Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome back to cool people who did cool stuff.
Speaker 2: You're a weekly reminder that sometimes people beat people to
Speaker 2: death with clubs, but in a good way, like when
Speaker 2: those people had enslaved them. I'm your host, Margaro Kiljoy
Speaker 2: and my guest today is Sophie.
Speaker 1: Hi.
Speaker 2: Hi, Sophie, Hi, You ever beaten A Nope, I'm not
Speaker 2: gonna ask that.
Speaker 1: Anderson and Truman are here. They say hello, Oh amazing. Yep.
Speaker 1: Everyone say hi to Anderson, Rentron Truman.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you better do it.
Speaker 1: They can't hear you say it louder.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Also, people should say hi to Rory, our audio engineer. Hi, Rory,
Speaker 2: Hi Roy. And that's our guest Sophie, who's also our producer.
Speaker 2: And our theme musical was written for us byon Woman.
Speaker 2: And this is part two in a two parter about
Speaker 2: the Great Dismal Swamp Maroons, who were a multi century
Speaker 2: resisted project to the slave empire of the United States
Speaker 2: of America. When you pick like one topic and sort
Speaker 2: of deep dive and just realize even like everything ties
Speaker 2: into the fact that it's this like slave economy, just
Speaker 2: like every little piece of it, even the poor white
Speaker 2: people who end up siding with them. It still ties
Speaker 2: into the fact that it's a slave economy, Like it's
Speaker 2: just like such a overwhelming fact of American history.
Speaker 1: A Marca sucks scay Mass country.
Speaker 2: Yeah, some good people here, you know. Yeah, So we
Speaker 2: just had Carrie's Rebellion. The Leveler Quaker Republic has fallen,
Speaker 2: and many of the people fled into the swamps, the
Speaker 2: Great Dismal Swamp. Not long after, in seventeen eleven, the
Speaker 2: tusc Aurora, which is that confederacy of three different tribes
Speaker 2: that folks have been working with who lived a bit
Speaker 2: further inland from the swamp, went to war against the colonies.
Speaker 2: Tensions were high between the two groups. They both had
Speaker 2: valid points. Indigenous people were accused of harboring runaway slaves,
Speaker 2: while settlers were you know, stealing Tuscarora land and sending
Speaker 2: out surveyors to map to put towns in where it
Speaker 2: wasn't theirs, and also just showing up and stealing people
Speaker 2: and selling them. So really again, just complicated thing, you know,
Speaker 2: just a complicated conflict that we certainly couldn't take signs
Speaker 2: and I can't do it and even pretend the Tuscarora
Speaker 2: people and their allies, including a bunch of African and
Speaker 2: mixed race Maroons, went to war. Oh, because you already
Speaker 2: even have even at this point, there's already some Maroons
Speaker 2: in those swamps. There's already people who just like I
Speaker 2: ran away, and a ton more of them are about
Speaker 2: to arrive. But like, so they went to war and
Speaker 2: they're basically their goal was to kidnap enough white landowners
Speaker 2: to exchange them back for their loved ones.
Speaker 1: Cool.
Speaker 2: Again, no historical or current parallels at all. And the
Speaker 2: first day they went through and killed like one hundred
Speaker 2: and thirty white people, mostly white land owning men, and
Speaker 2: kidnapped a ton of people because they were trying to
Speaker 2: do this hostage exchange thing. The governor tried to raise
Speaker 2: up a militia, but the albumarl of white people were like, no,
Speaker 2: we're We're good. The tusker are. They're not mad at us,
Speaker 2: they're mad at the other white people. They're mad at
Speaker 2: the rich people and the like landowners, and shit, we're
Speaker 2: not going to fuck with them. Besides, we're mostly Quakers,
Speaker 2: so we're not doing it. So it was a South
Speaker 2: Carolina militia alongside allied indigenous fighters who put down the rebellion.
Speaker 2: Really yeah, they had to bring them in from elsewhere.
Speaker 2: And then also, like, I mean, the other thing about
Speaker 2: the history of the destruction of indigenous peoples in the
Speaker 2: United States is or the place that became the United
Speaker 2: States is using dividing conquer tactics and getting one group
Speaker 2: to fight against the other group.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it wasn't all like crush rebellion. The two
Speaker 2: sides sued for peace and they had a truce and
Speaker 2: they agreed to release all their hostages. So the Tuscarora
Speaker 2: released all their hostages. The English were like, why would
Speaker 2: we do what we said we were going to do,
Speaker 2: and they didn't. Instead, they sold their hostages into slavery,
Speaker 2: fucking clown asque country, Fucking.
Speaker 1: A stupid place we live in.
Speaker 2: So the Tuscara went back to war. They were like,
Speaker 2: all right, well, we had a truce and you didn't
Speaker 2: do it. So they attacked more of the slave labor camps.
Speaker 2: But unfortunately the divide and conqueror was like real close
Speaker 2: to home. They told the chief of the northern Tuscarora,
Speaker 2: it was kind of divided into two groups, told them
Speaker 2: that he would rule over the southern Tuscarora too if
Speaker 2: he would join the English in the war, and that happened.
Speaker 2: So hundreds of southern Tuscarora and their allies laid up
Speaker 2: in a fort for a last stand, and a ton
Speaker 2: of them were slaughtered or sold into slavery. At this point,
Speaker 2: the majority of the Tuscarora went north and joined the
Speaker 2: Iroquois Confederacy, which is that massive democra project that is
Speaker 2: way way more interesting in radical and democratic than the
Speaker 2: US has ever been or will be. But a whole
Speaker 2: lot of the Tuscarora people, as well as the Machapunga
Speaker 2: and presumably other allies, they couldn't make it north because
Speaker 2: they were blocked by soldiers. So where do they go?
Speaker 2: They went into the swamps, and the Yamassee people from
Speaker 2: South Carolina had been a major tool of the English
Speaker 2: in the war against the Tuscarora. Within months of helping
Speaker 2: put down the revolt of the Tuscarora, they had their
Speaker 2: own revolt because they realized that they were on the
Speaker 2: wrong side and that they weren't getting treated any better.
Speaker 2: And they have the Yamassee War, which lasted another two years.
Speaker 2: So now the swamps have the pesky leveler whites and
Speaker 2: blacks they have fighting indigenous people and they've all been
Speaker 2: driven into the swamps. Because of all that slave labor
Speaker 2: and plantation culture could move into the area more freely.
Speaker 2: So basically the like the cool vibe of North Carolina
Speaker 2: is going away quickly, right, numbers of enslaved people skyrocketed.
Speaker 2: Laws against black and indigenous people voting were passed. Black
Speaker 2: people from Virginia started making their way into the swamps
Speaker 2: also at this point, and they're fleeing the slave labor
Speaker 2: camps where they've been imprisoned. And the thing is people
Speaker 2: were helping them do it. Like the thing that is
Speaker 2: like it wasn't just like, oh, I'm going to go
Speaker 2: run into the swamps and hope for the best. Right,
Speaker 2: these swamps are a pretty literal maze, right, and the
Speaker 2: wrong path will kill you. So they were met by
Speaker 2: other Maroons who navigated them in Oh it's cool. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they had this whole elaborate system.
Speaker 1: Because if you don't like, you're fucked right, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not this is not a nice concrete path, this
Speaker 1: is swamp.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's not even just like, oh, I'm going
Speaker 2: to walk through some like knee high muck. It's like
Speaker 2: I'm walking through nee high muck. Now I'm over my head.
