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Black Kos, Week in Review - The American Maroons of Virginia and North Carolina [1]
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Date: 2023-07-14
I have Jamaican Maroon blood from my mother’s side of the family. So the topic of Maroons has always fascinated me. Soi when I heard about American Maroon, I naturally became fascinated about the topic and read every resource and link I could find on it.
The Great Dismal Swamp Maroons were African-Americans who escaped the horrors of American slavery by living in the marshlands of the Great Dismal Swamp . The swamp covers an area between the states of Virginia and North Carolina. Although The Great Dismal Swamp has a very harsh environment, modern research suggests that thousands of Maroons lived in the swamps between about 1700 until the end of the Civil War in the late 1860s. Runaway slaves and indentured servants were a persistent problem for landowners in colonial Virginia. Slaves and indentured servants fled from abusive masters, to escape from a lifetime of forced conscription without pay, or in search of family members from whom they had been separated.
Stowe’s title character, Dred is a Great Dismal Swamp Maroon who preaches against slavery and incites slaves to escape bondage. Dred was first published in two volumes beginning in 1856. her novel “Dred” initially had better sales numbers than Uncle Tom's Cabin. But many have speculated that because its narrative was written like a documentary it just doesn’t evoke the powerful long lasting emotional reaction from readers that characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin did. The response to Stowe's first work, Uncle Tom's Cabin, appears to have powerfully impacted her second anti-slavery novel Dred. Uncle Tom's Cabin drew criticism from many abolitionists and African-American authors at the time for its perceived passive martyrdom of the title character Uncle Tom and its seeming endorsement of colonization as the solution to slavery. Dred, by contrast, introduced a revolutionary black character who was an heir to the American revolution rather than a passive problem to be expatriated away.
Another author of note Professor Dan Sayers of American University has done some of the most significant research on the Great Dismal Swamp Maroon settlements beginning with a project in 2002. Sayers’ work culminated in the book “A Desolate Place, for a Defiant People”. Lastly, on a personal note, I’m a direct decedent of Jamaican Maroons from my mother’s side, so I’ve always had a keen fascination with the subject matter of Maroons and their culture, this lead me to do some research in this area.
For some more background, the words "Maroon" and "Seminole" in all likelihood share the same origins from the Spanish word cimarrón, meaning "wild", "untamed", or “defiant”. On the other hand Cuban linguist José Juan Arrom has traced the origins of the word maroon further back than the Spanish cimarrón and notes it was first used on the island of Hispaniola (which the Dominican Republic and Haiti share) to refer to feral cattle. Later his research shows it was used to refer to enslaved Indians who escaped to the hills, and then by the early 1530s to enslaved Africans who also fled bondage. Arrom proposes that the American Spanish word ultimately derives from the Arawakan root word simarabo, roughly translated as "fugitive", in the Arawakan language spoken by the Taíno people native to the Caribbean. Because simarabo has a similar sound and meaning to the Spanish word cimarron, there is in my opinion a good chance the word Maroon is a kind of portmanteau of both meanings.
Osman was an African Muslim who had ran away and lived as a Maroon in the swamps.
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture / Photographs and Prints Division ID# 497439
At the beginning of the 18th century, as the Maroons came to live in the Great Dismal Swamp region, they mostly settled on a type of island in the marshes called mesics, basically the high and dry parts of the swamp. The Great Dismal Swamp Maroons included both people who had purchased their freedom and those who had run away and escaped. African-Americans later used this same swamp as an escape route on the Underground Railroad on their way North to freedom.
Reading the literature there seems to be some debate among historians in regards to how much independence the Maroons actually enjoyed from the local white communities. But historical records do show nearby whites often left Maroons alone so long as they paid a quota in logs or shingles. Local businessmen also seemed to ignored the fugitive status of people who provided labor in exchange for trade goods.
Dismal Swamp Maroons did have leaders but their roles seemed to have been more like those of a village elder or wise person, with the primary responsibility of keeping order and settling disputes. There doesn’t not seem to have a prominent chief or leader who stood out, which is a marked contrasts to what I’ve found with the black Seminoles.
