130 years after the establishment of Scratch Hall, the maroons of European descent were considered “colored” by the Union Army and fought in tawny companies in Black regiments during the Civil War.32
The attacks on plantations and aid to escaped slaves that characterized early maroon resistance continued throughout the eighteenth century, despite efforts by both North Carolina and Virginia governments to stop them. During this period, the African presence in the swamp grew remarkably, reflecting changing demographics in the labor force and an increased colonial dependence on chattel slavery.
The West African men and women who were brought to North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and who would have contributed their numbers to the swamp maroons, came from a variety of territories along the western coast of the continent, kidnapped from tribal populations in what is today the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, Morocco, Senegal, and Gambia, among others. In particular, notable tribes like the Coromantee from the Gold Coast, who had lived communally in Africa, were fierce warriors, and often played central roles in slave revolts in the New World.33 Many of these slaves passed through the Caribbean first, and their experiences opposing bondage there made them especially dangerous to the ruling class of the North American colonies. Recognizing this danger, the New York Assembly went as far as to impose a special tax on Africans imported indirectly via the Caribbean in order to discourage the practice.34
In the Great Dismal, a kind of division of labor evolved: Maroon settlements in the middle and northern areas of the swamp—which were constituted mainly by those of African descent, attacked plantations on the Virginia side—while tawny settlements attacked those on the North Carolina side. These guerilla struggles only intensified during the Revolutionary War.
In 1775, Lord Dunmore, the last Royal Governor of Virginia, cynically switched Virginia’s traditional position on slavery and issued an emancipation proclamation that promised freedom to any slaves or indentured servants who would fight for the king. It was an early experiment with a policy that Britain later universalized across the continent when the Revolutionary War grew in scope. Maroon fighters answered the call, joining a band of six hundred ex–field hands and poor whites to successfully attack an American militia in Princess Anne County in 1775, and expropriating seventy-seven pieces of field artillery from American-held villages that autumn. Black crowds started gathering in Norfolk, which bordered the swamp, where they held meetings and created “disturbances.” Throughout Dunmore’s campaign in the Tidewater region, Black guerillas and white “Ragamuffins” (as they were termed by the American press) wreaked havoc on the plantation economy, expropriating livestock and crops, freeing slaves, and killing planters.
Spelling out quite clearly the extent to which their new natural-rights theory and revolutionary rhetoric extended to slaves and other laborers, the American State Legislature in North Carolina responded to these developments by forbidding the manumission of slaves by their owners in a law titled “An Act to Prevent Domestic Insurrection.” Repressive legislation of this nature did not cease after the war. Though they changed their target from Loyalist slave-owners to Quakers and others considered subversive, the slave-owning American patriots remained extremely anxious about rebellion by this motley crew of maroons, slaves, and poor whites. The motivations of the American property-owning class remained consistent from before the War for Independence to long after the departure of the last British ship.
It is worth noting that on other parts of the continent, groups similar to the early swamp maroons played a key role in instigating action against British authorities rather than on their behalf. One particular example is that of Black and white sailors in New England, who engaged frequently in strikes and sabotage in response to the British policy of pressing sailors into service against their will. For twenty-five years before the Revolutionary War, seamen in Boston led constant, militant riots against impressment by British officials, beginning in 1741 when a mob attacked a sheriff. Events ramped up over the course of that year and three hundred sailors—armed with “axes, clubs, and cutlasses”—attacked the commanding officer of a ship. Later that same year, a multiracial conspiracy by domestic workers and sailors, organized in taverns along the waterfront, threatened to destroy a British naval fort and burn down all of New York City.35
Nevertheless, efforts to “reclaim” the Revolutionary War, by pointing to its supposedly proletarian roots, or to the influence of Enlightenment philosophy on slave insurrections, are sharply contradicted by the guerilla bands of maroons, slaves, and servants attacking their “revolutionary” masters farther south. We mention this period not to take sides in a war between governments in which both sides deserve utter contempt, but to highlight the social war that was constantly taking place beneath the surface. That this other war manifested itself sometimes in favor of the British, and at other times the Americans, matters less than the deeper patterns of cross-ethnic alliance, revolt, and experimentation by the dispossessed at this time. The struggles of both the sailors and their maroon counterparts represent a liberatory self-activity, autonomously driven, that continued long after the American War for Independence was over.
Little changed after the war, then, for the classes of people driven to maroon themselves in the Great Dismal Swamp. The communities of the swamp continued to grow and develop their own ways of life, including their own unique cultural and religious practices. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the swamp was home to around two thousand people—mostly of African descent but with sizable tawny and Indian populations—grouped in numerous, overlapping settlements throughout the roughly 1,500 square miles of swampland.36 Though a canal was constructed by developers, which connected the Intercoastal Waterway to a lake in the center of the swamp, efforts by the likes of George Washington and Patrick Henry to turn the wilderness into fertile farmland failed utterly.37 Attacks on plantation society continued uninterrupted up to the turn of the century, when the rebels began to coordinate themselves across larger and larger geographic areas, seeking not just the immediate relief of individual escape from slavery, but the destruction of the entire economic order.
To No Longer Bear What They Had Borne
Rustling cattle, burning plantation property, liberating slaves, and stealing crops were frequent features of maroon life throughout the eighteenth century. As slaves were also engaging in similar activities, and because some slaves would escape for only short periods of time before being returned to the plantation, it is difficult to distinguish in the historical record between acts committed by true maroons and those by those still held in bondage.38
Regardless, new patterns of rebellion—distinct from the smaller and less “ambitious” raids of earlier decades—began to emerge around 1790. Coinciding with a huge period of unrest and maroon-driven revolution across the Caribbean, insurrectionary activity in the Tidewater region of Virginia and North Carolina began to take on a new character, as rebels sought to expand and coordinate attacks over larger and larger geographic territories, and as they directly targeted not just plantation production but also white-controlled cities and political centers.
Between 1790 and 1810, attacks on the plantation economy occurred in nearly every season of every year, and any number of conspiracies and revolts could serve to demonstrate the changing focus of target. The three highlighted below were specifically chosen because they demonstrate the coordinating and encouraging role of the Great Dismal Swamp and its inhabitants.
Early Insurrection Attempts: 1792–1800
The first of these insurrectionary attempts began in May 1792, and involved over nine hundred slaves and maroons on the eastern shore of Virginia. As