Speaker 2: There's an alligator you.
Speaker 1: Know right, Oh in that giant spider that you talked about.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, like literally later on, basically, the colonial media,
Speaker 2: or I guess it was the United States media. The
Speaker 2: slave media was like, God, this sounds like something that anyway. Whatever.
Speaker 2: The slave media was like, there's snakes in there. Don't
Speaker 2: go in there. There's snakes, you know, stay here and
Speaker 2: grow stuff for us instead of hanging out with snakes.
Speaker 2: I mean there were lots of venomous snakes in there.
Speaker 2: It was a really rough place, you know. And overall,
Speaker 2: the most common form of resistance that the Maroons did
Speaker 2: sort of universally was they helped others find their way in.
Speaker 2: And we also have some evidence that basically once you
Speaker 2: were helped in, they would set you up. The people
Speaker 2: who live there. You're not necessarily like joining in. It's
Speaker 2: not like, oh, we all live in one big, happy
Speaker 2: commune or like one big city in the middle and whatever.
Speaker 2: But they're like, oh, okay, we'll set you up. Well,
Speaker 2: we know where all the spots of land are. Archaeological
Speaker 2: evidence is that over this entire region, like almost all
Speaker 2: of the dry island areas had like multiple buildings and
Speaker 2: like was like people were living there, you know, yeah,
Speaker 2: And so they get you set up when you get in,
Speaker 2: and soon enough you have multi generational communities scattered all
Speaker 2: throughout the swamps. Some are in the edges, still interacting
Speaker 2: with the regular world. Some are deep inside the swamps.
Speaker 2: Many people spend their entire lives without leaving the swamps. Theoretically,
Speaker 2: we don't know a ton about their lives. There's like
Speaker 2: the stuff that people are able to conjecture, and the
Speaker 2: numbers are pretty unknown. The main estimate that people have
Speaker 2: is like two to three thousand over the course of centuries,
Speaker 2: like not total, but at any given time. But those
Speaker 2: are the estimates of like the militias chasing Nat Turner later.
Speaker 2: So there's no reason to believe those estimates. Like we
Speaker 2: don't know, we don't know when people live there. A
Speaker 2: lot of them wild people went, according to the Governor
Speaker 2: of Virginia, every single day. The Governor of Virginia said
Speaker 2: about the dismal quote, great numbers of loose and disorderly
Speaker 2: people daily flock thither, which is, I want to be wherever,
Speaker 2: great numbers of loosen disorderly people greatly daily flock thither,
Speaker 2: even if I don't say it. And so the Great
Speaker 2: Dismal Swamp became a maroon community, not just any maroon community,
Speaker 2: but the largest and longest lasting and most influential in
Speaker 2: US history. As history of Medievo cadal I put it, quote,
Speaker 2: the Great Dismal Swamp was a regional magnet to the oppressed,
Speaker 2: the dispossessed, the defiant, the rebellious, and those who refused
Speaker 2: to be bound by the conventions of hierarchical society. Swamps
Speaker 2: were places where no horses or dogs could be used
Speaker 2: to hunt them down, and where tobacco production simply could
Speaker 2: not take place. They were places of peace, where loved
Speaker 2: ones could not be bought or sold. These were places
Speaker 2: where freedom seekers could build the intimately democratic communities where
Speaker 2: they could survive and thrive. Wow, I know, it's just
Speaker 2: like I such a like people do amazing shit in
Speaker 2: really bad situations. You know. Yeah, sometimes it almost seems
Speaker 2: like it doesn't really, but sometimes it seems like it
Speaker 2: takes a real bad situation before people do really amazing shit.
Speaker 2: But actually people would have been doing this amazing shit
Speaker 2: if there hadn't been the terrible stuff either, So I
Speaker 2: don't know. They lived in swamp cabins on the islands
Speaker 2: of dry Land. They raised livestock and crops. The Maroons
Speaker 2: had their own internal economy. Archaeologists are aware of at
Speaker 2: least one person building musical instruments. Most of their life
Speaker 2: was concerned with daily life, not waging war against slave society.
Speaker 2: But there were like multiple anthropologists of like, there's like
Speaker 2: four different classifications of Maroons in there. There's like the
Speaker 2: deep maroon people who are like, I'm never going anywhere,
Speaker 2: and then there's the people who kind of live in
Speaker 2: the periphery and mostly raid and like. So you can't
Speaker 2: really easily say, like, oh, everyone wanted to be left alone.
Speaker 2: The people want to be left alone went to the
Speaker 2: damn middle, and the people who wanted to hang out
Speaker 2: on the edge and like kill people they didn't like
Speaker 2: lived on the edge and kill people they didn't like.
Speaker 1: You know, that makes sense.
Speaker 2: It's just logical something for everyone.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: As for the word maroon, maroon was originally a Spanish
Speaker 2: term for the cattle that escaped from early settlers and
Speaker 2: went feral. By the fifteen forties, it was applied to
Speaker 2: people and by the fifteen seventies, it appeared in English
Speaker 2: and the colonial Americans the government wasn't really a big
Speaker 2: fan of this thing that was happening. They were like,
Speaker 2: we don't even know where the line between the two
Speaker 2: of our colonies is who's in charge? And this is
Speaker 2: like literally they would have this problem where they'd want
Speaker 2: to go and raid or they'd want to strike back
Speaker 2: right against the raiders, but they kind of didn't because
Speaker 2: they didn't know whose territory it was, because they didn't
Speaker 2: know if it was Virginia North Carolina. And the existence
Speaker 2: of maroonage was really uncomfortable for white slavers because it
Speaker 2: was a beacon for enslave people, absolutely, but also because
Speaker 2: it didn't sit right with the lies that slavers told.
Speaker 2: Slavers in the US at the time would claim shit
Speaker 2: that like, oh, black people are naturally docile, or they
Speaker 2: can't survive without benevolent white owners, and the Great Dismal
Speaker 2: Swamp was just a counter example, and they weren't happy
Speaker 2: with it. Historian J. Brent Morris put it like this quote,
Speaker 2: Maroon voices demand a reassessment of the meaning of freedom.
Speaker 2: Maroonage in the Dismal represented an alternative to a life
Speaker 2: of enslavement. It also represented a choice, in most cases
Speaker 2: to live free lives in the swamp in the south
Speaker 2: rather than seeking it in a free state or Canada.
Speaker 2: Maroon Voices also remind us that freedom was not just
Speaker 2: an accomplishment after passage along the underground railroad, but a
Speaker 2: maroonage process sustained by their own heroic efforts. And a
Speaker 2: lot of both of these books that I read about
Speaker 2: this really wanted to kind of hit home. I think
Speaker 2: in kind of contrast the way that American history is
Speaker 2: taught that even the underground railroad, like people kind of
Speaker 2: like the underground railroad, the white people kind of like
Speaker 2: the underground railroad because it's like, oh, we went and
Speaker 2: helped people. And it's true, the people who did the
Speaker 2: underground railroad are fucking heroes, right, but then what yeah,
Speaker 2: totally that's a And also like they were freeing themselves
Speaker 2: with help, right, not sure, just pure people without agency
Speaker 2: you can't rescue themselves. And the existence of maroons. The
Speaker 2: self emancipation is a big evidence of that. And people
Speaker 2: talk about basically anyone, including the people who use the
Speaker 2: underground railroad, are self emancipating. And I really like that
Speaker 2: way of framing it. It's also true that, yeah, people
Speaker 2: would get north and nearly you're free, welcome to capitalism,
Speaker 2: work a job, or die, you know. Yep. Literally half
Speaker 2: the arguments that the abolitionists made against slavery were economic,
Speaker 2: that it was cheaper to not take care of people's health. Yeah,
Speaker 2: everything that seems like it should be good is bad. Like,
Speaker 2: for example, that Ben Franklin thing where he's like, let's
Speaker 2: make America white. It was an argument against transporting people
Speaker 2: from Africa, right, because he didn't want more black people,
Speaker 2: because he wanted America pure and white, and so it
Speaker 2: was sort of an anti slavery argument for the aliens.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh that breaks my brain.
