“better order” were soon to come. Trouble first erupted in 1677, when the Lords Proprietors—aristocrats appointed by the crown to exact fees and manage the territory—attempted to impose new restrictions on the inhabitants. Thirty or forty armed settlers seized the customs records and imprisoned the acting governor, along with several other officials. A group of West African and European fugitives from servitude in Virginia also managed to escape and join the rebellion at the same time. The Lords Proprietors backed down and replaced the governor. The conflict came to be called Culpeper’s Rebellion, after the radical inhabitant John Culpeper, who had been involved in seditious activities from Charleston to Virginia and New England while “endeavoring to sett the poore people to plunder the rich.”13
A new, larger conflict involving similar tensions rose to the surface in 1704. This time, the governor began requiring a swearing of allegiance to the crown for all offices, a practice harshly opposed by the dissident settlers, who physically removed him from office. A tense calm held, but by 1711 the “Quaker War” had broken out, pitting those who desired to maintain their non-plantation way of life against wealthier newcomers, who sought to turn North Carolina into a profitable, well-governed monocultural agrarian economy. The stakes were clear: either the Albemarle Sound would remain a free territory—multi-ethnic and with a cooperative basis for interactions between settlers and Indians—or slavery would reign supreme.
The stakes of the conflict extended well beyond the single settlement and had broader consequences for English imperial and economic aims: the vast majority of settlers brought to Virginia in the late-seventeenth century were bond-laborers of one kind or another, and from the moment of setting foot in the wilderness of this new world, many of these commoners sought an immediate escape from—if not the destruction of—the world from which they came. Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia understood this threat well. A clever statesman, Spotswood was more in tune with long-term, imperial, and capitalist strategy than many of his contemporaries. He had long manipulated and intimidated various Indian tribes into paying tribute to Virginia, and it was these tribes that in part helped to prevent the creation of permanent maroon settlements on the colony’s western front in the Blue Ridge Mountains.14
Despite the overwhelming force of the English empire, the Roanoke inhabitants fought well. Aided in particular by the renowned skill of West African sailors in navigating the area’s difficult waterways, the men and women built an impressive fort and won their first battle. After three years of large battles and small guerilla skirmishes, however, the combined forces of Spotswood’s Virginia militia and the English Royal Marines forced the settlers to either surrender or retreat into the nearby swamps.
After the defeat of the Roanoke Settlement, there was one final obstacle in the path of English imperial and economic strategy in North Carolina: only a few months after the Quaker War ended, forces from England, South Carolina, and Virginia waged a brutal campaign of extermination against the northern Tuscarora Confederacy. The Tuscaroras were more numerous and powerful than the Roanoke settlers, though, and were assisted by individual fugitive-fighters of African and European descent who were fleeing their own recent defeat in the Albemarle Sound. Thanks in part to the help of a brilliant fort-builder, engineer, and escaped “militant against slavery” known to us only as Harry, the Tuscaroras held off enormous European forces until 1713.15 That spring, South Carolinian militia finally defeated the Tuscaroras’ Fort Hancock, massacring nine hundred men, women, and children, and enslaving the rest.
Many of the surviving members of the Tuscarora Confederacy left the territory, fleeing as far north as Pennsylvania and New York. Some guerilla bands continued the fight as late as 1718, while others sought to create a life in the wilderness alongside the European and West African fugitive-rebels who had fought in the Quaker War. Many of these latter groups of Tuscaroras formed the nucleus of the first Great Dismal Swamp maroons, as not just isolated warriors but politically and socially unified communities. They were joined by more maroons from Virginia, in particular from the Powhatan Confederacy and Chowan Nation, and within a generation would form large communities capable of attacking and destabilizing one of the most profitable regional economies in the world.
A Bald Cypress emerges from the edge of Lake Drummond in the center of the Great Dismal. US Fish and Wildlife Service
The period of this mass escape represents a confluence of historically relevant developments. The decade in which power was consolidated by North Carolina’s emerging planter class saw the end of the Roanoke Settlement and Tuscarora Confederacy and the beginning of the swamp maroons, and was pivotal in the larger history of Atlantic capitalism and English empire. For England and the colonies under English power, this period finalized
the establishment of the limited monarchy, England’s entry into continental European politics, the development of a bureaucracy, the rise of executive government, the emergence of high finance and public credit, the birth of tariff protection, the union with Scotland, the end of religious struggles, convulsions in the landowning sector of the economy, and rapid acceleration in the advance of the business and professional interest.16
All these changes were a distinct transition, a modernization of political and economic forces that coincided precisely with the end of a certain phase of primitive accumulation in the colonies.17 For fugitive debtors, servants, and slaves, the living dream of an egalitarian and libertarian way of life, which had briefly taken root in Albemarle, was wiped out and replaced by the forced exodus, enslavement, and extermination of Indians; the forced labor of the poor; and the establishment of a violently maintained racial hierarchy. Though their struggle would seriously challenge the plantation system and inspire countless thousands to rebellion, the later swamp maroons emerged less as a lived alternative to this reality than as a fierce attack upon it.
Fleeing to the Swamp
The impassibility of the Great Dismal Swamp and the mythology that surrounded it provided protection to these early maroons, making their recapture cost-prohibitive and dangerous. Augustine Herrman, an early mapmaker, described the area in 1670 as “Low Suncken Swampy Land not well passable but with great difficulty. And herein harbours Tiggers Bears and other Devouring Creatures.” In 1728, William Byrd II—slave-owner, aristocrat, and credited founder of Richmond—was tasked with surveying the boundary line between North Carolina and Virginia, in part to help with jurisdictional conflict that had erupted between the states over the recapture of slaves.18 After his difficult trek through the swamp, Byrd wrote, “The ground of this swamp is a mere quagmire, trembling under the feet of those that walk upon it.”19
Poets who had never set foot in the area wrote of the territory as a metaphor for the darkness and hidden nature of the soul. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow mythologized the swamp in his poem “The Slave in the Dismal Swamp”:
Dark fens of Dismal Swamp…
Where will-o-wisps and glow worms shine,
In bulrush and brake:
Where waving mosses shroud the pine,
And cedar grows and the poisonous vine,
Is spotted like the snake.
A generation later, Harriet Beecher Stowe explicitly acknowledged the Great Dismal as a harbor for escaped slaves in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Though she would
