Naturalist Antoine Le Page du Pratz received “two good ones, which had fallen to me by lot. One was a young Negro about twenty, with his wife of the same age.” After six months, the couple ran away. Native Americans captured them sixty miles away, and soon the husband “died of a defluxion on the breast, which he catched [sic] by running away into the woods.”
To du Pratz, the couple had run away because they were lazy. The man’s “youth and want of experience made him believe he might live without the toils of slavery,” he said. In fact, the young Senegambians had chosen marronage over enslavement—emblematic of the fierce African resistance of the early 1700s.
Between 1700 and 1724, marronage, revolts, and more than fifty insurrections aboard slave ships caused much alarm throughout the British colonies. In the thirteen North American colonies, maroons—“runaways who hid[e] and lurk in obscure places,” also called outliers—drew attention for the potential threat they posed.
In 1721 Virginia lieutenant governor Alexander Spotswood feared it would be difficult to apprehend “Negroes” who had settled in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Should their number increase, he thought they would endanger the frontier settlers and threaten the peace of the colony. Virginians and Marylanders knew maroon communities were well established in Jamaica, and to prevent a similar development, they instituted a policy of divide and conquer, offering Native Americans two guns and blankets or coats as a reward for each maroon they captured.
William Byrd II, the founder of Richmond, went so far as to recommend ending the slave trade, “lest [Africans] prove as troublesome and dangerous everywhere, as they have been lately in Jamaica….We have mountains in Virginia too, to which they may retire as safely, and do as much mischief as they do in Jamaica.” Lieutenant Governor William Bull of South Carolina warned that if the Cherokees were run out of the mountains, their land would become a “refuge to the runaway negroes…who might be more troublesome and more difficult to reduce than the Negroes in the mountains of Jamaica.”
The specter of Jamaica continued to be used whenever it was convenient, but unlike Jamaican maroons, most maroons in the colonies did not live in distant communities; they melted into their surroundings at the borderland of populated areas. They typically lived in underground, human-made caves, or dens as they called them, dug several feet underground and closed by well-camouflaged traps. Families, mothers with children, and friends could remain hidden there for years. They hunted, fished, and gathered fruit. They received food from friends and relatives and helped themselves to the pantries of plantation owners. They acquired clothes, salt, firearms, and ammunition through trade with free and enslaved Blacks and with poor whites. In the hinterland, maroon communities—comprising from twenty to eighty people—raised crops, poultry, and pigs. They, too, traded and appropriated what they could not produce.
Maroon communities remained a constant threat to slaveholding colonies. In the early 1700s, a North Carolina act deplored that “many Times Slaves run away and lie out hid and lurking in the Swamps, Woods and other Obscure Places, killing Cattle and Hogs, and committing other Injuries to the Inhabitants.” Newspapers regularly reported on their numerous “depredations.” Petitions to legislatures denounced the damage they caused to livestock, crops, and stores, as well as to the citizens’ sense of safety, all the more because they traveled well armed. They encouraged desertion and often organized the liberation of loved ones.
In their “obscure places”—and more than any other population—maroons were attuned to the natural world. They found sustenance and protection in the environment; knowing it intimately was paramount to their survival. The popular image of the wilderness as dangerous and savage served them well. They built a parallel reputation as ferocious people who could measure up against wild beasts. But to them, danger and savagery lay in the slavers’ world. “I felt safer among the alligators than among the white men,” the maroon Tom Wilson once said.
Maroons’ autonomy shattered the racist view of Black people as incapable of taking care of themselves. Besides, their very existence underlined the limits of the terror system used to control the enslaved population. Cornelia Carney—whose father and cousin and their friend were maroons—expressed a common sentiment when she said Black people were too smart for white people to catch them. Of course, that view was exaggerated. Maroons were captured and as a deterrent were tortured or gruesomely executed. Some gave up and returned to slavery. Some died in the woods.
But they had enough success stories to be an inspiration. The maroon Pattin, his wife, and their fifteen children lived underground for fifteen years and emerged only after the Civil War. In the Great Dismal Swamp, a Union soldier encountered children who had never seen a white man. Some maroons did not even know there had been a war.
In the end, the 1720s prediction that warring outliers would descend from the mountains did not materialize. Maroons did launch numerous assaults. Whenever they were outgunned and outnumbered, which was often, they employed the guerrilla tactic of disappearing. But American maroons were not antislavery insurrectionists. Individuals, families, and communities were the norm. They never had the numbers to lead a successful slave revolt. More than anything, they wanted to be left alone. When some plots were discovered, and during Nat Turner’s revolt, they were suspected, but nothing could ever be substantiated.
Tenacious. Creative. Self-confident. Fearless. Resilient. They displayed all these qualities and more to their enslaved admirers. Maroons became folk heroes. In the 1930s, formerly enslaved men and women recalled their hard-won and defiant freedom. Maroons created an alternative to life in servitude, a free life in a slave society, a free life in a free state. Free Blacks and runaways were still subjected to white supremacy; only maroons were self-ruled. For three years, the maroon Essex endured hunger, frostbite, and the bites of hounds, but all these hardships were well worth it. When captured, he simply said, “I taste how it is to be free, en I didn’ come back.”
Soon, though, maroons disappeared from popular consciousness and scholarly research. But not the essence of marronage: self-determination and freedom outside of white hegemony. The heart of the maroon beat in the establishment of Black towns, the emigration to Black nations, movements for Black power, and Black institution building yesterday and today. Marronage outlived the maroons.
1724–1729
THE SPIRITUALS
Corey D. B. Walker
And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—rhythmic cry of the slave—stands today not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas.
—W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
What is the sacred sound of freedom? For continental and diasporic Africans in North America in the early eighteenth century, the sound would inevitably have been polyphonic. Freedom would have been a sonic cacophony of beats, rhythms, and melodies, clapping and stomping in syncopated time that moved between and beyond purely notational patterns. It would have resembled, reflected, and refracted the stirrings of an Atlantic world in motion.