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<h1 id="reader-title">Deep in the Swamps, Archaeologists Are
Finding How Fugitive Slaves Kept Their Freedom</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">Allison Shelley,
Richard Grant - September 2016</div>
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<p>The worse it gets, as I wade and stumble through the <a
target="_blank"
href="https://www.fws.gov/refuge/great_dismal_swamp/">Great
Dismal Swamp</a>, the better I understand its history
as a place of refuge. Each ripping thorn and sucking
mudhole makes it clearer. It was the dense, tangled
hostility of the swamp and its enormous size that
enabled hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of escaped
slaves to live here in freedom.</p>
<p>We don’t know much about them, but thanks to the
archaeologist hacking through the mire ahead of me, we
know they were out here, subsisting in hidden
communities, and using almost nothing from the outside
world until the 19th century. The Dismal Swamp covered
great tracts of southeast Virginia and northeast North
Carolina, and its vegetation was far too thick for
horses or canoes. In the early 1600s, Native Americans
fleeing the colonial frontier took refuge here, and they
were soon joined by fugitive slaves, and probably some
whites escaping indentured servitude or hiding from the
law. From about 1680 to the Civil War, it appears that
the swamp communities were dominated by Africans and
African-Americans.</p>
<p>Thigh deep in muddy water, wearing Levis and hiking
boots rather than waterproof waders like me, Dan Sayers
stops to light a cigarette. He’s a historical
archaeologist and chair of the anthropology department
at American University in Washington, D.C., but he looks
more like an outlaw country singer. Long-haired and
bearded, 43 years old, he habitually wears a battered
straw cowboy hat and a pair of Waylon Jennings-style
sunglasses. Sayers is a Marxist and a vegan who smokes
nearly two packs a day and keeps himself revved up on
Monster Energy drinks until it’s time to crack a beer.</p>
<p>“I was such a dumb-ass,” he says. “I was looking for
hills, hummocks, high ground because that’s what I’d
read in the documents: ‘Runaway slaves living on
hills....’ I had never set foot in a swamp before. I
wasted so much time. Finally, someone asked me if I’d
been to the islands in North Carolina. Islands! That was
the word I’d been missing.”</p>
<p>The Great Dismal Swamp, now reduced by draining and
development, is managed as a federal wildlife refuge.
The once-notorious panthers are gone, but bears, birds,
deer and amphibians are still abundant. So are venomous
snakes and biting insects. In the awful heat and
humidity of summer, Sayers assures me, the swamp teems
with water moccasins and rattlesnakes. The mosquitoes
get so thick that they can blur the outlines of a person
standing 12 feet away.</p>
<p>In early 2004, one of the refuge biologists strapped on
his waders and brought Sayers to the place we’re going,
a 20-acre island occasionally visited by hunters, but
completely unknown to historians and archaeologists.
Before Sayers, no archaeology had been done in the
swamp’s interior, mainly because conditions were so
challenging. One research party got lost so many times
that it gave up.</p>
<p>When you’ve been toiling through the sucking ooze, with
submerged roots and branches grabbing at your ankles,
dry solid ground feels almost miraculous. We step onto
the shore of a large, flat, sun-dappled island carpeted
with fallen leaves. Walking toward its center, the
underbrush disappears, and we enter a parklike clearing
shaded by a few hardwoods and pines.</p>
<p>“I’ll never forget seeing this place for the first
time,” recalls Sayers. “It was one of the greatest
moments of my life. I never dreamed of finding a 20-acre
island, and I knew instantly it was livable. Sure
enough, you can’t put a shovel in the ground anywhere on
this island without finding something.”</p>
<p>He has named his excavation areas—the Grotto, the
Crest, North Plateau and so on—but he won’t name the
island itself. In his academic papers and his 2014
book, <a target="_blank"
href="https://www.amazon.com/Desolate-Place-Defiant-People-Co-published/dp/081306192X/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1472575812&sr=8-1&linkCode=ll1&tag=smithsonianco-20&linkId=41a79db4d491d8696a14dfbdf65b9b07"><em>A
