href="#ulink_0c080341-fa08-58be-87ac-af56fdc1cfab">15 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 197–199.
16 Ibid., 197–201.
17 “Primitive accumulation” is a term commonly used to describe the initial processes of development and forceful dispossession that laid the groundwork for capitalist economies around the world. As Marx wrote, “This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in theology.” We would caution the reader to understand this accumulation not as a singular event that occurs at the dawn of capitalism, but rather as an element consistently present in every era: Just as the wars on peasant heretics and witches in Europe, and their maroon counterparts in America were a part of primitive accumulation in their time, so too were the later wars of imperial ambition of the twentieth century, along with the neoliberal reforms, structural adjustment programs, and prison industries of the twenty-first; Karl Marx, “Volume One: Capital,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978), 431.
18 For a healthy reminder of the political and personal ethics of our country’s early founders, we strongly encourage our readers to check out Byrd’s diaries. His own accounts of perpetrating sexual assaults on domestic workers and slaves are written with bone-chilling nonchalance.
19 Jack Olsen, “The Cursed Swamp,” Sports Illustrated 17, no. 22 (November 26, 1962): 68.
20 In Dred, Stowe describes the radical slave protagonist: “The large eyes had that peculiar and solemn effect of unfathomable Blackness and darkness which is often a striking characteristic of the African eye. But there burned in them, like tongues of flame in a Black pool of naphtha, a subtle and restless fire, that betokened habitual excitement to the verge of insanity” (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp [New York: Penguin, 1995], 241).
21 Olsen, “The Cursed Swamp,” 68.
22 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 340.
23 Ibid., 344–346.
24 These cattle were brought back to the swamps and bred as livestock to sustain the maroon communities, while others were allowed to re-wild in the swampland, eventually evolving into a mixed breed that observers have called Swamp Buffalos.
25 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 225.
26 Ibid., 224.
27 James Redpath, Roving Editor: Or Talks with Slaves in the Southern States, 243.
28 We shift here to using more conventional “racial” rather than national designations (e.g., white instead of European) for these protagonists, in part because their own society was doing so at the time. “White” and “Black”—as terms that are used for categories of labor, power, rights, privilege, and conduct—emerge and concretize in this period, though the maroons themselves may have had very different ways of thinking about their own ethnic and cultural loyalties. “Black” as a category and identity can partly be understood as the product of chattel slavery and its legal and moral justifications, but is equally a product of the pan-African cultures of resistance that developed in places like the Great Dismal.
29 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 229.
30 John Tidwell, “Maroons: North America’s Hidden History,” August 26, 2002, 3. http://www.freewebs.com/midnightsea/maroons.pdf.
31 Political prisoner and ex–Black Panther Russell “Maroon” Shoatz has written about this distinction as well, arguing specifically that the origins of the term “white trash” lies in a derogatory reference to the class of “poor whites” who committed the ultimate act of race treason by marooning themselves with other servants, slaves, and Indians to attack the plantation order (“The Real Resistance to Slavery in North America,” in Maroon the Implacable: The Collected Writings of Russell Maroon Shoatz, eds. Fred Ho and Quincy Saul [Oakland: PM Press, 2013], 131–156). A similar history could be ascribed to the word “redneck,” which, though it was embraced proudly by the men it was given to, was initially a derogatory term invented by the media for the armed miners who fought to unionize in the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921. “White” functions not just as a designation of racial loyalty and privilege but as a pledge of allegiance to capital itself (William Byrd, William Byrd’s Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina [Raleigh: North Carolina Historical Commission, 1929]).
32 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 225.
33 In 1733, for example, a group of about 150 mostly Coromantee slaves, armed only with knives, took over a Danish fort on the island of St. John and held their ground for over seven months (Rediker and Linebaugh, The Many Headed Hydra, 201–202).
34 Ibid.
35 Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, “The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, and the Atlantic Working Class in the Eighteenth Century,” in Gone to Croatan, eds. Ron Sakolsky and Richard Koehnline (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1993), 135; Rediker and Linebaugh, The Many Headed Hydra,174–193.
36 In comparison, the neighboring port city of Norfolk had roughly seven thousand residents in 1800.
37 In spite of the failed drainage efforts led by these founding fathers, massive logging and development made possible by the canal and later railroad construction have unfortunately reduced the swamp to roughly one-tenth of its original size. This reduction of habitat for would-be insurrectionaries and fugitives offers further insight into how private development and industrial attacks on the land have themselves functioned as part of a state strategy to discipline rebellious populations. The remaining portion of the swamp was turned into a wildlife refuge in 1974.
38 In Louisiana this clever tactic of temporary escape was explicitly acknowledged with a name: petit marronage. It described the common tactic by which slaves, in lieu of the possibility of permanent escape, would leave their work en masse for a week or two at a time until certain demands were granted by the owner (John Tidwell, “Maroons: North America’s Hidden History.” August 26, 2002, 5). The similarity with the later tactic of the labor strike is remarkable, and likewise brings to mind the early labor movement’s characterization of work under capitalism as “wage slavery.” Without diminishing the unique brutality and indignity of chattel slavery, this evolution of tactics offers one further reminder that slavery
