“lurking about the neighbourhood”: Slave Economy and Petit Marronage in and , 1730 to 1860

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The State University

By

Marcus P. Nevius, Ph.D.

Graduate Program in History

The Ohio State University

2016

Dissertation Committee:

Leslie M. Alexander, Advisor

Kenneth W. Goings

Margaret Ellen Newell

Copyright by

Marcus Peyton Nevius

2016 Abstract

Titled “lurking about the neighbourhood”: Slave Economy and Petit Marronage in

Virginia and North Carolina, 1730-1860,” this dissertation examines petit marronage, reflected in the actions of small groups of enslaved people who hid out for long periods of time in the region’s swamps and forests. Founded upon a case study of the Great

Dismal Swamp, this project argues that maroons who “lurked about” remained an integral source of much needed labor, a fact that at once tied maroons to the two states’ broader slave societies while the swamp functioned as, one historian has noted, a “rival geography” that enslaved people used to resist bondage. Enslaved people were the core labor source for whites who sought to build classic plantations, such as Henry King

Burgwyn of Northampton County, North Carolina. But for others, such as Dismal Swamp

Land Company agent Samuel Proctor, the contradictions inherent to the fallacy of race were less of a concern. To these men, utilizing enslaved labor to develop its swamplands was of foremost importance. To negotiate the conditions of their labor, as slaves or as quasi-free men, was of utmost consequence to Virginia and North Carolina’s maroons.

Because slave labor was so central to the aims of plantation owners, land company agents, and commission merchants, enslaved peoples’ resistance against outright exploitation exerted significant pressures upon slave societies. The most persistent form of this pressure was petit marronage. Local white commission merchants dispatched and hired enslaved and free blacks to perform the arduous tasks required in

ii the production of swamp products. Some of these bondspersons fled such camps into the deepest regions of the swamp, but retained access to the broader world outside the swamp through contact with slave laborers. As a result, petit marronage provided the quintessential complication to the formations of race, , and early capitalism in the lower Chesapeake and in the Albemarle. To make the case for this argument, this work is founded in a primary source base including runaway advertisements; planters’ and merchants’ records, inventories, letterbooks and correspondence; colonial, provincial and state records; abolitionist pamphlets and broadsides; slave narratives; and the records and inventories of private companies.

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Dedication

To my mother Wini, thank you for encouraging my dreams of being a scholar. To my father Gary, my brothers Garrett and Derrick, thank you for being the bedrock upon which my personality rests. To my wife, Jihan, without your love and support, this project would not have been possible.

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Acknowledgments

This project has been encouraged and supported by many good friends, peers, colleagues, and professors. Among the first were the folks at North Carolina Central

University. Comrades in this “academic struggle” include D’Weston Haywood, A.J.

Donaldson, Brandon Winford, James Blackwell, and TaKeia Anthony. My thesis advisor,

Freddie L. Parker, and committee members, Jim C. Harper, and Joshua Nadel, offered sage advise during an early stage of this project. At each yearly meeting of the

Association for the Study of African American Life and History, Jerry Gershenhorn,

Lydia Lindsey, Tony Frazier, and Carlton Wilson have been sure to ask about this project’s progress.

At Ohio State University, colleagues in the Writing Center entertained my interest in marronage. These folks include Dickie Selfe, Aleta Burns, Katie DeLuca, Kate

Shipley, Carmen Meza, Michelle Cohen, Sara Franssen Wilder, Blake Wilder, Lori

Critcher, and Krupal Amin. In the department of history, William Sturkey, Tyran

Steward, Curtis Austin, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, and Stephanie Shaw set the standard for me to achieve. Cam Shriver, Jamie Goodall, Jessica Wallace, Tim Leech, Dani Anthony,

Jessica Blissit, John Brown, Danielle Grevious, and Sarajaneé Davis encouraged me to remain steadfast in my pursuit of the Great Dismal’s maroons. Mark Boonshoft and

Kevin Vrevich graciously sifted through chapter drafts and offered insightful advice. In advance of my dissertation defense, ‘Doc’ Samuel Hodges seized the opportunity to serve as an external reader. My dissertation committee members, Kenneth Goings and

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Margaret Newell, maintained genuine interest in this project through to its completion.

My dissertation advisor, Leslie Alexander, is truly a champion of this work, and of this early stage of my career. To each of my readers, I have benefited as much from your interest as I have from your kind criticisms. All errors herein remain my own.

This project has also benefited from generous research support. I thank the

Department of History and the College of Arts and Humanities for several grants and awards. I thank Frances S. Pollard and John McClure, of the Virginia Historical Society, for providing a Mellon Fellowship. Alan Gallay and Noeleen McIlvenna encouraged me to visit the Dismal, and as a result, I benefited from five weeks of study and fellowship during an archaeological field school led by Dan Sayers of American University. During the field school, I became a more well rounded scholar in conversations with Julia Klima,

Mark Hamilton, Kathryn Benjamin Golden, and Daniel Lynch. In Spring 2016, Ruth

Dunnell, chair of the Department of History at Kenyon College, offered me a home in

Glenn McNair’s office. There, I finished revisions to this dissertation while teaching a seminar on Free Black Communities in the Early . The seminar’s students included Quashae Hendryx, Emily Hills, Kelley Russell, Anna Cohen, and James Wojtal.

Each challenged me to think more carefully about the subject, and about my dissertation.

In January 2013, two great scholars of Black history ascended to the celestial resting place. Each brought her and his own special cynicism to bear in entertaining my incessant optimism about the academy. Sylvia Jacobs and Bob Engs, may you rest eternally in Heaven.

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Vita

2005...... B.A. History, North Carolina Central

University

2010...... M.A. History, North Carolina Central

University

2011 to present ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of

History, The Ohio State University

Fields of Study

Major Field: History

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgments ...... v

Vita ...... vii

List of Figures ...... ix

Introduction ………………………...... 1

Chapter 1: “a Very Mutinous People”: Slavery, the Egalitarian Spirit, the Formation of Race, and the Black Freedom Struggle in the Lower Chesapeake and the Albemarle, 1660-1730 ………..……………………………………………………………...……... 28

Chapter 2: “this Province Suffers by the Inhabitants and Slaves running away there where they are Succour’d”: The Establishment of a Slave Society in the Lowcountry and the Lower Cape Fear, 1722-1775 ...... 60

Chapter 3: “The General of the Swamps”: Petit Marronage and Insurrection Conspiracies during the Long Revolutionary Era in the Valley of Humility, 1767-1802 ……………102

Chapter 4: “liv’d by himself in the Desert about 13 years”: The ’s Hired Free Blacks, Enslaved Laborers, and Petit Marronage in the Early Nineteenth Century …………………………………………………………………………………150

Chapter 5: “a city of refuge in the midst of slavery”: Slave Labor Camps, Rising , and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal during the Antebellum Era .... 192

Epilogue: “From Log Cabin to the Pulpit”: William H. Robinson and Petit Marronage at the Turn of the Century ………...... ………………………………………………. 227

References...... 237

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List of Illustrations

Figure 1. Henry Mouzon, “An Accurate Map of North and .”...... 94

Figure 2. James Cook and Henry Mouzon, “A map of North & South Carolina.”...... 96

Figure 3. Henry Schenck Tanner, “A New Map of Nth Carolina.”...... 97

Figure 4. Photo, Washington Ditch Historical Marker ...... 116

Figure 5. Photo, Dismal Town Historical Marker ...... 117

Figure 6. Print, “The Discovery of Nat Turner.” ……………………………………... 198

Figure 7. Print, “Osman the maroon in the swamp.” …………………………………. 221

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Introduction

In 1856, David Hunter Strother, a travelogue author and illustrator, visited the

Great Dismal Swamp accompanied by two black boatmen. Beginning three years prior,

Strother travelled throughout Virginia and North Carolina to collect local stories, his journey inspired by northern abolitionists in search of Virginia’s maroons. Departing a causeway used by the swamp’s land companies to extract lumber and other natural resources, Strother worked his way into the dense undergrowth. Halting when he heard footsteps, Strother encountered a “gigantic negro, with a tattered blanket wrapped about his shoulders, and a gun in his hand.” Strother described the man standing before him as dressed in “a pair of ragged breeches and boots,” and described his physical features as

“purely African.” Although strong and physically imposing, the man appeared fearful.

Choosing not to engage with the man, Strother returned to the causeway where he sketched the man in the underbrush. Upon viewing the sketch, the boatmen spoke of

“Osman,” but answered no more of Strother’s questions.1 Strother’s encounter, however, produced the first known sketch of an American maroon.

Essentially a massive peat bog, the Great Dismal Swamp is today a vast tidal wetland approximately 190 square miles situated along the border of eastern Virginia and

North Carolina. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Dismal covered nearly

1 David Hunter Strother, “Osman the maroon in the swamp,” by Porte Crayon. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. (September 1856.) Strother’s image and narrative were published under the pen name Porte Crayon, a French moniker translated literally as “pencil/crayon holder.” See Cecil D. Eby, Jr., “Porte Crayon”: The Life of David Hunter Strother. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1960.) 1

2,000 square miles. Beyond its low hanging tree limbs, verdant in the warmer months, and its dense underbrush, exist small islands of dry landscape covered in leaf litter. These

“hummocks,” as they are known locally, rise no more than ten feet above the water table.

It was to these hummocks that Africans, and later African Americans, escaped to seek refuge from American slavery as early as the first years of the eighteenth century. Due in part to the establishment of large plantations, few such large swamps featured as part of

Virginia’s landscape to the north of the Great Dismal. But to the south, in the Carolinas, such large swamps featured prominently. To be sure, communities of enslaved runaways existed in many places on the edges of plantations in the Americas, from the southeastern

United States to Brazil.2 The Africans who fled to these communities frustrated the efforts of colonial officials who sought to secure slave societies, and as Richard Price once explained, such communities reflected the failures of slavery as an institution of total control.3

In general, the term marronage is derived from the Spanish term cimarrón. This term was first used in Hispaniola in reference to feral cattle in the 1530s, and later in reference to enslaved Amerindians who escaped to the hinterlands of local Spanish

2 Perhaps the most problematic existed in a similar slave society on the periphery of the Atlantic World, slave populations notwithstanding. See Emilia Viotta da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara of 1823. (: Oxford University Press. 1994.); and Erin Mackie, “Welcome the Outlaw: Pirates, Maroons, and Caribbean Countercultures.” Cultural Critique. 59. (Winter 2005.) 24-62. 3 Richard Price, editor. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1973, 1979, 1996.)

2 colonies. By the seventeenth century, the English adapted the term maroon (and the

French and Dutch adapted the term marron) in reference to enslaved absconders in their own contexts. By the early nineteenth century, United States officials created the term

Seminole to describe marronage in the Spanish borderlands of the Florida panhandle.4

Since the 1970s, anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians have developed two terms – grand marronage and petit marronage – to distinguish between different groups of absconders who fled from slavery. Grand marronage refers to those who formed long- standing communities recognized by treaties with colonial powers; this form of marronage existed primarily in the Caribbean and South America, in regions where the slave population comprised a majority. Petit marronage indicates smaller, often transient maroon groups that hid out without the protection of such a truce. The latter phenomenon

– petit marronage – has been viewed traditionally as a form of slave flight akin to “laying out.” But whereas absconders who lay out often sought most a reprieve from bondage, and eventually returned to plantations of their own volition, maroons engaged in petit marronage sought to negotiate the conditions of their bondage within slave societies.

Most were returned to plantations by force or rule of law, but others succeeded in wresting some forms of accommodation from the planters, yeomen, and commission merchants who held them in slavery.

4 Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas. (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press. 1993.); Alvin O. Thompson, Flight to Freedom: African Runaways and Maroons in the Americas. (Kingston, JA: University of the West Indies Press. 2006.); and Timothy James Lockley, editor. Maroon Communities in South Carolina: A Documentary Record. (Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press. 2009.); Kenneth Wiggins Porter, “Negroes and the Seminole War, 1835-1842.” Journal of Southern History. 30. 4. (November 1964.) 427-450; Porter, “Negroes and the Seminole War, 1817-1818.” Journal of Negro History. 36. 3. (July 1951.) 249-280; and Porter, “Three Fighters for Freedom.” Journal of Negro History. 28. 1. (January 1943.) 51-72.

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At its core, this project is an examination of petit marronage in Virginia and North

Carolina from 1730 to 1860. This work studies the ways that enslaved and free blacks engaged in this phenomenon, and the ways that such actions changed over time. In short, some maroons used a range of actions – from hiding in the most remote swamp and forest interiors to hiding in plain sight on the fringes of slave labor camps in the same swamps and forests – to force the hand of slave holders. Historians have generally characterized this form of slave resistance as slave flight, and in this context, historians have privileged the types of escape to regions beyond the American south. Most such works emphasize the ; more recently some historians have highlighted maritime flight.5 However, petit marronage was the opposite – flight into local hinterlands in the

5 Most historians brought new focus to the contours of perhaps the most famous form of escape during the antebellum era, the Underground Railroad. Such works characterize the ways by which organizations in port cities or small free black communities in the rural Ohio River valley played key roles in spiriting escaping African Americans to freedom. Still more studies have broadened the traditional scholarship on abolitionism, once centered upon the accomplishments of male leaders including William Lloyd Garrison and , and male organizers in antislavery societies and in third party politics. These trends have cast early American abolitionism in proper transatlantic context, have emphasized themes including contributions of ordinary women to the local and national movements to free African Americans from enslavement, and have highlighted the implications understood in examinations of the brief window of emancipations in the states of the Chesapeake, and Virginia. See Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad. (New York: W.W. Norton and Co. 2015.); Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance. (Urbana, IL: University of Press. 2014.) On the latest trends, see Maurice Jackson, Let this Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism. (: University of Press. 2009.); Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1998.); Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, editors. The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1994.); and Eva Sheppard Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion. (Baton Rouge: LA: Louisiana State University Press. 2006.) A non-exhaustive list of the earlier trends in abolitionist scholarship includes: R.J.M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement. (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. 1983); Ronald G. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism After 1830. (New York: W.W. Norton and Co. 1978.); Walters, American Reformers 1815-1860. (New York: Hill and Wang. 1978.); Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists. (New York: Oxford University Press. 1969.) On maritime escapes, see W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1997.)

4 midst of southern slave societies.6 In contrast to the grand maroon colonies that were established in other places in the Atlantic World – the Portuguese colony of Brazil in the seventeenth century, or the English colony of Jamaica in the eighteenth century for instance – this in no way meant that maroons in North America were able to completely repudiate slavery in the American south. Rather, most of the maroons who “lurked about” the Great Dismal remained an integral source of much needed labor on the frontier. This meant that such maroons were at once tied to plantation society by the value of their labor while remaining relatively insulated from the restrictions and punishments endured by slaves in plantation contexts. Prior to the American Revolution, Africans engaged in petit marronage most often sought to separate completely from colonial slave society in

Virginia and North Carolina. But, after the Revolution, the introduction of slave labor camps into the Great Dismal increasingly brought white land company agents into contact with black slave laborers. Acting on behalf of land company shareholders, land company agents offered black slave laborers a wide range of concessions in exchange for a modicum of consistent work at canal labor sites. When black slave laborers’ demands went unmet, such laborers turned to petit marronage, slipping away into deeper regions of the Dismal until land company agents met their needs. As a result, petit marronage mitigated against planters and local administrators who sought to establish totally repressive local slave societies through the enforcement of repressive laws.

Scholarly interest in marronage in the American southeast dates to the World War

II era. Study of the subject was first inspired by the oversights that a generation of

6 Yuko Miki, “Fleeing into Slavery: The Insurgent Geographies of Brazilian Quilombolas (Maroons), 1880-1881.” The Americas. 68. 4. (April 2012.) 495-528.

5 reconciliationist historians published in their characterizations of American slavery.7

Known most commonly as the Dunning School, such historians argued that blacks were docile slaves, and inferior to whites. Early Dunning School critics included John Hope

Franklin and W.E.B. Du Bois.8 Other historians explained that slavery was a peculiar institution specific to the American south. This peculiar institution fostered the development of social and legal customs that encoded black inferiority into all elements of southern society; southern intellectuals, lawmakers, and plantation owners defended vigorously.9 Perhaps the most vigorous Dunning School critic,

7 Ulrich B. Phillips, the leading historian of the Dunning School, characterized enslaved people as mere instruments of efficient plantation regimes that, over time from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, grew into efficient protoindustrial enterprises. Informed by a position that reflected the Jim Crow Era’s racist depictions of black inferiority, Phillips was blind to the fact that slaves resisted outright exploitation of their labor through flight and rebellion. As Phillips, informed by the racist attitudes of Jim Crow Georgia, explained that enslaved people accepted this role with little resistance as beings inferior to white owners. In Phillips’s view, rebellious behavior equated to slave crime, and therefore only in rare and exceptional cases did slaves rebel against the efficient plantation labor system. Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1918, 1966.) 8 In particular, Du Bois cited historians William A. Dunning and Phillips as “Standard-Anti-Negro” references in his magisterial work Black Reconstruction. See W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880. (New York: Russell & Russell. 1935, 1962.) Historian John Hope Franklin argued that not all African Americans remained enslaved in a perfect plantation enterprise. Indeed, some were manumitted, others were freed as the sons and daughters of relationships between white men and black women, and many gained freedom through flight. As a result, proslavery southerners became increasingly militant throughout the antebellum era. See Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina 1790-1860. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1943.); and Franklin, The Militant South. (: Beacon Press. 1956.) 9 In the mid-1950s, Kenneth M. Stampp reminded historians that slavery was built gradually between 1619 and 1865, in a “step by step, choice by choice” fashion by men who were “more or less blind to the ultimate consequences of the choices they were making.” Such men manipulated slavery as an institution by building social customs and creating intellectual rationalizations that justified perpetual black enslavement. Stanley Elkins argued that southern slavery was a problem of American institutional and intellectual life. The institution shaped southern laws, informed the intellectual defense of southern life voiced by southern intellectuals, and traumatized enslaved people in ways analogous to World War II era German concentration camps. As a result, enslaved people were reduced to a childlike dependence on southern planters, characterized as the “Sambo” stereotype in the early twentieth century. See Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. (New York: Vintage Books. 1956.); and Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life. Second Edition. (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press. 1959, 1968.)

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Herbert Aptheker, reached the conclusion that few phases of antebellum southern life and history went unaffected by concerted and militant slave actions, either real or imagined.

But beyond this, enslaved peoples’ most poignant act of resistance was marronage.10

Aptheker’s attempts to apprise scholars about the problem of marronage did not gain traction in the academy. Instead, four general historiographical trends flourished in the post World War II era: slaves’ humanity centered on slave families and slave culture; slavery’s immoralities became most visible by the efforts of abolitionists; and slave resistance was most visible as reflected by outright rebellion. In each genre, historians forged ahead. Informed by the massive resistance white southerners posed to the modern

Civil Rights movement, a second wave of historians produced rich works that fleshed out the nuances of the gradual development of American slavery in regional and temporal contexts. These historians emphasized the long history of racism in the United States, and established the importance of the study of enslaved peoples’ cultures, communities.11

10 Herbert Aptheker, “Maroons within the Present Limits of the United States,” Journal of Negro History 24. 2. (April 1939.) 167-184; Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts: On Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel and Others. Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. (New York: International Publishers. 1943, 1993.) Aptheker’s other central conclusions explained that an important consideration of Southern politicians’ plans to annex the southern and western borderlands was the insulation of slavery as an institution, and that the maintenance of the southern social order was the prime motive of the slaveocracy. 11 Carl N. Degler, “Slavery and the Genesis of American Race Prejudice.” Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2.1. (October 1959.); Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1968.); Jordan, The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States. (New York: Oxford University Press. 1974.); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 1975.); Sterling Stuckey, “Through the Prism of Folklore: The Black Ethos in Slavery.” The Review. 9.3. (Summer 1968.); Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina From 1670 Through the . (New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 1974.); John W. Blassingame, : Plantation Life in the Antebellum South. (New York: Oxford University Press. 1972.); George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Company. 1972.); Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925. (New York: Pantheon Books. 1976.); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. (New York: Vintage Books. 1972, 1976.); Thomas L. Webber, Deep Like the Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community, 1831-1865. (New York: W.W.

7

Vincent Harding, in particular, described African, and subsequently African American, resistance as a dynamic movement for justice in all aspects of life – a metaphorical river of struggle representative of the “transformative power that humans create” to sustain an indomitable hope. This river’s wellspring was the moment that enslavement forever altered the life of every enslaved person, the river’s ebbs and flows characterized in the historical record by slave revolts.12 By the mid-1980s, historians had also turned due attention to the importance of gender in the history of slave resistance. Giving voice to a critical question posed by Sojourner Truth in 1851, Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a

Woman, explained that black women were “perhaps the most vulnerable group of antebellum Americans.” Three constraints defined black women’s experience: enslavement, sexism, and color. On southern plantations, enslaved women were forced to

Norton & Company. 1978.); Mechal Sobel, Trabelin’ On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1979.); Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. 1984.); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America. (New York: Oxford University Press. 1987.); Margaret Creel Washington, A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community-Culture Among the Gullahs. (New York: New York University Press. 1988.); Roger D. Abrahams, Singing the Master: The Emergence of African-American Culture in the Plantation South. (New York: Penguin Books. 1993.); Sylvia R. Frey, “Between Slavery and Freedom: Virginia Blacks in the American Revolution.” Journal of Southern History. 49. 3. (August 1983.) 375-398; Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age. (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1991.) 46-50, 77; Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community 1720-1840. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1988.); Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America. (New York: Penguin Books. 2005.); Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean 1736-1831. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. 1992.) 12 Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Company. 1981.) More recently still, scholars have traced Harding’s metaphorical river more closely, adding nuance by highlighting how loyalty oaths bound together in resistance descendants of the Akan and Gold Coast ethnic groups. See Walter C. Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2006.) 45-7, 171-74; and Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in the Kongo and in the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2007.) Historian Gerald Horne has extended this argument further explaining that, in the context of the British Atlantic, African resistance was a central mitigating force against the imperial designs of London Parliamentarians. See Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. (New York: New York University Press. 2014.)

8 labor alongside enslaved men. In the minds of antebellum whites, such laborers effectively removed enslaved women from the ideal of feminine fragility. But far worse, black women were often the targets of sexual violence and exploitation at the hands of paternalistic planters.13

The lessons voiced by historians of slave resistance, culture, community, and gender reoriented the study of slavery in the American south, and legitimized African

American history as a field of study. In the mid-1990s, several major synthesis studies compiled new understandings of American slavery. Philip D. Morgan’s comparative study of the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry revealed important similarities and differences in the ways that slavery developed over time in Virginia and South

Carolina.14 Ira Berlin’s work provided a framework for the study of “societies with slaves,” and of “slave societies,” over time.15 Other historians emphasized the cultural

13 Stanley Elkins’s focus on blacks’ intellectual and cultural inferiority, and Genovese’s emphasis on the power of planter paternalism also inspired critics to look more closely at the roles that women played in southern society. In particular, Stanley Elkins had effectively excluded black women from not only the Sambo theory, but in his broader work, black women were absent from discussion of West African societies, from his explanation of the , and from his characterization of Latin American slavery. See Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company. 1985.) On Sojourner Truth, see Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company. 1996.) 14 In the South’s two primary “slave societies,” the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry, race relations were fluid initially, as whites and blacks shared the work of clearing land; cultivated provisions; and reared livestock. Parallel separate, but intricately connected white and black communities developed in each society, changing in unique way as the nation neared the outbreak of the Civil War. See Philip D. Morgan, “Work and Culture: The Task System and the World of Lowcountry Blacks, 1700 to 1880.” William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd Series. 39. (1982.) 564-99; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press. 1998.) 15 Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South. (New York: The New Press. 1974, 2007.); Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2003.); Berlin, The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations. (New York: Penguin Books. 2010.) The quote can be found in Berlin, Many

9 markers that made Africans distinctive over time. Michael A. Gomez explained that, prior to 1830, the evolution in identity from ethnic African to racialized African

American occurred in different spatial and temporal spaces. This transformation occurred in concert with the development of social stratification according to class in each region.16 Co-authored with Loren Schweninger, John Hope Franklin’s Runaway Slaves:

Rebels on the Plantation established the centrality of slave flight as a major form of slave resistance in southern plantation societies.17 The Morgan, Berlin, Gomez, Franklin and

Schweninger syntheses inspired a new wave of regional studies of southern slavery that included new perspectives of slavery and slave labor. Franklin and Schweninger, in particular, provided a new framework for the study of slave resistance and planter authority within the plantation system. Franklin and Schweninger detailed the wide range of factors that motivated slave flight, with particular emphasis on the length of time such absconders spent in flight. Absconders remained at large for hours, days, weeks, months and years at a time. They established camps close to the plantation or in remote regions

Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 1998.) 5. 16 Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 1998.) Various African identities, once founded upon ethnic markers, gave way to socially constructed racial identifiers “intimately informed by the political context” of the American south. The initial period of seasoning cleansed “saltwater” Africans through a process that included forcing Africans to learn one or more European languages, even as Africans resisted such impositions – particularly in the case of the American south – through the creation of Africanized English. For a rich discussion of the term “saltwater” slaves and slavery as it relates to the Middle Passage and the African diaspora, see Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to the American Diaspora. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2007.) 17 Franklin and Schweninger identified a number of factors, including different motives, incentives, and activities that influenced the decision a potential runaway undertook when considering escape. Escapees were men and women, big and small, young and old. Franklin and Schweninger also demonstrated how planters and slave owners went to great lengths to prevent slave flight. See John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation. (New York: Oxford University Press. 1999.)

10 of every state in the south; the largest of which became safe havens for new runaways that might be known by historians as evidence of petit marronage.

This dissertation pushes Franklin and Schweninger’s conclusions to logical conclusions: absconder camps in the midst of slavery were not only indications of petit marronage; petit marronage was the defining marker of slave resistance in the American southeast. To extend Franklin and Schweninger’s findings, this dissertation employs a framework that highlights multiple uses of the same landscape – the Great Dismal

Swamp – by blacks engaged in petit marronage, and by whites engaged in the business of slavery. This framework is inspired by the late Stephanie M.H. Camp’s book Closer to

Freedom, a study of slave resistance informed by the lessons of women’s history. Camp explained that planters attempted to confine slave activity to specific and highly regulated spaces, such as the fields and slave quarters of the South. Enslaved men and women evaded such captivity, creating perpetual conflicts resulting from such “geographies of containment.” In response to containment, enslaved people ran away to “rival geographies,” or locations in which they spent time with their families, sought rest from work, and found amusement. Relative to geographies of containment, rival geographies were not settled environments. Most importantly, movement characterized the rival geography; the passage of enslaved men and women between each clandestine space was the very thing slaveholders sought to control most.18

18 Stephanie M.H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 2004.) 1-3. Camp based her inquiries on the premise that the study of slave resistance assisted the development of American slave historiography in its maturation from “the plantation nostalgia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the ‘Sambo’ theses of midcentury to the impassioned ‘accommodation versus resistance’ debate” that characterized scholarly discussions from the mid 1970s to the end of the millennium. Emerging from the

11

Until very recently, studies of grand marronage in the Caribbean and South

America have overshadowed the study of its counterpart in North America, and the importance of petit marronage in the American southeast. As a result, grand marronage has been characterized as the most evident reflection of major slave resistance against new world slave societies. Two recent books have reversed this trend, calling upon scholars to attend evidence of marronage in different North American contexts: Nathaniel

Millett’s The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and Their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic

World, and Sylviane A. Diouf’s Slavery’s Exiles.19 My study of petit marronage in

Virginia and North Carolina attends this call. In short, this work reveals that petit marronage served many purposes as defined by enslaved Africans, and later African

Americans, who engaged in flight to swamps and forests. In the Great Dismal particularly, slave labor provided the means by which commission merchants and land company shareholders invested capital to fund land improvement projects designed to

discourse of this thirty year period were examinations of the complex nature of slave resistance, themes including the ways enslaved individuals were simultaneously agents and subjects, persons and property, and resistors and accommodators in temporal and geographical spaces that just as often varied as much as their shifting identities. By fixing the lens of focus specifically onto enslaved women, Camp revealed new truths about the nature of daily resistance. Higher numbers of women than men were affected with greater consistency in such spheres. Men experienced a higher degree of mobility facilitated primarily by the jobs assigned to them, including tasks that required ferrying information, supplies, and equipment between plantations. 19 Nathaniel Millett compares the Dismal maroons’ existence to Octave Johnson, who for a year and a half subsisted with thirty others in a Louisiana bayou just four miles from the plantation they had fled, stealing livestock and trading meat for cornbread from untrustworthy “field slaves.” Johnson’s group of maroons slept on logs, burned cypress leaves to suppress the bayou’s incessant mosquitos, and moved about to avoid slave hunters’ bloodhounds before they were caught in a bloody encounter. By contrast, during the 1810s the “maroons” who gathered at the Spanish fort at Prospect Bluff in West Florida built a community. Its peak population counted hundreds of men, women, and children reflecting the African and Indian diasporas. They lived in British built, well-constructed houses, cultivated fields, participated in an exchange economy, organized a militia for defense, and participated in a political system. Prospect Bluff thus emerges from Millett’s story as a prime example of grand marronage in North America. Nathaniel Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and Their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World. (Gainesville, FL: the University Press of Florida. 2013.); and Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons. (New York: New York University Press. 2014.)

12 develop access to natural resources. As most historians have concluded, petit marronage was a means of slave resistance that allowed absconders a measure of freedom while remaining near familiar neighborhoods or family members. But this was only one facet of a complex story. Most who engaged in petit marronage were compelled by many motivations, including labor for pay at the behest of local white merchants. To engage in petit marronage in these contexts, then, was to remain in flight in highly mobile maroon groups that allowed American maroons to retain connections to family members as much as it permitted trade in goods for subsistence, or even the chance to gain a meager income.

More than the story of slave resistance, then, petit marronage is also a narrative of negotiation and accommodation – of relationships between slave holders and enslaved people. Not readily visible in the primary records of the eighteenth century, such relationships were particularly important during the antebellum era in the context of slave labor camps in the Great Dismal. White land company shareholders established such camps, dispatched slave laborers to them, and sold the natural resources produced by slave laborers to local commission merchants who, in turn, sold such products to merchants throughout the Atlantic world of the nineteenth century. This uncharacteristic context for slavery calls to mind a second historiographic trend of consequence to this dissertation. In the mid-1940s, historian Eric Williams pointed to the centrality of the

African slave trade in European economic development. Williams argued firmly that

13 central to the global Industrial Revolution was the capital slavery produced, and that any argument to the contrary reflected racist Jim Crow era attitudes.20

Since the mid-1990s, historians have revisited Williams’s thesis. James Oakes has pointed out that, in the Old South, slave economy and politics were intertwined inextricably in a relationship defined as liberal capitalism. Southern slave societies were defined by the denial of freedom to blacks, but southerners also defined themselves within a broader global context of emerging free market capitalism.21 The Old South’s liberal market capitalism was characterized poignantly in political discourse, but also in southern slave markets. The extent to which slavery dehumanized black people in these markets has recently been explained by Walter Johnson as a process by which people were “reduced to the simplicity of a pure form: a person with a price.”22 In the context of the American , historians have turned attention to, among other themes, the truth that a rising professional class of speculators who sought fortunes in the new Deep South dealt black slaves to a new generation of planters who sought their fortunes in a system of slavery rested upon cotton.23 These studies acknowledge slave

20 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1944, 1994.) 21 James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South. (New York: Vintage Books. 1990.) xi-xxi. 22 Walter Johnson, Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum . (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1999.) 2. 23 Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South. (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. 1989, 1996.); Robert H. Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade. (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. 2003.); Jonathan D. Martin, Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2004.); Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2005.); Joshua D. Rothman, Flush Times and Fever Dreams: A Story of Capitalism and Slavery in the Age of Jackson. (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press. 2012.); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2013.); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. (New York: Basic Books. 2014.); Calvin Schermerhorn, Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South. (Baltimore: The Johns

14 resistance at the center of southern slavery, but in their emphasis on slavery and capitalism in the context of the domestic slave trade, these studies shift emphasis away from Williams’s larger point that South’s peculiar institution provided the capital that ultimately fueled the rise of the Industrial Revolution. By emphasizing slave labor camps as a crucial context for inquiry, this study of petit marronage lays a foundation for such work.

Similarly, historians have found that enslaved people produced goods not only for subsistence in the context of slave families, or in the context of expanding transatlantic markets in the nineteenth century, but also for sale in an internal economy of and trade with one another and with slaveholding and non-slave holding whites.24 Such studies extended historical knowledge of slave rebelliousness, industrial slavery, free black slave ownership, and free black emigration with important implications for understanding the criminal justice system of the antebellum era. In this vein, Loren

Schweninger drew attention to the need to establish the contours of what he described as the “underside of slavery.” In the nexus of self-hire and quasi-freedom, Schweninger identified an “internal economy” by which clandestine exchanges facilitated the development of a class of enslaved people who were virtually free – still enslaved legally but living autonomous lives. In a study that revealed the extent to which the boundaries between freedom and enslavement blurred, Schweninger observed that slave holders often turned a blind eye to low-scale economic activities that led ultimately to self-

Hopkins University Press. 2011.) and Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2015.) 24 John T. Schlotterbeck, “The Internal Economy of Slavery in Rural Piedmont Virginia.” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post Slave Studies. 12. 1. (1991.) 170-181.

15 purchase, primarily because such activities could produce an economic benefit.

Schweninger concluded that such activities occurred widely throughout Virginia, even as such activities remained limited in scale by comparison to slave economies in the

Caribbean.25 Taking this new wave of scholarship on slavery and capitalism into account, this dissertation turns attention to the internal economy that sustained maroon groups in the Great Dismal, and Virginia and North Carolina more broadly.

Whites who controlled the means of production in southern slave societies increasingly pushed slavery into emerging global markets in the industrial nineteenth century. But these were not the circumstances of most whites who subsisted as yeoman farmers. Nor was this the case for most enslaved blacks, or many free blacks.26 In this vein, historians turned attention to slavery in urban contexts, highlighting interracial interactions in towns such as Richmond, Petersburg, and Norfolk.27 Others revisited rural contexts. Melvin Patrick Ely’s Israel on the Appomattox unveiled a twofold paradox in the classic conception of Virginia’s slave society. The convergence of Virginia’s

25 Loren Schweninger, “The Underside of Slavery: The Internal Economy, Self-Hire, and Quasi-Freedom in Virginia, 1780-1865.” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post Slave Studies. 12. 2. (September 1991.) 1-22. Schweninger cited as an example the slave society of Jamaica, citing studies that concluded that enslaved people participated “freely in the market economy” on the island. 26 Jeff Forret, Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2006.); Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country. (New York: Oxford University Press. 1995.); and Bill Cecil-Fronsman, Common Whites: Class and Culture in Antebellum North Carolina. (Lexington, KY: the University Press of Kentucky. 1992.) 27 Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2003.); Tommy L. Bogger, Free Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia 1790-1860: The Darker Side of Freedom. (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. 1997.); Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company. 1984.); Ira Berlin and Herbert G. Gutman, “Natives and Immigrants, Free Men and Slaves: Urban Workingmen in the Antebellum South.” American Historical Review. 88. (December 1983.) 1175-1200; Robert S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South. (London: Oxford University Press. 1970.); and Richard C. Wade, Slavery in the Cities: The South, 1820-1860. (New York: Oxford University. 1964.)

16 declining slave-labor driven tobacco economy with the emergence of post revolutionary ideologies of natural rights produced unique circumstances for African Americans. As a result of such changes, at least one community of free blacks formed in the context of one slaveholder’s efforts to bequeath in his will lands to former slaves in Prince Edward

County, Virginia, in the midst of the South’s largest slave holding state.28 By revealing the contours of the free black community that developed along the Appomattox River,

Ely encouraged scholars to reinterpret the previous historiographical characterization of

28 Melvin Patrick Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War. (New York: Vintage Books. 2004.) ix-x; 455-468. Ely’s work includes an historiographical essay of great interest, contextualizing his study broadly in concert with the recent works of a wide range of historians including the late John Hope Franklin, Brenda Stevenson, Barbara Jeanne Fields, Tommy Bogger, Joshua Rothman, Loren Schweninger, and Sally E. Hadden; and legal scholars including Ellen D. Katz and Philip J. Schwarz. Emergent in the 1970s was a view of southern African American history that explained with great emphasis the subversive qualities of enslaved blacks, and the responses of fear it elicited among whites. In brief, a generation of young historians learned that “whites treated free blacks as though they were slaves who unfortunately had slipped the formal bonds” of slavery. Such a view Ely attributes to Ira Berlin’s groundbreaking thesis in Slaves Without Masters first published in 1974. In Israel on the Appomattox, Ely highlighted the richness of county court records as repositories of trial records, suit papers, deeds, wills, estate accounts and inventories, patrollers’ returns, lists of free blacks, and militia documents, among other important documentation. In addition, Ely emphasized the fact that Virginia’s county courts both tried defendants in civil suits and represented the governing and administrative bodies of rural localities. What emerges from such documents, as I have also found, is a history of black and white relationships far more complex than the classic adversarial view, inherent to most studies of slave rebellion and slave flight. Reflecting this trend in scholarship, Ely offered a recent take on the “turning point thesis” during his commentary as part of the session “North Carolina Free People of Color in the Early Republic,” at the annual meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early Republic, July 2015. Raleigh, NC. Ely cited two an important new trend as evidence of the “turning point” thesis’s limitations: a marked rise in black property holding began in the Upper South in the 1830s, and did not peak until the 1850s. This “contrarian’s view” overturned the prevailing historiographical arguments detailing the hardening of racial lines in the Upper South. Histories had once cast the years immediately following Turner’s rebellion as a “turning point” during which proslavery southerners capitalized upon fears of free blacks as a threat to the region’s slave systems and social orders, in a concerted effort to separate the races. Ely explained that a closer look at nineteenth century documents reveals important glimpses of daily life between blacks and whites in the region. Such evidence exposes the fact that “many Southern whites felt secure enough to deal fairly and even respectfully with free African Americans partly because slavery still held most blacks firmly in its grip.” This paradox set the stage for “a drama of free black pride and achievement” in the Old South, wherein “ties of culture, faith, affection, and economic interest could span the barrier between black and white.”

17 overarching slave societies that functioned primarily to repress all but the most spectacular of Black achievements in the struggle for freedom.29

In the past five decades, African American history has matured as a field of academic inquiry. This maturation, in turn, has informed the “master narrative” of the traditional field of American history, first professionalized in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. The study of African American history has also informed present histories of the American south.30 No longer, then, does the South remain a monolithic subject of historical inquiry, in which classic slave societies are characterized simply by the tobacco planting counties of the Chesapeake, the rice planting parishes of the

Lowcountry, or the rapidly expanding cotton planting regions of the antebellum Deep

South. Fading into the past, also, are histories that cast Southern race relations along simple binaries of black and white. Only by taking into account these historiographical shifts can scholars begin to appreciate in full the long heritage of petit marronage in the

American southeast. In doing so, we learn more the subject in the context of the antebellum era.

29 Such works have highlighted, for instance, the ways in which free women of mixed ancestry cultivated intimate relationships with white men, in ways that circumvented extant laws designed to keep apart the races. See Warren E. Milteer, Jr., “The Strategies of Forbidden Love: Family across Racial Boundaries in Nineteenth-Century North Carolina.” Journal of Social History. 47. 3. (2014.) 612-626; Emily Clark, The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2013); Rebecca J. Scott and Jean M. Hébrard, Freedom Papers: An Atlantic Odyssey in the Age of Emancipation. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2012.); Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2003.); and Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South. (New York: Oxford University Press. 1996.) 30 Nathan I. Huggins, “The Deforming Mirror of Truth: Slavery and the Master Narrative of American History.” Radical History Review. 49. (1991.) 25-48.

18

Discussions of marronage and slave resistance in the mid-Atlantic southeast often begin with examinations of the Great Dismal Swamp. To this end, Hugo P. Leaming’s book Hidden Americans, published posthumously in the mid-1990s, can be situated along with Franklin and Schweninger’s Runaway Slaves as the major works in a second wave of scholarship of American marronage. Franklin and Schweninger’s work treated slave flight broadly, and situated marronage within this framework. Leaming’s book centered on the Dismal Swamp, contending that a permanent maroon community formed within, and remained entrenched from the mid seventeenth century until the Civil War. An

“ongoing core of persons, and a framework of social institutions that changed in membership,” supported one another, and incorporated new escapees into the community from surrounding plantations. These settlements developed in concentric circles radiating outward from the swamp’s center over time, with the most remote communities always remaining deeply entrenched.31 But many historians rejected Leaming’s observations; the most poignant critique cited a number of critical errors in analysis and interpretation of primary source material and historical context.32

Most recently, a third wave of scholarship presently examines the subject of petit marronage. In Slavery’s Exiles, Sylviane A. Diouf extends Leaming’s framework, noting that instead of patterns of concentric development, the Dismal’s maroon communities

31 Hugo P. Leaming, Hidden Americans: Maroons of Virginia and the Carolinas. (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1993.) 32 In a review published in the William and Mary Quarterly, Peter C. Stewart observed that, although published posthumously, Hidden Americans contained errors in numerical sequence regarding the counting of years and population figures; and an erroneous interpretation of the Revolutionary war battle at Kemps Landing in Princess Anne County, described as a victory for “a band of African Americans and poor whites” over the local militia instead of the actual skirmish involving more than one hundred Redcoats, and “dozens of Norfolk merchants and Princess Anne County planters.” See Peter C. Stewart, review of Hidden Americans: Maroons of Virginia and the Carolinas. By Hugo Prosper Leaming. Studies in African

American History and Culture. (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1995. Pp. xxii, 482.)

19 were established in two zones: the hinterland in the swamp’s interior, and the borderlands along the edges of the swamp. More accurate than Leaming’s framework of concentric circles of maroon settlement, Diouf’s zones of maroon activity have informed my work.33

Nathaniel Millett has argued that most maroons in North America, including the maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, were “not much more than desperate bands of runaways who struggled on a daily basis to survive.” Instead, the “Negro Fort” along the

Apalachicola River reflects the only instance of grand marronage north of the Caribbean, and therefore, the most important characterization of North American marronage.34 A recent article indicates that maroons in the Great Dismal established “communities within communities” within its depths. Such communities were bound together by the fact that they both renounced enslavement and that they embraced their status as fugitives. Less a permanent population over two centuries, these communities were multiple semi- permanent settlements that shared the common goal of a meaningful existence both within the swamp, but to a degree, also within the slave societies that surrounded the swamp. In this way, Ted Maris-Wolf argues that enslaved laborers and maroons “carved out identities and negotiated their wages within a biracial labor system that relied upon and supported slavery.”35 This labor system was, by the 1850s, a new development in a swamp that long functioned as the center of petit marronage in Virginia and North

Carolina.

33 Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles. 209-29. 34 Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and Their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World. 1-11. 35 Ted Maris-Wolf, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Maroon Life and Labor in Virginia’s Dismal Swamp.” Slavery and Abolition. (2012.) 1-19. Emphasis added.

20

Maris-Wolf’s focus on the Dismal’s biracial labor system is central to this dissertation. Because maroons visited the Dismal’s slave labor camps to trade with slave and free blacks, the hinterland and borderland zones of marronage were not mutually exclusive. Historical records reveal only glimpses of maroon activity generally, but taken with the material records recovered by the Dismal’s primary historical archaeologist,

Daniel O. Sayers, the swamp’s story of petit marronage becomes clearer.36 With the recent insights provided by Sayers, Millett, Maris-Wolf, and Diouf, I argue that petit marronage in the Dismal endured far longer than the maroon community at Prospect

Bluff, and predated the Dismal Swamp’s antebellum slave labor camps. Perhaps the most important takeaway is that a study of petit marronage helps to explain the long endurance of slavery as a flexible system supported by negotiation and accommodation. In particular, the merchants who dispatched slave laborers to the swamp were beholden to the actions of the slaves themselves. Such laborers dictated the pace of their work; they arrived late in the mornings, or slipped away into the deepest reaches of the swamp to avoid work altogether. Moreover, the swamp was a gendered space, in that its primary characters were men who labored at canal sites, or cut lumber and shingles. Through clandestine networks of communication, women who spend the majority of their time on local plantations supported these men by providing materials for subsistence. By their flight into the Dismal, maroons claimed the swamp as a base for resisting enslavement.

36 Daniel O. Sayers, A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp. (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. 2014.); Sayers, “Marronage Perspective for Historical Archaeology in the United States.” Historical Archaeology. 46. 4. (2012.) 135-161; Sayers, “The Political Economy of Exile in the Great Dismal Swamp.” International Journal of Historical Archaeology. 11. 1. (2007). 60-97; Sayers, “The Diasporic World of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1630-1860.” Ph.D Diss. Department of Anthropology, College of William and Mary. (2008).

21

Thus the Dismal Swamp was, along with other such swamps, a gendered landscape that functioned in relation to more traditional plantation contexts as a rival geography.37

To make the case for the importance and long prevalence of petit marronage in the American southeast, this examines a primary source base including runaway advertisements; planters’ and merchants’ records, inventories, letterbooks and correspondence; the records and inventories of land companies; and colonial, provincial and state records. As historians interested in marronage have discovered, the traditional sources contain many silences. As men and women who fled enslavement, maroons typically did not leave in their wake copious documentation of their escapes. To narrate their stories and, in essence, to narrate the long history of petit marronage in the

American southeast, I pay particular attention to abolitionist pamphlets and broadsides; to slave narratives; and to runaway advertisements. Such silences have required, also, that I employ archaeological and anthropological methods to tell the story of the Dismal’s maroons.

These interpretations add rich texture to the historiographies of slave resistance, and of slavery and capitalism. The history of the Underground Railroad is the means of escape and resistance to slavery undertaken that is most widely known in the American public. Yet the Railroad operated only from about 1815 through 1860, and its reach was limited primarily to the Upper South, or to the South’s major port towns including

Baltimore, New Orleans, and Charleston. In the century prior to 1830, then, most African descended people resisted enslavement primarily through participation in petit

37 Stephanie M.H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004.)

22 marronage. Colonials in Virginia expressed their concerns of slave flight into the swamp as early as the 1660s, but it was not until 1730 that the first significant population of maroons took root in the Dismal. This population was comprised of more than three hundred rebels who fled into the swamp after the Chesapeake Rebellion. Following the rebellion, local observers described maroons who “lurked about,” departing slaveholders’ plantations but remaining in the general vicinity. Such actions challenged officials’ efforts to criminalize slave flight effectively, and frustrated wealthy whites’ efforts to project authority over unincorporated territories such as the Great Dismal. Before the

Dismal became a destination for fugitive slaves, numerous “fringe” groups including whites, Indians, and mixed peoples lived in the swamp’s margins, much to the disdain of some contemporary observers. Yet, only “fugitives” of African descent who lived in the most remote sections of the swamp became maroons. This narrative comprises the first chapter of this dissertation.

As early as 1722, provincial officials in Charleston petitioned the Lords

Proprietors of Carolina, decrying the fact that slaves in flight found refuge in the swamps near Wilmington. The South Carolinians did not succeed in annexing the region, and in the years leading up to the American Revolution, North Carolina was established as a colony in its own right. Beginning in the , the upheavals of the American independence movement initiated significant changes to the slave societies of the Dismal swamp region. Petit marronage evolved as well, as the environment that maroons inhabited in the swamp changed. In this context Norfolk, Virginia merchants drew upon local planters for the first group of slave laborers assembled in the Great Dismal. With

23 the initiation of the Dismal Swamp Land Company in the early 1760s, the introduction of enslaved laborers into the swamp gave rise to a new population of African descendants who, upon fleeing canal labor camps, might become maroons. The American War for

Independence interrupted merchants’ efforts to establish an infrastructure in the Dismal by which they might take advantage of enslaved labor to gain access to the swamp’s natural resources. But the war’s interruption did not end petit marronage. After the war, merchants turned increasingly to enslaved people born locally. The Dismal’s laborers acted with their feet to secure liberty, as had their African ancestors of the previous generation. As a result, a number of reports reveal that colonial militias were dispatched to disband maroon groups not only in Dismal region, but also in swamps throughout eastern North Carolina. These themes comprise this dissertation’s second and third chapters.

