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Maroon Communities in South Carolina: A Documentary Record
A detailed history of communities of escaped slaves who survived in South Carolina swamps
Maroon communities were small, secret encampments formed by runaway slaves, typically in isolated and defensible sections of wilderness. The phenomenon began as runaway slaves, unable to escape to safe havens in sympathetic colonies, opted instead to band together for survival near the sites of their former enslavement. In this first survey of documentary records of marronage in colonial and antebellum South Carolina, Timothy James Lockley offers students and scholars of history an opportunity to assess the unique features and trends of the maroon experience in the Palmetto State.
South Carolina's maroon communities were typically formed in dense swamps where self-contained communities could remain hidden beyond the commercial interests of white society, game could be hunted, lands could be adapted for farming, and plantations could be reached if needed for raiding and trading. Marronage was a persistent problem for planter society in that its success left fully formed runaway-slave camps within striking distance of white communities and interactions between these two worlds were often violent. In addition maroons often maintained ties to enslaved African Americans on their former plantations, creating a web of community that operated outside of white control. Lockley surveys eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century historical sources gathered from newspaper reports, court proceedings, government and military records, correspondence, and reward advertisements to illustrate the efforts of white South Carolinians to locate maroon communities, defend against raiding parties, and kill or capture runaways living in these societies. Lockley organizes these documents chronologically, dealing first with the origins of marronage, then with two surges in maroon activity just before and just after the American Revolution. After a lull in marronage at the start of the nineteenth century, a final swell occurred during the 1820s.
These primary documents are augmented by eight maps and by Lockley's introduction and afterword, which place the maroon societies of South Carolina in the larger context of marronage in other regions of the New World.
Maroon communities were small, secret encampments formed by runaway slaves, typically in isolated and defensible sections of wilderness. The phenomenon began as runaway slaves, unable to escape to safe havens in sympathetic colonies, opted instead to band together for survival near the sites of their former enslavement. In this first survey of documentary records of marronage in colonial and antebellum South Carolina, Timothy James Lockley offers students and scholars of history an opportunity to assess the unique features and trends of the maroon experience in the Palmetto State.
South Carolina's maroon communities were typically formed in dense swamps where self-contained communities could remain hidden beyond the commercial interests of white society, game could be hunted, lands could be adapted for farming, and plantations could be reached if needed for raiding and trading. Marronage was a persistent problem for planter society in that its success left fully formed runaway-slave camps within striking distance of white communities and interactions between these two worlds were often violent. In addition maroons often maintained ties to enslaved African Americans on their former plantations, creating a web of community that operated outside of white control. Lockley surveys eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century historical sources gathered from newspaper reports, court proceedings, government and military records, correspondence, and reward advertisements to illustrate the efforts of white South Carolinians to locate maroon communities, defend against raiding parties, and kill or capture runaways living in these societies. Lockley organizes these documents chronologically, dealing first with the origins of marronage, then with two surges in maroon activity just before and just after the American Revolution. After a lull in marronage at the start of the nineteenth century, a final swell occurred during the 1820s.
These primary documents are augmented by eight maps and by Lockley's introduction and afterword, which place the maroon societies of South Carolina in the larger context of marronage in other regions of the New World.
168 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 29, 2022
Interesting source for HIS457
December 13, 2012
As Timothy Lockley demonstrates in his edited documentary record of Maroon Communities in South Carolina, “marronage was a far more serious problem for eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century South Carolina than has hitherto been acknowledged, involving more maroons in more locations and over a longer period of time than any history of slavery in the state has indicated.” Consisting mainly of primary source material from the South Carolina House of Commons General Assembly and supplemented by regional newsprint and occasional private correspondence, Lockley has assembled a loosely-threaded volume of documents, reprinted directly from his exploration of the South Carolina Department of Archives, which portray in chronological order the consistent appearance of runaway slave activity in the swamplands surrounding urban and plantation life in South Carolina from 1711 through the 1830s.
