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Daniel O. Sayers

DIASPORAN EXILES
16301860

IN THE

GREAT DISMAL SWAMP,

The Great Dismal Swamp Landscape Study is an ongoing ethnohistorical archaeology project designed to
bring a landscape and anthropological perspective to
bear on the circa-16301860 occupation of the Dismal
Swamp. Thousands of African Americans, as maroons
and enslaved laborers, permanently dwelled in the
swamp, as did untold numbers of Native Americans
throughout this period. That these groups interacted in
socially and economically significant ways is attested to
in the record, but very little is ultimately known about
how their politicaleconomic systems emerged and
transformed. This project represents the first intensive
effort in bringing the tools of historiography, archaeology, and anthropology to an analysis of the Great
Dismal Swamp as a diasporan and exilic landscape.
KEYWORDS: North American diasporas, maroons,
exiles, postcontact political economy, landscape analysis
The Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina and
Virginia was home to thousands of diasporans prior to
the Civil War. African and African American maroons,
enslaved laborers, and Native Americans chose to live
and eke out livings in the swamp rather than contend
with the innumerable transgressions of colonialism and
slavery. Despite an ambiguous and limited documentary
record, it is clear that people from myriad cultural backgrounds resided in the dark fens of the harsh wetland for
nearly two and a half centuries after contact. If anthropology teaches us anything, it is that groups residing in
even such remote and trying landscapes will do what
Daniel O. Sayers is a doctoral candidate in historical
archaeology in the Department of Anthropology,
College of William and Mary. His dissertation work in
the Great Dismal Swamp follows interests in the
African diaspora, political economy and Marxian studies, and landscape analysis. For more than a decade, he
has worked in archaeology throughout North America
and has striven to make archaeological research politically and socially relevant. He has authored or coauthored articles in the Journal of Archaeological Method
and Theory, International Journal of Historical
Archaeology, Western Journal of Black Studies, and
Michigan Archaeologist.

10

humans always do. They will develop systems of

exchange, produce and acquire food, exploit the natural
landscape and forge cultural landscapes, form and maintain kinship and social groups, and develop cultural
systems in which all residents are immersed and
enmeshed.
The Great Dismal Swamp Landscape Study
(GDSLS) has been implemented to bring anthropological and ethnohistorical archaeological tools and
perspectives to bear in the development of a more
comprehensive understanding of diasporan political
economies and cultural landscapes (Sayers 2005b).
Although the GDSLS is in progress as of this writing, a
general discussion can be provided of the analytical
framework of the project, the documentary record of
the diasporan occupation of the Dismal Swamp, and
the analytical potential of an exilic perspective on the
social history of the swamp.
CONCEPTUALIZING DEFIANCE
AND CAPTIVITY IN THE GREAT DISMAL
SWAMP
As has been made very clear from research on historical capitalism and capital-infused slavery systems, the
rise and entrenchment of politicaleconomic inequalities directly relates to processes of resistance and
defiance enacted by the oppressed and exploited (Mintz
1985, Orser 1996, Paynter 1982, Scott 1985, Wolf
1982). Defiance, whether as individual acts or collective action, occurs whenever and wherever the structurations of capitalism and capitalist slavery envelop
people, create vast ranges of systemic inequalities, and
overtly restrict the power and wills of the underclasses
(Frey 1991, Genovese 1979, Taussig 1980). Resistance
and defiance occur with predictable regularity when
people within a system are disallowed the capacity for
self-reliance and are systemically denied access to, for
example, means of production, adequate food, and the
materials (e.g., commodities) that they produce as
direct producers, whether as enslaved or wage laborers
(Paynter and McGuire 1991, Nassaney and Abel 2000,
Turner 1995). Indeed, this range of dialectical antagonisms is so strong and chronic that resistance and
defiance should be construed as inherent to capitalism
and its secondary systems.