In truth, the war’s interruption increased the opportunities that enslaved and free blacks took to participate in petit marronage. If the first population of maroons in the

Dismal were the direct descendants of West African societies, and thus most prone to resist enslavement through flight, the second generation comprised perhaps the last who might trace directly their lineage to the Middle Passage. Yet, this shift did not preclude their penchant to resist enslavement. Still descendants of Africa, whatever their degree of assimilation, these men and women also engaged in petit marronage. With the return of peace and the establishment of the American republic in the 1790s, the Dismal Swamp region’s white merchants returned to financing canal construction projects. This narrative comprises the fourth chapter of this dissertation. As my work in the records of early

24 nineteenth century Norfolk commission merchant Richard Blow reveals, the Dismal’s landscape functioned as a center of human interaction in which racial and ethnic designations again blurred in ways only paralleled by that which took place in the port towns of the early republic. In flight from plantations, enslaved blacks sought refuge in the most remote sector of the swamp’s interior. Slave laborers, on the other hand, occupied a liminal space at the swamp’s fringes, at once a landscape that protected a significant measure of autonomy and a proximal site in relation to the region’s primary port at Norfolk. Over time, canal construction transformed the very landscape that had supported the maroons’ efforts to live independently. While such projects ultimately hindered the formation of a long-term maroon colony, the very nature of canal construction supported petit marronage. Thus, as more merchants invested in swamp projects during the early republic and antebellum eras, the population of blacks engaged in petit marronage in the Dismal increased.

After 1800, a new generation of planters pushed into the Deep South, establishing cotton plantations that, for laborers, drew upon enslaved populations in the Upper South.

Still, through the first half of the nineteenth century, merchants associated with the

Dismal Swamp Land Company continued to invest in the swamp’s infrastructure, and the swamp’s population of enslaved and hired black laborers continued to increase. Canal encroachments notwithstanding, petit marronage continued to complicate state officials’ efforts to secure full authority. Even the momentary disruptions in the early 1830s caused by the panic inspired by David Walker’s Appeal and by Nat Turner’s Rebellion did little to change the way that petit marronage functioned in the Dismal. The substantial social,

25 political, and economic changes of the global 1840s and 1850s, however, set in motion a second significant shift in context for petit marronage in Virginia and North Carolina. I narrate these stories in the dissertation’s final chapter. Heightening production of the swamp’s raw materials accounted for a substantial increase in the number of enslaved laborers who, by the late 1840s, were listed on registries entered into county courthouse records that detailed their vital statistics. This coincided with the transatlantic movement to end to slavery that inspired abolitionists to observe the horrors of black enslavement while traveling in the two states. For example, in January 1852, Edmund Jackson published an account titled “The Virginia Maroons” in the Boston newspaper The Liberty

Bell. The report claimed that Jackson had heard rumor of a “city of refuge in the midst of

Slavery” in the Great Dismal Swamp. Four years later, published

Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, a novel inspired by similar reports of maroons.

To be sure, marronage was not new to these abolitionists; in the first half of the nineteenth century, reports revealed to astute observers like Stowe the presence of maroon communities in Spanish borderlands of the Florida panhandle. Nor did Jackson’s report claim that he had found the city of refuge for which he searched. But he, like

Stowe, had been drawn to the Dismal for its peculiar history of petit marronage. Thus, petit marronage was no longer a mere matter of local concern; it had become an issue of national intrigue. In this context, Jackson’s remarks provide evidence of the central contribution my study presents to historians. The swamp “community” to which Jackson referred was not a permanent settlement; rather, it was comprised of slave labor camps and geographically mobile American maroon groups that had been engaged in petit

26 marronage for several generations. Jackson and Stowe recognized this “community” as a force with great potential to destabilize the southern slave system; locals in Virginia and

North Carolina sought to perpetuate the myth that petit marronage did not exist.

27

Chapter 1: “a Very Mutinous People”: Slavery, the Egalitarian Spirit, the Formation of Race, and the Black Freedom Struggle in the Lower Chesapeake and the Albemarle, 1660-1730

Petitions to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina reveal the civil unease that characterized the northern region of the colony during the mid-seventeenth century, unveiling conflict inspired by English officials’ attempts to impose the Crown’s authority upon a faction of its residents. Some warned the Lords that unhappy settlers were

“poisoning the peoples eares (sic), unsettling and disquieting their minds.” These people circulated “false and dangerous Reports tending much to the indignity of your Honors and reproach of your Government.” The reports revolved around the price of land, fanning the flames of unrest “among divers (sic) others,” causing some to attempt to secede from the colony to establish their own government.38 Colonials in the Albemarle region of what would become North Carolina feared the influence that the potential for rebellion held, “for considering the vast coast and wild woods of the backside of

Virginia,” dissenters might arrive “from Maryland & the Wilderness between Virginia and Albemarle extending one hundred miles without one Inhabitant.”39 The petitioners warned that, should the dissenters not be quieted, “hundreds of idle debters, theeves,

Negros, Indians, and English servants will fly into them & from thence make Inroads and dayly Incursions, whence great mischief may follow which may better be foreseen and

38 William L. Saunders, editor, The Colonial Records of North Carolina: 1662 to 1712. Vol. 1. (Wilmington, NC: Broadfoot Publishing Co. 1993), 256. North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 39 Saunders, Colonial Records of North Carolina. 261.

28 prevented than after remedied.”40

These warnings were expressions of the grave fear that the dispute would influence northern Carolina’s marginal members of society – the English servants,

Indians, “idle debters, theeves,” – and most importantly, their enslaved “Negros.” Of paramount importance was preventing the spread of rebellious ideals among the region’s enslaved individuals. Furthermore, these colonials distinctly feared the wilderness in which they lived, as an uncontrolled geographic expanse into which the colony’s black slaves and white servants might flee to find refuge together. However, the same petition to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina reveals the vastness of the Albemarle region. The petitioners observed a settlement with undefended roads and shallow waterways that was

“by reason of the woods, swamps, rivers, creeks, and runs, this Country being no waies

[sic] accessible by Land” except from Virginia, to the north, “and that but by three passes or avenues.”41 Thus, the petitioners spoke of the Albemarle in relation to the Virginia

Tidewater, observing the paths by which a large number of their servants and slaves might escape or move about. By their flight into this wilderness, these marginalized peoples would respond to civil unrest with the aim of taking control of their own circumstances. Avoiding colonial warfare, then, would rest upon separating black slaves from Indians and servants. Cooperation between these three groups revealed what historian Margaret Newell has recently observed as the “shaky legal foundation” upon which the English lay claim to North American lands, grounded in part upon Indians’ willingness to accept the terms of land ownership the English imposed upon them.42

40 Ibid, 256-61. 41 Ibid, 260. 42 Margaret Ellen Newell, Brethren By Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2015.) 1-16.

29 These fears of civil unrest, of slave rebellion, and of uncontrolled geographic expanses were almost realized during the infamous Nathaniel Bacon’s Rebellion of

1676.43 The conflict proved to be the genesis of the great American paradox of slavery and freedom in the region, whereby aspiring white farmers united against the Crown’s increasingly wealthy representatives in Virginia’s elite landed classes. Some of these former indentured servants organized around racism against Native Americans and

Africans in support of the landed classes. Others cast their lot with dispossessed Native

Americans and enslaved Africans. Though quashed, the rebellion was one factor resulting in the development of a racial ideal uniting former servants and white elites. By 1700, a nascent and racially exclusive ideal of republican freedom for white Virginians existed, dependent upon the enslavement of more than twenty percent of the colony’s population of enslaved Africans. In many ways, Bacon’s Rebellion represents the highpoint of interracial rebellious activity in colonial Virginia and Carolina, but it was not the last. In

1710, a failed insurrection conspiracy involving blacks and some whites in the lower

James River region of Virginia reflected the fears expressed by the northern Carolinians nearly fifty years earlier. By 1730, however, an organized uprising comprised solely of enslaved Africans during the Chesapeake Rebellion signaled the end of an era of , characterized by colonials who cooperated across racial lines.

43 Ignited by the death of Thomas Matthews’ overseer in a July 1675 skirmish with a Doeg trading party from the northern Chesapeake, and amplified by Berkeley’s hesitance to provide protection for backcountry farmers, the rebellion was, in essence, a ruse for land speculators to justify the seizure of reserved Pamunkey lands. Newcomers to the colony and recent appointments to the Council of State, Nathaniel Bacon and Giles Bland, represented a class of new elite immigrants. Both Bacon and Bland resented Governor Berkeley’s authority, particularly his policies regarding Indian lands. After several weeks, Berkeley crushed the rebellion, establishing the Middle Plantation Treaties. In effect between 1677 and 1680, the treaties reestablished the Pamunkey’s reservation, forbidding English settlement within three miles. This protection was short lived; the Pamunkeys began selling acreage, and the deal was voided in October 1677. By the 1690s, planters aggressively acquired Indian lands by fraud, petition, and speculation. See Anthony S. Parent, Jr. Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 2003.)

30 With an eye toward North Carolina’s colonial development, this chapter centers the important transition from interracial cooperation in conspiracies and rebellions to rebellious activity that was distinctly African within two significant historical contexts.

The first was the rise of Virginia’s great planter class beginning in the 1660s, and the increase in the importation of enslaved Africans beginning in the 1690s; the second involved the rise and fall of the egalitarian society created by the first two generations of

European settlers in the northern Carolina colony beginning in the 1660s and ending in the second decade of the eighteenth century. In both contexts, conspiracies and rebellions notwithstanding, the Great Dismal Swamp drew into its periphery people of all races who preferred to live outside the authority gradually claimed by local officials in newly incorporated areas of the lower Chesapeake and the Albemarle. But by 1730, the swamp drew into its most remote depths particularly rebellious African and African American maroons, whose mere existence fueled the sustained black freedom struggle in the region.

Perceptions of propensity to rebel notwithstanding, this significant group formed the first engaged in petit marronage in the Dismal prior to the American Revolution.

* * * * *

Since the 1970s, historians have observed that the creation of racial slavery in

Virginia and northern Carolina was the work of a small, emergent class of “great planters” with large landholdings acquired by way of rampant speculation, and with the support of nascent political networks that formed the bedrock of colonial Virginia’s social code.44 To protect their increasing investment in slave labor, Virginia’s great planters were forced to respond to domestic distress, to class conflict, and to black revolt

44 Anthony S. Parent, Jr. Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 2003.)

31 often buttressed by moments of interracial cooperation. The matrix of conditions that created this class of great planters in turn produced complex barriers for white former servants who aspired to become small farmers and great planters in the Tidewater and the

Albemarle region of northern Carolina. This rise of the great planters also facilitated conditions through which local Native American confederations were dispossessed of their lands. Finally, the planters’ rise to prominence expedited the conditions through which the constraints of black enslavement were tightened. As a result, in the seventy years between 1660 and 1730, this small, powerful planter class contributed significantly to the creation of America’s racial dilemma. This paradox of American slavery and freedom, then, was not simply that an amorphous group of whites found freedom in the context of increased black enslavement. Rather, their freedom was shaped by and in response to the attempts of Native American groups to retain ancestral lands, and in response to the complex struggle for black liberty.

Prior to Bacon’s Rebellion, colonial Virginia’s great planter class accomplished the objectives of asserting their authority in several stages. First, the great planters established a foothold in the James River valley, encroaching upon Native American lands in the effort to build large tobacco producing plantations. Initial English efforts to establish its tobacco-producing colony at Jamestown were set against the various political boundaries maintained by the Algonquian-speaking groups that comprised the

Powhatans. Powhatan territory was bounded in the west by the fall line, the natural navigational limit of oceangoing vessels that separated the tidewater region from the interior piedmont, where the Siouan-speaking enemies of the Powhatans – the Monacans and Mannahoacs – resided. South of the James River valley, Iroquoian-speaking

32 Nottoways, Meherrins and Tuscaroras peopled the Great Dismal Swamp region. This territory, named Tsenacommacah, was under the consolidated influence of the paramount chief Powhatan, who inherited control of a core group of six communities between the

James and York rivers and established tributary alliances with more distant communities to the north, south, and west.45

On March 22, 1622, a Pamunkey attack on Jamestown provided the impetus for land encroachment: “conquest by right of Warre, and law of Nations.”46 Pamunkey warrior Opechancanough led the offensive against the English colonists. The offensive resulted in the deaths of three hundred thirty settlers, nearly a quarter of the colony’s population. In 1644, the second Pamunkey campaign against Jamestown fueled further those who advocated the land grab against the Native Americans, and a treaty in 1646 completed the removal of the Pamunkeys from the north shore of the James. Prior to the

Anglo-Powhatan wars ending in 1646, English colonists had negotiated a relationship with Native American groups under Powhatan, and his successor Opichankano, seeking

45 April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2004.) 9-37. This view is based in large part on Hatfield’s analysis of John Smith’s records, including an early map he produced. During the first Anglo-Powhatan War from 1609-1614, both Powhatans and English colonists sought to subordinate one to the other, with Powhatan seeking to treat the English as a tributary kingdom and the English looking to procure a consistent supply of corn from the Powhatans. Coinciding with increased knowledge of the prospect of trading with rival groups including the Susquehannocks (although the establishment of the colony of Maryland made this an increasingly difficult prospect after 1634,) English colonists abandoned the Spanish-inspired model of exacting labor from Native Americans after the beginning of the second Anglo-Powhatan War in 1622, opting to secure full separation from the influence of the Powhatans. Hatfield asserted that the English continued to rely heavily upon established Native American trade networks and routes, incorporating such information about such physical, social, and political geographies into the conceptualization of their own maps. In her view, the English established political dominance over Tsenacommacah by midcentury, represented by the terms of the treaty that ended the third Anglo-Powhatan war in 1646. By such terms, the Powhatans were forced to pay annually twenty beaver skins to the English in addition to being removed from their traditional core homeland between the James and York rivers. The establishment of English forts along the fall line on the Rappahannock, York and James rivers furthered the process of debasing Tsenacommacah. But the continued Siouan and Iroquoian presence beyond still made Indian geographies crucially important to the English. 46 Parent, Foul Means, 17.

33 trade of animal pelts and foodstuffs while also seeking to extract tribute from Powhatan.47

In 1649, Governor William Berkeley opened reserved lands on the lower end of the

James-York peninsula to English settlement. In the following twenty years, English settlers rapidly patented the lands of Virginia’s middle neck – the land between the York and Rappahannock Rivers. English settlers dispossessed the Pamunkeys in the 1650s, by way of intimidation and cheating, restrained only by the Virginia General Assembly.

Between 1652 and 1659, the lengthy English Civil War rendered Governor William

Berkeley politically incapacitated, accelerating the land grab. This led to a series of efforts to stem the flow of settlers into Indian territory, by the general assembly and

Governor Berkeley. After 1669, the colony’s western frontier was rendered void of serious Indian opposition.48

Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676 took place in the context of this land grab and the nascent colonial government’s inability to stop its expansion. The rapid expansion of

Virginia’s class of small farmers coincided with the English Crown’s efforts to curtail land speculation, and to stabilize the value of tobacco during the 1690s. The Crown began its attempts to regulate land tenure by rooting out abuses in the headrights, patent, and quitrent systems. Virginia’s great planters resisted at every turn, claiming reform

47 Ibid,16-20. 48 Parent, Foul Means, 16-20. The offensive was a success in part due to the “enthusiasm for tobacco,” which had led to an increased Native American presence in and about Jamestown. The resulting boom in tobacco plantations drove conflicts between colonists and the Powhatan confederation, which sought to protect its lands from English encroachment as settlers sought to claim land English settlers viewed as underutilized. The push for tobacco lands also highlighted a significant weakness in the colonists’ land utilization: under emphasis on planting corn for sustenance. For corn, the colonists had come to depend upon local Native Americans who in turn sought to slow English encroachment through an agreement to provide the food staple. English colonists forced the trade in corn, however, by threat of arms. This was evidenced as early as 1619, in the Powhatan leader Opechancanough’s complaints to the newly installed Virginia House of Burgesses. Initially, the House of Burgesses responded by denouncing the settlers’ actions, and regulating trade with the Indians to licensed and bonded interactions, and by restricting the excessive plantation of tobacco. These measures had little effect, as white settler land encroachment continued.

34 would lead to their ruin. In particular, speculation on headrights contracts used to acquire enslaved blacks provided the great planters with the advantage of increasing production capacity in relation to that of small farmers. In 1698, the Board of Trade instructed

Governor Francis Nicholson to end engrossment by shifting away from headrights contracts to a system of homesteads. Prior to the 1690s, headrights on blacks had been accepted in violation of the “great Charter,” which had set the terms of indenture for laborers imported into Virginia. With the diminished servant supply, however, blacks had become central to the acquisition of land, particularly due to the fact that slaves, like land, could be entailed to great estates, or leased to lesser planters. To curtail competition from this constituency, increasingly represented in the House of Burgesses, the great planters conceded to Governor Nicholson’s action to end the use of headrights claimed on enslaved blacks in April 1699. To work around this in the effort to retain rights to land speculation, in June, the great planters devised a new system of land patents, centered on treasury rights. By 1710, Governor Alexander Spotswood had enacted a land policy that legitimized all existing grants, with a subsequent 1713 general assembly act encoding a land forfeiture clause to apply to grants after 1710. After 1720, Virginia’s land grab expanded exponentially.49

In addition to increasing the size of landholdings, the great planters resorted to

African slave labor as a measure of economic efficiency. Prior to the eighteenth century,

49 Ibid, 40-54. Treasury rights consisted of the following: payment of an immigrant’s transportation, and payment of five shillings to the auditor for a treasury right, affirmed a speculator’s right to survey and patent fifty acre tracts, essentially the same terms as under headrights. This facilitated the great planters’ ability to maintain large tracts of land, without paying the requisite quitrents. This was evident in Edward Randolph’s 1695 report of fraud in the tobacco trades. In response, administrators of the House of Orange created the Board of Trade in 1696, installing John Locke with the charge of remedying the problem of lax tobacco revenues and rampant great planter speculation. Based upon Commissary James Blair’s report on Virginia’s problems, Locke affirmed the great planter transgressions.

35 however, colonial Virginia remained a marginal market in the English Atlantic slave trading system. Although secured by the monopoly it held on the market in African slaves in 1674, the primary English royal trading company, the Royal African Company, struggled to meet the growing demand for enslaved laborers prior to 1678. As a result, the great planters, and later, merchants began importing blacks through intercolonial trade routes from Barbados, primarily by way of independent traders. Before 1681, almost 600 enslaved Africans thus arrived in the colony. In that year, a drop in the price of tobacco slowed the importation of enslaved Africans into the colony, but importation rebounded after 1683, when direct trade with West Africa opened. By 1698, the RAC’s monopoly was finally broken, and the British Parliament opened the slave trade to

Virginia to independent merchants. After 1707, independent traders shipped almost 700 blacks annually to Virginia alone. Between 1699 and 1710, independent traders carried

6,835 enslaved Africans to the colony, the RAC, 679.50 According to these enumerations, by 1710, more than 7,500 Africans had been transported to Virginia.

50 William A. Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the , 1672-1752. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 2013). Indentured servants and enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia at different times during the tobacco-planting season. Merchants delivered the former in the fall, after tobacco had been harvested, processed, and packed for shipment to England. On the other hand, traders focused on the exploitation of black labor, and as a result, shipped enslaved Africans to Virginia in the late spring and early summer, in time for field labor. Further, Africans’ agricultural experience rendered slave labor the more profitable investment. Recent historiographical trends demonstrate that most Africans arrived with extensive knowledge of hoe agriculture, mound cultivation, replanting techniques; and fallow or rotational planting, crop processing, and tobacco culture. This was knowledge of tobacco cultivation the English did not possess. Introduced in West Africa early in the sixteenth century, tobacco and corn were staples in the region by the end of the seventeenth century. Such experience explains in part why Virginia planters imported enslaved laborers from the Bight of Biafra and the Congo. Parent, Foul Means, 60-66. Parent consults the following primary sources, and edited primary sources, among others, for his contentions regarding Africans’ knowledge of agriculture: William Hugh Grove Diary, April 1732, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Library; P.E.H. Hair, Adam Jones, and Robin Law, editors, Barbot on Guinea: The Writings of Jean Barbot on West Africa, 1678-1712, 2 vols., Hakluyt Society, 2d Ser., nos. 175, 176. (London, 1992); [George Story?], “Commonplace Book” (including travels in various parts of Africa, ca. 1680-1700), HM 31307, Huntington Library, San Marino, ; Francis Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa… (London, 1738.) 31-33.

36 As the Virginia great planters expanded their landholdings and imported increasing numbers of African slaves in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, to the south, a vast expanse of colonial English North America remained outside the Virginia great planters’ direct influence. With the possibility of landownership for poor whites in

Virginia almost nonexistent, many migrated southward often in the company of enslaved blacks or Native Americans. Thus began the flight of Virginia’s misfits, social outcasts, and religious dissidents to the Great Dismal Swamp and the coastal region of the

Albemarle Sound. Northern Carolina’s earliest European settlers rejected the social hierarchy represented by Virginia’s great planters, by resisting the attempts of men among them who sought to establish an aristocracy. Instead, they were resolute in the effort to establish a society of equals. Though northern Carolina was nominally a

Restoration colony owned and managed by English proprietors, the small farmers who actually settled the Albemarle region sought to fulfill the revolutionary ideals of social egalitarianism inspired by the English Revolution. Here, people of European, Native

American, and African descent cohabitated, intermarried, and divorced, independent of societal norms projected across the Atlantic from England. According to Noeleen

McIlvenna, these settlers established a frontier society the Virginia gentry considered “a very mutinous people,” a society in which former servants, dispossessed Native

Americans, and some Africans escaped the economically stratified culture of their

See also Alan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680-1800. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 1986.); David W. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1981); and James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 1994.)

37 northern neighbors by establishing a society of equals.51 Primarily working to subsist, the settlers of Old Albemarle traded with pirates, and recognized no social elites. These

European and African newcomers coexisted with the predominant Native American group in the region, the Tuscaroras, as they did not threaten indigenous sovereignty.

The English Restoration arrived in the Chesapeake and Albemarle regions in the form of Governor William Berkeley’s return to Virginia. Berkeley, a Lord’s Proprietor, set about the mission of establishing the royal aristocracy’s legitimacy not only in the lower Chesapeake, but also throughout the southern colonies. In 1664 Governor Berkeley sought to extend Virginia’s jurisdiction into the Albemarle, appointing William

Drummond the region’s first governor. Berkeley believed that the Virginia lawyer would promote the interests of the lower Chesapeake’s nascent great planter class. Instead

51 Many also joined the oppressed poor whites, to escape persecution for their resistance to the establishment of Anglican Church control of colonial affairs. The earliest recorded settlers included Nathaniel Batts – a fur trader who married into the Yeopim Indian culture – and George Durant. Both men bought land from the Yeopim in 1660 and 1661. Their political dissent was, in part, rooted in the English Revolution. During “Oliver’s Days” in the 1650s, the English citizenry learned that if the king’s authority could be brought into question, then no legitimate authority could be rooted simply in custom and deference. In England, Oliver Cromwell commanded the New Model Army and supported freedom of conscience, providing an example of the authority that might be rooted in a meritocracy. This disproved the prevailing notion that intelligence and competence were the exclusive possessions of England’s landed gentry. In April 1647, the rank and file of the New Model Army chose representatives in response to arrears in pay, and formed the General Council, demanding an extension of the franchise, equal distribution of parliamentary seats, and the revocation of all titles of privilege. These Levellers executed King Charles I in 1649, and the ensuing power struggle between the Levellers and Cromwell resulted in the dissolution of the House of Lords and the Anglican Church’s loss of sole interpretative authority of the Bible. Although Cromwell later suppressed the Leveller movement, their claims brought into question the implications of authority restricted to an aristocracy. After 1653 England’s aristocracy gradually reunified, and the restoration of the Crown’s authority in the person of King Charles II broadened the understanding of the illegitimacy of deference to social rank by proving the important example that true power resided in the control of force, rather than divine bloodlines. See Noeleen McIlvenna, A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660-1713. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 2009.) Prior to 1713, some Africans figured prominently in Albemarle society. Thomas Andover, a free river pilot, appears in the region’s primary records twice: once in 1694, as the recipient of compensation for his services in a suit against a wealthy widow; and once again in 1697, in a case in which he testified that he received a gun as payment for his services. Andover’s cases appear in the North Carolina Higher Court Records, 1697-1701, Mattie Erma Edwards Parker, editor. (Raleigh, NC: North Carolina State Department of Archives and History. 1971.) 114. See Jacqueline A. Martin, “The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1607-1865.” Master Thesis, Western Washington University. (December 2004.) 36-45.

38 Drummond, a former indentured servant, encouraged the opposite. Drummond convened the first meeting of the Albemarle Assembly, a model Albemarle settlers held as the standard for future governors. In the next year, the Lord’s Proprietors’ first attempt to govern the region came in the form of the Concessions and Agreement, a document that organized the Albemarle region as a county in concert with Clarendon on the Cape Fear

River and , near Charles Town, in southern Carolina. The act called for

Albemarle settlers to lay out towns to provide for defense against Native Americans, a directive the Albemarle settlers – engaged in trade and friendly relations with the Indians

– deemed unnecessary.52 In order to fill their coffers, the proprietors placed increasing pressure on Governor Berkeley and his deputies to collect quitrents from Albemarle farmers under the terms of the Great Deed of Grant acts of 1668 and 1670. Exercising the great degree of latitude they felt was rightfully their own, Albemarle farmers drafted a series of acts for ratification by the proprietors in 1669. These acts inspired the Albemarle farmers’ earliest petitions to the Lord’s Proprietors, alerting them to the dangerous influence of the dissention caused by the efforts to collect quitrents.53

52 McIlvenna, a Very Mutinous People, 20-30. The Headrights instructions stipulated that the head of household be entitled to eighty acres, with eighty more for a wife and any male servant with the ability to bear arms. Female servants, children and enslaved individuals over age fourteen earned farmers an additional forty acres. Lastly, Christian servants earned forty acres upon release from indenture. In tune with the aspirations of the landed gentry who sought to restrict the access poorer farmers might get to opportunity, just two years later the initial headrights grants were cut in half. Governor Drummond served only three years, replaced by Samuel Stephens in 1667. By 1672 the first real signs of dissention between the Virginia great planters and Albemarle farmers emerged after Virginia imposed a tax on tobacco from Albemarle shipped through Virginia ports. To circumvent the tariff, Albemarle farmers sold their produce directly to vessels from England and New England. 53 Ibid, 31-35. These acts are observed by McIlvenna as the “politically astute community carefully created an alternative to the colonial models of both Virginia and Massachusetts,” a “moral economy that did not require a church structure but rather was based on a humanist, secular morality that refused to enforce a particular religious faith – or the need for any faith – among its subscribers.” Among them were an act absolving the debts of new arrivals, legalizing civil wedding ceremonies, and “An Act What Land Men Shall Hould in One Devidend,” a measure that set the maximum of 660 acres for any landowner.

39 In 1672 Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Lord Shaftesbury, a prominent Lord’s

Proprietor, ratified the Albemarle Acts. Together with John Locke, Lord Shaftesbury penned the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. The Constitutions were an attempt to create a hereditary feudal system in Carolina, complete with aristocrats. The preamble described a colony organized into seigniories and baronies overseen by hereditary nobles, and provided for the establishment of the Anglican Church. Locke’s theories of possessive individualism undergirded the Constitutions. These theories conflicted with the Albemarle’s Leveller-inspired leadership who viewed land ownership not as a form of social control, but as the basis for an egalitarian society. As a result, the Constitutions were never enforced in the Albemarle region, inciting tensions between Albemarle settlers and successive governing representatives of the Lord’s Proprietors that would continue at least until the end of the Proprietary period in 1721.54

The first acts of outright resistance to the Virginia great planters’ projections of authority occurred between 1673 and 1680, after the arrivals of John Culpeper and

Thomas Miller inin the Albemarle. The events that became known as Culpeper’s

Rebellion were a popular revolt against several constraining acts on colonial commerce, imposed by the English Crown. In 1677, Thomas Miller assumed the post as Albemarle’s fourth governor, inspiring Culpeper and allies from New England who plotted to overthrow Miller’s authority. Culpeper’s Rebellion bled into a larger communal effort, including some enslaved blacks and Native Americans. In response, the citizens of

Currituck drafted the Currituck Resolutions to replace the Fundamental Constitutions.

Miller was arrested, and representatives from the four Albemarle districts set up a council

54 Ibid, 36-45.

40 at Durant’s home. In November 1679, Miller escaped prison and traveled to England by way of Virginia, leading to Culpeper’s trial in England based upon treason charges in

1680. To Miller’s dismay, the proprietors later acquitted Culpeper.55

The second attempt to usurp local authority in the Albemarle occurred between

1681 and 1695. Beginning in the fall of 1681, Set Sothell arrived in Albemarle to assume the post as the region’s fifth governor, with instructions to construct a town and council house, and to centralize political power in the hands of the proprietor’s representatives.

This worked against the existing arrangement, with power seated at George Durant’s home. Sothell moved the seat of government west to Chowan precinct, where he would quickly attract and organize a coalition of farmers with ambitions to be great planters.

The ensuing problems were twofold: a faction of farmers with ambitions to be great planters also aspired to form an aristocracy of wealthy governing families; and the ensuing land grab encroached upon Native American lands, in violation of the initial treaty that set the western boundary of European settlement. In 1689, Albemarle farmers imprisoned Sothell, and in the next year, the Lords appointed Phillip Ludwell in Sothell’s place. The proprietors gave Ludwell specific instructions, directing the new governor to expand of voting rights to all freemen, and to create a bicameral legislature. Ludwell’s jurisdiction was expanded to include the southern portion of the Carolina colony.

Because the lower Cape Fear River valley was experiencing a rapid increase in population immigrating to the region from the Clarendon region of southern Carolina,

55 Ibid, 49-70. In particular, the Albemarle settlers took exception to the Navigation Acts and several other acts. The first Navigation Acts in 1651 prohibited the use of foreign vessels in the transportation of any import or export in the . Upheld by King Charles II, these acts were reinforced with the passage of the second Navigation Acts in 1660. The second acts specified that enumerated commodities pass through English ports, before being sold abroad. The Staple Act of 1663 and the Plantation Duty Act of 1673, which required payment of English duties on intercolonial trade, further impinged upon the Albemarle farmers’ profits.

41 Ludwell focused his attentions on the region, leaving the Albemarle population much to their own devices. In this context, the Albemarle assembly of elected freedmen became the House of Burgesses, while the governor and Lords’ deputies served as an upper house. In essence, the colony of North Carolina was formed, although its formal separation from the Lowcountry would not occur before the 1720. Most significantly, the region’s black slaves were formally disfranchised. This last move was a legal initiative suggesting the extent to which the region’s African population might exert political influence, and the extent to which such influence might occur in concert with the region’s whites.56

By November 1693, Ludwell affirmed the decree that all lands in possession of the region’s farmers were subject to the Great Deed of 1668, and set quitrents at a farthing an acre. This meant that the quarrels over quitrents were settled. By 1694,

Sothell, Durant and Culpeper had died, bringing the first generation of contested

Albemarle leadership to a close.57 In some ways, the quitrents agreement and the deaths of the first generation’s competing leaders quieted white settlers among the Albemarle’s dissenting “mutinous people.” Still, by 1700, Crown and the Virginia great planters realized the danger posed by the Albemarle’s the haven for egalitarian liberty to the security of the lower Chesapeake’s slave society. The Ablemarle had offered lucrative opportunities for its initial settlers: fast money for the younger sons of an aristocracy who might not realize their hereditary promise in England on the one hand, and on the other, the chance to escape the tight grasp of perpetual poverty for the landless. In order to secure the Crown’s authority, and the hierarchy associated with belonging to the English

56 Ibid, 71-83. 57 Ibid, 84-88.

42 aristocracy, it became necessary to bring the first generation of Albemarle society into the orbit of its northern neighbor.

To the south of the Albemarle Sound, the Pamlico Indians offered little resistance in the new Bath precinct, but groups to the west and south included the powerful

Tuscarora, and the smaller group, the Bear River Indians. Similar to interactions between white settlers and Native Americans in Virginia fifty years earlier, tensions flared between the nascent planter elite in northern Carolina with reports that the Bear River group had attacked a party of white surveyors in the summer of 1699. By 1703, Chowan planters encroached upon Core Indian lands west of the Chowan River. By the next year, new deputy governor Robert Daniel secured a tentative peace agreement with the

Tuscarora, but Chowan/Anglican efforts to quiet Quaker defense of the Native Americans meant the peace accords would be short lived.58 The final blow to the Albemarle’s egalitarian society materialized between 1708 and 1711, during Cary’s Rebellion. Pitting a faction led by former South Carolina legislator Thomas Cary and councilman John

Porter, against that led by deputy North Carolina governor William Glover and Chowan elite Thomas Pollock, this struggle essentially ended the Albemarle farmers’ egalitarian visions. When Cary, Porter and their Quaker alliance overthrew Glover and Pollock’s government, North Carolina’s Quakers and Levellers celebrated a short-lived victory.

58 McIlvenna, a Very Mutinous People, 95-126. In 1701, the passage of the first Vestry Act had made clear the effort to stamp out resistance to the new English order, requiring the construction of Anglican churches and a tax for ministry salary. Anglicans gradually circumscribed the power of the region’s Quaker faction, reducing Quaker influence to control in Perquimans and Pasquotank precincts by 1705. By January 1706, the Anglicans succeeded in assembling without Quaker representation. This struggle to establish the authority of the Anglican Church in Old Albemarle reflected a twofold attack against the multiracial, egalitarian society that Albemarle farmers, Native Americans and blacks had constructed prior to 1700. The efforts to establish the Anglican Church, led by the emerging Chowan precinct elite, had the ultimate goal of annexing Native American lands.

43 Between 1709 and 1711, white North Carolinians lived in relative peace. The

Anglican establishment was rendered null and void and farmers diversified their economy with additional crops, livestock, and naval stores including pitch and tar. But the Cary faction attracted the attention of Virginia’s governor Edward Hyde, who feared their rebellious activity would incite similar actions among the colony’s enslaved individuals. In 1710, Hyde’s fears were realized. The colony’s slaves planned a rebellion and escape to the Great Dismal Swamp, where the Albemarle settlers’ indifference would ensure that the rebels would not be disturbed. The plot centered in Virginia’s James City,

Isle of Wight, and Surry Counties. After Hyde consulted with the Chowan elite, he dissolved the North Carolina Assembly under Cary’s leadership, and penned the Anti-

Sedition Act of 1711. Cary’s men responded by launching an offensive against the

Pollock faction, forcing the Pollock faction to call on the help of Virginia militiamen and the British Navy. Without enough time to enlist the aid of Tuscarora warriors, Cary and other rebel leaders fled the colony in July 1711.59 With the defeat of Cary’s rebels, the

Chowan elite turned their attention to suppressing the Tuscarora. Between 1711 and

1713, Chowan planters, South Carolina militiamen, and Indian warriors under the command of Colonel John Barnwell sacked Tuscarora towns, forcing the group to retreat to the safety of the Five Nations in New York. Barnwell’s incursions preceded the expansion of wealthy South Carolina families’ landholdings northward.60

Taken together, the suppression of Albemarle society and Tuscarora dispossession thereafter signaled a small victory for the great planters of the Tidewater, their

59 Ibid, 127-147. See also David La Vere, The : Indians, Settlers, and the Fight for the Carolina Colonies. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2013.) 60 Ibid, 148-163.

44 representatives in Old Albemarle, and the Crown’s efforts to consolidate control in the region.61 In this context, the Virginia and North Carolina colonial governments commissioned the first official survey of the boundary separating the two colonies in

1728. The wealthy Virginia planter, Colonel William Byrd II, led a team of surveyors from both colonies, recording his experiences in a travel journal titled The History of the

Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina. Travelling west from Currituck

Sound, one team led by Byrd traversed the southern expanse of the Great Dismal, while a hired group of surveyors cut through the heart of the swamp’s cypress forests to a meeting point on the swamp’s western edge. On March 11, half a mile beyond the edge of the swamp’s forest line, Byrd’s team encountered a mulatto family who explained to

Byrd that they were free. Byrd could not conceal his skepticism, noting that slaves were known to take shelter among poor white people in the region. Byrd assumed that the family’s condition made it necessary for them to enter into any coercive terms set by the region’s whites, but as one scholar has observed, Byrd’s sarcasm belies a significant reality: what seemed to be a situation of exploitation was most likely an economic interdependence between they and the mulatto family. This was characteristic of the region. While the team led by Byrd interacted with the mulatto family, the team that hacked through the center of the swamp did not report an instance of human contact.62

The mulatto family Byrd’s team encountered was most likely associated with a group of people that the Virginia great planters and their representatives in North

61 The defeat of Cary’s rebels notwithstanding, the egalitarian spirit of the Albemarle’s first two generations would live on, taken up in the later . On the North Carolina Regulator Movement, see Marjoleine Kars, Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 2002.) 62 William Byrd, The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and N. Carolina Run in the Year of Our Lord 1728. (Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press. 1728.) 43-45. See also, Martin, “Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp,” 54-56.

45 Carolina would have considered peculiar, at best, and unlawful at worst. More than that, they upheld the rebellious sentiments of the mutinous people of years past. The region bore witness to an influx of British settlers, the majority of whom were Scotch-Irish.

Surviving members of the Tuscarora, who had not fled north to form the League of Six

Nations with the Iroquois, settled along the southwestern edge of the Dismal, where they entered into trade relations with the latest influx of European settlers. After a generation, a hardscrabble community of subsistence farmers with “tawny complexions” formed, known as the Scratch Hall people, centered in what became southwestern Gates County.

Similar communities formed to the north, known as the Nansemond Indians, as a result of the cross-cultural exchanges between descendants of the Meherrin, Chowanoke, and

Catawba, and Virginia’s transient poor whites. Viewed by traditional Virginia and North

Carolina colonials as clannish, secretive, brutish beer drinkers, the Scratch Hall peoples’ communities were accessible only by winding footpaths that represented an intentional affront to civil authority. Local knowledge dictated caution in interactions with the

Scratch Hall dwellers, who were notoriously inhospitable and irreverent when contacted by English authorities or travellers.63 By 1729, the Albemarle region reverted to royal control, with the revocation of the proprietary charter of North and South Carolina. In the

Great Dismal, this latest projection of English authority was little more than nominal.

The struggle to found a society based upon egalitarian ideals in the Albemarle, the rise of a great planter class in the Tidewater, and the subsequent formation of an egalitarian society in northern Carolina highlights a significant understanding: Africans,

Native Americans, and Europeans had many identities, but the classifications of race

63 Ibid, 47-52.

46 were inconsistent prior to the mid-seventeenth century. In truth, Europeans constructed racial upon foundations defined by ethnic identities in response to the religious, social, political, and economic transformations in the region. Such transformations drew into question the nature of group identity. In the lower Tidewater and the Albemarle, new and shifting cultural and societal formations further complicated emergent definitions of group identity. From the perspective of the nascent class of great planters, the need to control human labor was central in these transformations. Just as the great planters unified in the effort to extend their authority and to secure their geography, the great planters’ projections of authority in turn produced efforts that united the poor whites, the blacks, and the Indians whose labor was the subject of royal control.64

Between 1619 and 1680, more than fifty percent of the African descended population in English North America originated from the African continent. This trend

64 The trade networks of the international market economy drew labor out of the North American southern borderlands in the form of Native American slaves. As a result, in the Albemarle, Native societies changed rapidly, forming various confederacies, including the Tuscarora. Beginning at contact with the Spanish in 1565 Florida peninsula, Native American societies were increasingly altered by the transformative forces of and the increasing European-style political organization of land. Thus, the linguistically and culturally diverse Native American groups of present-day southwest Georgia and north central Alabama converged to create the Creek confederacy; the convergence of diverse Native groups in modern-day central Mississippi came together to form the Choctaw alliance; and those along the Mississippi River between present-day Natchez, Mississippi and Memphis, formed the Natchez chiefdoms. In the late seventeenth century, the Creek, Choctaw, and Natchez primarily interacted with French and Spanish traders and imperialists in relationships that offered many opportunities to be incorporated into French and Spanish society through conversion to Catholicism. After the English establishment of Charles Town in 1670, however, diverse Native groups converged to form the Chickasaw in northern Mississippi and southwest Tennessee, the “chief slavers of Indians in the lower Mississippi Valley, selling their captives to English traders from South Carolina,”; and two periphery groups which remained largely isolated from English influence until after midcentury: the on the Appalachian plateau of eastern Tennessee and western South Carolina; and the Piedmont Indians of North and South Carolina. Two subregions of the American south came under English influence relatively quickly. In present-day eastern North and South Carolina, the Tuscarora (who themselves were an Iroquoian people relatively new to the south Atlantic coast) established a presence, and in coastal South Carolina the smaller Settlement Indian groups were often engaged in conflict with English settlers after 1670. Also, the Savannah River basin characterized the importance of trade in the English American south as the varied settlement of Tuscarora from the north; Yamasee, Apalachicola, and Apalachee from the south; Chickasaw from the west; and Shawnee, Cherokee and Creek groups came to the region at different times to take advantage of trade with the English. See Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South 1670-1717. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2002). 7-18; 41-68; 259-287.

47 held steady between 1680 and 1720, but with the onset of the First Great Awakening and the Christianization of Africans, acculturation to colonial American norms began to increase.65 Prominent among the initial African population were Senegambians who originated in West African regions where a majority of population groups maintained similar cultural norms. In these regions, ethnicity was the primary indicator of group identification. The key ethnic groups in Senegambia included the Wolof, the Malinke and other Mande speakers, the Sereer, the Fulbe, the Soninke, and the Bambara. By the peak of the transatlantic slave trade, Senegambia was comprised of several well-defined states including the Wolof states of Jolof, Waalo, Cayor (Kajor), and Baol (Bawol); the Fulbe state of Futa Toro; the Sereer state of Salum; and Malinke entities including Kantora,

Kabu, and Wuli. As a result, many enslaved Africans who initially landed in the Lower

Chesapeake and Albemarle could be characterized by linguistic, political and ethnic similarities. Various African identities, once founded upon ethnic markers, gradually gave way to socially constructed racial identifiers in the American south.66 In Virginia and northern Carolina, these similarities reinforced Africans’ difference as a group in relation to whites. But this did not mean that all peoples of African descent would immediately repudiate all facets of the new world in which they found themselves. From about 1620 through the 1650s, blacks’ identities as servants or slaves remained ambiguous; slavery had yet to be defined as the perpetual, debased, exploitive labor system reserved for later generations of Africans and their descendants.

65 Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 1998.) 46-55; 186- 209. 66 Gomez, 11-16.

48 In the last thirty-five years, historians have broken new ground in describing

Africans’ experiences in colonial Virginia, revealing these complexities. In describing the efforts that two African men who arrived in Virginia as slaves – Anthony Johnson and

Emanuel Driggus’ – undertook to gain freedom, T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes observed a paradox that was profoundly American. By working to accumulate liquid capital as a means to secure freedom and to establish their identities as members of colonial Virginia society, Johnson and Driggus represented an emergent class of Africans who had begun to associate the accumulation of property with the prospects of liberty and autonomy. A brief discussion of Anthony Johnson’s efforts to establish his family homestead, after securing his freedom, highlights this. Arriving in the colony in 1621 aboard the James,

“Antony a Negro” first labored on Richard Bennett’s plantation at the Warrasquoke settlement. About a year later, an African woman named Mary arrived at the Bennett plantation, aboard the Margarrett and John, and entered Bennett’s service. By 1640, the pair had secured their freedom, had taken the surname Johnson, and had married.67 Like many white former servants who aspired to become great planters, Johnson acquired a servant, named John Casor, under headrights legislation. His first actions as a free person involved purchasing cattle in Northampton County, Virginia in 1647. By 1650, Johnson owned a small farm on the shore of Pungoteague Creek. Three years later, Anthony’s eldest son, John Johnson, patented 550 acres of land on the south shore of the

Pungoteague, adding substantially to the senior Johnson’s landholdings. By 1654,

Johnson had acquired a female servant, Mary Gersheene. By the 1650s, Johnson had accumulated property in an amount requisite to the modest landholdings of his English

67 T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Owne Ground: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676. (New York: Oxford University Press. 1980.)

49 neighbors.68 Although a paucity of documents obscures further details of Anthony

Johnson’s path to freedom remains, another African’s effort to secure freedom and accumulate property provides deeper perspective of the ambiguous nature of group identity and black enslavement in colonial Virginia. Having been granted freedom in the years prior, in 1645 Emanuel Driggus indentured himself and his two daughters to the service of Sir Francis Pott. Driggus and his wife, Francis, were resold twice before entering the service of Stephen Charlton. After satisfying the terms of his indenture in the mid-1650s, Driggus patented 145 acres on King’s Creek in Northampton County.

To be sure, Anthony Johnson and Emanuel Driggus were, by 1660, free African property owners. Several more observations indicate the shrewdness that characterized both men’s efforts to function within the society under the construction of the great planters. In addition to the methodical acquisition of cattle in the mid-1660s, Driggus subleased a fifty-acre section of his land to a white tenant, Bartholomew Cozier. This was a clear indication that Driggus sought to conduct his affairs, as did his English neighbors.

Cozier’s patent was located on the south side of King’s Creek, on the least valuable portion of Driggus’ landholding.69 Similarly, in 1670, Anthony Johnson died, leaving his wife Mary the executor of his estate at Tonies Vineyard. Mary renegotiated the lease for the property, naming their sons as heirs. By 1677, John Johnson had purchased forty-four acres in Somerset County, Maryland, naming the property “Angola.” John held the land as a small freeholder for about four years, thereafter selling the property before moving to a new 200-acre plot in southern Delaware.70 Like Driggus, the Johnsons accumulated

68 J. Douglas Deal, Race and Class in Colonial Virginia: Indians, Englishmen, and Africans on the Eastern Shore during the Seventeenth Century. (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1993.) 69 Ibid, 79. 70 Ibid, 227-229.

50 properties with the clear intention of securing freedom and capital for future generations.71

Anthony Johnson and Emanuel Driggus were exceptions to the rule. Instead, many Africans were incorporated into the various fringe societies that, by 1730, took root in the Great Dismal Swamp’s periphery. And for most, experiences in English North

America involved resisting slavery, or mitigating the pressures it exerted on daily life.

Unlike Johnson and Driggus, or the mulatto family observed by Byrd and his survey team, many Africans rejected the pressures of acculturation, and their characters remained resolutely defiant. To secure freedom on their own terms, flight into the most remote regions of the Tidewater and Albemarle wilderness was necessary. This remote morass was the Great Dismal Swamp; nearly sixty percent of its land area formed the wilderness that shielded Old Albemarle from Virginia.72

Like the egalitarian society that developed in the Albemarle prior to 1713, the earliest settlers established subsistence farms on small parcels of dry land, distributed intermittently throughout the Dismal’s periphery. As the region’s economy developed, the Dismal’s farmers supplemented their produce by extracting lumber from the swamp.

According to several scholars, development spread gradually, in general, concentric patterns that originated in the lower Tidewater region and formed rings around the swamp’s impenetrable depths. In the early eighteenth century, a multi-ethnic class of

“edge-dwellers” formed as the Tidewater great planters imposed their authority on the outermost regions of the swamp, pushing development further into it. This class was comprised primarily of former indentured servants who had intermarried with local

71 Breen and Innes, 75-79. 72 Martin, Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp,” iv, 3.

51 Native Americans, and who had intermixed with a few people of African descent.

Throughout the century, Africans and their descendants who escaped the oppressive conditions of the Tidewater’s plantation labor system settled the swamp’s remote interior, wherein they established hidden communities. Men travelled from the interior to the swamp’s edges, where they traded with the edge-dwellers, or plundered larger plantations.73 These actions have been preserved in the primary record, often recorded as the “depredations” of roving bands of “outlyers.”