The Maroons survived by cultivated community rice and grain fields. They also made numerous things out of wood and plants (like furniture, musical instruments, and containers). Maroons knew which wild plants were edible, usable for dyes, good for herbal medicines, and importantly for swamp dwellers — good for keeping mosquitoes at bay.
Marronage, the process of freeing oneself from the bondage of chattel slavery, took place all over Latin America and the Caribbean, with Jamaica, Panama, St. Vincent and Dominica all having significant Maroon communities. But marronage also occurred on Portuguese and Arabic slave islands of the Indian Ocean, and even amazingly enough in Angola in Southern Africa. But until fairly recently the idea that Maroons existed in North America in significant numbers was rejected by most historians.
Dan Sayers of American University wrote the following on his research:
“In 2004, when I started talking about large, permanent maroon settlements in the Great Dismal Swamp, most scholars thought I was nuts,” “They thought in terms of runaways, who might hide in the woods or swamps for a while until they got caught, or who might make it to freedom on the Underground Railroad, with the help of Quakers and abolitionists.”
By downplaying American marronage, and overplaying a “white savior” model of involvement in the Underground Railroad, American historians have shown a clear racial bias. American history as currently frequently taught and constructed has demonstrated a reluctance to acknowledge the strength of innate African-American resistance to slavery. Sayers states that the way they have approached the subject has also revealed the shortcomings of their methods:
“Historians are limited to source documents. When it comes to Maroons, there isn’t that much on paper. But that doesn’t mean their story should be ignored or overlooked. As archaeologists, we can read it in the ground.”
When Dan Sayers started doing archival research on the Great Dismal Swamp. He found scattered references to Maroons dating back to the early 1700s. The first accounts described runaway slaves and Native Americans raiding farms and plantations, and then disappearing back into the swamp with stolen livestock. In 1714, Alexander Spotswood, the colonial lieutenant governor of Virginia, described the Dismal Swamp as a “No-man’s-land,” to which “Loose and disorderly people daily flock.” Since Africans and African-Americans were not referred to as “people” in the records of 18th-century Virginia, this suggests that poor whites were also joining the swamp communities.
By carefully studying Virginia's colonial and antebellum laws, a number of historians have been able to track the scale of the continuing problem of runaway servants and slaves. During the General Assembly's March 1661 session, for instance, lawmakers addressed the circumstance of "English running away with negroes." Landowners saw blacks and whites working together as threatening because slaves had less to lose if caught. Pressure could be exerted on white servants, who still had a chance at legal freedom. If caught, the servants "shall serve for the time of the said negroes absence as they are to do for their owne by a former act." This former act, presumably from 1643, called for captured runaways to serve double the time gone; this new act now added additional time for every slave involved.
In September 1663, lawmakers worried about the "unlawful meetings of servants," and directed masters to "take especiall care that their servants doe not depart from their houses on Sundayes or any other dayes without particular lycence from them." This action foreshadowed a 1680 law, aimed at preventing "Negroes Insurrections," that begins by noting "the frequent meeting of considerable numbers of negroe slaves under pretence of feasts and burialls," suggesting this to be "of dangerous consequence." The concern was that, if allowed to meet with one another and move freely, servants and slaves were more likely to hatch plots, run away, or even rise up.
In 1728, William Byrd II led the first survey into the Great Dismal Swamp, to determine the Virginia/North Carolina boundary. He encountered a family of maroons, describing them as “mulattoes,” and was well aware that others were watching and hiding: “It is certain many Slaves Shelter themselves in this Obscure Part of the World....” Byrd, an aristocratic Virginian, loathed his time in the swamp. “Never was rum, that cordial of life, found more necessary than it was in this dirty place.”
Sayers and Austin often have only changes in soil color to help them identify habitation sites from the Great Dismal Swamp's refugee community.
