Between
Slavery and Freedom:
African
Americans in the Great Dismal Swamp 1763-1863
A Masters thesis presented to the
Department of Anthropology
the College of William and Mary,
Williamsburg, VA
Edward Maris-Wolf
3/04/2002
LIST
OF TABLES…………………………………………………………. 3
LIST
OF FIGURES………………………………………………………… 4
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS…………………………………………………5
ABSTRACT…………………………………………………………………6
INTRODUCTION:
Between Remembering and Forgetting………………...9
CHAPTER
I: Present Pasts in African-American
Archaeology…………….16
CHAPTER II: Environmental Context………………………………………29
CHAPTER
III: Historical and Cultural Contexts……………………………41
Eighteenth
Century……………………………………………………41
Nineteenth
Century……………………………………………………54
CHAPTER
IV: Forward and Back…………………………………………..84
CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………….93
BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………….95
LIST OF TABLES
It is necessary to thank a number of
people who have inspired me during this project. Above all, Rachel, my parents, Caroline and Toby encouraged me to
see this through. My thesis committee,
Ywone Edwards-Ingram, Kathleen Bragdon, and Norman Barka provided invaluable
wisdom and constructive criticism.
Diane Stallings, Garrett Fesler, Nicholas Luccketti, and Eric Deetz
introduced me to the archaeology and history of the Chesapeake and encouraged
me every step of the way. The scholarship and comments of Richard Price, James
Axtell, David Blight have also been particularly inspiring. In addition, I would like to thank research
librarians at the Library of Virginia, Virginia Historical Society, Rockefeller
Library, and Swem Library for all of their time and help.
I
would also like to thank the following for their correspondence and
resourcefulness: Pedro Funari, Charles Orser, Edith Seelig of Gates, NC; Jo Ann
P. Foreman of Elizabeth City, NC; Frederick M. Johnson of the Norfolk County
Historical Society, Wallace Memorial Library; Bobbie Lyons of the Research Library
and Archives of the Mariners’ Museum; and the staff at Riddick’s Folly Museum
in Suffolk, VA.
Of
course, all errors and omissions are my responsibility.
The
study of maroon (runaway slave) communities in North America has long been
overlooked in favor of larger maroon societies in the Caribbean and South
America. This essay attempts to
illuminate the nature of North American maroon communities by presenting the
evidence for maroonage in the Great Dismal Swamp and, further, by proposing a
means of examining maroon lifeways in the Dismal Swamp that may differ from
those of contemporaneous maroon societies further south.
While
maroon societies in Suriname, Haiti, Brazil, and Jamaica were often sizable,
sustainable, and isolated enough to serve as destinations for runaway slaves,
those in North America such as those in the Great Dismal Swamp were amorphous
and less populous and therefore may have served more as intermediate, liminal
spaces where slaves worked and subsisted—between slavery and freedom—before
attempting to reach safer, more sustainable communities elsewhere. In other words, maroon communities in North
America may have been means to ends
in the North or Canada, whereas societies in South America and the Caribbean,
once established, were largely intended as ends in themselves.
Through
a contextual rendering of available environmental, archaeological, and
historical evidence, this essay offers an approach to locating and analyzing
maroon sites in the Great Dismal Swamp aimed at offering greater insight into
the nature of maroon communities in North America.
“The general becomes a sword
The sovereign becomes a mausoleum
The rich become a fence
The poor become stones and sand.”
--Kim Kwangsop, “Having Died”
“To endeavor to forget anyone is a certain
way of thinking of nothing else.”
--La Bruyere, ‘Of the Affections’, Characters
The Great Dismal Swamp, straddling the
eastern border of Virginia and North Carolina, is an ecological and cultural
artifact of early African-American life in the New World. From 1763 to 1861, diverse groups of
African-American individuals harvested timber, cut shingles, dug canals,
dredged ditches, piloted flatboats, and cultivated crops for European Americans
eager to exploit them and the natural resources of an otherwise “thick, boggy,
impenetrable wilderness” (Schoepf 1911:99).
At various times, in various places, slaves, laborers, and
European-American workers interacted in the swamp, exchanging information and
goods necessary for survival. While it
is unclear exactly how many maroons inhabited the Dismal Swamp during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, runaway slave advertisements, travel
accounts, published personal narratives, and contemporary newspaper and
magazine articles all suggest that individual runaways consistently sought
freedom in the Great Dismal beginning in the latter portion of the eighteenth
century until the Civil War.
Although recent scholarly interest
in the Dismal Swamp focuses on the commercial enterprises it once engendered,
the history of the swamp’s main occupants and workers—African Americans—remains
relatively unexplored. Even less known
are the identities and everyday lives of maroons who worked and lived in the
swamp alongside free and slave laborers.
Indeed, despite Herbert Aptheker’s insistence, long ago, that dozens of
maroon (runaway slave) communities once existed within the present limits of
the United States, next to nothing is known about the nature, composition, or
even location of most of these communities, including those in the Dismal Swamp
(Aptheker 1939; Weik 1997). Much more
is known about maroons further south, where oral histories and written
documents provide the framework for reconstructing the collective pasts of
sizeable maroon societies such as those in eighteenth-century Suriname and
Jamaica (Price 1990; Price 1996; Campbell 1990). Cultural anthropologists and historians, led by Richard Price,
pioneered the study of maroon societies by examining maroon cultures in South
America and the Caribbean.
Only in the last two decades have
archaeologists in the Caribbean and South America begun to investigate maroon
sites, hoping to add to the substantial scholarship on maroon societies begun
twenty-five years ago by cultural anthropologists and historians (Weik 1997:83;
Price 1996:xi-xxvii). While much maroon
archaeology conducted in the Caribbean and South America has centered on simply
locating maroon sites and little
more, its ultimate purpose is to “branch out and address the diversity of
historical settings in which Africans lived” (Agorsah 1994:165; Weik 1997:83;
Armstrong 1999:186). Indeed, perhaps
the greatest achievement of nascent archaeology in the Dominican Republic,
Jamaica, and Suriname has been to ask new questions
about maroon life and the manner in which it is studied (Arrom and Arevalo
1986; Agorsah 1994:176-180; Agorsah 1997:3-11). While some may argue that historical archaeology is simply “an
expensive way of finding out what we already know” about well-documented
communities (and they may be largely correct), there can be little doubt that
archaeology is an invaluable resource for gathering information on those who
lived undocumented lives or who were
actively marginalized in the historic record, such as maroons (Deetz 1993:159;
McKee 1995:38-41). For reclaiming the
pasts of North American maroons largely hidden from history, such as those in
the Great Dismal Swamp, the potential for archaeology, in conjunction with
history and anthropology, is vast and undeniable (Leaming 1995).
For researchers interested in
investigating North American maroons, archaeology provides an additional text
or record of the past that can corroborate, challenge, or complete existing
histories and ethnographies. More
generally, maroon archaeology examines the moral nature of documenting,
representing, and using the past; this is particularly true in the case of the
Great Dismal Swamp, where prevailing histories and texts commonly omit the
perspectives, indeed the presence, of maroons and African-Americans from “the record.” As Rhys Isaac writes in The Transformation of Virginia, one constantly confronts the moral
nature of documenting the past. Isaac
writes, “I consider histories to be not just packages of factual knowledge but
primarily moral acts that must help present and future generations by advancing
the ethical understandings of the world into which they are published” (Isaac
1998:xxxi). Viewing the representation
and use of the past as an inherently moral act, insofar as it represents a
process through which information is judged then actively included or actively
dismissed at every stage, allows archaeologists to conduct research into the
African-American past with a heightened awareness of obstacles (see Trouillot
1995). Isaac’s conception of
history—its purpose, its function—becomes readily apparent in attempting to
view African-American life through the prisms of European-American writers and
historians. In short, modern
researchers interested in African-American pasts must recognize the moral
nature of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century histories which they employ
and the fact that archaeological investigation, also a series of moral acts,
can supply essential information as yet uncovered.
A great deal is known about European
Americans in the Great Dismal during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
while less is documented about the activities of the swamp’s African-American
residents. Although detailed financial,
property, personal, and even marriage records exist for the swamp’s many
European-American residents, little in the way of official records exists for
African Americans, not to mention maroons in the Dismal. The abundance of published accounts
recording European-American value judgements and views on myriad topics
(ranging from the quality of a harvest to the religious education of slaves to
the eulogizing of fellow citizens) appears to have been recorded often at the
expense of African-American perspectives on the same topics. Take, for example,
the well-recorded life of Willie (pronounced Wylie) McPherson, who, for a
number of years until his death in 1835 was one of the wealthiest residents of
the Great Dismal Swamp and served as a Justice of the Peace (Pugh 1964:
18,90). McPherson’s obituary, published
in the Norfolk and Portsmouth Herald,
December 21, 1835, reflects, in the words of one twentieth-century historian,
“his status as a worthy citizen” (Pugh 1964:91):
“At
the Eagle Hotel in this Borough, on Saturday night last, Willie McPherson,
Esq., of Camden County (N.C.) died in his 60th year of his age. On Thursday last he came to town on
business, in the enjoyment of his usual good health of which, from his regular
habits and temperate course of life, he has been blessed with an uncommon
share…..The death of this worthy citizen is a public loss. For the persevering industry and prudent
enterprise by which he realized a very large estate he exerted in promoting the
public interest, and the welfare of his neighbors. He was correct and upright in all his dealings; plain and
unassuming in his deportment, and kind and benevolent in his social
intercourse” (Pugh 1964:91).
Indeed, much has been written about
European Americans inhabiting or visiting the Great Dismal for sport, leisure,
or business. Charles Royster’s recent
work entitled The Fabulous History of the
Great Dismal Swamp Land Company is an example of the kind of scholarship
possible when well-documented lives (those of celebrities) are the subject
(Royster 1999). The task is more
difficult for investigating African Americans living in the Great Dismal Swamp
and even more difficult to approach the question, “What were the various
African-American views of Mr. McPherson?”
While histories have been written, obituaries printed, genealogies
chronicled for European Americans, the everyday lives and views of the swamp’s
diverse African-American residents have been actively silenced.
In the rare instances where the voices of
African Americans have survived in the record, their accounts often differ
fundamentally from those of European Americans describing the same person or
thing. For example, in his
autobiography, Narrative of the Life of
Moses Grandy, Late a Slave in the United States of America, former slave
Moses Grandy offers a competing obituary for Willie McPherson, “the very worst
man as an overseer over the persons employed in digging the [Dismal Swamp]
canal.” Grandy writes,
“M’Pherson
gave the same task to each slave; of course, the weak ones often failed to do
it. I have often seen him tie up
persons and flog them in the morning, only because they were unable to get the
previous day’s task done; after they were flogged, pork or beef brine was put
on their bleeding backs to increase the pain; he sitting by, resting himself,
and seeing it done….I have seen him flog them with his own hands till their
entrails were visible; and I have seen the sufferers dead when they were taken
down. He never was called to account in
any way for it” (Grandy 1968:23).
Grandy’s
elegy and that of the Herald, above,
differ tremendously; this difference,
however, must be seen in moral, not factual terms, as Grandy’s elegy
even appears to corroborate that published in the Herald. The Herald’s McPherson is a “worthy citizen”
who exhibited “persevering industry and prudent enterprise” through his “very
large estate.” His death was indeed “a
public loss.” Factually similar but
morally opposite, Grandy’s McPherson is a man who makes deadlines for canal
construction by flogging slaves under his charge, all the while maintaining his
composure, “sitting by, resting himself, and seeing it done.” Grandy’s account
exemplifies what it was to be a worthy European-American citizen whose “regular
habits and temperate course of life” were worthy of praise and admiration from
other European Americans subscribing to the Herald. It is only after seeing Grandy’s McPherson
together with the Herald’s McPherson
that a larger truth can be arrived upon; that Grandy and those at the Herald (and, most likely, the
newspaper’s audience) represent fundamentally different worldviews. For Herald
subscribers interested in subjugating African Americans and profiting from
their labor, McPherson’s obituary, in Isaac’s words, helped McPherson’s
generation advance the ethical understandings of the world into which it was
published—McPherson, a brutal slave overseer, wealthy landowner, and
respectable Justice of the Peace was to be revered. Conversely, Grandy’s account, published nine years later in
Boston, encouraged its readers to judge the world in Grandy’s moral terms and to
see McPherson, and slavery, as brutal affronts to humanity. By comparing the two texts, the cognitive
landscapes of two segments of the Euro- and African-American cultures present
in the mid-nineteenth century are represented.
By contextualizing and comparing relevant data, researchers are able to
arrive at common truths that are morally opposed.
African-American archaeology, while
necessarily a moral historical and anthropological endeavor, aims to do more
than further a moral mission.
Archaeologists today seek to expand the study of African Americans and,
more specifically, maroons to include a more general study of ethnicity,
illuminating the “process of group identity” in spaces where identities were
negotiated between slavery and freedom (Singleton 1999:2). In addition, archaeologists investigating
maroon sites must operate publicly and inclusively, offering transparency in
their data collection and interpretation methods, as well as diversity among
their excavation and interpretive teams.
Maroon archaeology in the Great Dismal Swamp, for example, might follow
a public course that combines the efforts of professional researchers with
volunteers consisting of interested local residents, teachers, and
students. The public interpretation of
maroon sites enables visitors and volunteers to become, in a tangible way,
“actively engaged in some activity that allows them to feel connected to the
past” (Horton 2000:10). In addition,
emphasizing the public nature of such projects underlines the need for African
Americans to play a critical role in conducting and interpreting maroon
archaeology, since “white perspectives and those of blacks will not necessarily
be the same” (Singleton 1997:149).
The following essay, it is hoped, might
serve as a small beginning to a new representation of the Great Dismal Swamp’s
human past; one that explores the ecological, historical, and cultural
contributions of maroons and African-American laborers to swamp life from 1763
to the Civil War.
CHAPTER
I
Present
Pasts in African-American Archaeology
“The certainties of one age are the
problems of the next.”
--R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism
Archaeological investigations of maroon
societies are expanding the study of slavery beyond the plantation in an effort
to better understand the tremendous variation in African-American environmental
adaptation, land use, living conditions, and cultural contact with Europeans
throughout the Americas (Sanford 1996:98; Singleton 1999:15-16; Weik
1997:83). Investigations into North
American maroon communities are beginning to form an American tributary to a
larger current in global maroon studies and, more generally, African-American
history. In the last decade, the aims
of maroon archaeology have paralleled those of African-American archaeology in
shifting from an emphasis on the basic identification and remembering of
forgotten peoples to “the study of the formation and transformation of the
black Atlantic world” (Singleton 1999:1).
Although still in primary stages, archaeologists in Brazil, Jamaica,
Suriname, and the Dominican Republic, are beginning to uncover evidence of the
daily lives of slaves, maroons, and Europeans that alters, supplements, or
questions previous historical and anthropological assumptions (Orser 1994;
Agorsah 1994; Harrington 1997:3). Seen
as a part of the modern multidisciplinary approach to the study of slavery and
resistance, maroon archaeology offers another perspective on the
African-American experience in the New World by investigating the relationship
of identity formation to material culture in contexts of differing power
relations (Singleton 1999:12-19).
Recent studies in African-American
archaeology illustrate the potential for maroon archaeology to contribute to
current research into African-American identity formation and transformation in
the Atlantic world (Singleton 1999).
While Theresa Singleton’s “I, Too,
Am America:” Archaeological Studies of African-American Life offers an
overview of African-American archaeology, as well as a collection of recent
investigations into identity formation and ethnicity, the variety of research
topics presented represents the diverse and variegated nature of
African-American archaeology today and how much it has diversified from its
primary emphasis on moral mission and social action several decades ago
(Singleton 1999).
Jay Haviser’s African Sites Archaeology in the Caribbean is an equally valuable
collection of articles that embodies the current trend in scholarship emphasizing
material, symbolic, and cultural transformations in African-American traditions
in the New World (Haviser 1999).
Perhaps no recent publication better exemplifies the current direction
of African-American archaeology than Maria Franklin and Garrett Fesler’s Historical Archaeology, Identity Formation,
and the Interpretation of Ethnicity, which explores the discourse between
ethnicity and the historical archaeological record.
Maroon archaeology, particularly in the
Great Dismal Swamp, has the potential to contribute new data and perspectives
on a wide range of current research themes in African-American
archaeology. The investigation of
maroon sites, for example, allows researchers to explore maroons’ cultural
identities as expressed through such material remains as tools, handcrafted
ceramics, beads, and food remains. In
addition, maroon housing and settlement, including possible spaces for
gardening, burying the dead, and disposing of refuse, suggest ways in which
runaways created a sustainable and meaningful existence within the Great
Dismal. Barbara Heath’s examination of
the slave population at Poplar Forest and her search for markers of identity
and “cultural choices” is particularly relevant to maroon archaeology in the
swamp. Did, as Heath asks of the Poplar
Forest slaves, African-American maroons “share a sense of ‘us’” while laboring
in the Dismal Swamp, and was this identity shared by African-American slaves
and free laborers (Heath 1999a:47)? What
are the material reflections of stolen freedom, legalized bondage, and free
labor in the swamp and how does the archaeological record differentiate between
legal status or occupation, ethnicity, and cultural identity at specific times
and in specific places within the swamp?