Settling the swamp’s interior sent a distinct message to the great planters and whites who supported the development of slave society in the lower Tidewater and the

Albemarle: the swamp’s hidden inhabitants intended to be slaves no more.74 Unlike other

Atlantic World maroon societies that achieved sovereign independence recognized by

European powers, the Dismal’s maroon communities were small, mostly hidden, and highly mobile.75 Still, these hidden Africans, and later hidden Americans, shared the same spirit of defiance and resilience exemplified by maroon communities throughout the

Atlantic World.76

Thus, significant forces converged between 1675 and 1725, centered on changing definitions of group identity, of race, and of economic circumstance in the Lower

73 Ibid, 36-63. 74 Martin, 35-36; Hugo Prosper Leaming, Hidden Americans: Maroons of Virginia and the Carolinas. (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1995.) 276-278. 75 Martin, iv, 3-4; Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons. (New York: New York University Press. 2014.) 209-229. 76 Richard Price, editor, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. 3rd edition, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1979, 1996.); Herbert Aptheker, “Maroons within the Present Limits of the United States,” Journal of Negro History 24. 2. (April 1939), 167-184; Aptheker, “Resistance and Afro-American History: Some Notes on Contemporary Historiography and Suggestions for Further Research” in In Resistance: Studies in African, Caribbean, and Afro-American History, Gary Y. Okihiro, editor, (University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 11-12; Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts: On Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel and Others. Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. (New York: International Publishers. 1943, 1993.)

52 Tidewater and Albemarle, regions that remained intricately connected to the broader

Atlantic World. The penchant the “very mutinous people” possessed for resisting the

Crown’s agents represented a poignant example of the potential power of territorial sovereignty. African servants and slaves, formerly held in bondage had, in a few cases, successfully established themselves as freed persons despite the changing circumstances of race and African enslavement. Never passive observers of developments in the lower

Chesapeake, some Africans had aligned themselves with the region’s mutinous lot in the effort to establish an egalitarian society in the Albemarle.77 It is within this context that, after 1676, the long black freedom struggle in English North America took firm root.

That which was not realized in Bacon’s Rebellion provides perhaps the most important implications for slave revolt and for interracial cooperation. In ending the rebellion, Virginia officials avoided the prospect of offering freedom to loyal servants and enslaved blacks. As a result of such cooperation, these officials increased legislation that distinguished white servants from black slaves. After 1687, these efforts intensified, inspiring increased black resistance. This was evident in a rebellion conspiracy on Ralph

Wormeley II’s Middlesex County plantation, a failed plot that provides evidence of one of the last vestiges of interracial rebellious cooperation in the Virginia colony. White servant John Nickson was named as the leader of a group of disenchanted servants and slaves, who conspired to arm themselves prior to their escape. Upon discovery of the

77 Furthermore, enslaved Africans had long resisted bondage, as evidenced in the testimonials of slave traders Thomas Phillips, Willem Bosman, Jean Barbot, and William Snelgrave. For instance, Barbot, who traded between Gorée Island, the Congo, and America from 1678 to 1712, noted that the Pawpaws of Dahomey were among the most rebellious. Bosman, a Dutch trader who travelled the Gold, Slave, and Ivory Coasts, observed that shipboard insurrection was most likely to occur near the African shore, prior to departure across the Atlantic. Bosman was witness to two insurrections. As a trader between Sherbro Island, , and Cape Lopez, Angola between 1704 and 1734, Snelgrave witnessed four insurrections. Among the most memorable was an uprising of Koromanti bondsmen aboard the Henry at Mumfort on the Gold Coast between 1721-1722. See Parent, Jr., 135-141.

53 plot, county officials confined Nickson to the common jail. Co-conspirators worthy of note were identified as Mingoe and Lawrence, who escaped the Wormeley plantation in

1689. For two years, Mingoe and Lawrence cooperated with other runaways, appropriating foodstuffs from plantations in Rappahannock County until November 1691, when they were reported to have stolen two guns and a carbine. After the weapons theft, the two were captured and tried in the Middlesex County court. As punishment, Mingoe received thirty-nine lashes, plus an additional five years and twelve days of service;

Lawrence, found in possession of a stolen gun, was branded a felon and confined to the county jail. His fate remains unknown.78

By 1710, an insurrection plot on the lower James River bore witness to perhaps the last vestiges of the mutinous lot to include cooperation between Native Americans and enslaved Africans, and a free black person. Planning to escape by force of arms in

James City, Isle of Wight, and Surry Counties, the group planned to settle in the southern end of the Great Dismal Swamp, in the Albemarle region. But Will, an enslaved black, betrayed the plot to his owner Robert Ruffin. A full investigation led by Edmund Jenings, president of the council, revealed the plot’s extent. A commission of oyer and terminer, led by Phillip Ludwell, examined several conspirators. Two blacks who labored on

Ludwell’s plantation confessed their knowledge. Their confession implicated Jamy, enslaved by John Brodnax, and Essex, held in bondage by Edward Ross. Along with

Will, Jamy and Essex were vigorously interrogated, but refused to confess further details

78 Parent, Foul Means, 147-148. During the trials, Edmund Jenings issued directives designed to charge whites with better policing slaves. On March 21, he issued a proclamation restricting slave assembly by charging owners and overseers with the responsibility of being more vigilant. Owners and overseers were to be fined 150 pounds of tobacco, paid to an informant, for knowingly permitting slaves to be absent from the plantation more than four hours. Further, enslaved people were not to be away from the plantation armed, or without a signed certificate; nor were they permitted to stay on another plantation without permission.

54 of the conspiracy. Nonetheless, Jamy and Essex were branded key conspirators and

“great Rogues,” and Jenings called for the arrest of suspects in Bruton Parish, including

Angola Peter, and his wife, Pamla; Bumbara, and Mingo. County commissions in Surry and Isle of Wight determined that additional numbers of enslaved blacks were also involved. In Surry, several suspected leaders were examined, including Scipio, Jackman,

Tom Shawn, a Native American named Salvadore, and a free black named Booth.

Because of his escape, Angola Peter was outlawed. For entertaining several conspirators at his house, Booth received a sentence of twenty-nine lashes. In Isle of Wight, Manuell was implicated as a leader, receiving forty lashes as punishment.79

In April, the Council of State issued an order that the suspected insurrection leaders be tried in General Court for the crime of high treason. Under these terms, the

General Court acquitted three of the accused, and found Salvadore and Scipio guilty.

Both received the penalty for high treason; both sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Salvadore’s sentence was carried out in Surry: his dismembered body was displayed by the county sheriffs, his head was displayed in the capital at Williamsburg, and his quartered body was displayed in James City, New Kent County, and Surry. Scipio was executed in Gloucester; his mutilated corpse was displayed in Middlesex, Lancaster, and King and Queen counties. Will, who betrayed the plot, was freed. Colonel Jenings announced an award of ten pounds for the capture of Angola Peter, to be paid to the bounty hunter who captured him alive. If he were to be returned to James City County dead, the reward was five pounds. His fate remains unknown.80

79 Ibid, 150-154. 80 Ibid, 150-155.

55 Although the Albemarle was feared as a place of African refuge as early as 1699, when the North Carolina General Assembly recommended that harsh penalties be levied on whites who harbored slave runaways, it was not until five years after the 1710 conspiracy that North Carolina adopted a slave harboring code as a part of the colony’s first formal slave code. The 1715 slave code penalized slaveholders ten shillings plus costs for damages caused by their slave runaways and enacted the “pass” or “ticket” system of written permission to be enforced by slave holders, essentially mandating that white colonials were responsible for the diligent policing of all black slaves in their neighborhoods.81 The 1715 slave code also included guidelines for punishing colonials who interacted commercially with the colony’s enslaved people. Article XLVI of the code stipulated that whites caught purchasing, selling, trading, borrowing, or lending to white servants or black slaves without written permission from a slave holder was subject to forfeiture of the item or the monetary value of the object in question.82 The act also outlawed the possession of arms by blacks while in transit between the region’s plantations.83 This emphasis placed on arms is significant, considering that, in Virginia, enslaved individuals had plotted armed revolt and escape to the Dismal Swamp only five years earlier.84

81 Freddie L. Parker, Running for Freedom, Slave Runaways in North Carolina, 1775-1840. (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1993), 29-30. Indeed, Parker’s extensive research reveals that slave runaways in eastern North Carolina robbed plantations, stole horses, cattle, chickens, and vegetables which they consumed or sold to free blacks and whites who conducted business with fugitive slaves as a part of the clandestine slave economy. 82 Clark, editor, State Records of North Carolina, 64. 83 In an act later repealed by the 1741 formal slave code, Article IX of “An Act Concerning Servants & Slaves” formed the basis for the later slave law. Additionally, this particular act stands as evidence of planter and colonial unrest concerning the uncontrolled movements of their chattels. See Walter Clark, editor, The State Records of North Carolina, 1777 to 1788. (Wilmington, NC: Broadfoot Publishing Co, 1993.) 63. North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 84 Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2001.) The initial of the colony developed parallel to its northern and

56 Still, the black freedom struggle surged in the lower Chesapeake and Albemarle regions. In 1730, the largest slave uprising in colonial Virginia materialized, during the

Chesapeake rebellion, inspired by a rumor that former governor and great landholder

Alexander Spotswood had suppressed a royal edict freeing newly baptized slaves. On a

Sunday in early November, 200 enslaved blacks assembled in Norfolk and Princess Anne

Counties. Probably led by a number of Christian Congolese, more than 300 rebels escaped into the Dismal Swamp. Observed by the naturalist John Brickell, these rebels threatened whites in Virginia and the Dismal Swamp region, before they were suppressed, primarily with the aid of the Pasquotanks, who pursued rebels in into the swamp. Brickell observed twenty-four rebels hanged in the woods, and Governor

William Gooch reported that the five leaders were captured, tried, and hanged. Citing that the overseers and patrols had failed to enforce the new statutes constraining enslaved people’s mobility, Governor Gooch directed county authorities to publish militia responsibilities according to the law, and for the militia to patrol two to three times a week to prevent night meetings. After 1730, colonial Virginians increasingly recruited

Native Americans to capture runaways, to suppress further black rebellious activity, and to prevent the formation of maroon societies in the woods and swamps of the Dismal

Swamp region.85 But these efforts were only marginally successful. Englishman J.F.D.

Smyth’s observations of the Great Dismal Swamp in the 1730s characterized runaways

southern neighbors, Virginia and South Carolina, creating differences between in the execution and development of the codes in northeastern and southeastern North Carolina. In the lower Cape Fear River valley, a rise in the production of naval stores, lumber and rice led to a marked increase in the slave population. Southeastern North Carolina was soon the most densely populated slave region of the colony. 85 Ibid, 161-162. To verify and describe using one of the primary sources used by Parent Jr., see John Brickell’s Natural History of North-Carolina, page 357. See also Governor Gooch’s correspondence, housed as a component of the Virginia Colonial Records Project.

57 hiding in the region “perfectly safe… [and able to] elude the most diligent search of their pursuers.”86

* * * * *

In many ways, the 1715 slave code signaled that the suppression of Old

Albemarle was in full swing, incorporated into the growing apparatus of Crown control at the level of colonial government. At the same time, it reveals that measures designed to discourage interracial interaction remained necessary; and more importantly, that it remained necessary to designate enslaved Africans and their descendants as excluded from colonial society. Furthermore, the need to control the “wilderness,” by creating a colonial apparatus to constrict slave mobility became clear. By ensuring that enslaved people would not carry arms in the colony’s hinterlands, or travel undocumented, colonial officials sought to ensure that slaves would not be able to take refuge within a wilderness from which they might make “dayly Incursions” on an increasingly stratified colonial society.

The wilderness loomed as an environment that resisted the control of Crown and colonial official alike. No geographic feature embodied this more than the Great Dismal

Swamp. As the Tidewater’s great planters worked to consolidate control and as they claimed the region’s best lands, former servants, resistant Native Americans, and escaped

African slaves fled into its depths. Prior to 1713, it shielded the residents of Old

Albemarle from the incursions of Crown officials, and facilitated the subsistence lifestyles maintained by the region’s residents. Although the suppression of the

86 Hadden, Slave Patrols, 138-142. Hadden’s emphasis is especially important here, as she interprets Smyth’s account of slave runaways who were able to utilize the remoteness of the Great Dismal to their advantage as they avoided capture by the slave patrols.

58 Albemarle’s egalitarian settlers signaled a small victory for the Tidewater great planters,

William Byrd’s observations of his travels in the swamp region in 1728 reveal that change was slow to take shape.

What Byrd and others observed was significant: as the great planters sought to consolidate control of African labor and to dispossess Native Americans, and to define race along these lines, less fortunate whites united with Indians and Africans to create their own racial perceptions. Interracial cooperation led to the creation of the Scratch Hall people and the Nansemond Indians, among other local fringe societies. But while these creations were substantial, many more enslaved Africans defied the exploitation of their labor by dealing perhaps the most impactful blow to the great planters: flight into the

Great Dismal. Supported by linguistic, political, and ethnic similarities, more than they were divided by differences in these, enslaved Africans who planned to flee or successfully fled the Tidewater between 1710 and 1730 gathered in the swamp with the purpose of never exiting its protective environment. Settlement of the swamp’s depths signaled their resolve to secure control of their labor and identities, and formed perhaps the founding generation of maroons in the Dismal. Over the next 130 years, these maroons’ struggle to retain control of this landscape – to repudiate enslavement as maroons – became the critical defining element of race in the region.

59 Chapter 2: “this Province Suffers by the Inhabitants and Slaves running away there where they are Succour’d”: The Establishment of a Slave Society in the Lowcountry and the Lower Cape Fear, 1722-1775

In 1722, British settlers near Charles Town, South Carolina expressed distress with Wilmington and Brunswick, the recently established ports to the northeast at the mouth of the Lower Cape Fear River. Since late in the seventeenth century, absconding slaves were known to have taken flight in the direction of the colony’s northern neighbor.

Some made an attempt to return to Virginia, claiming they had been “born free” in that colony. But others undoubtedly sought refuge in the swampy wilderness that separated

Charles Town from the Lower Cape Fear region. These patterns of flight prompted South

Carolina legislators to request that the colony’s London agents compel parliamentarians to approve annexation, on the basis that they could prove the extent to which South

Carolina “Suffers by the Inhabitants and Slaves running away where they are

Succour’d.”87

As in the Dismal, Africans found refuge in other swampy or forested environments throughout the Carolina colony. Prior to the 1720s, “fringe” dwelling whites struggled to create an egalitarian society and undermined the establishment of an expansive slave society in Old Albemarle. Maroons repudiated the effort to create an expansive slave society altogether by taking refuge in the Dismal. Each of these groups

87 Quoted in Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 1974.) 259.

60 of people had acted in their own interests, and at moments, had cooperated to ensure their own survival. Still, their collective actions represented a response to the efforts of great planters who sent officials into the region with the aim of recreating the slave society that had taken shape to the north. The English officials who established the colony’s permanent governance in Old Albemarle sought to launch a slave society. This slave society would serve at least three purposes. At least in theory, it would institute a system of labor control for slaveholders; it would subdue local Native American groups, rendering their ancestral lands open to aspiring planters; and, it would conquer the “very mutinous people” of Old Albemarle. Following the suppression of Old Albemarle’s first two generations of settlers, British officials turned their attentions to enslaved Africans.

What was significantly different in the Lower Cape Fear, however, was the lack of a founding generation of English settlers who established a precedent of mutiny against an expanding and encroaching class of distant great planters. If a sizable group of enslaved rebels had escaped to the Great Dismal Swamp by 1730, no such group was reported to have taken refuge in any of the swamps of the southeastern region of North

Carolina. As a result, the swamps in the region – Green Swamp, Angola Bay swamp, and

Holly Schelter – are not known to have harbored significant numbers of maroons or absconders in the first half of the eighteenth century. Still, by 1740, reports had warned of the movements of enslaved Africans in the Lower Cape Fear for almost thirty years.

Here, too, British authorities intensified efforts to consolidate control of marginal areas of the expanding British Atlantic Empire.88 This initiative began with encroachment by

British people and British officials who settled the region from the south. The first

88 On the concept of the “British Atlantic Empire,” see David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000.)

61 permanent settlers were prospecting British planters who sought to spread the cultivation of rice and indigo and British authority northward. When rice production failed to take shape as it had in the Lowcountry, planters in the Lower Cape Fear region concentrated their efforts on the production of tar, one of several important naval stores. The advent of tar production led to the establishment of an industrial form of black enslavement that coexisted in concert with the establishment of small-scale plantations. Tar production, in particular, facilitated significant opportunities for enslaved people who performed arduous labor in the region’s longleaf pine forests with little direct supervision. In the years between 1722 and 1775, these conditions merged with the fading egalitarian heritage of Old Albemarle to create significant challenges for colonial officials who sought to establish a stable government supporting black enslavement, different from those faced by governing officials in either Virginia or South Carolina.89

* * * * *

Nearly two hundred years prior to the permanent settlement of North Carolina, the first Africans set foot in the Lower Cape Fear River Valley. In 1526, Lucas Vásquez de

Ayllón led a Spanish expedition comprised of six ships and 500 explorers to survey and settle lands chartered by King Charles V three years prior. In addition to Indian translators attached to the reconnaissance mission originated in La Plata, Hispaniola, a number of Spanish-speaking enslaved Africans traveled with the Ayllón expedition.

Failing to establish a permanent foothold, the mission traveled southwest along the coast, attempting again to establish a permanent settlement at San Miguel de Guadelupe (along

89 Marvin L. Michael Kay and Lorin Lee Cary, Slavery in North Carolina 1748-1775. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 1995.) To understand better the ideological framework for this chapter, see Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. (New York: New York University Press. 2014.)

62 the present-day Peedee River, South Carolina.) In October, mutiny befell the settlement in response to the dwindling food supply and unfavorable weather. After Ayllón’s death on October 18, a faction of the settlers detained Ayllón’s successor, and many of the

Indian translators deserted the colony. Seizing the opportunity, the enslaved Africans revolted, setting fire to the rebels’ hut. Soon afterward, the mutiny was quashed and most of the expedition deserted San Miguel de Guadelupe for Santo Domingo. But at least one scholar has speculated that many of the Africans remained behind; further evidence of their fate has eluded researchers to the present day.90

More than a century later, Africans were observed to be in residence with the

Tuscarora Indians. In 1653, an English traveller received information from a Tuscarora chief who reported that at least one Spaniard lived among the Indian group. The Spaniard was described to be of considerable wealth, and head of a family of about thirty members. Seven of this Spaniard’s family members were reported to be “negroes.”

Moreover, at least one African was described to be a resident “with a great nation called the Newxes,” under the Tuscarora chief’s domain.91 Early English colonists also feared the French, who had established a presence at Mobile, and Atlantic pirates who harassed the shipping lanes utilized by colonists conducting transatlantic business.92 But it was not

90 Over the next century, only a few shipwrecked crews including Africans visited the Carolina coast, including a Spanish expedition under Angel de Villafane, shipwrecked at Santa Elena (present day Port Royal Sound) in May 1561. See P. Wood, Black Majority, pg. 3-7. On the speculation that many of the Africans who revolted at San Miguel de Guadelupe remained in the region, see Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts: on Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel and others. Sixth edition. (New York: International Publishers. 1993.) 163. 91 P. Wood, 5-6. Wood cites the observations of the Englishman’s report of the Tuscarora chief as the observations of an earlier scholar. See Alexander S. Salley, Narratives of Early Carolina, 1650-1708. In J. Franklin Jamison, editor, Original Narratives of Early American History. (New York. 1911.) 27. 92 For an extensive treatment of the establishment of the English Empire and the trade in slaves and other products with Native Americans, see Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South 1670-1717. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2002.)

63 until 1670, after the first permanent English settlement near Charles Town, that blacks were transported to the colony in significant numbers.

In these contexts of imperial contests between competing European states, and contentious negotiations between European settlers and Native Americans, Africans fled into marginal geographic spaces in the Carolina Lowcountry, heading northward toward the Cape Fear. Others fled toward Spanish Florida as early as 1688, prompting the colonial governor to send an envoy to St. Augustine to negotiate their return.93 Like the conditions that had developed in northern Carolina, some blacks and whites found common cause in their experiences in what remained a frontier society until the second decade of the eighteenth century. At least one scholar has observed that some enslaved

Africans intermixed with English colonists in the developing colony at Charles Town.

There, they assisted English efforts to defend the settlement against external dangers including hostile Spaniards to the south in the Florida colony, and Native Americans who defended their territory in the continental interior from encroachment.

In the correspondence of Anglican missionaries and European travellers, historian

Peter Wood has observed intimate relationships between Africans, Indians, and

Europeans. Several examples illustrate this point. In 1692, the colonial grand council received a petition from a white woman, requesting the council to intervene in her relationship with her French husband on her behalf. The husband had apparently taken up residence with a black woman; the wife requested alimony payments as restitution for their broken relationship. A 1707 will reveals that a white Indian trader granted freedom to an Indian woman with whom he had had several daughters. The trader also bequeathed

93 Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. 1999.)

64 to his widow two Indian slaves.94 Such relationships apparently endured well into the eighteenth century. The documentary record reveals that in 1720, James Gilbertson, a

Colleton County planter and assemblyman, drafted a will with considerable protections for his “mulatto woman Ruth” and her “three female children Betty, Molly, and Keatty.”

Upon Gilbertson’s death, Ruth was to be manumitted, and Ruth was to be permitted to live at Gilbertson’s plantation for the duration of “her natural life.” The children were to be manumitted at the age of twenty-one years. In part as a result of these interracial interactions, legislators in South Carolina began to take action to draft legal codes separating the races beginning in 1717. As late as 1731, the South Carolina governor and council heard the case of the mulatto Gideon Gibson and his descendants. In that year, several family members appeared before the governor and council to explain their status.

Gibson, a free black carpenter, had traveled to South Carolina from Virginia “for the better support of his Family,” settling along the Santee River. If Gibson’s free status had been enough to warrant the council’s inquiry, his heritage and the degree to which his family had mixed with whites added insult to their pretentions of a nascent racially separated colony. Gibson’s father had apparently been free in Virginia, and Gibson’s wife and children were classified as “white” in South Carolina. If these qualifiers were not evidence enough, Gibson held seven Africans in bondage. A generation after the council’s inquiry, Gibson’s family owned considerable land, and served as active participants in the politics of Craven County.95

94 P. Wood, Black Majority, 5-6. 95 Each of these three examples appears in P. Wood, Black Majority, 95-101. For the case of Gideon Gibson’s family, Wood drew upon both the colonial record and Winthrop Jordan’s seminal work. For the former, see Parish Transcripts, South Carolina, Box I, folder 4, pg. 24-5. For the latter see Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1968.) 171-73.

65 Notwithstanding these cases, scholars have observed that the African slaves who initially peopled the South Carolina Lowcountry were not transported to the colony directly from Africa. Rather they comprised a transplanted people, most of whom had already experienced life in slave societies in the Caribbean.96 According to Michael

Gomez, for many West and Central African peoples, the evolution from ethnic to racial identification occurred in different spatial and temporal spaces in concert with the development of social stratification according to class in each region. Based on extensive historiographical and primary source based examination of African worldviews, values, ethics and beliefs prior to the Middle Passage, Gomez observes that there existed two realms of African acculturation in the American south: the world of the slaves “in which intra-African and African-American cultural factors were at play”; and interactions between Africans, African Americans and the white slaveholding and nonslaveholding worlds – a cultural space where the terms of transfer were “conditioned by the asymmetry of power between slave and nonslave.” African identities, once founded upon ethnic markers, gave way to socially constructed new racial identifiers informed by the political contexts of the American south.97

This transformation in ethnic identity began in the barracoons that lined the

Atlantic coast of the African continent. The Middle Passage represented both a birth and a death canal for enslaved individuals, marking the beginning of both a “prolonged struggle between slaveholder and enslaved over rights of definition,” as well as representing the indelible memory of “ultimate rupture” from one’s past experiences.

96 Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. (Chapel Hill, NC: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press. 1998.) 2-18. 97 Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1998.) 3-10.

66 Once received in the Western Hemisphere, enslaved Africans were consumed by planters who initiated the rice and indigo plantations, “by the hellish reordering of human relations and the human condition for purposes of plunder and profit.”98 The initial period of “seasoning” – the attempt to break newly arrived Africans into the plantation regime through harsh punishments - included a process of forcing Africans to learn one or more

European languages, even as Africans resisted such impositions. Particularly in the case of the American south, “saltwater” Africans responded to such systematic debasement through the creation of Africanized English.99 Such regional and cultural homogeneity strongly contributed to cultural retentions that bound together African slaves in the

Lowcountry.100 As one scholar has observed recently, these cultural retentions provided a strong foundation for resistance as the crucible in which African people created a collective identity centered on unifying principles. This process involved the repeated synthesis of varied West African cultural into emergent African American cultural identities.101 More than any other colony, in South Carolina importing merchants and planters paid particular attention to the origins of slave cargoes. Because physical traits and personality characteristics were determined by region of origin, the earliest

Lowcountry planters generally preferred to import Africans who originated in the

Senegambia. In particular, these men valued Africans with knowledge of rice cultivation.

98 Gomez,11-16. 99 For full discussion of the term “saltwater” slaves and slavery as it relates to the Middle Passage and the African diaspora, see Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to the American Diaspora. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2007.) 100 Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. 1981.) 8-14; 75-86; 113-114. See also, Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origin of Rice Cultivation in the United States. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2001.) 101 Walter C. Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America. (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. 2006.)

67 Thus the importation of Senegambians tied the colony into a close relationship with rice growing regions in Africa.

Throughout the eighteenth century, these Africans were swept into an expansive plantation enterprise, increasingly directed and managed by a nascent and small class of wealthy white planters who inhabited Charles Town. Prior to the establishment of a permanent English colony in 1670, the term “plantation” connoted two separate ideas: one, a colonial occupation; and, two, entrepreneurial agriculture. In the English Atlantic, any newly settled place could be described as a plantation, and most newly settled lands were initially referred to as plantations. After 1700, however, a new notion for the term came into vogue: that of a “privately owned domain within tropical or subtropical

America that was geared relentlessly toward the transatlantic marketplace.” In South

Carolina, the signature features of English material culture that recent English settlers had not carried to the colony this transition in definition significantly. Wheat crops and tilled fields, for instance, failed in the warm, subtropical climate of the Lowcountry. In its place planters adapted a highly adaptive economic culture, leading to agricultural innovation that led to the dramatic increase of rice production and ultimately, the rapid importation of enslaved Africans.102

South Carolina planters employed four critical environmental adaptations to produce their plantation enterprises: first, in the latter half of the seventeenth century, settlers used British models of valuation to assess the worth of lands in the Lowcountry, and to create the first plantations. In particular, the rich soils of the Lowcountry’s river basins were targeted highly as prime lands for planting, but the region’s vast swamplands

102 S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2006.) 2-5.

68 and wilderness were seen as “dismal” without improvement. Second, settlers adapted a foreign crop – rice – to a new land, by modifying British methods for creating farmlands out of improved swamps and by appropriating African knowledge for planting rice.

These unique circumstances gave rise to the particularly violent plantation task system, drawing into a new regime many thousands of enslaved Africans.103 Third, to secure rice from the unpredictable environment, planters shaped land and rerouted natural watercourses by developing technical innovations for draining swamps and irrigating rice fields. These innovations were applied to other crops as well. By the 1740s, planters added indigo production as a second crop staple. Fourth, over time, as colonists settled the lands beyond Charles Town, they created in the region “contrasting zones for production and consumption.” By the eve of the War for Independence, the immediate region of Charlestown comprised an “urban core;” a secondary zone of less urban plantation settlement had taken shape in two river valleys, the Edisto to the south and the

Santee to the north; and northern and southern frontier zones had recently been settled.

The northern frontier zone included the initial settlements in the Lower Cape Fear river valley.104

Initially ridiculed as a doomed enterprise by British merchants, rice planting evolved into large-scale rice production as a relatively stable number of planters

103 Edelson, 5. Edelson builds upon, and in some cases, argues against, the significant historiography that has established the origins of the task system and rice in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Seminal works on these subjects include the following: Peter H. Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. (New York: W.W. Norton. 1974.); Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1981.); Peter A. Conclais, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920. (New York: Oxford University Press. 1989.); Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Lowcountry, 1740-1790. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 1998.); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1998.) 104 Edelson, 5-6.

69 established increasing numbers of plantation enterprises in the secondary and frontier zones between 1700 and 1740. The unique geography of the Lowcountry hindered the development of insular plantations of the sort that characterized the Chesapeake. Instead, settlers in the Lowcountry developed a custom of establishing several interdependent sites for agriculture, and in turn integrated them into enterprises that accelerated in production and growth after 1750. Planting rice as a practical matter followed a general pattern.105 South Carolina’s major waterways navigable below the fall line – the Cooper, the Ashley, the Wando, the Stono, and Goose Creek – all drained into the Lowcountry at

Charles Town. This meant that the Lowcountry’s far-flung frontier plantations funneled commodities into the city, as urban dwelling and enriched planters supplied frontier plantations with products sent upriver from Charles Town.106 Throughout the eighteenth century planters expanded the enterprises of rice and indigo production, reclaiming lands in the secondary and frontier zones of plantation development. The creation of these plantation enterprises thus changed the meaning of plantership in significant ways that remained unchanged in the Chesapeake.

105 Ibid, 74-90. Edelson contends that, to initiate commercial rice production, African knowledge was unnecessary for “integrating the crop” into a “dynamic model for British husbandry.” Methods of irrigating fields were the key innovation, not the planting techniques provided by enslaved Africans. Water mills common in early modern England operated by way of similar processes of damming, reserving, and conducting the resource. These methods of reclaiming swampland were shared broadly among northwestern European farmers. If anything, Edelson contends, the establishment of rice cultivation in South Carolina was collaborative. On rice plantations in the Lowcountry, English planters and enslaved Africans staked interests in the production and consumption of the crop: for the former, the interest lay primarily in production for sale; for the latter, the interest lay in the cultivation of a food staple. Producing rice as a staple commodity required freshwater swamps to be cleared, and for the labor of clearing and planting to be divided into individualized tasks. Planters directed enslaved people to build embankments of soil along the borders of cleared swamplands, above an area of land targeted for rice. Running water collected behind these dams created reservoirs that fed water into smaller pools. A secondary set of embankments controlled the flow of water beyond the smaller pools, allowing surplus water to be drained. Enslaved people then pressed holes into the soil with the heels of their feet, before covering the seed with dirt brushed across the hole with the heel of the foot. This distinctly African method for planting rice seed was important to the initial success of planting the crop, but not crucial to the development of it as a commercial staple. 106 Ibid, 6-9.

70 Between 1720 and 1740, urban planters increasingly believed that they were deploying the “great Industry”107 of slave labor for internal improvements. As a result, the frontier zones expanded in distance from Charles Town to the north and to the south.

Parish road commissions utilized slave labor to build roads connecting the frontier with

Charles Town; upon these wagon roads commodities travelled to port, primarily along the Cooper River. Before 1750, the sparsely inhabited frontier zone stretched between 40-

100 miles from Charles Town, without a river route or roadway to connect the frontier to the core. After 1750, however, settlement of the core peaked. Spurred onward by the development of tidal rice agriculture in the mid-1730s, the establishment of plantations on the frontier increased rapidly.108 In particular, planters’ roles changed from “direct mastery” to “distanced management.” The increase in white wealth associated with this changed the development of plantations from “units of production and places of social order” as planters underwrote the acquisition of multiple plantations. The development of these enterprises gave rise to a new class of daily plantation managers as well; including less wealthy planters hired to manage far-flung plantations, overseers, and enslaved drivers. The nature of the work performed under the task system changed as well. By midcentury, the phases of corn and rice cultivation had been assigned a task value, ranging from one-quarter and one-half acre of labor per slave daily. Rice production was measured by the peck or mortar; the construction of irrigation systems was measured by the cubic foot or by the “quarter.” In the early eighteenth century, enslaved laborers who finished daily work allotments before dark were permitted the remainder of the day for their own purposes. This practice, in particular, became customary by 1775.

107 Quoted on page 132. 108 Ibid, 128-141.

71 After 1712, “Carolina” ceased to define the vast territory that stretched from the

Chesapeake in the north to the Savannah River Lowcountry in the south. In the previous forty years, colonists had fortified Charles Town and claimed land tracts along the

Lowcountry’s rivers. Native Americans, enslaved Africans, English founding planters, and British merchants each had visions of claiming lands upon which they would fashion their own societies, thus transforming the Lords Proprietors’ prospective “Carolina” into a market-driven and expanding plantation society. In South Carolina, the Lords envisioned a “progressive, corporatist polity.” 109 But in reality, coastal Native American groups had established with the English a strategic defensive alliance protecting the existence of Cusabo country. Furthermore, enslaved Africans had constructed and maintained their own material cultures, even as they were coerced to labor in swamps to transform the landscape.

In this view, enslaved Africans retained their own visions of claiming Lowcountry lands, manifested in the waves of the black freedom struggle. Thus, in 1739, the most famous slave uprising in colonial British North America materialized in the form of the

Stono Rebellion. This uprising signaled the extent to which enslaved Africans would act for their freedom. Although fewer in number than the several hundred that rebelled in the

Chesapeake nine years earlier, the Stono rebels were noted for the number of whites left dead after the uprising, and their famous attempt to reach Spanish Florida. These African rebels’ unfortunate defeat held important implications for the development of slave societies throughout British North America in the eighteenth century. The actions of the

109 Ibid, 13.

72 Stono rebels made clear the need to constrain Africans’ movements not only in the

Carolinas, but also throughout the British North American colonies.

As Peter Charles Hoffer explains, an enslaved road work crew took exception to the arduous labor of constructing and maintaining the major thoroughfare connecting the

Charles Town to points south. Tired of working in disease-ridden, mosquito-infested swamplands, the small work crew acted as they did on numerous other occasions visiting

Hutchenson’s Store to partake of fellowship and beverages after a long day of labor.

During the night of September 8, 1739, Robert Bathurst and John Gibbs became first two white victims of the series of events that led to the deaths of more than sixty people. Slain by two slave laborers who could not risk being detected as they rummaged through

Hutchenson’s Store after it had closed for the evening, Bathurst and Gibbs were not killed in acts of armed rebellion. By committing murder, however, the enslaved road crewmembers had left themselves with no choice but to attempt to escape, or face the penalty of death for the capital offense.110 As the word of Bathurst and Gibbs’ murders circulated among the plantations of the region, the news emboldened enslaved people who also plotted escape. A secondary group of slave rebels sought to escape sure death and conviction, but failed after invading a second house and murdering more whites. The next morning, September 9, no less than sixty enslaved rebels returned to the store determined to rise against the colony before attempting to march south to Spanish

Florida. A motley crew of slaves gathered on Pon Pon Road, left with no other option but

110 Peter Charles Hoffer, Cry Liberty: The Great Stono River Slave Rebellion of 1739. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2010.) 80-88.

73 to take flight in the direction of Florida, where they were discovered and dispatched by the South Carolina colonial militia.111

John K. Thornton’s reading of the extant primary sources reveals that, beyond a spontaneous uprising of exploited slaves, the Stono Rebellion reflects key understandings rooted in the kingdom of Kongo between 1680 and 1740. In this view, Jemmy led a core of approximately twenty “Angolan” slaves in the uprising beginning September 8. White

South Carolinians suspected the Spanish of having inspired local enslaved Africans to revolt, because the slaves were Catholic and most likely originated in Angola, where the

Jesuits maintained a mission and a school that had converted thousands of Africans to

Roman Catholicism. If their religious identity was not enough, the fact that many of the rebels spoke Portuguese added to the white South Carolinians’ fears that the Stono rebels were receptive to Spanish propaganda. After sacking Hutchenson’s store, the rebels began their march to St. Augustine in Florida with two drums, under banners of their own design. Hearing this commotion, other slaves joined the original band of rebels, and the group expanded to include sixty slaves before they paused at a large field and began singing and dancing to the sound of a drumbeat. Thirty more slaves joined the rebels before battle ensued with a militia force. Observers reported that the slaves fought boldly, and suffered several fatalities before continuing the march to St. Augustine. On

September 9, a group of ten African rebels were captured by mounted troops and summarily executed. About a week later, a second group engaged in a pitched battle with a militia force, thirty miles from the Stono River.112

111 Hoffer, 93-101. 112 John K. Thornton, “African Dimensions of the Stono Rebellion.” The American Historical Review. 96. 4. (October 1991.) 1101-1113.

74 Building upon Peter Wood’s analysis of the rebellion’s context – an African response to English mistreatment and Spanish promises – Thornton observes two key elements in the eyewitness account that reveals how the “African background” of the rebels “contributed to the nature of the revolt.”113 First, the Stono rebels were drawn most likely from the kingdom of Angola, rather than from the Portuguese colony of Angola as contemporary reports of the Stono Rebellion implied. Kongo was a Christian country with a “fairly extensive system of schools and churches,” with an upper class that had developed a high level of literacy in Portuguese. In addition to assuming Portuguese as a second language, the educated Kongolese believed that their Christian and Catholic heritage made them a distinct people. Thus, Thornton observes, Kongolese slaves would have perceived Spanish offers of asylum as an opportunity for religious freedom, in addition to the freedom they might find in taking refuge at St. Augustine. Second, prior to

1739, Kongo had experienced numerous civil wars which had resulted in the capture and sale of many Africans sold into the Atlantic trade as slaves. Many of these captives would have been soldiers with military training, including in the use of firearms.114

White South Carolinians responded to the uprising through numerous efforts to reassert and strengthen control enslaved peoples’ movements in the Lowcountry.

According to Robert Olwell, South Carolinians achieved their aims in large measure through a complex interrelationship of domination and resistance, itself subject to a complex relationship between British colony – South Carolina – and distant metropole –

Great Britain. Olwell observes that white South Carolinians were perhaps the most attached to England, and to imitating English ways, among colonists in British North

113 Thornton, “African Dimensions,” 1103. 114 Ibid, 1103.

75 America including those who lived in the Chesapeake by the mid-eighteenth century.

Moreover, from its inception by royal charter Carolina developed as a colony dedicated to slave labor. As a slave society, dominating enslaved Africans lay at the core of all members of the society, from ministers of the church to administrators of public spaces and masters of private plantations. And because Carolina developed as a colonial society, the forms of domination and resistance were not without precedent within the context of the expanding British Atlantic Empire. In this view, many of the whites who settled

Charles Town and its hinterland were drawn from Barbados, which had become the first

English colony to transition from a society with slaves into a slave society in 1627.115 As a result, the Anglican commissary in South Carolina observed that blacks in the region seemingly comprised “a Nation within a Nation,” even in 1740.116

Following the Stono Rebellion, South Carolinians worked to consolidate power even as enslaved people continued to burn, to steal, and to flee – actions that undermined white rule. The year after Stono, South Carolina legislators framed the Negro Act of

1740, an act that sought to immobilize African slaves. The act remained little more than

“prescriptive fantasy,” as Edelson has observed, but enslaved people did not resort to outright resistance. In the Lowcountry, their actions played out within the confines of daily engagement with the rice regime and the expansion of the plantation enterprise into the South Carolina frontier. White colonists stabilized slavery through agricultural innovations – rice production in particular – that undermined the task system’s effectiveness and limited enslaved peoples’ influence on planter power as some enslaved

115 Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country 1740-1790. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1998.) 3-13. 116 Quoted in Olwell, 8.

76 people struggled to protect customary practices and others exploited new work opportunities.117 Others fled, moving about the South Carolina frontier into the Lower

Cape Fear river valley as maroons.

Whereas the outbreak of Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 in Virginia had ushered in the great American paradox of slavery and freedom, and the Chesapeake Rebellion in 1730 signaled the end of cross-cultural cooperation in Virginia in some ways, the Stono

Rebellion demonstrated no such pretentions for Lowcountry observers. It confirmed to

South Carolinians and to British colonials the inherent threat in the actions of enslaved

Africans who rose collectively in the effort to secure freedom in the colony’s slave society. In essence, the Stono rebels had exposed the tenuous nature of the control over enslaved Africans that South Carolinians claimed they exercised in their slave society.

However, this apparent lack of control did not inhibit the South Carolinians from attempting to recreate in the Lower Cape Fear the slave society from which they had moved. Quite the contrary, enslaved Africans’ movements about the region, and the fear that they would rise in revolt, provided the impetus to expand the nascent plantation enterprise into the Charles Town frontier.

In the 1730s, the South Carolina planters who settled the Lower Cape Fear River valley had occupied the region little more than a decade before the Stono rebels’ message reached the region. Yet, they were already engaged in the business of recreating the slave society they departed. This is evident in North Carolina Governor Gabriel Johnston’s report to the London Board of Trade drafted in 1737. Johnston informed that the boundary survey of the colony’s border with South Carolina had progressed slowly, and

117 Edelson, 10-11.

77 with much difficulty. At issue was the attempt to impose an artificial, jurisdictional boundary upon privately claimed land. Twenty-five years later, Governor echoed his predecessor’s sentiments, reporting that uncertain legal and political boundaries complicated the task of completing the colonial boundary survey. By comparison, in the late 1720s, William Byrd II had complained about irreverent mulatto settlers in the Dismal. But Johnston and Dobbs’ complaints differed. Survey parties had by 1762 encountered white homesteaders who had established farms that they sought to build into plantations, along the new North/South Carolina boundary.118

In the Valley of Humility, these aspiring planters encountered the long heritage of the colony’s comparatively lax slave code, which dated to 1715. By 1741, North Carolina legislators’ concerns about both ensuring the safe return of slave runaways to their rightful owner, and controlling the heightening occurrence of flight, brought about even stricter penalties for whites who might aid runaways. Moreover, the reward system was deliberately emphasized as incentive for whites who might return absentees, outliers, or maroons. An overall system of capturing runaways from the procedure of detention to designated places of return – such as the local jail or public gaol – was encoded.119 Thus, an integral component of North Carolina’s 1741 slave code was the creation of organized slave patrols. Article XXVI of the new slave code was crafted to terminate the problem of those who aided runaways:

And be it further Enacted, by the Authority aforesaid, That if any Per- son or Persons whatsoever shall directly or indirectly, at any Time af- ter the Ratification of this Act, tempt or persuade any Negro or Negroes, or other Slave or Slaves, to leave his, her or their Master or Mistress’

118 Bradford J. Wood, This Remote Part of the World: Regional Formation in Lower Cape Fear, North Carolina 1725-1775. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. 2004.) 3-4. 119 Parker, Running, 30-1.

78 Service, out of an Intent and Design to carry or convey away him, her or them out of this Government, or shall harbour or conceal him, her or them for that intent or purpose…”120

Whites found guilty of aiding black escape by convincing one to leave the plantation, or by hiding one from capture was subject to a penalty of “Twenty Five pounds” in the event they were responsible for the return of the runaway. Should they not return, the penalties were far worse. Those who were “afterwards apprehended and convicted thereof, he, she, or they shall, by the said Court, be severally adjudged and condemned as guilty of Felony, and shall suffer accordingly.”121

In truth, a series of acts within the 1741 slave code make indirect reference to maroon activity, and thus betray the level of concern with which whites addressed the problem of marronage in North Carolina. Chapter XXIV, sections XV through XLVII specifically outline the prohibition of arming slaves to hunt in the hinterlands, and the enactment of the slave pass system.122 More important, however, is the outlaw clause in section XLV. Runaways were subject to being outlawed, targets for slave catchers to injure at will. Lawmakers carefully noted, “many Times Slaves run away and lie out hid

[sic] and lurking in Swamps, Woods, or other obscure places, killing Cattle and Hogs, and committing other Injuries to the Inhabitants of this Government.” This resulted in specific guidelines directing people who witnessed to maroon activity to report the identity of a marooned slave to at least two justices of the peace.123 To discourage

120 Walter Clark, editor, The State Records of North Carolina, 1777 to 1788. (Wilmington, NC: Broadfoot Publishing Co, 1993.) 197. 121 Ibid, 197. 122 James Iredell, Laws of the State of North Carolina. (Edenton, NC: Hodge & Wills, Printers to the State of North Carolina. 1791-1800.) 85-95. The exceptions were to these codes were in sections XLI and XLII, which allowed slave owners to employ slaves as hunters on private lands to provide food for owner’s family provided the slave or slaves carried a pass and produced it readily upon demand. 123 Iredell, 93.

79 marronage, legislators entered into the code a caveat: any outlawed slave could turn himself or herself into the sheriff or other local authority for punishment. In addition,

North Carolina legislators aptly included a clause allowing slave runaways to return to their owner prior to capture. To be sure, lawmakers would do what it took to protect plantation society against maroons and outlaws who took refuge in the wilderness.

Diverging from past scholarly trends that have characterized regional development in the Lower Cape Fear as an extension of the South Carolina Lowcountry,

Bradford Wood’s work over the past decade has set the latest cutting edge of North

Carolina historical scholarship. As Wood’s work seeks to correct historical oversight of colonial North Carolina’s developments by recovering its distinct regional character of settlement, the present chapter seeks to do the same for marronage in North Carolina. In other words, drawing upon Wood’s claim of regional distinction offers important perspective for analyzing the movements of maroons in the region. But where, other than the Great Dismal Swamp, could maroons have found refuge? Four large swamps to the south of the Great Dismal Swamp – Dover Swamp, Green Swamp, Holly Schelter and

Angola Bay Swamp – as well as an expanse of undeveloped land to the east of

Wilmington stretching to Onslow Bay all offered opportunities for the enslaved runaways who moved about the area. Marshy areas in the vicinity of Wilmington were especially appealing as temporary shelter for those hiding from the plantation.124 In the years preceding Stono, two elements of the emergent Lower Cape Fear slave society distinguished it from the egalitarians who first settled Old Albemarle: first, the Lower

Cape Fear was established as a plantation society; and two, its plantation economies were

124 Freddie L. Parker, Running for Freedom: Slave Runaways in North Carolina, 1775-1840. (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1993.) 33.

80 complex, by comparison to those in both the Chesapeake and Lowcountry prior to the

War for Independence. When the Moore family of South Carolina moved to the region in the 1720s, they and the first wave of settlers brought rice and indigo cultivation with them. Within five years of initial settlement, a substantial population of enslaved people existed. Primary agricultural activities centered on the production of rice, which made settlement possible.

Due to its history of rice production, historians have traditionally located the

Lower Cape Fear region on the northern periphery of the Lowcountry. Economic activities developed to include the operation of sawmills, the production of cooperage for the trade with the Caribbean, and the production of naval stores, specifically tar produced in the region’s longleaf pine forests. The production of tar quickly rose to prominence, making the region British North America’s foremost exporter of the product by the end of the colonial era.125 Great Britain had relied upon Sweden and other Baltic nations to produce the substance, which was used on ropes and ship rigging to prevent deterioration.

After economic relations with the Baltic nations deteriorated and Swedish exporters tightened their monopoly on tar around 1700, the British government offered a bounty for the production of tar in the American colonies.126 Rapid expansion of tar production caused the British government to repeal the tar bounty in the 1720s, supporting the shift

125 B. Wood, 174-179. Most of the Lower Cape Fear’s export wealth consisted of tar, with lumber and turpentine comprising other significant exports. In total, the region’s exports remained less valuable than those exported out of South Carolina or Georgia. Still, By comparison to other colonial regions, the Lower Cape Fear profited more than the rest of North Carolina, more than the Middle Colonies or New England, and almost as much as the Chesapeake. 126 Percival Perry, “The Naval-Stores Industry in the Old South, 1790-1860.” The Journal of Southern History, 34. 4. (November 1968.) 509-526; Donnie D. Bellamy, “Slavery in Microcosm: Onslow County, North Carolina.” The Journal of Negro History. 62. 4. (October 1977). 339-350; Robert B. Outland III, “Slavery, Work, and the Geography of the North Carolina Naval Stores Industry, 1835-1860.” The Journal of Southern History. 62. 1. (February 1996). 27-56; Catherine W. Bishir, “Urban Slavery at Work: The Bellamy Mansion Compound, Wilmington, North Carolina.” Buildings and Landscapes. 17. 2. (Fall 2010.) 13-32.

81 to rice production in the Lowcountry. The same did not happen in the Lower Cape Fear; by 1729, merchants interested in establishing outposts persuaded the British government to reinstate the tar bounty. By 1735, Roger Moore and James Murray – among other regional elites – took up tar production.