(Marion Blackburn)
With the publication of Virginia's first newspaper, the Virginia Gazette, in 1736, owners began to place advertisements seeking the capture and return of runaway slaves and servants. From the 1760s until the Civil War, runaway slave ads in the Virginia and North Carolina newspapers often mentioned the Dismal Swamp as the likely destination for the absconded slave .There was also persistent talk in the contemporaneous local press of permanent Maroon settlements in the swamps, marshlands, and morasses of the area. British traveler J.F.D. Smyth, writing in 1784, set down this description: “Runaway negroes have resided in these places for twelve, twenty, or thirty years and upwards, subsisting themselves in the swamp upon corn, hogs, and fowls....[On higher ground] they have erected habitations, and cleared small fields around them.”
In 1831 the Great Dismal Swamp became the focal point of slaveholders’ fear after one of the most famous slave rebellions in U.S. history: Nat Turner’s Rebellion. Nat Turner’s Rebellion took place in Southampton County, Virginia in August 1831, a place that borders the Great Dismal Swamp. After killing nearly 65 men, women and children the rebellion was squashed by local militias and government troops in less than two days. Turner escaping his military defeat, succeeded in hiding out for several weeks and was later captured, tried and hung in Jerusalem, Virginia.
While Turner was evading capture, he claimed he had an army of runaway slaves nearby in the Great Dismal Swamp, waiting his arrival and his order to attack. News of this claim spread throughout the Virginia and North Carolina counties adjacent to the swamp. During this period, leading-up to the Civil War, Southern slaveholders were already in a panic due to constant revolts. News of Nat Turner’s Rebellion pushed many of them over the edge, fearing the prospect of more large slave revolt.
The writer Paul Johnson has a firsthand account from meeting minutes of the Quaker congregation handed down from his great-great-grandfather John Morgan, who lived on the border of the Great Dismal Swamp. The Quakers had a nearly 200 year history in Virginia and North Carolina. Their fair treatment of Native Americans and their support for abolition brought them into direct conflict with Southern slaveholders.
After Nat Turner’s Rebellion, towns and municipalities in Virginia and North Carolina made it mandatory for able-bodied men to serve in local militias or town guards. Morgan, rather than serve in the local militia, which was against his Quaker beliefs, hired a substitute. Meeting minutes of the Quaker congregation in Pasquotank County tell what happened to Morgan. John Morgan was charged by his Quaker congregation in 1831 with “hiring a substitute [soldier], offering a reward for every negro he should kill and for not attending Meetings.” The Quakers appointed a committee to investigate the charge and noted in the minutes that John Morgan “justified himself in this conduct.” The rest of the Quakers in his congregation were strongly against his actions. He was disowned by the congregation in December 1831.
Many Quakers left Virginia and North Carolina after 1831, due to the new restrictions and laws put in place to enforce slavery and prevent rebellions. White’s fear, anger and vigilantism was blamed for the death of more than 200 free blacks and slaves, who had no connection to the rebellion. Many more innocent people were jailed and had their property burned or stolen following the rebellion by disorderly white militias and town guards.
The New Deal era Federal Art Project’s (part of the WPA) historian Herbert Aptheker writing in 1939’s "Maroons Within the Present Limits of the United States", that likely "about two thousand Negroes, fugitives, or the descendants of fugitives" lived in the Great Dismal Swamp, trading with white people outside the swamp. Results of a study published in 2007, "The Political Economy of Exile in the Great Dismal Swamp", say that thousands of people lived in the swamp between 1630 and 1865, Native Americans, maroons and enslaved laborers on the canal. A 2011 study speculated that thousands may have lived in the swamp between the 1600s and 1860. While the precise number of maroons who lived in the swamp at that time is unknown, it is believed to have been one of the largest maroon colonies in the United States. It is has been pretty firmly established that "several thousand" were living there by the 19th century.
At various times, fear of slave unrest and fugitive slaves living among maroon population caused concern among local whites. A white militia with dogs went into the swamp in 1823 in an attempt to remove the maroons and destroy their community, but most people escaped. In 1847, North Carolina passed a law specifically aimed at apprehending the Maroons in the swamp. However, unlike other Maroon communities, where local white militias often captured the residents and destroyed their homes, those in the Great Dismal Swamp mostly avoided capture or the discovery of their homes.
