January 15, 2025 • 54 mins
Margaret continues talking to Sophie about the largest and longest-lasting maroon community in what became the United States.
https://daily.jstor.org/constructing-the-white-race/
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-04-02-0080
https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/events-african-american-history/san-miguel-de-gualdape-slave-rebellion-1526/
https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/05/peter-h-wood-strange-new-land-excerpt.html
J Brent Morris, Dismal Freedom
Modibo Kadalie, Intimate Direct Democracy
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome back to cool people who did cool stuff.
You're a weekly reminder that sometimes people beat people to
death with clubs, but in a good way, like when
those people had enslaved them. I'm your host, Margaro Kiljoy
and my guest today is Sophie.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Hi, Sophie, Hi, You ever beaten A Nope, I'm not
gonna ask that.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Anderson and Truman are here. They say hello, Oh amazing. Yep.
Everyone say hi to Anderson, Rentron Truman.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Yeah, you better do it.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
They can't hear you say it louder.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Yeah. Also, people should say hi to Rory, our audio engineer. Hi, Rory,
Hi Roy. And that's our guest Sophie, who's also our producer.
And our theme musical was written for us byon Woman.
And this is part two in a two parter about
the Great Dismal Swamp Maroons, who were a multi century
resisted project to the slave empire of the United States
(01:03):
of America. When you pick like one topic and sort
of deep dive and just realize even like everything ties
into the fact that it's this like slave economy, just
like every little piece of it, even the poor white
people who end up siding with them. It still ties
into the fact that it's a slave economy, Like it's
just like such a overwhelming fact of American history.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
A Marca sucks scay Mass country.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah, some good people here, you know. Yeah, So we
just had Carrie's Rebellion. The Leveler Quaker Republic has fallen,
and many of the people fled into the swamps, the
Great Dismal Swamp. Not long after, in seventeen eleven, the
(01:45):
tusc Aurora, which is that confederacy of three different tribes
that folks have been working with who lived a bit
further inland from the swamp, went to war against the colonies.
Tensions were high between the two groups. They both had
valid points. Indigenous people were accused of harboring runaway slaves,
while settlers were you know, stealing Tuscarora land and sending
(02:09):
out surveyors to map to put towns in where it
wasn't theirs, and also just showing up and stealing people
and selling them. So really again, just complicated thing, you know,
just a complicated conflict that we certainly couldn't take signs
and I can't do it and even pretend the Tuscarora
(02:31):
people and their allies, including a bunch of African and
mixed race Maroons, went to war. Oh, because you already
even have even at this point, there's already some Maroons
in those swamps. There's already people who just like I
ran away, and a ton more of them are about
to arrive. But like, so they went to war and
they're basically their goal was to kidnap enough white landowners
(02:51):
to exchange them back for their loved ones.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Cool.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Again, no historical or current parallels at all. And the
first day they went through and killed like one hundred
and thirty white people, mostly white land owning men, and
kidnapped a ton of people because they were trying to
do this hostage exchange thing. The governor tried to raise
up a militia, but the albumarl of white people were like, no,
we're We're good. The tusker are. They're not mad at us,
(03:18):
they're mad at the other white people. They're mad at
the rich people and the like landowners, and shit, we're
not going to fuck with them. Besides, we're mostly Quakers,
so we're not doing it. So it was a South
Carolina militia alongside allied indigenous fighters who put down the rebellion.
Really yeah, they had to bring them in from elsewhere.
And then also, like, I mean, the other thing about
(03:40):
the history of the destruction of indigenous peoples in the
United States is or the place that became the United
States is using dividing conquer tactics and getting one group
to fight against the other group.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
You know.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Yeah, but it wasn't all like crush rebellion. The two
sides sued for peace and they had a truce and
they agreed to release all their hostages. So the Tuscarora
released all their hostages. The English were like, why would
we do what we said we were going to do,
and they didn't. Instead, they sold their hostages into slavery,
(04:14):
fucking clown asque country, Fucking.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
A stupid place we live in.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
So the Tuscara went back to war. They were like,
all right, well, we had a truce and you didn't
do it. So they attacked more of the slave labor camps.
But unfortunately the divide and conqueror was like real close
to home. They told the chief of the northern Tuscarora,
it was kind of divided into two groups, told them
that he would rule over the southern Tuscarora too if
he would join the English in the war, and that happened.
