early development of capitalist wealth and power was thus not a “natural” or tranquil process but one enacted through constant violence against populations of the dispossessed. These communities and individuals resisted such processes with their lives. Every period of primitive accumulation—from the European theft of the commons to the earliest theft of Native lands—required bloody wars and ever-larger state apparatuses for enforcement. Always bubbling beneath the surface of such wars was the forced rewriting of daily social life on the bodies of the oppressed, the whole remaking of spiritual, communal, ethnic, and gender norms. The very existence of whiteness as a political and social category finds its origins in this period. Laborers of European descent became white as they were subjected to the various forces of democracy, divisions of labor, nationalism, and war.
In providing a commons beyond the boundaries of capitalist life, the role of wilderness was fundamental to the resistance of the swamp maroons. By the early 1800s, however, this wilderness was an island surrounded on all sides by a well-consolidated state and economic system. What had begun in part as an open, highly experimental mixture of radical cultural elements and ideas—European, Native, West African—evolved into a network of hidden, strictly oppositional, mostly Black settlements.
In all the phases of this evolution, radical and unpredictable religious forms played a key role—providing everything from a coordinating military role to a defense of women’s reproductive autonomy and their leadership in social and political life.60 A cross-Atlantic similarity can be noted here, as revolts by laborers in Europe were also marked by the magical, the irrational, the heretical, and the supernatural. By no coincidence, it was the same rationalist institutional forces that sought to govern Roanoke, enslave the Tuscarora, and drain the Great Dismal Swamp, and that sought to murder ungovernable women and stamp out uncontrollable spiritual practices in Europe.61 It is worth remembering that the quasi-atheist Deism of Thomas Jefferson, the man who ran Monticello like a well-oiled machine, was that of a slaveholder and politician.
Another theme emerges from the story of the Great Dismal, at what we might call the beginning of an anarchist history of the American South: that true affinity between differently racialized communities can only be found in a context of revolutionary violence. Even the process of forming the earliest Roanoke settlement must be understood in this way: the escape of fugitive servants and debtors was by legal definition an act of theft, and the constitution of the multi-ethnic settlement itself was made possible only by successive armed engagements with the English crown and an alliance with Tuscarora fighters. For the maroons of the Great Dismal, only through constant conflict with the plantation system was it possible to carve out settlements in which the racial order of the surrounding world could begin to erode. It was through acts of war with plantation society that various maroons could begin to approach each other as equals; only through the destruction of plantation society could that project have been completed.
Departing from the feel-good clichés and whitewashing of subjects like the Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman that one finds in high school textbooks, this history broadly affirms that the promise of escape is only fulfilled by the practice of attack. It reminds us why Tubman carried a handgun on her at all times, why many escaped slaves did not flee to the North but instead remained South, stealing from the economy that stole them, liberating their former coworkers, and attacking their former bosses.
Ultimately, these efforts forced American elites to reconsider slavery as the most stable and profitable system of agricultural production. The Civil War that resulted brought together competing visions for agrarian and industrial capitalism alongside new practices of exploitation and control, but it also opened new doors for resistance by the South’s angriest and most dispossessed. An equally violent social war continued underneath the formal national and racial divisions of the Civil War itself, with the poorest and most oppressed finding their own victories and defeats as one system of exploitation was replaced by another.
Endnotes
5 Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1943), 209–243; Hugo Prosper Leaming, Hidden Americans: Maroons of Virginia and the Carolinas (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1995), 252–253.
6 It is true that some slaves may have interacted with these ideas secondhand, but when slaves and maroons took up arms during the Revolutionary War, they often fought against the “revolutionary” forefathers, sometimes even the very same elite who contributed to Enlightenment thought. This pokes a fairly giant hole in the idea that the revolutionary ideologies of Jefferson, Paine, and the like had much to do with slave insurrections. More to the point, it is patronizing and absurd to imply that slaves needed the white bourgeoisie to tell them that freedom was worth fighting for, or what that freedom should look like. The effort to characterize slave organizing as an outgrowth of bourgeois philosophical sentiment seems to have less to do with fact and more to do with absolving the slave-owning founding fathers of some level of guilt.
7 “West Africans” of course includes a huge number of differing tribes and societies; there is little information on the specific origins of many of those who ended up as swamp maroons, though we do go into more detail later as to from where these men and women likely came.
8 We use “indentured servant” and “bond-laborer” interchangeably; such a worker, who was unpaid and could be sold between owners like credit, was purchased with the owner paying the worker’s travel cost or debts. Bond-laborers could be worked for a period of years or a lifetime, were often worked to death, and might be of West African, Irish, or English decsent.
9 A surviving expression hints at this early history, poking fun at South Carolina and Virginia by describing North Carolina as “a valley of humility between two hills of conceit.”
10 Their version of “Quakerism” was nontraditional. Settlers did not build an official church, few adopted pacifism, and their practice as a whole may not have necessarily even been Christian. At least some Roanoke settlers were also adopted as members of the Tuscarora tribe, being given different names and instructed in local religious rituals and cultural practices. (Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic [Boston: Beacon Press, 2000], 138–139.)
11 “Acts of the Assembly of Albemarle Ratified and Confirmed by the Proprietors the 20th Jan 1669 (–70),” Colonial and State Records of North Carolina (CRNC), vol. 1: 183–184.
12 “Lord Culpeper to Lords of Trade and Plantations” (December 12, 1681), in Calendar State Papers, Colonial Series, vol. II, America and West Indies, 1681–1685 (HM Public Record Office, 1898), 155.
13 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 151–152.
14 Most famously, in 1712, Spotswood took the children of native tribes from these mountains as hostages, forcing them to speak English and adopt Christianity while interned at the College of William and Mary. The children were to be killed if their tribes refused to assist in the colony’s war against fugitives; Anthony S. Parent, Jr., Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660–1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
