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and white “Ragamuffins” (as they were termed by the American press) wreaked havoc on the plantation economy, expropriating livestock and crops, freeing slaves, and killing planters.

      Spelling out quite clearly the extent to which their new natural-rights theory and revolutionary rhetoric extended to slaves and other laborers, the American State Legislature in North Carolina responded to these developments by forbidding the manumission of slaves by their owners in a law titled “An Act to Prevent Domestic Insurrection.” Repressive legislation of this nature did not cease after the war. Though they changed their target from Loyalist slave-owners to Quakers and others considered subversive, the slave-owning American patriots remained extremely anxious about rebellion by this motley crew of maroons, slaves, and poor whites. The motivations of the American property-owning class remained consistent from before the War for Independence to long after the departure of the last British ship.

It is worth noting that on other parts of the continent, groups similar to the early swamp maroons played a key role in instigating action against British authorities rather than on their behalf. One particular example is that of Black and white sailors in New England, who engaged frequently in strikes and sabotage in response to the British policy of pressing sailors into service against their will. For twenty-five years before the Revolutionary War, seamen in Boston led constant, militant riots against impressment by British officials, beginning in 1741 when a mob attacked a sheriff. Events ramped up over the course of that year and three hundred sailors—armed with “axes, clubs, and cutlasses”—attacked the commanding officer of a ship. Later that same year, a multiracial conspiracy by domestic workers and sailors, organized in taverns along the waterfront, threatened to destroy a British naval fort and burn down all of New York City.35

      Nevertheless, efforts to “reclaim” the Revolutionary War, by pointing to its supposedly proletarian roots, or to the influence of Enlightenment philosophy on slave insurrections, are sharply contradicted by the guerilla bands of maroons, slaves, and servants attacking their “revolutionary” masters farther south. We mention this period not to take sides in a war between governments in which both sides deserve utter contempt, but to highlight the social war that was constantly taking place beneath the surface. That this other war manifested itself sometimes in favor of the British, and at other times the Americans, matters less than the deeper patterns of cross-ethnic alliance, revolt, and experimentation by the dispossessed at this time. The struggles of both the sailors and their maroon counterparts represent a liberatory self-activity, autonomously driven, that continued long after the American War for Independence was over.

Little changed after the war, then, for the classes of people driven to maroon themselves in the Great Dismal Swamp. The communities of the swamp continued to grow and develop their own ways of life, including their own unique cultural and religious practices. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the swamp was home to around two thousand people—mostly of African descent but with sizable tawny and Indian populations—grouped in numerous, overlapping settlements throughout the roughly 1,500 square miles of swampland.36 Though a canal was constructed by developers, which connected the Intercoastal Waterway to a lake in the center of the swamp, efforts by the likes of George Washington and Patrick Henry to turn the wilderness into fertile farmland failed utterly.37 Attacks on plantation society continued uninterrupted up to the turn of the century, when the rebels began to coordinate themselves across larger and larger geographic areas, seeking not just the immediate relief of individual escape from slavery, but the destruction of the entire economic order.

      To No Longer Bear What They Had Borne

Rustling cattle, burning plantation property, liberating slaves, and stealing crops were frequent features of maroon life throughout the eighteenth century. As slaves were also engaging in similar activities, and because some slaves would escape for only short periods of time before being returned to the plantation, it is difficult to distinguish in the historical record between acts committed by true maroons and those by those still held in bondage.38

      Regardless, new patterns of rebellion—distinct from the smaller and less “ambitious” raids of earlier decades—began to emerge around 1790. Coinciding with a huge period of unrest and maroon-driven revolution across the Caribbean, insurrectionary activity in the Tidewater region of Virginia and North Carolina began to take on a new character, as rebels sought to expand and coordinate attacks over larger and larger geographic territories, and as they directly targeted not just plantation production but also white-controlled cities and political centers.

      Between 1790 and 1810, attacks on the plantation economy occurred in nearly every season of every year, and any number of conspiracies and revolts could serve to demonstrate the changing focus of target. The three highlighted below were specifically chosen because they demonstrate the coordinating and encouraging role of the Great Dismal Swamp and its inhabitants.

      Early Insurrection Attempts: 1792–1800

The first of these insurrectionary attempts began in May 1792, and involved over nine hundred slaves and maroons on the eastern shore of Virginia. As reported in the Boston Gazette, “about two weeks ago, the Negroes in that part of the State, to the amount of about 900, assembled in different parts, armed with muskets, spears, clubs, and committed several outrages upon the inhabitants.”39 Under the command of a leader known as Celeb, the slaves communicated with slave communities on the Dismal Swamp and Norfolk side of the bay, and secretly made weapons with the help of a blacksmith. Their intent was to cross the bay, join others on the mainland at the border of the swamp, and attack the arsenal at Norfolk, but their plans were discovered and the planters requested extra military supplies from the mainland.40

      Conspiracies and underground organizing in the area continued however, as evidenced by one intercepted letter found in Yorktown, Virginia in August 1793:

      Dear Friend—The great secret that has been so long in being with our own color has come nearly to a head that some in our Town has told of it but in such a slight manner it is not believed, we have got about five hundred guns aplenty of lead but not much powder.… I am full satisfied we shall be in full possession of the [w]hole country in a few weeks, since I wrote you last I got a letter from our friend in Charleston he tells me he has listed near six thousand men.…

Secret Keeper Richmond to Secret Keeper Norfolk.41

      Another letter was found addressed from Portsmouth, also in the Dismal Swamp region. The conspiracies failed to come to fruition, partly due to the intercepted communications and the shipment of arms from the mainland, but were notable for their size and ambition, and for their early attempts to communicate across vast areas. Their letters would have necessitated travel through territory either covered by the Great Dismal Swamp or bordering it.

      Even the mist that rose off the surface of the swamp's Lake Drummond invited conflict, with whites fearing demonic spirits while slaves and fugitives found spiritual guidance and power. US Fish and Wildlife Service

      In comparison, earlier known efforts at spectacular, collective resistance, like South Carolina’s Stono Rebellion, appeared more as an effort at joint escape and involved hardly more than a hundred participants. Not surprisingly then, word of this significantly larger attempted rebellion sent shockwaves through both slave and planter circles. Despite the insurrection’s failure, fear spread through white communities in the Tidewater region and beyond, and other slaves were encouraged to act. A letter sent one month after the failed conspiracy from Newbern, North Carolina confirms whites’ fears:

The negroes in this town and neighbourhood

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