Maroon archaeology confronts and attempts to formulate answers to such
questions, and, in doing so, seeks to re-examine the discourse concerning
ethnic “markers” or “Africanisms” on African-American sites, as it relates to
identity formation and cultural choices (Singleton 1999:1,6-7; Perry and
Paynter 1999: 300; Heath 1999a:47).
Archaeological investigation of maroon sites in the Great Dismal
will likely inform the current debates over ethnic markers and archaeology’s
ability to determine the legal or professional status of African Americans
through the material residue of their lives and activities (DeCorse 1999:147;
Perry and Paynter 1999:302; Weik 1997:85; Funari 2000:7; Kern 1999:33; Steen
1999:94; Singleton 1999:6-12). Domestic
sites of laborers, slaves, and maroons within the swamp should contain the
material records of inhabitants’ accessibility to markets and clandestine trade
networks within and beyond the Dismal.
In addition, assemblages should reveal the extent to which maroons
worked, traded, and otherwise interacted with lumber company employees and
slaves occupying various portions of the swamp at different times during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Excavations of maroon sites will increasingly produce artifacts
that are among those most debated by scholars as to origin and use. For example, assemblages from maroon sites
in the Dismal might include Colonoware sherds, stem or bowl fragments from
locally-made clay pipes, or beads or buttons resembling those excavated from
surrounding sites in North Carolina or Virginia. The presence (or absence) of such artifacts on an established
maroon site in the swamp would further scholars’ understandings of
African-American identity formation and transformation, as well as consumerism,
and either help to corroborate or negate claims that such artifacts are
tangible markers of cultural identity.
Maroon assemblages may underscore Heath’s concept of “cultural choices”
and begin to show that maroons, too, actively created sustainable, if
temporary, living arrangements that placed them not only physically between
slavery and freedom, but economically and socially, as well. The quantity of Colonoware sherds and
Chesapeake pipe fragments, in particular, would offer new data that might
contribute to the current debate over whether such goods were made and/or used
primarily by African Americans (Deetz 1999:42-44; Emerson 1999:47-82; Mouer et.
Al. 1999:83-115; Ferguson 1999:116-131).
Maroon assemblages will increasingly offer new portraits of
African-American material life that can be compared to those from a growing
number of collections from diverse slave sites throughout the United States and
abroad (Posnansky 1999:21-37; Heath 1999b:47-64; Walsh 1997:171-203).
Faunal remains recovered from maroon
sites will likely add a dimension to scholars’ current understanding of
African-American foodways in freedom, slavery, and between. What did Dismal Swamp maroons eat when
hungry? Did they have access to
firearms? What items were they able to
trade or purchase through clandestine networks connecting local farms and
towns? Analyses of maroon subsistence
and foodways will contribute data that can be compared to assemblages from
sites at Poplar Forest (Heath 1999b:58-61), Carter’s Grove (Walsh 1997:200);
Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose (Reitz 1994), Flowerdew Hundred,
Monticello, Kingsmill (McKee 1999:228-231), and numerous others (see Singleton
1995:124-126). Faunal remains,
interpreted in conjunction with results from flotation, phytolith and pollen
analyses, might clarify the degree to which maroons cultivated, hunted, or
purchased their food. Such contextual
evidence may help to illuminate differences between the subsistence, survival,
and resistance strategies between maroons and slaves, which might further
explain the nature of everyday maroon life as it differed from that under
slavery.
Maroon archaeology aims to expand upon
studies of African-American plantation life by exploring the extent to which
slaves and masters negotiated their identities in ways that the monolithic
language of “slavery” and “freedom” cannot capture (Walsh 1997:171-203; Heath
1999b:27-64; Sobel 1987; Fesler 2000:20-21).
Future archaeology, beginning in the Great Dismal Swamp, will add a
vital perspective to the recent scholarship on maroon communities in the
Caribbean and South America, which continues to challenge the traditional
conception of slavery as a rigid “institution” by emphasizing the agency,
resiliency, and creativity of African Americans in the face of European power. Scholars such as Richard Price, Philip
Morgan, and Mavis Campbell have stressed the importance of the diversity of
relationships forged between masters, slaves, and runaways in the New World
(Campbell 1990; Price 1990; Price 1996; Morgan 1998:449-451). Increasingly, it is clear that slaves and
masters exerted power in various ways in order to improve their respective
standings within existing social parameters (Sobel 1987:165-168). No where is this more true than in the Great
Dismal Swamp, where the line between freedom and slavery was continually
redrawn by individuals navigating lives between slavery and freedom.
Maroon Archaeology and the Great Dismal Swamp
While a number of cultural resource management surveys have been conducted in various parts of the Dismal Swamp (largely along the Dismal Swamp Canal, parallel to Route 17 in Virginia and North Carolina), a systematic survey has yet to be undertaken (McDonald and Barber 2000; McFaden and Hudlow 1992; Jones, Gray, Hudlow 1992). Of the several dozen registered archaeological sites resulting from informal surface collection and pot-hunting within the current bounds of the swamp in Virginia, the overwhelming majority is prehistoric (Lichtenberger, Groveman, and Gray 1994; Underwood and Blanton 1999)[1]. Only a handful of registered sites include historic components associated with canal activity, logging, or other instances of African-American occupation in the swamp (Lichtenberger, Groveman, and Gray 1994; Underwood and Blanton 1999; McDonald and Barber 2000; McFaden and Hudlow 1992; Jones, Gray and Hudlow 1992).
Although features such as the Washington Ditch and Jericho Ditch received official site designations as long ago as 1981 (44SK78 and 44SK79, respectively) only one formal archaeological investigation has ever been conducted in an area of the swamp which appeared to be associated with maroons. In 1987, Elaine Nichols, then a graduate student at The University of South Carolina, briefly surveyed a tract of farmland near the eastern border between Virginia and North Carolina in the swamp. According to Nichols, she and her crew produced the first material evidence of a hidden North American maroon community; the legendary “black Robin Hoods” of the Dismal Swamp had been found (Nichols 1988:118,133; Aptheker 1939:167). Nichols’s excavation demonstrated the feasibility of maroon archaeology in North America and furthered the study of swamp maroons by uncovering key documentary evidence for the presence of runaways in the Dismal (Ferguson 1992:58; Weik 1997:84-85,87). Nichols’s excavation, designed to simply locate and identify a maroon site, provides the basis for future maroon archaeology in the swamp, which will center more on the formation and transformation of African-American culture and material culture in the Great Dismal.
In order to build upon the foundation that Nichols established as the initiator of maroon archaeology in North America, a rigorous analysis of her theory and methods is critical to finding a new starting point for historical archaeology in the Great Dismal. Although Nichols pioneered the modern study of American maroons by setting her archaeological sights upon the swamp, her sources, assumptions, and conclusions outlined in her thesis illustrate the need for a more disciplined reflexivity between historical documents and archaeological data, a reflexivity that is more common in African-American archaeology since her fieldwork in the late 1980s. Today, an interpretive, contextual approach that recognizes the significance of archaeological evidence within the larger sphere of historical realities allows artifacts and written words to speak to one another and allows archaeologists to ask more—and better—questions.
In her 1988 thesis, No Easy Run to Freedom: Maroons in the Great Dismal Swamp of North
Carolina and Virginia 1677-1850, Nichols attempted to show how a maroon
community on Culpeper Island, within the Dismal Swamp, could be identified and
dated archaeologically. While
pioneering the idea that archaeology might illuminate the hidden pasts of
maroons, Nichols ultimately failed to convincingly prove her thesis for reasons
that are instructive to future archaeologists interested in locating maroon
sites in the Dismal and elsewhere in the Americas. First, and perhaps most important, her historical research was
incomplete and flawed, resulting in false assumptions that skewed her research
design. In short, she relied too much
on unsubstantiated evidence and fictional accounts in formulating her research
questions and placing her excavation site where she did. Second, Nichols’s conception of the swamp
was monolithic and static. Her swamp
was a single, bounded space that changed little, if at all, through time; there
were no competing lumber companies, no criss-crossing canal channels, no
commercial developments. Finally,
Nichols refused to abandon her assumptions even when the archaeological
evidence—scant as it was—failed to offer any credible support for her thesis;
there was little reflexivity between the artifacts and the documents she
collected.
For four days in 1987, Nichols and her
crew attempted to locate a maroon site on a farm about one mile south of the
Virginia state line in Camden County, North Carolina. Her site, “Culpeper Island,” sits off Sawyers Road, roughly 3,000
feet east of NC Highway 17 (Nichols 1988:110).
On the most basic level, however, Nichols was digging in the wrong
place. Although there may have been a
Culpeper island or “Culpepper Island” or “Culpeper’s Island” in the Dismal
Swamp that once harbored runaways, Nichols’s excavation area, as it turned out,
was not it. Nichols based the selection
of her site on a brief description of the legendary island in the prologue of
John Hamilton Howard’s 1906 novel entitled In
the Shadow of the Pines, A Tale of Tidewater Virginia (Nichols
1988:102-104). In his novel Howard
explained that
“Culpepper Island, a high
tract of three hundred acres, difficult of access, under the management of one
Stephen Crane, was a favorite rendezvous for deserting slaves and white
criminals. This refuge was maintained
for many years , and was a prosperous place of its kind, until a posse of
slaveholders made their way into the swamp, and routed the proprietor and
destroyed his profitable business.
Since the raid, Culpepper Island has been deserted as a residence,
though dwellers in the swamp make their way to it in search of game” (Howard
1906:iii).
While Nichols accepted Howard’s depiction
of Culpeper Island as fact, she rejected Howard’s placement of the island near
Wallaceton, Virginia, more than three miles north of the North Carolina
border. Although two other scholars
agreed with Howard’s hypothesis placing the island north of Wallaceton, Nichols
insisted the island’s true location was in Camden County, North Carolina, where
a Culpeper Island is labeled on modern maps (Nichols 1988:104; NC Gazeteer
1998?:??). Nichols argued that not only
was the island marked on today’s maps “a hideout for runaway slaves,” but also
the hideout for John Culpeper, who may have led a 1677 uprising in North
Carolina that became known as “Culpeper’s Rebellion” (Nichols
1988:103-104). Unable to find any
historical references to a Culpeper Island in Virginia, Nichols concluded,
“Given the lack of evidence that there was a Culpeper Island in Virginia,
the proximity of Culpeper’s rebellion to the site of Culpeper’s Island,
approximately 2 miles,…I am convinced that it is highly probable that Culpeper
Island in North Carolina is associated with the famous or infamous John
Culpeper” (Nichols 1988:105).
To corroborate her theoretical leap from
Wallaceton, Virginia, to Camden County, North Carolina, Nichols turned to David
Hunter Strother’s 1856 visit to the swamp for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (described in subsequent
chapters). After describing Strother’s
itinerary she argued,
“It is impossible to pinpoint an exact
location for where [Strother] was when he saw the maroon. But it can be inferred that he was probably
in the general vicinity of Culpeper island.
His camp was a horse camp 100 paces from the Dismal Swamp Canal. It is highly probably [sic] that [Strother’s] camp was close to the Virginia/North
Carolina border which would have placed him near the Island” (Nichols 1988:26).
Nichols placed Strother and the maroon
Osman, whom he spotted, near her dig site in North Carolina. As is shown in the following chapters,
however, Strother traveled down the Jericho
Canal, belonging to the Dismal Swamp Land Company in the Land Company’s
northwest section of the swamp, not the Dismal Swamp Canal, five miles to the
east that belonged to the Dismal Swamp Canal Company. In attempting to legitimatize the location and purpose of her
excavation, Nichols rearranged the historical record to suit her archaeological
needs.
In addition, Nichols’s research design
rested on her assertion that numerous general references to runaway slaves in
historical newspaper advertisements and articles referred specifically to
maroons inhabiting Culpeper Island. She
did not allow for the possibility that there might have been various bands of
maroons living in separate areas of the swamp or, more likely, individual
maroons, or small groups, working as “shingle getters” for large lumber
businesses. Furthermore, the only
definitive date Nichols gave for the Culpepper Island maroons was the date of
the Culpeper Rebellion of 1677. She
asserted that “this community of rebels contained runaway slaves, which I
believe were a part of the maroon community of Culpeper’s Island…” (Nichols
1988:81-82). If Nichols was correct, the
artifacts from her site on Culpeper Island should have dated to 1677 or before.
Nichols’s excavations, however, uncovered artifacts with termini post quems much later than her 1677 date for the supposed maroon
community (see Table 1).
Nichols’s model for excavating maroon
sites in the swamp was clearly removed from the reality of the historical
record. The theory and methods guiding
her excavations rested on a set of
assumptions that were in direct contrast to available documents. First, while she assumed that the swamp,
itself, bound all maroons together in a cultural, social, and economic “common
space,” Nichols ignored the fact that, beginning in the eighteenth century, the
swamp became divided into separate, large blocks of land used for different
commercial purposes (Nichols 1988:8).
As shown in the following chapters, available documents allow
researchers to view swamp maroons in more specific terms, rooted in particular
places at particular times. For
example, a runaway who worked in the Land Company’s swamp might have led a very
different existence, under different material conditions, than one who sought
refuge along the Dismal Swamp Canal, or those who attempted to exist by plundering
surrounding farms in the eighteenth century.
For those working for lumber companies as shingle-getters or laborers in
the nineteenth century, it was unlikely that “to survive, [they] selected
isolated, inaccessible and inhospitable places for settlement” (Nichols
1988:14). Rather, such maroons did the
opposite, seeking out employment in accessible, hospitable areas of commercial
activity within the swamp. Equally questionable
is Nicholas’s assertion that maroon societies in the swamp consisted of Native
Americans, European indentured servants, and a few African Americans. Not until 1850, she argued, were the swamp’s
maroon communities primarily African American (Nichols 1988:71-72,88). Neither the historical nor archaeological
records support this assertion, since the last Native American presence in the
swamp is documented to be much earlier (Blanton 2000).
Nichols’s model of maroon life in the
swamp, based upon an incomplete and inaccurate reading of the historical
record, predicted a misleading set of material remains she expected to find on
the Dismal Swamp maroon site. Her model
hypothesized a maroon material culture that included such “Africanisms” as
fetishes, charms, Colono Ware, wattle and daub housing structures, and
ceremonial containers of animal bones, teeth, and feathers. Nichols expected the site’s material culture
to reflect an African and Native American presence more than a Euro-American
presence and to have an ethnic distinctiveness different from the material
remains of small, isolated, rural, European- American farms of the same period
(Nichols 1988:106). In reality,
however, it is likely that the material culture of swamp maroons differed in
more subtle ways from that of the slaves and hired laborers they worked with in
the swamp. This, it seems, will present
the greatest challenge to archaeologists, who must devise a way of recognizing
patterns that will help distinguish between maroon and slave sites within the
swamp.
An
analysis of Nichols’s results demonstrates the ease with which archaeological
data can be manipulated to support false assumptions. More than 95 percent of the site’s artifacts came from
unprovenienced, plowzone surface collection (Nichols 1988:120). No subsurface features were identified. From the artifact assemblage, Nichols
concluded that her excavations had “revealed a late eighteenth/early nineteenth
century component most likely the remains of maroons, a late nineteenth/early
twentieth century settlement of poor whites, and some limited evidence of
logging activities in the nineteenth and twentieth century” (Nichols
1988:120). The fact that her few
artifacts dated the site to the “late eighteenth/early nineteenth century” was
in direct opposition to her thesis, that
Culpeper Island was a maroon site dating to Culpepper’s legendary
rebellion of 1677. Not one artifact excavated or collected
dated her site to the seventeenth century, let alone 1677. Nonetheless, Nichols retained her site’s
early date and asserted that the later artifacts simply proved that the site
was continuously occupied by maroons until 1870. She wrote,
“Ceramic patterns support the identification of this site as a maroon
encampment from the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century. The period from 1677-1870 has been
considered by references already cited, as a time of continuous occupation of
the Island by runaways” (Nichols 1988:120).
Moreover, Nichols attempted to explain
away the lack of early artifacts recovered from the site. For example, she wrote that earlier maroons
“would have been small in number and were unlikely to have started their
settlement in the Swamp with many goods or established networks. The lack of material evidence for an earlier
component may be a result of their material impoverishment” (Nichols
1988:120-121). Nichols continued,
“The overall quantity and quality of ceramics and other artifacts found on Culpeper island seem indicative of a group of people with very limited resources. The evidence confirms the historical data that maroon groups in the Swamp prior to the mid-nineteenth century were faced with serious threats to survival because of limited resources” (Nichols 1988:131).
Nichols attempted, unsuccessfully, to
draw compelling conclusions from negative evidence gleaned from only a meager
assemblage of artifacts.
Nichols appropriately concluded her thesis by acknowledging that her site was “different and unique” because of its “similarity to an industrial rather than a residential site, based on the lack of variation in the ceramic artifactual pattern” (Nichols 1988:131). But instead of asking new questions of her documents and initiating a discourse between her archaeological and historical data, she simply excluded the archaeological evidence from the equation (Nichols 1988:131). In fact, there is little doubt that Nichols succeeded in excavating a nineteenth-century commercial lumbering site, rather than a 1677 maroon encampment or a later maroon community. Indeed, by the late eighteenth century, Culpeper Island became prime commercial real estate bordering the Dismal Swamp Canal. Later, the site was once home to a number of small, temporary tramways (railroads) built to transport lumber through the swamp (Nichols 1988:127-128; Trout 1998:46-47).
