Maroons: In the African American Public History

City of Refuge is a story of petit marronage, an informal slave's economy, and the construction of internal improvements in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. The vast wetland was tough terrain that most white Virginians and North Carolinians considered uninhabitable. Perceived desolation notwithstanding, black slaves fled into the swamp's remote sectors and engaged in petit marronage, a type of escape and fugitivity prevalent throughout the Atlantic world. An alternative to the dangers of flight by way of the Underground Railroad, maroon communities often neighbored slave-labor camps, the latter located on the swamp's periphery and operated by the Dismal Swamp Land Company and other companies that employed slave labor to facilitate the extraction of the Dismal's natural resources. Often with the tacit acceptance of white company agents, company slaves engaged in various exchanges of goods and provisions with maroons-networks that padded company accounts even as they helped to sustain maroon colonies and communities. In his examination of life, commerce, and social activity in the Great Dismal Swamp, Marcus P. Nevius engages the historiographies of slave resistance and abolitionism in the early American republic. City of Refuge uses a wide variety of primary sources--including runaway advertisements; planters' and merchants' records, inventories, letterbooks, and correspondence; abolitionist pamphlets and broadsides; county free black registries; and the records and inventories of private companies--to examine how American maroons, enslaved canal laborers, white company agents, and commission merchants shaped, and were shaped by, race and slavery in an important region in the history of the late Atlantic world"

Maroon communities were small, secret encampments formed by runaway slaves, typically in isolated and defensible sections of wilderness. The phenomenon began as runaway slaves, unable to escape to safe havens in sympathetic colonies, opted instead to band together for survival near the sites of their former enslavement. In this first survey of documentary records of marronage in colonial and antebellum South Carolina, Timothy James Lockley offers students and scholars of history an opportunity to assess the unique features and trends of the maroon experience in the Palmetto State.

South Carolina's maroon communities were typically formed in dense swamps where self-contained communities could remain hidden beyond the commercial interests of white society, game could be hunted, lands could be adapted for farming, and plantations could be reached if needed for raiding and trading. Marronage was a persistent problem for planter society in that its success left fully formed runaway-slave camps within striking distance of white communities and interactions between these two worlds were often violent. In addition maroons often maintained ties to enslaved African Americans on their former plantations, creating a web of community that operated outside of white control. Lockley surveys eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century historical sources gathered from newspaper reports, court proceedings, government and military records, correspondence, and reward advertisements to illustrate the efforts of white South Carolinians to locate maroon communities, defend against raiding parties, and kill or capture runaways living in these societies. Lockley organizes these documents chronologically, dealing first with the origins of marronage, then with two surges in maroon activity just before and just after the American Revolution. After a lull in marronage at the start of the nineteenth century, a final swell occurred during the 1820s.

These primary documents are augmented by eight maps and by Lockley's introduction and afterword, which place the maroon societies of South Carolina in the larger context of marronage in other regions of the New World.

"For more than two centuries men, women, and children escaped from slavery and made the Southern wilderness their home. They hid in the mountains of Virginia and the low swamps of South Carolina; they stayed in the neighborhood or paddled their way to secluded places; they buried themselves underground or built comfortable settlements. Known as maroons, they lived on their own or set up communities in swamps or other areas where they were not likely to be discovered. Although well-known, feared, celebrated or demonized at the time, the American maroons, whose stories are the subject of this book, have been forgotten, overlooked by academic research, which has focused on the Caribbean and Latin America. Who the American maroons were, what led them to choose this way of life over alternatives, what forms of marronage they created, what their individual and collective lives were like, how they organized themselves to survive, and how their particular story fits into the larger narrative of slave resistance are questions that this book seeks to answer. To survive, the American maroons reinvented themselves, defied slave society, enforced their own definition of freedom, and dared to create their own alternative to what the country had delineated as being black men and women's proper place. The maroons were audacious, self-confident, autonomous, sometimes self-sufficient, and always self-governing; their very existence was a repudiation of the basic tenets of slavery. Sylviane A. Diouf is an award-winning historian specializing in the history of the African Diaspora, African Muslims, the slave trade and slavery. She is the author, notably, of Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (NYU Press, 2013) and Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America, and the editor of Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies."

A detailed guide on Jamaican maroons & their victory over the British