Tar thus dominated the southeastern North Carolina’s naval stores output. Tar production followed a relatively simple process. Enslaved laborers gathered wood from the long-leaf pines into a large circular depression hollowed into the ground and burned, until the substance ran out of the pit. This pit was known as a tar kiln. One end of the kiln was graded in a manner that allowed the tar extract to run through a pipe into barrels. A small hole in the kiln allowed the person or persons who tended it to light a fire, and the wood was subsequently left to smolder for long periods of time while the tenders extinguished large flames. A covering made of dirt-trapped heat, and kiln tenders controlled the kiln’s internal temperature by puncturing the covering with holes to permit the circulation of air into the kiln. Some kilns burned continuously for eight or nine days, with the typical unit about thirty feet in diameter and ten or twelve feet in height. This kiln might have produced 150 to 200 barrels of tar in a single burning, with larger units producing up to 1,000 barrels. Due to the amount of lightwood necessary for tar kiln operation, it took as little as three years for a colonist with ten slaves to exhaust 1,000 acres of long-leaf pine trees. Producing the tacky substance generally required as few as four slave laborers to operate a large kiln, but many kiln operators employed no slaves in the effort to produce the naval store. Often using oxen to haul carts of wood to the kiln, kiln operators used barrels coopered by skilled craftsmen to store tar. Waterways provided the primary means of transporting tar to the ports at Brunswick and

82 Wilmington.127 Crews that maintained tar kiln tenders often resided in temporary camps, located in long-leaf pine forests for weeks. Furthermore, tar burning was not seasonal, permitting tar producers to schedule production around crop growing seasons.128

In terms of export wealth, pine boards followed tar as the Lower Cape Fear region’s second most important product. Though the New England market dominated colonial British North America’s lumber exporting industry, the Lower Cape Fear region exported a significant number of boards, particularly to the British West Indian colonies.

By 1764, Governor Dobbs reported that forty sawmills operated on the branches of the

Cape Fear River. Two years later, Governor observed that ten new mills had begun operations. Historian Bradford Wood observes that slave labor also played a significant role in the region’s lumber industry, noting that although saw mill operation required few laborers, significant numbers of laborers were necessary to perform the work of supplying the mills with trees. Enslaved laborers used either axes or crosscut saws to fell trees, and to transport them to saw mills located along the Cape Fear and its

127 Ibid, 186-188. Using 181 estate inventories, Wood identified only nineteen tar producers including Nathaniel Baron, who held no persons in bondage but owned one-half of a kiln; and James and Anne Pollard, who owned five enslaved laborers and a small kiln. John Dallison held a share of a tar kiln, and six slaves. Richard Malpus held an estate containing more than 900 barrels of naval stores, but held no more than five bondspersons. Owning an average of 1,000 acres of land, the average tar producer owned between 16 and 28 bondsmen, with the highest number held being the 110 bondspersons that Richard Eagles employed at one time. See also Harry J. Carmen, editor. American Husbandry. (New York: Columbia University Press. 1939.) 244-45; Johann D. Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation, 1783-1784, from the German of Johan David Schoepf. Translated and edited by Alfred J. Morrison. (Philadephia: Bergman, 1911.) 140-44; William Tryon, “Tryon’s ‘Book’ on North Carolina,” edited by William S. Powell, North Carolina Historical Review. 34, 3. (1957), 411-12; John Brickell, The Natural History of North-Carolina. (Dublin, Ireland: Printed for James Carson, 1737), 265-66; Mark Catesby, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. (London: B. White, 1771), xxiii-xxiv; “Journal of a French Traveller,” 733-34; Thomas Nairne, “A Letter from South Carolina,” in Selling a New World: Two Colonial Sough Carolina Promotional Pamphlets. Jack P. Greene, editor. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. 1989.) 40-41. On the exhaustion of long-leaf pines, see Timothy , A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, colonists, and slaves in South Atlantic forests, 1500-1800. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1990.); Lawrence S. Earley, Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 2004.) 128 Ibid, 189-193.

83 tributaries. In addition to laboring in the production of tar and lumber, the Lower Cape

Fear region’s slave laborers worked as cattle ranchers and in provisions agriculture. Thus, the significance of Wood’s contribution to colonial North Carolina’s history revolves around an important contrast: by comparison to the “archetypal southern plantation focused on the production of one or, in some cases, two export crops.” Lower Cape Fear plantations utilized slave labor “to integrate a number of separate agricultural and, especially, nonagricultural activities for the production of a wide variety of staples.”129

Wood offers several observations of Lower Cape Fear planters to make this point.

By 1735, Roger Moore was among the first settlers to be exporting lumber, turpentine, and wood shingles from the region at his Hunthill plantation. Moore’s trading connections with South Carolina and Barbados allowed him to import some enslaved people, while participating in the West Indian provisions trade. At least four slave laborers were recorded in Moore’s will as skilled carpenters. Like Moore, James

Murray’s Point Repose plantation produced a wide range of goods, including rice, indigo, lumber, tar and pitch. More to the point, Wood’s analysis of Murray’s letters to Sarah

Allen regarding her plantation Lilliput prove particularly insightful. In 1757, Allen’s enslaved laborers had produced 900 pounds of indigo, 1,800 bushels of corn, and 300 bushels of peas. Yet the low price that corn fetched prompted Allen’s overseer to take her slave laborers to the Black River, where they worked to produce tar until November. At the time of Murray’s report to Allen, the group led by Allen’s overseer had produced at least 200 barrels of tar, with a second kiln in operation. Finally, Benjamin Heron’s 1770 will reveals that, at the time of his death, Heron was the owner of four plantations and

129 Ibid, 193-99.

84 significant wealth based largely upon the production of tar and turpentine. Heron generated some of his wealth as a Wilmington landlord. Other Heron profits derived from hiring out skilled enslaved carpenters.130

Wood’s most important conclusion, however, revolves around the relationship between slave labor and tar burning, the Lower Cape Fear region’s most significant economic activity. Just prior to the War for Independence, 5,000 enslaved people produced almost 50,000 barrels of tar, an average of ten barrels per bondsperson. Based upon Wood’s analysis of the primary record, the region’s tar exports were most likely produced by several hundred slaves, sent to labor full-time in the production of the naval store, even though tar production did not require full-time work. By contrast, turpentine production did require full-time labor, and enslaved people might produce 100 barrels crude turpentine per season. To this end, the region’s 8,000 to 16,000 barrels of turpentine per year might have been produced by a few hundred enslaved laborers.

Turpentine production shared similar features as tar burning and felling trees for lumber.

All three activities required slave laborers to spend significant time working on tasks in forests in isolation, or in relatively small groups, for long periods of time. Vast forest expanses made supervision of these activities unusually difficult, by comparison to agricultural enterprises confined to local plantations.

Other historians have emphasized the important relationship between naval stores production as central to the development of slavery in North Carolina. To this end,

Bradford Wood’s observations of slavery in the Lower Cape Fear rests upon the

130 Ibid, 201-8.

85 foundation laid in Marvin L. Michael Kay and Lorin Lee Cary’s work.131 As these historians observe, opportunities to own and improve land attracted a wide range of white settlers, but the need for labor accounts for the rapid increase in the population of enslaved blacks. Kay and Cary’s estimates begin with census data dating to the 1720s. In

1720, about 2,000 blacks and 4,370 whites inhabited North Carolina. Initially, the white population expanded at a more rapid pace than the black population. In 1730, 30,000 whites inhabited North Carolina, while the enslaved population increased to 6,000. After the 1730s, however, enslaved blacks were transported to the colony at a sharper rate than whites. By 1755, 19,000 blacks lived in North Carolina. Twenty years later, the colony counted 66,000 blacks. Immigration overland from either Virginia or South Carolina, as opposed to natural increase, was the primary factor in this population increase. Sparse primary documentation obscures concerted attempts to define the African origins of these slave imports. Moreover, unlike Virginians and South Carolinians, North Carolinians rarely referred to enslaved people’s origins. Kay and Cary explain that as a result of overland importation, the cultural origins of enslaved people in late colonial North

Carolina resembles the origins of bondspersons imported into the Chesapeake or Charles

Town. This is supported by North Carolina’s runaway advertisements, wherein advertisers sometimes referred to Angolans, Ibos, Mandingos, or Coromantees.132 By the mid-1750s, enslaved people were concentrated in the Old Albemarle and lower Cape

Fear River valley regions. In the following twenty years, plantation economies took root in the Neuse-Pamlico, the Upper Cape Fear, and Northern Inner Plain-Piedmont regions.

131 Marvin L. Michael Kay and Lorin Lee Cary, Slavery in North Carolina 1748-1775. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 1995); Kay and Cary, “Class, Mobility, and Conflict in North Carolina on the Eve of the Revolution.” in The Southern Experience in the American Revolution. Jeffrey J. Crow and Larry E. Tise, editors. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 1978.) 109-151. 132 Kay and Cary, Slavery in North Carolina, 19-21.

86 By 1775, population concentrations were sufficient to provide for substantial social contacts and the close personal relationships that facilitated the transmission of

African languages and creole derivatives, marital and familial relationships, and religious customs.133 In the same twenty years, slavery expanded significantly, and North

Carolina’s economy matured. Whites settled hundreds of new farms, merchant and country stores proliferated, and new roads, bridges, and towns were constructed. These developments signaled the expansion of the colony’s trade and communications, and the expansion of its produce in naval stores, lumber products, grains and livestock. An increase in merchant networks and operations in coastal and midland towns stimulated westward movement into North Carolina’s interior, assisting the establishment of

Hillsborough and Salisbury in about 1754, and of Charlotte in 1766. This increase in merchant operations translated into increased dependence on slave labor, and slave labor was significant in the development of colonial infrastructure in the form of roads, river systems, and harbor facilities.

As a result, three North Carolina ports developed: Edenton, serving the north and northwest; New Bern, serving the Neuse-Pamlico river valley; and Wilmington, drawing upon the Lower and Upper Cape Fear regions, as well as the piedmont interior as far north and west as Hillsborough, and as far west as Salem and Salisbury in Rowan

County. In fact, the value of North Carolina’s exports grew faster than that of any other southern colony (with the exception of Georgia) between 1768 and 1772. This increase in economy in North Carolina coincided with a decrease in dependence on the deerskin

133 Ibid, 24-26.

87 trade.134 It also meant that, unlike the Great Dismal Swamp and Edenton (which collectively functioned as the Norfolk hinterland), the emphasis on the production of naval stores and lumber products in the Lower Cape Fear region oriented much of North

Carolina’s economy on “the servicing of intra-colonial and intercolonial markets, at the expense of transoceanic markets.”135

Much of North Carolina’s produce was transported to Virginia or South Carolina for export, and thus recorded as produce of these colonies. Citing this, Kay and Cary offered an instructive corrective to previously distorted export values. They have estimated that, between 1768 and 1772, North Carolina’s exports were valued at

£670,000 sterling, as opposed to lower previous estimates. This value comprised about

36 percent and 20 percent of exports out of Virginia and South Carolina, respectively.

Rice exports serve as an important example. Until at least 1771, nearly all of rice grown in the Lower Cape Fear region was sent to Charles Town for export, shipped locally from

Port Brunswick. Another example is found in the nature of North Carolina’s tobacco exporting structure. Although much of the colony’s produce in tobacco was exported out of Port Roanoke by the end of the era, a significant amount was transported overland to

Petersburg, Virginia.136

These economic conditions significantly shaped what enslaved people experienced in the northern and southern regions of North Carolina. Unlike the

134 See Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade. For a comparative example of the importance of the deerskin trade, see also Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley Before 1783. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1992.) 135 Ibid, 27-28. 136 Ibid, 28; 236-237. Kay and Cary based their estimates upon a table sourced from James F. Shepard, “Commodity Exports from the British North American Colonies to Overseas Areas, 1768-1772: Magnitudes and Patterns of Trade,” Paper no. 258 produced by the Institute for Research in the Behavorial, Economic, and Management Sciences, Purdue University, Lafayette, Indiana. (October 1969.)

88 population distribution of enslaved people on plantations in the late colonial Tidewater region in Virginia and the South Carolina Lowcountry, in North Carolina, few enslaved people lived on plantations with high enough slave numbers for the development of specialized labor. At 1775, more than seventy percent lived on farms where fewer than twenty enslaved individuals were held in bondage. In areas settled earliest, where enslaved people consisted of a small proportion of the population, workforces were both multiracial and multistatus. Indeed, blacks, whites, mulattoes, and mustee indentured servants, apprentices, and free laborers often worked alongside a diverse range of

Africans, African Americans, mulattoes, mustees, and even a few Indians held in bondage. White attitudes about work both converged with and diverged from blacks’ perspectives. The result was that, in an overwhelmingly rural and preindustrial colony regional cultural distinctions, economic activities ranged from subsistence farming to production for market. These conditions were not entirely unfamiliar to Africans, many of whom were descended from preindustrial societies grounded in task-oriented practices.

In particular, West Africans shared with Europeans a notion of time dictated by the seasons, characterized by natural phenomena including the phases of the moon, and crop harvesting cycles.137

Various nonagricultural ventures characterized economic development prior to

1775. To this end, the production of naval stores and lumber products were paramount.

Production of these products also dictated the ways that enslaved people labored.

Arduous and time consuming, naval stores operations proved complimentary activities to agricultural pursuits, for they could be undertaken in relation to crop cycles. Tar

137 Ibid, 33-43.

89 production was generally undertaken in the winter months, beneficial to slaveholders as it meant that enslaved people could be put to labor in the months that they would otherwise be put to work in the fields. These enslaved individuals were often hired out to undertake naval stores and lumber production. Moreover, tar production was relatively inexpensive as it was based upon raw materials including dead trees, trees felled by winds, and trees previously boxed for turpentine. Thus, naval stores production concentrated most heavily in regions where slaveholding concentrated.

As a result of these factors, significant numbers of bondspersons in the Lower

Cape Fear region experienced a significant degree of autonomy not available to enslaved people confined to the area’s plantations. Further, slaves hired to work in the region’s forests might earn money for their own purposes by cutting extra wood for kilns or saw mills. To be sure, bondspersons took advantage of such isolating conditions to escape, demonstrating agency or discontent with their treatment. To mitigate such circumstances,

Lower Cape Fear planters sometimes sent men on horseback into the forests to oversee slave laborers, but these attempts were most likely sporadic at best. Most planters probably did as Benjamin Heron, who spent money regularly on care for slaves in the forest through provisions including rum, molasses, sugar, Indian corn, salt, or clothes.

Such expenditures ranged from paternalistic to brutal neglect, reflecting that negotiations between planters and bondspersons were critical in their efforts to discourage flight.138

As was the case in the Lowcountry, Africans’ cultural backgrounds determined agricultural labor patterns, often rooted in distinct heritages. Such knowledge was instrumental in the development of North Carolina’s colonial economies based on

138 B. Wood, 208-216.

90 diversified farming, open-range livestock rearing, the production of forest products, and the cultivation of rice and indigo. Generally, African collective approaches were combined with the individualized tasking system of slaveholders in ways that best suited the production of a particular crop or the production aims of a particular farm. Thus, enslaved people who toiled in the fields in counties adjacent to Virginia and in the Neuse-

Pamlico regions generally labored on farms based upon diversified farming, and that produced tobacco, grains, livestock, lumber and naval stores. As a result, a number of enslaved people developed distinct skills essential to North Carolina’s colonial economy, as artisans, river boatmen, domestics, and tar and turpentine producers.139

According to historian Mechal Sobel, Africans and English people both viewed physical labor as poor peoples’ work and thus tried to avoid manual work as much as possible in much of the eighteenth century. In Virginia, many elite slave owners viewed time in a fashion similar to Puritans in New England, emphasizing industriousness and efficiency as an essential use of time. African and English laborers performed tasks casually, working to the tune of internal clocks, as opposed to time based on agricultural tables that developed later.140 In the Virginia Piedmont, most blacks and whites lived in and shared living space in close proximity to one another. A very small percentage of

Piedmont slaveholders owned large mansions, or large parcels of land on which a marked separation of the African and English worlds existed. Thus, their views of space and its use were in part shared, although the space blacks shared were more likely to be comprised of community quarters set apart from most whites.141 In 1775, settlement

139 Ibid, 40-51. 140 Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1987.) 7; 64-66. 141 Ibid, 165-167.

91 patterns and plantations were arranged much like those that characterized the Virginia

Piedmont, with the exception of the largest in the Lower Cape Fear valley.

These shared views of the use of land and general distain for regular work routines were distinct to North Carolina’s diversified slave society in the mid-eighteenth century. By comparison to the conditions of the gang labor system associated with tobacco production in the Chesapeake, or the generally oppressive task system associated with rice production in the Lowcountry, enslaved people in North Carolina thus found in these work routines a level of autonomy to which they resorted in order to mitigate the conditions of enslavement. For example, in the longleaf pine forests of the southeast, small groups of slave laborers might spend more than a week’s time laboring away from the regular direct supervision of overseers experienced by enslaved laborers on the region’s rice plantations.

But even this level of autonomy was not enough for many enslaved Africans prior to the War for Independence. Certainly, no area of swamp in eastern North Carolina was as large or imposing as the Great Dismal Swamp, but in 1775, the colony was nonetheless characterized by vastness of its swamplands that remained undeveloped. As

North Carolina historian Freddie L. Parker has observed, the areas along the creeks of

Cumberland County, or the river basins of the Neuse, Pamlico, and Cape Fear rivers offered opportunities for maroon community development.142 For example, Tarrburg was located just south of the terminus of the Tar River, at the convergence of at least seven roads. A diverse network of waterways, including the Tar and Pamlico Rivers, Swift

Creek, Great Fishing Creek, and Deep Creek might support rapid movements of

142 Parker, Running for Freedom, 33-37.

92 runaways and maroon activity. Two sizable swamps – Beech Swamp, located along a tributary of the Great Fishing Creek, and Great Coneghta Pocosin just miles to the east of

Tarrburg – loomed ominously in the “Backcountry” that maroons occupied.143

Late eighteenth century maps depict several sizable swamps that were known to colonists.144 In 1837, James Cook and Henry Mouzon published several for the general public, which revealed the locations of these swamps in central-eastern and southeastern

North Carolina. These included the Northeast Swamp, which was situated at the beginning of the northeast branch of the New River in Onslow County between 1771 and

1775; and Holly Schelter, located just east of the northeastern branch of the Cape Fear

River between the southwest branch of the New River and Holly Schelter Creek, between what was then Dublin and Onslow Counties.145

A study of Onslow County sheds some light on the rural areas in between New

Bern and Wilmington. Carved out of New Hanover County in 1734, the county was crossed by a good river system and an abundance of swampland, with Bogue Sound and the Atlantic Ocean to the south. These geographic realities were instrumental to facilitating the development of runaway hideouts, and Onslow remained rural despite its location on the roads between New Bern and Wilmington. Population estimates in 1754 and 1769 reveal 695 and 1,216 taxable inhabitants respectively, with no urban centers of

143 Henry Mouzon, “An Accurate Map of North and South Carolina With Their Indian Frontiers, Shewing in a distinct manner all the Mountains, Rivers, Swamps, Marshes, Bays, Creeks, Harbours, Sandbanks and Soundings on the Coasts, with The Roads and Indian Paths; as well as The Boundary or Provincial Lines, The Several Townships and other divisions of the Land in Both the Provinces; the whole from Actual Surveys by Henry Mouzon and Others.” (London: John Bennett and Robert Sayer, 1775.)North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 144 James Cook and Henry Mouzon, “A map of North & South Carolina: accurately copied from the old maps of James Cook published in 1771, and of Henry Mouzon in 1775.” (New York: Harper & Bros. 1837.) North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, NC. 145 Cook and Mouzon, “A map of North & South Carolina.”

93 as many as 2,500 inhabitants.146 Bellamy’s study indicates that slaveholders who owned twenty or more bondspersons dominated the leadership of the county from very early on in its history. By 1790, 278 slaveholding properties existed within the county; the largest was the John Starkey property along the White Oak River near Swansboro. Starkey’s

Figure 1. Henry Mouzon, “An Accurate Map of North and South Carolina.” North Carolina Collection. Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

estate counted among its number 50 slaves, all of whom lived very near the county’s leading naval stores port.147 Onslow provides an excellent view, in microcosm, of the varied geography through which many maroons travelled or sought shelter in southeastern North Carolina. The swamplands of the Carolinas were particularly appealing for enslaved individuals who sought to become maroons, and particularly foreboding expanses of land for large landholders.

146 Bellamy, 340. 147 Ibid, 341-5.

94 A second, more detailed map of eastern North Carolina from the mid-nineteenth century depicted several more swamps with more detail. In 1839, Henry Schenck Tanner published, “A New Map of Nth. Carolina with its Canals, Roads & Distances from place to place, along the Stage & Steam Boat Routes.” The map showed North Carolina’s cartography from eleven years earlier including the positions of the swamps on the earlier maps. In addition to the Great Dismal, Tanner’s map noted the large Alligator Swamp, which stretched roughly between the Albemarle Sound in the north to the Pamlico River in the south and from the Atlantic coast in the east to the road between Plymouth and

Bath in the west.148 Tanner’s map also introduced several more accurate depictions of the swamps between New Bern and Beaufort, and Trenton and Wilmington.

The Holly Schelter Swamp depicted in Cook and Mouzon’s earlier map was positioned on Tanner’s map further to the south, just miles northeast of Wilmington between the Cape Fear river and the Atlantic Ocean. The original location of Holly

Schelter, as shown on Cook and Mouzon’s map, was renamed on Tanner’s chart – labeled by 1839 as Angola Bay Swamp. Additionally, Tanner depicted a sizable swamp located just to the west of New Bern – Dover Swamp – between the roads to what was then Kingston and Trenton. The existence of a much larger swamp – unnamed on

Tanner’s map and stretching between the Core Sound on the Atlantic coast and just east of Trenton in the west – presents interesting questions. Several of the main roads between

New Bern, Trenton, and Beaufort passed the unnamed wilderness. Also, the unnamed swamp was bordered by the Neuse River in the north and stretched almost to the Atlantic

148 Henry Schenck Tanner, “A New Map of Nth. Carolina with its Canals, Roads & Distances from place to place, along the Stage & Steam Boat Routes.” (Philadelphia: Henry S. Tanner. 1839.) North Carolina State Archives. Raleigh, NC.

95 coast in the south. This vast expanse of wilderness offered enslaved people ample opportunities for hiding out and marronage, and presented colonials with many challenges as to resisting slave flight.149

Moreover, maps reveal that North Carolinians were aware of the swamplands in

Figure 2. James Cook and Henry Mouzon, “A map of North & South Carolina.” North Carolina Collection. Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

their midst, and suggest that some people may have had knowledge that maroons and outlaws took refuge within them. Absconders who fled west from plantations near the coast found refuge in Angola Bay, Holly Schelter, and Green Swamp. The challenge for historians in documenting these movements remains a paucity of primary records,

149 Tanner, “A New Map of Nth. Carolina.” It is very important to note that the present researcher utilizes a combination of resources to argue for the possibility of marronage and slave flight into these lesser- known swamps in eastern North Carolina. However, given the nature of the relationship between slave flight and colonial response in the region, it remains a feasible possibility that places like Holly Schelter, Angola Bay, and the unnamed wilderness between Trenton, New Bern, and Beaufort posed the same threat to plantation society as did the Great Dismal Swamp.

96 however, as enslaved fugitives and maroons passed word of such hiding places of refuge back to the planters’ estates by way of trusted absentees or select skilled slaves whose business involved travel along the roads that crossed through the backcountry.150

Given the geography of Onslow County, and the probability that many of the region’s slaves were hired out, most freedom seekers in the county and those who travelled through the county, possessed knowledge of the options for refuge. Angola Bay

Figure 3. Henry Schenck Tanner, “A New Map of Nth Carolina.” North Carolina Collection. Wilson Library, University of North Carolina.

Swamp undoubtedly functioned as a fugitive refuge, especially given its peculiar name and its location between New Bern and Wilmington.151 Moreover, the particular

150 Hired out slaves, absentees and outliers passed word of the geography of eastern North Carolina as they traveled back and forth from the plantation to the backcountry. This is particularly true of skilled slaves such as slave watermen, who assisted the transport of timber, shingles, tar and pitch down the rivers of the region. For excellent discussions of the movements of slaves in the region, see Leaming or Cecelski.

97 reference to the “Bay Swamp,” in the 1734 act was probably a reference to what the

Cook, Mouzon, and Tanner maps later labeled Angola Bay Swamp. One observes in the

Cook, Mouzon, or Tanner maps that the land between New Bern and Wilmington, or

New Bern and Swansboro, or New Bern and Beaufort was largely covered by intermittent stretches of swampland and pine forest. Where swamps such as Green, Dover, and Holly

Schelter had taken their identities from descriptions of the geography within or proximity to colonial and state settlement in eastern North Carolina, the very reference to Angola suggests that the swamp fostered some relationship with enslaved individuals in its vicinity.

* * * * *

In the Valley of Humility, enslaved Africans and African Americans entered the

Revolutionary war era under a distinct set of circumstances in relation to those faced by enslaved people in the slave societies of the Mountains of Conceit. As was the case in early Virginia, in the South Carolina Lowcountry enslaved Africans resisted bondage by way of the most common form of resistance: flight. In many ways, the 1722 petition regarding flight to the Lower Cape Fear echoed the Chesapeake petitions from nearly sixty years earlier. Both sets of petitioners were most concerned with the tenuous security of their nascent colonial societies, with regard to the lack of control they possessed over enslaved peoples’ movements. As in Old Albemarle at the turn of the century, the Lower

Cape Fear wilderness loomed as an environment wherein African maroons, mulattos, and

151 One might suspect that the name Angola was a direct reference to the activity of African and/or Creole maroons in the swamp, made by early white North Carolinians living in its vicinity. Naming regions, swamps, rivers, estates, and the like was often a practice that established the identity of a specific place in relation to its inhabitants or geography. See Simpson and Leaming for reference to North Carolina. For an analysis of the practice in colonial Virginia, see T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676. (Oxford: Oxford University Press.) 1980.

98 less fortunate whites – “a very mutinous people” – took refuge prior to 1740. Though headed in the opposite direction to the south, the Stono rebels’ efforts to reach St.

Augustine in 1739 rendered all too clear the danger represented by the lure of the wilderness. As North Carolinians received word of Stono in the two years that followed, they redoubled efforts to legislate out of existence the mutinous lot by ensuring that enslaved people would not carry arms, or travel undocumented, or receive aid from whites. However, by midcentury, North Carolina remained relatively underdeveloped and, as a result, blacks and whites continued to live together more closely than in either

Virginia or South Carolina.

As in the Dismal, prior to 1730, Africans’ efforts to live in the swamps of the southeast signaled the resolve to secure control of labor and humanity. Evidence suggests that swamps located between New Bern and Wilmington – namely Angola Bay and

Holly Schelter, – offered precious refuge to absconders and maroons. On the other hand, the restrictions placed on slaves who continued to toil on local plantations served the purpose of hindering flight. Furthermore, laws such as the 1741 slave code served as a constant reminder to common whites of their duty to uphold oppressive nature of the relationship between slaves and masters. By setting the terms of the relationship through the designation of slave as chattel, masters attempted to dictate enslaved individuals’ identities in relation to whites with whom they interacted. Slave codes and patrols were organized to protect slave owners’ rights to restrict the liberties that enslaved people sought in the effort to abscond to local swamps and pine forests. Such evidence is analyzed more closely in later chapters, in the form of runaway advertisements published increasingly after 1790.

99 By 1775, North Carolina was the fifth largest British North American colony in population, with new areas of settlement opened in the lower Cape Fear River valley, around New Bern at the head of the Pamlico Sound, across the Piedmont, and pushing westward into the Blue Ridge Mountains. The colony was home to distinct regional geographic designations: Albemarle, Bath, the Granville District, the Upper Cape Fear, the Lower Cape Fear, the Backcountry, and the Piedmont. These regions evolved as a

“series of separate colonies,” that, after the War for Independence, meshed together as one. Given this, scholars have characterized colonial North Carolina as remote, disorganized, and lagging behind colonial development in other regions of British North

America. Further, most scholars have ignored the distinct regional character of North

Carolina’s colonial regions due to their importance in the context of the southern colonies. This scholarly consensus has shifted in the past ten years. Focusing on the actions of enslaved people who moved about the hinterlands of the colony’s eastern ports and plantations provides but one more reason to continue to advance this historiographical shift.

In the year the American War for Independence began, the Lower Cape Fear

Valley had been a slave society for nearly half a century. Yet, just as the refuge African maroons found in the Great Dismal Swamp was not unnoticed by enslaved people and white Virginia elites, enslaved people and some whites who claimed the same kind of relative freedom near the Great Alligator, Green, Holly Schelter, Dover, or Angola Bay swamps lost their collective effort to create highly local societies insulated from the advance a distant slave society. As early as the 1720s, British settlers in the Lower Cape

Fear concentrated on developing profitable plantations and importing enslaved laborers.

100 Although these planters initially invested in rice cultivation, after a few short years the plantation economy they established differed significantly from the rice-oriented economy of the Lowcountry. The resulting slave society that came to characterize North

Carolina was complex, founded upon the cultivation of rice, and the production of naval stores and forest products. As the region’s plantation economy matured, its population of enslaved Africans increased and so too did its slaveholders’ dependence on slave labor.

Still, at 1775, North Carolina’s plantation society left open many distinct opportunities for maroon community development. The events of the war with Great Britain would bring these realities into sharp focus.

101 Chapter 3: “The General of the Swamps”: Petit Marronage and Insurrection Conspiracies during the Long Revolutionary Era in the Valley of Humility, 1767-1802

In 1767, the Wilmington militia confronted approximately twenty “runaway slaves in a body arm’d.”152 The militia did not report the length of time that the group they encountered had been in flight, preoccupied instead by the perceived threat slaves in arms posed to the town. Less than a decade later, the local militias of neighboring Craven and Pitt counties reported the actions of another runaway group, thought to be organizing to gain access to arms in advance of an insurrection. In 1775, the Pitt County safety committee claimed that “a band of 250 slaves had been pursued for several days,” citing that the absconders were organizing for an insurrection to begin on July 8. Only a few had been captured. On the eighth, the group would “destroy the family where they lived,” and move toward the “Back country” after burning the homes of local whites. In the backcountry, they would meet with persons “armed by the Government for their

Protection.”153 Under this protection, the absconders would be free to form their own government.

152 Quoted in Timothy James Lockley, editor. Maroon Communities in South Carolina: A Documentary Record. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. 2009.) xviii. 153 Quoted in Jeffery J. Crow, “Slave Rebelliousness in North Carolina, 1775 to 1802.” William and Mary Quarterly. 37. 1. (January 1980). The absconders had most likely caught wind of the Regular Rebellion, the defiant effort for economic independence and political liberty launched against eastern elites by backcountry settlers in the North Carolina Piedmont. The Regular Rebellion had threatened to depose the existing governing body of the colony, seated at New Bern. See Marjoleine Kars, Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2002.)

102 Although local patrollers succeeded in preventing the perceived 1775 insurrection, the threat was all too real: the captured maroons were found to be in possession of a considerable amount of arms. Had they not been disbanded, they might have organized and launched an attack against area plantations. Nor did this perceived threat end with the peace of 1783. Five years after the Treaty of Paris ended the

American War for Independence, the Wilmington militia was mobilized again to arrest an enslaved runaway. Subsequent to his capture, the absconder was executed. The execution was intended to strike “terror into a gang of runaways who infested the said Town & neighbourhood.”154

In each of these three examples, local authorities sought to make an example of enslaved people who sought freedom. Because two of the groups sought arms, they posed clear and perceptible threats against Wilmington’s white residents. One group, in 1767, sought freedom in a community of their own design and were armed in defense of this community, but were pursued and disbanded by the Wilmington militia. The second group sought liberation from the shackles of their own bondage by way of an insurrection, perhaps inspired in 1775 by the impending American independence struggle. As we have seen in previous chapters, this group’s desire to organize an insurrection was similar to what other groups had done in the Valley of Humility in previous decades. The third absconder was caught alone in 1788, and executed in the effort to terrorize yet another band of “runaways” who had again taken to the forests and swamps of the Wilmington region. In each case, local authorities perceived each group to be extralegal for flight went against local laws that, by 1788, had locked most blacks into

154 Quoted in Lockley, editor. Maroon Communities in South Carolina. xviii.

103 enslavement. Just two years prior, perhaps in response to the threat posed by permitting the population of Africans to increase any further, North Carolina passed a duty on direct importation. Rendering direct importation unprofitable, the essential purpose of this tax was to limit the chance that slave rebellion might develop.155

Still, such instances of group flight did not abate with the enforcement of anti- flight statutes, or with the muster of the local militias. In fact, quite the contrary: it persisted. In June and July 1795 near Wilmington, a report claimed that a band of enslaved runaways “in the daytime secrete[d] themselves in the swamps and woods at night committed various depredations on the neighbouring plantations.” After the militia dislodged the group from the swamp in which they had found refuge, local officials learned that the group had been led by one “who styled himself The General of the

Swamps.” The band had killed at least one white man, and was accused of severely wounding another. By mid-July, the local militia had responded by killing nine, including the group’s leader. But on July 17, reports indicated that a new leader and several followers were still on the run.156

That this particular group of absconders remained in defiant flight suggests a resilience that extended beyond mere escape. That a new leader emerged to organize the group’s movements suggests even more – that these groups might perpetuate their existence by organizing to defend their right to form a community if they remained in flight. That reports informed of the presence of a “general” suggests the degree to which the group had organized. Led by a general, the group was more than a mere runaway

155 On the direct importation tax, see Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2005.) 16. 156 Wilmington City Gazette, July 18, 1795. Also quoted in Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts: on Nat Turner Denmark Vesey Gabriel and others. 50th Anniversary Edition. (New York: International Publishers. 1943, 1993.) 217.

104 band; it had transitioned into a maroon community in the context of petit marronage.

From the perspective of late colonial officials and townspeople alike, it makes sense, if for these reasons alone, that runaway groups had to be reined in. Left unmolested, the group might force upon colonial officials the concession of a treaty securing their right to live in the swamp. In this view, the problem of petit marronage had real potential to transition into one of grand marronage.

Enslaved peoples’ actions that comprised petit marronage are more clearly visible in the primary record of Virginia and North Carolina because they coincided with two significant events in the 1790s: the establishment of printing presses in North Carolina’s major towns; and, the proliferation of perceived or actual slave revolt conspiracies reported in local newspapers.157 This chapter draws upon these sets of primary sources, and my observations confirm historians’ previous interpretations of the effects of slave flight on North Carolina’s nascent slave society, in particular, between 1775 and 1802.

During this long Revolutionary era, African Americans engaged in petit marronage. This was a special concern for white authorities particularly during slave insurrection scares.

But beyond fears of slave revolt existed the real potential for the establishment of a long term polity, independent of the region’s slave societies, initiated by lurkers in the

“neighbourhood” who sought perpetuate to maroon colonies. This ultimately did not

157 Both this chapter and this dissertation owe a significant debt of gratitude to the groundbreaking work undertaken by Freddie L. Parker in the effort catalogue and produce greater appreciation of, as the late John Hope Franklin once wrote, “the complexities of the problem of plantation management,” and “the determination of many slaves to leave behind them the unspeakable burden of human bondage.” See Parker, editor. Stealing a Little Freedom: Advertisements for Slave Runaways in North Carolina, 1791- 1840. (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1994.) Parker’s work benefited from several scholars’ contributions to the study of African American history. These scholars include: George P. Rawick, general editor. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Company. 1972.); Latham A. Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary History from the 1730s to 1790. Vol. 1-4. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Company. 1983.); and Billy G. Smith and Richard Wojtowicz, Blacks Who Stole Themselves: Advertisements for Runaways in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1728-1790. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1989.)

105 happen, however, as Virginians and North Carolinians redoubled their efforts to stamp out slave conspiracies in the effort to establish a secure slave society.

* * * * *

Historians have consulted extant runaway advertisements and published reports of slave conspiracies to elucidate demographic and physical descriptions of individual runaways, and to explain in great detail that which took place when groups of runaways assembled in the swamps and forests of the American southeast during the conspiracy scares of the long Revolutionary era. This work has revealed that, for African Americans, the implications of white liberty were all too clear, particularly as the brief window of gradual emancipations closed in the north during the first decade of the nineteenth century. More than half a century ago, scholars began to dispel the notion that the problem of African American enslavement was not central to the American independence struggle ignited by whites in the 1760s. A generation of historians explained that, from the 1760s through the 1780s, white American colonists proclaimed themselves the victims of enslavement at the hands of the British Parliament. Such colonists expressed adamantly and publically that slavery was a condition fit only for people of African descent. This historiographical trend was inspired, in part, by new interest in the long black freedom struggle reflected by the long tradition of black military service, the details of which the historian Benjamin Quarles lay bare in the 1960s.158 By the 1980s, scholars

158 William C. Nell, Colored Patriots of the American Revolution. (Boston. 1855.) Republished by the American Antiquarian Society and NewsBank, Inc. 2005; Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1961.)

106 including the late Felix Nwabueze Okoye observed that chattel slavery was “the

Nightmare of the American Revolutionaries.”159

In many ways, these efforts to revise American history have proven fruitful.

Where once histories of the American Revolution privileged the narratives of the elite

“Founding Fathers,” few histories now tell the story of a “revolution” without making significant references to the contributions of both white ideological elites who protested the acts passed by Parliament they perceived to be the shackles of economic bondage, and as historian Gary Nash has explained recently, to “those not in positions of power and privilege, though the iconic founding fathers are assuredly part of the story.”160 Since the mid-1990s, historians have published works that seek to portray the pressures that

African Americans, common whites, and Native Americans exerted on white elites during the independence struggle.161 But even this revision to the story of America’s

159 F. Nwabueze Okoye, “Chattel Slavery as the Nightmare of the American Revolutionaries.” William and Mary Quarterly. 37. 1. (January 1980.) 4-28. 160 Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America. (New York: Penguin Books. 2005.) xv; The historiography of the Revolutionary Era is, of course, voluminous. Several works influential to the conception of this chapter include: Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Enlarged Edition. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1967, 1992.); John Shy, “The American Revolution: The Military Conflict Considered as a Revolutionary War,” in Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson, editors. Essays on the American Revolution. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 1973.) 121-156; Peter H. Wood, “Liberty Is Sweet:” African-American Freedom Struggles in the Years before White Independence.” in Alfred F. Young, editor. Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism. (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. 1993.) 149-184; Jon Butler, Becoming America: The Revolution Before 1776. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2000.); Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and their World. Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition. (New York: Hill and Wang. 1976, 2001.); Norman K. Risjord, Jefferson’s America: 1760-1815. (Madison, WI: Madison House. 1991.); Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and American Frontier. (New York: Hill and Wang. 2007.); Joseph J. Ellis, American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic. (New York: Vintage Books. 2007.); T.H. Breen, American Insurgents American Patriots: The Revolution of the People. (New York: Hill and Wang. 2010.) For a succinct treatment of the Revolution’s historiography, see Alfred F. Young’s introduction to the collection of essays entitled Beyond the American Revolution. 3-26. 161 Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 1991); James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730-1810. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1997.); Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country 1740-1790. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1998.); Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves,

107 revolutionary era can be extended further. With few exceptions, historians have yet to embrace in full the extent to which African Americans resisted enslavement, most often by the most benign of means. As historian Peter H. Wood has reminded historians, black enslavement was “an extraordinary crucible,” in which several generations of African

Americans considered the concept of liberty more adroitly than perhaps any other group of the colonial population before 1775.162 Perhaps no other group of Africans or African

Americans considered liberty more actively than maroons.

Despite the fact that no major slave rebellion took place in the South, enslaved people used this period of social upheaval to launch their own rebellious activities. In the

Valley of Humility, eighteenth century lawmakers privileged as an essential aim the prevention of slave rebellion, primarily to hinder the spread of rebellious ideals among enslaved African Americans who might gather in runaway groups for the purpose of planning insurrection. This perceived vulnerability to slave rebellion fomented in maroon camps persisted even after the war ended in 1783. In this context of highly localized resistance against the rise of a colonial elite during the American independence struggle, the problem of petit marronage presented special concerns. As North Carolina’s population became more African American than African, enslaved people continued to exercise petit marronage as the most effective daily strategy in the struggle to attain freedom into the early nineteenth century. And this strategy was founded upon the region’s swamps and forests, rendering the enforcement of state boundaries all the more important, and making a particularly worrisome problem for North Carolina’s officials an

& the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1999.); and Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. (New York: New York University Press. 2014.) 162 Wood, “Liberty Is Sweet.” in Young, editor. Beyond the American Revolution. 152.

108 issue for lawmakers in Virginia and in South Carolina. For many white North

Carolinians, then, the presence of enslaved Africans moving about local forests and swamps not only stimulated a perceived potential for organized revolt, it also threatened the stability of North Carolina’s slave society. Thus, the problem of petit marronage was more complex than an issue of colonial elites’ perception that enslaved people in local swamps and forests comprised a constant threat of slave rebellion.

Thus, the rising colonial elite of North Carolina responded to a wide range of concerns during the independence struggle, but these set of circumstances were not unlike those that beset legislators and planters in the neighboring local slave societies of

South Carolina or Virginia. In the former colony, the threat of invasion by British soldiers was bolstered by the perceived threat of “domestick enemies.”163 According to historian

Robert Olwell, these “domestick enemies” were enslaved blacks who toiled in the colony’s plantations, who in 1769, numbered 80,000 – outnumbering whites in the colony’s coastal region by a ratio of nearly three to one, and by an even greater ratio in the interior plantations regions. Lacking a population of whites significant enough to sustain a regular force of slave patrollers, Lowcountry planters retaliated fiercely against enslaved people who took flight.164 Elite South Carolinians also feared that dissident whites, particularly new arrivals to the colony, might ally with blacks in order to gain power in the colony. Henry Laurens, a prominent assemblyman, detested “domestic broils,” conflicts among South Carolina whites that were ultimately worse than “Fire,

163 Robert Olwell, “’Domestick Enemies’”: Slavery and Political Independence in South Carolina, May 1775-March 1776.” Journal of Southern History. 55. 1. (February 1989.) 21-48. 164 Olwell, “Domestick Enemies,” 22-25. Olwell cites in particular Charles Pinckney’s response to the arrival of more than 1,000 French Acadians to South Carolina from Nova Scotia in 1756. Pinckney feared that the Acadians would incite a slave rebellion, encouraging enslaved people to “rise upon their masters and cut their throats in hopes of obtaining freedom.” Olwell, “Domestick Enemies,” 26

109 Pestilence, or Foreign Wars.”165 As early as February 1775, fears of an alliance between

British soldiers and slaves were reported in London, in New England, and Charleston.

Thus a careful and inclusive balance of power and wealth between the colony’s white elites and nonelites was crucial. As more slaves fled the colony altogether, or to British lines, South Carolinians became aware that aligning with the other rebellious colonies was their best hope for preserving their own slave society. Thus, for the first time, the

South Carolina Provincial Congress claimed legislative power superior to that of the previous royally sanctioned colonial assembly.166

In the same year that South Carolina authorities confronted “domestick enemies,”

Virginia authorities faced an insurrection scare. In April, several enslaved people planned to revolt without British “encouragement” in the James River valley. On the fifteenth, a

Prince Edward County slave named Toney was charged with insurrection and conspiracy to commit murder, and received the penalty of fifteen lashes. In Chesterfield County three days later, an alarm was raised for fear of slave insurrection, leading to the rapid reinvigoration of the slave patrols that had otherwise been relaxed. On April 21, 1775, the

Virginia Gazette reported that two enslaved people had been sentenced to death. Among these Norfolk conspirators was Emanuel, owned by Matthew Phripp, the county’s militia lieutenant. The other conspirator was Emanuel de Antonio, who had attempted to legally obtain his freedom prior to becoming a conspirator. During the same day, Edmund

Pendleton reported that Williamsburg was alarmed by rumors of conspiracy. The

165 Quoted in Olwell, “Domestick Enemies,” 27. Blacks, too, organized in complex communities even as the dislocations of enslavement threatened the very fibers of familial bonds in South Carolina. See Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. 1984); and Margaret Washington Creel, A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community People Among the Gullahs. (New York: New York University Press. 1988.) 166 Robert Olwell, Masters, Slaves, and Subjects: The Culture of Power in the South Carolina Low Country 1740-1790. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1998.) 221-270.

110 colony’s last royal governor, Lord Dunmore, responded by removing the gunpowder stored at the town’s armory. On the April 22, Lord Dunmore announced to the House of

Burgesses that should they be responsible for bringing harm to any senior British official, the penalty would be to emancipate the town’s slaves.167

It should be noted that, in the former two instances, the threat of insurrection took place in the Virginia Piedmont region, to the west of the riverine fall line that separated the easy transmission of ocean going vessels to the colonial interior. But the James and

Appomattox rivers connected Price Edward and Chesterfield counties to the Hampton

Roads region, and primarily slave watermen facilitated the transfer of goods and information. During the scare of the April 21, the connection to the conspiracy upriver was revealed more clearly. The alarm had reached Williamsburg, situated on a bluff just east of the James, where Lord Dunmore took precautionary measures to secure the colony’s arms from enslaved people who might sack the town’s armory.

The movements of slave watermen who transmitted messages of insurrection along the James and Appomattox rivers were, to be sure, not petit marronage because slave watermen returned regularly to the wharves and plantations from which they had embarked. In other words, slave watermen remained a part of the slave societies, vital to such societies’ economies. This might be seen in the example of Joseph Harris. During the morning of October 27, 1775, the war reached Virginia in the form of the squadron of

British naval vessels that attacked Hampton. The ensuing battle resulted in part from the actions of Harris, a local mulatto man, who four months prior had been a pilot on the

Chesapeake Bay. On the 27th Harris, held in bondage by Henry King, had absconded and

167 Woody Horton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1999.) 34-5; 143-152; 156-61.

111 presented himself to Lord Dunmore. Harris’s knowledge of the coastline along the

Eastern Shore, and along the York, James, and Nansemond Rivers proved instrumental to the British squadron. Nor was Harris alone. Several hundred enslaved people presented themselves to the royal governor as soldiers prepared to fight in the effort to preserve the colonies to gain their own freedom. In November, Lord Dunmore acted upon the warning he had issued to the House of Burgesses in April, declaring freedom to slaves that joined the British forces at Williamsburg. Nearly 1,000 enslaved people acted, enlisting in

Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment. Harris died after a year of service in the Royal Navy on

July 19, 1776, but in that year, more than 400 former slaves sailed away from Virginia with the British.168

More than 400 former members of the Ethiopian regiment sailed off, confident that they had earned freedom as British soldiers, but learned soon that their fates were little better than slaves in Canada or the Caribbean.169 But many others chose to take their fates into their own hands by taking refuge in the Great Dismal Swamp. In turn, this group became the second substantive population of African Americans to engage in petit marronage in the swamp. This band remained encamped for some time upon the swamp’s dry hummocks, beyond the reach of Patriot militiamen and retreating Loyalists. It was known that all travellers needed to move throughout the region with care, as these

“fugitives” were thought to rob or murder passers-through.170 As the Chesapeake rebels had discovered in 1730, the Dismal Swamp loomed ominously to whites as a place where

168 Holton, Forced Founders, xiv-xvii. For further emphasis on the influences that common, marginalized, and dispossessed “Americans” continued to exert upon the nation’s white elites, see Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution. (New York: Hill and Wang. 2007.) 131-163. 169 James Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2007.) 80-1. 170 Charles Royster, The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company: A Story of George Washington’s Times. (New York: Vintage Books. 1999.) 250.

112 some blacks and whites found refuge. Thus, the black freedom struggle peaked again during Lord Dunmore’s retreat from Virginia in 1775. More to the point, these

“maroons” – groups engaged in petit marronage – had seen not only an opportunity to abscond in the recent struggle for independence between white Virginia Patriots the colony’s last royal governor, but also an opportunity to lay claim to the swamp.

Thus African Americans engaged in petit marronage, viewed primarily as

“domestick enemies” in South Carolina or as British conspirators in Virginia. Evidence of both perceptions exists with regard to how whites in North Carolina viewed enslaved people in their own number. What made the Valley of Humility different than its neighbors, however, was the extent to which petit marronage characterized the collection of local slave societies that were, in effect, significantly younger and less developed than those to the north and to the south. This is a direct reflection of the extent to which petit marronage made possible the movements of African Americans in the region’s nascent slave society and through its swamps and forests. These patterns reflected not only the endurance of petit marronage, but also foreshadowed its acceleration during the

Revolutionary era.

