven thousand residents in 1800.

37 In spite of the failed drainage efforts led by these founding fathers, massive logging and development made possible by the canal and later railroad construction have unfortunately reduced the swamp to roughly one-tenth of its original size. This reduction of habitat for would-be insurrectionaries and fugitives offers further insight into how private development and industrial attacks on the land have themselves functioned as part of a state strategy to discipline rebellious populations. The remaining portion of the swamp was turned into a wildlife refuge in 1974.

38 In Louisiana this clever tactic of temporary escape was explicitly acknowledged with a name: petit marronage. It described the common tactic by which slaves, in lieu of the possibility of permanent escape, would leave their work en masse for a week or two at a time until certain demands were granted by the owner (John Tidwell, “Maroons: North America’s Hidden History.” August 26, 2002, 5). The similarity with the later tactic of the labor strike is remarkable, and likewise brings to mind the early labor movement’s characterization of work under capitalism as “wage slavery.” Without diminishing the unique brutality and indignity of chattel slavery, this evolution of tactics offers one further reminder that slavery and wage work are not divided by some fundamental ethical/political boundary, but occupy one long, continuous development of bonded and exploited labor.

39 Boston Gazette and the Country Journal, June 18, 1792. In Leaming, Hidden Americans, 367.

40 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 366.

41 William F. Cheek, Black Resistance Before the Civil War (Beverly Hills: Glencoe Press, 1970), 101–102.

42 Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 213.

43 Ibid., 220, 224.

44 One of these informant slaves was named “Pharaoh” (Cheek, Black Resistance Before the Civil War, 108).

45 Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 154.

46 Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 229.

47 Ibid., 233.

48 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 250–253.

49 Maroons played a leading role in the Haitian rebellion as well, initiating revolutionary activity in the early period and continuing to carry it forward after Toussaint L’Ouverture and his army had agreed to play the role of French puppet. As Russell Shoatz writes in “The Dragon and the Hydra,” “Consequently, we witness the decentralized hydra elements [the maroon bands] launching the revolution, being displaced by Toussaint’s army—the dragon—only to resume their leadership roles during a crisis that saw the dragon capitulate to the French, thus showing [the maroons] as the most indispensable weapon the revolutionaries developed” (Shoatz, “The Dragon and the Hydra,” in Maroon the Implacable, 121).

50 Peter Linebaugh, “Jubilating, or How the Atlantic Working Class Used the Biblical Jubilee Against Capitalism, to Some Success,” The New Enclosures: Midnight Notes 10 (1990): 94.

51 Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 209–210.

52 This Peter bore the same name as the insurrectionary maroon leader of exactly one hundred years before, and was headquartered in the same county. Leaming hints at a possibly spiritual explanation for the name, in the common West African belief in the supernatural possession of a living figure by a beloved, deceased hero (Leaming, Hidden Americans, 255).

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