Desolate Place for a Defiant People</em></a>, Sayers
refers to it as the “nameless site.” “I don’t want to
put a false name on it,” he explains. “I’m hoping to
find out what the people who lived here called this
place.” As he sifts the earth they trod, finding the
soil footprints of their cabins and tiny fragments of
their tools, weapons and white clay pipes, he feels a
profound admiration for them, and this stems in part
from his Marxism.</p>
<p>“These people performed a critique of a brutal
capitalistic enslavement system, and they rejected it
completely. They risked everything to live in a more
just and equitable way, and they were successful for ten
generations. One of them, a man named Charlie, was
interviewed later in Canada. He said that all labor was
communal here. That’s how it would have been in an
African village.”</p>
<p>**********</p>
<p>Wherever Africans were enslaved in the world, there
were runaways who escaped permanently and lived in free
independent settlements. These people and their
descendants are known as “maroons.” The term probably
comes from the Spanish <em>cimarrón</em>, meaning feral
livestock, fugitive slave or something wild and defiant.</p>
<p>Marronage, the process of extricating oneself from
slavery, took place all over Latin America and the
Caribbean, in the slave islands of the Indian Ocean, in
Angola and other parts of Africa. But until recently,
the idea that maroons also existed in North America has
been rejected by most historians.</p>
<p>“In 2004, when I started talking about large, permanent
maroon settlements in the Great Dismal Swamp, most
scholars thought I was nuts,” says Sayers. “They thought
in terms of runaways, who might hide in the woods or
swamps for a while until they got caught, or who might
make it to freedom on the Underground Railroad, with the
help of Quakers and abolitionists.”</p>
<p>By downplaying American marronage, and valorizing white
involvement in the Underground Railroad, historians have
shown a racial bias, in Sayers’ opinion, a reluctance to
acknowledge the strength of black resistance and
initiative. They’ve also revealed the shortcomings of
their methods: “Historians are limited to source
documents. When it comes to maroons, there isn’t that
much on paper. But that doesn’t mean their story should
be ignored or overlooked. As archaeologists, we can read
it in the ground.”</p>
<p>Sayers first heard about the Dismal Swamp maroons from
one of his professors at the College of William and Mary
in Williamsburg, Virginia. They were smoking cigarettes
after class in late 2001. Sayers proposed to do his
dissertation on the archaeology of 19th-century
agriculture. Stifling a yawn, Prof. Marley Brown III
asked him what he knew about the maroons of the Great
Dismal Swamp and suggested this would make a more
interesting dissertation project. “It sounded great,”
says Sayers. “I had no idea what I was getting into.”</p>
<p>He started doing archival research on the Great Dismal
Swamp. He found scattered references to maroons dating
back to the early 1700s. The first accounts described
runaway slaves and Native Americans raiding farms and
plantations, and then disappearing back into the swamp
with stolen livestock. In 1714, Alexander Spotswood, the
colonial lieutenant governor of Virginia, described the
Dismal Swamp as a “No-man’s-land,” to which “Loose and
disorderly people daily flock.” Since Africans and
African-Americans were not referred to as “people” in
the records of 18th-century Virginia, this suggests that
poor whites were also joining the swamp communities.</p>
<p>In 1728, William Byrd II led the first survey into the
Great Dismal Swamp, to determine the Virginia/North
Carolina boundary. He encountered a family of maroons,
describing them as “mulattoes,” and was well aware that
others were watching and hiding: “It is certain many
Slaves Shelter themselves in this Obscure Part of the
World....” Byrd, an aristocratic Virginian, loathed his
time in the swamp. “Never was rum, that cordial of life,
found more necessary than it was in this dirty place.”</p>
<p>From the 1760s until the Civil War, runaway slave ads
in the Virginia and North Carolina newspapers often
mentioned the Dismal Swamp as the likely destination,
and there was persistent talk of permanent maroon
settlements in the morass. British traveler J.F.D.
