The Great Dismal Swamp was once a thriving refuge for runaways…

“I’m hoping to find out what the people who lived here called this place.” As [historical archaeologist and chair of the anthropology department at American University in Washington, D.C., Dan Sayers] sifts the earth they trod, finding the soil footprints of their cabins and tiny fragments of their tools, weapons and white clay pipes, he feels a profound admiration for them, and this stems in part from his Marxism.

“These people performed a critique of a brutal capitalistic enslavement system, and they rejected it completely. They risked everything to live in a more just and equitable way, and they were successful for ten generations.”

…Wherever Africans were enslaved in the world, there were runaways who escaped permanently and lived in free independent settlements.

…Marronage, the process of extricating oneself from slavery, took place all over Latin America and the Caribbean, in the slave islands of the Indian Ocean, in Angola and other parts of Africa. But until recently, the idea that maroons also existed in North America has been rejected by most historians.

…“They thought in terms of runaways, who might hide in the woods or swamps for a while until they got caught, or who might make it to freedom on the Underground Railroad, with the help of Quakers and abolitionists.”

By downplaying American marronage, and valorizing white involvement in the Underground Railroad, historians have shown a racial bias, in Sayers’ opinion, a reluctance to acknowledge the strength of black resistance and initiative. They’ve also revealed the shortcomings of their methods: “Historians are limited to source documents. When it comes to maroons, there isn’t that much on paper. But that doesn’t mean their story should be ignored or overlooked. As archaeologists, we can read it in the ground.”

…[Sayers] started doing archival research on the Great Dismal Swamp. He found scattered references to maroons dating back to the early 1700s. The first accounts described runaway slaves and Native Americans raiding farms and plantations, and then disappearing back into the swamp with stolen livestock. In 1714, Alexander Spotswood, the colonial lieutenant governor of Virginia, described the Dismal Swamp as a “No-man’s-land,” to which “Loose and disorderly people daily flock.” Since Africans and African-Americans were not referred to as “people” in the records of 18th-century Virginia, this suggests that poor whites were also joining the swamp communities.

…From the 1760s until the Civil War, runaway slave ads in the Virginia and North Carolina newspapers often mentioned the Dismal Swamp as the likely destination, and there was persistent talk of permanent maroon settlements in the morass. British traveler J.F.D. Smyth, writing in 1784, gleaned this description: “Runaway negroes have resided in these places for twelve, twenty, or thirty years and upwards, subsisting themselves in the swamp upon corn, hogs, and fowls….[On higher ground] they have erected habitations, and cleared small fields around them.”

Deep in the Swamps, Archaeologists Are Finding How Fugitive Slaves Kept Their Freedom | History | Smithsonian

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