Transforming Anthropology, Vol. 14, Issue 1, pp. 1020, ISSN 1051-0559, electronic ISSN 1548-7466. 2006 by the American
Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content
through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

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Complex processes of defiance undergird the

historical development of social systems in the pre
Civil War Dismal Swamp (Martin 2004, Nichols 1988,
Sayers 2005b, Wolf 2002). Between circa 1630 and
1860, people who defied the expansion and intensification of capitalism and its attendant labor regimes populated the Dismal Swamp. Rather than have their lives
determined to intolerable extents by the politicaleconomic logic of developing and intensifying capitalism
and slavery, thousands of Native Americans and African
Americans chose to co-inhabit the swamp on long-term
bases during this time (Leaming 1979).
Initially, resistant Native Americans in the
Chesapeake Bay Region were removed from their traditional lands through European American efforts at
expanding colonialist cultures and economy during the
period circa 162080 (Leaming 1979, Nash 1982). Such
ill-gotten land was transformed, generally speaking, into
distinct private and corporate-owned landscapes, the
carving out of which followed the emerging logic of capital and the use of land as a means of producing agricultural and manufactured products. Native Americans who
survived these long-term, often violent, processes of
diasporic displacement reacted in a range of general
ways. For example, some Native Americans resided in
and worked within the expansionist system as indentured
servants, enslaved laborers, or free persons (Morgan
1975:328332), whereas others fled or were forced to
areas beyond the pale of colonial expansionthat is, to
areas where capital had not yet become fully entrenched
(see Nash 1982:4366). Of particular interest here were
those who inhabited areas within the general extent of the
early capitalist system that could not be transformed in
ways appropriate and efficient for capitalist production
(e.g., swamps and mountains). Capitalist expansion and
development were highly uneven processes, and these
consistent nonuniformities created spatial nodes of
remoteness, such as the Great Dismal Swamp, that often
became spatialities of self-empowerment and defiance
for the oppressed and alienated.
Around 16801700, the capital-rooted system of
enslavement based on African labor emerged as an
alternative to Native American and European American
enslavement and indentured servitude in the Chesapeake
Bay region and wider mid-Atlantic (Morgan 1975).
Although enslaved Africans were present as early as
1640 (Klein 1989:2236), before the last decade of the
seventeenth century, Virginia hardly qualified as a slave
society (Morgan 1998:1), which also held true for the
rest of the Chesapeake Bay region (Morgan 1998:23;
see also Morgan 1975:295315). Once that system
gained a firm foothold, the mid-Atlantic became home
to thousands upon thousands of enslaved, captive
Africans, and several generations thereafter of enslaved

African Americans. As was the case with other underclasses, enslaved Africans and African Americans
throughout the Western Hemisphere, including the
Chesapeake Bay region, resisted the conditions of
enslavement and captivity in extremely variegated ways.
One chronic form of defiance of enslavement was
fugitivism, or marronage (e.g., Agorsah 1994; Aptheker
1996; Genovese 1974; Grant 2002; Hall 1992; La Rosa
Corzo 2003; Price 1996, 2002; Schweninger 2002;
Weik 1997, 2002, 2004). I have argued elsewhere that
flight from slavery took two general forms, extralimital
marronage and intralimital marronage (Sayers 2004).
The first form, extralimital marronage, a type of grand
marronage (Price 1996), involved flight to locales outside the slavery system proper to areas entrenched in
nonslavery political economies. Examples of extralimital marronage include the flight of thousands of
enslaved persons to Spanish Florida, where slavery did
not exist prior to the 1820s (Giddings 1858), the flight
of African Americans into Native American territories
beyond the periphery of the slavery system (see
Johnston 1970:269292), and the vast system known as
the Underground Railroad, through which tens of thousands of African Americans fled to nonslavery states,
Mexico, and Canada (Sayers 2004).
The most common form of intralimital marronage
was short-term marooning ( petit marronage; Price
1996) in local woods, swamps, and mountains (see
Mullins 1972). At the other end of the intralimital marronage continuum was permanent flight to locations
within the entrenched slavery system (another form of
grand marronage; Price 1996). Indeed, Aptheker (1996)
has argued that at least fifty maroon colonies
intralimital maroon colonies according to this model
existed in slaveholding states throughout the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries.
All forms of intralimital marronage appear to have
occurred in the antebellum Dismal Swamp. It is worth
noting that there is a strong parallel between the defiant
self-removal by Native Americans and the self-removal
by defiant enslaved Africans and African Americans
from exploitative systems into the Dismal Swamp.
After circa 1700, it is quite likely that a strong infusion
of African American maroons joined with already-resident Native Americans, European Americans, and
African Americans who had fled, or were descendents
of those who had fled, to the Dismal Swamp colonialist,
also as a response to the earlier brutal and exploitative
system.
After 1760, enslaved laborers were brought into the
swamp by canal companies to work and live. Due to the
profit potential, capitalists who sought to construct
canal systems and lumber the vast stands of cedar could
no longer ignore the Dismal Swamp, an exemplar
DANIEL O. SAYERS

