Hidden in Plain Sight: Maroon Life and Labor in Virginia's Dismal Swamp

Nineteenth-century maroons in Virginia's Great Dismal Swamp formed communities within communities, whose members were set apart from others not so much by space (an impenetrable wilderness) but by the legal status they renounced, the fugitive status they embraced, and the common goal of creating meaningful lives neither fully within, nor completely apart from, surrounding slave society. The following analysis of one group of Great Dismal Swamp maroons offers scholars a new way to conceptualize marronage in nineteenth-century North America. Rather than look only to remote places for traces of maroon societies, researchers might also consider examining such communities in more settled areas, including centers of large-scale industrial operations, where fugitives carved out identities and negotiated their wages within a biracial labor system that relied upon and supported slavery.