In her excitement to initiate archaeology
as a tool for locating American maroon sites, Nichols allowed a meager artifact
assemblage and fictional narratives to drive her archaeological methodologies
and conclusions. Martin Hall’s
lamentation is particularly relevant to the problems in Nichols’s thesis. Hall writes, “One of the most prevalent
shortcomings in historical archaeology as a discipline has been the failure to
marry words and things” (Hall 2000:16).
It is with this goal in mind—to align and allow discourse between the
historical and material records—that a new approach to maroon archaeology in
the swamp is presented in the following chapters.
Nichols’s work was crucial in expanding
the discipline of African-American archaeology to include the investigation of
potential maroon sites in North America.
A thorough analysis of her research design, methods, and conclusions is
intended here to lay the groundwork for future archaeological investigation and
not to diminish the influence of her work.
Indeed, much of the structure and content of this essay is designed to
overcome the difficulties and limitations of past research, in light of current
data produced by scholars investigating African-American sites in the region. Only by revising Nichols’s conclusions, is
it possible to begin anew, in the right place.
Chapter II
“Everything that is alive forms an
atmosphere around itself.”
--Goethe, Maxims and Reflections
Before draining, development, and
cultivation accelerated in the nineteenth century, ecologists estimate that the
Great Dismal Swamp encompassed nearly 1,235,500 acres. Today, the remaining swamp stretches across
a tract roughly one-third its original size, a large portion of which rests in
the Great Dismal National Wildlife Refuge (Whitehead 1972: 301-302; Trout
1998:30). For past visitors to the
swamp, however, attempting to pinpoint where, exactly, the Great Dismal began
and lesser, surrounding “dismals” ended was a subject rarely agreed upon.[2] Descriptions of the swamp—its length, width,
topography, flora, fauna, and human inhabitants—vary as greatly as the
historical and literary circumstances that produced them.
Beginning in the eighteenth century,
surveyors, travelers, and soldiers depicted the Dismal Swamp alternately as a
natural wonder, loathsome jungle, or strategic battlefield of differing sizes
and shapes. It is often difficult to
know, exactly, what or where writers were referring to when they described “the
Great Dismal Swamp.” Cartographers
interpreted the swamp’s limits differently, as well. For William Byrd, who skirted the dismal while surveying the
border between Virginia and North Carolina in 1728, the swamp was an
interminable morass. While Byrd hypothesized
that “it may be Computed at a Medium to be about 30 Miles long and 10 Miles
wide,” in reality he was as uncertain of the swamp’s dimensions as were its
bordering inhabitants, who “knew no more of the Matter than Star-gazers know of
the distance of the Fixt Stars” (Byrd 1929: 84, 60).
In 1777, the inspector of the Continental postal route between Philadelphia and Savannah distinguished between the Dismal, which stretched only “about 50 miles in Length, & 15 Miles in breadth, [480,000 acres]” and the numerous smaller swamps to the west (Hazard 1959:361). Several years later, however, Captain Johann Ewald, a Hessian Mercenary hired by the British in the Revolutionary War, was no more certain of the swamp’s size than Byrd had been nearly fifty years before. Ewald viewed the Dismal as unchartered territory, its extent known only to those who lived within it and the Patriots who secretly met there (Ewald 1979:277). A German traveler, Johann David Schoepf, also saw the swamp as wilderness, but one that was firmly bounded by civilization. In 1784 Schoepf wrote,
“This swamp is between
Norfolk and Suffolk, Edenton (which is 60 miles from Suffolk), and the
sea-coast, and is a thick, boggy, impenetrable wilderness, in length 40-50
miles from north to south, and 20-25 miles wide [more than 500,000 acres]. In it are found…bears, wolves, opposums,
raccoons, foxes, squirrels…for few people venture in, and fewer still know
anything of what is there except by hearsay. … While the British garrisions
were at Norfolk and Portsmouth, the Americans cut a foot-path through a part of
this swamp, to make a more secluded road for spies” (Schoepf 1911:99-101).
A decade later, Isaac Weld reduced the
greatness of the Dismal by subtracting 350,000 acres from Schoepf’s estimation. For Weld, the “great tract” of swampland
spanned just 150,000 acres.
The extent to which the dimensions of the
Great Dismal Swamp were unknown or largely not agreed upon is illustrated by
descriptions in two North Carolina school textbooks printed in 1815. In the first, written by Jedidiah Morse, the
Dismal “covers 140,00 acres, and has a lake in the middle about 7 miles long,
called Drummond’s Pond” (Coon 1926:42).
By contrast, William Guthrie’s geography more than doubled the swamp’s
size, claiming that it covered nearly 320,000 acres and contained several small
lakes (Coon 1926:44).
In several instances, it appears that
those who found the swamp threatening or overwhelming exaggerated the physical
greatness of the Dismal. For example,
in 1817 Samuel Huntington Perkins, a young New England tutor traveling through
the swamp, estimated the Dismal’s size to be over a million acres (McLean
1970:56).[3] In his journal, Perkins wrote with relief,
“My road lay through the centre of dismal swamp. And there was no probability of arriving at a stopping place before evening. Travelling here without pistols is considered very dangerous owing to the great number of runaway negroes. They conceal themselves in the woods & swamps by day and frequently plunder by night. However, as my means would not admit delay, concluded to proceed, and have now arrived without molestation” (McLean 1970:55-56).
Similarly, for many nervous whites who
lived in Southampton County, Virginia, during the Nat Turner rebellion of 1831,
the Great Dismal Swamp seemed to loom over them in a way the remote marshland
never had before. Fear magnified the
Great Dismal’s size. No longer did the
swamp stop in Suffolk; it appeared to lurk just below their Southampton
verandas. One Richmond newspaper
reported that the Turner “insurrection in Southampton is little more than the
irruption of 150 or 200 runaway slaves from the Dismal Swamp, incited by a
spirit of plunder and rapine” (Tragle 1971:36). Another account, published in The
Richmond Enquirer showed how whites came to see all surrounding Southampton
swamps as insidious extensions of the Great Dismal. The Enquirer reported
that the rebellion began when “about 250 negroes from a Camp Meeting about the
Dismal Swamp, set out on a marauding excursion, and have, for the sake of
plunder, murdered about 60 persons, some of them families much known” (Tragle 1971:46) It continued, “most, if not all, the blacks were runaways, who
had broken out of the swamps, to rob and do mischief” (Tragle 1971:47). While Nat Turner was at large, the Great
Dismal swamp seemed to swell, encompassing all “the swamps” in southeast
Virginia.
After Nat Turner was captured and
executed, however, the Dismal apparently contracted to its normal size. By 1836, according to farmer/editor Edmund
Ruffin, the swamp was, in Virginia:
“about 25 miles from east to west, and about 20 from north to south—that is from near Suffolk to the Carolina line [500,000 acres]. The swamp stretches perhaps 20 miles more southward within North Carolina, but with much contracted width, and limits not well defined on maps, or by report” (Ruffin 1837:513)
Although historians and biologists today
point to farming and timbering in the mid-nineteenth century that considerably
reduced the Dismal’s size and altered its ecosystem, contemporary reports
depicted an amorphous swamp sometimes larger than that described more than a century earlier by Byrd, sometimes
smaller. For example, in 1852, the
French traveler Charles Olliffe wrote that “the famous Dismal Swamp” included 640,000 acres of marshland
“filled from one end to the other, save for an occasional open spot, with a thousand kinds of plant remains: fragments of rotting wood…or tangles of dead tree roots of colossal size. Herbaceous plants, most of which resemble moss, although some grow 4 or 5 feet tall, cover the ground which is really a kind of blackish mud” (Olliffe 1964:53-54).
But the next year, Frederick Law Olmsted,
on assignment for The New York Times
reported that the “vast quaking morass”
encompassed only 150,000 acres, while the “little Dismal, Alligator, Catfish,
Green and other smaller swamps, on the shores of the Albemarle and Pamlico
contain over 2,000,000 acres” (Olmsted 1853a).
Clearly, even as late as the mid-nineteenth century there was little
consensus where or what the Great Dismal Swamp was, exactly. Indeed, David Hunter Strother (alias Porte
Crayon) of Harper’s Monthly
acknowledged the confusion over the swamp’s geography when he confessed in
1856:
“It would be difficult to define accurately the limits of the Great Dismal Swamp. On the Virginia side it occupies considerable portions of Nansemond and Princess Anne counties, and in North Carolina, portions of Gates, Pasquotank, Camden, and Currituck. Its area has been estimated at from six hundred to a thousand square miles [384,000 acres to 640,000 acres]” (Strother 1856:449).
Just as the size and location of the
Great Dismal Swamp have varied through time, according to contemporary
historical and literary pressures, so have descriptions of the swamp,
itself. Since the eighteenth century,
various writers depicted the swamp in language that suited their motivations
for traveling there. Where some
conjured “Gloomy Images” portending evil, others saw virgin beauty akin to Eden
(Byrd 1929:70). William Byrd described
the “Dirty Place” in terms that would forever fix the Great Dismal in the minds
of many Americans as an unhealthy morass, an oozing wound on an otherwise pristine
landscape. Byrd mused, “neither Bird
nor Beast, Insect nor Reptile came in view.
Doubtless, the Eternal Shade that broods over this mighty Bog, and
hinders the sun-beams from blessing the Ground, makes it uncomfortable
habitation for any thing that has life.”
He added solemnly, “Not even a Turkey Buzzard will venture to fly over
it” (Byrd 1929:70). David Hunter Strother (Alias Porte Crayon)
traveled to the Dismal in a similar frame of mind while on assignment for Harper’s Monthly magazine in 1856. He wrote, “Lofty trees threw their arching
limbs over the canal, clothed to their tops with a guaze-like drapery of
tangled vines; walls of matted reeds closed up the view on either side, while
thickets of myrtle, green briar, bay, and juniper, hung over the black, narrow
canal.” He concluded, “The sky was
obscured with leaden colored clouds, and all nature was silent, monotonous,
death-like” (Strother 1856:443).[4]
Perhaps influenced by the poems of
Thomas Moore and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (who both wrote poems celebrating
the swamp’s dreariness) Alexander Mackay described his dismal journey to the
swamp in the mid-nineteenth century. He
wrote,
“Its
name well indicates its character. From
the soft spongy ground springs a dense and tangled underwood, overtopped by a
heavy and luxuriant growth of juniper, cypress, cedar, and sometimes oak and
sycamore, which stand at angles, and are freqently seen propping each other up,
so precarious is their hold of the marshy soil. During the day-time the air is moist and relaxing; at night it is
laden with pestilential vapours, which war with every form of animal life but
that of the venomous reptile and the bull-frog, whose discordant croak ceases
not night or day. In passing through,
one cannot fail to be struck with the quantity of decaying timber which he
constantly sees around him; some prostrate, and melting, as it were, into the
semi-liquid earth…At night this timber emits a pale phosphorescent light,
which, with the fitful and cold lustre of the firefly, only serves to deepen
the pervading gloom….It is desolation in the lap of luxuriance—it is solitude
in a funeral garb” (Mackay 1850:170-171)
By comparision, Edmund Ruffin, in 1836,
saw the densely-wooded Dismal swampland as a cathedral, muted by brush, lit
softly by small patches of sunlight. He
exclaimed, “The trees are beautiful, and especially when they stand thick,
forming a high roof of their evergreen tops, supported by numerous columns
formed by their long and straight stems.”
Traveling the same canal that Strother would twenty years later, Ruffin
saw life, not death in the quagmire that surrounded him. He wrote, “The canal, when perfectly
straight for a long course, with the trees on each side almost joining their
branches across, presents a beautiful vista and perspective view—and with our
singular boat and its equipage would have furnished a fine subject for a
painter” (Ruffin 1836:517). Similarly,
in 1796, Benjamin Henry Latrobe looked to the swamp with wonder and awe,
recording his impressions in water color and words. On the subject of his painting, Latrobe described in his diary
the jungle-like “brake” that “formed a most beautiful semi-circular Arch over
our heads in many places” (Carter 1977:234).
In spite of the alternating gloom and
euphoria encountered in such descriptions of the Great Dismal Swamp, a number
of geographical, ecological, and biological constants surface in historical
depictions of the swamp to corroborate scholars’ views of the swamp’s natural
and human pasts. In the eighteenth
century, there is little doubt that the Great Dismal Swamp was, as one French
traveler recorded, mostly “a Considerable tract of land buried under water”
(AHR 1921:739). While timber companies
and local residents constructed several log roads through the swamp, the Dismal
was largely a waterlogged bog.
According to one German visitor, “whoever slipped his footing, sank up
to the neck in water and deep, fat mire” (Schoepf 1911: 99-101).[5] Before nineteenth-century logging denuded
the oldest and largest stands in the swamp, the Great Dismal was “entirely
covered with trees,” Weld wrote. “These
trees grow to a most enormous size, and between them the brushwood springs up
so thick that the swamp in many parts is absolutely impervious” (Weld 1799:102) Indeed, so dense was the brush within the
swamp that it was often impossible to see further than ten yards away or hear
even the report of firearms from a few hundred yards (Smyth 1784:235-236;
Latrobe 234). According to British
travel writer J.F.D. Smyth, “The only way of hearing any sound, for the least
distance, is by laying one’s ear close to the ground, by which means one can
hear six times as far as any other way” (Smyth 1784:236).
But the Dismal was never entirely under
water. There were ridges that ran
through the swamp, high enough to maintain dry ground even in the rainiest of
seasons (Smyth 1784:236). Diverse
plants and animals abounded on the swamp’s high ground. Weld explained that “juniper and cypress
trees grow where there is most moisture, and on dry parts, white and red oaks
and a variety of pines” (Weld 1799:102).
Smyth reported, “On these ridges are astonishing numbers of bears,
wolves, panthers, wild cats, oppossums, racoons, snakes, some deer, and every
kind of wild beasts; between them are vast numbers of otters, musk rats,
beavers, and all kinds of amphibious animals” (Smyth 1784:236-237; Schoepf
1911:99-101; Weld 1799:103). As well as
home to wild animals, the swamp’s dry spaces were commonly used as feeding
places for surrounding residents’ cattle and hogs (Byrd 1929:74; Smyth
1784:238; Schoepf 1911:99-101; Wertenbaker 1962:30; Royster 1999:249).
Lake Drummond, the second largest lake in
Virginia today, rested deep in the northwest quadrant of the Dismal Swamp and
abounded with fish (Smyth 1784:234).
Its water, slightly acidic from decomposing plant matter, proved as
healthy as it was brown. Its dramatic
setting and size greatly impressed visitors, who saw it as a body of water “so
much like belonging to [a] fairy land” (Ruffin 1836:515). Latrobe once wrote that
“upon opening upon Drummond lake, one simple idea, one immense object, uncompounded of heterogenous parts, fills the eye, at once and satisfies it. A vast circular surface of Water which appears perfectly circular, bounded by a margin of the most gigantic trees in the world (so gigantic that on entering the lake, the barkless stems of trees that have died, appear on the opposite side at the distance of 8 Miles, as objects of very large size) at one view opens to the eye. It absorbs or expells every other idea, and creates a quiet solemn pleasure, that I never felt from any similar circumstance” (Carter 1977:235)
Although the size and depth of Lake
Drummond today is much as it was in the eighteenth century, environmental
changes brought about by burgeoning timber, canal and agricultural industries
altered the surrounding swampland considerably in the nineteenth century. Timber companies felled and collected the
swamp’s oldest and largest trees, leaving behind open spaces, where smaller,
more dense brush began to grow. By
1836, leaders of one of the swamp’s largest lumber companies, the Great Dismal
Swamp Land Company, complained of a lumber shortage. Joseph Holladay, the company’s agent lamented, “It is unnecessary
any longer to conceal the fact that the timber for the best quality of shingle
is exhausted” (Reid 1948:102). Olmsted
reported several years later that
“Nearly all the valuable trees have now been cut off from the swamp. The whole ground has been frequently gone over, the best timber selected and removed at each time, of course leaving the remainder standing thinly, so that the wind has more effect upon it, and much of it, from the yielding of the soft soil, is uprooted or broken off” (Olmsted 1853b).
Perhaps more than any direct exploitation
of the natural resources, nothing changed the swamp more than an inadvertent,
but direct effect—fire. Edmund Ruffin
described his journey through the swamp’s “burnt woods,” where large stands of
trees were once consumed by fire, as in the great fire of 1806. “The parts more easy to walk through,”
Ruffin wrote, “are where the original gigantic forest growth has not been
destroyed or hurt by fire, or where the reeds, forming a thick growth, have all
died, and thus permit one, with some effort, to break his way through such a
brittle though close barricade.”