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spatial node of remoteness. By 1860, thousands of

African Americans had toiled and lived in the swamp as
integral players in the slow but steady transformation of
the naturally recalcitrant Dismal Swamp into a commodified landscape as well as in the development of a
unique political economy within the confines of the
morass. Further explorations of the documentary record
will clarify the significance of these diasporans.
THE NATIVE AMERICAN DIASPORA,
CIRCA 16301730
The documentary record is largely silent about the use
and inhabitation of the Dismal Swamp by Native
Americans during the colonial era of capitalist expansion and intensification. What can be said is that the
Great Dismal Swamp, roughly 2,000 square miles in
size during the early colonial era, provided a haven
for victims of expansion. The scanty documentary
record also hints at the fact that swamp dwellers
Nanesemond, Tuscarora, and othersmaintained a
resistant posture toward the abuses and transgressions
of European American colonialism, expansion, and
labor exploitation; they continued their defiance
through insurrections and rebellions of varying magnitudes outside the swamp (Leaming 1979). In all, it
seems that from circa 1607 to 1730, Native Americans
were the primary inhabitants of the swamp proper.
Although there is no reliable estimate as to the size of
this tribally and culturally mixed population, several
researchers posit low numbers of Native Americans in
the area at the time of contact (Blanton 2003,
Lichtenberger 1994:8).
INTRALIMITAL MARRONAGE IN THE GREAT
DISMAL SWAMP, CIRCA 17001860
The Dismal Swamp was one of the few places in the
United States where geographic conditions made it
possible for a large colony of runaways to establish
a permanent refuge. [Bogger 1982:2]
After the rise of slavery, Africans and African
Americans began to flee to and reside in the Great
Dismal Swamp. Some historians have concluded that
the largest intralimital maroon population in the United
States existed in the Dismal Swamp during the eighteenth century (Aptheker 1996:168, Genovese 1979).
Leaming (1979) argued that African American fugitives
and Native Americans (as well as some fugitive
European Americans, such as Irish indentured servants)
developed a complexly transformative but perpetual
cultural and social system between circa 1630 and 1865.
It is clear, though, that of all the fugitive groups, selfemancipated African Americans were the predominant
12

TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY 2006 VOL. 14(1)

occupants of the Great Dismal Swamp from circa 1730

till the Civil War.
Leaming (1979) has found that, as early as 1719,
African Americans and Native Americans joined
together in an insurrection that originated in the Dismal
Swamp; such collaborations were not uncommon in
the Chesapeake Bay region at the time (Johnston
1970:273). In 1728, William Byrd encountered a family
of African Americans in the swamp that claimed to be
free; he had his doubts about the veracity of this claim
(Byrd 1967:56). It seems that after circa 1730, a generation or two into the intensification of the slavery
system, absconding African Americans joined existing
mixed-cultural communities.
One of the earlier discussions of Great Dismal
Swamp African American maroons on record is by
J. F. D. Smyth, who wrote, Run-away negroes have
resided in these places for twelve, twenty, or thirty years
and upwards, subsisting themselves in the swamp upon
corn, hogs, and fowls that they raised on some of the
spots not perpetually under water, nor subject to be
flooded, as forty-nine parts out of fifty are; and on such
spots they have erected habitations, and cleared small
fields around them (Smyth 1784:239).
Other descriptions of the era are similar, and many
of these highlight the fact that maroons lived on high
ground in cabins or shacks, grew their own food and
hunted, and augmented their supplies through pilfering
at farmsteads peripheral to the swamp (Schoepf 1911).
One interesting account, quite likely dating to the late
eighteenth century, is found in the business ledger of
William Aitchison and James Parker, two investors in
the Dismal Swamp Canal Company: About 15 years
ago/a Negroe man ran away from his/Master & lived
by himself in the Desert [Great Dismal Swamp]/about
13 years & came out 2 years ago/he raisd Rice & other
grain & made/Chairs Tables &c. & musical instruments (Aitchison and Parker 1763:51). This entry is
quite informative because it not only provides a rare
primary-source discussion of long-term marooning but
also describes how the maroon engaged in handicraft
and subsistence-level production for survival (see also
Crayon 1856). In another case, a woman and her two
children were reported to have hidden in the Dismal
Swamp for about seven years before finally being
captured (Bogger 1982:2, Simpson 1990:7173).
Advertisements for runaways who were known to be
heading for the Dismal Swamp are also common in the
newspapers of the era (see Bogger 1982:2, 8; Wolf
2002:46). Finally, during the midnineteenth century,
Olmsted (1996:120121) details a discussion he had
with Joseph Church, an enslaved laborer in the swamp
who had, sadly, been owned by a church prior to his
tenure in the Dismal Swamp. Church told Olmsted that