Smyth, writing in 1784, gleaned this description:
“Runaway negroes have resided in these places for
twelve, twenty, or thirty years and upwards, subsisting
themselves in the swamp upon corn, hogs, and
fowls....[On higher ground] they have erected
habitations, and cleared small fields around them.”</p>
<p>The most comprehensive work that Sayers found was a
1979 dissertation by an oddball historian named Hugo
Prosper Leaming. He was a white Unitarian minister and
civil rights activist who managed to get accepted into a
Black Muslim temple in Chicago and wore a fez with his
Unitarian robes. Leaming surveyed local and state
records related to the Dismal Swamp, and scoured
unpublished local histories, memoirs and novels for
references to maroons. In his dissertation, later
published as a book, he presents a detailed account of
maroon history in the swamp, with a list of prominent
chiefs and vivid descriptions of Africanized religious
practices.</p>
<p>“His interpretations are stretchy, but I like the book,
and it was useful on the history,” says Sayers. “When it
came to the archaeology, I had nothing. I didn’t know
where to look, or what to look for. So I decided to
survey the swamp, find the high ground and dig there.”</p>
<p>The most useful map was a digital representation of the
swamp’s vegetation. It showed clusters of tree species
that typically grow on higher, drier ground. To help him
get into these areas, Sayers recruited young, energetic
assistants and armed them with machetes and loppers. “I
remember one day in particular,” he says. “There were
four of us and we went at it with everything we had,
just sweating bullets. In eight hours, we made 200 feet.
The brush was so thick it would have taken us a week to
get there, so we gave up.”</p>
<p>On the edge of the swamp, where sites were more
accessible, Sayers found some artifacts that clearly
suggested maroons. But it wasn’t until he saw the island
that he felt the rush of a big discovery. He went back
to his professors with a timetable. In 12 weeks, he
would identify the key sites, complete the shovel tests
and perform his excavations. Then he’d be ready to write
his dissertation.</p>
<p>“It was probably the greatest underestimation in the
history of archaeology,” he says. “Instead of 12 weeks,
it took three eight-month sessions. Then I spent five
more summers excavating with my students in field
schools.”</p>
<p>All the excavation sites at the nameless site are now
filled in and covered over. Apart from some water
catchment pits with fire-hardened floors, there’s not
much he can show me. But Sayers is an expressive talker
and gesticulator, and as he walks me around the island,
he conjures up clusters of log cabins, some with raised
floors and porches. He points to invisible fields and
gardens in the middle distance, children playing, people
fishing, small groups off hunting. Charlie, the
ex-maroon interviewed in Canada, described people making
furniture and musical instruments.</p>
<p>“There were hardships and deprivations, for sure,” he
says. “But no overseer was going to whip them here. No
one was going to work them in a cotton field from sunup
to sundown, or sell their spouses and children. They
were free. They had emancipated themselves.”</p>
<p>**********</p>
<p>On the outside wall of Dan Sayers’ office at American
University is a large photograph of Karl Marx, and a
flier for Great Dismal Black IPA beer. Inside, the
office has a comfortable, masculine, lived-in feel.
There’s an old pith helmet hanging on the wall, and a
Jaws poster, and the front page of a newspaper
announcing Obama’s election. In the bookshelves are the
entire works of Karl Marx.</p>
<p>I ask him how his Marxism influences his archaeology.
“I think capitalism is wrong, in terms of a social
ideal, and we need to change it,” he says. “Archaeology
is my activism. Rather than go to the Washington Mall
and hold up a protest sign, I choose to dig in the Great
Dismal Swamp. By bringing a resistance story to light,
you hope it gets into people’s heads.”</p>
<p>When ideological passion drives research, in
archaeology or anything else, it can generate tremendous
energy and important breakthroughs. It can also lead to
the glossing over of inconvenient data, and biased
results. Sayers has concluded that there were large,
permanent, defiant “resistance communities” of maroons
in the Great Dismal Swamp. Is there a danger that he’s
over-interpreted the evidence?</p>
<p>“Historical archaeology does require interpretation,”
he says. “But I always imagine what my worst critic is
going to say, or want as evidence, and I’ve done a
decent enough job to convince my academic peers on this.
There’s a few who don’t buy it. The show-me-the-money
historians don’t see much money.”</p>
<p>He takes me down the hall to his laboratory, where soil
samples are stacked in plastic bags on high shelving
units and hundreds of artifacts are bagged, numbered and
stored in metal cabinets. I ask to see the most
important and exciting finds. “In one sense, this has
been the most frustrating archaeology project
imaginable,” he says. “We haven’t found much, and
everything is small. On the other hand, it’s
fascinating: These soils are completely undisturbed.
