Data Acquisition and Its Constraints for Modeling Enslaved Freedom Seekers in the Great Dismal Swamp

Whether abolitionists, allies, or the enslaved freedom seekers themselves, Underground Railroad network agents were under constant threat as they moved through the Great Dismal Swamp in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. Extant sources that substantiate the moving parts of these operations are scant, and the available GIS data sources are contemporary, rather than historic, renders of landscapes through which freedom seekers moved. This means that workflow processes must employ margin-of-error calculations and accuracy analyses that reveal land cover change over time. This paper describes the workflows needed to historicize geospatial data and contend with an archival record fragmented by the compounding oppressive forces of colonialism and slavery.

In order for African Americans to appear in the historical record, something had to happen that either bolstered or disrupted the profit-driven regime of enslavement/exploitation. Blackness then, became an economic and political object in arguments used to justify the transatlantic slave trade and other historically exploitative interests (Wright 2015). Afro-descendant captives brought to the Americas were historically recorded as numerical units of cargo on slaving vessels. The captors’ sole purpose in recording these men, women, and children was to define those available for sale and estimate profit at sites of disembarkation. The fact that historical sources about enslaved people are inherently dehumanizing puts researchers like myself in positions of amassing sources from under-considered materials such as enslavers’ cadastral maps, deeds of transfer, wills, and more.Through modeling movement and its associated costs, this talk draws on mobility studies to assess the matrix of risk involved in humans fleeing volatile, dehumanized spaces at plantations in search of freedom and safety. In doing so, it models how we might employ historical geospatial data to generate new narratives of enslaved people in the United States and their flights toward freedom.