Un-Silencing Historical Maroon Societies in the United States

I grew up knowing many people who were born in the early-to-mid-20th century. I have found myself occasionally looking online for old timers I once knew only to find that they have absolutely no internet presence and acknowledgement of their existence—no obituaries, no blogosphere entries, no mentions in news articles, no known addresses or address histories, no nothing. My grandmothers and grandfathers, several elderly neighbors, and many family friends that I remember from the 1970s and 1980s are absent entirely. If I went by the internet as my only source of knowledge and remembrance, many, many people I knew simply don't seem to have ever existed. Thankfully there are memories in living minds like mine and an actual documentary record (internet be damned) that would confirm their existence and give some insight into their lives. We have multiple ways of knowing about such folks who are virtually absent, silenced even, in the world of the internet.

If, by its nature, the internet and the millions of humans who feed it information can unintentionally or intentionally silence and erase the details of the lives of many people of past decades, we must also know that the complex processes and histories behind pre-internet and tangible documentation did the very same thing. We know that many millions of people lived during the modern writing-dependent era that went largely or entirely unrecorded in the documents and, collectively, the archives that the centuries-long modern writing era produced. For a modern world that relies on tangible documentation for verification, confirmation, acknowledgment, and building memory, the fact that people can be made absent, erased, and silenced in the process of document creation and preservation is an extremely difficult challenge.¹ There has been a relatively long period of uneven development of knowledge about Maroon communities and societies that formed across the African Diaspora. Maroons were enslaved people of African descent who self-extricated from conditions of captivity, removing themselves to Indigenous landscapes or remote regions within the Euro-colonial domain. Many enslaved people marooned as individuals for short periods of time; that mode of resistance is known among scholars as petit marronage. Self-extricating African Diasporans who permanently removed to places outside or within the Euro-colonial slavery system took part in grand marronage, again as scholars would have it. This uneven development of knowledge is most clearly visible in the stark contrasts in national recognition and awareness of Maroons in the United States vis-àvis the rest of the hemisphere. Whether we think of Brazil, Suriname, Jamaica, Haiti, or Cuba, there has long been strong degrees of acknowledgement of the Maroon histories of those places—the Maroon state of Palmares in Brazil, the Haitian Revolution driven by Maroons, or the many Maroons like Cudjoe who are still national heroes throughout the southern half of the Western Hemisphere. The archives, oral historical discourses, public recognition, and scholarship, though quite varied in degrees of intensity and thoroughness, have long been present there.

When we turn our attention to the United States, things look different. Until recent times, Maroons were woefully understudied and underrecognized in mainstream historiography, to say nothing of the wider public. In fact, most historians determined, with varying degrees of certainty, that marronage had occurred to a high degree in many parts of the Western Hemisphere but not in what is now the United States. Of course, "runaway slaves" had been recognized since the dawn of the Abolition era of the 1840s. But in mainstream academic and public discourses, they had (and have) not been unambiguously perceived as being Maroons. Though this is not the place to take a deep dive into the complex and racialized understandings of Black resistance movements in U.S. history, I am comfortable saying that a view pervaded much scholarly and public perceptions that marronage happened elsewhere, but not here. This was supported, so it seemed, with the further elaboration that there were no suitable opportunities or landscapes for any significant marronage or for Maroon populations to thrive for any duration that was worth thinking about—especially when we had so many undeniable examples of persistent and long-term Maroon communities and societies in many other parts of the hemisphere that we could focus on if we were so inclined as scholars. The closest we had in U.S. history, in this view, was the Underground Railroad through which many benevolent white people (typically Quakers) assisted Black "runaways" in getting to Canada or Mexico.

Considering that immensely vast tracts of swampland, deep forests, and mountainous terrain existed in the colonial and early republic East and South, it is a curious idea that suitable landscapes and opportunities for grand marronage to thrive did not exist. And we must also consider that there is no reason that "runaways" or "freedom seekers" who went to live permanently outside the slavery system cannot be considered Maroons of the grand type. And, lastly, we must consider that when we take on the task of a linguistic shift and see that the thousands of recognized short-term "runaway slaves" were in fact Maroons practicing petit marronage, we have room to further expand our vision of marronage in the now-U.S. Recent scholarship has shown that indeed there was a much higher and salient intensity to grand marronage in the now-U.S. than most mainstream scholarship has recognized. With new lenses, we can see that the remote terrains of the Old South were perfectly suitable for grand and petit modes of marronage while petit marronage also happened within agricultural and urban landscapes. If we at all wonder in what kinds of contexts ideologically and politically driven silencing and erasures of past lives happen and how such omissions occur, we need only look at this topic of marronage in U.S. history and how it went out of public and mainstream historical memory for as long as it has. Or, in the case of the Underground Railroad, we see how it was largely rebranded in the distant past as another example of humble Abolitionist kindness.

One of the exemplary landscapes of historical marronage is the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina and Virginia. I have been working as a historical archaeologist on locating and analyzing Maroon-related archaeological sites for much of this millennium. My research on the Underground Railroad extends further back to the mid-1990s. But it has been in my work on the Dismal Swamp that I have engaged in a variety of ways with a range of scholars, including historians, anthropologists, and others over the years. As a loose confederation of researchers who are motivated to study the Diasporic Great Dismal Swamp, including its Maroons, I think it is safe to say that we are part of the much wider and growing contingent of people who are seeking to rectify the many decades and long-term silencing and erasure of Maroon lives and societies in the U.S. Most of us hope to also contribute to rising global awareness of the chronic and consistent existence of grand and petit marronage wherever race-based enslavement existed in the world. There is no shortage of deep appreciation for Maroon self-empowerment and their societies among us.

I met historian J. Brent Morris in 2009 at an Underground Railroad-focused conference in Norfolk, Virginia. We discussed our mutual interests in the Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, and Brent became a key member of our collaborative research team (the Great Dismal Swamp Landscape Study, or GDSLS) that obtained support from the National Endowment for the Humanities the following year. Brent also participated in our archaeological excavations. I met historian Marcus P. Nevius a few years later, in 2013, when he joined in our ongoing GDSLS archaeological excavations at a Maroon-and-Indigenous American community site in the Dismal Swamp and became a part of our collaborative team. In recent years, Marcus and Brent have published outstanding books on their research on the Dismal Swamp and its Maroons. Nevius's City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763-1856 (2020) and Morris's Dismal Freedom: A History of Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp (2022) are complementary, while each provides new information and insights about the documentary record of Maroon societies in the Dismal Swamp and differing analytical foci. They are both powerful works of history on their own and, combined, represent an incredible leap forward in our knowledge about the world that Maroons and Indigenous Americans created for themselves at the edges and in the remote interior of the Great Dismal Swamp. At the same time, they both have some important differences in their interpretation of the nature, scale, and intensity of marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp. These two volumes are important amplifiers in the wider recent move to unsilence Maroons histories in the U.S. and beyond.

