Hidden in Plain Sight: Labor, Power, and Identity of Great Dismal Swamp Maroons

Much of the current literature on North American maroon communities is dominated by concepts developed by scholars of maroon societies in such places as Brazil, Suriname, and Jamaica.  As a result, scholars interested in North American maroons typically apply Caribbean and South American research models to conclude that North American maroons separated themselves from surrounding society by living in “isolated, heavily wooded or swampy areas, or running to the mountains and beyond” (Schweninger, 2002).

This paper examines the changing nature of maroon communities located within the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina.  It contends that communities formed within the swamp by runaway slaves in the eighteenth century differed greatly from those created—or still in existence—in the mid-nineteenth century.  While early communities of fugitives resembled larger maroon societies in South America and the Caribbean, after about 1800 Dismal Swamp maroons formed communities within communities, whose members were set apart from others not so much by space (an impenetrable wilderness) but by the legal status they renounced, the fugitive status they embraced, and the common goal of creating meaningful lives neither fully within, nor completely apart from the surrounding slave society.  Fugitive slaves living in the Dismal Swamp forged their identities and claimed certain freedoms while working alongside black and white laborers, earning a wage, and maintaining communication networks with neighboring communities.

The changing nature of maroon communities in the Great Dismal Swamp offers scholars a new way to conceptualize marronage in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century North America.  Rather than look only to swamps, hills, and forests for traces of maroon communities, researchers might also consider examining such societies in more settled areas, including centers of large-scale industrial operations, where fugitive slaves carved out identities and negotiated power within a system that relied upon and supported slave labor.