Defining Freedom in the Atlantic Borderlands of the Revolutionary Southeast

Historians of North American slavery have generally argued that the continent lacked a significant tradition of marronage (independent communities of escaped slaves). Likewise, historians of slavery in North America and the Western Hemisphere, more broadly, have paid a great deal of attention to analyzing the changing patterns of and motives and goals behind slave resistance during the Age of Revolution. This article examines the history of the Negro Fort, which was North America's largest maroon community, and considers its origins, the backdrop of time and space, the lives of its inhabitants, and the structure of its government. The primary aim of the article is to consider the extent to which the inhabitants were able to carefully define their freedom in a unique manifestation of slave resistance that sought to reject their earlier condition of enslavement. In the end, the example of the Negro Fort adds to an understanding of slavery, slave resistance (both marronage and more general slave resistance), the Age of Revolution, and the Atlantic world and Borderlands at a crucial point in time.