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Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 246.

54 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 253.

55 Mullin, Flight and Rebellion, 154.

56 “Glister” is an older word for “glitter.” Delany uses it to refer to the highest level of conjure-men and women of the swamp; how he came to use this word is unknown.

57 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 258–259.

58 Rediker and Linebaugh, The Many Headed Hydra, 184–185.

59 Herbert Aptheker, “Maroons Within the Present Limits of the United States,” in Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, ed. Richard Price (Garden City, NJ: Anchor Books, 1973), 165.

60 Leaming, Hidden Americans.

61 Federici, Caliban and the Witch.

Near the end of the Civil War, in January 1865, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman arrived in Savannah, Georgia with his army of capital, “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”62 The destruction caused by his army was general and total throughout Georgia, South Carolina, and parts of North Carolina. “One could track the line of Sherman’s march … by the fires on the horizon. He burned the ginhouses, cotton presses, railroad depots, bridges, freighthouses, and unoccupied dwellings.”63 The violence spared no one, neither plantation playboys nor poor laborers, owners nor fieldhands, free nor enslaved.

      Thousands of formerly enslaved men, women, and children trailed the victors, many among them ambivalent to the Union, careless of the Confederacy, but with a burning hatred of the planter class and with a desire to take advantage of the opportunity opened up by the Union’s invasion. Sherman’s destruction not only served military interests, but industrialists as well, paving the way for reinvestment in the South by northern capitalists—what history will call the period of Reconstruction. For a very limited time at the end of the Civil War, attacks on the plantation economy by slaves and laborers partly coincided with the scorched earth policy of an army serving northern business interests.

      The Civil War brought to a head conflicts over race and competing visions of economic production that had been simmering for decades, but it did so on the terms of the ruling class, answering these problems in ways that perpetuated capitalist and colonialist conditions while realizing modern forms of exploitation for a new era. Nevertheless, the power vacuum opened up in this tumultuous period offered an opportunity to former slaves and fugitives who had built up networks of resistance and established maroon communities before the war. Insurgents continued to attack the plantation system long after the military conflict had ended, taking advantage of the state’s loss of regional control when possible, but also beginning to simultaneously respond to and reject northern models of democracy and wage work. Tactics shifted accordingly; sabotage against the plantations persisted, but was accompanied by strikes, the self-organizing of farm laborers, the rejection of labor contracts, the occupation of land, and armed community defense from white vigilantes.

In Savannah, where the ocean temporarily cooled the flames of Sherman’s brutal march, Union troops arrived as a scattered mass. In one group stood the Union Army, who believed they were determining the fate of the South for years to come. In the other group were the fugitives and deserters, who were welcomed into the city, marshes, swamps, and islands by the thousands of men and women who would actually deliver the final blow to one of “the most close knit, aristocratic, and affluent group of planters [of] the antebellum South.”64

      Endnotes

62 “If money … comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek, capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” (Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy [New York: The Modern Library, 1906], 834.)

63 “John H. Kennaway, 1865,” in Standing upon the Mouth of a Volcano: New South Georgia, A Documentary History, ed. Mills Lane (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1993), 3.

64 Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 78.

      Ogeechee Till Death:

      Expropriation and Communization in Low-Country Georgia

      “You ask us to forgive the landowners of our island.… I cannot well forgive. Does it look as if he has forgiven me, seeing how he tries to keep me in a condition of helplessness?”

      —Anonymous former slave from Edisto Island, South Carolina, October 1865

      “As to work, I do not imagine they will do much of it.”

      —Charles Heyward,

       a Combahee River, South Carolina planter, 1867

      On the eve of 1868, while prominent Savannah citizens delighted in Christmas and New Year’s festivities, another party was brewing in the swamps and rice fields of the Ogeechee Neck just twelve miles south of the city. Hundreds of rice workers and forest squatters were driving the plantation overseers off their lands, and concretizing their plans to occupy the land and create new lives for themselves, independent of the newly imposed rent and wage system.

      In November of 1864, Sherman’s troops took Atlanta and destroyed the entire railroad infrastructure in the city. They would return again, under different names, after the war to rebuild the railroads and the city but with northern, industrial investment and profit replacing the southern planter oligarchy.

      The Ogeechee Insurrection would last only a few weeks, but its legacy lives on as the most coordinated series of occupations of the coastal southeast rice plantations. While rice workers all over South Carolina and Georgia were striking intermittently, the Ogeechee rebels went beyond work stoppages and transformed their lives by claiming the land that their ancestors had been forced to turn into rice fields. With arms and manifestos, the insurgents fought in the footsteps of the maroons before them and attempted to destroy the plantation system forever.

      Land Contestation after the War

      At the end of the war, many Black workers chose not to leave the plantations, homesteads, and cities where they were enslaved. The story usually goes that this was because they were isolated from survival networks away from their homes; however, many slaves had already freed themselves at home and did not need to leave to find sanctuary. The Emancipation Proclamation, which officially freed the slaves, was a militarily strategic move that legalized the incorporation of fugitive and contraband slaves into the ranks of the Union Army, while crippling the South’s productive capacity during the war.65 In effect, the Proclamation was symbolic; slaves had already been freeing themselves by the thousands, not to officially join a war they were already fighting on their own terms, but because “they wanted to stop the economy of the plantation system, and to do that

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