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In 1939, historian Herbert Aptheker published a pioneering essay in the Journal of Negro History on Maroon communities in the now-United States. One must imagine that reading the essay when it was new was an enlightening moment for most, as its 15 or so pages described dozens upon dozens of barely documented communities of self-emancipated Black Americans in the South who found out-of-the-way landscapes to settle before legal Emancipation in 1863.

Maroon histories in the U.S. had not been discussed within the professional mainstream in the seven decades since legal Emancipation. Aptheker's essay was reprinted decades later, in 1973, in Richard Price's equally essential edited volume on Maroon groups throughout the Western Hemisphere, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. Aptheker's reprinted essay represented the only chapter that focused on Maroons in North America in that volume. This underscores the fact that since Aptheker, very little North American and U.S. Maroon history had been published by the time Price was assembling his volume; the rest of the chapters in the volume focused on Maroon societies in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. So, by 1977, one major essay had been published by an American historian on Maroons societies in the U.S. and North America in 110-plus years since Emancipation. Though a few historians, such as Gerald Mullin, had focused on enslaved Blacks running away from enslavement and how such self-emancipation was, in fact, detrimental to systemic enslavement, they did not locate permanent settlements of self-emancipators (or Maroons) in the U.S. So, the analytical foci in that literature highlighted the resistance inherent to acts of self-emancipation, or running away, and not what resulted culturally, socially, and politically from the self-emancipatory acts of countless people—namely, the creation and persistence of novel communities and societies in the remote places that the white enslaving world considered wastelands, deserts, and terra incognita.

There has been an increase of historiographies of U.S. Maroon societies since the 1980s. One must surmise that the dearth of published histories of Maroons in the U.S. in prior decades represents a widely shared disinterest in these resistance communities and cultures, the failure of traditional historiographic methods when faced with very limited documentary records, or a deep silencing and marginalization of Maroon lives that made them invisible to most historians before the Civil War. That the one historian who did show such interest, Aptheker, was a radical Marxist who published his pioneering essay in a Black history journal (i.e., not mainstream) during those anticommunist and strictly segregated times could be indicative of any or all of those possibilities. Whatever the reason, the rise of U.S. academic interests in Maroon societies was no doubt connected to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the wider revolutionary spirit of the age, which included Communist revolutions in Cuba and other locales that also had Maroon histories. With the postwar social and cultural reckonings on colonialism, racism, and race in the U.S., Maroon societies represented Black and Black-and-Indigenous American resistance and defiance to the colonial enslaving world that was the foundation of the Jim Crow South and segregated North of the 20th century.

It is not surprising in that cultural and political era of the mid to late 1970s that radical historians and scholar-activists were increasingly and strategically focusing on Maroons who instigated armed and transformative rebellions around the Western Hemisphere, like those of 19th-century Haiti and Brazil, and those that fought armed battles with their colonial oppressors, as happened in many places, including Suriname, Cuba, and Mexico. But in such works, like Eugene Genovese's From Rebellion to Revolution (1979), the historical importance of Maroons in the U.S is downplayed and all but dismissed because of the simple fact that none actively undertook violent rebellion while seeking systemic revolution. Nurtured by the highly visible methods of activism of the 1960s, such as rioting, protests, institutional takeovers and other in-your-face spectacles that were paired with declarations of revolutionary fervor, scholars sought examples of similar successful revolutionary action in the past, perhaps. Unfortunately, this extremely narrow focus on Maroons-as-insurgent-rebels helped to perpetuate the general disinterest (and perhaps disappointment for some) in the vast majority of Maroons and modes of Marooning in the U.S. and elsewhere. The majority of Maroons sought to remove themselves for as long as possible from the racialized colonial and enslaving world, not directly fight that world to their, or its, demise.

In 1939, the extent of knowledge that Aptheker had of Dismal Swamp Maroons was that the Dismal Swamp was (likely) home to around two thousand Maroons who carried on illegal trade with white people outside the swamp on its borders. Even this limited insight is based on iffy sources for a historian, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Dred: A Tale of the Dismal Swamp (1856) and two articles, one from an Abolitionist newspaper (Pennsylvania Freeman, 1852) and another from the South Atlantic Quarterly published in 1934, just a few years before Aptheker's essay was penned. Nonetheless, Aptheker's work represented the central statement on marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp for quite a long time.

Hugo Leaming completed his doctoral dissertation in 1979 and published a condensed version in 1995, both entitled Hidden Americans: Maroons of Virginia and the Carolinas. The dissertation in particular stands out as the first academic volume to bring together hundreds of primary sources, along with numerous secondary sources, in order to develop a narrative about the Maroon-and-Indigenous American communities of the Great Dismal Swamp across the pre-Civil War historical period. Whereas Aptheker could say very little about the Maroons of the Dismal Swamp, Leaming brings together so much primary material and interprets it through a Pan-Africanist perspective that we have, finally, an analysis of the social world that existed within the morass. Leaming's work stands as an impressive bibliographic assemblage of primary sources while also providing a compelling model, in part due to its simplicity, of Dismal Swamp settlement by diasporans prior to the Civil War. This model indicates that diasporic communities emerged in three relatively distinct locations in the vast 2,000 square mile swamp between the early 1600s and Emancipation: along the swamps edge or periphery, across its deep and expansive interior, and along mercantilist canals of the 1763-1863 era. I think it is safe to say that researchers since Leaming, including Morris and Nevius, conceive of the swamp landscape in the same or similar ways.¹

The Nevius and Morris books represent the first full-length and comprehensive historiographic treatments of the diasporic communities of the Dismal Swamp since Leaming. Rather than simply updating and revising Leaming's work, combined, these historians provide much new insight from primary sources they have found through their deep immersion in the archives and through their creative ways of dealing with the loud silences in those archives. Additionally, these works provide us with wonderful contextual information—both books, in their ways, situate the Maroons of the Dismal Swamp within wider social and political economic matrices and processes than previous works, including my own.

In both books, the authors are explicitly aware of the Trouillotian silences, sometimes deafening, that archives and documents of the modern world impose on its past peoples like Maroons. Unless mitigated in some way, such archival silences estrange the modern analyst from past peoples, even to the point of the latter's being erased and excluded from contemporary knowledges and discourses. There are many historical peoples whose lives and histories have long been silenced and erased, and Maroons of the Dismal Swamp are certainly among them.

