whites.
1799 Two whites are killed in Southampton County, Virginia when a group of slaves forcefully resist their transfer to Georgia.
August 1800 The famous Gabriel’s Conspiracy erupts, in which one thousand armed slaves from across the state attempt to march upon and attack Richmond.
1800–1801 A conspiracy started by slaves in Petersburg, Virginia, which plans an attack on Norfolk, spreads to the interior.
1801–1802 Reported slave conspiracies increase in counties across northeastern North Carolina.
June 1802 Fugitives and outlaws stage an armed attack on the Elizabeth County Jail in order to free slaves arrested for conspiracy.
1805, 1808, and 1810 Insurrectionary activity is reported in Isle of Wight, Norfolk, and Chowan counties, on both sides of the North Carolina–Virginia border. Arson attacks and cattle raids become increasingly common throughout this period, and newspapers warn white people not to spread news about the attacks for fear of their contagion.5
Whenever and wherever there has been slavery, there has been resistance. This period, however, is unique in comparison to earlier times due to the increase of coordinated and large-scale conspiracies attempting, not just to alter immediate conditions, but to fundamentally overthrow bondage. The individual endeavor of escape took on more conspiratorial and collective forms as revolt changed in both frequency and content.
Historians have attempted to explain the exponential increase in rebellious activity in a number of ways: a contributing factor was the concurrent spread of revolt in the Caribbean and across South America, including the massive revolution that began in the French colony of Saint Domingue (Haiti) in 1791. Others have pointed to the growth of bourgeois revolutionary ideas and natural-rights philosophy at the time, and their possible introduction into slave circles.6 Though this last theory remains untenable for a number of reasons, it does make sense that internal tension among the ruling class was an opportunity that was exploited by insurrectionaries at the time. Certainly it is true that word of rebellions in the Caribbean had spread to North American slave communities, and it’s reasonable to assume that these revolts, in turn, may have influenced the timing of several conspiracies.
The questions remain, however: what could explain the geographic conglomeration of this period of revolt around the counties adjacent to the eastern North Carolina–Virginia border, and how were these attempted revolts coordinated on a larger scale than their predecessors?
An early colonial governor of Virginia, Alexander Spotswood helped to consolidate the English Empire’s control over the mid-Atlantic by breaking up the original Albemarle Settlement and destroying the Tuscarora Confederacy. Charles Bridge Collection (portrait)
Between the cracks of contemporary historical studies on slave revolt—and in the personal letters, General Assembly notes, and newspaper clippings of the time—a tentative answer starts to emerge: this period and territory of revolt can be seen as the direct product of the Great Dismal Swamp maroons, who were part of a series of permanent, overlapping communities made up, at any given time, of around two thousand plantation fugitives. Nearly all of the aforementioned rebellions or conspiracies took place in areas that bordered or encompassed parts of the swamp, a massive piece of land that originally included an estimated 1,500–2,000 square miles, and stretched from Norfolk, Virginia to Edenton, North Carolina.
These maroons, who were of Native, European, and West African descent, built and held long-term communities in various parts of the swamp roughly from the end of the Tuscarora Wars in 1714 to the end of the Civil War in 1865. For 150 years these multi-ethnic rebels mixed and shared the diverse cultural and religious forms of the Tuscarora, Irish, English, and West Africans.7 Forced to flee above-ground life as debt fugitives, runaway slaves, or refugees from the brutal wars waged on Indians, the maroons established a permanent life in the swamp while waging a long-term, unceasing guerilla war against plantation society in the form of arson, cattle rustling, crop theft, encouraging slave escapes, and coordinating insurrections throughout the area. At times, the maroons and related slaves allied themselves with larger political forces—affiliating themselves, for example, with the British to attack American slave-owners during the Revolutionary War, and forming autonomous forces to fight the Confederacy ninety years later.
The swamp was a key site of social organization behind multiple waves of rebellion, demonstrating that individual escape could, in the right circumstances, transform into a practice of collective attack. Always intersecting with this dynamic interplay was a diverse and, at times, bizarre mixture of cultural and religious practices, blending everything from Tuscarora rites of passage, heretical Christian thought, and self-described witchcraft to the serpent-centered spiritual and political councils of West African conjure men and women.
The Sink of America, the Refuge of Our Renegades
No history of the Great Dismal Swamp maroons would be complete without a brief mention of their predecessors: the fugitives, who were escaped bond-laborers of both European and African descent, pirates, landless paupers, and religious and political radicals who formed the semi-autonomous Roanoke Settlement of North Carolina’s Albemarle Sound.8
Beginning in the 1640s, individuals and bands of escapees and rebels fled the plantation life of South Carolina and Virginia to what is now northeastern North Carolina, for the protection of the militarily powerful Tuscarora Confederacy.9 Eventually this multi-ethnic population coalesced into its own settlement, which by all known accounts was a successful experiment in cooperation between neighbors of vastly different cultural backgrounds. The community of several thousand maintained itself by way of subsistence farming, hunting and gathering, mutual aid, and small trade with the larger Tuscarora communities. No orthodox church was allowed to establish itself, with the settlers militantly preferring an anticlerical version of Quakerism that emphasized “inner light” and “liberty of conscience,” as well as adopting the practices of the Tuscaroras themselves.10 As early as 1675 the settlers called for the abolition of slavery, and one of the few declarations or laws they passed established a kind of jubilee for fugitives fleeing bondage elsewhere:
Noe person transporting themselves into this County after the date hereof shall be lyable to be sued during the terme and space of five yeares after their arrival for any debt contracted or cause of action given without the County and that noe person liveing in this County shall on any pretence whatsoever receive any letter of Atturney Bill or account to recover any debt within the time above mentioned of a Debtor liveing here with out the said Debtor freely consent to it.11
To no one’s surprise, the managers of profit and discipline in Virginia and South Carolina recognized the threat of such an appealing alternative that was ever present at their own borders. Virginia was physically separated from the Albemarle Sound by the dense and difficult Great Dismal Swamp, but since the very beginning of the colony, laborers had chosen to risk escape over the possible death and certain misery of enslavement on a plantation. Spelling out perfectly the early capitalist position on these settlers, the governor of Virginia wrote, “As regards our neighbours, North Carolina is and always was the sink of America, the refuge of our renegades: and till in better order it is a danger to us.”12
Efforts