Once 2,000 square miles in Virginia and North Carolina, the swamp today is perhaps one-tenth that size. (Allison Shelley)
As for the Great Dismal Swamp itself, little is known of Native American activity in the area prior to 1600. Native American communities clearly already in existence in the swamps when the Maroons began to flee there. Because for an escaped African-American leaving the area could inevitably lead to recapture, the inhabitants often used what was readily available in the swamp. Maroons seemed to even recycling tool remnants left by Native Americans. Maroons having few possessions, left few small artifacts that have been recovered, given historians little insight into their day-to-day lives. To date, excavation has yet to find any human remains. According to Sayers, historical archaeologist at American University who has led research on the maroons of the swamp, it is possible that the acidity of the water disintegrated any bones which may have been left behind.
Some Maroons were born to those who escaped slavery and lived in the swamp for their entire lives despite the hardships of swamp life including dense underbrush, insects, and other wildlife. But these same difficult conditions also made the swamp an ideal hiding place, not just for the former slaves, but also for free blacks, Native Americans, and White outcast.
Some Maroon communities were set up near the Dismal Swamp Canal, built between 1793–1805 and still in operation. These Maroons interacted more with the outside world than those who living in the swamp's interior. These Maroons also had more opportunity to contact outsiders once canal construction began. Maroons are known to have frequently interacted with slaves working on the canals as well as with poor whites to obtain work, food, clothes, and money. Record show some Maroons took jobs on the canal and eventually moved away. Other Maroons plundered nearby farms and plantations, stole from anchored boats, and robbed travelers on nearby roads; those caught were tried for murder or theft and executed. During the Civil War, the United States Colored Troops entered the swamp to liberate the people there, many of whom then joined the Union Army. Most of the Maroons who remained in the swamp left after the Civil War.
Renewed research on the Maroons has drawn the interest of historians like Eric Shepherd, a resident of Suffolk, Va., who organizes tours to help African-Americans get in touch with their roots. "As our ancestors are calling us to look for them, I think we ought to pick up the spiritual phone and answer the call," he says.
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Research led Shepherd to a distant relative named Moses Grandy, who left an account of his time in the swamp around 1800. He first went there to dig canals so his master could cut and transport timber.
"The labor there was very severe," Grandy wrote. "The ground is often very boggy: the negroes are up to the middle or much deeper in mud and water, cutting away roots and baling out mud: if they can keep their heads above water, they work on. ... [The overseer] gave the same task to each slave; of course the weak ones often failed to do it. I have often seen him tie up persons and flog them in the morning, only because they were unable to get the previous day's task done."
Grandy was skilled at handling boats, and sometimes his master allowed him to work for others, sharing the money that he made moonlighting. Over the years, Grandy saved enough to buy his own freedom. He could have headed north. Instead, he returned to live in the swamp.
"I built myself a little hut, and had provisions brought to me as opportunity served," Grandy wrote. "Here, among snakes, bears and panthers, whenever my strength was sufficient, I cut down a juniper tree, and converted it into cooper's timber. ... I felt to myself so light, that I almost thought I could fly, and in my sleep I was always dreaming of flying over woods and rivers."
"Slavery will teach any man to be glad when he gets freedom," Grandy wrote.
Stories such as Shepherd forefather’s Grandy, along with some of the artifacts Sayers found, are on display at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African-American History and Culture. Also in the 2011, a permanent exhibit was opened by the National Park Service to commemorate those who lived in the swamp during pre-Civil War times. Sayers gave a nice summary: "These groups are very inspirational. As details unfold, we are increasingly able to show how people have the ability, as individuals and communities, to take control of their lives, even under oppressive conditions."
American history has tended to severely underplay how frequently African-American used their own innate ingenuity and resourcefulness to escape slavery. Just like their brethren throughout the rest of the Americas, African-American who refused to bow to the bondage of slavery, escaped and formed their own free communities. Like the Quilombo of Brazil, rebellion that freed Haiti from France, and the Maroons of Jamaica, African-American too had people who created their own independent free communities. The American Maroons of Virginian and North Carolina are an important but overlooked part of the story of America that makes us what we are today.
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