You’re scratching the surface of an undiscovered world.”</p>
<p>In order to date these soils, and the traces of human
occupation left in them, Sayers used a combination of
techniques. One was the law of superposition: Layers of
undisturbed soil get older as you dig deeper. Also,
artifacts found in them, arrowheads, pottery and
manufactured items like nails, can be dated through the
collective knowledge of historical archaeologists, based
on the objects’ style and attributes. The third
technique was optically stimulated luminescence, or OSL.</p>
<p>“We collected soil samples without exposing them to
sunlight and sent them to a lab,” he explains. “They can
measure when these grains of sand last saw sunlight.
Normally, historical archaeological projects don’t need
to use OSL because there are documents and mass-produced
artifacts. It’s a testament to how unique these
communities were in avoiding the outside world.”</p>
<p>Before 1660, most people at the nameless site were
Native Americans. The first maroons were there within a
few years of the arrival of African slaves in nearby
Jamestown in 1619. After 1680, Native American materials
become scarce; what he identifies as maroon artifacts
begin to dominate.<br>
<span class="credits"></span> </p>
<p>Sayers pulls out a stone arrowhead about an inch long,
one side chipped away to form a tiny curved knife or
scraper. “In the interior of the swamp, there was only
one source of stone,” he says. “Tools left behind by
indigenous Americans. Maroons would find them, modify
them, and keep using them until they were worn down into
tiny nubs.”</p>
<p>Nothing was more exciting than finding the footprints
of seven cabins at the nameless site, in the 1660-1860
range. “We know from documents that maroons were living
in the swamp then. There’s no record of anyone else
living there. It is certainly not the type of place that
you would make a choice to live in, unless you needed to
hide.”</p>
<p>He pulls out a disk of plain, earth-colored Native
American pottery, the size of a large cookie. “Maroons
would find ceramics like this, and jam them down into
the post holes of their cabins, to shore them up. This
is probably the largest item we’ve found.” Then he shows
me a tiny rusted copper bead, perhaps worn as jewelry,
and another bead fused to a nail. The artifacts keep
getting smaller: flakes of pipe clay, gunflint particles
from the early 19th century, when the outside world was
pushing into the swamp.</p>
<p>“Everything we’ve found would fit into a single shoe
box,” he says. “And it makes sense. They were using
organic materials from the swamp. Except for the big
stuff like cabins, it decomposes without leaving a
trace.”</p>
<p>Seven miles away from American University, at the new
National Museum of African American History and Culture,
an exhibit about the maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp
is scheduled to go on view. For the curator Nancy
Bercaw, it presented an unusual challenge. “The ethos
here is that objects should speak for themselves,” she
says, talking over coffee in her office. “Dan Sayers
generously gave us ten objects. They are reworked
pebbles, shims for post holes, tiny fragments of stone
from an unnamed island. Some of them look like grains of
sand.”</p>
<p>Artifact 1 is a white clay tobacco-pipe fragment, 12
millimeters long. There is a small chunk of burnt clay,
a five-millimeter piece of flattened lead shot, a quartz
flake, a British gunflint chip (circa 1790), a shard of
glass, a nail head with a partial stem.</p>
<p>They are not the sort of objects, in other words, that
catch the eye or speak for themselves. Her solution was
to mount some of them in jewel cases like priceless
treasures.</p>
<p>The exhibit is in the 17,000-square-foot Slavery and
Freedom gallery, in a section about free communities of
color. “Traditionally, we’ve studied the institution of
slavery, not enslavement as it was lived,” she says.
“Once you start looking at our history through an
African-American lens, it really changes the focus.
Maroons become much more significant.”</p>
<p>The largest community of American maroons was in the
Great Dismal Swamp, but there were others in the swamps
outside New Orleans, in Alabama and elsewhere in the
Carolinas, and in Florida. All these sites are being
investigated by archaeologists.</p>
<p>“The other maroon societies had more fluidity,” says
Bercaw. “People would slip off down the waterways, but
usually maintain some contact. The Dismal Swamp maroons
found a way to remove themselves completely from the
United States, in the recesses of its geography.”</p>
<p>**********</p>
<p>On a cool cloudy morning in the Great Dismal Swamp,
Sayers parks his vehicle by a long straight ditch full
of black water. He sips his Monster, and sucks fire into
a cigarette. The ditch arrows through the gloomy swamp
to a vanishing point in the far distance.</p>
<p>“This is Washington Ditch, a somewhat unique monument
to brutality and entrepreneurship,” he says. George
Washington was the first to see economic opportunity in
the vast coastal swamp south of Norfolk, Virginia. In
1763, he formed a company with fellow investors to drain
the swamp, exploit its timber resources and dig canals
for transportation. This is the first canal, completed
in the late 1760s, and excavated by slaves.</p>
<p>“Imagine it,” says Sayers. “Digging, chopping, bailing
mud, working in chest-high water. One hundred degrees in
summer, full of water moccasins, ungodly mosquitoes.
Freezing cold in winter. Beatings, whippings. Deaths
were fairly common.”</p>
<p>The canal now known as Washington Ditch was the first
significant encroachment into the Great Dismal Swamp.
More canals were dug. Timber companies cut thousands of
acres of Atlantic white cedar, known locally as juniper,
and turned it into barrel staves, ship masts and house
shingles.</p>
<p>It became more dangerous for maroons because the canals
allowed slave-catchers to get into the swamp. But there
were also new economic opportunities. Maroons were able
to cut shingles for lumber companies that turned a blind
eye. Frederick Law Olmsted, who traveled in the South as
a journalist before he took up landscape architecture,
writing about the maroons in 1856, observed that “poorer
white men, owning small tracts of the swamps, will
sometimes employ them,” and also that maroons were
stealing from farms, plantations and unwary travelers.</p>
<p>Olmsted asked if locals ever shot the maroons. “Oh
yes,” came the reply. “But some on ’em would rather be
shot than be took, sir.” It’s clear that there were two
different ways of marooning in the swamp. Those living
near the edge of the swamp, or near the canals, had far
more interaction with the outside world. In the remote
interior, at the nameless site and other islands, there
were still maroons who lived in isolation, fishing,
farming and trapping feral hogs in the deep swamp muck.
We know this from Dan Sayers’ excavations and from
Charlie the former maroon. He described whole families
that had never seen a white man and would be scared to
death to see one.</p>
<p>The white residents of Norfolk and other communities
near the swamp were terrified of being attacked by the
swamp’s maroons. Instead, they got Nat Turner’s
insurrection of 1831—a rebellion of slaves and free
blacks in which more than 50 whites were killed and then
at least 200 blacks killed in reprisal. Turner was
planning to hide in the Dismal Swamp with his followers,
recruit the maroons and more slaves, and then emerge to
overthrow white rule. But his rebellion was suppressed
after two days, and Turner, after two months in hiding,
was captured and hanged.</p>
<p>What became of the Dismal Swamp maroons? Olmsted
thought that very few were left by the 1850s, but he
stayed near the canals and didn’t venture into the
interior. Sayers has evidence of a thriving community at
the nameless site all the way up to the Civil War.
“That’s when they came out,” he says. “We’ve found
almost nothing after the Civil War. They probably worked
themselves back into society as free people.”</p>
<p>Early in his research, he started interviewing
African-Americans in communities near the swamp, hoping
to hear family stories about maroons. But he abandoned
the side project. “There’s still so much archaeology
work to do,” he says. “We’ve excavated only 1 percent of
one island.”</p>
<p>**********</p>
<p>He’s out of Monsters and low on cigarettes. It’s time
to leave the Great Dismal Swamp and find the nearest
convenience store. On a raised gravel road, we pass
through a charred expanse of forest, torched by a
lightning fire. We skirt the shores of Lake Drummond,
the perfect blue lake at the center of the swamp, and
drive on through waterlogged cypress trees and stretches
where the road is walled in on both sides by thorny
brush.“I got very comfortable being in the swamp,” he
says. “Bears would watch me excavating. I ran into huge
water moccasins and rattlesnakes as thick around as my
thigh. But nothing worse happened than scrapes, bug
bites and losing equipment in the muck.” Once he was
wading to the nameless site with a group of students. A
young woman stepped into an underwater hole and
disappeared. But she surfaced a moment later, with no
damage done. On many occasions, students and other
visitors became so entangled in thorn patches that they
had to be cut loose. “Nothing happens quickly or
easily,” he says. “The swamp is a trickster and
summertime is really tough. But I love it. The
thunderstorms are really something. The sound of the
frogs and the insects and the birds, just as the maroons
heard it. I love what the swamp has done for me, and I
love what it did for them.”</p>
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<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">www.freedomarchives.org</a>
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