(04:43):
So hundreds of southern Tuscarora and their allies laid up
in a fort for a last stand, and a ton
of them were slaughtered or sold into slavery. At this point,
the majority of the Tuscarora went north and joined the
Iroquois Confederacy, which is that massive democra project that is
way way more interesting in radical and democratic than the
(05:03):
US has ever been or will be. But a whole
lot of the Tuscarora people, as well as the Machapunga
and presumably other allies, they couldn't make it north because
they were blocked by soldiers. So where do they go?
They went into the swamps, and the Yamassee people from
South Carolina had been a major tool of the English
(05:24):
in the war against the Tuscarora. Within months of helping
put down the revolt of the Tuscarora, they had their
own revolt because they realized that they were on the
wrong side and that they weren't getting treated any better.
And they have the Yamassee War, which lasted another two years.
So now the swamps have the pesky leveler whites and
blacks they have fighting indigenous people and they've all been
(05:47):
driven into the swamps. Because of all that slave labor
and plantation culture could move into the area more freely.
So basically the like the cool vibe of North Carolina
is going away quickly, right, numbers of enslaved people skyrocketed.
Laws against black and indigenous people voting were passed. Black
(06:08):
people from Virginia started making their way into the swamps
also at this point, and they're fleeing the slave labor
camps where they've been imprisoned. And the thing is people
were helping them do it. Like the thing that is
like it wasn't just like, oh, I'm going to go
run into the swamps and hope for the best. Right,
these swamps are a pretty literal maze, right, and the
(06:28):
wrong path will kill you. So they were met by
other Maroons who navigated them in Oh it's cool. Yeah,
they had this whole elaborate system.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Because if you don't like, you're fucked right, Like, yeah,
it's not this is not a nice concrete path, this
is swamp.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Yeah, And it's not even just like, oh, I'm going
to walk through some like knee high muck. It's like
I'm walking through nee high muck. Now I'm over my head.
There's an alligator you.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Know right, Oh in that giant spider that you talked about.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Oh yeah, like literally later on, basically, the colonial media,
or I guess it was the United States media. The
slave media was like, God, this sounds like something that anyway. Whatever.
The slave media was like, there's snakes in there. Don't
go in there. There's snakes, you know, stay here and
grow stuff for us instead of hanging out with snakes.
(07:21):
I mean there were lots of venomous snakes in there.
It was a really rough place, you know. And overall,
the most common form of resistance that the Maroons did
sort of universally was they helped others find their way in.
And we also have some evidence that basically once you
were helped in, they would set you up. The people
who live there. You're not necessarily like joining in. It's
(07:43):
not like, oh, we all live in one big, happy
commune or like one big city in the middle and whatever.
But they're like, oh, okay, we'll set you up. Well,
we know where all the spots of land are. Archaeological
evidence is that over this entire region, like almost all
of the dry island areas had like multiple buildings and
like was like people were living there, you know, yeah,
(08:04):
And so they get you set up when you get in,
and soon enough you have multi generational communities scattered all
throughout the swamps. Some are in the edges, still interacting
with the regular world. Some are deep inside the swamps.
Many people spend their entire lives without leaving the swamps. Theoretically,
we don't know a ton about their lives. There's like
the stuff that people are able to conjecture, and the
numbers are pretty unknown. The main estimate that people have
(08:27):
is like two to three thousand over the course of centuries,
like not total, but at any given time. But those
are the estimates of like the militias chasing Nat Turner later.
So there's no reason to believe those estimates. Like we
don't know, we don't know when people live there. A
lot of them wild people went, according to the Governor
(08:49):
of Virginia, every single day. The Governor of Virginia said
about the dismal quote, great numbers of loose and disorderly
people daily flock thither, which is, I want to be wherever,
great numbers of loosen disorderly people greatly daily flock thither,
even if I don't say it. And so the Great
Dismal Swamp became a maroon community, not just any maroon community,
(09:12):
but the largest and longest lasting and most influential in
US history. As history of Medievo cadal I put it, quote,
the Great Dismal Swamp was a regional magnet to the oppressed,
the dispossessed, the defiant, the rebellious, and those who refused
to be bound by the conventions of hierarchical society. Swamps
were places where no horses or dogs could be used
(09:33):
to hunt them down, and where tobacco production simply could
not take place. They were places of peace, where loved
ones could not be bought or sold. These were places
where freedom seekers could build the intimately democratic communities where
they could survive and thrive. Wow, I know, it's just
like I such a like people do amazing shit in
(09:55):
really bad situations. You know. Yeah, sometimes it almost seems
like it doesn't really, but sometimes it seems like it
takes a real bad situation before people do really amazing shit.