Nevius is clear that his focus is on petit marronage in the Dismal Swamp and that his temporal focus (ca. 1763-1856) largely coincides with the swamp's canal and lumber company era. His spatial focus is especially on the petit marronage associated with the enslaved labor camps and settlements that sprung up across the swamp along its 50-plus miles of canal corridors. In taking this focus, he has located a novel research space for which he has many documentary sources from company records, abolitionist articles, runaway advertisements and the like. One result is that Nevius is confident that he "engages in new ways the voluminous scholarship on slavery and capitalism, black resistance, and black agency in Virginia and North Carolina as well as the Atlantic world more broadly" by putting petit marronage in the Dismal Swamp center stage in his analysis (p. 10). Of this, I am certain he is correct. Still, he comes close to creating the feeling in the reader that grand marronage did not occur to a great degree. At a minimum, it seems that such Maroons lived in the swamp's deeps, but Nevius leaves them in the backdrop. For example, we hear that "only under rare conditions could large-scale maroon encampments…take shape in North America. Far more common were the conditions under which enslaved Africans and African Americans engaged in petit marronage, resisting enslavement in smaller-scale, highly mobile camps" (p. 10). We hear as well that "in perhaps the purest sense, the Dismal's Maroons were freedom's seekers who originated in plantation or swamp slave labor contexts and who engaged in petit marronage to repudiate altogether the slave societies that surrounded and encroached on the swamp" (p. 11), which does, on the face of it, appear to be excluding deep swamp grand marronage from his overall vision. It is because of the specific focus on petit maroons of the swamp's edges and canal corridors in the 100 years prior to the Civil War that we are repaid by exploring Brent Morris enlightening book alongside Nevius's pathbreaking analysis.

Morris's central description of his book is that it is the "first comprehensive history of the maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp" (p. 9) His focus is from the early 1600s up through and beyond the Civil War's conclusion. The comprehensiveness of the volume does not lie solely in its broad temporal scope. Its comprehensiveness also emerges from Morris's coverage of the several regions or zones of the swamp across that time while also utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to what constitutes acceptable data in historiographic analysis. Among many things, Morris provides full support for his idea that the "first self-governing African American communities, North or South, whether whites recognized them or not, included the maroon communities of the Great Dismal Swamp" (p. 13).

Acknowledging the relative dearth of documentation, and laying out his work as historian in our archaeology-rooted project, the GDSLS, Morris indicates that what differentiates his book from all previous efforts "to tell the story of the Dismal Swamp maroons is [his] interdisciplinary" approach (p. 9). This interdisciplinary method includes some alternative methods like "controlled speculation," which is a non-classical historiographic comparative method used when solid documentation is absent or extremely limited. This method allows Morris to use the precious but limited documentary record to augment the documentary information with the archaeological record and to make comparisons between Dismal Swamp Maroons and other Maroons settlements and societies throughout the hemisphere.

In considering the silencing exile of U.S. Maroons from the modern annals of mainstream history, Morris has much to say: "Scholars have seldom listened for their voices, but maroon voices were at times deafening in the American South, especially in and around the Great Dismal Swamp. They collectively registered one of the most thunderous indictments of slavery, and the echoes chafed at the ideological bases on which enslavers relied to justify owning other humans" (p. 12). Morris reminds us that a significant contributing factor to this silencing of Maroon voices is that the highly attenuated documentary record reflects the fact that so many of the Dismal Swamp's Maroons intentionally occupied a landscape that was marginalized in the extreme by the enslaving world beyond its borders. Maroons did not desire nor did they seek to be recorded by that outside world. And as might be expected, historians can run into problems when there is limited and truncated documentation on people and processes of history—the troubling basis for silencing and erasure—unless they get creative.

Nevius utilizes one such creative approach by saying "the history of petit marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp is perhaps best interpreted to be the narrative of negotiations and accommodations that took place in varying temporal contexts. This explanation provides a fuller contextualization of the history of black resistance in the swamp, but it also sheds light on little-researched exchanges between slaveholders and enslaved people in unbalanced relationships that offer a prime example of how unfreedom for slaves did not equate to absolute mastery by enslavers" (p. 11). Because most of the documents he uses to understand and interpret their lives were generated by the enslaving class and capitalists who ran the canal and lumber operations, Nevius must locate "the Dismal's maroons [by] reading against the grain of extant sources, a [recently developed] technique [for studying] archival silence" (p. 11). His view of petit marronage in the Dismal Swamp entwines petit maroons with the extractive swamp economy initiated by canal and lumber companies and their enslaved labor forces and settlements. He, too, realizes that the unique mode of undetected resistance enacted by all Maroons played a substantial role in contributing to the contemporary dearth of documentation; he will listen to the silences, and keep an eye on all signs of erasure, to try to come to historiographically legitimate understandings of their lives.

Morris largely follows a chronological schema in presenting his analysis. His first chapters focus on the chaotic regional political and economic milieu from which marronage in the Dismal Swamp arose in the 17th century. We come to understand that even a landscape as vast as the Dismal Swamp was, in effect, a remainder of a much larger landscape of refuge and freedom seeking, namely the colony of North Carolina. While Virginia was settled early and the class stratification of Euro-colonial society indelibly etched into that part of the world, North Carolina emerged as a large frontier that was beyond colonial law and control for outcasts, escapees from indenture, and Indigenous tribal groups that had been ravaged by disease, enslavement, and colonial usurpation of traditional lands. According to Morris, these early 1600s frontier settlers "did not come on behalf, with the permission, or under protection of any European authority of colonial government. Rather they voted with their feet in a system that otherwise marginalized and disenfranchised them, and they made no secrets of the motivations for settling south of Virginia. They were escaping the tobacco juggernaut—the labor, the exploitation, and the cutthroat culture" while also maintaining a respect for Indigenous society and claim to the land, namely the Tuscarora (pp. 25-26).

By the turn of the 18th century, North Carolina society was beginning to resemble the stratified Virginia colony, with landed elites gaining more power and initiating measures, including warfare, to control and subdue the rabble and resistance groups that thrived in North Carolina, including Maroons. By 1730, the power of Indigenous tribes and rebels had been steadily eroded and the countryside of North Carolina was turned over to the plow, plantation society, and the slavery system. The Dismal Swamp was the last remote element of that extremely dynamic landscape that could accurately be described as "vast" and had already been a refugium for hundreds if not thousands of Indigenous, African, and European rebels and outcasts for many, many decades. And this was not lost on colonials—the Dismal Swamp, like much of the surrounding landscape had been, was dangerous to the colony, not only in the loss of living and productive lands that it represented in the mercantilist imagination, but also because it was a colony-sized 2,000-square-mile haven for Maroons, outlaws, and bandits. "The edge of the Dismal was the edge of the 'civilized' world. On the other side was darkness into which no law extended, where monsters and beasts prowled, and where outcasts gathered into maroon communities," writes Morris (p. 42). This was a highly mixed society that emerged in the Dismal, making it "possibly the most cosmopolitan place in British North America" (p. 48) by the early 1700s.