Prior to the 1760s, enslaved African rebels and whites living on the fringes of plantation society blurred the distinction between freedom and enslavement in the

Dismal. This posed complex problems for state officials in Virginia and North Carolina who sought to develop and enforce clear divisions and definitions for race, and slave ownership. In this prerevolutionary context, elite whites undertook the first efforts to build an infrastructure to support the extraction of the swamp’s natural resources.

Proposed as early as 1728 by Governor William Byrd, it was not until May 1762 that the

113 former mayor of Norfolk County, Virginia, Robert Tucker, claimed 1,000 acres of swamp on its eastern fringe where he initiated the construction of a causeway. In March of the following year, plans to drain the swamp to create arable lands at a profit became public.

Two months later, on May 25, the Dismal Swamp Land Company (DSLC) announced its incorporation. The list of men who stood to profit from the formation of the company included Tucker, William and Thomas Nelson, Thomas Walker, the future first American president George Washington and his brother-in-law Fielding Lewis, John Robinson,

Robert Burwell, William Waters, John Syme, Anthony Bacon, and Samuel Gist.

Soon after the company’s incorporation, Washington and Lewis and two others toured the swamp’s fringes on horseback in both Virginia and North Carolina for two days. Washington’s survey of the swamp on the Dismal Swamp Land Company’s behalf signaled the beginning of the company’s claims to the swamp’s land and resources.

Washington observed sandy soils unsuitable for agriculture along the swamp’s outer roads. But having observed the swamp’s Green Sea – a landscape observed by William

Byrd comprising open lands and tall reeds and located in the swamp’s northwestern sector during his swamp survey in the late 1720s – Washington returned from his tour convinced that the inner swamp’s black soils were fertile.171 By all accounts, rendering this landscape arable would comprise a major project. The project would involve managers charged with establishing land claims with county surveyors, the production or purchase of a variety of tools, the purchase of a plantation near the swamp to serve as a base of operations, and most importantly, a labor force comprised of enslaved people.

171 Royster, 81-2.

114 This need led to the development of Dismal Town, on a tract of land patented by

Mills Riddick, owner of the region’s largest plantation. In January 1764, the Dismal

Swamp Land Company secured the backing of the Virginia House of Burgesses and the commonwealth Council in the form of a law that granted the company the right to dig canals or to build causeways through land adjacent to the Dismal. The law protected the company against suits in which local claimants might sue for damages, upon the justification that the company’s projects would benefit the public good. In August, the

Dismal Swamp Land Company began renting a plantation comprising 402 acres from

Riddick, located six miles south of Suffolk, Virginia on the eastern fringe of the swamp.

Soon known as “Dismal Plantation,” the Dismal Swamp Land Company’s managers named Washington’s younger brother John the plantation’s resident overseer. By historian Charles Royster’s count, fifty-four enslaved people labored at the plantation by

July: forty-three men, nine women, one boy and one girl.172

George Washington temporarily resided at Dismal Plantation to direct the beginning of the company’s swamp improvement project. Beginning in a field called white marsh, enslaved laborers were charged with the task of digging a ditch three feet deep and ten feet wide through a sector of old cypress and cedar trees, and younger red and white oak, maple, and elm trees. Beyond the sector of various trees lay a swamp of standing water bearing a dark amber color. As the enslaved labor crew advanced deeper into the swamp, the vegetation grew more dense, comprising a layer of undergrowth characterized by bamboo and large ferns rooted in the saturated black peat and thick vines that hung from the trees above. From Dismal Plantation, the ditch extended five

172 Ibid, 83-87; 97.

115 miles to Lake Drummond, for the purpose of draining water from arable land into the lake. Beyond the arduous work of ditch digging, the enslaved laborers at Dismal

Plantation also felled the oldest white cedar trees, shaving them into more than

Figure 4. Photo of the historical marker commemorating the site where enslaved people dug the first canal to link the interior swampland to Lake Drummond. The four and one half mile stretch was first chosen in 1762, after George Washington’s swamp survey. Taken by the author, May 2013.

ten thousand 18-inch shingles that the company sold for profit.173

In December 1764, the Dismal Swamp Land Company partners met in

Williamsburg. Acting upon an agreement to purchase more land in Nansemond County, the partners bought 1,000 acres adjoining the road connecting Suffolk to Norfolk, next to the Nansemond River. For this tract of land, the company’s partners envisioned a canal

173 Ibid, 98.

116 cut by enslaved laborers, connecting company land to the Nansemond River. But another topic taken up by the company’s shareholders is of particular interest to the study at hand.

As we learned in the previous chapter, the disruptions of war provided ample opportunity for petit marronage; this was true particularly for the Dismal Swamp Land Company’s enslaved laborers. At Dismal Plantation, flight had become a concern to the swamp company shareholders. Enslaved men were reported to “run about” Nansemond County at night, presumably to visit people enslaved on other plantations in the region. Aiming to

Figure 5. Photo of the historical marker commemorating the site where the Dismal Swamp Land Company established Dismal Town in 1763, on a 402-acre patent established by Mills Riddick. Taken by the author, May 2013.

bolster and secure the captive labor force already assembled, and believing that the addition of more enslaved women would end the men’s propensity to “run about,” the

117 partners voted to send five more enslaved people per partner, four men and one woman each. By this count, the company partners sent twelve more enslaved women to Dismal

Plantation, for a total of sixty-six enslaved people by early 1765.174

In effect, the Dismal Swamp Land Company threatened to usurp William

Aichison and James Parker’s interests in the swamp’s resources. Aichison and Parker, merchants based in Norfolk and Portsmouth, were prominent in local government and society prior to the American independence struggle, and Aichison was a member of the

Virginia House of Burgesses. Both Aichison and Parker were Scots who, in 1758, joined together to create the firm Aichison and Parker. In the late 1750s, the firm employed

Thomas Macknight, who recently immigrated to Virginia from Scotland, to build and operate a store in Windfield, a hamlet located on the on the southern fringe of the Dismal Swamp in North Carolina. To support this venture, Aichison and

Parker financed Thomas Macknight & Company, a firm based in North Carolina.

Through Macknight & Co., Aichison and Parker gained access to the colony’s wheat, pork, pine tar, lumber, and retail trades.

In North Carolina, Macknight acquired land patents and purchased property upon which he sought to build roads that would lead to better access to the colony’s northeast for his benefactors in Norfolk. Products manufactured in North Carolina flowed northward influencing the growth of Suffolk, a town with a public wharf suitable for small vessels in the West Indies trade located to the southwest of Norfolk. Another Scot,

James Gibson, established a merchant business at Suffolk based upon trade with North

Carolina. Gibson specialized in exporting pork and importing dry goods, and also traded

174 Ibid, 98-9.

118 in naval stores, deerskins, and rum. As Gibson’s business expanded, so too did his connection to other merchants, including Aichison and Parker.175 As Dismal Swamp

Land Company increased its work in the swamp, Aichison, Parker, Macknight, and

Gibson stood to profit from the improved infrastructure that would traverse the swamp’s landscape in the future.

As early as 1761, Thomas Macknight had sought a land patent on the swamp’s southern edge, of 1,400 acres, from the Granville proprietary. No sooner than Aichison,

Parker and Macknight received word of the Dismal Swamp Land Company’s formation, the three men conceived a plan to form a company of their own. The Campania Company would serve two primary purposes: it would organize the three men’s preexisting plan to drain land in the North Carolina sector of the swamp; it would also incorporate their swamp interest in order to protect it in North Carolina against Dismal Swamp Land

Company claims. Enlisting the support of , appointed recently the clerk of the North Carolina Superior Court, Macknight entered a patent of 700 acres, and

Johnston entered a patent of 2,800 on March 26, 1763. Three weeks later, Macknight entered another patent of 5,600 acres. The Campania Company’s land claims lay unimproved for the remainder of the decade, however, and in February 1770, the DSLC secured a land patent for all swamplands in North Carolina.176

The American independence struggle interrupted the Dismal Swamp Land

Company’s efforts to improve the Dismal Swamp landscape by way of slave labor. This halt on land improvement schemes caused by the war ensured that the space for petit marronage in the swamp would continue largely uninterrupted until the mid-1790s. As a

175 Ibid, 73-4. 176 Ibid, 88; 155-6.

119 result, the swamp remained prime territory for petit marronage when local commission merchants returned to the effort to build an infrastructure in the swamp. Canal construction depended upon slave labor; so too did the lumber industries that developed in the swamp in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The threat of slave rebellion, then, was a direct threat to the land company shareholders’ interests. In the wake of the war, as one scholar neatly put it, local authorities in Virginia, North Carolina, and South

Carolina believed that “resolute measures of repression” were necessary to restrict enslaved people from taking up arms.177 Historian Sally Hadden has observed that all gatherings of enslaved people inspired whites’ anxieties; this was particularly true of

North Carolina. As a result, planters petitioned state officials to redouble efforts to define slave flight a criminal activity. Dating to the eighteenth century, laws aimed to enforce the dispersion of all gatherings organized by bondspeople, and slave patrols were charged with the responsibility of enforcing such laws. Thus, a primary duty of slave patrols was that of breaking up large gatherings of enslaved people. But when patrollers discovered meetings between enslaved blacks and poor whites, organized for the purpose of trade or drinking, patrollers’ duties were cast against poor whites’ interests. Furthermore, nearly every slaveholder agreed that all enslaved people away from a given plantation must travel with a pass, but some slaveholders issued only “general passes” which might be good for an entire month. Patrollers complained about general passes, for they offered enslaved people virtual immunity from patrols and greater freedom to travel to distant

177 Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts. (New York: Columbia University Press. 1943.) 103. More recently, historians have taken up the subject of slaves in arms. See Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan, editors. Arming the Slaves From Classical Times to the Modern Age. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2006.)

120 places. In general, whites complained about general passes, citing that they increased the likelihood that an enslaved person might commit the crime of theft.178

Notwithstanding the concerns generated by slave gatherings or general passes, petit marronage persisted. Historians Loren Schweninger, and the late John Hope

Franklin, have offered a salient framework for this in their award winning synthesis

Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation. Some enslaved people absented themselves from plantations merely for a number of days, weeks, months or years, defined to be

“laying out;” others ran away to distant locations outside the local region of the plantation from which they absconded.179 Based in part upon this hierarchy of flight, enslaved people who lay out are the primary focus of the following pages of this study, as they represent the population of absconders most likely to be engaged in petit marronage. It was these men and women who posed perhaps the most complex problems for new state elite planters who sought to control enslaved peoples’ movements about the largely undeveloped North Carolina countryside, and for state legislators who sought to encode laws aimed at discouraging fringe dwelling whites from interacting with enslaved people who engaged in petit marronage. In other words, planters and legislators redoubled efforts to define petit marronage as a criminal activity in the wake of the independence struggle, to discourage and inhibit the potential nexus of activity between fringe dwelling whites, enslaved people, and free blacks.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, several historians compiled volumes of runaway advertisements. Since then, a generation of historians has rendered much of these

178 Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2001.) 109-114. 179 John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation. (New York: Oxford University Press. 1999.) 97-123.

121 materials available through online databases. On the cutting edge of this scholarship, in

1995, historian Lathan A. Windley compiled a profile of enslaved people who ran from slaveholders in Virginia and South Carolina. Citing that enslaved people took flight for a wide range of reasons and at any opportunity, in his analysis of runaway advertisements published between 1730 and 1787, Windley identified several useful trends. In Virginia during the Revolution, one or more owners who held three-quarters of absconders thought that runaways took flight for a location within the state. Another 59% thought to be heading to an original owner’s property. By comparison, only 31% of enslaved people who fled properties in South Carolina were advertised as destined for properties within the state. Between 1775 and 1787, 66% of Virginia slaveholders advertised the assumed destination of an absconder to be another property in the state; an even higher percentage of South Carolina slaveholders advertised the same, 86%. In 1787, a total of 292,627 enslaved people labored in Virginia, and 107,094 were held in bondage in South

Carolina.180

In 1770, North Carolina’s total population comprised 266,800, of whom 26%, or

69,600 were of African descent. By 1780, 91,000 enslaved blacks were counted among

North Carolina’s total population of 361,133. By the count of the first official federal census in 1790, the new state’s slave population had climbed to over 100,000, representing nearly one-quarter of the new state’s nearly total population 400,000. By

1790, then, North Carolina’s enslaved population had increased to nearly equal that of its southern neighbor. Virginia’s enslaved population totaled more than that of the

Carolina’s combined. Beyond these figures, however, the first federal census provides

180 Lathan A. Windley, A Profile of Runaway Slaves in Virginia and South Carolina from 1730-1787. (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1995.) 130-146.

122 data on an important population: free blacks. In 1790, this population stood at 5,041, a population that increased by 2,000 to number over 7,000 by 1800. The free black population continued its slight growth through the 1840 census to number 22,732, at which point free blacks comprised three percent of the new state’s total population. The rise in the state’s population of free blacks was the result of the American independence struggle, in concert with the long-standing struggles of the state’s dissident groups including the Quakers, who began to champion the antislavery cause in the years following the War for Independence.181

The contagion of independence notwithstanding, the growth of North Carolina’s enslaved population outpaced that of its free black population through 1840. This was due to the expansion of tobacco agriculture into the state’s northeastern counties, and the expansion of tar and turpentine production into the state’s southeastern counties. Between

1800 and 1840, the state’s enslaved population grew 84%, from 133,296 to 245,817. The majority of these bondspersons were held on properties in the state’s east, in Halifax,

Edenton, Newbern, Wilmington, and Fayetteville districts. In 1800, nearly 70% of the state’s enslaved people labored in these five eastern districts, comprising a total population of more than 93,000. Of these districts, the highest population of enslaved people, 31,445, labored in Halifax district where slaveholders had begun to produce tobacco. By 1840, the total enslaved population increased to over 153,000 in these five districts, with greatest increase in the Fayetteville district where slaveholders established

181 Parker, Running for Freedom: Slave Runaways in North Carolina, 1775-1840. (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1993.) 8-11. These data are shown in Table 1, “The White and Black Populations in North Carolina, 1770-1840.” pg. 9.

123 plantation-industrial enterprises based primarily upon producing tar and turpentine in the region’s pine forests.182

These data reveal a number of trends that help to contextualize the persistence of petit marronage. First, runaway advertisements in both Virginia and South Carolina show that most slaveholders assumed absconders would flee to local destinations. The reasons for such assumptions included the fact that many enslaved people had been the victims of sales to slaveholders in neighboring counties within the same colony or state, meaning that most enslaved people who fled one plantation sought to return to an original farm where family members most likely resided. Indeed, as many as 86% of advertisements posted in South Carolina reflected the message that an absconder would head to a property in a neighboring county. Similar trends are revealed in runaway advertisements posted by North Carolina slaveholders. And second, by 1790, North Carolina’s enslaved population had grown to match that of South Carolina’s population. Only a fraction of this number, however significant, was emancipated during the Revolutionary era. This meant that, into the antebellum era, more than 90% of the slave population in the Valley of Humility would have reason to flee bondage, the vast majority of whom would elect to engage in petit marronage if for no other reason than to remain close to the property where family members resided.

Between 1775 and 1840, nearly 2,800 enslaved people fled slaveholders in North

Carolina.183 A paucity of advertisements remains because printing presses operated sporadically in the state, but dating to the 1780s, extant runaway advertisements reveal

182 Ibid, 12-22. These data are shown in Table 2, “The N.C. Population by District, Number of Slaves, and Percentage of Slaves in Each District in 1800,” pg. 14 and Table 3, “The N.C. Population by District, Number of Slaves, and Percentage of Slaves in Each District in 1840,” pg. 16. 183 Ibid, xiii.

124 advertisers’ suspicions as to the distinct designation for enslaved absconders. Some extant advertisements reveal that enslaved people did not engage in petit marronage, opting instead for outright flight to distant destinations including the Caribbean or to urban areas such as Wilmington. Most were men. Several examples illustrate this. In July

1784, Abner Neale posted a runaway advertisement for Joe, who had absconded from near New Bern. Neale noted that Joe was “very talkative” and that Joe “has been a house servant in the West Indies, and is remarkably confident.” Offering a reward of twenty pounds for Joe’s capture and incarceration in any local jail, Neale surmised that Joe would go “to South Carolina, in company with a Negro fellow, of Mr. Silas Stevenson, who ran away likewise, and has been seen about thirty miles from this place, on the upper road to Wilmington.”184 Joe’s fate is unknown, but the implication voiced by Abner

Neale is all too clear: Joe’s former experience as a “house servant” in the Caribbean had provided the impetus for Joe to take flight.

As more printing presses began producing papers in the 1790s, more reports circulated news of enslaved peoples’ flight. In June 1795, William Grimes placed an advertisement in the North Carolina Gazette, warning its readers that Prince had absented himself from Grimes’ Tar River property in Pitt County. Prince was known to travel during the daytime, dependent “upon his ingenuity to frame an artful tale, when suspected and questioned.”185 Prince was “a black negro, spare-made, Guinea born,” who

“speaks the English tongue, so that he may be understood very well.” Grimes suspected that Prince would attempt to flee North Carolina by boat or ship, and warned “all Masters

184 North Carolina Gazette, 1784. North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, emphasis added. 185 North Carolina Gazette, June 1795. North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill, North Carolina, hereafter cited as NCC.

125 of Vessels from carrying him out of the state, or any other person from employing him, under the penalty of law.”186 Most men absconded alone, but not all. In 1798, Joseph and

Edmund Hatch believed that 50 year old Grudge and 25 year old Prince were headed for a “return to the West Indies” when they absconded from Jones County together in 1798.

The Hatches warned “all masters of vessels” against transporting the runaways “at their peril,” for Grudge and Prince “both speak French & broken English” and might convince an unwitting ship captain to unlawfully transport the pair to the Caribbean.187 In May

1793, William Bell, of Hyde County, near Currituck, advertised that “a negro fellow named A B E L (sic)” had broken out of the local jail about a week prior, dressed in

“homespun clothes.” Bell believed that Abel was headed south toward Wilmington, and would use his proficiency in speaking English to “pass by some other name.”188 In May

1795, Josiah Howard of Onslow County advertised for “a negro man, called M A R C H

(sic),” who he supposed was headed in the direction of Cape Fear. “He has been lately seen on his way to the northeast of Cape Fear,” Howard warned, “I expect from what information I have had, he means to stay there.”189

Although most advertisements described men who fled alone, women also sought to return to distant locations. Some advertisements reveal women’s special concerns: children. From these advertisements, one learns that even a fourteen-month-old son could not deter one woman’s effort to return to the Caribbean. In October 1793, James Wells of

Jones County advertised for “a negro wench named POLL sometimes called MOLL,

186 Ibid, 1795. 187 Parker, Stealing a Little Freedom, 6. 188 North Carolina Gazette, May 24, 1793. NCC. 189 Parker, Stealing a Little Freedom. 10-11.

126 about seventeen years of age” in the North Carolina Gazette.190 Wells advised that Poll had escaped with her fourteen month old son Hardy. Wells supposed that Poll and Hardy were “concealed by a certain Benjamin Gray, of Jones County, who once slipped her away to the West Indies.” Wells warned that all persons were prohibited from

“harbouring or concealing her – or from buying her from the said Benjamin Gray or any other person; and masters of vessels from carrying her out of the state” under penalty of law.191 That Wells suspected that Gray was involved in both the prior and current disappearance of Poll suggests the complicated web of interactions that North Carolina elites sought to hinder. That Poll trusted Benjamin Gray to aid her in her second attempt to the West Indies suggests that the connection the two shared was significant in its own right.

The Neale, Grimes, Hatch, Bell, Howard, and Wells advertisements notwithstanding, most enslaved absconders remained near the properties from which they vanished. Various advertisements suggest that flight to local woodlands and swamps often times served as the primary option when weighed against the longer trips to destinations beyond Old Albemarle, the Neuse-Pamlico basin, or the Lower Cape Fear region.192 In truth, planters who surmised that their slaves were “lurking about the neighbourhood,”193 referred to the swamps and woodlands that surrounded many plantations in the state, particularly in runaway advertisements wherein it is not

190 North Carolina Gazette, 1793. NCC. 191 Ibid, 1793. 192 Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. First Vintage Books Edition. (New York: Vintage Books. 1976.) 650. 193 Many planters suspected that enslaved individuals who absconded from their service were in fact just hiding out in the local wilderness, or among enslaved individuals on neighboring plantations. Thus, the phrase “lurking about the neighborhood” was often an expression of caution, signaling slave catchers, plantation owners and overseers, and members of plantation society alike to be aware of the movements and clandestine activities of the region’s enslaved individuals. To get an idea of the frequent use of the phrase, see Parker, editor, Stealing a Little Freedom.

127 specifically stated that the absconder in question might be within the limits of any particular county or plantation. Several examples illustrate this point. In the winter of

1793 John Simmons placed an advertisement advising that Jack “formerly the property of

David Hix, who is now an overfseer (sic) for Mr. Wilfon (sic) Blount,” was apparently

“the boy is fuppofed (sic) to be lurking about there, or Mr. Taylor’s on Neufe (sic).”194 In

February 1793, Whitmill Hill noted that Yarmouth “may be lurking about Edenton, as he there obtained his trade, in Mr. Collin’s ropewalk”. In the following month, Stephen

Cabarrus posted an advertisement for Isaac, citing “reasons to believe that he is lurking in

Perquimans County, where I understand he has lately taken a wife.”195 On April 6, 1797, an advertisement noted that 24-year-old Andrew ran away from the plantation of John

Hill. Hill supposed that Andrew would be found “lurking about Fayetteville,” as he had been “accustomed two years ago to row in the boats that ply between Wilmington and that place.”196 At times, John Hill’s plantation was a point of departure on the underground network of petit marronage, as suggested by the advertisement for Andrew.

At others, it was a point of destination. On June 8, 1797, Samuel Vance advertised for a

20-year-old runaway by the name of Alick. Vance’s description of Alick included “he is a stout likely fellow, and has for some time past, as I am informed, been lurking about the plantation of Mr. John Hill, to whom his mother belongs.”197

In June 1799, George Gibbs advertised after the disappearance of Johny. Gibbs noted that Johny was probably “about Mr. Waddell’s plantation, having a mother and

194 North Carolina Gazette, December 1793. NCC. 195 Parker, editor, Stealing a Little Freedom. 22. Perquimans County was largely located within the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina, encompassing the land and resources that provided refuge for enslaved persons. 196 Parker, editor. Stealing a Little Freedom. 127. 197 Ibid, 130.

128 uncle there.” Gibbs implored the paper’s readers to capture Johny and return him to the jail of Wilmington. Ironically, Gibbs noted that Johny would not be punished for his absence.198 Most slaveholders, however, were not as forgiving as Gibbs. Many evoked

North Carolina’s slave codes in their advertisements, signaling to other slaveholders and poor whites their intent to brand the actions of absconding slaves as criminal. A number of advertisements John Burgwin posted in the 1790s illustrate this point. Burgwin invoked North Carolina’s 1741 slave code when he designated his runaway slave York an outlaw in February 1797. York had run from Burgwin’s New Hanover County farm shortly before the advertisement was printed in the Hall’s Wilmington Gazette. York apparently resorted to petit marronage regularly, for Burgwin expressed that York had been “frequently harboured at the big Bridge, and it is supposed is now gone up towards

Long creek or Black river.”199 York was not the only enslaved person on the Burgwin farm who resorted to flight. In March of 1797, an unnamed 18-year-old bondsman ran away from John Burgwin and also engaged in petit marronage. Printed just six days after the slave’s escape, Burgwin’s advertisement alerted readers to Burgwin’s suspicion that the unnamed bondsman was headed to Wilmington where both a farm on which he was

“well known” and his wife Lucinda – a slave on another plantation – were located.200

Implicit in the advertisement was Burgwin’s warning that all who lived near the farm should avoid providing the unnamed slave with assistance of any kind. In May

1798, Nancy and her son Harry fled John Burgwin’s Castle Haynes Plantation. Burgwin believed they had headed for Wilmington or Old Town, where he thought they would be

198 Ibid, 138. 199 Ibid, 126. 200 Parker, editor. Stealing a Little Freedom.127.

129 “harboured by some of Mr. Carson’s negroes.”201 Mr. Carson and his neighbors were thus placed on notice to be on the lookout for the mother and son. John Burgwin’s advertisement for a runaway slave named Elijah, in October 1799, suggests several networks of support for petit marronage near Wilmington. Elijah was known to have been hiding at several area locations, including Wilmington, “John Telfair’s plantation down the river,” and “up the Northwest river, at Catfish, among the negroes there.”202

Historians have highlighted the fact that many runaways absconded locally in order to remain near a property where family members were held in bondage. As evidence, historians have pointed to men and women such as Isaac, Alick, and Johny, or the runaways for whom Burgwin advertised York, Nancy and her son, Elijah, or the man that Burgwin failed to name who sought to visit his wife Lucinda. But many others were identified as lurkers without clear indication that they moved about to visit wives or other family members. These instances reveal petit marronage. In March 1793, Simon Foscue of Jones County posted an advertisement in the North Carolina Gazette. Foscue warned that Joe was “supposed to be lurking about Mr. Foy’s, Mr. Witherspoon’s, or Swift

Creek” near New Bern and the Neuse River.203 In the same month, Edward Witty of

Jones County informed the readers of the North Carolina Gazette that “a Negro fellow named NED alias DICK (sic),” had absconded from his service. Witty claimed, “he is missed since about a month, and is supposed to be lurking about in the neighbourhood, or to have gone with Mr. Pollock’s Negroes, towards Edenton.”204 Witty offered a reward of three pounds for Ned’s return, and warned all masters of vessels in the region against

201 Ibid, 133. 202 Ibid, 138-9. 203 North Carolina Gazette, March 23, 1793. NCC. 204 North Carolina Gazette, 1793. NCC.

130 “harbouring him” or transporting him out of the state.205 Several key statements emerge from Witty’s advertisement. Witty thought that Ned could be “lurking about the neighbourhood,” a statement that is perhaps better understood as Witty’s belief that Ned was engaged in petit marronage in the surrounding wilderness of Jones County. But

Witty also supposed that Ned might have escaped with Mr. Pollock’s enslaved runaways, north toward Edenton and the Great Dismal Swamp. This assumption expanded the local scope of petit marronage, extending it northward from Jones County to the southern frontier of the Dismal, a distance of more than 120 miles.

In April 1794, Benjamin Garrot advertised for Rose: “it is probable fhe (sic) is lurking about the town of Newbern, or over trent (sic).”206 Similarly, John Hobday offered 20 dollars for Mingo, who he thought, “is fuppofed (sic) to be lurking about

Wayne County,”207 and John Dickson posted that both 25 year old Jim and 18 year old

March “may be lurking fome (sic) place about Newbern.”208 Both men placed advertisements in the North Carolina Gazette in the spring of 1796. Many slave runaway advertisements echoed the sentiments of planter Joshua Carter. His August 1795 advertisement in the North Carolina Centinel noted that his slave Cuff had absconded two months earlier, and that “He has a wife near the mouth of the Cape Fear, and it is expected he is lurking in that neighbourhood.”209 In September 1797, W. Nash advertised that “a Negro fellow by the name of John Gardener” had taken flight. Garderner was “a short active well set fellow, and is by trade a Blacksmith” who Nash believed could be identified by a scar on his face. Nash supposed that Gardener could be found in several

205 Ibid, 1793. 206 North Carolina Gazette, April 5, 1794. NCC. 207 North Carolina Gazette, April 1796. NCC. 208 North Carolina Gazette, April 1796. NCC. 209 Franklin and Schweninger, 90.

131 places, for Gardener was “known in Fayetteville by Mr. Grove’s negroes, in Wilmington by Mr. D. Moor’s, in Chatham by Mr. Mallett’s.” Gardener was “endeavouring to get on board some vessel to go round to the northward,” and headed in the direction of

Wilmington or New Bern to accomplish his goal.210 The proliferation of runaway advertisements in North Carolina in the 1790s was more than the mere result of the establishment of printing presses; it signaled the prevalence of petit marronage. At the turn of the century, slaveholders’ complaints about petit marronage persisted. Thus, in

August 1800, Henry Lockey advertised for his runaway slave Simbo in the Newbern

Gazette. Simbo was a Methodist preacher who had run in November of the previous year, and was “supposed to be lurking some times down the Neuse river, and at others up the same.” Simbo was most likely visiting congregants on local plantations, as Lockey warned that Simbo “ranges through Craven, Jones, and Onslow counties,” without presenting concrete knowledge of his exact whereabouts.211 To be sure, however, this reflects the problem of petit marronage as well. As shown in the runaway advertisements listed above, slaveholders continued to search for ways to constrain not only the movements of enslaved people – to limit petit marronage – but also to limit the interactions between enslaved people and common whites.

For slaveholders and early state legislators in the American southeast, petit marronage was problematic not only during the American independence struggle when some whites might choose to align with blacks. It was particularly troublesome when local events revealed the deepening social and economic divisions between common

210 Ibid, 130. 211 Unknown author, “Eighteenth Century Slaves as Advertised by Their Masters.” Journal of Negro History. 1. (April 1916.) 205.

132 whites and white elites in the war’s wake, and in the early years of the early republic. In the spring of 1800, the residents of Richmond, Virginia bore witness to the contentious

April elections for the state’s General Assembly, elections that white Federalists and

Republicans competed vigorously to win. The elections spawned rumors of disunion, and in turn, inspired a young enslaved artisan named Gabriel to plot what historian Douglas

Egerton has viewed as perhaps the most extensive slave conspiracy in the history of the south. A husband and highly skilled blacksmith, Gabriel hired out his time to slaveholders and master artisans in the Richmond area. Gabriel was but one of many black Virginians politicized by the rhetoric of liberty and equality Federalists and

Republicans espoused, but the state’s black artisans were not alone in feeling isolated from the benefits of liberty and equality. In Richmond and in Norfolk, many white artisans were members of Democratic-Republican societies, but felt their specific interests were subordinated to those of the party’s leaders. In this political and class divide between Federalists and Republicans, Gabriel perceived an impending civil war.

By convincing white artisans to join urban enslaved artisans in their demands for justice,

Gabriel sought to exploit an expanding rhetorical divide between Republican artisans and

Federalist merchants.212

As a slave artisan in an urban context, Gabriel was himself not engaged actively in petit marronage. By remaining in town, Gabriel chose actively to organize the conspiracy from within. The men who Gabriel recruited, however, utilized petit marronage as they spread word of the plot. In early August, the plan for the rebellion emerged. Gabriel first identified a group of chief lieutenants: his brother Solomon;

212 Douglas R. Egerton. Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 & 1802. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 1993.) 3-17.

133 Thornton, a blacksmith; and Ben Woolfolk, George Smith, and Sam Byrd. Throughout

August, these men traveled about Richmond seeking recruits at Baptist religious meetings, barbeques, and fish frys. The conspirators’ mission for recruits extended beyond Richmond and Henrico County, into the surrounding counties of Hanover and

Caroline to the north, Powhatan and Goochland to the west, and Petersburg and

Chesterfield County to the south. As the leader of the plot, Gabriel planned a meeting at which the conspirators decided to form three columns that would enter Richmond on a

Saturday midnight. The leading column’s mission was to enter the town to set fire to the warehouses in the city’s southeast. Drawing the response of white men who would answer the town’s firebell, two succeeding columns would then enter Richmond from the west. The missions that each of these columns would undertake would ensure a rapid occupation of the town. One column would seize the town’s weapons in its armory; the other column would seize the governor’s mansion with the aim of taking Governor James

Monroe hostage. Upon seizure of the town’s weapons and of the governor, the columns would then use the town’s weapons to slaughter whites who would pivot from fighting the warehouse fires to defend the town. This conspiracy was not without purpose.

Gabriel’s columns were comprised of free black and white artisans and enslaved people.

Once Gabriel and his co-conspirators had ended the whites’ effort to quash the rebellion, together they would demand the abolition of slavery.213

The plot was thwarted on the morning of August 30. Two slaves held by the

Sheppard family of Henrico, Pharoah and Tom, betrayed the plot to Mosby Sheppard.

Sheppard drafted a note informing Governor Monroe of the plot, and the governor

213 James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730- 1810. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1997.)

134 scrambled a militia force to patrol the neighborhood of Prosser’s plantation.

Compounding the difficulties that the conspirators would face in launching the attack on

Richmond, a violent rainstorm washed out a bridge necessary for entry into Richmond.

Gabriel informed his co-conspirators that the rebellion would be delayed until Sunday, and during Sunday, militia patrols prohibited the initiation of the planned rebellion. The next day, Governor Monroe initially disbanded the patrols, deeming the plot a rumor. But one of the patrollers, William Mosby, received information from an enslaved woman that reinvigorated Governor Monroe’s suspicions, and the governor responded by sending magistrates to the Prosser plantation in search of Gabriel. The magistrates did not find

Gabriel, and in his place interrogated “Prosser’s Ben.” Ben apparently divulged information revealing the extent of the plot, and authorities mobilized the militias of

Richmond and the surrounding counties. The militias rounded up suspected conspirators, and on September 11, local magistrates first met to begin trials for conspiracy and insurrection. In the following two months, almost seventy men were tried, and forty-four were convicted.214 Twenty-seven conspirators were hanged in the wake of Gabriel’s conspiracy. Gabriel, Solomon, and Martin were among the men who lost their lives.

However, Gabriel’s plot to bring about justice based in racial equity did not die the day he was taken to the gallows. Sancho, a conspirator held by John Booker of Amelia, revived Gabriel’s failed plot in the fall of 1801. A ferryman, Sancho had not been directly involved in Gabriel’s original plan to unite artisans against Virginia’s planter elite, but he had recruited conspirators near Petersburg in order to support the offensive against

214 Sidbury, 7-8.

135 Richmond. Unlike Gabriel and his core group of black and white artisans, Sancho was an enslaved waterman.215

During the American independence struggle, eastern Virginia and North Carolina had lost a significant proportion of its population of enslaved watermen when many fled with the evacuating British forces. In their place, however, a new generation of watermen emerged, beholden to a distinct hierarchal heritage in their trade. At the lowest rank were common laborers, who worked the docks, loaded and unloaded ships, and manned loaded vessels; or who were hired by towns to repair wharves and bridges. The next rank was occupied by trained rivermen, enslaved and free people who sailed light boats and flatboats along the region’s waterways. As river pilots, these men gained significant knowledge of the region’s geography – of its swamps and forests. Enslaved rivermen gained access to local networks of friendly free blacks and white laboring men along the rivers, and as a result, often engaged in petit marronage while entrusted with the duty of transporting goods.

Nominally enslaved by Booker, Sancho labored as a riverman on the Roanoke

River along the border of Halifax and Charlotte counties, where a majority black population inhabited the western region of the counties. Booker was under the impression that Sancho was docile and loyal, but in western Halifax and Charlotte, Sancho found new co-conspirators. According to Egerton, Sancho carried into the new plot a number of lessons from Gabriel’s failed conspiracy. Unlike Gabriel, Sancho sought a small, dedicated band of followers in order to lessen the chance that the plot might be betrayed.

215 Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion. 119-131. As historians Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh have observed, Atlantic mariners of all ethnic backgrounds denounced slavery, seeing a link between human bondage and their own impressments into service on the high seas. See Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. (Boston: Beacon Press. 2000).

136 Sancho did not seek to inspire a mass following of disfranchised white artisans or laborers to the cause, although they expected that “the poor [white] sort that has no blacks” would remain neutral during the uprising.216 Instead, these men were enslaved watermen hired out on the region’s rivers, including Humphrey, Abram, and Absalom, and by November the core group numbered almost sixty. These men, it is important to note, were best positioned to employ the strategic advantage afforded by petit marronage.

Unlike the earlier planned plot, the core conspirators kept the date of the new conspiracy, either Good Friday or Easter Monday 1802, secret. Sancho and the new conspirators also developed a much simpler plan: the soon-to-be rebels would launch a quick strike against whites in the region, beginning with a meeting at “at Daniel

Dejarnett’s [public house] and Jamison’s store.”217 By quickly dispatching slaveholding whites and those who sought to defend the counties, Sancho and the conspirators expected to wrest concessions from local authorities including freedom, the right to wages, and an equitable distribution of property. Beyond this, the revolt would contribute to the decline of slavery throughout the lower Chesapeake by inspiring the wives, cousins, friends, and parents of skilled watermen laboring on the plantations and farms of the region’s riverbanks to abandon their forced labor.218

Enslaved rivermen provided a vital link between port towns such as Richmond,

Petersburg, and Norfolk, moving both goods and information about the region. In their riverine journeys, these men also circulated news of conspiracy. Absalom carried news of the Halifax conspiracy to Charlotte County to enlist potential leaders, and others, if not

216 Quoted in Egerton, Gabriel’s Conspiracy. 125. 217 Ibid, 124. 218 Egerton, Gabriel’s Conspiracy. 121-131.

137 Sancho himself, carried news of the Halifax conspiracy to Amelia and to Petersburg. By

Christmas 1801, news of the conspiracy had extended to Nottaway, bordering Amelia and

Dinwiddie counties in southeastern Virginia. There, the plot centered on Joe and Bob, held by Batt Jones and John Royall. Joe and Bob planned to rally a troop of slaves who would raise in much the same fashion as Sancho’s men would in Halifax, to slaughter whites in a quick strike against enslavement before marching on Petersburg. There, the

Halifax men would join them. But the plot overextended quickly. In Nottoway, Ned, held by Grief Green, reported that four unfamiliar enslaved people had spoken openly of the conspiracy over the course of two days. In Petersburg, Rochester Jumper, a free black, recruited Lewis, a slave waterman who labored at the Manakin town ferry. Held by John

Brown, Lewis was hired to travel to Petersburg, and did so under the authority of a pass he wrote for himself. Lewis carried the news of the conspiracy out of the Appomattox

River basin as far as Goochland County, twenty miles north of Richmond. From

Manakin, Lewis carried news of the conspiracy to Franke Goode, Roling Pointer, and

Jacob Martin, literate enslaved people who took up the charge of leading the plot in

Powhatan. From Powhatan, Lewis carried the plot to Richmond. With memories of the swift retribution dealt against Gabriel and his co-conspirators still fresh in the town’s collective memory, Lewis found few recruits. However, news of the conspiracy travelled down the James, to Norfolk.219

In Norfolk, news of the conspiracy was well received. The city was home to nearly 7,000 residents, almost 3,000 of whom were blacks. A group of potential conspirators emerged centered around Will, a slave held by the estate of Mary and

219 Ibid, 125-128.

138 William Walke of neighboring Princess Anne County [present day Virginia Beach]. The

Walke heirs permitted Will to hire his time at the city’s docks, where Will sought to recruit both free and enslaved black, and white dock laborers. As Egerton has explained, little extant evidence offers present day observers a clear link between the Norfolk and

Halifax conspirators, an indication of the extent to which the Halifax conspirators no longer retained control of the original plan. But beyond this, it is important to note that this lack of primary evidence is also a clear indication of petit marronage, used by the conspiracy’s operatives to facilitate the transport of information about the region.

Nor did the plan remain bound to Norfolk. As the primary port for northeastern

North Carolina, the city hosted numerous black watermen who lived and labored in

Virginia’s southern neighbor. Soon, an “emissary” carried the news to Elizabeth City and beyond, initiating a “correspondence” between meetings in Norfolk and North

Carolina.220 Eventually, the conspiracy reached into the northeastern North Carolina counties of Bertie, Halifax, Hertford, and Martin. Enslaved blacks in North Carolina received news of the Halifax conspiracy by way of another messenger as well. Unlike enslaved people in Norfolk, conspirators in North Carolina initially understood themselves to be connected to a larger conspiracy by way of the conspirators in Halifax,

Virginia. From Booker’s Ferry, Isaac, a skilled slave held by the estate of Joseph Wilkes, travelled down the Roanoke to Brunswick County, Virginia. There, he recruited Phill and charged him with raising a company of slaves once word that the Halifax conspiracy had reached the county. From Brunswick County, Isaac continued down the Roanoke into

North Carolina, taking news of the Halifax conspiracy to Roanoke Rapids. From

220 Quoted in Egerton, Gabriel’s Conspiracy, 129.

139 Roanoke Rapids, news of the conspiracy reached Halifax County, North Carolina.

Egerton offers key examples of statements given by the North Carolina rebels indicating the level at which they perceived themselves to be an extension of Sancho’s original plot.

Davy, a literate slave, stated that the “head negroes” lived in Virginia, and that “a negro man somewhere in Virg[ini]a,” orchestrated the plot “under the ground [and] that when the fight was begun all the negroes were to join those who commenced.”221 Many of the

North Carolina blacks who pledged allegiance to the original plot were rivermen, like

Sancho and Isaac, who were trusted to hire their own time. Many wanted more physical and economic independence than that to which they had become accustomed as hired watermen who traveled about the region. Some were like Salem, who told others that he envisioned a fight not only for the right to the full fruits of their labor, but also for control of “their time.”222

But the concerted, quick striking, and broad reaching revolt Sancho envisioned was not to be, even with Isaac’s efforts to ensure that the North Carolina rebels would remain linked to the original plot. It was not long before the North Carolina rebels formed their own plot, led by “Captain” King Brown and Frank, both literate slaves. To be sure, these men were not the “General of the Swamps” observed near Wilmington, North

Carolina in the previous decade. Nor would they remain aligned with Sancho’s original plot. The Easter date notwithstanding, King Brown and Frank chose Thursday, June 10, as the date they and their followers would rise in revolt. On this day, several local

Kehukee Baptist associations would hold their quarterly meeting, making the whites vulnerable, as they would not be armed. King Brown and Frank’s men would sack houses

221 Quoted in Egerton, Gabriel’s Conspiracy. 130. 222 Ibid.

140 in the small village of Windsor, setting them ablaze, while awaiting new recruits from area plantations. Once assembled, they would march north to assist the Virginia rebels.

By mid-spring 1802, King Brown and Frank had recruited nearly thirty leaders, each of whom pledged to recruit a group that would execute the plan once it commenced. By

May 6, King Brown declared to another rebel that all rebels along the Roanoke were poised to rise in revolt.223

As early as December 1801, Virginia authorities mobilized the slave patrols near

Petersburg, in response to the rumors of a new conspiracy. Sancho, living in Halifax upriver from Petersburg, was unaware of that the patrols had been mobilized and thus did not communicate a new plan of action to the conspirators at Nottaway. The Nottoway rebels, led by Bob and Joe, continued to wait for the Easter holiday. But on January 1,

1802, patrols rounded up Bob, Joe, and three lieutenants, accusing them of having been caught actively planning the revolt. Bob divulged the plot, and Major Richard Jones relayed the news to William Prentis, the mayor of Petersburg. The following day, Prentis initiated communication with Virginia governor James Monroe, and two weeks later,

Monroe alerted the General Assembly. Speaking of the alarm in Nottoway, Monroe explained that several causes had inspired the “growing sentiment of liberty” expressed by Virginia’s enslaved people.224 Gabriel and Sancho and their followers had not been excited merely by their enslavement, warned Monroe, but also by the notions of liberty and equality voiced by whites.

About a week later, Bob and Joe were hanged in Nottoway, but having discovered that the two were not the original conspirators Virginia authorities did not rest. In early

223 Ibid, 130-131. 224 Quoted in Egerton, Gabriel’s Conspiracy. 133.

141 February, Isaac and Phill were arrested, having been betrayed by three slaves: George,

Adam, and Jeffrey. The three claimed that Isaac had sought recruits in North Carolina.

On February 12, Isaac and Phill were hanged. But the testimony against Isaac revealed that the plot had extended beyond just a few counties, as Virginia authorities had previously thought. In this context, Norfolk mayor John Cowper reported to Monroe the rumored revolt planned for the port city. Monroe responded with an order for extra vigilance in the city, and on April 15, Will was revealed by two men, Caleb Boush and

Jarvis. The two men forcefully took Will to John Floyd, who had hired him out. There,

Will attempted to deny his involvement in the plot. Floyd, Boush and Jarvis questioned

Will about his travels. When caught in a lie, Will implicated Ned and Jeremiah in a written statement. More conspirators were arrested in Norfolk, and the local militia was called up to defend the city. The Easter holiday passed without incident as Sancho’s plot continued to unravel.225

As the plot unraveled in Norfolk, it also came apart in Halifax. On May 1,

Monroe appeased Halifax authorities by mobilizing patrollers to arrest suspected conspirators at Booker’s Ferry. Even before this sweep, Abram implicated others, including Sancho. On April 23, Sancho was the first to appear before the local court.

Abram told the court that Sancho was responsible in full for the plot, and that Sancho had organized two companies to meet at Jameson’s store the night before Easter. The justices acted swiftly, sentencing Sancho to the gallows in three weeks time. As Sancho’s hanging date approached, Halifax authorities arrested those identified as Sancho’s lieutenants, including Absalom, Frank, and Martin. On May 15, Sancho, Absalom,

225 Egerton, Gabriel’s Conspiracy. 132-137.

142 Martin, Frank, and Abram were hanged. In total, thirteen enslaved people were tried in

Halifax.226 Downriver from Halifax, the North Carolina rebels received news of Sancho’s execution. So too did North Carolina’s governor, Benjamin Williams, in a letter from the former governor William R. Davie. Davie’s letter gave Williams reason enough to mobilize North Carolina’s militia, and on June 2, the militia intercepted a letter addressed to King Brown “containing the names of about 14 negro men” sent by Frank by way of

Fed, a local slave.227 By June 10, patrollers had rounded up more than thirty local bondmen, and convinced two young enslaved boys to confess the extent of the plot.

Those identified as the plot’s leaders were sent to Windsor to stand trial. On June 16,

King Brown and nine others hanged at the Windsor gallows.

The enslaved rivermen who joined Sancho’s plot possessed an essential knowledge of the region’s rivers and forests. Because their labors often meant long trips at great distances from the properties of the slaveholders who hired them out, these black rivermen often experienced a degree of freedom that ultimately amounted to petit marronage. This was a key difference distinguishing Gabriel’s plotters, who had been skilled artisans, from most who joined Sancho’s attempt to revitalize Gabriel’s effort to secure freedom in and near Richmond, Virginia. The latter group of enslaved people had been slave watermen, most of whom labored upon the rivers of Southside Virginia, transporting goods about for distant slaveholders who permitted them to hire out their time.228

226 Ibid, 139-143. 227 Quoted in Egerton, Gabriel’s Conspiracy. 144. 228 Egerton, Gabriel’s Conspiracy. 121-122; Egerton, “Fly across the River”: The Easter Slave Conspiracy of 1802.” North Carolina Historical Review. 68. (April 1991.) 88.

143 Most, but not all. One of these rivermen was maroon Tom Copper, leader of the

North Carolina wing of Sancho’s Easter Conspiracy in 1802. Like the leader of the maroon group that raised the anxieties of Wilmington authorities nearly a decade earlier, to local authorities in the Elizabeth City vicinity, Copper was known as the “General of the Swamps.” From a hideout in the southern Great Dismal, Copper led raids on local plantations, reportedly tapping into the network of enslaved rivermen who worked the waterways of the Albemarle to orchestrate his group’s movements with enslaved people who toiled on plantations within a 100-mile radius.229 Through this form of petit marronage, Copper maintained his own freedom. Copper also facilitated liberty for absconders who took refuge with him in the Dismal.

Nor did the fear of a swamp general leading maroons out of the swamps in a frontal assault against North Carolina’s growing slave society dissipate after rumors of

Copper’s raids fell silent. Nearly twenty years later, in 1821, reports alerted the reading public that eighty runaways inhabited a swamp near White Oak. The alarm resulted in a twenty-six day “slave hunt.” William L. Hill, of the Onslow County militia, reported that a group of the “most daring runaways” had been responsible for arming themselves, and defied the plantation regime “in open day,” having “ravaged farms, burnt houses and had ravished a number of females.”230 During late August and early September, a legislative committee on claims debated the belief that the slave rebels had adopted a plan of communicating others enslaved in adjoining southeastern counties, namely Duplin, Jones, and Carteret. However, as one historian observed, these maroons were not responsible

229 David S. Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2001.) 129. 230 Quoted in Donnie D. Bellamy, “Slavery in Microcosm: Onslow County, North Carolina,” Journal of Negro History. 62. (October 1977.) 346-7.