But actually people would have been doing this amazing shit
if there hadn't been the terrible stuff either, So I
don't know. They lived in swamp cabins on the islands
of dry Land. They raised livestock and crops. The Maroons
(10:18):
had their own internal economy. Archaeologists are aware of at
least one person building musical instruments. Most of their life
was concerned with daily life, not waging war against slave society.
But there were like multiple anthropologists of like, there's like
four different classifications of Maroons in there. There's like the
deep maroon people who are like, I'm never going anywhere,
(10:39):
and then there's the people who kind of live in
the periphery and mostly raid and like. So you can't
really easily say, like, oh, everyone wanted to be left alone.
The people want to be left alone went to the
damn middle, and the people who wanted to hang out
on the edge and like kill people they didn't like
lived on the edge and kill people they didn't like.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
You know, that makes sense.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
It's just logical something for everyone.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
As for the word maroon, maroon was originally a Spanish
term for the cattle that escaped from early settlers and
went feral. By the fifteen forties, it was applied to
people and by the fifteen seventies, it appeared in English
and the colonial Americans the government wasn't really a big
fan of this thing that was happening. They were like,
we don't even know where the line between the two
(11:18):
of our colonies is who's in charge? And this is
like literally they would have this problem where they'd want
to go and raid or they'd want to strike back
right against the raiders, but they kind of didn't because
they didn't know whose territory it was, because they didn't
know if it was Virginia North Carolina. And the existence
of maroonage was really uncomfortable for white slavers because it
(11:39):
was a beacon for enslave people, absolutely, but also because
it didn't sit right with the lies that slavers told.
Slavers in the US at the time would claim shit
that like, oh, black people are naturally docile, or they
can't survive without benevolent white owners, and the Great Dismal
Swamp was just a counter example, and they weren't happy
(12:02):
with it. Historian J. Brent Morris put it like this quote,
Maroon voices demand a reassessment of the meaning of freedom.
Maroonage in the Dismal represented an alternative to a life
of enslavement. It also represented a choice, in most cases
to live free lives in the swamp in the south
(12:23):
rather than seeking it in a free state or Canada.
Maroon Voices also remind us that freedom was not just
an accomplishment after passage along the underground railroad, but a
maroonage process sustained by their own heroic efforts. And a
lot of both of these books that I read about
this really wanted to kind of hit home. I think
in kind of contrast the way that American history is
taught that even the underground railroad, like people kind of
(12:46):
like the underground railroad, the white people kind of like
the underground railroad because it's like, oh, we went and
helped people. And it's true, the people who did the
underground railroad are fucking heroes, right, but then what yeah,
totally that's a And also like they were freeing themselves
with help, right, not sure, just pure people without agency
(13:08):
you can't rescue themselves. And the existence of maroons. The
self emancipation is a big evidence of that. And people
talk about basically anyone, including the people who use the
underground railroad, are self emancipating. And I really like that
way of framing it. It's also true that, yeah, people
would get north and nearly you're free, welcome to capitalism,
work a job, or die, you know. Yep. Literally half
(13:30):
the arguments that the abolitionists made against slavery were economic,
that it was cheaper to not take care of people's health. Yeah,
everything that seems like it should be good is bad. Like,
for example, that Ben Franklin thing where he's like, let's
make America white. It was an argument against transporting people
from Africa, right, because he didn't want more black people,
(13:52):
because he wanted America pure and white, and so it
was sort of an anti slavery argument for the aliens.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Yeah, oh that breaks my brain.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Yep. Fucking eighteenth century politics in the US are wacky. Yeah,
nineteenth century, twenty whatever politics. The swamps stood in the
way of colonization. It was untameable, it was unplawable, it
was full of disease. It actually probably wasn't really full
of disease, but they believed in the miasma theory of
disease at the time. I mean, I'm sure the mosquitoes
(14:24):
were carrying some diseases. I'm sure it wasn't a super
healthy place. But they thought literally like disease like grew
up out of the water.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Not ideal, but also really good to scare people off.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Yeah, that's a good point, they probably, Yeah, there's diseases
here in snakes, you know, stay the hell away from us.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Which is like, probably true, but maybe not as extreme
as they wanted people who they wanted to keep out
to think.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Right, Yeah, totally. And so the idea of this untamable
nature was an affront to the very idea of enlightenment
rational Western thought. Nature has to be subdivided and controlled.