Speaker 2: Yep. Fucking eighteenth century politics in the US are wacky. Yeah,
Speaker 2: nineteenth century, twenty whatever politics. The swamps stood in the
Speaker 2: way of colonization. It was untameable, it was unplawable, it
Speaker 2: was full of disease. It actually probably wasn't really full
Speaker 2: of disease, but they believed in the miasma theory of
Speaker 2: disease at the time. I mean, I'm sure the mosquitoes
Speaker 2: were carrying some diseases. I'm sure it wasn't a super
Speaker 2: healthy place. But they thought literally like disease like grew
Speaker 2: up out of the water.
Speaker 1: Not ideal, but also really good to scare people off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good point, they probably, Yeah, there's diseases
Speaker 2: here in snakes, you know, stay the hell away from us.
Speaker 1: Which is like, probably true, but maybe not as extreme
Speaker 1: as they wanted people who they wanted to keep out
Speaker 1: to think.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, totally. And so the idea of this untamable
Speaker 2: nature was an affront to the very idea of enlightenment
Speaker 2: rational Western thought. Nature has to be subdivided and controlled.
Speaker 2: But the swamp refused them, and so the people who
Speaker 2: lived in it were themselves sort of inherently outlaws, even
Speaker 2: the ones who weren't fugitives, because they were living in
Speaker 2: this uncontrollable space and they lived as outlaws. The first
Speaker 2: raids out of the swamp were in seventeen oh nine.
Speaker 2: They robbed storehouses and started picking off farm animals that
Speaker 2: were close to the swamp. Also in seventeen oh nine,
Speaker 2: they started planning a slave revolt from the swamps, one
Speaker 2: that I don't know a ton about, but it happened.
Speaker 2: In seventeen oh nine, Black and indigenous people started getting
Speaker 2: ready for revolt. Its leaders were hanged, drawn and quartered,
Speaker 2: including a man named Angola Peter, but neither of Virginia
Speaker 2: or North Carolina was sure of who was in charge
Speaker 2: of subduing revolts because no one knew where the line is.
Speaker 2: But don't worry one bold man just kidding. He sucked
Speaker 2: and he's kind of a coward.
Speaker 1: I was like, it was, like, what podcast am I on?
Speaker 2: H Yeah, yeah, will Bird the second? If there was
Speaker 2: a show about bad people?
Speaker 1: O fucking way.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Could you imagine being named the second instead of Junior?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Like, I'm sorry, you don't get to be uh the
Speaker 2: number until you're at least the third. You're just gonna
Speaker 2: have to suck it up for a generation. Kiddo, you
Speaker 2: are William Bird Junior.
Speaker 1: That's so fucking funny.
Speaker 2: In seventeen twenty eight, he went into Survey the Place.
Speaker 2: He was a wealthy Virginia planter who wanted to know
Speaker 2: exactly where the line between good and noble Virginia and
Speaker 2: bad and rebellious North Carolina was. He was one of
Speaker 2: the worst people I've ever read about. He was absolutely
Speaker 2: brutal to the people he owned. He was so afraid
Speaker 2: of slaver volt that he tortured and sexually assaulted everyone
Speaker 2: he owned just to make sure they would never revolt God.
Speaker 2: And then here's the part that makes him like not
Speaker 2: just terrible, but like fucking poetically terrible. Starting in seventeen
Speaker 2: oh nine, I think when he's like a kid, he
Speaker 2: had recurring nightmares about slaver volts. And the way that
Speaker 2: these nightmares happen is that there is a great fireball
Speaker 2: in the sky over Virginia that represents divine wrath against slavery.
Speaker 2: Imagine having that dream and then being like, I'm probably
Speaker 2: the good guy here. I have dreams where God is
Speaker 2: going to burn me up for my evil. Better go
Speaker 2: mistreat these people. It's through his accounts that we get
Speaker 2: some of the first written record of the people living
Speaker 2: in the swamp. So this is like when I say
Speaker 2: that the record is like kind of fucked up, this
Speaker 2: is the first guy who like went in and talked
Speaker 2: to people who lived there.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So unreliable narrator, I know.
Speaker 2: But what's so funny is I think he's so in
Speaker 2: his own head that he doesn't occur to him to
Speaker 2: have lied in.
Speaker 1: This case, because he sure so weird.
Speaker 2: He starts on the coast and then with a bunch
Speaker 2: of surveyors he starts heading west inland. And the people
Speaker 2: he met there were terrible and barbarous people. After all,
Speaker 2: they shared work equally between men and women. Oh, this
Speaker 2: is the thing that's going to come up again and again.
Speaker 2: But it's like really subtext because women are written out
Speaker 2: of all history, right, Well, you know who else is
Speaker 2: written out of history? Advertisers. There is not actually a
Speaker 2: lot of record of the advertisers of old newspapers. I
Speaker 2: sometimes look, I don't always find it because one thing
Speaker 2: that I absolutely did start noticing Isbister doing a radical
Speaker 2: podcast with mainstream advertisers, is that old radical newspapers absolutely
Speaker 2: at advertisers because you actually need to pay to get
Speaker 2: things out there. And I'm in part of a long,
Speaker 2: noble tradition of pivoting to ads like these ones. And
Speaker 2: we're back. So obviously you talk about at the time
Speaker 2: how women are written out of history. But one of
Speaker 2: the things that's come up everything I've read about the
Speaker 2: dismal swamp, they're like not marking the gender of what's
Speaker 2: happening overall. I mean, they are some times are talking
Speaker 2: about women who are enslaved who fled there and stuff
Speaker 2: also right, but it seems like almost everything, including the
Speaker 2: fighting that I'm going to talk about, happening, was fairly
Speaker 2: probably not fifty to fifty gender split, but was like
Speaker 2: a substantially more egalitarian thing than what was happening outside. Specifically,
Speaker 2: when Bird Junior is in there, he's like, is terrible
Speaker 2: here they share work equally between men and women, I know,
Speaker 2: And like he's also like almost mad that they offer
Speaker 2: anyone runaway slave or common criminal alike, not just a
Speaker 2: place to stay, but help them get a good spot
Speaker 2: of dry land. Like one family also that probably had
Speaker 2: a fugitive for a father, because he was asking like,
Speaker 2: oh do y'all do and they're all like, oh, we're
Speaker 2: all born free. But then like dad just like kind
Speaker 2: of kept hiding, you know, yeah, because he was because
Speaker 2: he's a fugitive. That family where the dad was a fugitive,
Speaker 2: still took in this like white survey team and gave
Speaker 2: them a place to stay and fed them because they
Speaker 2: are good fucking people, like probably two good of people.