144 for “great deeds of violence,” or for an attempt to single out the slaveocracy as “special victims of their raids.”231 Nor did the slave patrols succeed at stamping out the maroons’ penchant for rebellion. In the same year, a new “General of the Swamps” rose to lead maroon groups in Onslow, Carteret, and Bladen counties. Three hundred militiamen from the three counties were called into action in the months of August and September. The militiamen were successful in “suppressing the spirit of insurrection” by arresting some of the rebellious slaves and free blacks and by deterring others. The reported leader of the unrest, Isam or General Jackson, remained on the run for three years until 1824, where he died from a public whipping at Cape Fear.232

Nine years after the agitations of General Jackson began, Moses, the captured fugitive slave who had been on the run in southeastern North Carolina for two years, gave valuable information about which the maroon groups inhabited the swamps of the region, offering important intelligence regarding which such groups cooperated with one another.233 Maroons in Onslow, Jones, Sampson, Bladen, New Hanover, and Dublin counties collaborated in the stockpiling of hidden weapons; in the coordination of messengers between Wilmington, New Bern, and Elizabeth City; and in the organization of several maroon camps in Dover Swamp, on Gaston’s Island, at Prince’s Creek, along the Newport River, and near Wilmington. The maroon camp in Dover Swamp gave refuge to nearly forty absconders, and when “the place or camp in Dover was found, a party of neighbors discovered the camp, burnt 11 (sic) houses, and made such discoveries

231 Ibid, 347. 232 Quoted in Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts: On Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel, and Others. 6th ed. (New York: International Publishers. 1993.) 267. Emphasis added. 233 Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 288-9.

145 as convinced them it was a place of rendezvous for numbers.”234 Located just a few miles to the east of New Bern, Dover Swamp loomed as a place of refuge not only for enslaved people already engaged in petit marronage, but also those who remained enslaved in the town who sought to abscond.

* * * * *

At the turn of the century, maroons were still in the Great Dismal. The Dismal had offered refuge as early as 1730 when the Chesapeake rebels fled into its dense cover, in the 1760s when George Washington and the early investors in the Dismal Swamp

Land Company first initiated efforts to tame the swamp’s landscape, and again during the

American independence struggle when many of Lord Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment opted to seek cover within the Dismal rather than evacuate with the British forces.

Furthermore, maroons sought refuge in swamps and forests throughout eastern North

Carolina. Even if they met with little success in maintaining their camps, it was clear that people held on plantations would take flight at any opportunity throughout the American independence struggle. Near Wilmington, reports indicated as much in 1767, 1788, and in

1795, when a “general” in the swamps was discovered to be coordinating the establishment of a maroon colony near the city. The general discovered near Wilmington in 1795 may have been Tom Copper, although due to a paucity of documentary materials, historians may never know for sure.

But what whites in eastern North Carolina knew for sure by 1800 was this: in a relatively nascent slave society, constraining the movements of enslaved people – ending petit marronage – was of paramount concern. What court documents and reports of

234 Ibid, 289.

146 insurrectionary activity have revealed to historians of previous generations is that this concern was most evident during slave insurrection scares, inspired by the American independence struggle beginning in the 1760s and enduring long after the official end of the war in 1783, into the first decade of the nineteenth century. Enslaved African

Americans did not observe the independence struggle idly, nor they did not accept the postwar re-establishment of a slave society in the Valley of Humility without resistance.

As the heightened reports of insurrectionary activity in the 1790s reveals, enslaved people keenly observed the effects of protest against oppression and were apt to apply its principles for their own truly revolutionary cause: recognition of black humanity. This was evident most poignantly in enslaved absconders’ use of petit marronage to establish spaces in which they could develop their own societies in local swamps and forests.

But these principles – protest in the form of insurrection and the effort to establish geographies controlled by blacks – were not the only reasons for white authorities’ anxieties. Beneath fears of insurrection fomented during gatherings of enslaved people in local swamps and forests lay a much deeper cause for concern: petit marronage itself. For white authorities, more sinister than the threat of slave insurrection was the potential that a maroon colony might persist and grow as it incorporated more geographic space and more enslaved people who sought freedom with their feet. At minimum, then, enslaved people who engaged in petit marronage might serve as couriers of insurrectionary information, traveling from plantation to plantation to recruit potential rebels with plans of revolt. Unmolested by local militia and county patrols, however, some maroon colonies may have ultimately developed into towns controlled solely by blacks.

Contemporary reports support this argument as well. Reports in Craven and Pitt counties

147 in 1775 conveyed the sense that local whites believed that the enslaved people who sought freedom intended to kill the families who held them in bondage. White authorities also reported that these maroons planned to live in backcountry swamps and forests under the protection of arms provided by the “Government for their Protection.” No significant leap of historical imagination is necessary to ascertain that, with government protection – the protection of the Regulars of North Carolina’s piedmont counties, for instance – such a maroon colony would most likely have coexisted peacefully with neighboring plantations and properties. Its mere existence, then, would have exerted a destabilizing effect on North Carolina’s slave society as a whole. Runaway advertisements, particularly those that complain of absconders who “lurked about the neighbourhood,” are the best evidence of this concern as it manifested between 1775 and 1802. Even a generation thereafter, reports continued to reveal the presence of maroon groups not only near the Great Dismal, but also throughout eastern North Carolina.

Notwithstanding these possibilities, the chance that a maroon colony might persist long enough to become an African polity within North Carolina’s slave society was short lived for several reasons. A declining population of Africans might indeed lessen the chance that the most rebellious of enslaved people would seek refuge in the state’s swamps and forests. But a second change exerted even more significant pressure on maroons who sought a habitat of liberty in these regions: a deepening commitment to black enslavement in North Carolina. Although petit marronage persisted until the Civil

War, planters in northeastern North Carolina devoted more time and resources to the establishment of tobacco plantations. This coincided with an increase in distant merchants who sought access to North Carolina’s lumber and naval stores, retrieved from

148 long-leaf pine trees in the state’s swamps and forests. Resulting in part from these combined pressures, the space for marronage on a grand scale shrunk significantly. To engage this story more closely, it is necessary to examine the Great Dismal Swamp’s enslaved labor camps.

149 Chapter 4: “liv’d by himself in the Desert about 13 years”: The Great Dismal Swamp’s Hired Free Blacks, Enslaved Laborers, and Petit Marronage in the Early Nineteenth Century

In about 1780, a “negroe man” emerged into Norfolk, Virginia from the “Dismal

Swamp, or Deserts” located on the city’s southern periphery. An entry in William

Aichison’s and James Parker’s merchant ledger noted that, for thirteen years, this man had lived within a landscape that extended “from within ten miles” of the town “to within

3 miles of Edenton in North Carolina.” Aichison’s and Parker’s entry indicated that the unnamed swamper “raisd Rice & other grain” to sustain himself. But subsistence was not enough seemingly; Aichison and Parker noted that the swamper claimed to have also produced “Chairs, Tables & musical instruments.” The merchants did not mention for whom the swamper produced his wares. They seemed more intrigued that the swamper had done so in a land in which nature seemed tantamount to almost mythical proportions.

This land gave refuge to “many Bears, Tigers, Raccoons” and a “great lake” known as

Drummond’s Pond.235 However, no less than five years after reports claimed that Lord

Dunmore’s disbanded regiment took to the swamp, this black swamper had emerged in

Norfolk with enough of a presence to have caught the attention of two of the city’s foremost merchants.

235 William Aichison and James Parker Manuscript Memorandum and Account Book, 1763-1804. ppg. 51- 52. Alderman Library Special Collections. University of Virginia. Charlottesville, Virginia. Hereafter referred to as UVA.

150 Aichison and Parker recorded nothing more about the swamp’s black producer, neglecting to explicitly indicate their interest in him. And at present, more information about the Dismal’s black producer remains lost to the historical record. But he remains intriguing in part because historians have written extensively about blacks in three distinct post-Revolutionary contexts: free or enslaved in urban settings; enslaved in the plantation setting; or as conspirators and as rebels who sought to strike the most impactful blow against the institution of slavery through flight from both town and plantation, primarily by way of the Underground Railroad. Much less has been written about the black men and women who lived in what most whites viewed as the peripheral environments of their slave societies, namely swamps such as the Great Dismal. There remains a limited collection of monographs dedicated to this subject.236 This is largely the result of a paucity of extant primary source materials that has hindered historians’ efforts to learn about swamp dwelling African Americans, particularly prior to the mid-1820s.237

For African Americans, however, canal digging and shingling in the late eighteenth century initiated slow changes to the landscape that existed previously as a

236 Published posthumously, Hugo Prosper Leaming’s monograph first focused attention on the Great Dismal Swamp, taking up the initiative of earlier scholars who had presented evidence of marronage in the Dismal in works focused on the history of African Americans. More recently, historical archaeologist Dan Sayers has published a volume documenting the material record of the Dismal’s maroon inhabitants. On the former, see Leaming Hidden Americans: Maroons of Virginia and the Carolinas. (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc. 1995); on the latter, see Daniel O. Sayers, A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp. (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. 2014.) 237 The latest historiographical trends have sought to fill this gap by providing the context through which scholars might understand better marronage in North America. One book has done much to bring attention to the existence of the “American Maroon,” citing the various contexts within which African Americans engaged in marronage in the early United States. Another study has focused attention upon the Spanish borderlands of the Florida panhandle in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, highlighting the existence of what Nathaniel Millett argues comprised perhaps the most complete North American maroon community at Prospect Bluff. On the former, see Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons. (New York: New York University Press. 2014.) On the latter, see Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World. (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. 2013.)

151 vast and remote refuge for petit marronage. These changes would unfold throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Moreover, the initiation of such projects shaped the duties that enslaved laborers were forced to undertake within the context of merchants’ efforts to tame the swamp’s landscape. One change in particular, the introduction of black letter carriers into the Dismal region, seemed to serve the immediate interests of commission merchants in Norfolk. Like Aichison and Parker, commission merchants sent frequent communications between their residences in the town and plantations or swamp labor camps in counties throughout the region. For instance, to facilitate the exchange of important correspondence between he and his correspondents, commission merchant

Richard Blow relied on blacks to carry letters. Some of these letter carriers performed their duties faithfully, as evidenced in the language Blow used to describe “old Bob,” who carried a letter from Portsmouth to commission merchants Blow and Scammell at

Tower Hill in Southampton County, Virginia. In late July, 1801, Blow wrote to the merchants, informing that he received their “letter of the 25th last night by old Bob.” Not only had Bob arrived in Portsmouth with the letter the previous night, but also Bob was entrusted with returning to Tower Hill with the latest letter. Old Bob had travelled to

Portsmouth in the company of Blow’s coopers, and old Bob seemed to share the duty of carrying letters with the coopers.238

Beyond mere indications of the faithfulness with which slaves such as Bob performed their duties, such letters linking commission merchants in Norfolk and

Portsmouth to their plantation managers or swamp agents reveal important glimpses of the pressures that enslaved people exerted on commission merchants. Such letters also

238 Richard Blow to Blow and Scammell, July 29, 1801. Richard Blow Letterbook, 1801-1803. Virginia Historical Society. Richmond, Virginia, hereafter cited as VHS.

152 reveal the measures of accommodation enslaved peoples’ actions extracted from swamp agents tasked with ensuring that slave laborers completed the work of canal projects and shingle production. Beyond this, these documents offer clues that reveal the story of petit marronage in the region. Using such letters, this chapter examines this most intriguing element of the Dismal’s social and economic landscapes, highlighting the porous boundaries of the world of swamp labor as revealed by petit marronage.

* * * * *

During the American Revolutionary crisis, in 1782, antislavery proponents succeeded in establishing a statute supporting for blacks in Virginia. While the law eased restrictions on manumissions, its definitions for citizenship restricted inclusion in the commonwealth’s body politic to elite white men. This provision ensured that blacks would not obtain freedom easily.239 These conditions led to the development of a small class of free blacks in Virginia. The same did not take place in North Carolina, as a gradual emancipation measure never passed. In this context, then, blacks carried letters between commission merchants in the region’s primary port town, Norfolk, and the earliest canal projects initiated in the Great Dismal Swamp. And the Dismal was a landscape at the center of a region in which the period for gradual emancipation was brief. Little more than twenty years later, the Virginia statute came under attack from whites who feared an increase in the population of free blacks in the state. A number of histories published in the late 1980s and the 1990s explain that whites’ attitudes about emancipation hardened increasingly in the two states, following the slave conspiracies in

239 Eva Sheppard Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion. (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. 2006.) 1-38.

153 1800 and 1802 – Gabriel’s conspiracy among black and white artisans in the former and

Sancho’s attempt to organize black slaves in the latter.240

Free and slave black laborers toiled in the Dismal not only in the context of

Virginia’s brief moment of gradual emancipation, but also in the context of the earliest decades of the domestic slave trade inspired by the westward expansion of the new

United States after 1803.241 In part the nexus of these contexts – the marked increase in the free black population caused by gradual emancipation on the one hand, and the beginning of the domestic slave trade on the other – precipitated the 1806 Virginia statute leading to legislative restrictions on blacks and on black manumissions. Essentially, the

1806 law not only ended manumissions, but also barred free people from remaining in the state. Still, in twenty-four years, Virginia’s manumissions law created continual questions about black enslavement as a moral and a social problem, the implications of which were felt in northeastern North Carolina.242 As historian Tommy Bogger has explained, in Norfolk particularly, many formerly enslaved people had gathered the resources to pay for their own freedom. Some had established themselves as skilled artisans and semiskilled laborers with access to credit and steady employment. A thriving

240 Douglas R. Egerton. Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 & 1802. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 1993.); and James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel’s Virginia, 1730-1810. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1997.) 241 Two important and recent works explaining this idea include Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2005.) and Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. (New York: Basic Books. 2014.). Other recent works include Darlene M. Perry, “A Profitable, But Risky Business: Slave Hiring in Colonial and Antebellum Eastern North Carolina.” Master’s Thesis. Department of History. East Carolina University. Greenville, North Carolina; Jonathan D. Martin, Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2004.); Calvin Schermerhorn, Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2011.) and Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 2015.) 242 Melvin Patrick Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War. (New York: Vintage Books. 2004.)

154 trade with Caribbean ports provided opportunities for Norfolk’s small free black population to engage modestly in business as shopkeepers or in real estate ventures.

Some became gainfully employed, as evidenced by several shops operated by black entrepreneurs located near the city’s main business district.243

Beginning with the Embargo of 1807, however, Norfolk’s economy slowed significantly. Merchants including Richard Blow complained loudly of Jefferson’s embargo, reporting significant losses due to restricted shipping traffic at the ports of

Norfolk and Portsmouth. While shipping traffic rebounded for a brief time after the embargo was repealed in 1809, it was disrupted again by British blockades on American shipping during the . Just two years after the Treaty of Ghent ended the war in 1815, shipping traffic suffered due to a slowed economy, a state of commerce that endured through the end of the Panic of 1819.244 Free black men’s access to employment was severely constrained, in a town where access to maritime occupations was already subject to restriction. As a result, for enslaved blacks, the scenarios by which freedom might be obtained were ended. For free blacks, the prospects for economic vitality worsened progressively. Thus, Norfolk’s free black men sought work beyond its borders as sailors, or as hired agricultural laborers in nearby counties, or as laborers in the

Dismal.

For the small population of free blacks in the main town located on the Great

Dismal’s southern periphery, Elizabeth City, prospects for economic vitality were even

243 Tommy L. Bogger, Free Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia 1790-1860: The Darker Side of Freedom. (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. 1997.) 85-129. 244 Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America. (Chapel Hill: Institute of Early American History and Culture, the University of North Carolina Press. 1980.) 209-235; Burton Spivak, Jefferson’s English Crisis: Commerce, Embargo and the Republican Revolution. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. 1988.); and Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 2013.) 130-31.

155 worse than the economic circumstances endured by free blacks in Norfolk. The town did not attract many transatlantic ships due to its geographical position on the Albemarle

Sound, west of North Carolina’s barrier islands. The barrier islands were notorious for causing shipwrecks, which gave the region a reputation as a graveyard for oceangoing vessels. According to historian David S. Cecelski, Elizabeth City was a semi-autonomous port town that from which white merchants conducted more business with English ports in the Bahamas, West Indies, or other southern ports than they did with other North

Carolina port towns. By the first decades of the nineteenth century, enslaved and free black boatmen and fishermen worked the shores of the Albemarle Sound, before returning to Elizabeth City to prepare their hauls for transport to the region’s main ports at Portsmouth and Norfolk.245

Perhaps the Dismal’s black producer simply emerged from the swamp to pursue a new line of work within Norfolk’s free black community, the economic hardships the population endured notwithstanding. Yet, one more context warrants consideration in order to grasp in full the complexity of slave labor and petit marronage in Virginia’s and

North Carolina’s Great Dismal Swamp. The nature of work along the region’s waterways constantly brought black watermen into contact with Atlantic seamen who often carried with them the revolutionary politics of the black Atlantic. A slave waterman’s life was often characterized by the unique circumstances of labor in port towns, as enslaved people hired to work at wharves embraced a modicum of independence by comparison to those who labored on inland plantations. Further, free and enslaved blacks were witness to and participated in the interracial mixing that took place in southern port towns such as

245 David S. Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 2001.) 4-13; 61-76.

156 Norfolk. These unique circumstances in southern port towns, relatively cosmopolitan by comparison to inland plantations, disturbed many southern planters, and southern seaports featured prominently in contentious political debates. As late as 1860, Atlantic shipping could be characterized to some degree by racial equality present in seamen’s wages, social status, and work assignments. Though black watermen never led a slave rebellion, they contributed to the conception of a culture of slave resistance that shaped

African-American freedom struggles.246

These peculiar circumstances of seafaring egalitarianism and cosmopolitan port town culture in Atlantic context bore significant influence on local conditions. Indeed, some free and enslaved blacks were inspired to pursue the occupations afforded to black

246 Ibid, xvi-xvii; 38-9. Cecelski has done much to connect the history of North Carolina’s black seamen to recent discussions of the black Atlantic World, a field of study that prominent historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, and W. Jeffrey Bolster, have done much to advance in the past fifteen years. Bolster’s work recontextualizes the extent to which blacks participated in the cosmopolitan Atlantic World as seamen. Beyond their roles in establishing port towns in coastal North Carolina, black sailors were agents in their own right. Black sailors were “central to African Americans’ collective sense of self, economic survival, and freedom struggle.” This was a central component to the formation of “black America.” Between 1740 and 1865, black sailors were active in every North Atlantic seaport from Boston to the Caribbean. By comparison to white sailors who often viewed constraining maritime occupations with contempt, black sailors and freedmen saw opportunity in the jobs of the sea. Blacks sailed a world wherein “the sanction of profit, the severance of mutual obligations between employer and employee, the international influence of racial thought, and the availability of slaves in African markets” converged to facilitate the particularly ruthless character of African enslavement. The trans-Atlantic slave trade peaked in the twenty years between 1760 and 1780, as each year nearly 65,000 of the 10,000,000 total number of enslaved Africans arrived in the Americas. Both oceangoing vessels and plantations “manifested harshly exploitative elements of feudalism and capitalism, combining in one workplace the virtually unchecked personal authority of the feudal lord and the impersonal appropriation of workers’ labor so fundamental to capitalism.” As Linebaugh and Rediker have argued, from this convergence of labor, markets, profit, trans- Atlantic transport and ideology developed the class of sailors that defined an Atlantic World that was all their own. This class of sailors presented slaveholders with significant difficulties, captured in England by way of the myth of the many-headed hydra. The hydra’s many heads were represented by dispossessed commoners, exported felons, indentured servants, religious radicals, misunderstood pirates, urban labors, restive sailors, deserted soldiers, and oppressed African slaves, all who collaborated against the control of elite classes in a variety of ways. Their , strikes, , insurrections, and revolutions circulated the Atlantic world along with the commodities they produced, often to the east from American plantations to the Irish commons, and finally to the English, French and Spanish urban centers. This impactful motley crew’s labor was critical to the foundation of the Atlantic world, and their actions defined it. On Bolster, see Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1997.) On Linebaugh and Rediker, see The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. (Boston: Beacon Press. 2000).

157 mariners, or to open up a business in Norfolk. Others fled Virginia and North Carolina after 1806 for fear of re-enslavement. However, most black and white people in

Southside Virginia or eastern North Carolina did not flee, and few could muster the means to open a shop, or to take to the open ocean in search of a more democratized world of labor. Beyond this, in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the Great

Dismal region remained relatively isolated from the rapidly industrializing metropolis of

Baltimore at the northern end of the Chesapeake. The swamp was a largely underdeveloped backwater prior to the 1820s, then, when the canals built by enslaved laborers in the swamp provided crucial connections for white merchants’ interests in northeastern North Carolina. Once the first of the major canals was completed in 1829, access to the swamp’s raw materials was tied to the lower through the ports at Norfolk and Portsmouth. These canals supported the export trade in the region’s primary industry – the production of lumber for shingles – as well as its secondary regional agricultural and retail trades. In particular, rapid growth of the canal infrastructure supported North Carolina’s rise to lead all colonies in naval stores production, the bulk of which was exported through the port of Norfolk.247 Because of these conditions, ironically, the Dismal’s slave labor camps provided a viable option to free blacks who might hire time at a canal site. For blacks still enslaved, however, petit marronage provided the means necessary to leverage the value of their labor against the complete control merchants sought through their swamp agents.

Since the wave of new social and labor histories beginning in the 1960s, many historians have agreed that enslaved laborers were critical to the production of the natural

247 Marvin L. Michael Kay and Lorin Lee Cary, Slavery in North Carolina 1748-1775. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. 1995.)

158 resources wrested from the swamps and pine forests of the American southeast.248 In these regions, enslaved laborers worked individually or in small groups felling trees for lumber, cutting new canals, or building and maintaining the tar kilns that in turn produced tar, pitch and turpentine. The most recent work has highlighted the ways that such laborers were more than mere units of economic production; this population comprised a complex blend of enslaved and free blacks hired to labor in swamps and forests.249 In these swamps and forests, too, lived enslaved blacks engaged in petit marronage – this was particularly true of the Great Dismal.250 This recent historiographical trend has done much to recover the distinct ways that these conditions complicated enslavement, advancing in breadth and depth scholarly understandings of slavery produced by the leading scholars of the “new social history” school.251

248 Sinclair Snow, “Naval Stores in Colonial Virginia.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 72. 1. Part One. (January 1964). 75-93; Percival Perry, “The Naval-Stores Industry in the Old South, 1790- 1860.” The Journal of Southern History, 34. 4. (November 1968.) 509-526; Donnie D. Bellamy, “Slavery in Microcosm: Onslow County, North Carolina.” The Journal of Negro History. 62. 4. (October 1977). 339-350; G. Melvin Herndon, “Forest Products of Colonial Georgia.” Journal of Forest History. 23. 3. (July 1979). 130-135; Peter C. Stewart, “The Shingle and Lumber Industries in the Great Dismal.” Journal of Forest History. 25. 2. (April 1981). 98-107; Robert B. Outland III, “Slavery, Work, and the Geography of the North Carolina Naval Stores Industry, 1835-1860.” The Journal of Southern History. 62. 1. (February 1996). 27-56; Catherine W. Bishir, “Urban Slavery at Work: The Bellamy Mansion Compound, Wilmington, North Carolina.” Buildings and Landscapes. 17. 2. (Fall 2010.) 13-32; Bradford J. Wood, This Remote Part of the World: Regional Formation in the Lower Cape Fear, North Carolina 1725-1775. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. 2004.) 210-16; Lawrence S. Earley, Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of an American Forest. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. 2004.); Robert B. Outland III, Tapping the Pines: The Naval Stores Industry in the American South. (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. 2004.); and Timothy Silver, A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, colonists, and slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500-1800. (New York: Oxford University Press. 1990.) 249 Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South. (New York: The New Press. 1974, 2007.) Berlin’s seminal work was founded upon the groundbreaking research compiled and published by John Hope Franklin, who conducted his work in archives throughout the South at the height of the Jim Crow era. See John Hope Franklin, The Free Negro in North Carolina, 1790-1860. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1943.) 250 Megan Kate Nelson, “Hidden Away in the Woods and Swamps: Slavery, Fugitive Slaves, and Swamplands in the Southeastern Borderlands, 1739-1845.” in Angel David Nieves and Leslie M. Alexander, “We Shall Independent Be:” African American Place Making and the Struggle to Claim Space in the United States. (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado. 2008.) 251 Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. (Chapel Hill, NC: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and

159 In short, prior to 1830, the distinction between freedom and enslavement in the coastal Upper South was blurred by the fact that free blacks labored alongside enslaved blacks in the Dismal. This was, in fact, a complex conundrum for state officials in

Virginia and North Carolina who sought to develop and enforce clear divisions and definitions for race, labor, and slave ownership. As a result, the swamp remained prime territory for petit marronage as local commission merchants launched their first efforts to change the swamp’s landscape. In the Dismal, these issues came to bear most poignantly during the construction of the Dismal Swamp Land Canal. Championed by Virginia governor Patrick Henry as early as 1784, the canal project was chartered by an act passed by the Virginia Assembly on December 1, 1787. Canal construction depended upon a similar act supporting construction, not passed by the and House of Commons until November 1790.252 Three more years passed before construction of the canal began, the first stage of which took place between 1793 and 1805. Enslaved laborers cut the first stage of the canal through twenty-two miles of pocosin and pine forest from the Elizabeth River in Virginia to the Pasquotank River in North Carolina. A second phase of canal construction cut a six-mile canal to the Northwest River in North

Carolina, completing the effort initiated in the 1760s by white investors in both states to connect the Chesapeake Bay with the Albemarle Sound by 1829.253

If a paucity of primary sources has made problematic historians’ efforts to catalogue and examine the lives of enslaved and free blacks in swamps or forests, this

Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press. 1998.); Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2003.); and Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 1998.) 252 Jesse F. Pugh and Frank T. Williams, The Hotel in the Great Dismal Swamp and Contemporary Events Thereabouts. (Old Trap, NC: Jesse F. Pugh. 1964.) 253 Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song, 105-109.

160 threadbare source base has certainly hindered the effort to narrate the long persistence of petit marronage. Yet, Aichison and Parker’s reference to the swamp’s producer suggests that petit marronage was the means by which the producer retained his intriguing connection to Norfolk, and to Aichison and Parker. This is not all that surprising. Many

Virginia and North Carolina whites, like Aichison and Parker, viewed the Great Dismal

Swamp as a “desert,” a desolate countryside full of perils for any white citizen who dared travel through it. The Dismal’s murky landscape was so named not in reference to an exceedingly hot and dry landscape but as an allusion to a land in which no substantive agricultural ventures would take root. In addition to this reputation, the swamp was also known as a refuge for a motley crew of blacks, whites, and Native Americans through the

Revolutionary War. As a result, the Dismal (and other swamps in the American southeast) represented foreboding lands to whites whose lives were linked to local farms and plantations. These deterrent reputations notwithstanding, Aichison and Parker were but two of many postrevolutionary merchants whose primary interest lay in transforming the swamp landscape to make its lands arable. Doing so would bolster their efforts to turn a profit in both regional and Atlantic trade networks.

But both Aichison and Parker were staunch Loyalists who returned to Great

Britain prior to 1776. Aichison died one year after his return, but well into the first decade of the nineteenth century, Parker continued to conduct the company’s merchant business from Great Britain.254 Evidence of their transatlantic merchant business is preserved today in a manuscript book, archived in the special collections of the Alderman

254 Charles Royster, The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Land Company: A Story of George Washington’s Times. (New York: First Vintage Books. 2000.)

161 Library at the University of Virginia.255 Eighty-eight numbered pages bound in contemporary green vellum, this source reveals the extent to which Aichison and Parker’s business connections spanned the Atlantic World between 1763 and 1804. Aichison and

Parker’s clients included local merchants: William MacCormick and Company operating in North Carolina; and John Lidderdale, operating in Williamsburg. Aichison’s and

Parker’s contacts also ranged beyond the lower Chesapeake to men operating in Atlantic ports: unnamed merchants in Havana, Cuba, as well as Albert Nesbitt, a merchant operating in Santa Cruz, in the Canary Islands.

Several entries noted on page eighty-four reveal more information about the business Aichison and Parker conducted with Albert Nesbitt in the Spanish Canary

Islands. From Tenerife, the Norfolk merchants sought a shipment of “Canary brandy (if cheap)” along with “onions, Potatoes, Walnuts, Chestnuts, Raysons, Almonds” and figs.

In a second note on the same page, the Norfolk merchants informed Nesbitt of the products they held in Virginia for transport to the Canaries. Among the notable items,

Aichison and Parker held pork, hog’s lard, beeswax, flour and sugar, and they expected a cargo of “Indian Corn” to be readied for transport by November. In summing up that which they expected to export to Tenerife, Aichison and Parker informed Nesbitt that the shipment included “Boards, 15 to 25 feet in length” and “Shingles & Clapboards for storehouses.”256

Several more entries on page seventy-eight provide record of cargoes commissioned by several locals to be delivered to Tenerife, aboard an Aichison and

255 Special thanks to Dan Sayers, of American University. In May and early June 2013, I joined Dan’s field school in the Great Dismal. During the five-week seminar, Dan presented his historiographical research to the group, at which time I was apprised of the Aichison and Parker manuscript book. I later viewed the book in the Alderman Library Special Collections at the University of Virginia. 256 Aichison and Parker Manuscript Book, 84. UVA.

162 Parker ship. To delineate which cargoes belonged to which consigner, Aichison or Parker drew lines drawn across the page beneath the final note corresponding to each. One cargo comprised pork and beef, the former product a Virginia staple, consigned by Francisco

Bentoso. Several following records note a number of horses, small and large, destined for the island’s port and consigned respectively by Dr. Simon Herreras, Dr. Henrique Casalo, and Dr. Thomas Juan Russel. The cargo intended for Madam Russel is of particular interest. Dated June 20 of an unrecorded year, a cargo including “2 Chests of drawers, of

[ ] the upper of it for use of a table & the body to be divided into three drawers” was destined for Tenerife. Aichison and Parker did not mention who originally produced the chest of drawers but one wonders if it was the Dismal’s black furniture maker, given

Aichison and Parker’s interest in him. Aichison and Parker were not averse to dealing in slaves. The records that both preceded and followed notation of the chest of drawers reveals Aichison and Parker’s responsibility for the transport of an enslaved girl and an enslaved woman. The preceding note recorded briefly that the girl was “about 10 years old.” Following the record of the chest of drawers, a longer note signaled the value of the woman, aged thirty-five. Apparently, the woman’s value to the merchant who received her in Tenerife might be qualified by the fact that she understood “Cookery & Baking & is Cleanly, good tempered.”257

Yet the Aichison and Parker manuscript book reveals nothing more about their contacts with enslaved blacks beyond that which is revealed by their passing reference to the enslaved girl and woman transported to Tenerife. And the Norfolk merchants recorded nothing more about the mysterious “negro” producer of furniture rumored to

257 Aichison and Parker Manuscript Book, 78. UVA.

163 have emerged from the Dismal in about 1780. In the story of the black furniture maker, the Aichison and Parker manuscript book has left historians with a small piece of the story of petit marronage. However, more of the story of petit marronage is revealed in the letterbooks in which commission merchant Richard Blow kept record of his transatlantic accounts.258 Based in Norfolk and Portsmouth, Virginia, Blow arranged for cargoes to be shipped from Norfolk’s hinterlands to a number of ports in the Atlantic World. Blow conducted business in a number of important commodities; those mentioned most included tobacco, pork, cotton, and salt. Also, Blow’s Portsmouth and Norfolk wharves warehoused, imported, or shipped barrel staves, shingles, lumber, tar, turpentine, herring,

Indian corn, sugar, flour, and Irish potatoes. Blow operated at least seven ships: the

Venus, the Rebecca, the Averick, the Vancours, the Niagara, the Lacona, and the Argus.

These ships connected Blow’s operations to a regional economy, centered in the James,

York, and Rappahannock river valleys of Virginia. These ships also connected the

Virginia Southside and northeastern North Carolina – a region dominated by the Great

Dismal Swamp – to planters, farmers, and small merchants in Virginia’s riverine network. Most frequently mentioned were the major ports of the new nation in New

York, Charleston, and Baltimore; the major ports in the Caribbean including ports in

Jamaica and Bermuda; the major ports in the United Kingdom at Liverpool, London, and

Cork; and major European ports including Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

As mentioned previously, the persistence of petit marronage notwithstanding, the commission merchants of the Dismal Swamp region initiated and conducted transactions by way of letters at times carried from point to point by blacks. In a notation at the

258 Special thanks to Frances S. Pollard and John McClure, of the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, for bringing the Richard Blow Letterbooks to my attention during a visit to the VHS in Summer 2014.

164 bottom of each letter copied into his letterbooks, the first dated 1801-1803, and a second dated 1807-1809, Richard Blow noted who transported each letter to its intended destination.259 In some instances, the enslaved letter carriers were identified by name. In others, they went unnamed. This was a pattern Blow followed throughout the first decade of the nineteenth century. A number of these letters reveal the confidence Blow or his agents placed in blacks entrusted to deliver important correspondence. Writing on Blow’s behalf on September 15, 1801, Edward Frith informed Colonel John Hoomes that “Mr.

Sears, and your negroe Man arrived here on Sunday.” Accompanied by Mr. Sears, the unnamed “negroe” man had faithfully discharged his duty, arriving with “your favor of the 12th inst Contents observed.” In other words, the two men had arrived with a letter from Colonel Hoomes dated September 12.260 One might assume that it had been necessary for this black letter carrier to be accompanied by a trustworthy white man as he transported such important correspondence. But a few days later, Edward Frith expressed no distrust in the black man he employed to transport horses to Col. Hoomes without the watchful eye of a white person. In the letter, Frith informed that the horses Col. Hoomes expected had departed Portsmouth. “The groom said he could not go with them, to leave

Mr. Lightfoots [sic] Horse,” Frith explained, “consequently I was compeled [sic] to Hire a Negroe Man to lead one of them up, who no doubt will answer the purpose.” Frith made sure to emphasize his confidence in the hired porter by underlining his word choice, but went even further. “It may be well for you to send a man, and horse to meet them,” he continued, “as Mr. Sears had no other way of gitting [sic] up, then by riding

259 The Virginia Historical Society archives hold several loose pages of a third letterbook, dated 1806. 260 Edward Frith to Colonel John Hoomes, September 15, 1801. Richard Blow Letterbook, 1801-1803. VHS.

165 each of them a few miles at a time.”261 It is clear that Edward Frith expressed strong confidence in the hired horse porter. But that Frith did not name a specific “man” to meet the black horse porter is also suggestive. Frith, like most agents that were his peers, named specific white men and women to whom they referred when making recommendations for tasks such as transporting letters or horses. However, Frith mentioned rarely by name blacks hired for similar tasks.

Richard Blow’s confidence in his black letter carriers seems to have remained steadfast, even in challenging times. This is reflected in correspondence written during a yellow fever outbreak in Norfolk in late October and early November 1801. Writing from

Portsmouth on October 28, Richard Blow summarized the information he had received.

Reporting that the disease was particularly fatal to “new comers,” Blow named several well-known residents who had taken ill. Again Blow called upon the slave Bob, this time to carry news of the outbreak to Blow and Scammell in Petersburg. In the letter, he advised the gentlemen not to attempt the trip to Norfolk before substantial rains fell, cooling the relative temperature in the region and thereby diminishing the disease outbreak. Along with the letter, Blow sent a horse cart with Bob for the gentlemen.262

Richard Blow was not unlike many white men and women who trusted enslaved people to carry letters, and to transport goods between different locations in Virginia, particularly in rural areas. But enslaved people did not carry all of Blow’s letters. For example, Blow sent by mail an October 29 letter to the Brown and Rives Company, explaining the reason he was not in Portsmouth when their ship, the Washington, called at port. Perhaps Blow sent this letter by mail because old Bob had been sent to Blow and

261 Frith to Hoomes, September 17, 1801. Richard Blow Letterbook, 1801-1803. VHS. 262 Richard Blow to Blow and Scammell, October 28, 1807. Richard Blow Letterbook, 1801-1803. VHS.

166 Scammell just the day before; Blow made no mention of his trusted carrier. Explaining to

Brown and Rives that he had delayed his return from his “plantation up the country” in a failed attempt to wait out the yellow fever outbreak, Blow turned to a discussion of the business at hand. To the business partners, Blow explained that he would have accepted the price of “4 Guineas & 5 Cent at once” for the Washington’s cargo. Hoping this offer to be fair and accepted, Blow explained that he would call for the company’s tobacco “to be floated imediately,” [sic] upon orders from Brown and Rives. He would have the tobacco cargo ready by Monday morning, Blow promised, before mentioning that the yellow fever outbreak had discouraged ships from the York and Rappahannock rivers from calling at Portsmouth. “If you load the Washington you should mention to those who load the Tobacco that there is not the least danger in coming to Portsmouth,” Blow cautioned, “the ship lays at my wharf and there is no instance of a sailor having the fever on our side of the river.”263

The topic to which Blow next turned attention is intriguing, particularly in the context of his relationship with the black letter carriers and in that of the black canal laborers he hired. “I find my young man has purchased some corn I sent Henry Heth of

Manchester,” Blow wrote. Apparently, Heth was not pleased with the quality of the corn he received, for he refused payment when Blow called upon him to settle up. If Heth stood by his refusal, Blow alerted Brown and Rives, Blow would be forced to call upon the company for payment; this was the reason he decided to alert the businessmen of the matter. The quality of the corn was not an issue, Blow argued further, for it had been

263 Richard Blow to Brown and Rives Company, October 29, 1801. Richard Blow Letterbook, 1801-1803. VHS.

167 verified. “Mr. Frith assures me the corn was very good,” Blow reported, “& put on board the Craft in good order.”

Read casually as a vague reference to an unnamed fellow, the “young man” to whom Blow referred might be seen as an irrelevant character in a report about a dispute in the quality of the corn in question. However, cast in the contexts previously mentioned, this vague reference might be interpreted as a young slave to whom Blow entrusted the duty of not only purchasing corn that he had in turn sold up the James

River, but also assessing its quality. That a third party had vouched for the corn’s quality only confirms Blow’s trust in the unnamed purchaser. On November 8, Richard Blow sent a letter to Blow and Scammell by mail, reporting the end of the yellow fever outbreak. Reminding the men that he had written a letter carried previously to them by

“old Bob,” Blow informed that a round of rain and frost had turned the trick. The gentlemen might now send a cargo of coarse salt and tobacco to Portsmouth, where it would be received safely.264 Again, Blow had affirmed implicitly his trust in “old Bob,” this time adding a term of affection to signal his trust.

By late 1801, then, Blow had enlisted his black letter carriers despite the wide spread fears that Virginia and North Carolina blacks were engaged in Gabriel’s conspiracy, and despite the persistence of petit marronage. However, it seems that the changing sentiments regarding free blacks’ mobility in the region had shifted by the middle of the decade. On January 7, 1806, Blow wrote Colonel Thomas Newton of

Norfolk, reporting to Newton the discussion held by the Canal Directors the previous day. Newton apparently had two concerns for Blow to address: one matter involved a

264 Blow to Blow and Scammell, November 8, 1801. Richard Blow Letterbook, 1801-1803. VHS.

168 slave named Robin; the other matter involved an offer to hire to the company a number of

“fellows” by way of annual contract. Informing Newton that he had presented before the

Canal Directors Newton’s offer to provide the company with hired slaves for the year,

Blow reported the directors’ hesitation in accepting the offer. The directors had apparently taken issue with one particular laborer, “a runaway for some time past.” The directors had therefore not rendered a decision regarding Newton’s offer to hire to the company more enslaved laborers, but they were to come to a determination regarding

Robin within the week. “I have no doubt Robin will be continued as heretofore,” Blow told Newton, before advising Newton to continue soliciting the directors’ attention regarding the hiring of his slaves. Though it is not clear if Robin was the runaway to whom the directors referred, one should think it no irony that this particular letter bears the specific name of its carrier: “Negro Robin.”265

Thus, some letters offer evidence of the conditions that compelled some to flee

Blow’s canal labor camp. Other letters suggest the attraction of paid labor that compelled some free blacks to seek to toil at the canal site. On January 21, 1806, Richard Blow wrote to Richard S. Green, informing him that “your man Harry has come over for the purpose of going on the Canal.” If Harry were to be sent to join the other canal laborers, he would need a blanket. “I have therefore thought best to send him back to you for the purpose of getting one or two,” Blow continued, “or if you wish me to find them & deduct them from his wages, youll [sic] please say so by his return in the morning.”266

That Blow received Harry’s request to labor on the canal is reflective of the constant need to send laborers to the canal site in support of the project. But that Blow sent Harry back

265 Richard Blow to Colonel Thomas Newton, January 7, 1806. Richard Blow Letterbook, 1806. VHS. 266 Richard Blow to Richard S. Green, January 21, 1806. Richard Blow Letterbook, 1806. VHS.

169 to Green for essential supplies – blankets – and expected his return the next morning, this reflects the draw of the canal site for potential canal laborers such as Harry. Perhaps he had heard of the drudgery of canal labor, but perhaps he had also heard of the relative latitude that canal labor in the swamp afforded. It is equally as compelling to think that

Harry was aware of the networks of petit marronage that existed in the swamp, and knew that laboring at the canal site afforded him proximity to such networks.

Several letters to Richard Blow’s Dismal Swamp Canal agent Samuel Proctor, dated 1806-1808, illustrate further the complex nature of letter carrying by enslaved individuals, reveal more clearly the conditions at the canal site, and suggest the persistence of petit marronage in the Dismal. On January 21, 1806, Blow replied to a letter he had received previously from Proctor. Noting that he had received the letter in

Portsmouth on the 15th “by the Negroes who brought it down,” Blow explained to Proctor his disappointment in the way the letter was received. Blow was not upset with Proctor’s choice in letter carriers; rather, Blow took exception with the manner in which the black carriers had discharged their duties. The black letter carriers had failed to deliver such important correspondence in the proper manner. Blow continued in dismay: “they only called and delivered it as they were going up, which is very wrong.” Apparently the canal laborers had visited some other destination, undisclosed by Blow, before delivering the letter on their way back to the canal site. Blow explained to Proctor, “whenever you write by any of them again, direct-them to call with the letter to me as soon as they come here, and if I am at not home to leave it at my house.”267

267 Richard Blow to Samuel Proctor, January 21, 1806. Richard Blow Letterbook, 1806. VHS.

170 With the talk of letter carrying protocol out of the way, Blow turned to a discussion of business. Proctor was responsible for the construction of the Dismal Swamp

Canal. That which Blow instructed Proctor to do with materials sent to the canal site reveals in brief the pressures that Blow’s canal laborers exerted on his enterprise. “My young man has sent up by Tow to you 8 pair Shoes for the Negroes who want them,”

Blow began. “An Account of their delivery you will keep,” he continued, “so as they may be deducted from their wages.”268 These were crucial instructions; Proctor was to keep strict record of the canal laborers who received shoes. The cost of the shoes was to be subtracted from the black laborers’ wages, an indication that these men were perhaps free blacks hired to labor at the canal site.

Further instructions reveal even more about the canal laborers. The laborers were not exactly a punctual group, a problem Blow sought for Proctor to correct. Blow directed Proctor to give the canal laborers “strict orders, at what time they are to be at their places of work every monday [sic] morning.” They were to set about their labor no more than one hour after they arrived “without a reasonable & good excuse.” And if punctuality was not problem enough, what Blow revealed to Proctor next was perhaps the most egregious of infractions. “I am told Jim Pennock has not been up since christmast

[sic],” Blow told Proctor. Pennock’s exact whereabouts were unknown: “he is now lurking about Norfolk, if so let me know it, that I may have him taken up & sent to you, by a constable.”269 Apparently Jim Pennock had voted, with his feet, to search for work in

Norfolk. More than this, it would be necessary for Pennock to be returned against his will, by an officer of local law, to the canal site.

268 Blow to Proctor, January 21, 1806. Richard Blow Letterbook, 1806. VHS. 269 Ibid.

171 Jim Pennock’s exercise of petit marronage notwithstanding, Blow advised Proctor how he should go about securing hired slave laborers for the canal site. “Write Mr.

Spratt,” instructed Blow, “to see that all the hands that come down his way is sent off every monday [sic] morning from the mill.” To guide Proctor’s actions with the laborers hired from the mill, Blow offered one final set of instructions. Blow explained that a

“young fellow name Henry,” hired of Mr. Graw of Norfolk, was to be received and set to labor according to the same set of instructions as applied to the hired mill slaves. Henry

“appears to have been brought up tenderly,” Blow advised, “never been used to hard work.” Mr. Graw sought for Henry to be taught the virtues of hard work; Proctor’s directive was to “see if he will answer our purpose.” If Henry were to take to canal labor,

Proctor should keep him at the site. If, however, Henry refused hard labor, Blow directed

Proctor to “let him return home with a letter to me.”

In a final set of directives, Blow reiterated the purpose for spirits that arrived in the swamp during the preceding week, and for the spirits that were to arrive from Mr.

Spratt in the days to come. Proctor was to allow the canal laborers to imbibe one dram in the morning, a practice that was “contrary to former usage.” Where Proctor had before been discouraged from allowing the canal laborers to drink at all, it was now necessary to permit a small amount to encourage good behavior. A dram a day was a privilege, wrote

Blow, and “all delinquents in Duty should be disbard [sic] of their allowance.”270 In total, the letter highlighted problems with punctuality on the part of the canal laborers, whose tardiness was most likely the result of their penchant for petit marronage. And if

Proctor’s dismay with the laborer’s Monday morning tardiness was not a clear enough

270 Ibid.

172 indication of petit marronage, then the report that Jim Pennock lurked about Norfolk was clear enough evidence of petit marronage. But overall, Blow’s letter signaled his confidence that the canal project would be carried out, and that blacks retained his trust as letter carriers. “I hope that when I come up to see you that I shall find you going on well,” Blow closed the letter, before advising that Proctor attend Captain Wilkin’s advice at all times. Blow noted that none other than a group of “canal negroes” carried his letter from Portsmouth to Samuel Proctor in the swamp.

Between 1807 and 1808, however, the canal project was fraught with inefficiencies. Again, the enslaved laborers caused many such problems. For example, in mid-January 1807, Blow wrote Proctor to explain the delay in the transit of requested canal camp supplies, including blankets and a plow. Blow explained to Proctor that he had received one letter, delivered on January 13th “by the negro man you sent” in the late evening. This man had supposedly arrived in Portsmouth too late to be sent to Norfolk to retrieve the requested supplies. Blow had directed him to remain in Portsmouth before returning to the swamp the following day. Blow reminded Proctor that receipt of the supplies should support progress toward the goal of “opening a way to the pond [Lake

Drummond]” by the following week.271 Read casually, this letter signals the pretentions of an efficient enterprise: a dutiful agent overseeing the construction of the Dismal

Swamp Canal, and an equally dutiful merchant ensuring the transportation of necessary supplies between Norfolk, Portsmouth, and the canal construction site. But the efficiency of this enterprise was tenuous at best. Blow explained that the delay in the arrival of the supplies could be attributed to the unnamed enslaved laborer entrusted with the duty of

271 Blow to Proctor, January 23, 1807. Richard Blow Letterbook, 1807-1809. VHS. The “pond” referenced in the letter was Lake Drummond, located in the center of the Great Dismal Swamp.

173 returning with them. Instead, the laborer had seized upon the relative freedom of his duty.

In the morning of the 14th the laborer “went off,” explained Blow, “and I did not see or hear any more of him.”272

A letter dated May 29, 1807 and sent by regular mail explained to Samuel Proctor the purpose for a keg of chewing tobacco recently sent to the swamp. Blow advised

Proctor to distribute the chewing tobacco in small rations, such that it might last for the duration of the upcoming summer. Proctor might also expect the arrival of more enslaved laborers. Their purpose was to expedite the work of building the canal during the recent stretch of good weather the region experienced. Blow advised Proctor to draw upon the

“Bear Quarter Gentlemen,” who produced shingles in another sector of the swamp, who would send some enslaved laborers to the canal for “a few weeks.” The Bear Quarter

Company might benefit, thought Blow, from an unobstructed canal as far as the “North

West run,” upon which shingles could be floated freely to the canal’s main branch.273

Several days later, Richard Blow sent another letter to Proctor, this time carried by

“negro Robin.” Responding to news that the Bear Quarter Company had refused to send

Proctor the requested laborers, Blow advised Proctor to proceed with the canal construction as he saw fit. Expressing dismay with the Bear Quarter Company, Blow directed Proctor to retaliate. “If the shingle gitters [sic] wont join you with their hands to clear it [the North West run] out, and attempt to carry the shingles across the canal,”

Blow suggested, “you may easily prevent them by taking up the Bridges.”274

272 Ibid. 273 Blow to Proctor, May 29, 1807. Richard Blow Letterbook, 1807-1809. VHS. 274 Blow to Proctor, June 2, 1807. Richard Blow Letterbook, 1807-1809. VHS.