Euro-colonials worked across the 18th century to eliminate the last vast wasteland that was standing in their proverbial backyard. William Byrd II, an elite Virginian, surveyed the colonial boundary, an act that signaled the first steps toward taking some level of control of the swamp. Byrd followed up his survey with a proposal to the king "to bring the swamp into productivity" (p. 58). This included draining it, lumbering its vast stands of cypress and cedar, and growing grains in the resulting rich soils that would be profitable to the crown. Of course, enslaved labor would be needed—Black laborers by the thousands—to see the tide turn in the proposed manner. Byrd was more than happy to lay out a callous breeding plan for maintaining the labor force under what would surely be dangerous work with high mortality rates.

It would take a few decades to see any concerted effort to drain and develop the swamp, but in the early 1760s, the Adventurers to Drain the Great Dismal Swamp formed with full support of the Virginia House of Burgesses and set out to develop the Dismal into, well, nonexistence. George Washington was a major figure in this proto-corporation composed of Virginia elites and investors; the first canal to be excavated by enslaved workers bears his surname and still runs its 4-mile course in the swamp today. As Morris describes, the work was extremely difficult for the 50 or so enslaved laborers, male and female, who lumbered and excavated the canal. They lived on a plantation that they had built for the company, known as Dismal Town. It was located at the edge of the swamp, just a few miles south of Suffolk, Virginia, and was part of the much larger 40,000-acre company holding. And Marooning was a common way these workers resisted the dangerous labor regime that those enslavers imposed on the enslaved. The Adventurers to Drain the Great Dismal Swamp was not a successful enterprise. It disbanded on the eve of the Revolutionary War.

Morris details the many ways that Dismal Swamp Maroons were powerful agents in the unfolding of colonial-era local and regional history. For example, Dismal Swamp Maroons were essential players in the rise of the uneven landscape and political developments of the early Virginia colony that led to the separation of the North Carolina frontier from Virginia. They were also instigators of or participants in local and regional skirmishes and resistance battles. And swamp dwellers created fear and loathing of the Dismal Swamp among Euro-colonials, which increased its effectiveness as a safe haven for Marooning and fugitivism. It is clear that Dismal Swamp Maroons occupied primary positions as agents of change and development of the Mid-Atlantic society. With the Dismal Swamp still standing in the 1770s, Morris avers that "the swamp remained a liminal space between two things at once. The whites whose interests lay in conquering it were disappointed and defeated. They were repelled by its dangers, its mysteries, and its refusal to conform to the demand to be productive….[at the same time, for Maroons and enslaved laborers] the swamp was their powerful guardian, protection against the outside world that would enslaved them, and a dark paradise that offered them a most unlikely gift—freedom in the midst of Tidewater slave society" (p. 65). This spatial dialectic would persist up to the Civil War, as would marronage in the swamp.

With the rise of the canal and lumber companies in the 1760s, Nevius's and Morris's analyses begin to overlap most saliently. Nevius's analysis contains references to earlier decades, but the documentation (and its silences) on petit marronage is most telling in the late 18th and 19th centuries—surely a state of the archives that is largely explained by the fact that canal and lumber companies, and the swamp canal boom, corresponds to this 100-year period before the Civil War. That Nevius uses canal and lumber company documents as the anchors of each of his chapters further reflects this fact.

Nevius states that his analytical approach is to "emphasize the centrality of enslaved people and American maroons with the Dismal's extractive and informal slave economies" by engaging "archival silence in the historical primary sources" (p. 12). To that end, Nevius starts each of his chapters "with a key source or event that foregrounds enslaved Virginians and North Carolinians in what becomes an extended examination of the ways the Lower Chesapeake's extractive economy took shape over time" (p. 12). And in some ways, this method, which differs from Morris's, propels Nevius into great narrative detail—into the sentence-by-sentence thick of things with his primary and period sources. For example, in the first chapter, we read in some detail about William Aitchison and James Parker, two Norfolk, Virginia merchants whose business and mercantile connections spanned the region and much of the Atlantic world, including Havana, Cuba, and Tenerife and other Canary Islands in Spain. They started a business ledger in 1763 by recording "the first of eighty-eight numbered pages bound in green vellum" (p. 20). Among many sundry and specific items as well as horses that they agreed to deliver to Tenerife, they were responsible for shipping two enslaved persons, a child, and an adult woman. They also had a chest of drawers whose top could be used as a table that was also destined for that Spanish island.

Why this chest of drawers draws Nevius's attention is because of information found in another separate entry in the ledger. That entry contains information on a Maroon of the Dismal Swamp who had lived in the swamp for around 13 years and had come back to the outside world a couple of years prior. The entry describes how that Maroon lived by himself in the swamp all those years and made musical instruments, tables, and chairs while also growing grains such as rice. Unfortunately, the merchants gave no further information on what the destination was for the Maroon's handicrafts, but Nevius suggests that it is possible that the Maroon was the maker of the chest of drawers bound for Tenerife, a scenario that makes some sense when "set into the broader framing of the Dismal's extractive and informal slave economies" (p. 21).

From this opening glimpse of the connections between Dismal Swamp Maroons, the swamp's extractive lumber and canal company, and the global Atlantic trade, Nevius lays out some essential developments in the swamp from 1763 up through the end of the century. Covering some of the same ground as Morris, we understand that the initial Adventurers to Drain the Great Dismal Swamp, or the slightly later Dismal Swamp Company (DSC), effort was on most economic levels a failure. During the war years, the company and its holding were largely abandoned by investors—obviously George Washington was busy with other matters during this period. Morris explains that the Dismal Plantation was raided by British forces, no doubt coming from Lord Dunmore's Norfolk, where they burned buildings, took provisions, and liberated the enslaved people there (p. 70).

After the war, the DSC resumed its efforts. During the postwar decades, the company barely kept afloat. We see in company records that the enslaved people did not work up to company standards, that Marooning was not uncommon among the workforce, and that incursions onto the DSC tract by smaller operators—lumber rustlers, if I may—were recurring problems. According to Nevius, "from the mid-1760s to the early 1790s, Dismal Plantation remained a haphazard operation, and extant records show little change in the observations made by company officials. And these documents also show that agents and overseers could do little to compel enslaved laborers to perform even routine maintenance tasks or to prevent slaves from fleeing" (p. 36). Nevius explores the evidence for Tom, who fled John Augustine Washington in 1767 and appears to have been a swamp Maroon for twenty years. We also know of Venus and Jack, who fled the work regime of the company and Dismal Plantation. And, if Nevius is correct, it seems likely that the unnamed furniture-making Maroon can be added to this list. The documents, with their limited direct information on Maroons of the Dismal, like the Aitchison and Parker ledger, give us "evidence of an important resourcefulness on the part of people who have long captured literary and scholarly interest" (p. 24). Their Marooning, their using the swamp for daily subsistence, like rice growing, and their staying connected to the outside world through their labor all point to strategic use of the swamp and its anonymous terrain.