Although even then, according to Ruffin, these parts “are scarcely
passable” (Ruffin 1836:517).[6] Olmsted described similar conditions during
his visit to the swamp. Despite the
fact that fires were frequent and destructive occurances in the mid-nineteenth
century, Olmsted observed that “the swamp is scarcely passable in many parts,
owing not only to the softness of the sponge, but to the obstruction caused by
innumerable shrubs, vines, creepers and briars which often take entire
possession, forming a dense brake or jungle” (Olmsted 1853a). Strother, too, encountered areas of the
swamp diminished by man and nature. On
entering a burnt woods, he wrote:
“The overarching gums had given place to a thick grove of pointed juniper trunks, deadened by a recent fire. This region bore some resemblance to the crowded docks of a maritime town. The horizontally projecting limbs were the booms and the yards, while the hanging vines served as cordage. Then the gums and cypresses reappeared, the same bed of reeds, evergreens, and briars, in endless perspective” (Strother 1856:444).
While enterprising farmers dug ditches to
drain vast tracts on the swamp’s southern and eastern peripheries, much of the
Great Dismal remained boggy and wet.
One observer wrote in 1845 that the swampy soil “trembles under the
feet, and filling immediately the impression of every step with water” (Howe
1845:401; see also Tragle 1971:297).
Other than during times of occasional drought, the swamp provided an
efficient breeding ground for mosquitoes, flies, and other pests (DSLC
9/1/1852; Reid 1948:106; Ruffin 1861:205).
Insects were so savage, according to Strother, that they were said “to
worry the life out of a mule” (Strother 1856:450). Indeed, mosquitoes and yellow-flies attacked swamp visitors and
laborers alike; they drove patrons from a short-lived summer resort on Lake
Drummond and swarmed hungrily to the beef brine rubbed deep into the bleeding
backs of beaten slaves (Strother 1856:450; Freund 1949:45-451; Grandy
1968:22-23; Starobin 1970:63; Southern Literary Messenger 1838:25). It was generally agreed that the swamp’s
water was potable, if not medicinal.
Some went further and insisted, “The water is the colour of wine &
the most pleasant that I ever drank” (McLean 1970:55-58). Ruffin argued that the Great Dismal’s water
was “preferred for drinking by all the laborers and others most accustomed to
its peculiar, and at first, disagreeable flavor, to nay other water whatever”
(Ruffin 1836:518). Likewise, Strother
remarked that the water was “fresh, healthful, pleasant to the taste, and, it
is said, will keep pure for an unlimited time.” He added that its slightly acidic quality appealed to captains of
vessels who required drinking water on long voyages (Strother 1856:450).
Reviews of the swamp’s air quality,
though mixed, were generally less flattering. One visitor, Daniel French, wrote
to his wife in Connecticut, “these swamps in hot and dry weather send forth a
deadly and poisinous vapour, which produces various sickness and death, and
give a great part of the people a yellow, pale, and death like countenance,
which makes one shudder with horror.”
Reassuringly, he quickly added, “but the thunder storms which are almost
every day, coll and purify the air” so that “now and then a fresh and rosy
cheek is to be seen” (French 1938:157).
Samuel Warner was less balanced, writing in 1831 that “the noisome
exhalations” of the swamp “infect the air round about, giving agues and other
distempers to the neighboring inhabitants” (Tragle 1971:297-298). While it is difficult to accept Warner’s
picture of the swamp’s atmosphere as purely toxic, it is equally difficult to
embrace Ruffin’s assertion that
“the laborers are remarkably healthy, and almost entirely free from the autumnal fevers that so severely scourge all the surrounding country. It is said that no case has yet occurred of a shingle-getter dying of disease in the swamp—nor did my informants know that any one had been so sick as to require to be brought out” (Ruffin 1836:518).
It is likely that Ruffin’s sources lacked
the knowledge or the inclination to accurately relate health conditions of
African Americans working in the swamp.
Just two years later, for example, the Dismal Swamp Land Company’s
business agent reported to the firm’s president, “I regret to inform you that
One of the Co. Negroes died last week with inflammation & obstruction of
the bowels” (Starobin 1970:63; DSLC 2/1/1838; DSLC 7/31/1838). In addition, doctors regularly visited
slaves working in the swamp, administering medicine for such diseases as
cholera (Reid 1948:118). Moreover, by
1853, work in the swamp was so dangerous or unhealthy that the Dismal Swamp
Land Company was one of the few companies in the nation to regularly secure
life insurance policies on its hired slaves (Savitt 1977:583, 591).[7]
In the second half of the eighteenth
century, African Americans were compelled to alter the geography of the Great
Dismal through clearing, planting, and canal building. European Americans, beginning with William
Byrd II, dreamed of taming and draining the Dismal through mass slave
labor. Such dreams would irrevocably
alter the Great Dismal Swamp’s human and natural history.
Chapter
III
“In these new towns, one can find the old
houses only in people.”
--Elias Canetti, The Human Province
Although considerable evidence supports the presence of maroons in the Great Dismal Swamp in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the nature of the evidence differs greatly from one century to the other. Eighteenth-century references depict maroons only in general terms, which prevent modern archaeologists from associating such accounts with specific spaces within the swamp. By contrast, several nineteenth- century documents locate contemporary maroon sites within particular areas of the swamp, allowing archaeologists to approximate their locations to within an area of a few miles. In addition to locating maroon sites on the map, it is necessary to situate them in time. Thus, the historical and cultural contexts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century maroons serve as a departure for further exploration of everyday life in the swamp and act as the basis for a model of maroon life—between slavery and freedom.
Since the early eighteenth century, the
area surrounding the Great Dismal Swamp, especially in North Carolina, had a
reputation as a “Rogue’s harbor” and haven for fugitive slaves and idle debtors
(Leaming 1995:83-105; Crow 1980:92; Byrd 1929:58; Erickson 1994:G2). For years, tension brewed among Virginia’s
officials over the fact that the government of North Carolina, in sheltering
maroons and criminals, “has encourag’d this unneighbourly Policy in order to
increase their People” (Byrd 1929:58). While Virginia’s claims might have been
true, little evidence exists of maroons in the Dismal Swamp before the 1760s.1
Instead, it is clear that many middle and lower-class Virginians and
North Carolinians who bordered the swamp saw it as their livelihood. Small landowners and squatters harvested
massive stands of white cedar on the swamp’s periphery, delivering cut shingles
and other lumber to merchants in Norfolk for markets in the north (Erickson
1994:G2). Poor farmers also used the
swamp as a free feeding ground for their livestock (Wertenbaker 1962:30). It was not until Virginia/North Carolina
relations soured further in 1728, when William Byrd II helped survey the swamp
in search of an accurate borderline between the states, that wealthy European
Americans came to see the Great Dismal Swamp as something to be exploited,
rather than simply avoided.
William Byrd’s legacies to the Great
Dismal Swamp were considerable and far-reaching. First, in his History of
the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, Byrd offered his
readers a detailed, play-by-play account of the ill-fated survey that, finally,
determined the width of the swamp. Byrd
described the Dismal as a place worthy of its name where “the Eternal Shade
that broods over this mighty Bog, and hinders the sun-beams from blessing the
Ground, makes it an uncomfortable habitation for any thing that has life.” He
scorned the smell of the swamp’s air as so corrupt that “Not even a Turkey-Buzzard
will venture to fly over it” (Byrd 1929:84,70). While he no doubt valued literary notoriety over scientific
accuracy, Byrd’s description of the swamp nonetheless fired the imaginations of
many would-be adventurers.
Byrd’s second legacy was his utopian
“Proposal to Drain the Dismal Swamp,” which outlined his scheme to make the
spongy swamp muck “the fittest soil in the world for producing hemp” (Ruffin
1837:522). In a plan that was adopted
thirty-five years later by a group of hopeful entrepreneurs (including George
Washington), Byrd explained how the Great Dismal could be attacked through
timbering and conquered through agriculture within the space of ten years. With the enthusiasm of a motivational speaker,
Byrd highlighted his eight-step plan to success:
1)
Sell twenty shares to investors.
2)
Obtain a Royal grant with an exemption from paying levies for ten years.
3)
Survey the land.
4)
Select a plantation site on “the skirts of the Dismal.”
5)
Obtain all necessary supplies; tools, clothes, etc.
6)
Purchase ten seasoned “negros.”
7)
Teach slaves how to saw, make shingles, draw clap-boards, etc.
8)
Use profits “for the purchase of negros, as fast as room can be made for them “
(Ruffin 1837:523).
Byrd’s proposal, which set forth the
beginnings of large-scale, commercial exploitation of African Americans in the
swamp, was nothing less than a celebration of slavery. Byrd advised that females as well as male
slaves be bought, so “that their breed may supply the loss.” Indeed, children would also make sound
investments, since they “not only season better than men and women, but will be
very soon fit for labour, and supply the mortality that must happen among so
great a number.” Byrd assured his
readers, however, that in spite of any losses through slave deaths, once the
goal of three hundred slaves was obtained, there would be considerable “profits
ariseing from the labour of negros on the land,” not to mention “the
unspeakable benefit it will prove to the publick” (Byrd 1929:524, 523).
Thirty-five years later, a group of
twelve men self-styled as the “Adventurers for Draining the Great Dismal Swamp”
filed a petition for land in the Great Dismal Swamp in the hopes of realizing
William Byrd’s dream (Brown 1967:24; Stewart 1979:59; Royster 1999:82). George Washington, Thomas Nelson, Robert
Burwell, and the nine other prominent businessmen who comprised the
shareholders of the new Dismal Swamp Company (hereafter referred to by its
later name, Dismal Swamp Land Company) began to follow religiously Byrd’s
recommendations toward financial success; within two years, they hired a
surveyor who mapped their 40,000-acre property; they rented a 402-acre farm,
“Dismal Plantation,” on the western skirts of the swamp, obtained necessary
supplies, and anted several slaves each (totaling forty-three men, nine women,
a boy, and a girl) (Reid 1948:17; Royster 1999:97). Each day, a portion of slaves remained at Dismal Plantation to
farm, while others either cleared land by cutting shingles or dug what would
become known as the Washington Ditch into the swamp. Until the Jericho Ditch was finished in 1812 and extended a
waterway through the company’s land to Suffolk,Virginia, the Washington Ditch
remained the company’s main artery for transporting shingles out of the swamp.
Norfolk, just north of the Dismal and the
destination for the company’s shingles was, in the eyes of a French visitor
“the most Considerable town for trade and shiping In virginia.” From Norfolk, the shingles and surplus corn
or rice the company’s slaves grew were shipped to New England and the West
Indies (AHR 1921:739). John Washington, George Washington’s younger
brother, managed the company’s daily business from Dismal Plantation and
attempted to keep the company’s slaves under his control. In 1768, however, John Washington ran the
following advertisement in the Virginia
Gazette:
“Nansemond,
June 20, 1768. RUN away from the
subscriber some time in April 1767, a new Negro man named TOM, belonging to the
proprietors of the Dismal Swamp. He is
about 5 feet 6 inches high, has his country marks (that is, four on each of his
cheeks.) Any person that apprehends the
said fellow, so that I may get him, shall have three pounds reward, paid by
JOHN WASHINGTON” (Virginia Gazette
1768).
Tom was the first documented runaway
to be associated with the Dismal Swamp.
(While he may have spent time in the swamp itself, Tom was located in
1781 at a neighbor’s house nearby.)
Several years later, another advertisement further illustrated John
Washington’s difficulty of controlling slaves so close to the swamp:
“WARRASQUEAK
Bay, November 18, 1771. RUN away from
the Subscriber, in Isle of Wight, a Negro named JACK, about five and thirty
Years of Age, five Feet ten Inches high, a slim, clean made, talkative, artful,
and very saucy Fellow. Also a Negro
Woman named VENUS, thirty two years old, five Feet four Inches high, stout
made, very smooth tongued, and has been five Years accustomed to the House. They worked in the Dismal Swamp about two
Years, under Mr. John Washington, and carried with them several different Kinds
of Apparel….Nathaniel Burwell” (Virginia
Gazette 1771).
About the same time, John Mayo of
Cumberland ran a similar advertisement for “a young Negro man name TOM, about 6
feet high, [who] has a roguish look, and has lost part of one of his
ears.” Mayo reported that “He has been
seen in Nansemond and Norfolk counties, and is supposed to be about the Dismal
Swamp” (Virginia Gazette 1768b; Virginia Gazette 1769).
Although advertisements such as
these offered few specifics, they suggested that the Dismal Swamp had entered
the minds of surrounding planters and businessmen as a place where their slaves
might abscond. Such general references
to the “Dismal Swamp,” however, are broad and offer little meaningful
information beyond that of a general indication of the eastern Virginia/North
Carolina border. It is impossible to
say from three advertisements whether or not Tom, Tom, Jack, and Venus intended
to escape to maroon communities somewhere
in the swamp. Slaves often engaged in
the practice of petit marronage,
where they left their their masters for several days or weeks until they were
able to successfully negotiate a safe return (Watson 1978:322). For example, Moses Grandy, who grew up near
the swamp in Camden County, North Carolina, recalled:
“I
remember well my mother often hid us all [four sisters and four brothers] 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” (Grandy 1968:5).
Such
petit marronage was commonly accepted
by many slave owners as part of the slave system. Here existed considerable room for negotiation and compromise in
the master/slave relationship. Slaves
often ran off with temporary goals in mind, such as visiting a relative or
lover on a neighboring plantation (Price 1996:3). Before returning to their master, using another slave as
mediator, runaways often negotiated an acceptable punishment with their
masters, one that discouraged their future disappearance but wasn’t so harsh as
to discourage them from ever returning home.
Unlike petit marronage, however, “It was marronage on the grand scale,
with individual fugitives banding together to create independent communities of
their own that struck directly at the foundations of the plantation system,”
according to Richard Price (Price 1996:3-4).
While only slim evidence for petit
marronage in the Dismal Swamp exists for the period before the revolutionary
war in runaway advertisements, several travel accounts from the 1770s suggest
that such marronage “on a grand
scale” may have, in fact, existed.
In 1775, J.F.D. Smyth, a well-known
British travel writer, offered a brief history of the Great Dismal Swamp, which
he traveled through on his way to Norfolk while fleeing patriot pursuers who
suspected him a spy. After being
“alarmed by a Negro, and soon afterwards by a white man,” Smyth hired the Negro
to guide him through the swamp to Norfolk.
It was clear that Smyth traveled through a portion of the swamp that
“belongs to a company of proprietors,” but which
company’s land and where, exactly, he was in the swamp is unclear. Smyth described the scene that enveloped
him: “This is a safe harbour and place of perfect security for all kinds of
wild beasts, as well as stray horses, cattle, hogs, and runaway Negroes many of
whom live here to be old without the least danger of being discovered” (Smyth
1784:239). He continued, more
generally,
“Run-away
Negroes have resided in these places for twelve, twenty, or thirty years and
upwards, subsisting themselves in the swamp upon corn, hogs, and fowls, that
they raised on some of the spots not perpetually under water, nor subject to be
flooded, as forty-nine parts out of fifty of it are; and on such spots they
have erected habitations, and cleared small fields around them; yet these have
always been perfectly impenetrable to any of the inhabitants of the country
around, even to those nearest to and best acquainted with the swamps” (Smyth
1784:102).2
If Smyth is to be believed, maroons
inhabited the Great Dismal and surrounding swamps as early as the
mid-eighteenth century, carving out homesteads and gardens in the swamp’s high
ground. One of the most significant pieces
of information in Smyth’s narrative centers on the fact that an
African-American man warned him of approaching peril, before any European
American man knew of the danger. From
early on, it seems that vast communication networks existed between African
Americans in distant places that allowed them to send urgent messages and to
keep abreast of the latest news, such as the condition of loved ones or who
might be sold and when.
Johann David Schoepf offered a
strikingly similar history of maroons in a description of his travels through
the Dismal Swamp on his way to North Carolina in 1784. While it is possible that Schoepf’s
published description was influenced by Smyth’s earlier account, Schoepf’s is
important nonetheless in showing the degree to which the Great Dismal had
become a popular symbol of slave resistance. Schoepf wrote,
“small
spots are to be found here and there which are always dry, and these have often
been used as places of safety by runaway slaves, who have lived for many years
in the swamp, despite all the snares set for them by their masters, even if
planters living near-by, for they are chary of going in. So these negro fugitives lived in security
and plenty, building themselves cabins, planting corn, raising hogs and fowls
which they stole from their neighbors, and naturally the hunting was free where
they were” (Smyth 1784:99-100).
Like Smyth before him, Schoepf attested
to the existence of maroon “habitations” or “cabins,” as well as small fields
or plots surrounding them where maroons could plant corn or raise stolen
animals. His portrait of maroon life in the swamp is one of a settled existence
and a seemingly permanent community.
Other evidence for maroons in the Great
Dismal Swamp surfaces in accounts dating to the revolutionary war. In 1777, Elkanah Watson rode from Suffolk to
Edenton, North Carolina, on the western edge of the swamp. He remembered that “We travelled near the
North border of the great Dismal swamp, which, at this time, was infested by
concealed royalists, and runaway negroes, who could not be approached with
safety. They often attacked travelers,
and had recently murdered a Mr. Williams” (Watson 1856:36-37). It is unclear whether or not Watson saw the
existence of maroons in the swamp as a direct result of the presence of
royalists hiding in the swamp or the war.
