unknown and generally disapproved of by the slaveholders, preached a faith and worship very different from those of Anglo-Saxon Christianity. Also in the society of the enslaved there were conjure men and women, sorcerers or folk psychotherapists who helped the sick to uncross or cast off their spells of depression, hysteria, or obsession.54
The spiritual messengers were an opaque force, unregistered and unmarked by plantation society, but highly respected by slaves and maroons alike. Their religious orientation varied greatly, ranging from Christian Methodism to a variety of traditional West African folk spiritual practices and magic. These practices had evolved for over a hundred years in the Great Dismal Swamp, resulting in the blending of the strange mixture of Quaker ideas and Indian religion that had come earlier, with the spiritism and mysticism of more recent Black maroons. At his trial, for example, one of the leaders of Gabriel’s Uprising remarked that he was sent south to recruit with the “outlandish people” who were “supposed to deal with witches and wizards,” and therefore would be useful to the efforts of their army.55
Though religious figures’ involvement in slave coordination started much earlier, the recognized central council of conjure men and women, known as “the Head,” emerged sometime around the end of the eighteenth century, during or after Gabriel’s Uprising. What we know about this institution comes largely from the writings of an early Black nationalist named Martin Delany, who wrote a novel fictionalizing the travels of an escaped slave throughout the southern United States, Cuba, and Central America, documenting Delany’s vision for Black liberation and his role in revolutionary Black politics. Delany wrote specifically about the conjure councils of the Great Dismal Swamp and, as his observations greatly reflect known West African practices of the time, is understood to be credible.
According to Delany, the Head was made up of seven leading conjure men and women, drawn from the plantation, town, and maroon communities, and known as the “seven-finger high-glisters.”56 The glisters held a permanent location in a cave in the swamp, where they housed supplies, performed rituals, and kept their most sacred symbol, a large living serpent, considered a holy object in many West African practices and often used to represent the religions of African spiritism.
In addition to performing collective rituals, the Head’s primary function was the ordaining and coordination of the many underground spiritual figures across the region. In order to be ordained as conjure men or women, non-maroons were forced to (at least temporarily) escape their bondage and find the council. As spiritual leaders returned to their fields and towns from the swamp, a link was established between the swamp maroons and aboveground plantation society, connecting slave communities to an underground council that had contacts all over the Tidewater region and beyond. As Leaming writes:
The social impact must have been tremendous. Knowledge that such a council existed and was perpetually engaged in such ceremonies could only have been of inestimable value in the preservation of hope and the encouragement of struggle for those African Americans in bondage who believed. Above all else … the Head, like the conjure person of the plantations, considered themselves to be the chaplains corps of the war on slavery. The Head deeply revered the memory of Nat Turner, and claimed to have been associated with his effort. As young conjure men they had fought alongside General Gabriel and took pride in that action forty years later.57
Baptist and Methodist ministers were involved in spreading word of slave insurrection and maintaining morale as well, though their level of coordination with the Head is less known. Many of the Black spiritual leaders of this time would have fallen somewhere in between the gospel Christianity of the Methodist preacher and the spirits-worshipping mysticism of the seven-finger high-glisters, mixing the two variably to suit the occasion. What resulted from the maroon experience and its influence on slave organization was not a religious or political orthodoxy, but a vast spectrum of spiritual, communal, and insurrectionary practices, the inheritance of over a hundred years of life among diverse co-conspirators in the wilderness.
The impact of these practices, whether in the swamps or in the fields, was no less than the development of an oppositional, pan-African identity. Slaves just arriving from the Caribbean or West Africa got off the boat speaking different languages and possessing markedly different cultural backgrounds; in short, they arrived as Akan, Coromantee, Asante, Malagasay, Igbo, or Papa.58 It was the law, science, labor, and economy of the plantation, and the pan-cultural resistance to these things, that made these men and women “Black.”
The maroon role in spreading the insurrectionary fires of the Tidewater region continued after the concentrated period of uprisings to which we draw attention here. Both isolated and coordinated expropriations of cattle and other plantation property remained common, and the settlers of the swamp remained active in coordinating this revolt. Though rebellious activity erupted throughout the southeast in the nineteenth century, it continued to disproportionately appear in areas bordering this swampland, and newspapers often reported the surprising presence of lighter-skinned people in the groups responsible.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, the maroons and the many slaves they helped to liberate autonomously attacked Confederate forces and plantation property and generally destabilized the economic production that was so desperately necessary for the South to remain in the war. For example, the Richmond Daily Examiner reported on January 14, 1864, that a group of 500–600 Black “banditti” was ravaging the countryside in Camden and Currituck counties, both of which closely bordered the Great Dismal Swamp on the North Carolina side. The paper argued, “This present theater of guerilla warfare has, at this time, a most important interest for our authorities. It is described as a rich country … and one of the most important sources of meat supplies that is now accessible to our army.”59
Sometimes considered 'the grandfather of black nationalism,' Martin Delany was active against slavery, advocated for resettling former slaves outside the United States, and wrote the first novel published by a Black man in the United States, which highlighted the spiritual systems of maroons in the Great Dismal.
Alongside their tawny comrades, some of these autonomous maroon forces eventually joined Black regiments in the Union Army, while others continued guerilla activity and the liberation of the enslaved. Most of the maroon settlements voluntarily returned to life outside the swamps after Union victory, hopeful for the effects of emancipation, but the Great Dismal Swamp continued to be a major spiritual and political center for Black life long after. Though either forgotten or ignored by many twentieth century historians, the legacy of this territory and the resistance it enabled lives on in the memory of the communities to whom it provided refuge.
The Promise of Escape and the Practice of Attack
The history of maroon settlements and guerilla struggle in the Tidewater region covers a long stretch of time and cultural development. From the early 1600s to the end of the Civil War, an ongoing, nearly uninterrupted war on early capitalism and its processes of primitive accumulation was waged by successive groups of maroons, fugitives, slaves, and Indians (who are included in the former groups as well). These were not conflicts that could be easily ignored by the dominant colonial and planter forces; maroon and fugitive existence consistently undermined English imperial strategy and later destabilized the consolidation of labor power needed for the development of early American agrarian capitalism, so much so that slave revolt ultimately helped to catalyze a civil war and force agrarian capitalism’s transition from chattel slavery to wage labor. As subsequent chapters will demonstrate, the adoption of wages represents not a victory over or departure from the forces behind