The simple fact that Lockley has “edited,” not “authored” the volume speaks to the paucity of secondary source material available, such that fundamental gaps on marronage in America warrant the publishing of archives themselves. Significant contributions to the study of maroon communities (often termed marronage and referring to runaway slave encampments in New World slave-holding societies) have followed Richard Price’s foundational Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas largely in keeping with their more prevalent and better-documented existence in the Caribbean and South America, particularly regarding Brazil, the Guianas, Cuba and Jamaica. On the North American mainland, the existence of marronage has gone largely unexplored, partially due to assumptions about the nature of British-American chattel-slavery and the tendency to view slave resistance in the United States primarily in the form of the slave revolt. Lockley’s careful treatment of his source material is meticulously footnoted, interspersed with minor commentary at key moments, and provides essential context with larger discussions at each chapter’s outset, making his volume an exceptional resource for interested scholars, both in terms of the archival leads and the demonstration of marronage in the public record.
Seen largely through the eyes of the South Carolina legislature, correspondence between governors in South Carolina, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia, petitioning planters, concerned citizens, officer reports, personal accounts, and newspapers such as the Charleston Courier, the Savannah Georgian and the Gazette of the State of Georgia, the “depredations” and “petty plunderings” of “a few runaway Negroes” provoke such consistent and considerable anxiety over the course of Lockley’s record that larger patterns become recognizable; marronage in South Carolina was something greater than the sum of isolated incidents. In particular, Lockley does well in his minimalist contributions to situate marronage in South Carolina against the context of other forms of resistance (such as the Stono Rebellion in 1739 or the Vesey Conspiracy in 1822), its occurrence in the Spanish Americas, the French colonies, Brazil and the British Caribbean, and especially its observable fluctuations within the backdrop of larger historical trends in South Carolina. These included the largely Barbadian composition of early planter society, the consistent import of free-born African slaves through 1808 (including 40,000 between 1803 and 1807), the exploitation by the enslaved of planter instability, distraction and/or chaos related to conflict with the British including the Stamp Act of 1765, the Revolutionary War in the 1770s and the War of 1812, and confusion over the boundary line between Georgia and South Carolina.
Maroon communities in South Carolina were heavily dependent on the surrounding swampland and marshes for survival, building small, highly-mobile subsistence communities exploiting their “off the grid” location. Anglophone culture largely found swampland impenetrable; as property it impeded large scale farming, as terrain it proved impossible for horseback and visually homogenous, as wetland it housed troublesome vegetation, reptiles, insects and disease, all of which maroons used to their advantage, employing camouflage, canoes, treetop vantage points, small scale farms and especially localized knowledge of pathways, hideouts and food sources. Maroon camps were by no means impoverished; often they were found well-provisioned with housing, barrels of rice, dozens of canoes, wells, hog pens, pots, axes, scaffolds for drying meats etc. In the eyes of slaveholders and legislators, runaway slaves were a continual problem, applying amorphous pressure on resources, often quantified in small groups as they ambushed locals en route to trade or ransacked plantation farms, slaughtering or stealing cattle, weapons, grain, tools and clothing. Spanning the documentary record are reports in the legislature of runaway activity, from rewards for “Outrages and Robberys” and petitions by concerned citizens for the mustering of militia to pleas for compensation for lost “property” by slaveholders and dispatches between officer and governor. It is clear that no decades passed without incident.
More engaging are the larger “bursts” of marronage referred to by Lockley, such as the 40 or so “Savannah River” maroons, or the 100 or so runaways in Colleton County in the mid-1760s, troublesome enough to compel action by Lt. Gov. William Bull to the South Carolina Board of Trade, complaints by the Grand Juries of Georgia and South Carolina, and the hiring of Catawba Indians (“professional slave catchers”) to finally locate and destroy such communities. Indeed, one such notorious maroon by the name of Joe managed to evade local forces for over four years, causing uproar upon the shooting of planter George Ford in 1820, despite public and private bounties, pursuit by state militias and local hunting parties, and reports in newspapers statewide. These “larger bursts” of marronage, from 1765-1774, 1775-1787 and 1813-1829 are not attributable to any single cause, although Lockley’s attention to their parallels with U.S./British conflict is enticing.
An enduring problem with the study of marronage in the United States is the complete dependence on institutional observation by its detractors. Lockley is hesitant to engage in speculation, and rightfully so, even as the general impression of his documentary record offers substantial pause for a reconsideration of the existence of marronage in the slaveholding South. Is the ebb and flow of this documentary record reflective of political patterns, or changing awareness within the cultures of marronage formed in swamps across South Carolina? It is unclear as to how involved maroons may have been in the Stono Rebellion, and certainly changes in individual leadership, group dynamics, historical contingencies and available resources may have had just as much of an effect on the presence or absence of marronage in the public record at any given time. There is also the issue of suppressed reportage, touched on only briefly here, in light of the fact that slaveholders occasionally (or perhaps often?) avoided publicizing enslaved resistance in attempts to keep their own captives “in the dark.” Some maroon communities may have preferred to lay low and avoid the ire of slaveholders altogether, while others may have existed in far greater numbers than attributable from the perspective of white townspeople.
