LITMIR.BIZ

      An early colonial governor of Virginia, Alexander Spotswood helped to consolidate the English Empire’s control over the mid-Atlantic by breaking up the original Albemarle Settlement and destroying the Tuscarora Confederacy. Charles Bridge Collection (portrait)

      Between the cracks of contemporary historical studies on slave revolt—and in the personal letters, General Assembly notes, and newspaper clippings of the time—a tentative answer starts to emerge: this period and territory of revolt can be seen as the direct product of the Great Dismal Swamp maroons, who were part of a series of permanent, overlapping communities made up, at any given time, of around two thousand plantation fugitives. Nearly all of the aforementioned rebellions or conspiracies took place in areas that bordered or encompassed parts of the swamp, a massive piece of land that originally included an estimated 1,500–2,000 square miles, and stretched from Norfolk, Virginia to Edenton, North Carolina.

These maroons, who were of Native, European, and West African descent, built and held long-term communities in various parts of the swamp roughly from the end of the Tuscarora Wars in 1714 to the end of the Civil War in 1865. For 150 years these multi-ethnic rebels mixed and shared the diverse cultural and religious forms of the Tuscarora, Irish, English, and West Africans.7 Forced to flee above-ground life as debt fugitives, runaway slaves, or refugees from the brutal wars waged on Indians, the maroons established a permanent life in the swamp while waging a long-term, unceasing guerilla war against plantation society in the form of arson, cattle rustling, crop theft, encouraging slave escapes, and coordinating insurrections throughout the area. At times, the maroons and related slaves allied themselves with larger political forces—affiliating themselves, for example, with the British to attack American slave-owners during the Revolutionary War, and forming autonomous forces to fight the Confederacy ninety years later.

      The swamp was a key site of social organization behind multiple waves of rebellion, demonstrating that individual escape could, in the right circumstances, transform into a practice of collective attack. Always intersecting with this dynamic interplay was a diverse and, at times, bizarre mixture of cultural and religious practices, blending everything from Tuscarora rites of passage, heretical Christian thought, and self-described witchcraft to the serpent-centered spiritual and political councils of West African conjure men and women.

      The Sink of America, the Refuge of Our Renegades

No history of the Great Dismal Swamp maroons would be complete without a brief mention of their predecessors: the fugitives, who were escaped bond-laborers of both European and African descent, pirates, landless paupers, and religious and political radicals who formed the semi-autonomous Roanoke Settlement of North Carolina’s Albemarle Sound.8

Beginning in the 1640s, individuals and bands of escapees and rebels fled the plantation life of South Carolina and Virginia to what is now northeastern North Carolina, for the protection of the militarily powerful Tuscarora Confederacy.9 Eventually this multi-ethnic population coalesced into its own settlement, which by all known accounts was a successful experiment in cooperation between neighbors of vastly different cultural backgrounds. The community of several thousand maintained itself by way of subsistence farming, hunting and gathering, mutual aid, and small trade with the larger Tuscarora communities. No orthodox church was allowed to establish itself, with the settlers militantly preferring an anticlerical version of Quakerism that emphasized “inner light” and “liberty of conscience,” as well as adopting the practices of the Tuscaroras themselves.10 As early as 1675 the settlers called for the abolition of slavery, and one of the few declarations or laws they passed established a kind of jubilee for fugitives fleeing bondage elsewhere:

Noe person transporting themselves into this County after the date hereof shall be lyable to be sued during the terme and space of five yeares after their arrival for any debt contracted or cause of action given without the County and that noe person liveing in this County shall on any pretence whatsoever receive any letter of Atturney Bill or account to recover any debt within the time above mentioned of a Debtor liveing here with out the said Debtor freely consent to it.11

To no one’s surprise, the managers of profit and discipline in Virginia and South Carolina recognized the threat of such an appealing alternative that was ever present at their own borders. Virginia was physically separated from the Albemarle Sound by the dense and difficult Great Dismal Swamp, but since the very beginning of the colony, laborers had chosen to risk escape over the possible death and certain misery of enslavement on a plantation. Spelling out perfectly the early capitalist position on these settlers, the governor of Virginia wrote, “As regards our neighbours, North Carolina is and always was the sink of America, the refuge of our renegades: and till in better order it is a danger to us.”12

Efforts to put the Roanoke Settlement and its Tuscarora neighbors in “better order” were soon to come. Trouble first erupted in 1677, when the Lords Proprietors—aristocrats appointed by the crown to exact fees and manage the territory—attempted to impose new restrictions on the inhabitants. Thirty or forty armed settlers seized the customs records and imprisoned the acting governor, along with several other officials. A group of West African and European fugitives from servitude in Virginia also managed to escape and join the rebellion at the same time. The Lords Proprietors backed down and replaced the governor. The conflict came to be called Culpeper’s Rebellion, after the radical inhabitant John Culpeper, who had been involved in seditious activities from Charleston to Virginia and New England while “endeavoring to sett the poore people to plunder the rich.”13

      A new, larger conflict involving similar tensions rose to the surface in 1704. This time, the governor began requiring a swearing of allegiance to the crown for all offices, a practice harshly opposed by the dissident settlers, who physically removed him from office. A tense calm held, but by 1711 the “Quaker War” had broken out, pitting those who desired to maintain their non-plantation way of life against wealthier newcomers, who sought to turn North Carolina into a profitable, well-governed monocultural agrarian economy. The stakes were clear: either the Albemarle Sound would remain a free territory—multi-ethnic and with a cooperative basis for interactions between settlers and Indians—or slavery would reign supreme.

The stakes of the conflict extended well beyond the single settlement and had broader consequences for English imperial and economic aims: the vast majority of settlers brought to Virginia in the late-seventeenth century were bond-laborers of one kind or another, and from the moment of setting foot in the wilderness of this new world, many of these commoners sought an immediate escape from—if not the destruction of—the world from which they came. Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia understood this threat well. A clever statesman, Spotswood was more in tune with long-term, imperial, and capitalist strategy than many of his contemporaries. He had long manipulated and intimidated various Indian tribes into paying tribute to Virginia, and it was these tribes that in part helped to prevent the creation of permanent maroon settlements on the colony’s western front in the Blue Ridge Mountains.14

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