What is clear is that the legend of the Dismal Swamp maroons gained a
big boost by the chaotic situation following the British occupations of Suffolk
and Norfolk and other wartime activities in and around the swamp. For example, during the war, Simeon Deane, a
patriot fleeing the British, hid in a portion of the Dismal near the road to
Suffolk. He lay “in the thick Swamp”
with a blanket for shelter, having food brought to him. He stayed more than a week, “continually in
the Swamp & almost ready to perish by such Millions of Insects” (Royster
1999:255). Deane’s petit marronage in the swamp demonstrates the exact kind of
activity that had concerned Watson on his trip to Edenton—strange soldiers secreted
behind bushes. At a time of lawlessness
and mass confusion, various European Americans who would not otherwise have
cause to flee sought refuge in the Dismal Swamp.
African Americans, too, capitalized on
the chaos of the war. Many of the Land
Company slaves saw wartime confusion as an opportunity to run, as did 50,000
other slaves from across the South (Crow 1980:88-89; Watson 1978:317). Six of the company’s slaves fled to the
British (Berkeley and Berkeley 1976:151).
Many more ran away only to be captured and held as war prizes by
neighboring slave owners (Reid 1948:21; Berkeley and Berkeley 1976:151). Others simply disappeared (Schoepf
1911:100). In the immediate aftermath
of the war, it must have been difficult to tell who was and who was not a
runaway in the area surrounding the swamp.
Hessian mercenary Johann Ewald documented
the war’s effect on the swamp’s geography and land use in his war diary. Near Great Bridge, Virginia, Ewald wrote,
“Indeed, the inhabitants have made a passageway through this wilderness, with
the help of fallen trees (called logs), for single travellers on foot. One can cross here with the aid of a
compass, but if the year is not very dry, it is impossible” (Ewald 1979:277; Schoepf
1911:99). Again showing how the war had
reached the Great Dismal, Ewald boasted, “Through the prisoners I collected the
information that their rendezvous was in the great Dismal Swamp” (Ewald
1979:285). The accounts of Deane and
Ewald indicate that wartime marronage
in the swamp may have been something entirely different from that before and
after. It is probable that wartime
accounts of swamp maroons might have reflected only war-related activities in
the swamp, rather than those of pre-existing maroons.
Following the revolutionary war,
there were large-scale economic forces present in the swamp other than that of
the Dismal Swamp Land Company. The
Lebanon Company, led by Hugh Williamson, claimed 40,000-50,000 acres of land
below the Land Company’s grant (Stewart 1979:61; Berkeley and Berkeley
1976:153). Laborers for the Lebanon
Company proceeded in much the same way as those in the Dismal Swamp Land
Company did, by felling cedar trees for shingles and then cultivating cleared
land. Just as Byrd and Washington had
believed before him, Williamson dreamed that “After the Timber is removed, such
land cannot be exhausted by agriculture” (Royster 1999:293). There are but few
records detailing the operations of the Lebanon Company; it is not clear to
what extent it employed slave labor. It
is often forgotten that the Lebanon Company owned more land than the Dismal
Swamp Land Company and, most likely, employed at least the number of laborers
that its better known competitor did in Virginia.
In addition to competition from work on
the larger Lebanon Company tract to the south, smaller enterprises constantly
nipped at the Dismal Swamp Land Company’s heels, encroaching on its land, and
often stealing its shingles (Royster 1999:312). Lumber companies of all sizes sprouted throughout the Virginia and
North Carolina counties bordering the swamp.
It was the age of wood, and cedar from the Great Dismal decorated houses
across the eastern United States and Caribbean.
Contemporaries assumed, as historians
have since, that any references to the “Dismal Swamp” or, in the following
case, the Great Swamp, were specific enough for meaningful interpretation. By the late eighteenth century, however,
such terms were too general and failed to account for the division of and
separate areas within the swamp. Nonetheless,
Dennis Dawley of Princess Ann, Virginia, advertised the following in the State Gazette of North-Carolina in
1789:
“Thirty
(Silver) Dollars Reward. RUN-AWAY on
the 3d inst. from the subscriber, a Negro man, named TONEY, about five feet
eight or nine inches high, his breast a good deal projected, a very likely
active fellow, about 25 years of age; has been whipped (before I had him)
consequently his back much marked; he is as black as most negroes, drinks
hard. By information he was seen at the
Great Swamp, passing as a freeman, having procured from some villain a free
pass to protect him, and said he intended to ship himself on board the first
vessel going out of the country” (Windley 1983:456).
Dawley’s advertisement underscored the
fact that many forces were at work in the swamp. In this case, a free African-American laborer for one of the
lumber companies likely offered Toney a free pass so that he might travel to
Norfolk to catch employment on an international vessel. Not only was communication and exchange
occurring between slave and free, but communication on a grander scale,
regarding ships and trade in surrounding towns, must have also occurred. Several years later, Virginia legislators
acted to end all collaboration between free blacks and slaves. Free blacks who harbored slaves were to be
fined $10 or lashed up to thirty-nine times.
It also became a felony for free blacks to hand their free papers to slaves
(Bogger 1982:29).
A new chapter in African-American history
in the swamp began in 1790, when the legislatures of Virginia and North
Carolina brought another of Byrd’s dreams to fruition by authorizing the
creation of the Dismal Swamp Canal Company (Royster 1999:36). Located in the eastern half of the swamp,
the company’s canal would eventually extend nearly twenty-three miles from Deep
Creek, Virginia, to Joyce’s Creek in North Carolina, thus linking the Elizabeth
River to the Pasquotank (Brown 1967:32).
The canal also served as a final bisection of a previously wild area of
the swamp. In 1793, hired slaves,
starting on both ends, slowly began digging the canal with saws, axes, and
picks (Royster 1999:342; Wertenbaker 1962:159; Brown 1967:32; Berkeley and
Berkeley 1976:155). Additionally, slave
owners contracted their slaves at times of the year when they were not farming
(Hinshaw 1948:21). Several years later,
an advertisement placed in a Norfolk newspaper by the Canal Company stated that
it wanted “a number of well disposed, able Negroes and Laborers such as
Ditchers, Sawyers and Shingle Getherers” for the ensuing year (Brown
1967:34). Thus, in addition to
constructing its canal, the Dismal Swamp Land Company sought “shingle getters”
to cut cedar on its property.
Increasingly, correspondence between
Dismal Swamp Land Company officials reflected the growing competition in the
swamp and anxiety over fiscal matters.
Not only were the Lebanon and Dismal Swamp Canal companies producing
vast quantities of shingles, as were dozens of smaller companies, but
trespassers continued to steal Land Company trees and shingles. Land Company supervisor Thomas Sheperd
complained that trespassers passed “boldly over the line…cutting and Slaying
the Timber in a most horrid manner.” He
continued, hopelessly, “Every persons, Owners of the lower swamps is Opposed to
the Dismal Swamp Company I believe they hate me upon earth” (Royster
1999:395). Perhaps he was right. Even the Dismal Swamp Canal Company bought
stolen shingles from trespassers on the Land Company’s property (Royster
1999:397). In the following decades,
Land Company records became increasingly rife with dividend and investor angst;
lowering expenses and obtaining less expensive labor became chief concerns in
company correspondence (Reid 1948:89,109).
Perhaps it was the growing desire to slash production costs that
provided the motive for illegally hiring maroons in the nineteenth century.
Nineteenth
Century
By 1800, although it could still be
described as “a vast oval, thirty miles in breadth, and fifty in length, with a
lake, nearly in the center, seven miles diameter,” the Great Dismal was not
seen as a single, 1500 square-mile entity by those who worked and inhabited it
(Smyth 1784:234). The swamp was divided
and largely conquered. No longer could
one refer accurately to “the depths of the Dismal Swamp,” since there were but
few depths to speak of. Three large commercial interests, which
constructed roads and canals that allowed easy passage to and from the swamp’s
depths, divided much of the Dismal. The
Dismal Swamp Land Company owned more than 40,000 acres in the swamp’s northwest
corner; the Dismal Swamp Canal Company managed several thousand acres
surrounding its 22.5-mile canal right-of-way in the east; and the Lebanon
companies (there were two now) harvested cedar and white pine trees on more
than 50,000 acres of the swamp across the Virginia border in North Carolina
(Stewart 1979:61; Royster 1999:293; DSLCR 1837:D10). In addition, small businessmen and farmers had long ago parceled the
swamp’s periphery into individual lots, which they subsequently cleared and
cultivated. African Americans,
primarily, hired or bought by entrepreneurs—large and small—created new lumber
companies, drained and sowed fields, graded decent roads, carved new canals,
and, by 1836, constructed railroads in the swamp. Thus, by the nineteenth century, human (economic) forces divided
the swamp’s vast physical space into smaller workable units where different,
often competing, systems of labor were underway.
No longer could the Great Dismal be
imagined as a single, bounded entity isolated by its desolateness from
surrounding commerce and community. In
fact, maroons inhabiting the swamp in the nineteenth century relied
specifically upon the commerce and community that permeated the physical and
legal boundary lines of the Dismal.
Unlike their eighteenth-century counterparts, who fled slave society to
an impenetrable and unchartered wilderness such as that described by Byrd,
Dismal Swamp maroons of the nineteenth century sought refuge and freedom within
a space planned, managed, and controlled, largely, by various slave-owning
commercial businesses. Divisions in
ownership and activity within the Dismal shaped how the swamp’s various
inhabitants—slave shingle getters, free and slave lumbermen, ditch diggers,
canal workers, cart boys, and maroons—lived and to what degree these “swampers”
were documented for posterity. The
historical evidence for nineteenth-century maroon life in the swamp (more
specific, substantial, and reliable than that of the eighteenth century)
suggests that runaways were inextricably involved in the commerce and community
of those who worked and lived in and near the swamp. Therefore, a close reading of documents that depicted life in and
about the swamp—the larger context—is necessary to understand the personal and
commercial forces that formed the framework for maroon life in the Great
Dismal.
The Dismal Swamp Canal, wedding North
Carolina and Virginia maritime interests in a 22.5-mile interstate waterway,
shaped the swamp’s use and development perhaps more than any other commercial
undertaking in the nineteenth century.
The canal served regional and national interests by linking Viginia
ports with North Carolina markets and provided a safe, inland passageway for
supplies in the event of a national naval crisis (Newton et. al.
1825:6-7). In 1805, after twelve years
of sawing, chopping, and picking by the Canal Company’s slaves, the corridor
was “navigable to admit shingle flats to pass the whole distance river to
river” (Brown 1967:39). The following
table of tolls from 1807 illustrates the impact that the new waterway had on
swamp life:
18” & 22” shingles--$.25 per 1000
24” “ --$.33
per 1000
36” ‘ --$.50
per 1000
Barrel staves --$.50 per 1000
Hogshead staves --$.75
per 1000
Carts passing the road --$.25
Wagons “ --$.50
Horse and man --$.12
½
Head of cattle --$.06
Hogs and sheep --$.02
(Brown
1967:40)
Shingles, staves, and other products
floated through the Dismal on the new canal.
More importantly for swamp life, however, was the presence of foot,
horse, and wagon traffic alongside the waterway (Royster 1999:414). In addition to its commercial benefits, the
canal opened the Dismal Swamp to a new wave of human occupation that
transformed the swamp’s dismal reputation into one centered on its exotic
geography and attractive, medicinal drinking water. A road “that McAdam himself could not improve” built parallel to
the canal proved “a very good road equal to many Turnpike roads” for those interested
in crossing or visiting the swamp (Berkeley 1976:158; Tunis 1829). Revised toll tables, such as that of 1810,
acknowledged the additional presence of
“foot travelers” on the new road (Sherman 1878:68-69). Opportunists such as William Farange anticipated
the presence of travelers on the canal by opening a “house of entertainment”
along the road, catering to the needs of weary businessmen and tourists (Brown
1967:37). The increased presence of
tourists and their desire to see the canal and visit Lake Drummond created new
challenges to those who would keep slaves and laborers silently sequestered in
the swamp. Tourists such as the Irish
poet Thomas Moore in 1803 required knowledgeable guides who, piloting small
boats, could travel more or less freely throughout the swamp. Merchant, tourist, and hired guide could
traverse and explore the Great Dismal Swamp with a previously unimaginable
ease. As a result, published accounts
of swamp life became more and more common in the nineteenth century. When taken together, literary and
documentary snapshots depicting swamp still-lifes combine to project a moving
picture of African-American life that is anything but static.
Experiences of African-American laborers
in the Dismal Swamp were largely shaped by the nature of their duties, rather
than their status as free or slave. For
those constructing or dredging channels on the Dismal Swamp Canal, everyday
life proved harsh and exhausting, especially when large numbers of workers
posed management problems for company overseers. Depending on the weather, season, and current project, Canal
Company records show anywhere from 150 to 300 free or slave African Americans
employed in canal construction or repair (Whele 1819; Berkeley
1976:158-160). Moses Grandy, a slave
who operated a boat on the Dismal Swamp Canal in the 1820s, witnessed as many
as 700 fellow African Americans at work on the canal as he slipped by each
day. He remembered, “The labor there is
very severe. The ground is often boggy;
the negroes are up to the middle, or much deeper, in mud and water, cutting
away roots and baling out mud; if they can keep their heads above water, they
work on” (Grandy 1968:22-23). Continuing, Grandy described life along the canal
banks in the disinterested language so characteristic of his narrative. At the end of each day, he wrote, the canal
workers
“lodge
in huts, or, as they are called, camps, made of shingles or boards. They lie down in the mud which has adhered
to them, making a great fire to dry themselves, and keep off the cold. No bedding whatever is allowed them; it is
only by work done over his task that any of them can get a blanket. They are paid nothing, except for this overwork. Their masters come once a month to receive
money for their labor; then, perhaps, some few very good masters will give them
$2 each, some others $1, some a pound of tobacco, and some nothing at all. the food is more abundant than that of field
slaves: indeed, it is the best allowance in America—it consists of a peck of
meal and six pounds of pork per week; the pork is commonly not good; it is
damaged, and is bought, as cheap as possible, at auctions” (Grandy 1968:22-23).
Violence was a part of African-American
life along the canals. Overseers
flogged workers for not keeping pace or, in one case, catching small game to
supplement the company’s meager rations (Grandy 1968:22-23; Hodges
1982:40-42). Other times, laborers were
whipped so severely that their “entrails were visible” and “the yellow flies
and musquitoes in great numbers would settle on the bleeding and smarting
back[s]” (Grandy 1968:22-23). Augustus
Hodges, a free African-American man who traveled to the swamp to secure work,
resolved, at one point, to take revenge on an overseer who had beaten an old
slave (named Hubbard) until he was “more dead than alive” (Hodges
1982:40-42). Hodges resisted, however,
because “The masons were all poor whites who would be glad to help kill us for
the simple sake of a few smiles from the rich whites” (Hodges 1982:40-42). Controlling hundreds of hired hands, slave
and free, African- and European-American, often proved challenging for Canal
Company managers. For example, in a
letter written from Portsmouth, Virginia, to Samuel Proctor at the swamp,
Dismal Swamp Canal Company president Richard Blow inquired about a slave, Jim
Pennock, who had escaped a month before.
Blow admonished,
“I
wish you to give the Negroes strict-orders, at what time they are to be at
their places of work every monday morning & not suffer them to be indulged
an hour after the time…without a reasonable and good excuse. I am told Jim Pennock, has not been up since
christmas, & that 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” (Blow 1806).
In the same letter, Blow expressed his desire for ever-more efficient
labor on the canal when he suggested that a new system of incentives, perhaps,
might reduce overseers’ violence and the resulting impulse of laborers to
flee. Blow wrote,
“I
have sent up some Spirits last week & have directed Mr. Spratt to send you
some for the purpose of giving the hands a dram in the morning, this is
contrary to former usage, but I wish them encouraged if they behave well, a
Gill[?] a day in the winter is not too much provided they behave well, but all
delinquents in Duty should be [denied?] of their allowance” (Blow 1806).
At the same time that Blow attempted to
tighten company control over its labor force and increase his workers’
motivation, it appears that he thought nothing of allowing enslaved African
Americans travel to and from the swamp alone.
In fact, it appears that Blow’s was common practice, as it was not
uncommon for single African American slaves to travel, unescorted, in and
around the swamp with impunity. Blow
explained to Proctor, “This [letter] is handed you by a young fellow name
Henry, which I have hired from Mr. Green of Norfolk…his Master wishes him to be
taught how to work, you will see if he will answer our purpose….if not
discharge him, and let him return home with a letter to me” (Blow 1806). Earlier that day, Blow had sent Henry home
to Norfolk so that his master might furnish him with a blanket for work.
Indeed, the complexity and quantity of
commerce in the swamp in the nineteenth century may have created a feeling
among African Americans that minor disappearances or transgressions would go
unnoticed or overlooked by masters ultimately unable to control every aspect of
swamp life. For example, one day
Grandy, still a slave, struck out alone into the swamp in search for a cure to
his rheumatism. He explained, “I
therefore had myself carried in a lighter up a cross canal in the Dismal Swamp,
and to the other side of Drummond’s Lake.