But the swamp refused them, and so the people who
lived in it were themselves sort of inherently outlaws, even
the ones who weren't fugitives, because they were living in
(15:12):
this uncontrollable space and they lived as outlaws. The first
raids out of the swamp were in seventeen oh nine.
They robbed storehouses and started picking off farm animals that
were close to the swamp. Also in seventeen oh nine,
they started planning a slave revolt from the swamps, one
that I don't know a ton about, but it happened.
In seventeen oh nine, Black and indigenous people started getting
(15:35):
ready for revolt. Its leaders were hanged, drawn and quartered,
including a man named Angola Peter, but neither of Virginia
or North Carolina was sure of who was in charge
of subduing revolts because no one knew where the line is.
But don't worry one bold man just kidding. He sucked
and he's kind of a coward.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
I was like, it was, like, what podcast am I on?
Speaker 2 (15:57):
H Yeah, yeah, will Bird the second? If there was
a show about bad people?
Speaker 1 (16:02):
O fucking way.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Yeah. Could you imagine being named the second instead of Junior?
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Like, I'm sorry, you don't get to be uh the
number until you're at least the third. You're just gonna
have to suck it up for a generation. Kiddo, you
are William Bird Junior.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
That's so fucking funny.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
In seventeen twenty eight, he went into Survey the Place.
He was a wealthy Virginia planter who wanted to know
exactly where the line between good and noble Virginia and
bad and rebellious North Carolina was. He was one of
the worst people I've ever read about. He was absolutely
brutal to the people he owned. He was so afraid
of slaver volt that he tortured and sexually assaulted everyone
(16:44):
he owned just to make sure they would never revolt God.
And then here's the part that makes him like not
just terrible, but like fucking poetically terrible. Starting in seventeen
oh nine, I think when he's like a kid, he
had recurring nightmares about slaver volts. And the way that
these nightmares happen is that there is a great fireball
(17:06):
in the sky over Virginia that represents divine wrath against slavery.
Imagine having that dream and then being like, I'm probably
the good guy here. I have dreams where God is
going to burn me up for my evil. Better go
mistreat these people. It's through his accounts that we get
(17:28):
some of the first written record of the people living
in the swamp. So this is like when I say
that the record is like kind of fucked up, this
is the first guy who like went in and talked
to people who lived there.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
So unreliable narrator, I know.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
But what's so funny is I think he's so in
his own head that he doesn't occur to him to
have lied in.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
This case, because he sure so weird.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
He starts on the coast and then with a bunch
of surveyors he starts heading west inland. And the people
he met there were terrible and barbarous people. After all,
they shared work equally between men and women. Oh, this
is the thing that's going to come up again and again.
But it's like really subtext because women are written out
of all history, right, Well, you know who else is
(18:12):
written out of history? Advertisers. There is not actually a
lot of record of the advertisers of old newspapers. I
sometimes look, I don't always find it because one thing
that I absolutely did start noticing Isbister doing a radical
podcast with mainstream advertisers, is that old radical newspapers absolutely
at advertisers because you actually need to pay to get
things out there. And I'm in part of a long,
(18:34):
noble tradition of pivoting to ads like these ones. And
we're back. So obviously you talk about at the time
how women are written out of history. But one of
the things that's come up everything I've read about the
(18:54):
dismal swamp, they're like not marking the gender of what's
happening overall. I mean, they are some times are talking
about women who are enslaved who fled there and stuff
also right, but it seems like almost everything, including the
fighting that I'm going to talk about, happening, was fairly
probably not fifty to fifty gender split, but was like
(19:15):
a substantially more egalitarian thing than what was happening outside. Specifically,
when Bird Junior is in there, he's like, is terrible
here they share work equally between men and women, I know,
And like he's also like almost mad that they offer
(19:35):
anyone runaway slave or common criminal alike, not just a
place to stay, but help them get a good spot
of dry land. Like one family also that probably had
a fugitive for a father, because he was asking like,
oh do y'all do and they're all like, oh, we're
all born free. But then like dad just like kind
of kept hiding, you know, yeah, because he was because
he's a fugitive. That family where the dad was a fugitive,
(19:59):
still took in this like white survey team and gave
them a place to stay and fed them because they
are good fucking people, like probably two good of people.