Both authors explore the pre-Civil War 19th-century swamp in compelling ways. Nevius's method of using specific sources, often very dry company memoranda and letters (I have plodded through many of these tediously written documents myself), as entry points into wider explorations of different aspects of petit marronage in the swamp is quite effective. With this meticulous approach, Nevius comes to understand that "in pursuit of their ultimate aim of turning a profit in the swamp" investors came to accept, however grudgingly, that short-term Marooning was a "vital component of company operations" (p. 55). Petit Maroons were essential workers in the Dismal.

In interpreting such mundane documents, Nevius presents a detailed picture of life in the swamp for workers, petit Maroons, and company supervisors, while also regularly making connections to wider political-economic and social processes and events. For example, in discussing the early 1800s excavation of the Dismal Swamp Canal, Nevius combs the company documents that contain numerous communications between Richard Blow and his labor overseer or supervisor Samuel Proctor. Nevius writes, "Blow instructed Proctor to allow each laborer to imbibe one dram of liquor in the morning, a practice that was 'contrary to former usage.' Proctor had previously been discouraged from allowing the canal laborers to drink at all, but a small amount was now permitted to encourage good behavior. If the spirit rations did not produce the desired result, 'all delinquents in Duty' would be denied their 'allowance'. Despite such labor issues, Blow remained confident that the canal project would be carried out and retained trust in his enslaved letter carriers: groups of 'canal negroes' would be carrying the letter to Proctor in the swamp" (p. 59).

This is one of many passages throughout his book that capture the kinds of richness in detail of daily life that Nevius is able to derive from the mundane records of daily life in the swamp, despite the obvious biases and silences in records written by an elite enslaver to his swamp supervisor. We see that enslaved workers understood their position and that they were able to gain liquor privileges—a result it seems of their "bad behavior," or daily acts of resistance—as well as relatively free travel opportunities as trusted letter carriers.

In another chapter, Nevius uses the published account of Moses Grandy's life as an enslaved worker in the 1830s in the Dismal Swamp as an introduction to tracing in detail the rise of several competing lumber and canal companies in the 1800s—the swamp's contribution to the era's wider canal boom in the U.S.—and the groups of tens and hundreds of "shingle getters"; cedar shingles were now a central commodity being produced within the swamp by enslaved workers and shipped out on boats through the canal system. And petit Maroons were important informal workers for the companies all the while.

Nevius also connects Gabriel's Easter Rebellion of 1802 and Nat Turner's Insurrection to petit marronage in the Dismal Swamp and the unique nature of the swamp and its labor regime. In the case of the latter, the wider fears among enslavers that Nat Turner and his group were intending on finding their way from Southampton, Virginia to the Dismal in order to escape and stir up trouble among the Maroons there led to increased public concerns about the swamp's capacity to be a haven for Maroons and outlaws. And yet, petit marronage along the canal corridors did not come under any obvious fire or corrective measures and the labor system appears to have stayed largely the same, despite the post-Turner fears of the swamp. The extractive swamp industry was far too reliant on Maroon lumber and shingle production to make too many waves, despite the wider uproar and panic about the swamp's Maroon threat.

On the topic of overt rebellion and the Dismal Swamp, Morris has a chapter entitled "North American Maroon Wars, 1775-1831" that explores the strong connections between the Swamp's Maroons and warfare and rebellions, like the Revolutionary War, Gabriel's Rebellion, and Nat Turner's Insurrection. Morris also informs us of a coordinated plot in 1792 involving Maroons and enslaved people that extended from Richmond, Virginia to the Dismal some 90 miles southeast, and on into northeastern North Carolina. Hundreds of enslaved people and Maroons were part of this plan, which included violence against enslavers in the northern reaches of the Dismal in Virginia (which no doubt included Suffolk) and on into Norfolk, where they were to destroy the city's armaments and kill its residents.

Other smaller exposed plots followed in the next few years, all of which were inspired, according to Morris, by the successes of the Haitian Revolution. The wider enslaving classes fearful of such massive revolts could not help but connect the local exposed plots to the Dismal Swamp. And so it went across the early 1800s, as newspaper accounts and other sources indicate a chronic, if not continuous, threat of insurrection involving Maroons of the Dismal and enslaved people in the many Virginia and North Carolina counties surrounding it. Maroon leaders, like General Tom Copper (1802), General Peter (ca. 1805), Mingo (1818), Pompey Little (early 1820s), Ned Downs (1818), Bob Ferebee (1820s), and Sam Ricks (1822), stirred up regular threats and actual struggles prior to 1831. It is no wonder that it was a widespread understanding that Nat Turner was connected to the swamp and its Maroons even after he was captured some two months after the insurrection.

I observe with some joy that we are now in a position to have document-supported but differing understandings of the nature of marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp. Such a state of things was unimaginable prior to the recent decades of interest in researching the Maroons histories of the Dismal Swamp. We see when comparing these two books that there are somewhat conflicting understandings of petit marronage, both derived from the same or similar documentary and scholarly sources. On the one hand, Nevius understands petit marronage to have included not only Maroons who went into the swamp for a few days, weeks, or months but also those who went in the swamp for much longer periods of time, such as years and even decades. It seems that Nevius defines a petit Maroon, in the case of the Dismal Swamp, based on whether they worked for or were strongly associated with enslaved company labor regimes rather than on the intended and actual duration of their period of Marooning, which could happen anywhere on the swamp's periphery or possibly in the interior away from canals. On the other hand, Morris sees a difference between short-term petit Maroons and liminal Maroons, or those who marooned for indefinite and longer periods of time. Liminal Marooning was made possible with the rise of the unique labor regime of the swamp (and its economic demands discussed with finesse by Nevius) that allowed Maroons to settle at the social and spatial periphery of the enslaved company settlements and work surreptitiously alongside company laborers proper in ways that benefited both groups. In another way, a new mode of Marooning came into being alongside the swamp's labor regime, a mode that differed from long-term/permanent Deep Swamp interior and short-term/temporary petit Marooning—but it was much closer to long-term grand marronage than to the petit mode.

