City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763-1856

City of Refuge explores petit marronage, slave economies, and internal improvements in the Great Dismal Swamp, challenging perceptions of desolation and highlighting the resilience of black communities. It examines the interactions between maroons, company slaves, and white agents, and their impact on race and slavery in the region.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 168 pages
Publication date: 15 October 2021
Publisher: University of Georgia Press

City of Refuge is a captivating tale of petit marronage, an informal slave economy, and the development of internal improvements in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. This vast wetland, often deemed uninhabitable by white Virginians and North Carolinians, became a refuge for black slaves who sought to escape the dangers of flight. Instead of taking the risky route of the Underground Railroad, they fled into the swamp's remote sectors and engaged in petit marronage, a form of escape and fugitivity that was prevalent throughout the Atlantic world. In this alternative, maroon communities often neighbored slave-labor camps, which were located on the swamp's periphery and operated by companies like the Dismal Swamp Land Company. These camps employed slave labor to facilitate the extraction of the swamp's natural resources. Interestingly, company slaves often engaged in exchanges of goods and provisions with maroons, forming networks that not only helped to sustain maroon colonies and communities but also padded company accounts. Marcus P. Nevius, in his examination of life, commerce, and social activity in the Great Dismal Swamp, delves into the historiographies of slave resistance and abolitionism in the early American republic. City of Refuge utilizes a diverse range of primary sources, including runaway advertisements, planters and merchants' records, inventories, letterbooks, and correspondence, abolitionist pamphlets and broadsides, county free black registries, and the records and inventories of private companies. Through these sources, Nevius explores how American maroons, enslaved canal laborers, white company agents, and commission merchants shaped and were shaped by race and slavery in this significant region of the late Atlantic world.

Weight: 270g
Dimension: 151 x 226 x 14 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780820361697