If there are any complaints to be lodged against Lockley, they are trivial. A highly guarded seven page Afterward seems about all Lockley is willing to offer, which on one hand allows the record to speak for itself, but on another could benefit from the opinion of its compiler, given the previously mentioned state of U.S. maroon historiography. There is a bigger picture here with the consistent and substantive presence of maroons in South Carolina, to be linked with other regions in the Deep South, with insurrections, trade networks, and ultimately the limits of white Southern slaveholding hegemony. Additionally, we are left to assume that Lockley has scoured the state archives in South Carolina and relevant correspondences in personal and professional source material, but we are given very little information regarding the discriminatory approach taken to formulating such a “documentary record.” Further, it might prove useful to examine the known use patterns for swampland that remain to this day “unsettled,” as, given maroons’ environmentally-determined patterns and the abundance of activity described by Lockley, it is reasonable to believe many were in some form or fashion constantly inhabited or continued beyond the direct observations of occasional white interlopers.
The study of maroon communities may always orbit more identifiable phenomenon, given the speculative nature of research located in the gaps of the historical record. However, Alain Lockley’s edited volume is surprisingly rich with maroon activity and lucidly presented in a manner that manages to tell a story despite the shifting boundaries and moving targets. Based on the necessary and invaluable contribution of primary material contributed here, it will take historians willing to enter the swamps with more tenacity and imagination than that exercised by colonial militias in South Carolina, if any further maroon communities are to be located, unless that is, they don’t want to be found.
The simple fact that Lockley has “edited,” not “authored” the volume speaks to the paucity of secondary source material available, such that fundamental gaps on marronage in America warrant the publishing of archives themselves. Significant contributions to the study of maroon communities (often termed marronage and referring to runaway slave encampments in New World slave-holding societies) have followed Richard Price’s foundational Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas largely in keeping with their more prevalent and better-documented existence in the Caribbean and South America, particularly regarding Brazil, the Guianas, Cuba and Jamaica. On the North American mainland, the existence of marronage has gone largely unexplored, partially due to assumptions about the nature of British-American chattel-slavery and the tendency to view slave resistance in the United States primarily in the form of the slave revolt. Lockley’s careful treatment of his source material is meticulously footnoted, interspersed with minor commentary at key moments, and provides essential context with larger discussions at each chapter’s outset, making his volume an exceptional resource for interested scholars, both in terms of the archival leads and the demonstration of marronage in the public record.
Seen largely through the eyes of the South Carolina legislature, correspondence between governors in South Carolina, Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia, petitioning planters, concerned citizens, officer reports, personal accounts, and newspapers such as the Charleston Courier, the Savannah Georgian and the Gazette of the State of Georgia, the “depredations” and “petty plunderings” of “a few runaway Negroes” provoke such consistent and considerable anxiety over the course of Lockley’s record that larger patterns become recognizable; marronage in South Carolina was something greater than the sum of isolated incidents. In particular, Lockley does well in his minimalist contributions to situate marronage in South Carolina against the context of other forms of resistance (such as the Stono Rebellion in 1739 or the Vesey Conspiracy in 1822), its occurrence in the Spanish Americas, the French colonies, Brazil and the British Caribbean, and especially its observable fluctuations within the backdrop of larger historical trends in South Carolina. These included the largely Barbadian composition of early planter society, the consistent import of free-born African slaves through 1808 (including 40,000 between 1803 and 1807), the exploitation by the enslaved of planter instability, distraction and/or chaos related to conflict with the British including the Stamp Act of 1765, the Revolutionary War in the 1770s and the War of 1812, and confusion over the boundary line between Georgia and South Carolina.