These apparent differing perspectives lead each author to different interpretations of the exact same document in at least one instance. We have already read about Nevius's interpretation of the Aitchison and Parker ledger entry that details the Maroons who lived in the swamp for thirteen years and made musical instruments, tables, and chairs while growing grains like rice for subsistence. True to his perspective, Nevius understands that the Maroon in question was a petit Maroon who was making things for the company. Morris recognizes that Maroon as having been a member of one of the Deep Swamp communities, one who made surpluses of things for trade with liminal Maroons and enslaved company workers and/or for use in his own community—the production of many such items was his contribution to the self-sustainability of his village and community. Though I have long interpreted that document in ways similar to Morris, Nevius's petit-marronage-focused perspective has added a new and most welcome viewpoint that is worthy of consideration.

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Since Frances and Melville Herskovits's work with the Saramaka Maroons of Suriname in the 1920s through 1940s, cultural anthropologists have routinely done ethnographic and ethnohistorical work on and with contemporary Maroon communities across Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. As much of this anthropological literature shows, including Richard Price's popular and essential Maroon Societies volume, today's Maroons are descendants of Maroons of slavery times that, in many cases, have maintained their communities for generations and centuries. Whether in Suriname, Jamaica, Colombia, Brazil, Cuba, or any of a host of other countries, we understand that vibrant and complex cultural traditions, ethnic identities, and social worlds are found in contemporary Maroon communities and societies (e.g., palenques and quilombos). And because today's Maroons have oral histories about their ancestors, historical ethnographers have been able to collaborate with them and help us understand that their pasts are equally vibrant and complex while also being structured through those initial decades of resistance to enslavement, enslavers, and the colonial worlds of Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. Richard Price's First Time (2002) comes to mind as an essential example of historical anthropology among Maroons, in this case the Saramaka of Suriname. Hotly debated historical processes, such as ethnogenesis, acculturation, and creolization often support ethnographic interpretations of past and present Maroon societies, while forms and modes of resistance are quite often front and center in this work. Whether we consider the kingdom of Palmares of Brazil that lasted for around 100 years, or the many historical Maroon figures regarded as national heroes, like Zumbi in Brazil or Grandy Nanny of Jamaica, or the linguistic complexities of Saramaka creole speech, there is an incredible wealth of knowable and known dimensions to past and contemporary Maroons societies throughout much of the Western Hemisphere.

Anthropologists have not produced many ethnographic accounts of U.S. Maroons, mainly, it seems, because few contemporary self-identifying Maroon settlements or communities exist—namely, the communities of Black Seminoleidentifying people of Florida, the West, and the Southwest. Oral histories from individual descendants of Maroons are not readily and voluminously known to scholars, though that does not at all mean they are not being told within families and communities around the country. If you are hearing echoes of the state of things in historiographic work on Maroons in the U.S. and abroad, well, so am I.²

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Historical Archaeology in the U.S. and in other parts of the world is typically considered to be a part of Anthropology that emerged as its own subdiscipline in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This subdiscipline focuses on the material culture and landscapes of the past 500 years or so. This chronology coincides with the rise of modernity as well as the emergence of capitalism as an expanding, intensifying, and transforming socioeconomic system. Of course, that time period also coincides with the rise and entrenchment of race-based enslavement across the globalizing and colonizing capitalist, or at least capitalistic, world.

Unlike many other specialty areas in archaeology of the ancient world, historical archaeologists have documentation of the people at many of the sites we work at and certainly have wider historical context information available in nearly all cases. Many of us are formally trained in historiographic methods while others less formally learn to do basic archival research as a matter of course in their careers. Regardless of the nature of our training, we all rely on historians and their work to help us contextualize and understand our sites. And we rely quite a bit on the works of anthropologists, their theories about how societies and cultures work, and on our own anthropological training to interpret and connect our sites to larger scale cultural, social, and political-economic processes. Our anthropological training pushes us into areas of interest and interpretation that are rooted in social science and other theories of how societies persist and change across time. We are interested in how societies are structured and how their internal (e.g., class struggle, dialectics of domination and resistance, and racialization) and external processes (e.g., environmental forces and confrontations with other societies) create social frictions and day-to-day life circumstances. Our specific archaeological sites, in a word, are our central points of insertion into wider dialogues about globalizing capitalism, indigenous social worlds, historical processes of change, and contemporary issues.

Today, African Americans, their sites, and the African Diaspora more generally are among the most discussed and researched areas in U.S. historical archaeology. Amazingly, Maroon sites have yet to become a major focus in historical archaeology despite the otherwise massive interest in African Diasporic resistance, peoples, sites, and social histories. Meanwhile, despite the defining interest in Indigenous Americans that guides precontact archaeology in the U.S, focus on Indigenous Americans in historical archaeology is not a particularly central aspect of the discipline, which is not at all to say that it is absent. Several Black Seminole and Maroon sites in Florida, the seat of much university training in historical archaeology since the beginning of the profession in the 1960s, have been explored to widely and somewhat wildly varying degrees—archaeological sites in Florida such as Fort Mose, Angola, and Pilaklikaha come to mind immediately. Beyond Florida, there is the work on Maroon-and-Indigenous American sites that has been done in the Great Dismal Swamp. Otherwise, the Maroon or Maroon-and-Indigenous American sites that could exist in the Southern states remain particularly underexplored by historical archaeologists, despite the previously noted increase in historiographic analyses of Maroon and mixed resistance communities in many of those states. As is the case with ethnographic historiography and anthropology, a wider variety of historical archaeological research and work has been done on Maroon-related sites outside the U.S., with Maroon sites in Suriname, Brazil, St. Croix, Mexico, and many other countries and regions represented in the literature. More echoes.

In the mid-1980s, Elaine Nichols did early archaeological work at a possible Indigenous American-and-Maroon site located on land that was once part of the vast Great Dismal Swamp. That site is called Culpepper Island, and it appeared as a rise in an otherwise flat expanse of farmland in northeast North Carolina. Nichols's results were inconclusive, owing mainly to the plowed nature of the location and the fact that no Maroon sites in similar contexts had been previously excavated to provide a point of comparison for her data. But the murky and interpretation-defying archaeological record at Culpeper Island did point to one thing as far as I was concerned upon reading her 1988 master's thesis in the early 2000s: any Dismal Swamp Indigenous American-and-Maroon archaeology would have to be done at relatively pristine sites in order to stand a chance at yielding an interpretable and meaningful archaeological record. And the only hope of finding any pristine sites was to go into the swamp itself.

Our GDSLS archaeological work took place in the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge (Refuge), the largest standing portion of the original swamp. Owned by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) since the early 1970s, the Refuge is around 190 square miles in size, or about 10% of the original pre-Civil War Dismal Swamp (within which Culpepper Island used to be located). Most of the known pre-Civil War canals that were excavated and built by enslaved laborers who worked for lumber and canal concerns and corporations are fully or partially present in the Refuge—the current Refuge contains most of the pre-Civil War Dismal Swamp Company's acreage.