I was left on the shore, and there built myself a little hut, and had
provisions brought to me as opportunity served” (Grandy 1844:24). Here, under trees owned by the Dismal Swamp
Land Company, he lived for a time in a “camp” similar to “those commonly set up
for negroes” (Grandy 1844:24). Slaves such as Grandy often traveled about the
swamp alone. Frederick Law Olmsted,
while traveling the swamp in search of a story in 1853, encountered a slave
named Joseph who, like Grandy, was walking in the Dismal unescorted. Olmsted explained that he “picked up on the
road a jaded-looking Negro” who “belonged (as property) to a church in one of
the inland counties” (Olmsted 1971:46).
Slaves in the Dismal Swamp were a mobile
community. Canal boat hands cruised the
waterways, exchanging news and greetings as well as goods. Lightermen piloted their shingles throughout
the swamp, likely trading information along with lumber. Even gangs maintaining or expanding the
Dismal Swamp Canal covered great distances during their work alongside hundreds
of others traveling the canal and road.
Other slaves, such as those charged to assist in toll collecting or
canal maintenance, must have acted as social synapses, collecting and
dispensing information to vast quantities of people throughout the day.
In a broader sense, transience and
mobility characterized many slaves’ lives in the Dismal Swamp as a result of
commercial hiring practices. A number
of slaves spent much of their lives moving and adjusting to new jobs and
masters. Slaves often moved back and
forth between hired masters, responding to the labor needs of new development
projects. The construction of smaller,
auxillary canals, often funded by neighboring lumber companies employed large
numbers of African Americans in the swamp.
While the numbers might have been smaller for the cutting of the White
Oak Spring or Riddick canals in North Carolina, creating the North West Canal
employed, according to one traveler, 240 laborers (Berkeley 1976:158).
The construction of railroads in the
Dismal also employed free and slave African- American labor. At one point between 1833 and 1836, as many
as three hundred men worked on the Portsmouth and Roanoke Railroad, carving a
five-mile passageway through the northern edge of the swamp (Berkeley
1976:162). Later, the construction of the
Norfolk and Petersburg Railroad leveled a 100-foot wide swath, ten miles long
through the swamp (Wertenbaker 1962:183; Berkeley 1976:163). It is likely that both African- and
European-American laborers were employed in its construction (Strother 1856:455).
Although less is known about the African
Americans employed in canal building, shingle getting, or other activities in
the North Carolina portion of the swamp, several sources recorded fleeting
glimpses of their everyday lives and the transience it involved. In his articles for the New York Times, Olmsted described a group of slaves who were
preparing to be sent “in a schooner more than sixty miles” to harvest lumber in
another swamp, as they had in the Great Dismal. The very nature of the slaves’ work schedules, their resilience,
and their makeshift houses were emblematic their lives, which were ever on the
move. Olmsted wrote that the slaves
“are mostly hired by their employers at a rent, perhaps, of one hundred dollars a year for each, paid to their owners. They spend one or two months of the Winter—when it is too wet to work in the swamp—at the residence of their master, where their families usually have ‘quarters.’ At this period little or no work is required of them; their time is their own, and if they can get any employment, they will generally keep for themselves what they can get for it. When it is sufficiently dry—usually early in February—they go into the swamp in gangs, each with an overseer” (Olmsted 1853b).
Swamp architecture, the design of slaves’
shelters while in the swamp, was a replicable, easily transportable style of
housing that demonstrated slaves’ ability to adapt to ever-changing housing
conditions. The “camp,” as it was
called could be constructed almost anywhere a shingle getter needed to
rest. Olmsted wrote,
“Arrived at their place of destination, a rude “camp” is made, huts of shingles, plank logs and boughs, built upon the driest spot that can be found—usually upon some place where shingles have been shaved before, and the shavings have accumulated into little hillocks” (Olmsted 1853b).
It is unclear where, or in which state,
Olmsted encountered these slaves he described.
But while his descriptions of slave life were generalizing and broad,
his brief description of swamp architecture bears a striking resemblance to
later descriptions of slave and maroon housing in the Dismal Swamp Land
Company’s tract of the swamp in Virginia.
As will be discussed further in the following section, an architecture
similar to that described above became the dominant, portable style of
African-American shingle-getting communities within the swamp, at large.
Ironically, it is the products of
institutional racism that today provide the clearest pictures of those—free and
slave—who labored on North Carolina’s side of the Dismal Swamp. In an attempt to control (or at the very
least monitor) those working or living in the Dismal Swamp (Kent 1991:III-V)
the North Carolina General Assembly enacted a law in 1847 declaring
“That
no free person of color shall work…in the said swamp without having gone before
the clerk of the proper court and caused a description of himself…and keeping
and having ready to produce the copy of such description certified by the clerk
[of the county court] …and any free person of color found employed…in the said
swamp without such copy, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, may be
arrested and committed, or bound over to the next court of the county…and on
conviction may be punished by fine, imprisonment and whipping, all or any of
them at the discretion of the court” (Franklin 1943:74).
Not only were free African Americans
registered at local court houses, but many slaves who were hired to work in the
swamp were entered into the court books as well. As a result, hundreds of fastidiously recorded descriptions
display the outward appearances of free and slave who, most likely, worked
together to cut the Orapeake Canal and harvest lumber in the Dismal Swamp
before the Civil War. Olmsted might
have been referring to the 1847 statue when he described the process by which
the slaves he encountered were inspected.
He explained,
“Before
leaving, they are all examined and registered at the Court-house, and passes, good for a year, are given them,
in which their features and the marks upon their persons are minutely
described. Each man is then furnished
with provisions and clothing, of which, as well as of all that he afterwards
‘draws’ from the stock in the hands of the overseer, an exact account is kept
and charged against him” (Olmsted 1853b).
The registration entries, recently
re-discovered in the North Carolina State Archives provide sketches, drawn by
those in power, of the effects of nineteenth-century slave life on the bodies
of African Americans. For example, a
Gates County, North Carolina, recorder observed that Sawyer, a slave owned by
James Goodman of Nansemond County, Virginia
“is
about Thirty five years old of Dark brown Complexion, has a wild look full
eyes, but thin beard around the mouth small mouth with a small scar in the
Center of the forehead and a small scar in fronet of the right year and one on
the back of the Cheek bone behind the left eye and a not on each nuckle bone of
the Great toe and a large Scar on the right leg half way from the foot to the
Knee stands five feet five & ahalf inch, and weghs one hundred and fifty pounds” (Fouts 1995:3)
Other registrations offer clues into
slaves’ personal histories, such as Armsted’s recorded in 1854. It stated:
“Armstead is about sixteen years of age of a very dark copper color has a slight scar on the right side of his face & fore head which was caused by a burn when small, has a scar under his right eye & a small scar on each one of his knees and stands without shoes Four feet & Eleven inches high” (Fouts 1995:100).
In many cases, the recorders’ worldviews were documented more clearly than the objects of their descriptions. Gates County Clerk H.L. Eurecc wrote, “William is about Thirteen years old Black but not very black good pleasant countenance clear of scars” (Fouts 1995:99). In other cases, registrations may help to draw distinctions between the everyday lives of slaves and free African Americans working in the swamp. For example, Siah Pearce, “a free boy of Color” was described as follows: “Siah is about sixteen years of age of a copper Color has large features, a scar over his left Eye, one on his left arm caused from vaxinating and stands without shoes five feet one and a half inches high” (Fouts 1995:108). When subjected to more systematic analysis, such descriptions may provide valuable information on ante-bellum African-American nutrition, health, and family structure. It is also important to note that most of those in the North Carolina registers, and their employers or owners, were residents of Nansemond County, Virginia (Fouts 1995:i). The fact that, in their lifetimes, laborers might have worked in several areas of the swamp, under different employers, for various companies, illustrates the permeable nature of the swamp’s strict commercial boundaries and the transience inherent in swamp life. African Americans, free and slave, migrated throughout the swamp, following the jobs that accompanied canal construction and maintenance, lumber harvesting, and dozens of other tasks that came and went with the seasons (Thorne 1991:v-x). Unfortunately, little more is currently known about African- American life in the North Carolina portion of the swamp.
By contrast, many details of the everyday
life of workers in what was once the Dismal Swamp Land Company’s holdings in
Virginia are retrievable. Much of the
land currently preserved within the Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge
encompasses the former property of the Dismal Swamp Land Company, which operated
and documented its lumber business there from 1763-1902. Many of the Land Company’s receipt books,
annual reports, and correspondence survived, preserving details of the
company’s lengthy history. In its records,
officials interested in satisfying shareholders and demands from faraway markets
documented names of employees, supplies ordered to clothe slaves, locations of
work areas, and descriptions of the small “ditches,” or canals, that slaves dug
in order to transport shingles cut within the swamp to markets near Suffolk,
Virginia. While intending to record
only basic financial and operational information for the company, bookkeepers
inadvertently scribbled onto ledger lines fragments of everyday
African-American life that today allow the researcher to recreate, to a certain
extent, the everyday lives of free and slave in the swamp. Such documents provide a backdrop and
context for accounts of maroon life in the Great Dismal written by contemporary
travelers and journalists.
Based in the northwest corner of the
Dismal, the Dismal Swamp Land Company controlled more than 40,000 acres of
forested swampland. In the nineteenth
century, the Land Company’s holdings and operations were organized according to
a single commercial goal—to deliver as many shingles and other lumber products
to waiting ships and mills on Shingle Creek, near Suffolk, Virginia (Trout
1998:21). To this end, Company managers
physically redesigned their portion of the swamp as much as possible. Company slaves constructed a complex system
of canals and roads of varying lengths and sizes that allowed a centralized
inspector to monitor laborers’ output throughout the company’s tract (Reid
1948:127-128).
Waterways were the lifeblood of the Land
Company’s economy. A number of small
ditches, like capillaries, allowed “lighters,” or lean, flat bottomed barges,
to transport lumber through the swamp to larger arteries, which in turn,
carried produce to market in Suffolk.
The Washington and Jericho Canals, the Company’s most vital waterways,
radiated outward from Lake Drummond; the Washington to the west, the Jericho to
the north. It was the Jericho, twelve
feet wide, four deep, and ten miles long, that served as entryway and exit for
most workers and visitors to the “company swamp” (Ruffin 1837:517; Strother
1856:451).
Company waterways, swelled with rain or
dessicated by drought, structured and regulated “swamp time” by setting the
pace at which the transport of goods and people flowed (Genovese
1976:291-292). Edmund Ruffin entered the
swamp, and swamp time, through the Jericho Canal while researching an article
for The Farmer’s Register in
1836. He rode aboard a boat that
“was flat bottomed, long and spacious, belonging to the land Company, and designed solely for conveying passengers in trips to the lake, for pleasure or business. It was well suited for the purpose, and was well manned and provided for this occasion. The mode of propelling the boat is the same as is always used for shingle boats. A strong pole is fastened across the square head, and another in like manner at the stern, at right angles to the boat, the other ends extending across the tow-path on the margin of the canal. By these poles the men push the boat along in a rapid walk, and at the same time lean on them so as very much to lighten their labor. Four experienced hands accompanied our boat, who relieved each other from time to time” (Ruffin 1837: 516-517).
Ruffin’s journey down the Jericho from
Shingle Creek to Lake Drummond probably took several hours, at most, five
(Arnold 1888:13). On Land Company
canals, lighters moved and time passed only as quickly as the African-American
boatmen decided to walk (Reid 1948:87).
By contrast, mules, driven by slave and
free African Americans, hauled much of the lumber from many areas of the swamp
to Land Company canals along a vast network of wooden or “cordoroy” roads which
could extend five or six miles into the dense cane-brake (Reid 1948:87,89;
Ruffin 1837:517). Ruffin described such
roads as he peered from his canal boat:
“Double lines of poles are laid in the direction of the road, about the distance apart of the cart wheels. Across these are laid split pieces, merely long enough for a single track of a cart, of 4 to 6 inches in diameter, and as angular and irregular as may be supposed, from mauling. These lie close to each other across the sleepers, and present a very rough and unstable surface for the wheels, and still worse for the feet of the mules” (Ruffin 1837:517).
Those who walked the company’s log
causeways and muddy tow-paths were primarily African Americans. On any given day during the nineteenth
century, anywhere from forty to a hundred slaves and free laborers collected
and transported lumber within the Land Company’s tract (DSLCR 1837; Reid
1948:92,118). Land Company managers
divided laborers into five general groups.
Shingle getters collected lumber and cut shingles; cart headmen likely
drove carts down company roads; cart boys loaded carts and assisted cart
headmen in hauling lumber; road hands repaired and constructed roads; and
lightermen piloted lighters through the Land Company’s canals (Reid 1948:88;
Grandy1968:8; Strother 1856:451). When
the need arose, the Land Company also employed African Americans from the
surrounding area in the “clearing and deepening” of its canals (DSLCR 1852;
Almasy 1988:51). In addition, it is
important to note that many of the Company’s canals were dug by outside
contractors, who drew their labor from other parts of the swamp (DSLCR 1852a:2;
DSLCR 1832).
Land Company laborers worked by “tasks,”
whereby “the employers have nothing to do except to pay for the labor executed”
(Ruffin 1837:518). For those owned or
hired by the Land Company, it appears that Olmsted was more or less correct in
writing that
“The slave is not in the meantime driven at all; no force is used to make
him ‘work smart.’ He lives as a free
man; having the liberty of the swamp; hunts ‘coons, fishes, eats, drinks,
smokes, sleeps and works according to his own will. It is only asked of him that he shall have made at the end of a
half-year so many shingles as shall, at a certain price, refund to his master
he hire paid for him and the value of the clothing and provisions he has
drawn.” (Olmsted 1853b).
After visiting the Land Company and
interviewing a number of its workers, Strother wrote, more specifically, that
“The
Company owns a number of slaves, and hires others, who are employed in getting
out the lumber in the shape of shingles, staves, etc. These hands are tasked, furnished with provisions at a fixed
rate, and paid for all work exceeding the required amount.3 Thus an expert and industrious workman
may gain a considerable sum for himself in the course of the year” (Strother
1856:451).
Edmund Ruffin wrote that such a task system allowed enslaved African Americans considerable freedom in the form of leisure and mobility. While those he described might have disagreed, Ruffin asserted that Land Company slaves
“live
plentifully, and are pleased with their employment—and the main objection to it
with their masters, (they being generally slaves,) and the community, is that
the laborers have too much leisure time, and of course spend it
improperly. Their heavy labors for the
week are generally finished in five, and often four days—and then the remainder
of the week is spent out of the swamp, and given to idleness, and by many to
drunkenness” (Ruffin 1837:518).
Ruffin’s account of Land Company slave
life was rife with racist assumptions and judgements. Nonetheless, it is useful to researchers because it helps
corroborate the existence of the notion of “free time,” in a double sense,
among enslaved and laboring African Americans in the Great Dismal. As long as slaves, laborers, or maroons (as
will be shown) completed their tasks on time and without problems, Land Company
officials to a large degree let them be.
The facts of leisure and widespread mobility among Land Company slaves
and laborers in the nineteenth century is critical to the understanding of how
workers and company managers created a system of slavery in the swamp based on
compulsion and power and social negotiation and partial emancipation. Much like the slaves that Philip Morgan
described in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, laborers in the Land Company’s swamp
negotiated and helped create a task system that provided (within limits) time
and freedom to, among other things,
hunt and travel (Morgan 1998:138). It
is the limits, the social and
cognitive parameters that shaped such notions that future archaeological
research might help to further elucidate.
Slaves hired from surrounding plantations
completed many of the Land Company’s tasks during the nineteenth century (Reid
1948:118). Every January, the Company
actively solicited nearby masters, offering them an average of forty dollars for
a grown man’s labor in the swamp for a year (Reid 1948:89). The transfer of John was typical of the
contract made between the Land Company and slaveowners:
“On
or before the first Day of January next I promise to Pay unto Francis Harris
the sum of Fifty Dollars for the hire of Boy John the present year for the use
of the Disl S. L. Co.—And also to give said Boy food customary Clothing a Hat
and Blanket—As witness my hand & seal this 3rd day of January
1851. Joseph Holladay Agent” (DSLCR
1851)
The terms of such agreements between the
Land Company and local masters largely determined hired slaves’ basic material
lives for the following year. According
to the contracts, food, rudimentary clothing, a hat, and a blanket were
provided each slave. Nothing more. Further documentation shows that the Land
Company indeed fulfilled its limited contractual obligations by regularly
ordering the bare minimum for its workers.
Corn, meal, and “mess pork” were bought every couple months (DSLCR 1852;
Reid 1948 94, 118); clothing, in the form of socks, shoes, trowsers, shirts,
and other “negro clothes” was also provided (DSLCR 1814; DSLCR 1832; DSLCR
1832); and hats and blankets were furnished the slaves, as well (DSLCR 1832;
DSLCR 1837).
A broader reading of non-company records
shows how slaves and laborers must have supplemented their meager rations
through hunting, trapping, and fishing when they were not working. Deer, otter, raccoons, possums, pheasants,
partridges, wild ducks, perch, wild cattle presented swampers with prospects of
hearty meals (Strother 1856: 448).
Strother’s description of the living area in the main company settlement
of the swamp, however, suggested that African Americans went well beyond
hunting and fishing to find a better meal.
Scanning the site, Strother recalled, “There was bacon, salt fish, meal,
molasses, whisky, and sweet potatoes, besides plenty of fodder for the
mules” (Strother 1856:451). How slaves obtained molasses, whisky, and
sweet potatoes or how common such items were in the makeshift cupboards of
swamp workers remains unclear.
Descriptions of swampers’ domestic
sites, as well as their settlement patterns
exist in both written and pictorial form. Edmund Ruffin offered the most detailed written account of
workers’ home sites from his boat on the Jericho canal when he observed,
“The only sign of life was seen at intervals in a ‘camp’ of a pair of shingle-getters. Their houses, or shanties, are barely wide enough for five or six men to lie in, closely packed side by side—their heads to the back wall, and their feet stretched to the open front, close by a fire kept up through the night. The roof is sloping, to shed the rain, and where highest, not above four feet from the floor. Of the shavings made in smoothing the shingles, the thinnest make a bed for the laborers, and the balance form the only dry and solid foundation of their house, and their homestead, or working yard” (Ruffin 1837:518).
Ruffin’s portrait of Land Company
camps is significant for many reasons.
First, Ruffin’s structures are strikingly similar to those described by
Olmsted and Grandy in other areas of the Great Dismal Swamp. Houses in the camp, it seemed, were more
than improvised, lean-to shelters; rather, they were the result of a cultural
tradition singularly adapted to surviving everyday life on the highest (driest)
ground of the Dismal Swamp. It could be
argued that camp structures represented a distinct architectural style
incorporating the values, worldviews, and necessities of their occupants into
their very design.
Second, the scattered buildings that
Ruffin saw only “at intervals” along
the canal characterized the settlement patterns and lifeways of Land Company
laborers. Shingle-getters likely worked
and camped in pairs or small groups.
The task system did not require slaves or laborers to return to a
central location each night; instead, the system allowed workers to remain in
various parts of the company swamp, together, for several days at a time.
Finally, Ruffin’s account suggested
that shingle-getters’ quarters, “not above four feet from the floor,” were too
small to support significant indoor life.
Shingle-getters must have spent most of their time outside, retreating
inside only to sleep or escape the weather.
A clearing in the form of a “homestead, or working yard” commonly
surrounded laborers’ houses, according to Ruffin. Depending on the condition of the soil around the house, the yard
may have included a small plot for farming or an area where other personal
activities were conducted. It is
unclear from the documents where, exactly, shingle-getters built such camps and
how long they were occupied.
Strother also saw and documented
structures within the Land Company’s swamp.
Unlike Ruffin, however, Strother described and sketched a single
settlement, located beside the Jericho Canal.
He remembered
“a rude wharf, piled high with fresh-made shingles. From the landing a road...leads back into the Swamp. A hundred paces brings us to Horse Camp, the head-quarters of the shingle-makers in this district. A group of picturesque sheds afford accommodation for a number of men and mules....Although of the rudest character, there seemed to be every material for physical comfort in abundance” (Strother 1856:451).
Besides Ruffin’s brief descriptions and
Strother’s small sketches, there is little else that details workers’ everyday
lives in the Land Company swamp.
There is little agreement on how many
maroons inhabited the Great Dismal Swamp at any given point during the
nineteenth century. Herbert Aptheker
argued that as many as two thousand “Negroes, fugitives, or the decendents of
fugitives” inhabited communities in the swamp (Aptheker 1939:168). By comparison, Gerald Levy asserted that
because of the swamp’s difficult terrain, only a few hundred maroons could have
inhabited the Dismal at any given time (Erickson 1994:G2). Whatever the true number might have been,
sufficient evidence exists to prove the existence of runaway slaves in the
swamp during the nineteenth century.
Numerous reports, popular and academic, written since the 1830s attest
to the fact of these maroons (Tragle 1971:297-299; Arnold 1888:7; O’Reilly
1890:18; Catlin 1905:341-342; Taylor 1928:23-25; Preston 1933:167; Aptheker
1939:168; Eppse 1943:158-159; Genovese 1979:68-69; Leaming 1994; Kay 1995:101;
Franklin 1998:??; Parramore 2000:131).
Fictional accounts of swamp maroons also contributed to the popular
perception of the swamp as a hideaway for fugitive slaves (Moore, Stowe 1856; Longfellow;
Ledoux; Howard 1905).
The sources for many of the historical
and fictional descriptions of swamp maroons were a small collection of
travelers’ accounts, contemporary reports of the Nat Turner rebellion, and
runaway slave advertisements referring to the Dismal as a refuge for fugitive
slaves. For example, in 1817, Samuel
Perkins rode alongside the Dismal Swamp Canal.
He wrote that the swamp “is inhabited almost exclusively by run away
negroes” who were often seen “fleeing to the woods & swamps and subsisting
for years on food there found or conveyed to them by their former fellow
sufferers” (McLean 1970: 55-62). A number of newspaper reports published during
and immediately after the Nat Turner insurrection in 1831 described the Dismal
as a haven for runaways, where “two or three thousand fugitives were preparing
to join the insurgents” (Tragle 1971:336).
Scattered throughout the nineteenth
century, advertisements also portrayed the swamp as the probable destination
for a number of runaways from surrounding areas. For example, in 1850, one Pasquotank County, North Carolina,
master sought three runaway slaves who likely “have secreted themselves in the
Dismal Swamp.” The next year, a man in
Isle of Wight County, Virginia, advertised for his slave who “is lurking about
the Dismal Swamp” (Bogger 1982:2). The
problem with most contemporary accounts of swamp maroons is their generality
and overwhelming reliance on hearsay.
Although scholars often consider such accounts to be primary sources,
they are, in fact, often secondary, and serve only to contextualize the more
specific available evidence.
Documentary evidence of maroon life in
the Land Company swamp during the nineteenth century is slight, but
informative. Only two sources—the
narrative of an escaped slave named Charlie and Strother’s article—suggest how
shingle getters and supervisors may have incorporated maroons into the Land
Company’s operations. In addition,
Olmsted’s more general account of swamp maroons, although unclear as to which
shingle company he described, appears to corroborate Charlie’s and Strother’s
accounts and offers a more complete picture of interaction and exchange between
maroons, slaves, and laborers in the Land Company swamp.
Olmsted intertwined personal observation
with hearsay to paint a popular portrait of swamp maroons. “There are people in the swamps now,” he
wrote, “that are the children of fugitives and fugitives themselves all their lives.” Of particular interest to Olmsted was the
nature of interaction between maroons and slave shingle getters working in the
swamp. Olmsted wrote, for example, that
maroons
“cannot obtain the means of supporting
life without coming often either to the outskirts to steal from the
plantations, or to the neighborhood of the camps of the lumbermen. They live mainly upon the charity or wages
given them by the latter. The poorer
white men owning small tracts of the swamps will sometimes employ them, and the
negroes frequently” (Olmsted 1853b).
According to Olmsted, it was common for
African-American laborers employed by the lumber companies to hire maroons in
the swamp. When the shingle getters employed maroons, “they made them get up
logs for them, and would give them enough to eat and some clothes, and perhaps
two dollars a month in money.” Eager to
observe a Dismal Swamp maroon for himself, Olmsted asked his guide (a slave
hired to work in the swamp) how to spot one, as opposed to a regular shingle
getter. “’Oh dey looks strange,’” his guide replied, “Skeared
like, you know Sir, and kind o’ strange, cause they’s not got much to eat and
ain’t decent’—(not decently clothed,) ‘like’s we is’” (Olmsted 1853b).
Olmsted’s information is consistent with
that in Strother’s article published in 1856.
In describing the interaction between slave and free employees and
maroons in the Land Company’s area Strother explained,
“These [maroons] live by woodcraft, external depredation, and more frequently, it is probable, by working for the task shingle-makers at reduced wages. These employees often return greater quantities of work than could by any possibility have been produced by their own labor, and draw for two or three times the amount of provisions necessary for their own subsistence. But the provisions are furnished, the work paid for, and no questions are asked, so that the matter always remains involved in mystery” (Strother 1856:451).
Strother’s description is more useful
than Olmsted’s because it explains how runaways managed to subsist once they
reached a specific portion of the
swamp—that controlled by the Dismal Swamp Land Company. Rather than fleeing slave society
completely, maroons sought refuge within the swamp and continued to work for a
slave-owning business venture that benefited from their inexpensive labor. It was a symbiotic relationship that allowed
maroons to negotiate a greater freedom, or a step toward freedom, in exchange
for their labor. Hired slaves
benefited from a similar relationship with their temporary masters, as well
(Eaton 1960:671). Both hired slaves and
maroons, to some extent, were able to negotiate degrees of freedom from their
Land Company supervisors (Bogger 1982:84; Starobin 1968:115).
About the same time Strother visited the
swamp for his assignment, a slave named Charlie (or Charley) escaped to the
Dismal after hearing that he might be sold and separated from his wife (Cowan
1998). Charlie fled to the house of a
friend who secured him work in the swamp, where he worked for several months as
a shingle-getter before escaping to Canada.
Charlie related that upon entering the Dismal,
“I
boarded wit a man what giv me two dollars a month for de first one: arter dat I
made shingles for myse’f. Dar are heaps
ob folks in dar to work. Most on ‘em
are fugitives, or else hirin’ dar time.
Dreadful ‘commodatin’ in dare to one anudder. De each like de ‘vantage ob de odder one’s ‘tection. Ye see dey’s united togedder in’ividually
wit same interest to stake. Never hearn
one speak disinspectively to ‘nut’er one: all ‘gree as if dey had only one head
and one heart, with hunder legs and hunder hands. Dey’s more ‘commodatin’ dan any folks I’s ever seed afore or
since. Da lend me dar saws, so I might
be ‘pared to split my shingles; and den dey turn right ‘bout and ‘commodate
demsels. Ye ax me inscribe de
swamp? Well: de great Dismal Swamp (dey call it Juniper Swamp)
‘stends whar it begins in Norfolk, old Virginny, to de upper part ob
Carolina. Dat’s what I’s told. It stands itse’f more’n fifty mile north and
souf. I worked ‘bout four mile ‘bove
Drummond Lake, which be ten mile wide.
De boys used to make canoes out ob bark, and had a nice time fishin’ in
de lake” (Redpath 1859:288-295).
Charlie stated exactly where he worked as
a shingle-getter in the swamp—about
four miles above Lake Drummond.
It is likely that he worked on a site not far from the banks of the
Jericho Canal that resembled those described by Ruffin and Strother. Charlie was a salaried employee, but never
made it into company books. It was
probably a common shingle-getter who supervised Charlie and reaped greater
earnings from the shingles Charlie cut.
In return for his labor, Charlie gained two dollars a month and
temporary freedom. In addition to Charlie’s
descriptions of the economic workings of the Land Company, it is important to
note the nature of his relationship to the other Company shingle-getters and
their generous relationship to one another.
As a newcomer, Charlie saw the veteran shingle-getters and Land Company
slaves around him as a vibrant community of people, bonded by their labor or
their common purpose for being there.
Although available references indicate
that all Land Company slaves and laborers were male, Charlie referred to
families—women and children maroons—who inhabited the swamp, as well. While his more general account of maroon
families is similar to Schoepf’s and Smyth’s of many years before (and might
have suffered from revision after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred was published in 1856) Charlie’s carries the weight that only
primary documents do, relating the strength of first-hand experience. He recalled, “Dar is families growed up in
dat ar Dismal Swamp dat never seed a white man, an’ would be skeered most to
def to see one. Some runaways went dere
wid dar wives, an’ dar childers are raised dar” (Redpath 1859:293). Again, Charlie framed life in the Dismal
Swamp as a community experience.
Charlie went on to describe everyday swamp life in greater detail:
“Dismal Swamp is divided into tree or
four parts. Whar I worked da called it
Company Swamp. When we wanted fresh
pork we goed to Gum Swamp, ‘bout sun-down, run a wild hog down from de
cane-brakes into Juniper Swamp, whar dar feet can’t touch hard ground, knock
dem over, and dat’s de way we kill dem.
De same way we ketch wild cows.
We troed dar bones, arter we eated all de meat off on ‘em up, to one
side de fire. Many’s de time we waked
up and seed de bars skulking round our feet for de bones” (Redpath
1859:288-295).
Charlie confirmed that he worked in
“Company Swamp,” (the Dismal Swamp Land Company’s portion of the Swamp) the
precise area of the swamp that Strother and Ruffin visited and described so
explicitly. In addition to showing that
maroons relied on wild hogs and cattle living in the swamp to supplement any
food provisioned them by the Land Company, Charlie’s account supports the idea
that maroons, as well as slaves laboring in the Dismal, enjoyed a degree of
mobility during their free time. It
might have been this mobility that allowed for the existence of communication
networks between maroons in the swamp and slaves on plantations considerably
further away. For example, in
describing the predicament of his wife, whom he had left behind, Charlie
lamented, “Den I heern dat old mass’r made her live wid anudder man, coz I left
her. Dis ‘formation nearly killed
me….Well, arter I heern dat she was livin’ wid ‘nudder man, dat ar made me to
come to Canada” (Redpath 1859:288-295).
Clearly, the morass and mire that made up the swamp failed to hinder the
communication of important long-distance information between maroons and
plantation slaves.
Indeed, slaves and even maroons traveled
with relative freedom within the Land Company’s swamp. For example, from their camps, Charlie and
other maroons and slaves often journeyed several miles south to Lake Drummond
to attend religious services. Charlie
explained that
“Ole man Fisher was us boys’ preacher. He runned away and used to pray, like he’s ‘n earnest. I camped wid him. Many’s been de ‘zortation I have ‘sperienced, dat desounded t’rough de trees, an’ we almos’ ‘spect de judgment day was comin’, dar would be such loud nibrations, as de preacher called dem; ‘specially down by de lake” (Redpath 1859:293).
It appears that the Land Company’s
community of African-American men regularly congregated together to listen to
their own preacher on the shores of Lake Drummond, one of the most accessible
(and therefore public) places in the entire swamp. How was it possible for hired and fugitive slaves to freely travel
and meet in the swamp’s busiest area and not be detected? Or, if their meetings were known and
condoned by company officials and other European-Americans in the swamp, what
does this say about the nature of race and labor relations in the Dismal? Perhaps a clue lies in Charlie’s brief description
of his preacher, Fisher. It is likely
that Charlie’s “Ole man Fisher” was the same “old Toby Fisher” described by
Ruffin during his trip down the Company’s Jericho Canal to Lake Drummond in
1836. Ruffin, eager to learn about the
swamp’s history was referred to Toby Fisher by the African-American boatmen he
had hired. According to Ruffin, Toby
Fisher was an authority on all that had occurred in the swamp, since he “was
then [in 1806], as he still is, and has continued to be, a shingle-getter in the
swamp” (Ruffin 1837:519-520). It is
conceivable that Ruffin, a prominent European-American visitor, was led by his
boatmen to a Dismal swamp maroon for a history lesson. Conversely, it is significant that shingle
getters such as Toby Fisher (whether he was or was not the preacher) had easy
access to traffic through the swamp and to visitors of the Land Company’s
operation.
Similarly, Strother’s account supports the view that traditional
lines of race, class, and status may have been blurred to some degree in the
Land Company’s territory in the nineteenth century. During his visit to Lake Drummond, Strother ate, played cards,
lounged, and slept next to a motley crew of Land Company employees—his two
African American boatmen/guides Jim Pierce and Ely Reed, the company
shingle-counter Joe Skeeter, and an unnamed assistant to Skeeter (likely a
slave). Strother remarked, “I spent a
night of sweet repose, awaking two or three times to turn over and be again
soothed to sleep by the snoring quartette performed by my companions” (Strother
1856:448). Reified racial barriers
common in everyday life outside the swamp apparently held little sway within
the Land Company’s territory. It should
be noted that Pierce and Reed, as well as Skeeter, appeared in the Nansemond
County, Virginia, census records of 1850 (Almasy 1988:51,55,39). Strother’s descriptions of those he met in
the swamp, like many of his narrative’s details, were remarkably accurate
(Kirby 1995:151-161).
Strother’s writings and illustrations
present the only reliable first-hand portrait of a Dismal Swamp maroon and help
the reader to imagine what Charlie might have looked like while working in the
swamp. While wandering off a wooden
track made for transporting shingles by cart, Strother penned the only lasting
description and portrait of a Dismal Swamp maroon, whom he called Osman. He reported,
“At length my attention was arrested by the
crackling sound of other footsteps than my own. I paused, held my breath, and sunk quietly down among the reeds. About thirty paces from me I saw a gigantic
negro, with a tattered blanket wrapped about his shoulders, and a gun in his
hand. His head was bare, and he had
little other clothing than a pair of ragged breeches and boots. His hair and beard were tipped with gray,
and his purely African features were cast in a mould betokening, in the highest
degree, strength and energy. the
expression of the face was of mingled fear and ferocity, and every movement
betrayed a life of habitual caution and watchfulness….He did not discover me,
but presently turned and disappeared” (Strother 1856:453).
While Strother’s account confirmed
the existence of maroons in the Dismal Swamp Land Company tract in 1856, the
records of the Dismal Swamp Land Company remained silent on the illegal
practice of hiring maroons (Trouillot 1995).
Was Charlie’s employment sanctioned by Land Company bean counters? Or was such “hiring” secretly undertaken by
slave laborers? Several sources suggest
the former. During the nineteenth
century, Land Company officials increasingly complained of high labor costs
(Reid 1948:102,109). In several cases,
the Land Company’s agent was urged to keep labor costs to a minimum (Reid 1948:
116-117). Might the necessity of cheap labor have driven the Company to
illegally hire runaway slaves? In
addition, there were several instances where company officials documented
expenses under curious, amorphous headings, such as “Extra lightering &
other work done by hands this month” (DSLCR 1860a; DSLCR 1860b). It is possible that the Company agent
cloaked all expenses associated with maroon labor as “other work.”
Unlike many maroons in Brazil or
Suriname, slaves who fled into the Land Company’s sector of the Dismal Swamp
sought refuge in a highly organized commercial entity based on slave labor and
the exploitation of African Americans.
It would have been difficult for runaways to hide in the Lumber Company swamp or one of the other areas managed
by a large commercial operation; instead, maroons were likely detected and
either welcomed or returned. If
accepted into the lumber enterprise as workers, maroons were employed by
European-American managers or African-American de facto supervisors operating in the swamp. Once living in the swamp, it is clear from
the accounts of Olmsted, Strother, and Charlie that maroons fit easily into an
established task system based on individual production and incentives. For Land Company officials, there was
apparently little distinction not only between maroons and slave laborers, but slave
laborers and free African-American laborers, as well (Bogger 1982:84).
Unfortunately, the documentary evidence
for maroon life in the Great Dismal Swamp raises far more questions than it
answers. Where were maroons living and
in what proximity to other Land Company workers? How many runaways such as Charlie fled to the swamp in the
nineteenth century? Were maroons mostly
temporary residents in the swamp, or did they settle, raise children, and die
there? What was the basis of their
diet—Company rations, or nearby flora and fauna? How much contact did maroons have with those in Suffolk, Norfolk,
or Elizabeth City? What relationships
did maroons maintain with African Americans enslaved on surrounding plantations
and lumber company tracts? Did swamp
maroons constitute a socially-bonded “community,” or were their bonds strictly
economic?
Employing documentary evidence as a basis
for a model of maroon subsistence, archaeology offers a hope of illuminating
the cultural and material formation and transformation processes undergone by
African Americans between slavery and freedom in the Great Dismal Swamp.
Chapter
IV
--Oliver Wendall Holmes, The Professor at the Breakfast Table
One of the most promising projects
involving maroon archaeology involves the search for the material remains of quilombos (runaway slave communities) in
Palmares, in northeastern Brazil. The
comparative, multidisciplinary approach employed by those investigating
Palmares is one that might be adopted by archaeologists working on a large
number of maroon sites throughout the Americas, as well as by future
researchers of communities within the Great Dismal Swamp (Orser and Funari
1999:7; Harrington 1997:4).
Archaeologists Charles Orser, Pedro Funari, and Scott Allen discovered
that the material remains of maroon sites include a number of objects
manufactured outside Palmares. For
example, in addition to native pottery and locally-made, glazed ceramics the major
presence of European ceramics in artifact assemblages “suggests that the people
of Palmares maintained constant links with some segments of the local
Portuguese population” (Orser 1994:14).
The maroons of Palmares, like those in
Suriname and other locations, could not live in isolation; they situated
themselves in an ever-shifting spatial equilibrium that allowed positive
exchange with neighbors on the one hand, and, on the other, prevented unwanted
contact with European slavers (Price 1990:25; Orser and Funari 1999:6). Orser writes that the fluidity, negotiation,
and constant exchange that existed between maroons and their neighbors in
Palmares makes traditional archaeology or the construction of a standard ethnography
of quilombos impossible without
adopting a wide perspective that extends well beyond the communities (Orser
1994:5). It is likely that quilombos were societies as open as they
were closed—they were economically tied to the larger European world from which
they physically (and culturally) severed themselves. Thus, in order to study Palmares, Orser and Funari argue, various
related communities and social forces on its periphery—and beyond—must be
explored, as well. A comprehensive
archaeology of Palmares is therefore only as complete as concomitant
investigations of surrounding colonial Portuguese sugar plantations, Native
American sites, Dutch colonial sites, and historic Angolan communities (where
many newly-arrived slaves originated).
Orser and Funari advocate a global, as well as a local approach to slave
and maroon archaeology (Orser 1994:5,17; Orser and Funari 1999:6).
In a recent survey of maroon archaeology, Terry Weik also emphasized the need for adopting a broad view while excavating and interpreting maroon sites in the Americas. He advised that
“A comparative perspective
on maroon, plantation slaves, free blacks, and urban slaves is required. The extent of contact and exchange between
maroons and plantation slaves is an issue which could provide insights into the
permeability of the boundaries of slave societies, as well as the
(in)dependence of maroons in terms of culture identity and economics” (Weik 1997:86).
Archaeologists investigating maroons in
the Dismal Swamp should accept Weik’s challenge by adopting an approach similar
to that of Orser and Funari—think globally, dig locally. While one goal is to ultimately place swamp
maroons within the context of the larger currents of the African Diaspora in
the Americas, archaeologists must first focus on locating sites and distinctive
activity areas within the swamp (Armstrong 1999:178; Harrington 1997:5). A new reading of the historical record
(presented in chapter four) emphasizes the diversity of people at work in the
Dismal at any given time during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By anchoring evidence for maroons to
specific times and spaces within the swamp, archaeologists can now begin to
evaluate maroon, slave, and laborer sites in the swamp as they changed through
time, in relation to ever-evolving communities surrounding the Great
Dismal. New archaeological research
undertaken in the Dismal can be conducted within the larger context of what
Theresa Singleton has called the “study of the formation and transformation of
the black Atlantic world” (Singleton 1999:1).
A multidisciplinary, comparative approach similar to that undertaken at
Palmares will work in the Dismal Swamp.
Employing many of the same theoretical
underpinnings as research at Palmares, maroon archaeology in the Great Dismal Swamp
must be conducted with an eye towards more than simply locating and identifying
sites, although this is the first step.
Dismal Swamp maroon archaeology is designed to determine the duration,
material diversity, and process of community formation present at those North
American sites where African-Americans lived between slavery and freedom.
Identifying African-American sites (especially maroon and slave sites) in the
swamp today benefits from a number of studies of African-American material
culture not yet available to Elaine Nichols, who pioneered North American
maroon archaeology in the 1980s. Such
studies include Lorena Walsh’s comprehensive examination of material culture at
Carter’s Grove plantation (Walsh 1997:171-203), Barbara Heath’s exploration
into the daily lives of slaves at Poplar Forest (Heath 1999b:47-64), and recent
discourse on free African-American communities, such as Fort Mose and Elmwood,
Michigan (Deagan and Landers 1999:261-282; Bastian 1999:283-298). Recent scholarship detailing the material
remains of slave sites throughout the east may allow archaeologists working in
the swamp to identify inter- and intra-site patterns based upon recovered
buttons, beads, ceramics, and faunal remains that will determine distinct
occupation areas of maroons, slaves, and free laborers.
Clearly, the place to begin archaeological testing in the swamp is
the Dismal Swamp Land Company’s old tract now under the protection of the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service as the Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge. Using historical records as a guide, a
project area encompassing a section of the Jericho Canal, midway between Lake
Drummond and Suffolk, would allow archaeologists to begin subsurface testing in
the approximate area where Strother spotted Osman and where Charlie, the
maroon, once lived.
The first phase of testing would aim to
locate all sites within the project area
contemporaneous with Land Company operations. The survey might consist of shovel test holes occurring at
measured intervals, systematic subsurface testing of the area’s high ground, or
aircraft-mounted imaging similar to that done at Fort Mose in Florida (Deagan
and Landers 1999:270; Carter 1979). In
order to locate and identify maroon sites accurately, a large sample of other
sites must first be obtained as a standard for comparison. To this end, as many contemporary maroon and
non-maroon sites within the Wildlife Refuge should be located as possible.
More extensive testing, followed by
complete excavations of various sites would hopefully offer archaeologists a
lens into the everyday operations of the Land Company in the area. By following the trail of clues strewn
throughout the available documents (historical, anthropological, and archaeological)
archaeologists could then begin to identify artifacts and features that mark
the locations of past roads, camps, and canals of the company. Clothing, tools,
and other supplies detailed in receipts and letterbooks should form the
framework for a recognizable artifact pattern indicating the past presence of
shingle-getters and Land Company laborers.
For example, Edmund Ruffin’s description of the homes of shingle getters
is useful as a starting point for archaeological investigation and interpretation:
“Their houses, or shanties, are barely wide enough for five or six men to lie in, closely packed side by side—their heads to the back wall, and their feet stretched to the open front, close by a fire kept up through the night. The roof is sloping, to shed the rain, and where highest, not above four feet from the floor. Of the shavings made in smoothing the shingles, the thinnest make a bed for the laborers, and the balance form the only dry and solid foundation of their house, and their homestead, or working yard” (Ruffin 1837:518).
Except for the areas where logging
railroads and later commercial activities disturbed landforms (as shown in
Mallory Hope Ferrell’s composite map) much of the nineteenth-century high
ground in the Wildlife Refuge, where shingle-getters constructed their homesteads,
should still be intact and dry today (Trout 1998:46-47). Ironically, commercial drainage and
development that has been progressively drying the swamp for years might be
responsible for the preservation of any subsurface features, since
decomposition rates are faster for litter submerged in the acidic swamp water
than that in drier soil (Day 1982:670).
Therefore, the footprints of shingle-getters’ distinctive homes might
still be visible in areas where posts were driven through the peat into the
shallow clay subsoil for support. Some
kind of midden, or scatter of domestic refuse, in the form of animal bone and
containers for all the goods that Strother spotted in Horse Camp—salt fish,
molasses, whisky—should serve as markers of camps and working yards, as well.
The following phase must be a rigorous
analysis of all accumulated data designed to prompt new questions of the
documentary evidence. Will all
excavated camps and homesteads fit a similar pattern, or might there be enough
variation in the number of manufactured goods, for example, or items listed on
Land Company documents to distinguish slave from maroon sites? Archaeologists in search of neatly bounded
maroon sites in the Land Company tract must recognize the challenge of
distinguishing maroon sites from slave and free laborer sites within the
company swamp. Will “Africanisms” or
other ethnic markers separate maroons from Land Company slaves or
African-American sites from European-American sites on the artifact inventory
list (Howson 1990)? Or will settlement
patterns showing relative isolation or inaccessibility mark a rogue camp of
runaways? Only through practical
methodologies that allow for an active reflexivity between the material and
historical fragments of slave and maroon life will archaeologists truly see the
people of the swamp through the things they left behind (Yentsch 1994:xxii,
188-195, 311).
By first focusing on nineteenth-century
sites within the Land Company’s documented space archaeologists can work
backwards through the swamp’s development from the 1850s, when Charlie
inhabited the swamp, to the eighteenth century, when the Land Company’s slaves
began draining the Dismal. As work
begins and new questions arise from recovered archaeological data, documents
will lend themselves to alternate readings, which will, in turn, spark new ways
of seeing and organizing the archaeological data, and so on. A reflexivity between written, material, and
perhaps oral sources will promote a contextual, interpretive approach ripe for
local and global comparative analysis (Hodder 1986:121-155; Hodder 1999:80-104;
Hall 2000:24).
By stressing the importance of the
historical record in assembling an archaeological research design for
excavations in the Dismal Swamp, it is hoped that written and material evidence
may be viewed, in Martin Hall’s terminology, as transcripts. Hall writes,
“I see the transcript as a web of relations that entwine both objects and words. Transcripts are the basic building blocks of my historical archaeology, because they are the means of connecting material assemblages (the key subject matter of archaeology) with texts (the key sources with which historians work)” (Hall 2000:16).
Transcripts “play against one another,”
engaging in discourse that constantly opens otherwise static artifact
assemblages and documents to reinterpretation (Hall 2000:17). In order to initiate discourse in a
meaningful way, archaeologists must investigate the geographical, historical,
and cultural contexts of maroon sites and communities in and outside the
swamp. Without grounding the study of
maroons within contexts—within particular spaces in the swamp (such as the Land
Company tract) and within particular time periods (such as 1850s)—transcripts depicting
everyday life or material goods become meaningless (Wilkie 1995:137-138). As archaeologists, Matthew Johnson writes,
“context is the central and defining feature of our discipline” (Johnson
1999:107).
Like the quilombos of Palmares, maroon sites within the Land Company’s area
are ideal case studies in the permeability of the boundaries of slave society,
as well as maroon (in)dependence (Weik 1997).
More broadly, maroonage in the Dismal can be viewed not only as a form
of resistance to surrounding slave society, “but also as a phenomenon which
intersects and engages these societies in economic and cultural dimensions”
(Weik 1997:89). In this way, The Land
Company’s operation can be seen physically and symbolically as a space of
intersection, overlap, and exchange between diverse peoples inside and outside
the slave system (Orser 1994:5; Osrser 1996:189-201). For example, an approach
similar to that taken by Mark Hauser and Douglas Armstrong in their analysis of
African-American ceramics may be appropriate in the Dismal Swamp. Hauser and Douglas write,
“Exchange provides a link between communities previously believed separated by legal and social structures. Exchange mediates relationships between enslaved persons from different plantations; between enslaved persons and free persons; and between the European population and the African population” (Hauser and Armstrong 1999:78).
In viewing exchange and interaction
between slaves and maroons or maroons and free laborers in the Land Company’s
tract, archaeologists must attempt to identify geographical, social, or
cultural limits of maroonage.
Archaeologists must ask, as Orser did in Palmares, “How could the
boundaries of this community be established?
Who would be considered to be its members? When is one inside or outside Palmares” (Orser 1994:10)? The question is even more difficult for
those attempting to locate Dismal Swamp maroons than quilombos. Unlike Palmares,
it appears that the traditional maroon community—a physically isolated entity
of runaways existing on the margins of the dominant slave society, such as
those in Suriname and Brazil—does not appear to have existed in the Dismal
Swamp in the nineteenth century.
Instead, maroons in the Dismal Swamp formed communities within communities,
whose members may have been set apart from others not by space but by the legal
status they renounced and the fugitive status they embraced.
Maroon archaeology in the Great Dismal
Swamp has the potential to clarify and challenge traditional conceptions of how
slaves and maroons negotiated meaningful lives within a society dependent upon
slavery and shaped by European-American power.
Data collected from African-American sites in the swamp will contribute
to the current study of African-American material life in slavery and
freedom. Investigations into the size,
duration, and settlement of maroon communities in the Dismal will serve as a
basis for future anthropological scholarship on maroon societies in North
America. Is the role of the maroon
community in Charlie’s case—as an intermediary between slavery and freedom—the
exception or the rule?
In addition, future research in the swamp
will further broaden the scope of African-American archaeology beyond that of
plantation archaeology, to include a window into a commercial world dominated
by African Americans of diverse backgrounds.
Archaeology in the swamp will provide a new host of answers—and
questions—about the meaning of race, ethnicity, freedom, slavery, and other
social constructions that may not be apparent in the existing written record
(McKee 1995).
A key component to any future archaeology
in the Wildlife Refuge will be its commitment to what Michael Blakey calls “a
new archaeology of public engagement,” where the public is actively informed
and involved in developing research questions, conducting oral history
interviews, and, possibly, excavating potential maroon sites (McKee 1998:2;
Singleton 1997:146-151). Indeed, adding
public archaeology to the mission of the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife
Refuge in conjunction with a public history program focused on human-caused
alterations to the swamp’s environment would only strengthen the goals of the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. In
addition, a public, interdisciplinary approach combining the efforts of
historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and local residents would succeed
in resuscitating American interest in an area of study where scholars of the
Caribbean and South America are far ahead.
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Almasy, Sandra L.
1988 Nansemond
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Glen
Publishing.
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Herbert
1939 Maroons Within the Present Limits of
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[2] “Dismal” is old French for swamp.
(Berkeley and Berkeley 1976:141)
[3] Perkins’s description appears
exaggerated because it supercedes contemporary estimates of the swamp’s size by
several hundred thousand acres. For
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1819:62-64.
[4]
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swamp imagery and representation during the nineteenth century see Miller
1989:23-46.
[5] On log roads in swamp see also Strother
1856:451; Thomas Place Scrapbook; Ewald 1979:277; Schoepf 1911:99-101; Smyth
1784:238-239.
[6] On the great fire of 1806 see Ruffin
1836:519-520
[7] The Dismal Swamp Land Company paid $160
plus insurance annually [about $16 extra per $1000] to masters for slave
hires. Only three percent of all
industrial slaves employed during any year in the 1850s were covered by life
insurance; see Savitt 1977:585.
1 Byrd described “a family of Mulattoes,
that call’d themselves free” that he met 6 ¼ miles east of the swamp during his
survey (Byrd 1929:56,58).
2 It is important to note that here Smyth was relating what he had heard about maroons in the Great Dismal as well as the nearby Great Alligator Swamp.
3 See Reid 1948:89.