presented the land as a symbol of the moral stagnation of white southern civilization. Her portrayal of the environment also perfectly suited the “dark” racial stereotypes she used in her writing.20
Many of these descriptions were designed to sell papers or books, or in Byrd’s case, to garner a large paycheck from the English crown. The swamp was hardly the desert that early explorers described; though pits and peat bogs were dangerous to careless strangers, it was and remains a beautiful, biodiverse wilderness filled to the brim with otters, bobcats, deer, over two hundred species of birds, as well as a large lake, and juniper, gum, cypress, and southern white cedar trees. Islands between the fens and peat bogs made it possible to grow crops and raise livestock, and game was plentiful.21
Observers projected their own anxieties or affinities onto the mythology and ecology of the swamp depending on their position in plantation society. For example, the area around Lake Drummond at the center of the wilderness was long held to be of spiritual importance to swamp dwellers, who reported the existence of lights hovering over the water. While maroons and slaves viewed the phenomenon as “soft lights … used by the Gods to guide us lost slaves,” well-to-do white people outside the swamp referred to the lights as “the terrible people of the mist.”22
Even the natural foods of the area bore a contested political significance, depending on one’s position in the plantation order. Blue lupine, a plant that grows there wild, was considered devilish by proper society, but was consumed enthusiastically as a cereal grain by maroons, who credited its introduction to Grace Sherwood, a famous African herb doctor and witch of Currituck County.23
An 1867 map of the Great Dismal Canal portrays the Albemarle Sound and the counties surrounding the swamp on both sides of the Virginia-North Carolina dividing line. D.S. Walton/Hosford & Sons
The emergence of white supremacy, new divisions of labor, new forms of misogyny, and a paranoid fear of magic and witchcraft all intersected with a fear of the wild.
This mythology about the natural world, paired with the very real dangers of the swamp, created a place the “better” sort of people tried to avoid—in other words, a perfect environment for the formation of hidden, yet permanent large-scale maroon communities, otherwise more common to the Caribbean than North America.
Some of the earliest known activities of these maroons included attacks on Virginia’s cattle industry. Planters would guide their herds to the healthy grasslands west and north of the swampland, where, unbeknownst to them, they were vulnerable to cattle rustling by maroons.24 Even before larger-scale settlement in the swamp, slaves could use the territory as a sort of backup plan: in 1709, for example, a slave insurrection planned jointly by Indians and Africans took place in Isle of Wight County, on the edge of the swamp, and when it was stamped out by the Royal Governor of Virginia, one of the leaders, an African named Captain Peter, eluded capture by fleeing to the relative safety of the swamp.25
As word of these efforts spread through the slave and servants’ quarters of the Tidewater region, and conflicts over the future of North Carolina ended, the population of the swamp grew rapidly, and the establishment of real settlements was possible. This process started with larger, unified groups of Tuscarora Indians, who provided a cultural and organizational foundation, and who were soon joined by the formerly European (and some formerly African) settlers of Roanoke. Some of the earliest fugitives to enter the area, likely from the Virginia side, were Irish, as evidenced by early Celtic trail names like the Shallalah and Ballaback roads, and by the continued use of words like “shanty” (from the Irish shan tigh, meaning old house) among African Americans into the early-nineteenth century.26
Many of the inhabitants of the Great Dismal were known to temporarily leave the swamp to do small jobs, either for trade or petty cash. In particular the maroons were known as excellent shingle-makers; nearby settlers would often turn a blind eye to their illegal status in return for help harvesting wood for roofs. One runaway slave who spent some time in the swamp, and was interviewed after he escaped to Canada, had this to say about the inhabitants’ hospitality:
I boarded wit a man what giv me two dollars a month for de first un. Arter dat I made shingles for myself. Dar are heaps ob folks in dar to work: Most on ’em are fugitives, or else hirin’ dar time. Dreadful ’commodatin’ in dare to one anudder. De each like de ’vantage ob de odder one’s ’tection. Ye see dey’s united togedder in’ividually wit same interest at stake. Never hearn one speak disinspectively to anutter one: all ’gree as if ’dey had only one head and one heart, with hunder Legs and hunder hands. Dey’s more ’commadatin’ dan any folks I’s ever seed afore or since. Da Lend me dar saws, so I might he ’pared to spit shingles; and den day turn right ’bout and ’commodate demsels.27
An early print of the blacksmith Gabriel Prosser that appeared in white newspapers.
The earliest known settlement, named Scratch Hall, was founded in the 1730s as the Tuscarora’s numerical and cultural dominance subsided. The wild cousins of the poor whites of the southern countryside, the Scratch Hall folk were tawny or tan-skinned descendants of the Roanoke Old Settlers, and probably had a good deal of Tuscarora ancestry as well.28 They lived in the mixed swampland and pine barrens of the southern edge of the swamp. Guerilla raids on plantations that began in the area with the Tuscarora were continued by the Scratch Hall people, who harassed plantations by capturing horses, rustling cattle, and “committing other enormities.” They were helped in these endeavors by reportedly ferocious dogs called the Scratch Hall breed, which they bred and trained with the specific purpose of hunting and herding animals like cattle and horses.29
Images like this one appeared in white newspapers and journals after conspiracies like Gabriel’s Insurrection, galvanizing white fear and hatred.
Colonial and, later, American newspapers often did not recognize these tawny maroons as properly white. Groups of white vigilantes attacking similarly multi-ethnic maroon settlements in South Carolina reported frustration at not being able to tell “who was a negro.”30 Laws against intermarrying between races, unheard of in the non-plantation-based Roanoke Settlement, can be understood to have emerged in this period not as the product of “prejudice” but rather as an attempt to biologically police boundaries that governed the social divisions of labor, wealth, and power in society. In this context the definition of race was clearly political, with whiteness seen as a social—rather than biological—inheritance of privilege and power, rooted in the plantation order and concretized by the loyalty one did or did not express to the economic system. In his surveying the border between North Carolina and Virginia, Byrd hinted at this distinction: “Most of the North Carolina whites were poor, but did not belong to the ‘poor white’ class, which was held in contempt even by many of the slaves. The term ‘poor white’ connoted more than poverty.”31