Prior to the start of my doctoral dissertation fieldwork in 2003, no archaeological surveys or excavations had ever taken place in the Refuge. It is a huge tract of swamp for which we—including the USFWS—had no knowledge about its pre-Civil War era archaeological sites, including ancient precontact Indigenous American sites or even reasonable evidence that any such sites existed at all. What I pieced together through research was that while the Refuge swampland had been lumbered extensively for over a century, no wholesale transformations of the soils and peat of the swamp (like plowing) had ever occurred in the swamp contained within the Refuge. One reason for this history of limited development of the landscape is that its land had been continuously owned by lumbering companies since the 18th century. But another significant reason for the survival of such a large portion of the original Dismal is that it was home to Maroon-and-Indigenous American communities whose presence helped limit the commercial onslaughts across the canal-and-lumber era (1763-1863).

As I had hoped, through our months of pedestrian surveys and informant guidance, I was able to determine that the Refuge contained landforms, smaller landscapes of relatively higher and drier ground, including mesic islands. I was able to survey seven such landforms and determined that each contained intact and pristine soils and thus an intact archaeological record. More expansive excavations on landforms near pre-Civil War canals demonstrated that enslaved company laborer settlements were present and that they left behind an artifact regime that did not look much different from those we might expect at a typical site of the historical period. Transfer-printed vessels, nails, domesticated animal bones, British and French gunflints, knives, glass bottles, liquor flasks, and other sundry kinds of daily-used items were represented in the archaeological deposits of these communities.

There can be no doubt that petit maroons were part of these communities, whether living among workers or in locales just beyond the easy reach of company supervisors or overseers who were regularly present at the laborer settlements. In contrast, my excavations at deep interior landforms yielded evidence of communities that were not connected to the outside world and its globalizing market—the tangible evidence of which is found in the mass-produced and market retailed materials like those of the enslaved company worker settlements. Rather, interior communities used ancient Indigenous artifacts but regularly modified them to meet their present needs. For example, an ancient spear point was chipped along one side to form a sharp knife blade. Ancient ceramic pieces were also recovered across excavations that also represent re-use by interior communities.

Though I have said much about these communities elsewhere, I will impart here that they represent two constituent modes of living within a wider complex society that formed in the Dismal Swamp between 1607 and 1863 that was far more vast and profound than we commonly realize. And it was a society comprising thousands of Diasporans—Maroons, enslaved workers, Indigenous peoples—many of whom were born, raised, and died there across more than two-and-a-half centuries. Some lived largely self-reliant lives in the interior using the materials and provisions of the swamp itself (including ancient people's material culture, like stone tools), while others stayed connected to the wider world and relied on its goods and sundries like most people did in the world outside the swamp by way of living near the commercial canals.

Those two constituent modes of living were not unconnected. The archaeological evidence points to the entanglement of those two modes via underground or informal trade networks once the company laborer settlements and canals came to the swamp, mostly after 1800. Before that time, during the ca. 1607-1800 era, all archaeological evidence points to the fact that interior communities stayed far removed from the outside world and its market goods, which inevitably end up being deposited in the soils upon which people live. I extrapolate from archaeological evidence, with solid support from geographic information and historiographic records, that thousands of Maroons and Indigenous Americans lived in communities in the swamp's interior across those 260-plus years.

Though the rise of the canal and lumber company era changed the swamp's world and introduced outside-world goods into the existing informal economy, interior resistance communities thrived for many generations before the Civil War. And the canal and lumber era brought in thousands of enslaved workers whose labor regime and communities, in turn, attracted petit Maroons in great numbers as well as Maroons who forged a new kind of grand marronage just outside the active canal work areas and settlements. Morris calls these Maroons "liminal" Maroons (p. 130) while Nevius considers them to be part of the "petit" Maroon world of the swamp, as discussed above.

Of the two authors, Morris in particular uses the findings of our GDSLS archaeological research to great advantage, seeing many ways to integrate his documentary analysis with the insights that archaeological data and interpretations provide about life within the swamp among interior and enslaved canal company worker communities. This is notably evident in his central chapter, "Maroon Life in the Great Dismal Swamp." Here, Morris is able to connect the residues of daily life—the artifacts and housing footprints—to issues about which documents say little, like the swamp's informal economy and what circulated within it, the connectivity between canal company settlements and the "Deep Swamp" communities (or interior communities in my language), and reconstruction of Deep Swamp interior village landscapes: "Maroons' homes were but part of a deep swamp village. Dotting the landscape would have been pits, each around three feet deep, that may have been used as water filters, collecting drinking water after it had been filtered through surrounding sands. Although houses of varying construction would have filled a great deal of available dry ground [mesic island ground surface], there were other outbuildings here and there, and fences of wood and vines enclosing some spaces. In some sections, houses were constructed so that their entranceways faced one another across a twenty-five-foot common area. Archaeological features adjacent to these structures also suggest that some maroons constructed porches adjacent to their houses, which also faced one another. Many daily activities took place outside, possibly in the shared space of the central courtyard. These likely included socializing and community preparation of food" (p. 110).

Morris's historiographic vision of a deep swamp community landscape is clearly inspired by GDSLS archaeological findings and represents one of several places in his narrative that he melds documentary and archaeological data from within the swamp itself to un-silence the daily lives of interior Maroons. His artful use of the archaeological record of an enslaved canal company settlement to explore liminal or petit marronage is noteworthy as well. Finally, Morris adeptly discusses our finding that less ideal areas (i.e., lower-elevation areas) of one twenty-acre island were abandoned by the turn of the nineteenth century, but that better areas (i.e., higher-elevation areas) of the same island stayed populated into the 1860s to suggest that, "the archaeological record does not support the contemporary suggestion that hardly any maroons were left deep in the swamp by the 1850s" (p. 135). Indeed not.

What the archaeological record does show is that the impacts on the swamp initiated as early as the Revolutionary War and Dunmore's Emancipation Proclamation and certainly underway by 1800, when the canal boom was on, were transformational, creating not only the conditions for what for Nevius views as petit Marooning associated with the canal labor regime (Morris's Liminal Marooning) but also for interior swamp community shrinkage and expanded defensive posturing—with an increased reliance on outside world materials, like munitions. But contrary to many commentators of the pre-Civil War decades as well as historians of the modern age, like Eugene Genovese, interior Maroons were not physically eliminated. But their lives and histories have been obscured, ignored, and silenced all these years.³

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For years, I have said that the history of Maroons and Indigenous Americans in the Dismal Swamp was sorely under-recorded and that all we hear today are whispers in those records about their lives and the magnitude of their feats. And, in many ways, I still hold to that general idea. But the books by Nevius and Morris have intensively amplified those formerly barely audible whispers, undermined the archival silences from which not even whispers could escape, and in many instances provided new sources that were previously unknown to scholars of the Dismal Swamp Maroons. And, importantly, these authors have gifted us centralized locations of the names of Maroons across the centuries. There is a certain power in seeing so many named Maroons in historiographic narratives about the Dismal Swamp, like the leaders of Maroon groups recited above, as well as Bob Garry, Osman Hunter, Abraham Lester, "Charlie," and "Long Davy" Coston. This gift extends to enslaved company workers, like Boothe, Tom Weston, Joe Seguine, and Old Bob, and those who did not fit easily into either category, like Venus, Tom, Moses Grandy, and Jack.

