Description: "The massive and foreboding Great Dismal Swamp sprawls over 2,000 square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina. From the early seventeenth century, the nearly impassable Dismal frustrated settlement. However, what may have been an impediment to the expansion of slave society became an essential sanctuary for many of those who sought to escape it. In the depths of the Dismal, thousands of maroons--people who had emancipated themselves from enslavement and settled beyond the reach of enslavers--established new lives of freedom in a landscape deemed worthless and inaccessible by whites. This is the first book to fully examine the lives of these maroons and their struggles for liberation"--
Brief description: J. Brent Morris is professor of history at Clemson University.
Review Quotes:
"Brent Morris resurrects the marginalized, enslaved, but nevertheless extraordinary people who marooned in and around the Great Dismal Swamp from roughly 1600 to 1900. . . . [A] remarkable excavation of concealed lives and buried history, a celebration of such people as Abraham Lester, Little Isaac, Venus Dismal, and others, whose stories are rarely--if ever--told."--Journal of the Civil War Era