174 The letters carried by enslaved carriers notwithstanding, the bulk of Richard

Blow’s correspondence was carried by traditional mail. This was especially true of correspondence sent to locations beyond the immediate lower Chesapeake region. Three letters, mailed between March and April 1807, illustrate this point. On March 7, Blow mailed a response from Norfolk to Mr. John Howland, addressing the difficulty the

Howland brothers had encountered in picking up cargoes in Wilmington, North Carolina, and Charleston, South Carolina. Blow explained to John Howland that he had written

Captain George Howland to entice him to call at the port at Norfolk, where Blow could secure a “Freight of wheat & flour or of Tobo & Cotton.” To add incentive, Blow explained that “Had Capt Howland remained here two [ ] three days untill [sic] I had got home, he would got a Frt [sic] & been in Europe before this day.” Should the decree recently pronounced by the “Emperor of France” not “knock up our carrying trade,”

Blow added, the outlook for the freighting business in Norfolk was positive.275

Captain George Howland had not arrived in Norfolk by mid-April, as evidenced by an April 18 letter, also sent beyond the lower Chesapeake by regular mail. Blow described the rapidly improving Norfolk market, informing Captain Howland that he might procure “staves suitable for the Irish market.” Competition from other vessels calling at the Norfolk port might provide incentive for a visit in the near future. Blow informed that he could successfully load ships ranging in size from 180 to 250 tons through the summer, with cargoes including tobacco, flour, naval stores, cotton, and wheat for ports in England, Holland, and “any other ports in the North seas.”276 The very next day, Blow sent a letter by regular mail at Mr. Humphrey Hathaway’s request,

275 Richard Blow to Mr. John Howland, March 7, 1807. Richard Blow Letterbook, 1807-1809. VHS. 276 Richard Blow to Samuel Proctor, April 18, 1807. Richard Blow Letterbook, 1807-1809. VHS.

175 describing the extent of his solicitations on behalf of the shipping industry of Norfolk.

Blow explained that he had sent a letter to Captain Fairley in Baltimore, advertising the prospective cargoes to be had at the city’s port.277

Although the small towns on the southern frontier of the Great Dismal constituted the hinterland upon which the port at Norfolk drew for cargoes, correspondence sent beyond the North Carolina state boundary also proved to be beyond the range Richard

Blow considered acceptable for an enslaved laborer to carry mail. A letter sent to Mr.

David Clark at Plymouth, North Carolina in March 1807 illustrates this point. Acting as an agent on Clark’s behalf, Blow reported the sales of rum and lumber produced by

Clark, sold beyond the port at Norfolk, or kept in Blow’s storehouses at Portsmouth.

Clark had previously written to Blow, expressing satisfaction with the sale of his rum.

Clark seemed dismayed, however, at Blow’s charges for storing lumber. Blow responded assuring Clark that the charges were commensurate to those he assigned to Mr. Whitlock of Suffolk, and Talbot Godwin of Scott’s Landing. To support the defense of the storage charges, Blow assured Clark that the commission he collected was cheap in relation to the expense of storing “so bulky & troublesome [ ] an Article.” The common storage charge was one dollar a month, not including the expense of “negro hire loading in & out of a yard” and the expense of hiring an enslaved laborer to load Clark’s lumber onto ships at port.278 To be sure, Plymouth could be considered the southern reach of the lower

Chesapeake region, as Norfolk constituted the primary port of call for items transported from Plymouth despite the town’s location on the western shore of North Carolina’s

277 Blow to Proctor, April 19, 1807. Richard Blow Letterbook, 1807-1809. VHS. 278 Blow to Proctor, March 15, 1807. Richard Blow Letterbook, 1807-1809. VHS.

176 Ablemarle Sound. Yet, Plymouth remained beyond the distance that Richard Blow sent the enslaved laborers he employed to transport letters.

In a letter dated July 3, 1808, Blow congratulated the progress Proctor reported regarding work on a canal in the North Carolina sector of the swamp. Blow again lamented the fact that he would be unable to send Proctor more enslaved laborers. In the

“two or three weeks” prior, Blow reported, “many applied” for work in the swamp. Blow promised that he would send Proctor the necessary help after the fall corn harvest, suggesting such help would arrive from North Carolina.279 As he had the previous spring,

Blow suggested that Proctor solicit help from the Bear Quarter people. Apparently, the

Bear Quarter people were experiencing difficulty transporting their shingles to market yet again. Sending help was in the best interest of the Bear Quarter Company, Blow reminded Proctor, as their assistance in clearing the main canal could result in the reward of sending their shingles to market upon it.280

The bulk of letters sent by traditional mail notwithstanding, a year after he first appeared in the Blow letterbook Robin, like Old Bob before him, retained Blow’s trust as a carrier. In addition, more than a year after the Canal Directors had considered Robin’s station with Blow and the company, Robin’s enslavement had continued. Further information regarding Old Bob, Robin, or Blow and Proctor’s negotiations with the Bear

Quarter Company is not included in the letterbook and thus remains unknown. Still,

Richard Blow’s notations provide important glimpses into the operations of slave labor in the swamp. In particular, Blow entrusted enslaved laborers to carry correspondence

279 Blow to Proctor, July 3, 1808. Richard Blow Letterbook, 1807-1809. VHS. The other projects included work initiated on an unnamed “Fort,” and work “ingaged [sic] getting Timber for the navy Yard, or for the Bridge across the Potomac.” 280 Blow to Proctor, July 3, 1808. Richard Blow Letterbook, 1807-1809. VHS.

177 between he and his agent, Samuel Proctor, in the Dismal. At least two of these bondsmen,

Old Bob and Robin, were entrusted to carry letters on more than one occasion. Blow’s trust in both Old Bob and Robin suggests that Blow entrusted the delivery of such letters, notwithstanding the opportunity that some, like Jim Pennock, might take to flee into the swamp’s depths.

But these observations leave unaddressed how swampers, such as the producer of chairs, tables and musical instruments observed by Aichison and Parker, went about the work of building such goods, or why canal investors like them might have taken interest in the black swampers like him. To this end, Blow’s letterbook offers intrigue. In addition to investment in the construction of the Dismal Swamp canal, Richard Blow conducted a diverse operation as a commission merchant. A dispute over the price of a cargo of pork offers interesting insight into one of the primary foodstuffs that sustained canal laborers and lumbermen. More to the point, the dispute reveals that pork was a good traded to the canal laborers and lumbermen, and potentially, to the swamp’s maroon inhabitants.

In December 1808, Blow drafted a long letter in response to Mr. Lewis Bond, expressing dismay at Bond’s refusal to pay a bill. If Bond’s refusal was not insult enough, the reason he offered for nonpayment added injury. Instead of being indebted to

Blow, Bond countered that Blow was indebted to him, with interest, over the unsatisfactory proceeds Blow had collected on a shipment of pork. Blow had rendered payment on one barrel of the pork sold to tarmaker Henry Morris three and a half years prior, in May 1805. Blow reminded Bond that he had taken up the remainder of the pork, and disposed of it himself, without further word on the matter.281 This was an important

281 Blow to Proctor, December 6, 1808. Richard Blow Letterbook, 1807-1809. VHS.

178 misunderstanding, Blow outlined, for he had been under the impression that he was to sell the pork on commission. Subtracting this commission, he had rendered a satisfactory payment of $1,000 to Bond. Furthermore, it seemed that collecting such a profit was a minor miracle. In the three years passed, Blow claimed that he had failed to retail the pork to either lumbermen or to tradesmen. At the time Blow composed his letter to Bond, he informed Bond that he had yet to collect more than $650 due on the sale of the pork.

What little of the pork he had sold had been discharged for use on ships at port in

Norfolk.282 On the surface, this dispute is instructive for investigations of the lower

Chesapeake region’s diversifying economy in the early nineteenth century, in the wake of the deepening early nineteenth century devaluation of tobacco. By the early nineteenth century, both planters and merchants in the lower Chesapeake region had shifted emphasis away from tobacco to a more diversified range of crops and commodities. In the Virginia Southside, pork, wheat, and shingles predominated.283

Beyond Blow’s far-flung transatlantic business transactions or his business as a commission network for Virginia and North Carolina’s riverine networks, however, the letterbooks invite more probing questions. The responses to such inquiries illustrate the ways in which one man was able to build a materially successful life out of the same swamp in which enslaved laborers toiled to sparse material gain. Moreover, this perspective provides a firmer basis for the present attempt to grasp in full that which motivated enslaved people to engage in petit marronage. Blow’s agent, Samuel Proctor,

282 Ibid. 283 Alan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680- 1800. (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 1986.); Lorena S. Walsh, “Slave Life, Slave Society, and Tobacco Production in the Tidewater Chesapeake, 1620-1820.” in Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, editors. Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas. (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. 1993.) 170-202; Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619- 1877. (New York: Hill and Wang. 1993, 2003.) 24-33; Berlin, Many Thousands Gone. 134-135.

179 continued working in the Dismal Swamp in the years following those recorded in Blow’s letterbook dated 1807-1809. Employed by the Dismal Swamp Land Company as early as

March 1816, Proctor wrote a number of letters to Dismal Swamp Land Company shareholders, apprising them of that which took place in the swamp. Writing from Deep

Creek, Virginia, on March 12, Proctor offered James Henderson, a company shareholder, advice based upon his experience living and working in the swamp. “Your timber laying in the Dismal Swamp Canal are much exposed to pilage,” [sic] Proctor began, “I think if you had some good person – working the timber they would prevent others from pillaging – which are much Practiced at present.” Informing Henderson of the missing timber was not enough, however. Proctor advised Henderson to “be very cautious – who you suffer to work – as we have a number of broken merchants down here at this time.”

Proctor did not elaborate upon who he defined as “broken merchants,” but this could only have been a reference to but a few: agents working for competing land companies, enslaved lumbermen or canal laborers who comprised a secondary market in commodities like pork, or, most intriguingly, blacks engaged in petit marronage in the swamp. What Proctor advised next limits the likelihood that he referenced the former two groups: “no contract made with them would be of any device.”284 White agents or laborers contracted from a competing land company would surely have worked, but only under the conditions of an indenture that enumerated the terms of their labor. Enslaved lumbermen or canal laborers were not permitted to enter into legal contract with the

284 Samuel Proctor to James Henderson, March 12, 1816. Dismal Swamp Land Company Papers, Letters and Papers, 1814-1816. Perkins Special Collections, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. Hereafter cited as PSC.

180 company, but this did not hinder Proctor from creating social contracts with canal laborers and lumbermen bound by spirits, or tobacco, or pork.

Surely, Proctor would have viewed the third group, blacks engaged in petit marronage, as pillagers. That pillagers threatened the security of the DSLC’s timber was not enough to convince Henderson to act, but perhaps more detail might communicate the urgency of the matter. Seeking to convey that he knew of men who would work in the swamp to protect the company’s interest, Proctor continued, “I merely mention this knowing of some – who has made – application or will do it shortly, it will be well for you to enquire into the character and sercumstances [sic] of those you admit to work.”

But why? In his years as a swamper, perhaps Proctor had observed more than a few white swampers whose actions gave him pause. Or perhaps he referenced a more subtle reality.

Stating explicitly that he always offered similar advice to “persons living at a distance – and holding property in the canal,” Proctor added one more thing for Henderson to consider: “I have been agent for the Dismal Swamp Canal Company – and being always on the Spot – I see every thing that is going on.”285 It may do well here to suggest that, in all that Proctor observed, ruling out maroons as the “broken merchants” was not something Proctor was willing to do. Maroons would most likely live at the canal site and create in the site a space for community, in lieu of an absentee swamp agent. Given latitude to work without white interference, they may even have overseen the security of the company’s lumber.

Apparently, Henderson acted upon Proctor’s explicit advice to send into the swamp contractors of good report. But doing so did not bring about the significant

285 Proctor to Henderson, March 12, 1816. Dismal Swamp Land Company Papers, Letters and Papers, 1814-1816. PSC.

181 progress the shareholders sought on the construction of the canal, nor did it solve the issue of pillaged timber. In late June 1817, Proctor informed the company’s shareholders of a delay in the survey for a section of the Dismal Swamp Canal caused by the lack of a court order permitting it to commence. Reporting that the surveyors, Davis and West, had

“quited [sic] work for want of timber” and noting that he believed that “Butts and Bartee would have been at work at this time” if the canal were navigable, Proctor otherwise informed the shareholders of an optimistic outlook on the canal’s progress. Despite the recent rains, the shingles produced in the swamp could be sold for $10 a board. At the time of his report, Proctor noted that he could obtain seventeen of the best quality shingles.286

More than a year later, Proctor addressed a new letter to James Henderson.

Proctor sought to assume responsibility for the timber owned by both the land company and E. Sexton “until such time the difference between you & the Bartee Butts & Co could be settled.” Bartee and Butts had assured Proctor that they would not cut more timber until the dispute was resolved, but had since reneged and delegated the labor of getting timber to “other persons who are cuting [sic] & carving off all in their power,” and “will cut all that is of any value.” Proctor expressed the urgency of the situation in plain language: “you had better seek some remedy if there is any,” before he reported the names of the new timber purchasers employed by Bartee and Butts. Because Davis had not produced one shingle in the previous twelve months and West had produced a negligible amount, several men sought to buy out Davis’s interest in the timber at the site, including Wilby Foreman, Issak Wallace, and Wilson Bartee. The new purchasers were

286 Samuel Proctor to the Dismal Swamp Land Company, June 31, 1817. Dismal Swamp Land Company Papers, Letters and Papers, 1817-1818. PSC.

182 determined to produce shingles at the site, warned Proctor, and would not be stopped unless dramatic measures were taken. “I can point out one way you may stop them,”

Proctor suggested, “the water are entirely out of the DS Canal.” Perhaps Proctor now suggested to Henderson that which Blow had suggested to him a decade earlier. By this measure, he continued, the new purchasers “cannot bring any shingles this way and by prohibiting them comeing [sic] down your Canal will finally stop them untill [sic] next winter.”287

Proctor’s suggestions were not enough, however, to impede the new purchasers’ attempts to take timber from the disputed site, or to speed progress of the canal survey so that the Dismal Swamp Land Company’s claim might be validated and thus protected from the new purchasers’ incursions. Writing from Suffolk in January 1819, Proctor responded in a particularly long letter to an inquiry from the land company shareholders.

He reported again the lack of work undertaken by Davis, who had “not done any thing in the companys [sic] swamp since March 1817” and that West had been at work “only at such times as when the water was drown out the canal for the purpose of working on it.”

But Davis and West’s intransigence on completing their work was not the only problem

Proctor faced as the company’s agent in the swamp. The surveyors were short enslaved laborers also. Proctor reported that West’s work proceeded “tho [sic] with a much less number of hands [ ] than specified in his Contract.” West had not been sent the enslaved laborers to whom Proctor referenced as “hands” because they had been put to work cutting timber, but herein lay the problem Proctor had reported with the new timber purchasers. All “the timber of much value are claimed,” Proctor informed the company

287 Samuel Proctor to Henderson, August 15, 1818. Dismal Swamp Land Company Papers, Letters and Papers, 1817-1818. PSC.

183 shareholders, “by Butt and Bartee,” even though said timber was “supposed to belong to the survey of Sexton & M Cotley at the time the contract was made with Davis.” To resolve the issue, Proctor had the survey lines examined, and reported to Sexton his findings. Sexton “promised to examined [sic] them & then forward them to Mr.

Henderson fully two months ago.” At the time Proctor wrote the company, he promised to resurvey the lines once the cold weather broke. Compounding Proctor’s difficulties was the matter of back taxes owed on the company’s land. To this inquiry, Proctor responded by setting the context for his arrival as a company agent on March 25, 1816.

He informed the company shareholders that he expected the land taxes to be paid “as heretofore done as you have other lands in this neighbourhood and never was call’d on for them by any person.” Such taxes were not his responsibility, then, Proctor explained, before deferring to the company’s authority: “but if the compy [sic] requires it I will pay the taxes on this land or any other they may have in this county and will inquire into the thing in [ ] and see it is paid.”288

If the salacious details of Davis’s and West’s inability to complete the canal survey were not enough to explain the survey’s slow progress, if competition from the new purchasers hired by Bartee and Butts threatened to rob the company of the land survey’s valuable timber, and if Proctor sought to align himself even more closely with the Dismal Swamp Land Company by taking responsibility for securing its shingles and its land tax debt, then perhaps offering some advice based upon his years of experience working in the swamp might further strengthen his ties to the company. To this end,

Proctor closed the January 1819 letter with an important suggestion. He advised the

288 Samuel Proctor to the Dismal Swamp Land Company, January 11, 1819. Dismal Swamp Land Company Papers, Letters and Papers, 1819-1825. PSC.

184 company shareholders to “get some person to work whose business it would be to be on the land for it lays in a neighbourhood very much exsposed [sic] to pillage.” Apparently, the company had done little to protect its canal site against “pilage,” [sic] as he had warned Henderson three years earlier. Further, if Davis and West could not be counted on to do as he had done for Richard Blow ten years earlier – live, in effect, in the swamp while overseeing a group of enslaved laborers – then someone else should be employed to do so. Again, a superficial interpretation of the Proctor’s caution lends itself to the conclusion that he referred to the hire one or more of the competing partners’ agents.

But Proctor again extended his caution with specific details, observations that lend to a different conclusion. “If no person are at work on it I think a quantity of the second quality shingles might be got on it yet,” Proctor explained, “if the price for the timber could be reduced to Say 3$ [ ] for 3 feet shingles.”289 Because no competing partner would reduce so dramatically the price for the shingles they produced, in effect,

Proctor suggested hiring out the labor to an independent contractor. In this context of competing contractors and company claims, however, Proctor most likely would have mentioned the entity by name. In the absence of a named competitor to whom the company might contract the labor of shingle getting, a new possibility comes to bear: hired slaves. This is a plausible explanation, given Proctor’s extensive experience working with enslaved laborers in the swamp. But it is one worth pushing further.

Specifically, Proctor characterized the land tract as “a neighbourhood very much exsposed [sic] to pillage.” The term pillage connotes actions taken up by an extralegal body of people.

289 Proctor to DSLC, January 1819. PSC.

185 This leads us to the only remaining conclusion: maroons. If this seems to be a questionable conclusion, let us bear in mind that as early as 1780, the local merchants

Aichison and Parker had reported their interactions with the swamp’s black producer of

“Chairs, Tables & musical instruments.” By 1819, Aichison was long dead, and Parker had long since returned to Great Britain. A new host of land merchants and their agents toiled in a swamp now more open to the regional riverine economy, if not to that of the

Atlantic World. But, as revealed by Proctor’s reluctance to state explicitly the laborers to whom he referred, the swamp had yet to give up the secrets kept by those persons who inhabited its depths.

In late 1820, Samuel Proctor wrote a letter that signals a significant shift in his position regarding the production of swamp shingles, and also reflects the pace of development in the regional shingles economy. By December of the year, the extent to which Proctor had become frustrated with the company’s quarrels with rivals is evident.

In a letter to Mr. Thomas Griffin, a company shareholder, Proctor explained “I report the managers of your Company was so indecissive [sic] in respect to leting [sic] out the

Timber owned by them & E. Sexton they declared there [sic] Willingness to let out this timber by contract.” After more than a year, the matter of contracting the labor necessary to produce shingles continued to present the Dismal Swamp Land Company with a challenge. Sexton and the company managers had not advertised for work in the local newspapers in more than a year, and “no application in all this length of time had been made which is enough to convince them that that method will not do.”

In other words, Proctor had not succeeded in convincing the company managers or Sexton that they needed to run more advertisements. But beyond this, Sexton and the

186 company managers had succeeded in bungling recruitment even further. “To be more exsplitset [sic] from the little allarm [sic] given by threattening [sic] to sue the former contracters,” Proctor continued, “the common class of people such as buys there [sic] timber by the thousand has become shy & timid.” In his reference to the “common class of people,” one observes that Proctor had effectively separated himself from that to which he had once perceived himself to belong. But beyond this, Proctor had moved further away from the deferential language that characterized his earlier correspondences to

Dismal Swamp Land Company shareholders, or that which he used in his letters to

Norfolk commission merchant Richard Blow. Proctor thus argued “some other method must be adopted If the people can understand the price they are to give for timber by the thousand.” Put another way, to end its timber woes once and for all, the Dismal Swamp

Land Company had to assume a role as the authority that set the price for timber in the swamp region. Further, Proctor added, “no other terror or restrait [sic] held out against them but to pay for the timber as they git [sic] the shingles and sell them.”290

This was perhaps the most significant of Proctor’s observations, for it held important consequences for local whites who had long participated in a regional riverine economy that had resisted market prices determined by incorporated companies at the behest of Atlantic markets. Further, such a sea change in the riverine market threatened to significantly transform the way in which maroons might engage in the merchants’ and land companies’ efforts to construct the swamp’s infrastructure, or the company’s effort to produce swamp shingles. Proctor pressed his argument further; the company could be confident that enough local people would work under terms the company set that the

290 Samuel Proctor to Thomas Griffin, December 12, 1820. Dismal Swamp Land Company Papers, Letters and Papers, 1819-1825. PSC.

187 company could create contractual agreements. In this way, Proctor explained, “the first one that neglects or fails to pay for the timber on the day he sells & receives the money for the shingles sold” could be deemed no longer sufficient enough to work for the company. The terms of such a contract could have clear limits as well, Proctor outlined,

“taking care to permit none to commence but such that are good for the timber of one cargo.” Finally, Proctor urged Griffin to act quickly to establish his suggested protocols before the end of the year. “If you do not go to work Mr Sexton will,” Proctor warned,

“which may not fully answer your views as to the price of timber for the ensuing year only.” Such prices “ought to be $125” for two foot boards, and $250 for three foot boards.291

Perhaps the region had begun its recovery after the recession in Atlantic shipping traffic brought about by the economic upheavals of the latter years of the 1810s. Such prices represented exponential increases over those Proctor suggested might be obtained just three years prior. More than this, such prices had the potential to infuse the company with significant profits that would in turn be used to develop further the Dismal Swamp.

This, too, meant trouble for the swamp’s maroon inhabitants who would ultimately be forced to retreat deeper into its depths to escape the encroaching canals and lumbering companies. But another significant change in the swamp environment also threatened the refuge the swamp offered its maroon residents. This came in the form of the

“improvements” made to the Dismal Swamp Canal in the second decade of the nineteenth century. As merchants and their companies became more interested in the swamp, they launched new ventures designed to create access to its resources – primarily

291 Proctor to Griffin, December 1820. PSC.

188 its timber. Not only did these actions effectively shrink the size of the swamp, but also they also inevitably brought maroons into closer contact with the outside world.

To be sure, swamp developers including George Washington and his stepbrother

John, and William Aichison and James Parker, and Richard Blow sought to impose their view of the region’s landscape onto that which was already claimed and utilized by a host of different peoples. At least one of these men was the producer of chairs, tables, and musical instruments whose story Aichison and Parker recorded in their manuscript book.

Other men also scratched modest gains from its earth. Ironically, it is in the record of

Samuel Proctor’s will that one might begin to assess the implications of slavery in the region, and begin to understand why petit marronage persisted. In March 1831, Proctor pronounced his last will and testament in Camden County, North Carolina, for the purpose of bequeathing his property in land and slaves to his wife, Elizabeth Proctor, and their five children: Albert G. Proctor, Frank S. Proctor, Samuel Proctor, Ann Elizabeth

Proctor, and Nancy Proctor. Listed in seventeen items, the elder Samuel Proctor directed his executors to ensure that his inheritors received seven different land tracts in both

Virginia and North Carolina, one house and lot each in Elizabeth City and in Deep Creek, the house and farming implements at their home plantation, and the swamper’s tools he had acquired during his years of toil in the Dismal. Significant in the will were two land claims along the Dismal Swamp Canal, including a 145 acre plot on the canal’s west side

“commencing at Spence’s Road & extending up the canal” to the Culpepper Lock. But significant, also, were Proctor’s directions for the distribution of “my negroes,” whom he sought “to be equally divided between my five children” and “my wife Elizabeth

189 Proctor.”292 Once the Norfolk merchant Richard Blow’s humble agent, and later a more assertive agent for the Dismal Swamp Land Company, Proctor had transcended the life of a swamper to eventually hold unnamed blacks in bondage. He had done so by relying upon an extensive experience with enslaved laborers.

* * * * *

Samuel Proctor’s will reveals that, in his late life, Proctor was a man of considerable material means in northeastern North Carolina. He had acquired such means in several corresponding contexts: one characterized by local merchants who sought to open the swamp’s natural resources to the broader Atlantic World by establishing land companies which constructed canals and produced shingles from the swamp’s timber; one characterized by free blacks who struggled to establish themselves in the region’s port towns, Norfolk and Elizabeth City, by hiring out their labor; and one characterized by that which is most difficult to document by way of traditional historical research: enslaved laborers who sought to be slaves no longer by taking to the swamp’s inner depths wherein they established maroon camps that reflected the long heritage of petit marronage in the region.

Yet, this preliminary conclusion is still an insufficient answer to the question of why Aichison and Parker took notice of the maroon producer of chairs. Limited extant primary source material renders the task of answering such a question difficult. But the records produced by the Dismal Swamp Land Company, beginning in the 1790s, provide a good foundation for extended inquiry. In the DSLC’s later exploits in the swamp, particularly after 1840, even more is revealed about enslaved labor. But, to get even

292 Samuel Proctor, Will Book C, Camden County, North Carolina (May 1831.) 123-125. North Carolina Division of Archives and History, Raleigh, North Carolina. Hearafter cited as NCDAH.

190 closer to the impact of petit marronage in the swamp, one must look beyond the DSLC’s records to include records created by the region’s commission merchants. In this vein, one might consider in concert with the more voluminous DSLC records, the Aichison and

Parker manuscript book, or the Blow letterbooks, to reveal even more about enslaved labor, regional economies, and most intriguingly, petit marronage.

Descriptions of the efforts to manipulate the swamp’s landscape for various agricultural and industrial enterprises reveal that it was the primary focal point for the development of the region’s economy in the years following the American independence struggle. Beginning after 1794, wealthy investors in the DSLC initiated the construction of canals to facilitate the development of the swamp’s lumber, and throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the DSLC was at the forefront of the region’s lumber and shingling industries. In these same lands the scores of free blacks, enslaved laborers, and maroons undertook a different, but equally important process – that of putting their knowledge of local environments to use in support of their newly created agency. This phenomenon was petit marronage, and it persisted into the antebellum era.

191 Chapter 5: “a city of refuge in the midst of slavery”: Rising Abolitionism, Slave Labor Camps, and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal during the Antebellum Era

Little more than six months after Samuel Proctor’s will was entered into the Gates

County records, reports in the Daily National Intelligencer apprised the reading public in

Washington, D.C. to the state of unrest that rocked the Virginia Southside in the previous week. On August 29, 1831, the paper’s editor published a number of reports, which arrived from Richmond, compiled into a brief article. Dated August 24-26, the letters detailed the events of Nat Turner’s Rebellion, reflecting reports from Petersburg “and other places near Southampton.” According to the “best information,” the Intelligencer’s editor reported, “a number of negros, chiefly runaways, combined on Sunday, for the purpose of plunder.” The initial marauding bands had “committed some murders” before being joined by others and proceeding to the Southampton County town of Jerusalem.

There, they were met by a small force of local militia mustered quickly in response to the rebellion. The editor’s report claimed the militia stopped the rebels, mortally wounding

“their leader and taking some prisoners.” The initial militia group was joined thereafter by reinforcements, and forming various “parties,” the larger militia force initiated their own campaign of terror against Southampton’s slaves. “In all the affairs,” the

Intelligencer’s editor observed, at least of the militias, “the whites have not lost a man.”293

293 Daily National Intelligencer. August 29, 1831.

192 That the militia had mortally wounded Nat Turner was, of course, false. But beyond this, the Intelligencer’s editor concluded there existed “no cause for the slightest alarm” although it had been necessary to organize a “sufficient force” in Southampton “to scour the country, and secure all the misguided wretches who have taken part in this insurrection.” The misinformation was not limited to a false report of Turner’s injury.

The same article included preliminary reports of the rebellion’s casualties and the total estimated number of rebels, received in Richmond on August 26. The total number of rebels ranged from 150 to 400. Twenty to thirty white families were reported to have

“fallen victim” to the “ferocity” exhibited by Turner’s rebels. The sheer number of rebels and casualties notwithstanding, the rebels’ further progress had been “arrested, that they are seeking shelter in the swamps” which were then surrounded by militia and volunteers.

Positioned later in the article was a reprinted letter drafted at Belfield, in neighboring

Greeneville County, Virginia. Dated two days earlier, August 24, the local observer wrote that all able-bodied whites were in arms. This observer noted that between “eighty and a hundred” residents of Southampton had been “butchered, their heads severed from their bodies.”

Perhaps the Intelligencer’s editor had intentionally privileged these reports, casting confidence that the remaining rebels had been stopped despite the rebels’ efforts to take refuge in the Great Dismal. Conceivably, the editor simply listed the most recent information at his disposal. Yet, others reported similar observations indicating that the rebels aimed to shelter in local swamps. In the immediate aftermath of the rebellion, John

Hampden Pleasants, editor of the Richmond based Constitutional Whig, reported that

193 several of Turner’s co-conspirators were also “dodging about in the swamps, in parties of three and four.”294

Historians have long known that the reported numbers of slain whites were exaggerated in various newspapers nationwide, in part due to fears that Turner and the rebels had struck a more impactful blow against the region’s slave society than had actually been the case. Indeed, fears grew to a feverish pitch, based upon rumors that other rebel groups in nearby North Carolina counties plotted to join Turner’s group. The

Belfield observer’s report corroborated those dated August 25, noting that several of

Turner’s rebel groups had attempted to cross a vital bridge at Jerusalem before being slaughtered by the local militia. But the Belfield observer, like the first observer and

Pleasants, also added a critical detail regarding the region’s swamps. Confirming that the majority of the rebels had been successfully arrested, the letter writer reported, “the intention of the negroes was to reach the Dismal swamp.” In the Belfield observer’s view, the rebels seemed to assault whites at random “until they are interrupted, when they disperse and skulk about the woods.”295 The Belfield observer may not have known much about the Dismal’s maroons in particular. Yet, it is all but certain that all three observers knew of local officials’ efforts to curb the problem of petit marronage.

In truth such reports reflected local peoples’ fears of petit marronage, given

Virginia’s long and antagonistic relationship with the Great Dismal and North Carolina as a refuge, its particular history of enslaved blacks moving about in support of commission merchants, and its history of swift action to secure its swamps in the wake of revolts.

294 Thomas C. Parramore, “Covenant in Jerusalem.” in Kenneth S. Greenberg, editor. Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2003.) 58-76. 295 Daily National Intelligencer, August 29, 1831.

194 Within a week of the rebellion, the Southampton authorities were convinced they had restored order and rounded up the rebels who remained on the lam. The rebellion’s leader, Nat Turner, was captured six weeks later. The authorities learned that Turner had hid under a pile of fence rails near his original owner’s plantation in Southampton, rather than taking refuge in the Dismal. Turner was, in this context, an absconder and not a maroon for he did not succeed in finding a maroon group engaged in petit marronage. In revisiting Turner’s escape, however, one is grounded in the danger that whites perceived in petit marronage. In examining the fears inherent in local observers reports about the rebels’ goal of reaching the Dismal, one learns how petit marronage endured. In this context, the Great Dismal’s slave labor camps and maroon camps drew the attention of local whites beyond the commission merchants and land company shareholders who dealt directly with blacks in the Dismal first, and by the late 1840s, black and white abolitionists in the north.

* * * * *

Turner’s failure to overthrow Southampton County’s slave society has characterized the ways that scholars have explained the rebellion’s significance. Prior to the mid-1980s, many studies explained that the geographical, social, and legal space for such an arrangement as the Dismal’s city of refuge disappeared soon after Turner’s

Rebellion. The historians of this generation held sway through the mid-1990s, and published seminal works that gave voice to this view.296 If successful, the rebellion held

296 Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2003.); Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 1998.); Berlin and Philip D. Morgan, editors. Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Live in the Americas. (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. 1993.); Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South. (New York: New Press. 1974, 2007.)

195 great promise as a key blow against black enslavement. But Turner’s capture, and the reprisals the rebels he inspired met with, served as but one more example of how southern authorities succeeded in controlling local landscapes through brutal oppression of black slaves.297 Beyond this, for African Americans the rebellion’s consequences were severe. The racial divisions that undergirded slavery hardened in Virginia and North

Carolina, and as a result, enslaved people faced the most severe form of American slavery in the antebellum era comparable only to bondage on the new cotton frontier of the Deep South. The implications the three observers’ comments reveal about the cover of the swamp in the wake of the Turner Rebellion notwithstanding, the most widely read historians have thus long cast the revolt as a watershed moment in the story of how slave resistance peaked before rapid reprisals supported a hardening of racial lines in the antebellum slave societies of Virginia and North Carolina.

The latest monograph on the subject, historian David Allmendinger, Jr.’s Nat

Turner and the Rising in Southampton County, has brought these insights to bear in the latest examination of Turner, the man; the rebellion Turner inspired; and the county and parish in which the rebellion began. Allmendinger’s examination of the key account of the rebellion, attorney Thomas R. Gray’s transcription of Turner’s own account, reveals several important themes indicative of the present state of historical scholarship on the subject. Beginning Sunday night and continuing through the day Monday, August 21 and

22, Turner and the original band of rebels he led travelled a seemingly circuitous but

297 Kenneth S. Greenberg, editor. Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2003.); Stephen B. Oates, The Fires of : Nat Turner’s Fierce Rebellion. (New York: Mentor Books, New American Library. 1975.); Henry Irving Tragle, editor. The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material Including the Full Text of the “Confessions” of Nat Turner. (New York: Vintage Books. 1973.); Eric Foner, editor. Nat Turner: Great Lives Observed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1971.); William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner. (New York: Vintage International Books. 1967.)

196 purposeful route throughout St. Luke’s Parish, from Cabin Pond in the general direction of Jerusalem. The rebels stopped at sixteen predesignated houses, and executed twelve white men, nineteen white women, and twenty-four white children. Near Jerusalem, the rebels’ advance on the county courthouse was stopped, and in the ensuing repression nearly forty-two slaves and two free black men lost their lives at the hands of local militias.298 Turner fled the skirmish with local militia near Jerusalem, and went into hiding the night of Tuesday, August 23, in the woods near Cabin Pond, a short walk from the house where his master Joseph Travis lay slain. The next day, Turner observed in the distance a company of white men in search of rebels who remained in flight. Thursday night, Turner removed to a more secluded hideout under a pile of fence rails in a field a mile to the west of the old Benjamin Turner II plantation, where he had been born into slavery. There Turner remained secluded for the balance of September and October, while early news reports speculated that he had retreated into the Great Dismal Swamp and reports in mid-September claimed that he had been jailed in Baltimore.

Rains in early October washed the hot summer into recent history, and on

Saturday, October 15, a slave named “Red Nelson” first sighted Turner. On October 27,

Nathaniel Francis observed Nat Turner emerging from the den he had occupied since removing to the west of the old Turner farm. Upon his encounter with Turner, Francis fired a shot that passed through the crown of Turner’s hat, and Turner fled. Three days later, a party of fifty men with dogs initiated a search of the two-mile radius where

Francis had sighted Turner. While the party sought Turner’s location that morning,

Benjamin Phipps set out alone on Francis’s property, armed with a shotgun. Phipps

298 David F. Allmendinger, Jr., Nat Turner and the Rising in Southampton County. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2014.) 1-8.

197 encountered Turner, who he did not know. Upon identifying himself, Turner surrendered to Phipps. Joined by others who had searched for Turner, Turner was secured on Peter

Edwards’s property one mile to the north of the old Turner II plantation. The next day, a procession carried Turner through St. Luke’s Parish to the courthouse at Jerusalem.299

Figure 6. “The Discovery of Nat Turner.” Citation: Schom- burg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library Digital Coll- ections. Accessed January 18, 2016.

In the courtroom, Turner was examined for two and a half hours by magistrates

James Trezvant and James W. Parker, and attorney William C. Parker. Attorney Thomas

299 Allmendinger, 1-8.

198 R. Gray was not present for the initial hearing. By Turner’s account, when the original band of rebels had reached a point three miles to the south of the county courthouse, they numbered nearly sixty men, armed with guns, axes, swords, and clubs. Turner later told

Gray he witnessed nearly fifteen slayings, was party to at least three, and claimed sole responsibility for one. In the ten weeks that followed the rebellion local authorities gathered evidence, while the widespread panic the rebellion inspired spread throughout the American southeast.300 The evidence such authorities uncovered demonstrated that the rebellion had originated entirely within St. Luke’s Parish; and that the rebellion was planned entirely by Turner, influenced only by anecdotal recollections of Gabriel’s conspiracy in Richmond in 1800 and of Vesey’s conspiracy in Charleston in 1822.

According to Allmendinger, Turner’s confession reflected little of the influence scholars have attributed to the nascent Northern abolitionist movement. Explaining his own motivations, explained St. Luke’s Parish resident John Boykin, Turner noted that he acted upon a Divine impulse constant in his own words since as early as 1826.301

Thus, historians have revisited Turner’s Rebellion as an important watershed in the history of American slavery, with specific attention directed to how quickly local society returned to normal in the wake of the revolt. Several historians have highlighted the importance of placing the Turner Rebellion into the specific historical contexts of community, shaped by what was “ordinary and familiar” to locals in the Virginia

300 Peter H. Wood, “Nat Turner: The Unknown Slave as Visionary Leader.” in Leon Litwack and August Meier, editors, Black Leaders of the Nineteenth Century. (Urbana, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 1988.) 27-40; Charles Edward Morris, “Panic and Reprisal: Reaction in North Carolina to the Nat Turner Insurrection, 1831.” North Carolina Historical Review. Vol. 42. No. 1. (January 1985.) 29-52. 301 Ibid, 1-8.

199 Southside: the churches and evangelical communities at the center of rural life.302 Other historians have emphasized the ways that African Americans maintained robust connections that seemed to defy the key ways by which slaveholders sought to oppress slaves. John Schlotterbeck and Loren Schweninger have highlighted the ways in which enslaved people in the Virginia piedmont maintained an “internal economy,” This was a clandestine economy by which emerged a class of enslaved people who were virtually free – still enslaved legally but living autonomous lives. Melvin Patrick Ely, in the seminal work Israel on the Appomattox, has traced the contours of the free black community that developed in Prince Edward County, Virginia, the result of a significant group of slaves manumitted in the wake of the Revolutionary fervor.303 These studies have done much to enrich our knowledge of the ways in which the paradox of American slavery and freedom came to bear during the antebellum era, in the classic Chesapeake slave society. The threat of armed slave rebellion may have engendered serious fears among Virginians and North Carolinians only briefly, and may not have been enough to jolt local officials into action in the effort to secure their peculiar institution prior to 1840.

302 Daniel W. Crofts, “Communities in Revolt: An Introduction.” Journal of the Early Republic. 27. (Winter 2007.) 655-660. Crofts’s brief essay summarizes several contributions to a session titled “Communities in Revolt: Southampton County and Nat Turner’s Rebellion,” convened during the July 2005 meeting of the Society for Historians of the Early Republic. Building upon earlier contributions to the Greenberg edited volume, Randolph Ferguson Scully, Patrick H. Breen, and Anthony E. Kaye advanced collectively an argument explaining that scholarly focus on local communal institutions reveals the tensions that divided black and white male evangelicals; the efforts of evangelical congregations to rebuild “communities of trust” in the months following the rebellion, through the negotiations in Baptist congregations to retain black congregants; and, the intimate nature of southern neighborhoods, as reflected by the fact that Southampton neighborhoods were characterized by a mix of property holdings that placed families and blacks and whites into close proximity to one another on a daily basis. 303 John T. Schlotterbeck, “The Internal Economy of Slavery in Rural Piedmont Virginia.” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post Slave Studies. 12. 1. (1991.) 170-181; Loren Schweninger, “The Underside of Slavery: The Internal Economy, Self-Hire, and Quasi-Freedom in Virginia, 1780-1865.” Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post Slave Studies. 12. 2. (September 1991.) 1-22; and Melvin Patrick Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War. (New York: Vintage Books. 2004.)

200 Nor may it have been enough to impede the progress of the Dismal’s land companies, and their swamp infrastructure projects.

As reflected in examination of the slave labor camps in the Great Dismal, deeper inquiry further emphasizes the extent to which the paradox of American slavery and freedom waged on through the antebellum era. The latest historical studies have taken up this charge. Historian Ted Maris-Wolf explains that in the Great Dismal, maroons established “communities within communities,” bound together by the fact that they both renounced enslavement and that they embraced their status as fugitives. By the 1850s, enslaved laborers, maroons, and immigrant and poor whites had “carved out identities and negotiated their wages within a biracial labor system that relied upon and supported slavery.”304 In this work, Maris-Wolf has illustrated how slave labor camps supported enslaved people who fled into the Great Dismal, inviting more sustained inquiry into the subject. To this end, it is important to note that the “communities” Maris-Wolf has highlighted owed their existence to the swamp’s long heritage of petit marronage.

Though the decade preceding the Civil War arrived long after Aichison and Parker first set about the business of establishing a land company, or long since the black producer in whom they took such interest emerged into Norfolk, what the merchants noted about his presence in the swamp had finally come to fruition. Maris-Wolf’s work has accounted for the development of such interlinked enslaved laborer-maroon communities in the antebellum era; unearthing the longer heritage of such linkages has ultimately been the focus of this dissertation.

304 Ted Maris-Wolf, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Maroon Life and Labor in Virginia’s Dismal Swamp.” Slavery & Abolition. (2012.) 1-19.

201 The substantial social, political, and economic changes of the global 1840s and

1850s, initiated by the national and transatlantic movements for emancipation and abolition, set in motion the last act in the South’s valiant defense of black enslavement in advance of the .305 These broad sweeping changes in global and national context considered, however, little changed in Virginia and North Carolina’s local communities through the remainder of the 1830s, particularly within the Great

Dismal Swamp. In 1847, a report published in Frederick Douglass’s North Star reflected the observations reported by a writer for the Zion Herald, signaling to readers that locals knew the Great Dismal Swamp was a hiding place, a “city of refuge,” for absconding slaves. Five years later, in January 1852, Edmund Jackson published an account titled

“The Virginia Maroons” in the Boston newspaper, The Liberty Bell. Jackson presented his attempts to ascertain the length of time that a “colony” of enslaved and free people had lived in the swamp, what portion of this “colony” could be considered “Fugitives” of southern law, and what portion of its population descended from these fugitives. He had heard of a “city of refuge in the midst of Slavery,” home to a permanent population that endured despite its impoverishment relative to the landowners and the merchants of the region. At its core existed a set of “Swamp merchants” whose “entire trade” was with the swamp’s “Maroons” – fugitive and free blacks who lived in its virtually inaccessible depths. Jackson also explained that local objectors blocked his efforts to substantiate

305 William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816- 1836. (New York: Harper Torchbooks. 1965.); David M. Potter, The South and the Sectional Conflict. (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. 1968.); Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War. (New York: Oxford University Press. 1970, 1995.); Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s. (New York: John Wiley and Sons. 1978.); William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party 1852-1856. (New York: Oxford University Press. 1987.); Bruce Levine, Half Slave and Half Free: The Roots of the Civil War. (New York: Hill and Wang. 1992.); William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Volume I, Secessionists at Bay. (New York: Oxford University Press 1990.); Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Volume II, Secessionists Triumphant. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2007.)

202 these claims, fearing that he would propagate any information to reveal the inherent weaknesses of the southern slave system in support of the abolitionist cause.306

At the time Jackson reported his search for the Virginia maroons, the Great

Dismal had been at the center of various land companies’ efforts to reclaim or improve its swampy soils for nearly a century. These companies operated largely outside of the influence of the rising antebellum abolitionist movement, their attentions fixed on serving various markets in the late Atlantic World. In the 1840s, forest industries in the Dismal expanded significantly, accounting for a substantial increase in the number of enslaved laborers in the swamp and exacerbating the incursions of the industrial nineteenth century into an environment otherwise remote. Thus, before the early 1850s, it had been a vast wetland comprised of more than 2,000 square miles, straddling the boundary between

Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. But as the Civil War drew near, the chance that the Dismal’s maroons might encounter whites increased. To be sure, marronage was not new to abolitionists; in the first half of the nineteenth century, reports revealed to astute observers such as Stowe the presence of maroon communities in Spanish borderlands of the Florida panhandle. Nor did Jackson’s report claim that he had found the city of refuge for which he searched. But he, like Stowe, had been drawn to the Dismal for its peculiar history of petit marronage. Thus, petit marronage was no longer a mere matter of local concern; it had become an issue of national intrigue.

Yet, instead of reporting merely the existence of slavery at work in the form of swamp labor camps, Jackson and Stowe sought instead to dramatize the institution’s ills by characterizing such camps as a “city of refuge.” In turning our attention to Jackson

306 Edmund Jackson, “The Virginia Maroons.” The Liberty Bell. By Friends of Freedom. January 1, 1852.

203 and Stowe’s efforts to substantiate the Dismal’s maroon encampments, we add texture to our understanding of black life in the swamp in the generation before the Civil War. In doing so, we learn about the final years during which petit marronage sustained the maroon communities in eastern Virginia’s and North Carolina’s swamplands. In this same vein, we also learn of the last efforts local merchants undertook to turn a blind eye to petit marronage in support of their own swamp ventures. Heightening production of raw materials, too, accounted for a substantial increase in the number of enslaved laborers in the Great Dismal. By the late 1840s, these laborers were listed on registries entered into county courthouse records that detailed their vital statistics. In these records, one encounters a rich record of humanity in the midst of slavery.

To bring this argument into full relief, examination of one final context is necessary to ascertain in full why such maroon communities, once an obscure reality known primarily to local commission merchants and land company shareholders, came to be known by national audiences: abolitionists’ characterizations of the Great Dismal, its enslaved laborers, and its maroons. Historian Sylviane A. Diouf has recently reminded historians of this most important theme. In 1842, poet Henry W. Longfellow first apprised the nation of the Dismal’s maroons in a poem titled “The Slave in the Dismal

Swamp.” Early in the next decade, a series of novels brought even more attention to the

Dismal’s maroon communities. In 1853, the celebrated ex-slave Frederick Douglass published . The novel featured the central character named Madison

Washington, who hid in a cave in the swamp for five years. Douglass’s novel exercised some literary license, as the swamp’s landscape featured no caves. In the same decade,

William Wells Brown’s novel placed Nat Turner in the Dismal, along with several

204 hundred followers. Martin R. Delany, too, used the swamp as a setting for the novel

Blake; or, the Huts of America, in which the central character, a runaway named Blake or

Henry Holland, meets Turner’s old followers. Three years after Douglass apprised black and white northerners of the swamp’s almost mystical maroons, the key novel in this genre was appeared. Featured first as a series of short stories, in 1856, Harriet Beecher

Stowe published Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. The novel featured Dred, the leader of a group of the swamp’s maroons and the son of Denmark Vesey and a

Mandinka mother.307

Basing the novel on the various accounts of Turner’s retreat to the woods, Stowe tacitly invited her audience to debate more fully the perspective of blacks such as Nat

Turner who took the revolutionary era’s rhetoric of rebellion in the effort to secure natural rights revolutionaries to its natural conclusion. In this view, the novel Dred warned that the bloody rebellion reflected blacks’ understanding that revolt had become the recourse blacks could take to resist whites who sought to curtail their ability to move freely about the region. Published four years after her famed novel ’s Cabin,

Dred reflected Stowe’s effort to communicate a core shift in her antislavery ideology: a rejection of the African colonialism she previously endorsed in the realization that colonization would not solve the issue of black resistance. Instead, she put forth the belief that nothing short of steadfast opposition to slavery, in the form of a sustained effort to end the institution, would suffice.308 Implicitly, Stowe’s warned that enslaved individuals

307 Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons. (New York: New York University Press. 2014.) 209-210. 308 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Robert S. Levine, editor. Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. (New York: Penguin Books. 2000.) ix-xxxv.

205 regarded resistance as a necessary component of their existence, and that such resistance would be fomented in close proximity to slave society, under the cover of the swamp.

That Stowe blended into Dred’s narrative her interpretations of the reports produced after the Vesey conspiracy only served to strengthen her rhetorical argument.

That she based Dred’s character upon Denmark Vesey reflected some literary license.

But it also reflected her interest in apprising abolitionist readers of the rhetorical link between the leaders of such revolt conspiracies and the Upper South’s most famous place of maroon refuge. The Vesey conspiracy had taken place in urban Charleston, where blacks might blend into their own communities for protection, but the cityscape offered the advantage to its militia and law enforcement apparatus. However, the notion that blacks might resort to rebellious activity, if allowed to move about freely, had long plagued whites in rural Virginia and North Carolina. Such fears were most poignant during times of upheaval, dating to the seventeenth century. The American Revolution had brought such fears into sharp focus, for as whites announced their intentions to throw off the shackles of colonial economic enslavement, so too had African Americans begun to sound their intentions to bring about the end of American slavery.

From 1831 to the outbreak of the Civil War, the nature of slave labor and economy changed little in the Great Dismal, slave uprising conspiracies and outright revolt notwithstanding. To be sure, the Turner Rebellion was the exception to the rule; most blacks in Virginia and North Carolina responded to enslavement with actions shaped by local circumstances. In the following examination of the final years of slave labor and economy in Virginia’s and North Carolina’s eastern swamplands, one observes such contingencies in concert with several distinct changes that were indeed responses to

206 extra-regional pressures to bring slavery to an end. While many articles and book chapters have drawn important attention to the impact of Turner’s uprising, highlighting it as a reflection of the black freedom struggle, or emphasizing the waves of panic it caused in white communities throughout eastern Virginia and North Carolina, much more comprehensive work remains. What scholars have yet to flesh out in full is the extent to which the region’s swamplands loomed in the consciousness of whites who feared the implications reflected in the uprising in Southampton: enslaved people, given enough freedom to organize, would act in their own interest to end slavery. The reason such fears lingered was, contrary to previous assessments of the primary record, quite practical. In the wake of the Turner uprising, the Southampton rebels had sought to continue in the long tradition of petit marronage by taking to the Dismal. They could do so, in part, because the Dismal was home to slave labor camps from which those who engaged in petit marronage might procure supplies vital for subsistence. It was thus necessary, from the perspective of state and local officials, to rein in petit marronage.

In slavery’s midst potential rebels formed petit maroon communities, sustained in part by their own efforts but also by connections to slave laborers and free blacks hired to work in the Dismal’s slave labor camps. At least until the 1830s, such labor camps remained small and distributed widely throughout the Dismal’s environment. As the

Dismal Swamp Land Company and other companies increased claims to the swamp during the antebellum era, the more remote reaches of the swamp – where maroons camped in the effort to achieve total isolation from Virginia’s and North Carolina’s protoindustrial swamp slave societies – came within closer reach. This process had yet to be complete in the first decade of the nineteenth century, when commission merchant

207 Richard Blow communicated to Samuel Proctor his wishes for slave camp labor, and

Proctor apprised Blow of his struggles to bring itinerant slave laborers into compliance in the antebellum era. Still, it coincided with the process of extending the authority of slave society into the swamp. Given the earlier degree of isolation slave rebellions might ultimately have led to land concessions, if not more, from such remote maroon communities. Such concessions may not have weakened the local slave societies in

Virginia or North Carolina, for after Turner, the two states might lay aside local autonomy in exchange for federal support in putting down a persistent threat to local authority in the Dismal. By contrast, signing a treaty with a maroon group in the Dismal might have been beneficial in that such a treaty could have included provisions securing local plantations against further slave flight.309

That the Dismal and other swamps were vital to the economies of Virginia and

North Carolina, however, mitigated against the possibility of such a treaty. More than this, expansion of land companies brought maroons into closer contact with the expanding marketplaces of the late Atlantic world.310 A narrative of the Dismal’s antebellum slave labor camps demonstrates this point, beginning with a brief anecdote from the narrative of . Grandy, born in the mid-1780s in Camden County,

North Carolina, is commonly known for his narrative of escape from enslavement.

Grandy’s narrative provides a poignant description of his commitment to self-purchase,

309 Richard Price, editor. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1979, 1996.); Alvin O. Thompson, Flight to Freedom: African Runaways and Maroons in the Americas. (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press. 2006.) 310 Drawing upon his research of the Vesey Conspiracy, Douglas Egerton has apprised historians of this most important theme, namely, that enslaved people were acutely aware of the emergent marketplaces of the South’s urban centers. Given the nature of the relationship of the Dismal’s slave labor camps to commission merchants’ operations in Virginia and North Carolina, it stands to reason that enslaved laborers in the swamp’s camps responded similarly to shifting market conditions in the effort to secure economic and actual liberty. See Egerton, “Slaves to the Marketplace: Economic Liberty and Black Rebelliousness in the Atlantic World.” Journal of the Early Republic. 26. (Winter 2006.)

208 as well as graphic depictions of rigorous swamp labor and harsh punishments. But

Grandy’s narrative also provides evidence of how work in the Dismal facilitated the relative agency and spatial mobility that eventually undergirded his successful self- purchase by providing a palpable context for freedom. In one of his earliest memories,

Grandy recalled:

I remember well my mother often hid us all in the woods, to prevent master selling us. When we wanted water, she sought for it in any hole or puddle formed by falling trees or otherwise: it was often full of tadpoles and insects: she strained it, and gave it round to each of us in the hollow of her hand. For food, she gathered berries in the woods, got potatoes, raw corn, &c. After a time the master would send word to her to come in, promising he would not sell us.311

In addition to learning survival techniques at an early age, namely foraging for water and food, Grandy’s anecdote shows that he and his family had developed at least some sense of the geography surrounding the farm on which he was held in bondage. His master,

Billy Grandy, was a “hard drinking man” who by Moses Grandy’s recollection sold many to distant slaveholders. The youngest of at least eight children, Moses remembered the sale of his siblings to distant masters, including a detailed account of how one of his brothers was sold to Mr. Tyler at Dewan’s Neck in neighboring Pasqoutank County,

North Carolina. Brother Grandy later died hiding out from his new master’s cruel ways.312

Thus, hiding out might not have been the most viable means of resisting enslavement. But petit marronage, however, was. By his teen years, Moses Grandy was being hired out to perform work in the Great Dismal Swamp, with little more than a blanket for warmth and a self-fashioned hut for overnight shelter. Grandy’s daily duties

311 Moses Grandy, “Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy; Late a Slave in the United States of America.” in William L. Andrews, editor, North Carolina Slave Narratives, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.) 159. 312 Andrews, editor, 159.

209 included lumbering and ferrying loads of lumber along the swamp’s canals. Grandy explained in vivid detail the severe nature of swamp work, as enslaved laborers worked in waist to chest deep muddy water, cutting roots and excavating trenches. They also camped in huts made of shingles and boards, often lying in the mud by the fireside in the evenings. Grandy recalled that land company agents arrived “once a month to receive the money” for the fruits of enslaved laborers’ efforts, and sometimes remitted meager payment in cash or tobacco in return for the work the hired slaves had accomplished.313

Grandy spent most of his time in the swamp thus engaged, transporting goods along its growing networks of canals. Yet, Grandy’s description of living alone in the swamp during the year he spent recovering from rheumatism further illuminates the experiences of enslaved laborers that marooned themselves in the region. On the shore of

Lake Drummond in the Virginia section of the swamp, Grandy built himself a hut made of juniper timber, where he received provisions whenever “opportunity served.” Not unlike camps constructed by other swamp laborers, it “was entirely open on one side” guarded at night by a campfire. Still, the perils of living there were, at times, unavoidable:

One night I was awoke by some large animal smelling my face, and snuffing strongly; I felt its cold muzzle. I suddenly thrust out my arms, and shouted with all my might; it was frightened and made off. I do not know whether it was a bear or a panther, but it seemed as tall as a large calf.314

313 Grandy, “Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy; in Andrews, editor, North Carolina Slave Narratives. 169; Walter Johnson, Soul By Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1999.) 21-36; Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders, and Slaves in the Old South. (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. 1996.) 166; Calvin Schermerhorn, Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2011.) 64-79. 314 Ibid, 170-171.

210 It was the only time Grandy had encountered a wild animal at such close range. Upon his recovery, Grandy returned to working on the boats that plied the Dismal swamp canal, his resolve to secure his freedom redoubled. After three years thus engaged, Grandy paid one

Captain Minner for his liberty, and moved north to New England.

Thus, Grandy’s experience as a slave laborer in the swamp was twofold. In one sense, he labored along its canals, while the fruits of his industry were transferred to the man who held him in bondage. In this context, Grandy knew that he might earn enough money to purchase liberty, an endeavor in which he found success eventually. Yet, in a second sense, Grandy engaged in petit marronage for a year, repudiating the normal experience of swamp labor in the effort to recover his health. Given this view, scholars might understand the relationship that existed between maroons and land companies in the context of questions that investigate a diverse range of black runaways and white citizens who lived simultaneously in parallel spaces of autonomy. Such an understanding highlights what hired slave laborers and maroons perceived as the utility of taking refuge in local remote areas. Ironically, one of the major advantages of running to the swamp was its proximity to the material resources of local slave societies. More importantly, enslaved people engaged in petit marronage might remain close to family and friends who remained entrenched within local slave societies. Many enslaved persons who lurked about thus remained connected to their relatives or familiar surroundings, sometimes even supported by poorer whites or family or fellow slaves. Slaveholders, on the other hand, could only speculate about the places to which the people they held in bondage had escaped.

211 By the late 1840s, the Great Dismal’s “city of refuge” had become a topic of national interest. As the editor of The North Star, Frederick Douglass sought to apprise blacks in the north of its existence in March 1848. “This gloomy swamp is not without its interest; for it serves as a hiding-place,” an observer wrote in the Zion’s Herald, “a ‘city of refuge,’ for the poor slave.” The observer reported that local knowledge informed of hundreds who lived in the swamp. Prior to early 1848, these lurkers had been secure. “So extensive is this place, and so inaccessible to the population, that many of its inhabitants have never seen a white man,” the observer continued.315 That the Dismal’s maroons had not ever seen a white person may have been true. Or it may have been a hyperbolic statement intended to add urgency to the rapidly intensifying abolition movement. But what the observer reported next revealed the extent to which petit marronage sustained the swamp’s maroons: “Many of them receive their sustenance by laboring for slaves who have their tasks in parts of the swamp.”

To be sure, planters and merchants had invested in swamp projects for half a century by the late 1840s. In that time, two generations of enslaved blacks had been dispatched to the swamp in the manner observed by the Zion Herald’s observer. Locally, the practice was common knowledge, shaped in part by the decline in Virginia’s tobacco economy, and in part by the broader region’s diversifying slave-driven economy in shingles and other swamp industry. But the practice had yet to be broadcast to a national audience of abolitionist sympathizers. Thus, a “faithful servant” might be sent into the swamp to produce or retrieve shingles, with the promise that he might be given “so much for every task.” Frequently, the Zion Herald’s observer continued, “the slave takes once

315 The North Star, March 1848.

212 in two weeks a barrel of pork and two barrels of flour.” About once every two weeks, these rations depleted; the enslaved laborer completed the task of producing shingles, and the planter or merchant paid in more rations. Such an arrangement, the observer reported, had the effect of “thus encouraging the runaways.”316

While the first half of the North Star article summarized the ways in which hired slave laborers sustained runaways engaged in petit marronage, and the ways in which planters and merchants were complicit, the latter half reflect the significant change wrought by the deepening national crisis over questions of abolition and black enslavement. “But recently,” the observer noted, “parties of young men, with dogs, have hunted out these poor creatures; and, to use the expression of my informant, have ‘shot them down like partridges.’” Small scale raiding parties, such as these, had been dispatched to discover single maroons or small groups of maroons since the

Revolutionary era. In the several weeks immediately preceding the observer’s article, a

“company” of maroons was discovered and resisted a raiding party of slave hunters.

Armed with pistols, the maroon group fired upon the slave catchers. They were then

“fired upon by these man-hunters, with their longer and heavier guns.” Four of the maroons were wounded in retreat; several more were wounded and unable to get away.

This particular anecdote, the observer wrote, was retold by one wounded maroon who had been brought out of the swamp to the place where he recorded the recent skirmish as a surgeon dressed and set the maroon’s badly shattered knee.317

In observing the medical care the maroon received, the North Star’s report recorded the humanity afforded to a wounded black man in a region controlled by

316 Ibid. 317 Ibid.

213 slaveholders. In what he recorded as his last observation of the occasion, however, the observer accounted for how quickly such humanity might be disregarded. The slaveholder who claimed to own the maroon arrived, and in a rage, “stamped on the poor man’s face where he was lying, in a most shocking manner.” The observer saw in the maroon “a respectable man”; the slaveholder saw in him an object upon which he might project rage. And the slaveholder’s rage was emblematic of a deepening problem in the

Dismal swamp region. “So many of these poor wretched fugitives have been shot and wounded,” the correspondent opined, “the others have become so alarmed that they have come out and returned to their former masters.” Having apprised readers of the North

Star to the inner functioning of the Dismal’s “city of refuge,” the Zion Herald’s observer ended the article with a query: “If the slaves were happy in their present condition, would they prefer a residence in the Dismal Swamp to it?”318

The Zion Herald observer’s final question all but reflected Douglass’s penchant for cynicism. It also challenged abolitionist audiences to recognize the urgency of slavery’s inhumanities. While information regarding the Dismal’s “city of refuge” began to circulate in abolitionist networks in the late 1840s, local county officials who sought to continue projecting authority into the Dismal Swamp instituted a new instrument designed to catalogue all the swamp’s hired slave laborers. In this vein, the initiation of a new canal construction project in Gates County, North Carolina inspired the creation of the county register list. Intended to catalogue the physical characteristics of each slave laborer sent into the county’s portion of the swamp, the Registration of Slaves to Work in the Great Dismal Swamp Gates County, North Carolina 1847-1861 added one more layer

318 The North Star, March 1848.

214 of documentation that slaveholders might use, in concert with runaway advertisements, to track down enslaved people identified as runaways. The list also included descriptions of free men and Native Americans who sought and were granted work in the county’s sector of the swamp.319 As a result of the Gates County register, historians have a rich source that can be used to flesh out the micro narratives of some of the Dismal’s slave laborers.

Officially, the Gates County register was initiated to catalogue the numbers of enslaved laborers sent into the Gates County sector of the Dismal to begin work on the Orapeake

Canal. The project itself was initiated by the Orapeake Canal and Turnpike Company, incorporated by act of the North Carolina General Assembly ratified on January 18, 1847.

During this same session of the General Assembly, legislators ratified a law intended to provide support for the “apprehension of runaway slaves in the great Dismal Swamp.”

Harkening to the 1741 slave code, this 1847 act acknowledged that numerous enslaved people found refuge in the swamp, avoiding capture with the assistance of free blacks and whites.320

Even more constant than periodic slave patrols or small groups of local slave hunters, or local militias mustered during times of slave rebellion or conspiracy, the

Gates County register reflected the most consistent local effort to reinforce black enslavement in the Dismal Swamp region during the antebellum era. The register also reflects the extent to which the region’s slave society had changed. In previous settings such as the large plantation, enslaved people had labored under the watchful eyes of overseers or drivers in the older tobacco and rice slave societies of Virginia and South

319 The register has been transcribed by Raymond Parker Fouts. See Fouts, editor. Registration of Slaves to Work in the Great Dismal Swamp Gates County, North Carolina 1847-1861. (Cocoa, FL: GenRec Books. 1995.) The typescript is held in the collection of the Wallace Reading Room, Norfolk County Historical Society, Chesapeake Public Library. Chesapeake, Virginia. Hereafter cited as NCHS. 320 Diouf, 215.

215 Carolina, or they had labored on smaller farms where the relative close contact between a bondperson and an owner rendered such registries unnecessary in the Virginia piedmont, the South Carolina upcountry, or in most of North Carolina’s slave societies. Beginning on March 1, 1847, the majority of laborers listed in the Gates County register were employed for the purpose of cutting the canal, which extended from White Oak Spring

Marsh in Gates County to the Dismal Swamp Canal in Camden County, North

Carolina.321

Perhaps the majority of men whose names appear in the Gates County register begrudgingly performed the arduous tasks they had been dispatched to the swamp to accomplish. That the Orapeake Canal project warranted such a register, however, suggests the extent to which the region’s slave economy had changed. It also reveals the ways in which the region’s slave society could be threatened by petit marronage.

Edmond, the first slave laborer listed in the Gates County register, was identified as “the property of Nathaniel Booth of Nansemond County Virginia.” Sent into the swamp by

William B. Whitehead of Suffolk, Virginia to cut the Orapeake Canal, the Gates County registrar entered a keen description of Edmond’s physical characteristics. Edmond appeared to be “about forty five years old, Black good teeth, a little gray tolerable full beard with a scar on the Stomache, about 3 inches long and a scar on the out sid (sic) of right Kne (sic) about an inch long.” Without wearing shoes, Edmond stood about “Five

Feet eight & ½ inches high,” and weighed about one hundred seventy-six pounds.322

Similar entries at the beginning of the laboring season in consecutive years reveal that

321 Gates County Slave Records, n.d., 1783-1867. Box 2. North Carolina Division of Archives and History. Raleigh, North Carolina. Hereafter cited as NCDH. 322 Fouts, editor. Registration of Slaves to Work in the Great Dismal Swamp. 1.

216 Edmond returned to the Gates County canal site annually each January through early

1853.

By spring 1853, however, Edmond’s status had changed significantly. When

Edmond presented himself to the Gates County registrar for work in the Dismal, he was no longer a hired slave. Now free, Edmond had taken up his original owner’s surname.

Still, he chose to work at the Gates County location which, after seven years, must have been familiar: “Edmond Boothe said to be a free man,” the registrar recorded, “is hired the present year by William B. Whitehead.” No longer a slave, Edmond Boothe was “by hire registered as one of his hands imployed (sic) in the Great Dismal Swamp in the

County of Gates aforesaid.” Lest any land company agent or slave patroller be confused about Edmond’s new status as a free person hired to work in the swamp, the Gates

County registrar entered again a concise description of Edmond’s physical characteristics. In addition to a more accurate account of Edmond’s age and height, and consistent descriptions of his skin tone and the scar on his right hand, the registrar added new descriptions of several more scars: “Said Edmond is about forty eight years of age, of black complexion, is stoutly built, has a scar on his right hand, one on his breast, one on the left side of his face below the eye, and stands [ ] above five feet eight inches high.” Work in the swamp had apparently taken its toll on Edmond, nearly costing him vision in his left eye. More than that, two years prior, the registrar had not signed his name to the page that bore Edmond’s physical description. But in this entry, the registrar added one more indication of the authority by which the county registration list was to be

217 accorded: “In Testimony of which I hereunto submit my name and affix the seal of my office at Gatesville the day and year above, J. Riddick.”323

The Gates County register offers nothing more regarding Edmond’s story of labor in the swamp. A free man in 1853, perhaps he elected to find work elsewhere in the following years. While Edmond’s story illustrates how at least one slave laborer might transition into freedom and choose swamp work for at least one year, the register also reveals the ways in which enslaved people circumvented enslavement through flight. In

1847, the year that the North Carolina General Assembly enacted an updated runaway slave code, Edmond Booth was the first of thirty-four men sent into the Dismal by

William Whitehead. Among these men were four named Jack. One was a thirty five year old man, held in bondage by Abram Brinkly of Nansemond County, Virginia. The registrar described thirty-five year old Jack as “Old Black with flet (sic) forehead without beard, with a circle of hair around the fore head good front teeth bad jaw Teeth without scars of any kind,” ending the description by noting that Jack had been presented with “a fresh bruise upon the Outside of the right foot.” The second man was named Jack

Anderson, and described as a “free boy bound to Nathl Booth of Nansemond County

Vurginia.” Jack Anderson was thought to be twelve years of age, and characterized as

“old Bow legged Bow Backed ashed face with a scar just at the edge of the hair, with hair remarkable almost down to his eyes.” Jack Anderson stood about four feet five inches tall. The third Jack, held in bondage by Ann Brown of Nansemond County, was described as “a light brown Complexion about Fourty [sic] Five years old,” with a “small

Thin beard a small scar on the forehead over the left eye on the right & on the left leg, a

323 Gates County Slave Records, n.d., 1783-1867. Box 2, Folder, “Description of Hired, 1853.” North Carolina Division of Archives and History. Raleigh, North Carolina. NCDAH.

218 small scar on the back of the left hand.” Ann Brown’s Jack stood about five feet eight inches tall, and weighed nearly one hundred sixty pounds. The Tamer Brothers, also of

Nansemond County, held the fourth Jack in bondage. Their Jack was described to be

“cold Black with small eyes wide cheak [sic] bones tolerable good teeth a small scar upon the right cheek,” along with several more scars on the fingers of his hands. He, too, stood about five feet eight inches in height, but the registrar did not speculate about his age.324

That Whitehead sent four men named Jack to labor in the swamp, all from

Nansemond County, surely warranted careful entries into the Gates County register, in the event that one or more of the four men sought to flee from the canal site. This point is only supported when one takes into account the fact that other slaveholders sent men named Jack into the swamp as well.325 But, tested soon after the registration list and runaway slave code went into effect, county officials surely recognized the limitations of both. This was clear after one such Jack took flight from the labor camp and was brought before the county magistrate, C.M. Daughtry, on March 17, 1847. Enacting the slave code, Daughtry wrote that “negro Jack has this day been brought before me as a runaway and on examination there is strong suspicion of his guilt,” Daughtry remanded Jack to the county jail until due process of law might be conducted such that Jack’s owner might be

324 Fouts, editor. Registration of Slaves to Work in the Great Dismal Swamp. 2-4. 325 Willis S. Riddick sent one such man into the swamp from Suffolk, Virginia. Riddick’s Jack was described to be about forty-five years of age, “old dark brown color with high forehead projecting eye brow tolerabl beard a little gray a sar on the head near the top under the har a small scar on the back of the left hand and a scar at the hand of the same one inside a scar on the left Knee.” The Gates County registrar observed that Riddick’s Jack stood about five feet six and a quarter inches, and weighed about one hundred thirty eight pounds.

219 identified and called upon to retrieve Jack.326 Further evidence of Jack’s flight and pending case remain unknown. Yet, the distance between the swamp’s labor camps and the county’s enforcement apparatus is clear.

Still, many contemporary observers believed that the Great Dismal’s maroon population faced many difficulties that mitigated against a sustained presence in the swamp. Frederick Law Olmsted commented on the swamp’s depopulation after visiting the region in the mid-1850s. Observing a perceived change in the vitality of petit marronage, Olmsted noted that hunters using slave dogs had made it difficult for maroons remain entrenched within the swamp’s depths. In 1853, Olmstead interviewed Joseph

Church, a black man and the slave of a religious congregation. Living on the fringes of the swamp, Church had become acquainted with the swamp’s depths, describing “huts in

‘back places’ hidden by bushes, and difficult of [sic] access.”327 Church noted also that the slave hunters sometimes shot fugitives, and told Olmsted that some runaways would rather be shot than taken. Moreover, Church told Olmsted that slave drivers could easily distinguish between maroons and black shingle getters, for the runaways often appeared, upon confrontations with slave hunters, to be scared “and kind o’strange, cause dey hasn’t much to eat, and ain’t decent like we is.”328 In Church’s observations, one notes the way in which at least one enslaved person, living near the swamp, identified himself not only in relation to the swamp’s slave laborers, but also in relation to its maroons. Of those who remained entrenched as the Civil War approached, Frederick Law Olmstead

326 Gates County Slave Records, n.d., 1783-1867. Box 2, Folder, “Petition for Release from Jail by Suspected Runaway Slave.” North Carolina Division of Archives and History. Raleigh, North Carolina. NCDAH. 327 Frederick Law Olmstead, Arthur M. Schlesinger, editor. The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1953.) 120-123. 328 Quoted in Simpson, 73-4.

220

Figure 7. “Osman the maroon in the swamp,” by Porte Crayon. David Hunter Strother, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Septem- ber 1856. Citation: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed January 18, 2016.

described a dilapidated lot “born outlaws; educated self-stealers.” Maroons were “trained from infancy to be constantly in dread of the approach of a white man as a thing more

221 fearful than wildcats or serpents, or even starvation.” Olmstead thus observed, in his view, a situation of near desolation.

* * * * *

One might accept readily Olmstead’s view of the Dismal’s maroons, given the context historians have observed of the stark situation facing black Americans by the mid-1850s in both the north and the south. But that which is reflected within abolitionists’ inquiries of the Dismal region, or in the records of its land companies gives plausible reason for historians to revisit the subject. Taken together with Edmond

Jackson’s remarks as he searched for the “city of refuge” first cited in Frederick

Douglass’s paper, we are presented with the central contribution of the present study. The swamp “community” to which Jackson referred, and that which inspired Stowe’s novel

Dred, was not a permanent settlement. Rather, it was comprised of slave labor camps and geographically mobile American maroon groups that had been engaged in petit marronage for several generations. Jackson and Stowe recognized this “community” as a force with great potential to destabilize the southern slave system at a time when, since the Revolution, the South’s peculiar institution came under the most direct threat from without.

In these same lands, however, enslaved laborers, black absconders, and maroons undertook a different, but equally important process. These folks put significant knowledge of local environments to use in support of agency newly created, as they sought to live autonomously in the midst of slavery. Notwithstanding Nat Turner’s

Rebellion, the heritage of resistance and agency in the midst of slavery reflected by petit marronage was sustained until the Civil War. It was evidenced by Turner’s initial

222 sojourns through the woods in 1825, and the refuge he held tenuously for two months as slave hunters feverishly pursued him in 1831.

Born of the Revolutionary era’s rhetoric of natural rights and human equality, the antislavery movement advanced rapidly, the resistance of slaveholders and northern political and economic allies notwithstanding. Within ten years of the founding of

William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society, white Americans with a vested interest in abolishing slavery and stopping its spread into the western territories formed a national political coalition.329 In the north, Black Americans increased pressures upon whites who held political office in a rising effort to ensure that gradual abolition would take root quickly.330 Such political and social pressures fueled southern political leaders’ cries for secession.331 Historians have noted that, by 1858, many northerners and southerners alike held a common notion that a “” controlled the United

States, comprised of a politically and economically rooted oligarchy of Americans with a vested interest in slavery. As historian Leonard Richards has observed, the “slave power” thesis owed its rhetorical influence to the Free-Soil Party of the late 1840s and the early

1850s. From the Free-Soilers, the Republicans adopted their condemnation of the peculiar institution as a barbaric and blatant violation of the human equality enshrined within the Declaration of Independence. The “slave power” thesis held cache among a wide range of political luminaries during the 1840s and 1850s including former president

329 Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1967.); Merton L. Dillon, The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting Minority. (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. 1974.); and James Brewer Stewart, Abolitionists Politics and the Coming of the Civil War. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. 2008.) 330 Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2002.) 331 Elizabeth R. Varon, Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 2008.)

223 John Quincy Adams; Senators Charles Sumner and Salmon P. Chase; Alexander

Stephens, future vice president of the Confederacy; and South Carolina firebrand James

Henry Hammond. That a “slave power” threatened American liberty formed the basis of the Republican Party’s rapid rise in the 1850s.332 Perhaps most insulting, in the eyes of many southern firebrands, was the idea that the slave power’s rise undergirded Abraham

Lincoln’s platform for gaining the Republican Party’s nomination, and ultimately, his rise to the presidency in 1860.333

The political turmoil of the 1850s notwithstanding, slave laborers continued to be hired out to entities including the Dismal Swamp Land Company, their labor necessary to construct projects including the Orapeake Canal. As a result, enslaved lumbermen continued their support of petit marronage. Thus, the Dismal’s maroons continued to procure supplies from poor whites, and enslaved men and women who lived on the fringes of the swamp.334 Indeed, during his visit to the region in the 1850s, locals described to Olmstead maroons who in their view could not “obtain the means of supporting life without coming often either to the outskirts to steal from the plantations, or to the neighbourhood (sic) of the camps of the lumbermen.”335 Like David Hunter

Strother’s image of Osman the maroon, white Virginians and North Carolinians thus viewed the Dismal’s maroons as strange outsiders, their actions as unlawful pillage. This

332 Russel B. Nye, “‘The Great Slave Power Conspiracy.’” in Kenneth M. Stampp, editor. The Causes of the Civil War. Third Edition. (New York: Touchstone Books. 1991.); and Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination 1780-1860. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2000.) 333 Robert W. Johannsen, Lincoln, the South, and Slavery: The Political Dimension. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1991.); Richard J. Carwardine, Lincoln. (Harlow, England: Pearson Education Limited. 2003.); Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 2010.); and James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 2013.) 334 Simpson, 44-50. 335 Olmstead, 121.

224 view of the Dismal’s maroons would not change prior to the outbreak of the Civil War in

1861.

For southerners, Lincoln’s election to the presidency comprised the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back; in December 1860, South Carolina seceded from the

Union. Followed by several more southern states in the first four months of 1861, the

Civil War began with the first shots fired at Fort Sumter in Charleston. The two states that governed the lands that comprised the Great Dismal Swamp joined the Confederacy relatively late – Virginia in April 1861 and North Carolina in May 1861.336 As white southerners unified in one last defense of slavery, black Americans voted with their feet or took up arms to set in motion the final blow to the peculiar institution moving in droves to Union lines as the federal army moved into the south.337 Still, petit marronage most likely continued until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment set in motion the federally mandated end of American slavery in 1865. The Dismal’s remaining maroons could not chance emerging from within the swamp until they might be sure that they would not face the punishments for flight prescribed by law.

As novelist Bland Simpson remembered of his childhood in North Carolina in the

1950s, dating to the nineteenth century, successive generations of local people shared rumors of the Dismal’s maroons who inhabited “implacable jungle” beyond the Dismal

336 George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. 1965, 1993.); James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. (New York: Ballatine Books. 1988.); and Phillip Shaw Paludan, A People’s Contest: The Union and Civil War, 1861-1865. Second Edition. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of . 1988, 1996.) 337 Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War. (Boston: Brown, Little. 1953.); James M. McPherson, The Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union. (New York: Ballantine Books. 1965, 1982, 1991.); Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers. (New York: Meridian Books. 1991.); Patricia C. Click, Time Full of Trial: The Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony, 1862-1867. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2001.); and David S. Cecelski, The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2012.)

225 Canal. These maroons were the source of the region’s standard lore: the swamp had once been “full of runaway slaves and escaped convicts that the law wouldn’t follow in.”338

Thus the heritage of petit marronage endured in local memories until at least the mid- twentieth century.

338 Bland Simpson, The Great Dismal: A Carolinian’s Swamp Memoir. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. 1990.) 3-4.

226 Epilogue: “From Log Cabin to the Pulpit”: William H. Robinson and Petit Marronage at the Turn of the Century

The last maroons emerged from both the Dismal and eastern North Carolina’s other swamps once the Confederacy was defeated in 1865. During the early stages of the

Civil War, the Dismal Swamp Land Company continued to dispatch slaves and free blacks to its labor camps, and enslaved people continued to engage in petit marronage in swamps and forests throughout eastern North Carolina. The records such companies produced provide historians with perhaps the best sources for narrating the story of petit marronage in antebellum Virginia and North Carolina. In these records, historians discover a complex world of bondage and of freedom in the “midst of slavery,” a world in which petit marronage, not outright flight, was the primary mitigating factor against the two states’ broader slave societies.

But one ex- offers an intriguing perspective of the subject in postbellum memory. The title of William H. Robinson’s narrative suggests the importance that the author assigned to self-help and racial uplift, two themes that characterized the ways in which African American leaders sought to inspire the masses during the Jim Crow era.339 During the postbellum era, Robinson rose from meager means to the center of the Reconstruction era’s most significant denomination for African

339 Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1996.); and Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. (New York: Knopf. 1998.)

227 Americans: the African Methodist Episcopal church. But the narrative itself also signals the extent to which mobility was central to William’s life in another way. In the context of American slavery, petit marronage foregrounded William’s later movements from place to place. Perhaps this element of Robinson’s narrative may prove instructive to the ways in which historians might reconsider contextualization of African American and

American history. Recent path breaking works have sought to reconstruct the long history of African American political traditions, and have received significant attention justly.340

Yet, these works present the metaphorical tip of an iceberg, the base of which conceals an even richer history waiting to be fleshed out.

James H. Tifft, of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, published Robinson’s ex-slave narrative in 1913. That this narrative went to press during the height of the Jim Crow era suggests ex-slave narratives’ significance to publishers as record of the horrors of black enslavement during the height of the southern “Lost Cause” – the academic and cultural

340 Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to The Great Migration. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2003.) Historians have devoted much attention to narratives dictated, penned, and published by abolitionists during the mid- nineteenth century, or to ex-slave narratives collected by literary scholars employed by the Works Progress Administration of the Great Depression era. Sandwiched in between rests the robust historiography of the Civil War, in which African Americans’ roles as valiant soldiers in the black freedom struggle have received significant attention since the mid-twentieth century. As historian Stephanie Shaw has explained, a generation of freed men and women recorded their memories of enslavement, and, their memories of maturing during the Jim Crow era – a time of great American prosperity and poverty, and arguably, a time of the most violent of American racism. Thus, men and women, like William H. Robinson, came of age during an era that bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, spanning the end of Reconstruction until the 1920s. Recognizing that many skeptics had rendered salient criticisms of the WPA narratives, as well as other slave narratives, Shaw suggested that scholars acknowledge their value as records of Depression era experiences. Shaw invited scholars to seek deeper understanding of the implications of intergenerational relations such that scholars might better grasp how the experiences of an older generation both shaped and were shaped by those of a younger. Shaw’s call to study the Great Depression using the WPA Narratives invites scholars to do the same using narratives published in earlier eras, such as the Progressive Era. It is this challenge that this paper takes up, as grounds for more sustained future research. See Stephanie J. Shaw, “Using the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives to Study the Impact of the Great Depression.” The Journal of Southern History. 49. 3. (August 2003.) 623-658.

228 attempt to advance a redemptive narrative of Southern history between 1875 and 1925.341

But ex-slave narratives like Robinson’s, do not fit nicely within extant contexts for the study of either African American or American history. Nor does the narrative lend itself readily to classification as an autobiography.342 Instead, Robinson’s postbellum narrative disrupts two long-standing traditions of historical contextualization. In one, historians of nineteenth century America have viewed the Civil War era as a significant break, after which the nation reunified. The process of reunification involved the important social, economic, and political tensions of Reconstruction during which African Americans experienced significant gains that were ultimately rescinded during the Jim Crow era.343

In the other trend of historical contextualization, historians have centered attention on the lessons of the Reconstruction era in regard to African American history. In this historiographical trend, the temporal break is reflected in the compromise that

Republicans and Democrats forged during the presidential election of 1876-1877. As southern Democrats redeemed state legislatures, the metaphorical gate to segregation was thrown open. In the face of rising violence characterized most poignantly by the terrorist

341 Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1930. (New York: Pantheon Books. 1998.); William C. Davis, The Causes Lost: Myths and Realities of the Confederacy. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas. 1996.); John David Smith, An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865-1918. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. 1991.) 342 David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2001.) 438. Blight has argued that the narrative is best characterized as “fictional history combined with a personal narrative.” To Blight, Robinson’s use of Civil War imagery and place names throughout the narrative is most striking; in the moment of the American postbellum semicentennial, the usage of such resonated widely as emblematic of the black freedom struggle. Robinson’s narrative was but one of many publications aimed at promoting not only racial uplift, “a particularly African American vision” of progress in the years following slavery, but also a clear statement of the meaning that the African American community assigned to both the war and emancipation. 343 This note is by no means an exhaustive list of books in this historiographical trend, but intended to cite the most widely read historians in this stead. See, for example, Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. (New York: Harper & Row. 1988.); Kenneth M. Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction 1865-1877. (New York: Vintage Books. 1965.); John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 1961.); C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South 1877- 1913. (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. 1951, 1971.)

229 actions of the Ku Klux Klan, the black freedom struggle persisted. In 1896, however, the

United States Supreme Court upheld, in the majority decision handed down in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, the doctrine of “separate but equal” in public accommodations.

Southerners had redeemed the former Confederate states; African Americans would again be forced to fight the imposition of second-class citizenship.344

Given these historiographical trends, what can Robinson’s experiences prior to

1913 tell us about the African Americans’ central role in the making of postbellum

American history? In 1859, eleven-year-old William H. Cowens absconded into a swamp near Wilmington, North Carolina. He took flight after rescuing his mother from a vicious beating by slaveholder Scott Cowens. William Cowens later explained that he located a maroon encampment where he found refuge for nearly three weeks. Comprised of nineteen men, this group was highly mobile within the swamp; scouts knew of several different locations for future camps within a fourteen-mile radius. In a narrative published in the second decade of the twentieth century, William recalled that he had followed his father Peter’s directive, and that he drew inspiration from stories that other enslaved men and women had shared of their “adventures” and “their hiding places or rendezvous” in the woods. William’s father, Peter, had cast petit marronage as a clear act of defiance, once telling William to never remove his shirt prior to a whipping,

344 Also not an exhaustive list of books in this trend, several important works include Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 2009.); Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, Freedpeople in the Tobacco South: Virginia, 1860-1900. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 1999.); Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. (New York: Vintage Books. 1980.); Robert F. Engs, Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia 1861-1890. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 1979.) The seminal book in this historiographical trend was written by perhaps the most prominent African American scholar of the Jim Crow era, W.E.B. Du Bois. See Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America. (New York: Harcourt and Brace. 1935.)

230 explaining that he had once “lay in the woods eleven months for trying to prevent your mother from being whipped.”345

Peter’s characterization of petit marronage as an act of defiance surely encouraged his son’s flight, but William’s description of the wilderness near Wilmington is particularly intriguing in that it reflects a practical reason for his choice to flee. “Quite late that night I got opposite the hiding place,” he remembered. “It was a low swampy place back of a thick cane brake. It was so dark and the cane so thick when I got to the place where I had been directed to turn in I was afraid to venture.” This was a pristine landscape, but one in which many dangers lurked:

But as I stood there I imagined I could hear the baying of blood hounds, and so strong was the imagination that it drove me in. I had several things to fear, for that country was infested with bears. More than once I had seen a bear come out of a corn field with his arms full of corn, go up to the fence and throw it over, pick it up like a man, and walk off. Then we had reptiles, such as water moccasins and rattle snakes. Sometimes I could walk upright, sometimes I was compelled to crawl through the cane. About three o’clock the next morning I came out of the cane brake on the banks of a large pond of almost stagnant water. I could see the rocky mound or cave that I had heard so much talk of.346

While at the maroon camp, Robinson was placed under the direction of Uncle

Amos, the camp watchman and prophet, as an apprentice. After about three weeks, Uncle

Amos prophesized that the group of nineteen would be discovered by slave catchers. He advised that all members of the camp should move at once, or slave catchers would attack them within three days. The decision was made to move the camp, and preparations for the journey began. Uncle Amos advised each maroon to prepare arms and supplies until

345 William H. Robinson, From Log Cabin to the Pulpit, or, Fifteen Years in Slavery. Third Edition. (Eau Claire, WI: James H. Tifft, Publishing Printer. 1913.) 24-25. Peter was a slave pilot at the Wilmington harbor; historian David Cecelski notes briefly his interaction with William Robinson. See Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. 2001.) 121-123. 346 Robinson, From Log Cabin to the Pulpit, 30.

231 they “learned something about the country surrounding the other hiding place.” Three different parties foraged in the surrounding land that night and returned with what

Robinson considered “a considerable amount of provisions.” Yet, the next morning, slave hunters armed with shotguns and revolvers discovered the camp. Although Uncle Amos and Robinson had been watching, they had missed the slave catchers working

“noiselessly all night,” cutting their way through the cane to the maroon camp.347

William reveals nothing more of the details of his capture. Still, the narrative reveals both the motivations for flight to an antebellum maroon camp, and the dangers one faced in the attempt to take refuge within it. The possibilities of capture and of return to plantation society were omnipresent; this caused American maroons, such as

Robinson, to be ever vigilant.348 American maroons surveyed the surrounding wilderness, as a precaution in the event that one camp was discovered, that it might be possible to escape to a new unknown hideout. This is an indication of the high degree of geographic mobility such a camp exercised. Even William Robinson was privy to information of a different hideaway fourteen miles distant. Still, like other antebellum maroon camps,

Robinson’s group was discovered and captured by “slave hunters” who themselves worked diligently and quietly throughout the night to reach them.

But why would William recall his experience with petit marronage so long after his experience, and after significant involvements during the Civil War? After returning from the swamp, William was sold at auction in Richmond. He was resold subsequently to Joseph Cowens, Scott Cowens’s brother and a Wilmington merchant, who held the

347 Ibid, 28-38. 348 These subjects – the motivations and the dangers of marronage in the American south – are taken up at length in a recent book, Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons. (New York: New York University. 2014.)

232 young boy for nine months. After Cowens’s death at Greenville, Tennessee, the young boy labored as a cook for the Confederate army.349 After the Confederate defeat at Blue

Springs, Tennessee, Union soldiers liberated Robinson. Robinson enlisted in the Union army in November 1863.350 Less than a week after his liberation, Union soldiers reunited

William with his mother at Greenville, Tennessee. With Union soldiers, they marched onward to Knoxville, where William purchased a small log cabin for his mother.351

Claiming to respond to Douglass’s call to join the Union army, William noted that he served in the Massachusetts 54th and Indiana 28th regiments until he mustered out in

December 1865.352

In Tennessee, William worked several jobs – his first as a hosecart driver for the fire department. After seventeen months as a fireman, William “resigned to accept a situation” as a singer and banjo player with a local music troupe known as the Tennessee

Singers. The group toured Tennessee, Indiana, Illinois, , Kentucky, and

Windsor, Canada, until it disbanded in November 1868.353 Although the Tennessee

Singers disbanded, William continued singing and playing the banjo. In January 1869, the Hanlon’s Wizard Oil Company hired William and seven others to a yearlong contract.

This new group soon formed a band that gave street concerts advertising the company’s oil. Again, William toured the Midwest as a musician; his latest tour took him to New

York City. On May 21, 1869, William and the new band took passage from New York to

349 Robinson, From Log Cabin to the Pulpit, 96-98. 350 Ibid, 117. William H. Robinson’s experiences mirrored those of other enslaved African Americans thus impressed by the Confederates. For more on this subject, see Bruce Levine, Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves During the Civil War. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2006.) 351 Robinson, From Log Cabin to the Pulpit, 103-6. William noted that he negotiated a price of seventeen dollars for the house, but unable to count, he later discovered that he actually paid up to fifty dollars for the property. 352 Ibid, 106-19. 353 Ibid, 122.

233 London aboard the steamer, City of New York, a journey of about five weeks. After the band’s first concert in London, William was hired into the home of William S.

Beckenworth, initially detailing the horrors of American slavery for various audiences.

William remained in London almost a year, where he was educated learning to read and write.354

William was approximately twenty-one years of age when he returned to the states. Now more than a former American maroon, or a recent banjo player and singer,

William held conversation with some whites who would talk with him aboard the steamer that traveled back across the Atlantic to New York. One of these sojourners, Joseph P.

Ray, and his wife, tutored William during the thirty-nine day journey, adding to his growing desire to learn even more. In June, William departed New York City and returned to Nashville. There, he enrolled in Central Tennessee College, a school established by the Methodist Episcopal Church under the auspices of the Freedmen’s

Bureau. William remained enrolled at the college for three years, until the monies he had earned or that which had been gifted while he was in England had been exhausted.355 By

1874, William developed an interest in politics and oratory. But finding that stump speeches about the horrors of slavery filled his mind and heart with vengeance, William turned instead to the teaching profession at Lebanon, Tennessee. Finding teaching not suitable to the need to generate income, in turn, William found employment with the

Woodruff Sleeping Car Company. William was thus employed for the next several years,

354 Ibid, 122-25. 355 Ibid, 130-3.

234 as a sleeping car porter, and in this way traveled “every road of any importance in the

United States and old and New Mexico.”356

By the late 1870s, William’s post-emancipation journey had led him into the

“miserable life” of a gambler in Chicago, a life not characterized by “self denial and perseverance” but of “darkness, in immorality and sin.” On New Year’s Night, in 1877, the thought of his mother’s distaste for his most recent experiences proved enough to turn

William away from the gambler’s table for good. Seeking to fulfill the promise that he would “get the religion of Jesus” into his heart, he resolved to leave the vices of

Chicago’s gambling dens. William boarded a train departing the city, and took up residence with a Baptist preacher whom he had met during his previous travels, near La

Porte, Indiana. Later in the same year, William wed Mrs. Alice Goins, of Riverside,

Michigan, who bore him three children in more than ten years of marriage before her death in April 1892.357

A member of the Missionary Baptist Church by the mid-1880s, William explored his desire for conversion through the Baptist faith until 1891, when he joined Simpson’s

Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church in Indianapolis. In the same year, he was admitted to the Indiana District Conference. One month before his wife’s death, William was appointed an elder of the Methodist Episcopal Church, at Shelbyville, Kentucky. For the next five years, William exhorted to audiences in the Methodist Episcopal faith. Joined by his daughter Dora, William preached in Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois.358 Mobility

356 Ibid, 134-5. 357 Ibid, 146-150. 358 Ibid, 136-51.

235 featured prominently in William’s life, both from place to place in the postbellum United

States and beyond, and as a theme reflective of his postbellum experiences.

Sometime between the last decade of the nineteenth century and the publication of his narrative in 1913, a final transition proved significant in William’s life story. Known in the pre-Civil War era by the Cowens’ family name, in one final act of transition, he shed his enslaver’s surname. During a three-day feast “in the wilderness” during which he was reunited with family – an occasion he described for audiences in the second decade of the twentieth century as a “family reunion,” – William met with his mother and eight siblings. Because they had been dispersed among Cowens family members and others to whom they had been sold during slavery, each of William’s siblings bore a different surname. Joined by “missionary aunt,” the group decided to “establish a family name and record.” The missionary aunt recalled the family’s interest in Robinson Crusoe, to whom they referred as “Rob-o-bus-sho.” Formerly enslaved by the Cowens family,

William, his mother, and his siblings were thenceforth known by the surname

Robinson.359 Thus William became William H. Robinson, a man whose life story inspired the title of his narrative: From Log Cabin to the Pulpit.

Perhaps William had matured into a man who might draw upon his postbellum experiences as a preacher to dream up a narrative of fantastical proportions. But in 1913, during the semicentennial year of celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation,

Robinson, the Methodist preacher, explained the purpose for his narrative. He did not wish to “bias the minds of the people or instill a spirit of hatred.” Instead, his narrative revealed “the pathetic moan of slaves in almost utter despair, yet panting, groaning,

359 Ibid, 158-59.

236 bitterly wailing and still hoping for freedom.” He intended his narrative to give voice to

“slaves with their hearts, lifted to God, praying for deliverance from the cruel bonds, the auction block, and years of unrequited grinding toil for those who had no right to their labor.” Timely, these purposes were certainly significant in response to the violence that

Southerners had unleashed against African Americans’ political, educational, economic, and social gains since the Civil War. Robinson’s narrative contributed thus to the long tradition of truth telling documents intended to unveil the fables recast and retold by the progenitors of the South’s Lost Cause.

237 References

Primary Sources Slave Narratives, Maps and Traveler Narratives

Andrews, William L., editor. North Carolina Slave Narratives: The Lives of , , Moses Grandy, and Thomas H. Jones. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. 2003.

Blassingame, John W., editor. Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2005.

Brickell, John. Natural History of North Carolina. Murfreesboro, NC: Reprint by Johnson Publishing Co. 1968.

Byrd, William. The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and N. Carolina Run in the Year of Our Lord 1728. Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street Press. 1728.

Catesby, Mark. The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands. London: B. White. 1771.

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LaRoche, Cheryl Janifer. Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. 2014.

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Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press. 2000.

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Litwack, Leon F. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Knopf. 1998.

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