Speaker 2: You know. If they just drowned all of these men,
Speaker 2: the world would have been a better place. Allegedly, so
Speaker 2: Bird dedicated his life to destroying that man and everyone
Speaker 2: like him, like only a slaver colonizer can do. Thanks
Speaker 2: for the dinner.
Speaker 1: What a fucking asshole.
Speaker 2: He wrote this long piece about how if this society
Speaker 2: of slaves wasn't destroyed, like murdered in its cradle, it
Speaker 2: would likely become a new Rome.
Speaker 1: What a weird fucking motherfucking dude.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, Bird Junior is a strange man. He compares
Speaker 2: the Maroons to Romulus and Remus, the two twins who
Speaker 2: founded Rome. But negatively he's like, oh, we better stop this.
Speaker 2: Like he this man knows he's on the wrong side.
Speaker 2: He sees fireballs. And they kept telling him, all the
Speaker 2: people he stayed with, they kept telling him in no
Speaker 2: uncertain terms that if he and his men kept going
Speaker 2: into the real heart of the swamps, they would never return.
Speaker 2: This was maybe a friendly warning, and maybe it was
Speaker 2: all like, get the fuck out of here, don't blow
Speaker 2: up our spot.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: When they going got tough, the rich guy got going.
Speaker 2: His crew went on without him to survey in the
Speaker 2: interior of the swamp. He went around and waited for
Speaker 2: them to come out the other side, and then to
Speaker 2: try and take all the credit for doing the survey. Like,
Speaker 2: if you're gonna be a gentleman adventurer, asshole, at least
Speaker 2: go do the adventure. You know, I just don't like
Speaker 2: this man.
Speaker 1: No, he's awful. Fuck him.
Speaker 2: His crew survived, but they only made it like a
Speaker 2: mile or two a day while they're trying to survey
Speaker 2: the swamps. Eventually, after eight days, they ran short on
Speaker 2: supplies and they gave up on surveying and just booked
Speaker 2: it west, trying not to die. And even then they
Speaker 2: were still only able to make it like four miles
Speaker 2: a day across this terrain. Only two years later, the
Speaker 2: largest colonial era slave rebellion popped off, the Chesapeake Rebellion
Speaker 2: of seventeen thirty. And this one is interesting. We know
Speaker 2: way more about this one, or I know way more
Speaker 2: about this one than I did about the seventeen oh
Speaker 2: nine one. Basically, someone probably an enslaved person, started a
Speaker 2: rumor that the king had declared that anyone baptized Christian
Speaker 2: was now going to be freed from slavery, and so
Speaker 2: hundreds of people felt the local officials were refusing the
Speaker 2: king's orders to free them. They were like no, no, no,
Speaker 2: the kings had were free. Now we heard a rumor
Speaker 2: like I'm Christian, you gotta let me go, which is
Speaker 2: what it used to be, right right, And so they
Speaker 2: started drilling in units, getting ready for a fight because
Speaker 2: they had been given legitimacy by the king, which is
Speaker 2: such an interesting like most of the other rebellions didn't
Speaker 2: feel like they needed this. They were like that man
Speaker 2: thinks he owned me, let's kill him, you know. But
Speaker 2: it was an effective way to get hundreds of people together.
Speaker 2: They started drilling, getting ready for a fight, and it
Speaker 2: was broken up and the rebels fled into the swamps,
Speaker 2: and from there they led a gorilla struggle for years.
Speaker 2: And that asshole Bird yeah, Bird Junior, Yeah yeah, maybe
Speaker 2: Bird Senior was a little better, but I doubt it.
Speaker 1: Oh goddage, still far.
Speaker 2: Far from the tree.
Speaker 1: What did he do? What did he do?
Speaker 2: He was really worried about the Maroons. He was considered
Speaker 2: the world's leading expert on them because he'd met some
Speaker 2: of them and survived to tell the tale, because they'd
Speaker 2: fed him and housed him and informed him about dangers.
Speaker 1: This fuck.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Jamaico was in an all out Maroon war at
Speaker 2: the time, which I hope it covered more one day,
Speaker 2: and Bird was like, really worried about the maroons. I
Speaker 2: think he was also a little bit worried about his
Speaker 2: own career and posterity. He advocated for the end of
Speaker 2: the Transatlantic slave trade. Here's more of the people doing
Speaker 2: everything you think is good is secretly bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what's what's the what's the uh?
Speaker 2: He was like, we need to end the Transatlantic slave
Speaker 2: trade because Africans are more likely to maroon than seasoned
Speaker 2: That gets Air quotes African Americans who'd been born into slavery.
Speaker 2: It's about like three times more common for people who
Speaker 2: were born in Africa to maroon than people who were
Speaker 2: born in the United States. And so he was like,
Speaker 2: I'm going to write up this. He wrote up a
Speaker 2: long thing about how to physically drain the swamp. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: now we get to the drain the swamp part, because
Speaker 2: why not ever leave modern politics behind? And so he
Speaker 2: writes this whole thing about how to drain the swamp.
Speaker 2: But it wasn't him who tried to do it.
Speaker 1: Instead, is that where the fucking dream the swamp the
Speaker 1: shit comes from?
Speaker 2: So I don't know, I never thought about it and
Speaker 2: I never write about it. Yeah, I mean I doubt
Speaker 2: Trump was like specifically, like I'm talking about the Great
Speaker 2: Dismal Swamp.
Speaker 1: Oh no, No, he doesn't know anything about anything that's
Speaker 1: ever happened in the history of the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but this like goal to drain the swamp thing
Speaker 2: is a huge par art of this era of colonial
Speaker 2: history because people are really worried about this shit.
Speaker 1: No, it wouldn't make sense that that's where that originally started. God, Okay, And.
Speaker 2: So you know how like sometimes people look at Trump
Speaker 2: as like in the far right is his aberration and
Speaker 2: how far we've come far to the right of the
Speaker 2: old original. Like, Nah, the first guy who tried to
Speaker 2: drain the swamp, he was a guy you might have
Speaker 2: heard of. He's maybe the most famous slaver in all
Speaker 2: of history. He is so terrifying that he wore the
Speaker 2: teeth of slaves in his own mouth like a cartoon villain.
Speaker 1: Church fucking Washington and George Market It.
Speaker 2: Is George fucking Washington, the guy who went on to
Speaker 2: start the world's most powerful slave empire. George Washington and
Speaker 2: his brother John and some other guys.
Speaker 1: Fuck fuck fuck okay to me, more n me more demore.
Speaker 2: Yeah. In seventeen fifty three, the entire region was given
Speaker 2: a four guys because that's the other thing is that
Speaker 2: people were like, oh, private corporations run everything now in America,
Speaker 2: and like that is the way America was founded. It
Speaker 2: was actually really specifically in contrast to the way that
Speaker 2: like the Catholic countries, which were not less evil, but
Speaker 2: the Catholic colonies were more like everything's owned by the
Speaker 2: church and the state and shit. Yeah, whereas like British
Speaker 2: colonies were like, we have the such and such company
Speaker 2: with shareholders and blah blah blah. You know. So they
Speaker 2: gave the entire Great Dismal Swamp to four guys, not
Speaker 2: the Washington's. They were just hired on at first.
Speaker 1: This is breaking my brain.
Speaker 2: Continue, Yeah, In seventeen sixty two, the four Guys sent
Speaker 2: an enslaved cruise to tame the swamp, and they hired
Speaker 2: this thirty one year old white guy to help, a
Speaker 2: guy named George Washington, and Washington incorporated a group called
Speaker 2: Adventurers to Drain the Dismal Swamp, which is a genuinely
Speaker 2: funny name to name a company.
Speaker 1: What.
Speaker 2: Okay, sorry, because I think he's into this idea of
Speaker 2: like I'm a gentleman adventurer.
Speaker 1: You know, God, just the like romanticizing of this man
Speaker 1: that this country has, this planet has done. When he's like,
Speaker 1: that's your title, Yeah, that's your title, you fucking creep.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's just a cartoon villain. He runs a group
Speaker 2: called Adventures to Drain It. Yeah, and later this is
Speaker 2: renamed the Less Fun Dismal Swamp Company. The only thing
Speaker 2: that was dismal was their chances of success h and
Speaker 2: also the working conditions of the people who died enslaved
Speaker 2: underneath them. Each of these bold adventurers was like, all right,
Speaker 2: we're each going to donate five guys we owned to
Speaker 2: get this done, and we'll all get super rich. But
Speaker 2: they were all trying to outstingy each other, right, and
Speaker 2: so they all sent their least capable guys, their like
Speaker 2: least valuable people that they thought they owned. Old slave
Speaker 2: Teath himself didn't even send five. He only sent two
Speaker 2: guys he owned and forced to dig like dig ditches
Speaker 2: in swamp water. A whole bunch of them ran away
Speaker 2: to join the Maroons, including a couple with really cool names,
Speaker 2: Jack Dismal and his wife Venus. And those are good names.
Speaker 1: Those are good names.
Speaker 2: And we know at least Jack is going to ride
Speaker 2: away into the sunset, happy and alive at the end
Speaker 2: of this story. And I'm just assuming Venus does as well,
Speaker 2: because I have no evidence of the contrary.
Speaker 1: Cool fucking name Venus dismal.
Speaker 2: I know, I know I would. I'd be surprised if
Speaker 2: I've never met anyone who goes by that. That's such
Speaker 2: a good fucking name. The whole company was a failure.
Speaker 2: It was a dismal failure, and well done. I love
Speaker 2: how the swamp is dismal for slavers and evil civilization,
Speaker 2: but it's actually good and amazing for the people resisting
Speaker 2: these things. Unpaid workers kept dying or running away, and
Speaker 2: the only money that the company made was by selling shingles,
Speaker 2: and it did not drain the swamp, and it did
Speaker 2: not even survey the swamp. Seventeen seventy five year olled
Speaker 2: around and the Washington brothers, John and George had other
Speaker 2: shit on their minds. Their fun little adventure of overseeing
Speaker 2: a little death camp on the edge of a swamp
Speaker 2: was over, like literally, their idea of a good time
Speaker 2: is to go oversee a slave death camp. Anyway, I
Speaker 2: don't like them. No, so they had to move on
Speaker 2: to bigger things. They had a whole continent and later
Speaker 2: world to destroy with the American Revolution. I've probably mentioned
Speaker 2: it a few times on this show, but the leaders
Speaker 2: of the American Revolution were doing it to protect their
Speaker 2: right to expand their colonies into indigenous territories. And the
Speaker 2: whole thing about democracy and freedom is a terrible, sinister farce,
Speaker 2: a scam that they sold working people. But it's worth reiterating,
Speaker 2: as author Mediebo Cadale put it, quote, some people think
Speaker 2: that the United States of America is the greatest experiment
Speaker 2: in democracy, but there has never been any democracy here.
Speaker 2: Some people are in love with what they are told
Speaker 2: America is. But when you look at history very carefully,
Speaker 2: you will find that people whom I call freedom seekers
Speaker 2: and resistors were constantly running away from America. I really
Speaker 2: like that way of looking at it, being like, look,
Speaker 2: we're sold this like bill of goods. We're told America's
Speaker 2: land of freedom. Hey wait, why did all the black
Speaker 2: people side with the British? Hey wait, you know, like
Speaker 2: you just like slowly, it's not true, That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: The British declared freedom for any enslaved person who fled
Speaker 2: from the rebels. A group called Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment, fifteen
Speaker 2: hundred strong, wore sashes that read Liberty to Slaves as
Speaker 2: they went into battle against George Washington and his army
Speaker 2: of slavery. And that is fucking cool. You're on the
Speaker 2: right side of history if you are in a battle
Speaker 2: wearing a fucking sash that reads liberty the slaves. Some
Speaker 2: of George Washington's own slaves fought him in that war,
Speaker 2: like Harry, who'd been kidnapped in Gambia and renamed Harry
Speaker 2: by George Washington and fought on the British side as
Speaker 2: Corporal Harry Washington. And he was as important of an
Speaker 2: icon to the black soldiers fighting against the American Revolution
Speaker 2: as George Washington was to the other side. And I
Speaker 2: like that both sides. Out of Washington, it's likely that
Speaker 2: a great number of this regiment came from the maroons
Speaker 2: of the swamp. The main evidence that we have of
Speaker 2: this is that so many of these soldiers had intimate
Speaker 2: knowledge of the swamps. Basically, they were like, yeah, all
Speaker 2: the people were just like knew all their ways in
Speaker 2: and out of the swamps, so they're from there. The
Speaker 2: enslaved people who've been set to drain the swamp escaped
Speaker 2: en masse and fled for freedom or to go fight
Speaker 2: against the Americans. Even after British forces abandoned the South,
Speaker 2: the raids from the Dismal kept going. So like, the
Speaker 2: British stopped trying to have a military presence around the
Speaker 2: Dismal Swamp, but the Maroons kept going. They were like, nope,
Speaker 2: we're fighting these fucking slave men, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And these were multi racial units. One landless white laborer
Speaker 2: named Jeshiah Phillips led a black and white band of
Speaker 2: fifty people in a gorilla struggle against the expansionist Americans.
Speaker 2: Many of them were Maroons, and Maroons kept them safe.
Speaker 2: When white men in the South were impressed into the
Speaker 2: military to track down Phillips's band, they basically refused to.
Speaker 2: Like all these people got like, hey, you're a militia,
Speaker 2: now go track down that, like the white guy who's
Speaker 2: leading a mixed race group of people against us or
Speaker 2: a multiracial group against us. And people are like, now,
Speaker 2: we're good, We're not tracking that guy down. We kind
Speaker 2: of like him. A quarter of them deserted.
Speaker 1: That's so funny.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Phillips himself was caught and hanged in seventeen seventy eight.
Speaker 2: But one of the things that keeps going in this
Speaker 2: story is that as soon as they like take out
Speaker 2: one of the leaders, it stops nothing. And so that's
Speaker 2: how you know, the leaders are more like symbolic in
Speaker 2: figureheads rather than like indispensable. Sure, yeah, yeah, the band
Speaker 2: kept going until the end of the war. The whole
Speaker 2: Dismal Swamp region, not just the depths of it, was
Speaker 2: completely uncontrollable by the US, and that guy Jack Dismal,
Speaker 2: him and Corporal Harry Washington made it out on British
Speaker 2: ships to freedom, and I assume Venus was with him,
Speaker 2: but I don't know. Uck Yeah, yeah, because I'm not
Speaker 2: clearly the British were the bad people like twenty years
Speaker 2: ago at this point, I'm not trying. It's super hard
Speaker 2: to fend them. But like they told the truth when
Speaker 2: I said that not the.
Speaker 1: Biggest villain in this very particular story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they were like, hey, well, we'll set you free
Speaker 2: if you fight for us, and then they did.
Speaker 1: And then they kept their word, which is crazy, I.
Speaker 2: Know, like genuinely wouldn't be surprised all of that hadn't happened.
Speaker 2: But yeah, and during the war, the population of Maroons
Speaker 2: inside the swamp grew and grew sick, and for the
Speaker 2: most part, they lived peaceful lives after that, though again
Speaker 2: many of them joined great abolitionist conspiracies throughout the new country.
Speaker 2: And we're going to get how like in another like
Speaker 2: twenty years, they're gonna be like basically in a war
Speaker 2: against the US. And so there's all these abolitionist conspiracies
Speaker 2: going up and down the country. Literally there's word of
Speaker 2: mouth campaigns organized by enslaved people. People were talking and organizing,
Speaker 2: and what they were talking about, Sophie, is they were
Speaker 2: talking about what a great deal on stuff they could
Speaker 2: find have by listening to podcasts.
Speaker 1: Oh good for them.
Speaker 2: It's only through podcasting that you hear the finest of
Speaker 2: goods and services, such as the ones who support this
Speaker 2: very show and we're back. So now you have this country,
Speaker 2: the United States of America, and they didn't like that
Speaker 2: a really big chunk of itself was a lawless land
Speaker 2: of outlaws who kept stealing their quote unquote property aka themselves.
Speaker 2: Like literally most of the records that we have about
Speaker 2: like the number of people living there was the amount
Speaker 2: of property damage done by their raids, which was number
Speaker 2: of people who've left like slave labor camps. By seventeen ninety,
Speaker 2: laws were passed by both Virginia and North Carolina to
Speaker 2: build a canal through the swamp. They wanted to use
Speaker 2: a private company, of course, because that's what the US
Speaker 2: was founded on, and for a decade hundreds of enslaved
Speaker 2: people worked and died building a canal, though they eventually
Speaker 2: did successfully build a twenty two mile canal, which immediately
Speaker 2: started getting used by radicals, which is kind of cool.
Speaker 2: Itinerant abolitionist preachers used to coordinate rebellion, and abolitionist ships
Speaker 2: would like show up, they'd like sail into the canal
Speaker 2: to go find people were hiding out and put them
Speaker 2: on boats and take them up to like Boston and shit,
Speaker 2: which is fucking cool. The Dismal Swamp became a stopover
Speaker 2: place for a lot of self emancipators after the United
Speaker 2: States was founded, and all the while maroons are organizing
Speaker 2: to attack the slave empire. And I was promising you,
Speaker 2: how when like one leader goes down, there's this others
Speaker 2: I'm gonna like I started tracking all of the names
Speaker 2: of all the different leaders of bands.
Speaker 1: But yeah, who's up. Who's the next? Motherfucker?
Speaker 2: Tom Copper? One man. Tom Copper was a fugitive himself,
Speaker 2: and he led at least thirty eight fighters on.
Speaker 1: The very based name of Tom Copper.
Speaker 2: I mean, like it's such a good though, like like
Speaker 2: if you wanted to watch like a noir film about.
Speaker 1: It, Yeah, that character's day would be Tom Copper.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally. Yeah, he led at least thirty eight fighters.
Speaker 2: Those are the number that were like literally they all
Speaker 2: wrote their name down on like a registry, but there's
Speaker 2: almost certainly probably hundreds more.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And when he was arrested, six Maroons arrived on horseback
Speaker 2: and broke them out of jail.
Speaker 1: Fuck yeah, I knew we'd have a jail break in here.
Speaker 1: I know, just had jailbreak energy. Let's go on a
Speaker 1: horseback to where's this fucking movie?
Speaker 2: I know. God for the people who came and rescued
Speaker 2: him were caught and ended up in prison in his place.
Speaker 2: But you know, that's the thing you try and do
Speaker 2: when you try and rescue your friends. And he did
Speaker 2: get out. His army grew, he had captains one per
Speaker 2: county who organized as well, and eventually one hundred Maroons
Speaker 2: were caught and tortured and executed around eighteen oh two.
Speaker 2: Exactly what happened to Tom Copper I think is lost
Speaker 2: to him. Yeah, after he disappeared, a new Maroon military leader,
Speaker 2: a preacher named General Peter, stepped up.
Speaker 1: They're just like picking the most generic male names of history. Peter, Paul, Tom,
Speaker 1: I mean, like Phil, Mike, John.
Speaker 2: There was only like ten names for white or black
Speaker 2: people in America for a very long time.
Speaker 1: You know, you know that's actually so fair. I'm like, oh, right,
Speaker 1: are we just naming apostles? What's happening?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you just had you had to have a wasp name.
Speaker 2: And if you didn't have a wasp, like, you didn't
Speaker 2: have to be a wasp. You just had to have
Speaker 2: a wasp name.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so during this time, when you have this, these
Speaker 2: these people leading raids, the good whites of the South
Speaker 2: were terrified. One guy wrote a newspaper saying, quote, we,
Speaker 2: our wives, and our children were surrounded by desperadoes, white
Speaker 2: and black, who perhaps would laugh at our calamity and
Speaker 2: mock when our fear cometh, and you know what, I
Speaker 2: would mock. When that man's fear comes, I join in.
Speaker 2: And so they were like leading these raids but planning
Speaker 2: this larger attack. They wanted to do an attack on
Speaker 2: both North Carolina and Virginia on the same day with clubs, spikes,
Speaker 2: and axes. They didn't have any guns.
Speaker 1: Yet, clubs, spikes and axes.
Speaker 2: Oh I I know, I don't even know what the
Speaker 2: spikes were in this case, but.
Speaker 1: Fuck it, I love it. Yeah, spikes and axes, let's go.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And the whole thing was coordinated by a network
Speaker 2: of black preachers, and so later black churches and preachers
Speaker 2: and shit are going to get like basically run out
Speaker 2: of this part of the South. But for a while,
Speaker 2: you basically like get a free black man who's a
Speaker 2: preacher to go around and be like and the Lord said, hey,
Speaker 2: next Wednesday, we're gonna and then after that and then
Speaker 2: we're gonna do this other thing. You know. Yeah. Some
Speaker 2: people were caught and gave up under torture. Others were
Speaker 2: caught and stayed strong. There's like good lines about like
Speaker 2: people being like, nah, I'm you're not getting anything out
Speaker 2: of me, and like one guy was just like I'm
Speaker 2: gonna laugh when when we come for you, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and uh, after General Peter, there was oh, we're gonna
Speaker 2: get new names now, Pompy Little.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's what I'm fucking talking about. That is a
Speaker 1: cool fucking name. Pumpy Little. Let's go tell tell me
Speaker 1: what Pompy Little did. Please, I'm I'm on board. Why
Speaker 1: is this not a movie? And Pompy Little was a
Speaker 1: picturesque man. He was more than six feet tall. People
Speaker 1: were shorter back then. He was a giant of a man. Honey.
Speaker 2: He had a like I think he's the one. Oh no,
Speaker 2: it was a later guy who had this scar across
Speaker 2: his face. Maybe one of them had a scar across
Speaker 2: his face when we had been shot by a bullet
Speaker 2: and kept going, you know, and uh, he was completely fearless.
Speaker 2: He fought with a long, double edged knife, and when
Speaker 2: he would rob people, they'd be like, we're gonna tell
Speaker 2: and give you a description. He was like, good, my
Speaker 2: name's pomp and told people his name so that they
Speaker 2: would be afraid of him.