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[maroon] children were born, bred, lived, and died here

[the Dismal Swamp], that he, Church, had seen
[maroon] skeletons, and had helped to bury bodies
recently dead, and that there were maroons that lived in
the swamp that had been there all their lives
(1996:121). Church also mentioned that they had huts
in back places that were difficult of access, and
Olmsted reported that he felt that Church had been
himself quite intimate with them (Olmsted 1996:121).
The maroons of the Great Dismal swamp were
implicated, directly and indirectly, in a few of the more
notorious insurrections of the antebellum era (Leaming
1979). Around the time of Gabriels Rebellion, newspaper accounts, in 1802, describe increased insubordination among the enslaved population around Elizabeth
City, North Carolina, that was attributed to Tom
Copper, an infamous maroon in the Dismal Swamp.
There were also reports of a substantial population of
armed maroons from the Dismal Swamp amassing near
the VirginiaNorth Carolina border (see Aptheker
1996:154155, Bogger 1982:3). Dismal Swamp
maroons also figured prominently in Nat Turners
Rebellion. Nat Turner had intended to flee to the Dismal
Swamp after he had finished his insurrectionary work
in 1831. The National Gazette and Literary Register
states that members of Nat Turners cohort who were
still at large:
will be too anxious to bury themselves in the
recesses of the Dismal Swamp, to give a moments
well founded uneasiness to the inhabitants of the
surrounding countryside. It is believed that their
gang consisted principally of runaways, who had
been for years collecting in the swamp, and who are
supposed to have amounted to a formidable number.
[National Gazette and Literary Register 1831:1639]
This means, among other things, that maroons left the
swamp to assist Turner, and the plan was for all to return
to the Dismal afterward.
Several researchers have recovered a range of
sources that indirectly and directly tell of maroon communities and their settlements in the Dismal Swamp,
with some sources more acceptable as evidence than
others (Leaming 1979:324574, Martin 2004:108115).
Citing one of the more compelling sources, Martin
(2004:113114) discusses the circa-1870 reminiscences
of Caleb Winslow, a later abolitionist who grew up during the antebellum era in North Carolina at the edges of
the Dismal Swamp. Winslow discusses how maroons
were a law unto themselves and that no pursuing
master ever dared to set foot within their domain, or
daring so to do ever returned to tell the tale (Martin
2004:113). Winslow suggests that the maroons who
lived deep in the remote Dismal Swamp developed their

own system of governance, had strict rules in order to

maintain safety, and, mirroring Joseph Churchs comments, that scores of dusky children have been born
and reared to manhood within the bosom of this swamp,
who never beheld the face of a white man (Martin
2004:114). In 1856, Porte Crayon (1856) reported on
his encounter with a maroon named Osman (an Islamic
name) in a well-known writing about the antebellum
Dismal Swamp. Primary and secondary sources indicate that substantial numbers of maroons, following
petit and grand intralimital modes, did inhabit the
Dismal Swamp between circa 1720 and 1860. Maroon
population estimates vary to a marked degree, ranging
from 1,000 to 40,000 individuals (Aptheker 1996,
Genovese 1979); according to one estimate, maroons
with a value of over one million and a half dollars
lived in the Dismal Swamp (Simpson 1990:71). In any
case, it is certain that thousands of maroons lived in the
swamp (Franklin and Schweninger 1999:86). In
response to this significant and flagrant marronage, the
North Carolina legislature enacted, in 1847, A BILL to
Provide for the Apprehension of Runaway Slaves in the
Great Dismal Swamp AND OTHER PURPOSES (cited
in Martin 2004:99; see also Wolf 2002:6364). This bit
of legislation stated that many slaves belonging to persons residing or having plantations in the neighborhood
of the great Dismal Swamp, have left the service of
their masters and taken refuge in the said swamp and
that these maroons had assistance from neer-do-wells
outside the swamp (cited in Martin 2004:100). The
legal document proceeds to make assertions regarding
the corrupting and seducing influences of the evil
example and evil practices of maroons on otherwise
subordinate enslaved persons (Martin 2004:100). This
legislation had a profound impact on not only maroons
but also enslaved canal laborers who had been working
in the swamp for close to eighty years by the time the
legislation was enacted (Martin 2004:100).
ENSLAVED CANAL COMPANY LABORERS,
CIRCA 17601860
I have said this MPherson was an overseer where
slaves were employed in cutting canals. The labour
there is very severe. The ground is often very
boggy: the negroes are up to the middle or much
deeper in mud and water, cutting away roots and
baling out mud: if they can keep their heads above
water they work on.
Life of Moses Grandy
Mercantilist and capitalist efforts to gain profits from
the recalcitrant landscape began in the 1760s and
continued well past the Civil War. The first canal was
DANIEL O. SAYERS

