Jamayka Young | Issue 6, Spring 2025

This essay discusses a legacy and a history of formally enslaved people, and their connection to The Great Dismal Swap. It touches on colonial/settler ideology, the harms of colonization against Black and Indigenous peoples, and anti-colonial resistance. 

The Great Dismal Swamp, the largest remaining swamp on the East Coast of the United States, stretches across the Mid-Atlantic, from the Southeast of Virginia to the Northeast of North Carolina. The swamp serves as a relic of the original wetland of more than 1.2 million acres that has since been dwindled down to just 1/10th of its original size. 

The swamp was named Dismal by William Byrd II, a slaver and plantation owner in colonial Virginia, after his visit to the swamp in 1728. Upon seeing the thick bogs, swampy marshes, and massive mauls of migrating black bears he remarked that the area was a, “miserable morass in which nothing can inhabit.”

This statement was declared in direct opposition to the thousands of escaped formerly enslaved Black people, or Maroons, who had found their freedom amongst the impenetrable landscape, alongside the many Indigenous tribes who had been hunting in the region for millennia. 

The term Maroon comes from the Spanish term “cimarrón” meaning feral or untamed. As the colonists attempted to bring the Indigenous population and the enslaved Africans under heel, they simultaneously attempted to tame the landscape. 

The terrain made safe harbor for those escaping the unthinkable violence of chattel slavery and the encroachment of European settlement. For many escaped slaves fleeing north, the swamp was a critical stop on the Underground Railroad. 

For other former slaves in search of freedom beyond the control of white men, they chose to take up permanent residence in the swamp, trading with Native people, enslaved people, and occasionally even white people living outside the autonomous communities they built. Maroonage was not just an escape from bondage, but a chance to truly live as free, not reliant on the tenuous benevolence of northern colonial governments. 

While teeming with crocodiles, black bears, and other dangerous creatures, the dense, uneven landscape made it difficult for slave hunters and their dogs to navigate—a significantly more attractive option than the horrors the Maroons escaped from. One such Maroon who found refuge in the swamp, Tom Wilson, remarked “I felt safer amongst the crocodiles than the white men.” 

William Byrd was in the swamp scouting the land in order to lay the groundwork for a new capitalist venture. The Dismal Swamp Company, founded in 1763, was a land-speculation company. Byrd schemed with the powerful class of Virginia plantation owners, including George Washington, with the intention of draining the swamp in order to uncover and sell the land beneath it.

Draining the swamp would kill two birds with one stone. Simultaneously increasing the wealth of the growing capitalist class in the early United States, and furthering the settler colonial project of complete domination over the land, over the Native population, over the enslaved. 

The ever-growing scale of the colonial project and its violent, slave-labor fueled exploitation of stolen lands had begun degrading the soil. This made virgin land an increasingly valuable commodity. 

This viewpoint was in opposition to many Indigenous groups of the region. The capitalists imagined land as a commodity that could be owned by one man or company, rather than the commons of a community. And like any other commodity, it was something that could be used up and discarded when it lost its value. That value was the cash crops grown by the enslaved to be sold in European and American markets. 

Outside of the monetary value the land could bring to the slavers, it also served another end. Under the colonial ideology the settler glorifies himself, imagining his role in the world as divinely ordained to manage the rabble, to instill order over the otherwise unruly, casting the world in the image of his pristine, white god. 

Marshlands like the Great Dismal Swamp act as the antithesis to this manicured environment, a liminal in-between, an unmanageable space refusing definition, defiant as the Maroons that inhabit the wetlands, refusing their assigned roles as slaves. The Great Dismal Swamp serves as an example of resilience in the face of capitalist, colonial suppression and an outpost of anti-colonial resistance. 

The United States continues to be governed by an ideology that demands endless productivity and perfect order. One that attempts to stamp out “deviance” from prescribed order—Queer folks, Disabled folks, immigrants, people of color, and others that subvert the enforced myths of a heterosexual, white, Christian nation. Spaces like swamps, full of disorder, unsteady the ground this empire was built on. The Great Dismal Swamp, in all its liminal landscapes and Maroon encampments, teaches us to refuse definition, to refuse binaries, to refuse refinement, to be unruly.