Maroon communities in South Carolina were heavily dependent on the surrounding swampland and marshes for survival, building small, highly-mobile subsistence communities exploiting their “off the grid” location. Anglophone culture largely found swampland impenetrable; as property it impeded large scale farming, as terrain it proved impossible for horseback and visually homogenous, as wetland it housed troublesome vegetation, reptiles, insects and disease, all of which maroons used to their advantage, employing camouflage, canoes, treetop vantage points, small scale farms and especially localized knowledge of pathways, hideouts and food sources. Maroon camps were by no means impoverished; often they were found well-provisioned with housing, barrels of rice, dozens of canoes, wells, hog pens, pots, axes, scaffolds for drying meats etc. In the eyes of slaveholders and legislators, runaway slaves were a continual problem, applying amorphous pressure on resources, often quantified in small groups as they ambushed locals en route to trade or ransacked plantation farms, slaughtering or stealing cattle, weapons, grain, tools and clothing. Spanning the documentary record are reports in the legislature of runaway activity, from rewards for “Outrages and Robberys” and petitions by concerned citizens for the mustering of militia to pleas for compensation for lost “property” by slaveholders and dispatches between officer and governor. It is clear that no decades passed without incident.
More engaging are the larger “bursts” of marronage referred to by Lockley, such as the 40 or so “Savannah River” maroons, or the 100 or so runaways in Colleton County in the mid-1760s, troublesome enough to compel action by Lt. Gov. William Bull to the South Carolina Board of Trade, complaints by the Grand Juries of Georgia and South Carolina, and the hiring of Catawba Indians (“professional slave catchers”) to finally locate and destroy such communities. Indeed, one such notorious maroon by the name of Joe managed to evade local forces for over four years, causing uproar upon the shooting of planter George Ford in 1820, despite public and private bounties, pursuit by state militias and local hunting parties, and reports in newspapers statewide. These “larger bursts” of marronage, from 1765-1774, 1775-1787 and 1813-1829 are not attributable to any single cause, although Lockley’s attention to their parallels with U.S./British conflict is enticing.
An enduring problem with the study of marronage in the United States is the complete dependence on institutional observation by its detractors. Lockley is hesitant to engage in speculation, and rightfully so, even as the general impression of his documentary record offers substantial pause for a reconsideration of the existence of marronage in the slaveholding South. Is the ebb and flow of this documentary record reflective of political patterns, or changing awareness within the cultures of marronage formed in swamps across South Carolina? It is unclear as to how involved maroons may have been in the Stono Rebellion, and certainly changes in individual leadership, group dynamics, historical contingencies and available resources may have had just as much of an effect on the presence or absence of marronage in the public record at any given time. There is also the issue of suppressed reportage, touched on only briefly here, in light of the fact that slaveholders occasionally (or perhaps often?) avoided publicizing enslaved resistance in attempts to keep their own captives “in the dark.” Some maroon communities may have preferred to lay low and avoid the ire of slaveholders altogether, while others may have existed in far greater numbers than attributable from the perspective of white townspeople.
If there are any complaints to be lodged against Lockley, they are trivial. A highly guarded seven page Afterward seems about all Lockley is willing to offer, which on one hand allows the record to speak for itself, but on another could benefit from the opinion of its compiler, given the previously mentioned state of U.S. maroon historiography. There is a bigger picture here with the consistent and substantive presence of maroons in South Carolina, to be linked with other regions in the Deep South, with insurrections, trade networks, and ultimately the limits of white Southern slaveholding hegemony. Additionally, we are left to assume that Lockley has scoured the state archives in South Carolina and relevant correspondences in personal and professional source material, but we are given very little information regarding the discriminatory approach taken to formulating such a “documentary record.” Further, it might prove useful to examine the known use patterns for swampland that remain to this day “unsettled,” as, given maroons’ environmentally-determined patterns and the abundance of activity described by Lockley, it is reasonable to believe many were in some form or fashion constantly inhabited or continued beyond the direct observations of occasional white interlopers.
The study of maroon communities may always orbit more identifiable phenomenon, given the speculative nature of research located in the gaps of the historical record. However, Alain Lockley’s edited volume is surprisingly rich with maroon activity and lucidly presented in a manner that manages to tell a story despite the shifting boundaries and moving targets. Based on the necessary and invaluable contribution of primary material contributed here, it will take historians willing to enter the swamps with more tenacity and imagination than that exercised by colonial militias in South Carolina, if any further maroon communities are to be located, unless that is, they don’t want to be found.
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February 2, 2021Maroon communities. Congaree National Park. Enslavement. American Revolution. Primary source documents.
May 12, 2024
I had not hear of of maroons until about 9 months ago. This book was a good history of the maroon communities and as the documentary record was exceptionally well done and informative.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews