3 We recognize that until recently most antiauthoritarians made some approximation of the distinctions we are making simply through the use of adjectives—the authoritarian Left, the liberal Left, the bureaucratic Left—while still considering themselves to be a part of some larger Left. Along with many others from different post-Left and insurrectionary circles, we are choosing to abandon this language as a whole because, to us, it reaffirms a position within the binary of state politics in which our modes of struggle remain legible to and representative of the state we’re trying to destroy.
The “discovery” of the New World breathed new life into a European social system that was facing crisis and rebellion at home. Peasant uprisings across Europe in the fifteenth century took advantage of labor shortages, heretical religious ideas, and communal structures to eventually achieve a level of autonomy and self-sufficiency unknown to urban laborers centuries later. The existence of the commons—whether the fen, the field, or the forest—in which peasants and artisans could survive in hard times, proved a fundamental obstacle to the expansion of capitalism in Europe. The consequent destruction of these commons through the enclosures and expropriation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries opened the door to capitalist expansion and colonization, and forced entire classes of European laborers into intense poverty and despair. It was this class of newly proletarianized peoples that built and maintained the infrastructure of early capitalism’s cities, ports, and colonies. These processes also resulted in new waves of radicalism among these dispossessed peoples, from the antinomian and the Anabaptist to the Levellers and the Diggers, who self-organized to destroy the hedges and fences that enclosed formerly communal lands.
The ripples of these developments were felt beyond Europe to the whole of the Atlantic world, from West Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas. This world was globalized on the terms of slave-traders, merchants, and politicians, but the heavy lifting was done by diverse crews of West African, Indian, and European laborers, prostitutes, domestic workers, field hands, and sailors—“hewers of wood and drawers of water”—who sought every possible opportunity to rebel. Whether one refers to the impressment of sailors, the capture of Indians, indentured servitude, or the later development of chattel slavery, labor under seventeenth and eighteenth century capitalism was predominantly some form of slavery.
This slavery was not initially organized on strictly racial lines: for example, an Irishwoman captured and forced into servitude by English forces might work on the docks alongside a West African Akan man, who himself had once sailed with unpaid men of a half dozen different nationalities. This contributed a global and multi-ethnic character to revolt, whether it was that of the pirates of Bartholomew Roberts who attacked the slave trade of the early 1700s, the diverse characters behind the New York Conspiracy of 1741, or the autonomous fugitive settlement of North Carolina’s Albemarle Sound.
The motley character of these rebellions was particularly terrifying to those in power, and in this fear one can find the origins of the racial hierarchies we encounter today. Everything from legislation to new divisions of labor—in particular the role of poor Europeans as police or overseers—sought to divide, break apart, and isolate the threatening cross-cultural alliances that formed in the daily lives of the dispossessed. This process kicked into full gear in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries, sparked by events like Virginia’s Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676, which began as a ruling-class-led coup but grew out of control into an all-out war by English and African bond-laborers on the plantation elite. The word “white” did not even appear in legal records until 1691, but by the early-nineteenth century an entire code of racial categories, divisions of labor, scientific doctrine, and social conduct had evolved, which sought to shut out any possibility of meaningful, cross-ethnic solidarity.
This is not to diminish the importance of the mostly uniracial rebellions against southern chattel slavery, but to draw attention to the moments in which these racial codes were either not yet fully concretized or were simply thrown aside. The combative maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, and the fugitive settlement that preceded them, present an illustrative example of the interaction between changing divisions of labor, the origins of whiteness, the development of a rebellious pan-African identity, and the solidarity of the criminal and the propertyless.4
Endnotes
4 “Maroon” is a generic word used to refer to a fugitive from slavery, typically one who joined with other fugitives to live in some kind of autonomous settlement. Those who escaped North to Canada as individuals are rarely called maroons, for example, while the large settlements of escaped slaves who banded together in the Great Dismal, Caribbean, and Central and South America usually are. Most historians in the United States have only used this term to refer to African laborers, but in other parts of the world it can refer equally to enslaved Native or even English bond-laborers.
A Subtle yet Restless Fire:
Attacking Slavery from the Dark Fens of the Great Dismal
“For freedom we want and will have, for we have served this cruel land long enuff, and we are full able to conquer by any means.”
—Correspondence between slaves in Greene County, Georgia, and Martin County, North Carolina, eighteenth century
“Like one of the Patriarchs, I have my Flocks and my Herds, my Bond-men and Bond-women, and every Soart of Trade amongst my own Servants, so that I live in a kind of Independence on everyone but Providence. However this Soart of Life is attended with a great deal of trouble. I must take care to keep all my people to their Duty, to set all the Springs in motion and make every one draw his equal Share to carry the Machine forward. But then ’tis an amusement in this silent Country and a continual exercise of our Patience and Economy.”
—William Byrd II, wealthy seventeenth century planter, writer, and explorer
“Do not take me by my looks, I could kill a white man as free as eat.”
—Jacob,
a slave involved in Gabriel’s Uprising
From 1790 to 1810, the Tidewater region of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina experienced perhaps the most turbulent, constant, and ambitious series of conspiracies and insurrections ever faced by the institution of American chattel slavery. The product of over 150 years of autonomous activity by slaves, servants, fugitives, and Natives in the area, this period of rebellion forever changed the scope of insurrectionary activity under slavery.
The majority of day-to-day slave resistance and planning was unreported and remains unknown, but even a very brief survey of this time period presents an incredible outgrowth of rebellious activity:
May 1792 A conspiracy of nine hundred armed slaves, coordinated across multiple cities with plans to attack Norfolk, Virginia, is uncovered in a letter intercepted by slave-owners.
Summer 1792 Rumors of rebellion by slaves in Newbern, North Carolina, are reported in newspapers.
November 1792 An armed band of outlawed fugitives assassinates a plantation overseer in Charles City County, Virginia.
Summer 1793 Another conspiracy, allegedly involving as many as six thousand slaves, is discovered by slave-owners in a letter between fugitives in Richmond and Norfolk.
1795 A plantation overseer is murdered by fugitives or slaves in Wilmington, North Carolina.
1797 A group of fugitive slaves resist search by a white patrol in Prince
