Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons by Sylviane A. Diouf, and: The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and Their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World by Nathaniel Millett (review)

In March of 1856, the magazine writer and illustrator David Hunter Strother, better known as Porte Crayon, was deep in the Great Dismal Swamp working on a story. The watery wilderness straddling the Virginia-North Carolina border was a forbidding place, long known as a refuge for runaway slaves, or maroons. As he explained in his subsequent article for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Strother was anxious “to see one of those sable outlaws” for himself. Accordingly, he struck out from a logging canal and labored through the underbrush until he became exhausted and fell to his knees. Within moments, he heard a rustle, and before him appeared “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.” Simultaneously thrilled and alarmed, Strother noted the man’s “purely African features” and expression of “mingled fear and ferocity,” before he melted back into the forest. But the memory was powerful enough for the illustrator to produce an evocative sketch. When the black bargehands back at the canal saw the drawing, they began talking about “Osman,” but when Strother quizzed them they disavowed any knowledge of the enigmatic figure.

Throughout the antebellum era, white Southerners were obsessed with the problem of maroons. Maroons were the fugitive slaves who chose to remain in the South, sometimes only a stone’s throw from the domiciles of their owners, rather than flee north. They did this to stay near loved ones and sources of sustenance or to avoid the risks of a lengthy journey into free territory. Surprisingly, given how large maroons loomed in the Southern imagination and the numerous contemporary references to them in diaries, letters, and court records, there have been relatively few books about their experience in the United States.

Happily, Sylviane A. Diouf has now redressed the imbalance with Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons. Diouf, a curator at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black History of the New York Public Library, is the author of several previous books, including Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America (2007) and Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (2013). She is a gifted scholar and a wonderful writer with no patience for exotic interpretations of fact.

“The people whose stories are the subject of this book,” Diouf writes, “went to the Southern woods to stay.” (1) They were predominantly male, she notes, but there were women and children, too, and sometimes entire families, indomitable, determined souls who preferred the dangers of free maroon life to the humiliation and violence of chattel bondage. Their exact numbers are unknowable, of course, but at any given time probably in the low thousands. Diouf divides these people into two categories—borderland maroons and hinterland maroons. Borderland maroons were those individuals who lived very close to the plantations, towns, and cities where they had previously been held, whereas hinterland maroons, like Osman, fled farther afield, preferring to isolate themselves as much as possible from white society and the chance of betrayal and discovery.

In order to sustain themselves, borderland maroons resorted to frequent plunder of the farms and plantations in their vicinity and were a continual trial to authorities. Diouf notes that the earliest legislation to deal with maroons was “An Act for suppressing outlying Slaves,” passed in 1691. According to this act, the maroons “hid and lurk[ed] in obscure places killing hoggs [sic] and...