Speaker 1: He's fucking cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Eventually he was shot and killed, but that man
Speaker 2: lived free.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Then in eighteen eighteen, a multi racial, mixed gender gang
Speaker 2: of Maroons. This is the only one. I suspect all
Speaker 2: of these were multiracial, mixed gender, but I like this
Speaker 2: is the one where like specifically details that yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: they're like and then one of the women who was
Speaker 2: among them was shot and killed in the raid. You know,
Speaker 2: they declared themselves at war with nearby society and started
Speaker 2: raiding farms and slave labor camps. Maroons would do shit
Speaker 2: like basically they like go find the man who had
Speaker 2: personally enslaved them, dragged them into the swamps, and beat
Speaker 2: them to death with a club, like you imagine you
Speaker 2: just like own a bunch of guys and then they
Speaker 2: run away and you're like, oh, I'm sure that's the
Speaker 2: end of that. Yeah, okay, Like and this is like
Speaker 2: during the time when the South keeps trying to like,
Speaker 2: oh they they're docile, they don't mind. It's just you know,
Speaker 2: like nah.
Speaker 1: Nah, fuck around and find out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh this is wait here's ming Mingo is the
Speaker 2: guy with the the scar across his face our next guy,
Speaker 2: and I think Mingo is involved in the eighteen eighteen gang.
Speaker 2: He was a bandit as people called him nam Mingo,
Speaker 2: and one of the things that he did because the
Speaker 2: local white people, like the poor ones, didn't really have
Speaker 2: a problem with any of this, you know, because they
Speaker 2: weren't being targeted because they didn't own people. So Mingo
Speaker 2: would do murder for hire on slavers. Basically, some people
Speaker 2: were like, like a white guy was like, hey, I
Speaker 2: really want this slaver to die, and Mingo was like,
Speaker 2: all right, well, I think it was like two hundred
Speaker 2: bucks or something was the payment. But the method of
Speaker 2: the payment, as best as I can tell, was not
Speaker 2: give me money. It was go buy that guy and
Speaker 2: set him free. Interesting, and so then they were like,
Speaker 2: all right, we'll go kill that slaver that you don't
Speaker 2: like in exchange for you, you know, giving us money
Speaker 2: or doing this thing for us. This is the guy
Speaker 2: who had a scar across his face from a bullet wound.
Speaker 2: He was eventually betrayed by an associate, and it was
Speaker 2: like kind of a sad story. He was like the
Speaker 2: associate kind of waited until Mingo like shot his gun
Speaker 2: off in celebration, and then the guy was like, hah,
Speaker 2: your gun's empty and like jumped him. You know. Yeah.
Speaker 2: When he was betrayed, he was put on trial and
Speaker 2: everyone was outraged, although like a local town was totally
Speaker 2: scandalized because, to quote J. Brent Morris, eight white men
Speaker 2: admitted that Mingo had informed them of his plan to
Speaker 2: kill the Princess Anne County sheriff, and none of them
Speaker 2: had taken measures to stop him. And so basically it
Speaker 2: just like everyone was fine with these guys. Not everyone,
Speaker 2: obviously a lot of people were very unfine with these guys,
Speaker 2: but the like the poor people who lived in the area,
Speaker 2: including the poor white people.
Speaker 1: They were like, everything's cool. What do you mean.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was just that's just the guy who kills
Speaker 2: rich people, like, don't fuck with Luigi, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: And while most of the local white population wasn't specifically
Speaker 2: abolition so that's the other thing too, right, they didn't
Speaker 2: have abolitionist politics. Their primary form of assistance to the Maroons,
Speaker 2: besides the ones who were literally were Maroons themselves. And
Speaker 2: part of these bandit gangs is that they had a
Speaker 2: really strong no snitching culture.
Speaker 1: Oh okay, yeah.
Speaker 2: When outsiders would come and they'd be like, hey, what's
Speaker 2: in the swamps, people would be like, I heard of
Speaker 2: a swamp. What are you talking about? There's nothing there,
Speaker 2: you know, Because poor white rural people used to know
Speaker 2: something about class solidarity and hating cops, and many of
Speaker 2: them still do, but culture wars are trying to convince
Speaker 2: them otherwise. That's what I say about that. Whenever a
Speaker 2: Maroon leader went down, another stepped up. There was no
Speaker 2: end to the raids for decades. Huge bounties would go up,
Speaker 2: but people were like, we don't want to slave raid
Speaker 2: the swamps. That's how you die.
Speaker 1: What's that mythical creature where you cut off the head
Speaker 1: and another head grows back.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, they're the hydro of the swamps, which is
Speaker 2: cool because hydros live in swamps. Oh my god, that's
Speaker 2: fucking awesome.
Speaker 1: There you go.
Speaker 2: And one farmer at one point was like, all right,
Speaker 2: let's get a posse together, let's go capture the slaves.
Speaker 2: As soon as he announced his plan, maroons came into
Speaker 2: his fields and shop dead, immediately dead in front of
Speaker 2: his wife. Just were like you're dead now, and then
Speaker 2: like walked away, see you, sir?
Speaker 1: Enjoy Hell.
Speaker 2: Yeah. The people in charge of subduing the Maroons, like
Speaker 2: the actual like officials, kept winding up dead too, like literally,
Speaker 2: like they would like really leave the swamps to go
Speaker 2: assassinate people, so I like them. Yeah, And this came
Speaker 2: to a head and kind of ended when and this
Speaker 2: is not nat Turner's fault, but when future friend of
Speaker 2: the Pod Nat Turner led the most famous slaver vault
Speaker 2: in US history, which was only twenty five miles east
Speaker 2: of the swamps. Nat Turner led seventy folks on raids
Speaker 2: and killed about sixty white people men, women, and children
Speaker 2: before being stopped by a group of white vigilantes. Some
Speaker 2: of the rebels made their way to the swamps in safety.
Speaker 2: Nat Turner went underground. They didn't catch him for a
Speaker 2: little while. He didn't go to the swamps actually, and
Speaker 2: like he actually wasn't planning on using the swamps, but
Speaker 2: everyone was convinced he was planning on using the swamps,
Speaker 2: which he probably should have been planning on using the swamps.
Speaker 2: I haven't I've only read what the Great Dismal Swamp
Speaker 2: books has to say about Nat Turner. I haven't read
Speaker 2: the books about Nat Turner what they have to say
Speaker 2: about him yet. But white people lost their fucking mind
Speaker 2: and started massacring black people after not Turner, two hundred people,
Speaker 2: two hundred black people were like randomly killed, and then
Speaker 2: their heads were put on pikes alongside.
Speaker 1: The road, and like this, fucking Christ, it.
Speaker 2: Was a fucking massacre. And then the entire country, especially
Speaker 2: the South, like mobilizes against this threat of an outright
Speaker 2: slave revolution because Haiti had just had one thirty years earlier,
Speaker 2: and Haiti's revolution shook the western world to its core.
Speaker 2: And then yeah, yeah, yeah, and so in this area,
Speaker 2: now every white man was expected to be ready to
Speaker 2: be pressed into a militia at anytime. Hunting maroons became
Speaker 2: a full time job for some people.