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excavated in the 1760s, under the authority of George

Washington and other investors. Thereafter, until the
Civil War, numerous corporate concerns were formed,
and several canals of considerable length (e.g., 1020
miles) were excavated by African American labor.
Slowly, the Great Dismal Swamp became a significant
politicaleconomic and commercial landscape. Canal
companies reaped fortunes from timber, wood products,
and canal tolls (Arnold 1969; Dismal Swamp Canal
Company Records 18151865). Even though most of
the Great Dismal Swamp was divided into corporate
holdings on paper, large areas of relatively undeveloped
and natural swampland remained that defied the logic
of efficiency and economic control (Cohen 2001). The
result of capitalist efforts at exploiting and transforming
the swamp was a unique landscape where long linear
tracts of land associated with the development of canals
were surrounded by vast areas of largely unaltered natural swampland.
By the second decade of the nineteenth century, a
fairly sizable population of enslaved workers was
present in the Dismal Swamp (Wolf 2002), and they
were employed at, primarily, canal construction and
lumbering. By the late 1830s, Edmund Ruffin surmised
that there were about 500 men employed in the swamp
at the time of his travels therein (Ruffin 1837; Simpson
1990:48). Also, Moses Grandy, an enslaved worker in
the Dismal Swamp along Jericho Ditch in the 1820s and
1830s, mentions one supervisor having 500 to 700
men under his control (Grandy 2003[1844]:170). This
trend appears to have continued into the 1840s and
up till the Civil War (see Fouts 1995; Olmsted
1996:114116, 120). For example, after the 1847 North
Carolina legislation regarding maroons (discussed
above), county clerks required descriptions of individual enslaved laborers in the Dismal Swamp; one document lists and describes more than 400 enslaved
workers employed by just one company of many operating in the swamp at the time (Fouts 1995; see also
Wolf 2002:6364).
The documentary record makes it clear that during
the period from 1760 to 1860, thousands of enslaved
and free African American laborers were brought into
the swamp to live and to work for canal companies.
Furthermore, there do exist descriptions and drawings
of the camps in which these workers lived (e.g., Crayon
1856; Olmsted 1996) that have great potential relevance
for archaeological research. When we then consider the
coeval and earlier presence of thousands of marooning
African Americans, it seems accurate to say that the
Dismal Swamp was an African American landscape on
several levels, certainly after 1730 or so at any rate.
With the high population of African Americans over
this period, it would be expected that some degree of
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TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY 2006 VOL. 14(1)

interdependence and meaningful interaction occurred

between maroons and enslaved laborers. Although limited in information about Native Americans, the documentary record clearly outlines a unique system of
labor and goods exchange that emerged between
enslaved and marooning African Americans.
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MARRONAGE
AND ENSLAVEMENT
Maroons were quite significant to the labor regime that
evolved for canal company timber production and canal
excavation during the nineteenth century. Canal company laborers were paid outright for shingles after a
certain amount was produced (Crayon 1856; Olmsted
1996:114115). Individual workers produced shingles
(if that was the job they were given), and, according to
Olmsted, it is only required of him that he shall have
made, after a half a year has passed, such a quantity of
shingles as shall be worth to his master so much money
as is paid to his owner for his services, and shall refund
the value of the clothing and provisions he has required
(Olmsted 1996:115; see also Crayon 1856:451).
Otherwise, as Olmsted (1996:115) says, [t]he slave
lumberman . . . lives measurably as a free man; hunts,
fishes, eats, drinks, smokes, and sleeps, plays and
works, each when and as much as he pleases (Olmsted
1996:115; for another claim that canal laborers had
unusual levels of freedom, see Ruffin 1837:518). This
relatively rare labor system allowed much latitude for
canal laborers to get their shingles in the prescribed
time and to accrue wealth in order to buy their freedom
(see Grandy 2003). Maroons helped canal workers to
this end.
According to Crayon, The Swamp is said to be
inhabited by a number of escaped slaves, who spend
their lives, and even raise families, in its impenetrable
fastness. These people live by woodcraft, external
depredation, and more frequently, it is probable, by
working for the task shingle-makers at reduced wages
(1856:451). He also notes that shingle-makers return
greater quantities of work than could possibly have
been produced by their own labor, and draw for two or
three times the amount of provisions necessary for their
own subsistence (Crayon 1856:451). A Canadian
maroon, interviewed about his flight into the Dismal
Swamp in the 1850s, also generally mentions this system: I boarded wit a man what giv me two dollars a
month for de first one: arter dat I made shingles for
mysef (Redpath 1996[1859]:243). Importantly, he
adds that dar are heaps ob folks in dar to work. Most
on em are fugitives, or else hirin dar time (Redpath
1996:243). Canal companies turned a blind eye to the
presence of maroons in their gangs for obvious profitmotivated reasons.

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The Canadian maroons testimony sheds light on a

few social and political aspects of the marooncanal
company laborer dynamic. He, for instance, speaks of a
preacher named Fisher, who was a maroon. Apparently,
preacher Fisher was a significant figure in the swamp
at that time: Manys been de zortation I have sperienced, dat desounded trough de trees, an we would
almos spect de judgement day was comin, dar would
be such loud nibrations, as de preacher called dem;
specially down by the lake [Lake Drummond, in the
Virginia part of the swamp] (Redpath 1996:244). Thus
we see that religiosity permeated, to an unknown extent,
the maroon and canal laborer system.
However, not all relationships among maroons and
canal workers were beneficial for both parties. Olmsted
tells how canal company laborers, betray them
[maroons] instead of paying them (1996:121).
Olmsted also mentions that a class of maroon capturers
had emerged in the 1840s, apparently because of the
chronic marronage in the Dismal Swamp (Olmsted
1996:121; see also Bogger 1982). However, they appear
to have focused on maroons who worked in the canal
company camps.
It appears then that a rather complicated socialeconomic system emerged after the two groups of African
Americans coresided in the swamp. Although there were
maroons who lived on their own in more remote locations of the swamp, many maroons, it appears, joined up
with the company laborers to gain access to goods,
money, and companionship. Religious ceremonies at
Lake Drummond appear to have supplied a spiritual element to life in the swamp and one has to suspect that
other aspects of religion filtered through daily life in the
swamp. And whereas selfish and economically motivated
betrayals were evidently common enough, it appears that
most maroons were able to work in the swamp in relative
anonymity. In general, what is apparent in the documentary record is that a Dismal Swamp political economy,
replete with unique exchange systems, subsistence activities, and religiosity, thrived during the preCivil War era.
EXILIC LANDSCAPES, DEFIANCE, AND
ALIENATION
And just beyond the frontier between us and the
outsiders is the perilous territory of not-belonging:
this is to where primitive time peoples were banished,
and where in the modern era immense aggregates of
humanity loiter as refugees and displaced persons.
Edward Said
As has been made clear, the Great Dismal Swamp can
be considered a diasporic landscape where people from
quite disparate backgrounds found some form of refuge

from the exploitations and transgressions of colonial

expansion, human captivity, and enslavement in the outside world. Although there were significant differences
in the motivations behind the occupation of the Dismal
Swamp by these groups, the concept of exile, as presented by Edward Said (1990), may provide an avenue
for expanded discussion of the significance of these
diasporans, their political economies, and their remote
landscapes.
For Said, exile is an existential and socialized state
of being in and via which human actors, as individuals
or groups, form identities, develop historical senses of
self-worth, and, in some instances of large group exile,
cultivate and nurture nationalistic ideologies. Exile is
not a position in which one finds oneself, per se. Rather,
exile is a self-positioning forced on humans by other
humans. For the exiled, these processes create a perpetually foreign present and self. Thus, the memories of
and identification with erstwhile homelands, places of
nativity, familiar communities, and personal pasts are
cleft from that present and are also made foreign and
diaphanous. To be exiled is to be forced into developing
a new state of uprooted being and all that such existential rending entails. And one of the significant results of
exile is the development of notions and senses of
defiance to the constraints and impositions of forced
transplantation. Quoting Simone Weil, Said posits the
significance of the exilic problem: To be rooted is
perhaps the most important and least recognized need
of the human soul (Said 1990:364; see also Malkki
1997:52). And for Said, the roots of identity and place
that have primary existential consequence are those
binds to place that are developed prior to exile:
Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift between
a human being and a native place, between the self
and its true home: its essential sadness can never be
surmounted. And while it is true that literature and
history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even
triumphant episodes in an exiles life, these are no
more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling
sorrow of estrangement. The achievements of exile
are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever. [Said 1990:357]
Said suggests rather strongly that exile is inextricably
linked to estrangement and alienation. Exile is alienation of a grand order. Thus, the exilic life is always situated within a perpetual alienation from self, others,
and place where all formerly existing structurations of
life and mind are now somewhat apparitional and most
certainly discontinuous with the present. Interestingly,
in Marxian analysis, alienation and estrangement are
integral aspects of capitalist production and shape
DANIEL O. SAYERS

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human interactions and relations of all sorts (e.g.,

relations of production, labor relations, laborer relations
with commodification processes; see Meszaros 1971,
Ollman 1973, Sayers 2003). Equally significant, alienation also plays a critical role in the development of
resistant class consciousness. Thus, the potential significance of exile to politicaleconomic analysis is quite
apparent as alienation and exile seem to dovetail in their
psychosocial and political economic significance.
So, what were the Native American and African
diasporas but historically recognized instances of mass
exile? Native Americans were perpetually forced from
their homelands and their historical ties to time and
place. Cultural continuities were irrevocably transformed, families and communities shattered, and roots
to space and place decisively cut. Africans were forced
into labor regimes across the Atlantic and forever
removed from their places of nativity. From these mass
exiles came novel communities, cultures, and ideologies, to be sure, but also with them came oppression,
marginalization, sexual and physical exploitation, constant re-transplantation (or re-exile), and forced labor,
among other things. Of course, intricately bound within
these historical processes were the varied and continuous forms of resistance discussed in this article. As
people willfully tried to maintain and/or transform
senses of self and community amidst the alienation and
chaos of exilic life in motion (Shami 2001), their
chronic reactions to the transgressions of the political
economic orders in which they found themselves stood
out as defiance to exile and abuse.
The historical political economy of exile pervaded
the material conditions of existence in the Dismal
Swamp as well as the psychosocial and ideological
aspects of community and individual life. Therefore, the
dialectical relations between exile and numerous other
phenomena at several scales can potentially be explored.
For instance, the dialectics of gender relationships
within exilic conditions can be studied through various
sources of data (e.g., documentary, oral traditional, and
archaeological; see Partnoy 1988). Also, general and
specific aspects of self- and social identity formation
in exilic communities can be examined (Bisharet 1999).
As one last example, the localized roles of space and
landscape as a geographies of exilic alienation could be
profitably studied; the Dismal Swamp, ironically a sanctioned refuge now and an unsanctioned refuge of a very
different order prior to the Civil War, seems most opportune for such explorations.
When we look then at the three general groups of
inhabitants of the Dismal Swamp we are now in a position to see initial connections between exilic processes
and the fact of the continued presence of these people.
Native Americans and marooning Africans and African
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Americans in the Dismal Swamp were in some sense

adding another layer of exile to their preexisting exilic
condition. It is reasonable to postulate that in so doing,
they were seeking a space and place in which to re-root
themselves after exile in order to elaborate lifeworlds that
were closer to their ideals and in which they could form
meaningful communities. They essentially undermined
the role of exile as a form of cruelty inflicted on humans
by one another by opting to exile themselves and turn
the tables on the outside system in a mode of counterexile. Canal laborers also fit into this framework. In
instances in which canal laborers chose to work in the
swamp, they were opting to exile themselves from the
broader exilic system, much like the maroons and Native
Americans. In cases in which the enslaved laborer was
forced to work in the swamp, it was yet another layer of
forced exile, re-exile, that so circumscribed all diasporic
captives. Obviously, when considering all residents of
the Dismal Swamp, it can be said that the centuries of
variegated forms of Diasporic exile helped forge highly
complex politicaleconomic and cultural systems in that
remote landscape.
CONCLUSION
It can be said quite comfortably that the Great Dismal
Swamp was a diasporic landscape par excellence and
that defiance by thousands of exiles was an integral
aspect of that landscape and the lives of its denizens.
This was truly a marginal landscape where subaltern
alienation, freedom, enslavement, and resistance
existed in the interstices of an intensifying regional and
global capitalist economy. Although the general outlines of this history can be reconstructed, it remains the
task to develop a comprehensive understanding of how
exilic and counter-exilic lives were lived in the swamp
and what the roles of the specific landscape(s) of the
Dismal Swamp were in these processes.
The documentary record, although extremely
helpful, is not the only source of information from
which to develop a sound understanding of the social
and politicaleconomic histories of the exiles of the
Dismal Swamp. The author has initiated the GDSLS
with the intention of beginning to expand research
beyond extant documents and to bring the tools of
anthropology to bear on the subject of the exilic use of
the swamp prior to the Civil War. To this end, archaeological work in the United States Fish and Wildlife
Services Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife
Refuge in North Carolina and Virginia was initiated in
2003 and is scheduled for completion this year. Thus
far, several archaeological sites have been discovered in
the Refuge, many of which quite likely relate to
maroons, postcontact Native Americans, and enslaved
canal company laborers (see Sayers 2005a, 2005b;

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Sayers et al. n.d.). The archaeological recovery of materials left behind by these diasporans and features representing their use of landscape and place to try to
mitigate and undermine the effects of exile, exploitation, and alienation will provide telling historical
insight into how the communities operated, survived,
developed, and, perhaps, fell apart at the liminal edges
of expansionist capitalism. Also, interviews with
descendents of maroons, canal company laborers, and
Native Americans have also begun to be performed, and
there is much potential in this area for developing at
least a preliminary sense of the range and significance
of oral traditions that have survived to the present.
The GDSLS is making great strides in bringing
together formerly unknown or poorly understood
aspects of the preCivil War diasporic histories of a
major landscape element of the Chesapeake Bay region.
Perhaps as important, this study will finally allow for a
telling of a story of these quasi-mythologized but
largely forgotten and ignored people. Theirs is a story of
defiance, exile and counter-exile, self-emancipation,
and an active search for self-empowerment. Their histories are evocative and teach us that willful actions, even
from within oppressive straits, can inspire great
changes in the manners in which people of the modern
era live. Such reminders are indeed still invaluable and
necessary because the capitalist order still exacts its
heavy destructive toll on many, many lives.
NOTES
Many, many thanks to Lee Baker and Brad Weiss for
inspiring the production of this article and to Danna
Greenfield, Lee Baker, and the reviewers of this article
for helping make it a better piece. In having helped make
the Great Dismal Swamp Landscape Study possible, in
terms of counsel, inspiration, ongoing dialogue, and
assistance in the field, I wish to thank the following individuals: Vipra Ghimire, Brendan Burke, Aaron Henry,
Marley Brown III, William Fisher, Terrance Weik,
Michael Blakey, John Wilson, Martin Gallivan, Julie
Rowand, Shelley Hight, Bryan Poovey, Cindy Lane,
Delores Freeman, Brent Fortenberry, Audrey Horning
and her volunteer students, Dan Lynch, Dave Brown,
Thane Harpole, Jeff Dame, Kathleen Bragdon, Dennis
Blanton, Pat Gammon, Mary Keith Garrett, Ari
Hartmann, Michael S. Nassaney, Susan Sayers, Anthony
P. Sayers, Warren Perry, Jackie Martin, Jim Christensen,
Josh Walsh, and Gordon Yamazaki. The Canon National
Parks Science Scholars Program has generously supported this project through a multiyear grant. The
College of William and Mary Anthropology Department
and the Office of Grants and Research have also supported this project since its inception. CRT, Inc., president Troy Schindelbeck of Grand Haven, Michigan, has

my thanks for the use of quality archaeological field

equipment that his company produces. The archaeological fieldwork performed for this project was made possible by the good graces of the United States Fish and
Wildlife Service and the fine staff at the Great Dismal
Swamp National Wildlife Refuge Office, Suffolk,
Virginia, under ARPA research permit #2004-01-DIS
and USFWS special collections permit #C-2004-01.
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