Most significantly, perhaps, Nevius's and Morris's books have analytically connected the Diasporic social history of the Great Dismal Swamp with wider national and global phenomena (e.g., global capitalism, its slave trade, and colonial development), Diasporic and Black revolutions and resistance processes (e.g., the Haitian Revolution and hemispheric marronage), and given incredible historiographic context for understanding and assessing the significance of the swamp in modern history while also giving us a precious detailed look into the social world inside the swamp. Nevius does this work through his sentence-by-sentence approach to his primary sources that provide much detail from people who worked and lived in the swamp, while Morris sweeps us through two and half centuries through his meticulous assembling and reading of disparate sources, including strategic uses of archaeological evidence from the GDSLS. In each case, the authors had to develop creative and appropriate methods for reading the documents while also developing sound confidence in those sources.

I see very little to be critical of or to challenge in these compelling volumes. Reading them together is an informative and eye-opening process—though to be clear, they each stand on their own quite well. Even where they have divergent views of sources and aspects of marronage in the Dismal, they both present reasonable interpretations of their sources. Between both volumes, we develop an understanding that the world that Diasporans made for themselves in the Great Dismal Swamp was revolutionary in its nature, extremely complex, multigenerational in its socio-temporal scope, and an almost necessary outcome of race-based colonial and republican enslavement regimes. Such was the case in all other instances of petit and grand marronage in the Western Hemisphere, and these volumes help us understand why thinking the now-U.S. was an exception to this rule is dead wrong.

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If there is any subject in U.S. history that has the potential to compel a collaborative and transformational effort in the contemporary moment, it is the search for and recognition of hidden Maroon and Indigenous Americanand-Maroon communities. These communities were a significant aspect of U.S. and global history that represents thousands of Black and Indigenous lives of profound socioeconomic and ideational gravity at the time—they mattered as historical agents, as self-empowered individuals, as resistance fighters, as collective hotbeds of novel and widely influential social, cultural, and economic transformation, as looming threats in the minds of enslavers, and as embodied day-to-day challenges to enslavement and the oppressive estrangements of the wider world. Because of these reasons and many more, historians, anthropologists, and historical archaeologists have increasingly become interested in Maroons in the U.S. Anthropologists have become interested. And public, tribal and descendant groups, and government agencies in the U.S. have become extremely interested in Maroons. This could be a powerful and influential confluence of minds, professions, research efforts, and socio-political and personal interests among stakeholders and researchers. Though we academic researchers are collectively very late to recognize the wide-scale existence of and importance of Maroons in our nation's history, we are not too late for research, analysis, and remembrance of their lives to matter in our world today and tomorrow.

Public and academic awareness of Maroons in the U.S. has dramatically increased during the past 25 years or so. Some Black activists are finding their "inner Maroon," some people of many identity backgrounds are seeing revolutionary templates in the actions and societies of Maroons of the past, and some are advocating for various modes of social, identificatory, emotional, psychological, and philosophical Marooning. Some see in Maroons a forerunner African American and African-Indigenous anticapitalist ecological movement and a nondestructive alternative modus vivendi to capital-driven development. Many such calls for new ways to be inspired by and learn from Maroons are enunciated through contemporary Black voices. It is amazing to see how much contemporary people find inspiration in Maroons in the U.S. when the latter are just beginning to be unsilenced, historically resuscitated, and invited back from their exile from the annals of U.S. history. The power of Maroon lives and their unique mode of resistance to conditions under enslavement for people today is not something scholars should ignore or downplay. If there is a downside to increased interest in Maroons, it is that recognition and focus on the countless Indigenous Americans who were members of communities alongside Maroons is not as common in the public dialogues as one might hope. But I anticipate that such recognition will come.

Heading as we are into the second quarter of this century, books like those by Morris and Nevius will play important roles in expanding the awareness of and instigating new research on not only the Great Dismal Swamp but also in the largely erased Maroon settlements and Indigenous-and-Maroon communities of the rest of the Old South and in the Northern U.S. and Canada. As Nevius states in ending his book, "like the long black freedom struggle, the local legacies of petit marronage in North Carolina, Virginia, and the rest of the U.S. Southeast endured into the 20th century and continue to inspire concepts of freedom into the twenty-first" (p. 108). And Morris clearly articulates how the landscape of the swamp itself was instrumental in allowing such a wide variety of modes of resistance: "[Maroons] made Dismal freedom into whatever they wanted it to be, and refused to be limited by others' definitions of freedom. The swamp and marronage offered freedom to temporarily lay out for days or weeks, freedom to maintain family connections, freedom to plot and organize, freedom to continue along in a journey to a northern state or Canada, or freedom to permanently disappear into the recesses of the Dismal" (p. 177).

At the heart of each of these books is the idea that the swamp itself created unprecedented opportunities for enslaved African Americans and colonized Indigenous people to express their creative and political agency across a huge span of time, be it the one hundred years of Nevius's focus or the wider 260-plus years that are Morris's domain. For Euro-colonials and Americans outside the swamp, it was a wasteland and a spatial pathogen of a kind. For the Maroons and Indigenes inside the swamp, it was a marked improvement compared to that world the Euro-folk held to be so dear and civilized. And in their ingenuity and persistence, Indigenous people, Maroons, and enslaved laborers found many ways for the swamp to support their resistance, their choices and their agency. I have no doubt that any future positive social transformations will require creative and novel ways of creating, using, taking advantage of, and transforming our cultural landscapes.

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It has been seventy-five years since Aptheker first published his short but pioneering essay that described dozens of Maroon communities in the now-U.S. It is time for more work to be done on these communities and settlements across the U.S. by all of the research professions highlighted above as well as others. We need to continue widening our understanding of Maroon historical impacts and not seek only or primarily spectacular rebellions and organized insurrections, as was done in earlier decades. And perhaps we can do this more expansive research in ways that directly help forge powerful connections—imaginary, personal, social, or political—between researchers, descendants, the wider public and those long-silenced and exiled revolutionaries of the United States, such as the diasporans we now know with certainty thrived in the Great Dismal Swamp in the centuries before the Civil War.⁴