Speaker 3: But get a hobby, Jesus Christ, learn how to do
Speaker 3: a cross stitch, learn how to grow some crops, and oh, well,
Speaker 3: they can't do that, mine your business.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And they started trying to burn people out of
Speaker 2: the swamps. They would set fires on parts of it
Speaker 2: to flush people out to recapture. But even despite this
Speaker 2: huge concerted effort, this was not super effective. Even dogs
Speaker 2: can't really track scents deep into the swamps. And you
Speaker 2: kind of couldn't pay people enough to go hunting for
Speaker 2: people in the deeper parts of the Great Dismal because
Speaker 2: you'll just.
Speaker 1: Die alligators, spiders, snakes, disease, yep.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And angry Maroons.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not to mention what's waiting for you when you
Speaker 1: get there.
Speaker 2: Yeah. But while very few Maroons were captured during this period,
Speaker 2: the raids did more or less cease. This seems have
Speaker 2: kind of ended the like periphery Maroon bandit culture. For
Speaker 2: the last thirty or so years of the Maroon community's
Speaker 2: existence until the very end when they go back to war,
Speaker 2: folks mostly just wanted to survive. People on the outside
Speaker 2: assumed that the swamps were more or less empty now
Speaker 2: because they thought that the bandits on the periphery were
Speaker 2: all the people there. This was not the case. The
Speaker 2: Northern abolitionists started making a huge deal out of the
Speaker 2: Great Dismal Swamp, and so the struggle that came out
Speaker 2: of the swamp continued, but it became a propaganda thing instead.
Speaker 2: This is where abolitionism is really starting to come into
Speaker 2: its own and you know, I mean soon enough it's
Speaker 2: going to mobilize a war. And did kill the slavers,
Speaker 2: But the abolitionists are like, look, here's evidence that black
Speaker 2: people self emancipate and live without white masters. Frederick Douglas
Speaker 2: wrote quote that hundreds of slaves prefer the danger and
Speaker 2: darkness of the dismal Swamps to the homes and plantations
Speaker 2: of their Christian masters is proof that they dread the
Speaker 2: wolfish propensities of the slaveholder more than they dread the
Speaker 2: real wolf. That man could write.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Harriet Beecher Stowe, who's the abolitionist author of Uncle Tom's Cabin,
Speaker 2: wrote another book that was quite popular in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 2: but its largely forgotten today. It's called Dread, A Tale
Speaker 2: of the Great Dismal Swamp, and it's about a guy
Speaker 2: named Dread, which is also a good name.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And this book is openly like let's go to war
Speaker 2: for abolition. It celebrates the Maroon as a revolutionary, pointing
Speaker 2: out accurately that it will take fire and blood to
Speaker 2: end the evil of slavery. And no white person loved
Speaker 2: Maroon communities more than John Brown, who believed that Maroon
Speaker 2: gorillas were the key to ending slavery, the Great Dismal
Speaker 2: Swamp Maroons. He may or may not have been planning
Speaker 2: to retreat to the swamp after his raid on Harper's Ferry,
Speaker 2: It's not entirely certain. And you know, the Civil War
Speaker 2: breaks out and the Maroons are all over that shit
Speaker 2: many join Union forces, like as soon as black people
Speaker 2: are allowed into the forces or whatever, and like many
Speaker 2: of them like flee north in order to join, right,
Speaker 2: many joined as soon as the Union troops got a
Speaker 2: foothold in the south. Many waged a gorilla war in
Speaker 2: the South, whether for the Union army or not. There
Speaker 2: were irregular units called buffaloes that were made up of
Speaker 2: Confederate deserters, white unionists, and black fighters all fighting side
Speaker 2: by side. And these people fucking.
Speaker 1: Ruled, yes, fucking cool.
Speaker 2: They would just march around, freeing people and killing Confederates
Speaker 2: and they just like walking through the South being like nah,
Speaker 2: fuck this, and uh, Confederates in the area rode all
Speaker 2: this stuff. That was like it would be a piece
Speaker 2: of cake to go be up in the battlefields in
Speaker 2: the north instead of instead of being down here with
Speaker 2: this shit. Oh shit, and uh yeah, because they would
Speaker 2: like it was just a gorilla war. And then the
Speaker 2: other side knew that. I mean both sides knew some
Speaker 2: of the territory. I'm not trying to be like the
Speaker 2: white Confederates were like complete no nothings, but like although
Speaker 2: they were probably in the political party, the know nothings.
Speaker 2: But that's unrelated Maroons also sheltered Southern Unionists and Confederate
Speaker 2: draft dodgers. Hundreds of Maroons that didn't go fight directly
Speaker 2: went and got jobs unloading cargo for the Union army
Speaker 2: in nearby ports. Maroons were scouts for passing units. One
Speaker 2: of the main things that Maroons ended up doing was
Speaker 2: like hunting, especially wild hogs, and teaching others how to
Speaker 2: hunt in order to supplement military rations. And the war
Speaker 2: was won for the Union near the Dismal Swamp even
Speaker 2: before it was one else anywhere else in the South.
Speaker 2: And so as soon as the buffaloes like had that
Speaker 2: shit on lock, they just started moving further and further afield,
Speaker 2: just rest gieing people and killing Confederates. And then the
Speaker 2: war ended, and some swampers set out towards the rest
Speaker 2: of the world now that they had, you know, won
Speaker 2: their freedom, and many others just stayed put. And that's
Speaker 2: the story of two hundred years of resistance to slavery
Speaker 2: from a mostly black but tri racial alliance of rebels
Speaker 2: living in a cool last place, hanging out with spiders
Speaker 2: and killing Confederates.
Speaker 1: It's like, why do we need, you know, A remake
Speaker 1: of a movie seventeen times when this is like the
Speaker 1: literal perfect movie script.
Speaker 2: I know, especially once you start tying in the Union
Speaker 2: Army and all that shit. You can even kind of
Speaker 2: get some patriotism into it if you want, because the
Speaker 2: US was the right side of the fucking Civil War,
Speaker 2: Like you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, like, what are we doing here?
Speaker 2: This could be Yeah, I would watch the fucking like
Speaker 2: four seasons of this shit. At least, That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 3: Say.
Speaker 1: It might not even be a movie. It could be
Speaker 1: a whole series. Yeah, like honestly whole series and like
Speaker 1: the like it's like it's like real life The Walking Dead, honestly.
Speaker 2: Totally Yeah, people living dangerous, hard, short lives in beautiful
Speaker 2: found communities. That is that is literally the zombie apocalypse
Speaker 2: dream of the Walking Dead, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, thanks for telling me this story, Magpie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thanks for thanks for being a guest instead of
Speaker 2: just a producer. Sorry that your hometown's on fire.
Speaker 1: Thanks And if you you want to hear more of
Speaker 1: me being a guest, I recently did my friend Sarah
Speaker 1: Marshall's You Are Good podcast where we talk about the
Speaker 1: movie The Other Woman, and it's me not talking about
Speaker 1: anything historical or news or anything upsetting. So if you
Speaker 1: want to hear me giggle with my friend, check it out.
Speaker 1: If you want to hear more of what we already
Speaker 1: do at cool Zone Media or cool zone media dot com.
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Speaker 2: Sophie is hard at work about fixing that. Yeah, it'll
Speaker 2: be soon. Cool Well, next week join us for another
Speaker 2: dude thing about some of the stuff. I don't know
Speaker 2: what it's going to be yet, because I could so
Speaker 2: sucked up into one topic that I can't plan out
Speaker 2: anything else. I just entirely monofocused every week. It is
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