You know. If they just drowned all of these men,
the world would have been a better place. Allegedly, so
Bird dedicated his life to destroying that man and everyone
(20:19):
like him, like only a slaver colonizer can do. Thanks
for the dinner.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
What a fucking asshole.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
He wrote this long piece about how if this society
of slaves wasn't destroyed, like murdered in its cradle, it
would likely become a new Rome.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
What a weird fucking motherfucking dude.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Okay, yeah, Bird Junior is a strange man. He compares
the Maroons to Romulus and Remus, the two twins who
founded Rome. But negatively he's like, oh, we better stop this.
Like he this man knows he's on the wrong side.
He sees fireballs. And they kept telling him, all the
(21:01):
people he stayed with, they kept telling him in no
uncertain terms that if he and his men kept going
into the real heart of the swamps, they would never return.
This was maybe a friendly warning, and maybe it was
all like, get the fuck out of here, don't blow
up our spot.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
When they going got tough, the rich guy got going.
His crew went on without him to survey in the
interior of the swamp. He went around and waited for
them to come out the other side, and then to
try and take all the credit for doing the survey. Like,
if you're gonna be a gentleman adventurer, asshole, at least
go do the adventure. You know, I just don't like
(21:43):
this man.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
No, he's awful. Fuck him.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
His crew survived, but they only made it like a
mile or two a day while they're trying to survey
the swamps. Eventually, after eight days, they ran short on
supplies and they gave up on surveying and just booked
it west, trying not to die. And even then they
were still only able to make it like four miles
a day across this terrain. Only two years later, the
(22:07):
largest colonial era slave rebellion popped off, the Chesapeake Rebellion
of seventeen thirty. And this one is interesting. We know
way more about this one, or I know way more
about this one than I did about the seventeen oh
nine one. Basically, someone probably an enslaved person, started a
rumor that the king had declared that anyone baptized Christian
(22:28):
was now going to be freed from slavery, and so
hundreds of people felt the local officials were refusing the
king's orders to free them. They were like no, no, no,
the kings had were free. Now we heard a rumor
like I'm Christian, you gotta let me go, which is
what it used to be, right right, And so they
started drilling in units, getting ready for a fight because
(22:51):
they had been given legitimacy by the king, which is
such an interesting like most of the other rebellions didn't
feel like they needed this. They were like that man
thinks he owned me, let's kill him, you know. But
it was an effective way to get hundreds of people together.
They started drilling, getting ready for a fight, and it
was broken up and the rebels fled into the swamps,
and from there they led a gorilla struggle for years.
(23:15):
And that asshole Bird yeah, Bird Junior, Yeah yeah, maybe
Bird Senior was a little better, but I doubt it.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Oh goddage, still far.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Far from the tree.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
What did he do? What did he do?
Speaker 2 (23:26):
He was really worried about the Maroons. He was considered
the world's leading expert on them because he'd met some
of them and survived to tell the tale, because they'd
fed him and housed him and informed him about dangers.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
This fuck.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Yeah, Jamaico was in an all out Maroon war at
the time, which I hope it covered more one day,
and Bird was like, really worried about the maroons. I
think he was also a little bit worried about his
own career and posterity. He advocated for the end of
the Transatlantic slave trade. Here's more of the people doing
everything you think is good is secretly bad.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Yeah, what's what's the what's the uh?
Speaker 2 (23:59):
He was like, we need to end the Transatlantic slave
trade because Africans are more likely to maroon than seasoned
That gets Air quotes African Americans who'd been born into slavery.
It's about like three times more common for people who
were born in Africa to maroon than people who were
born in the United States. And so he was like,
(24:19):
I'm going to write up this. He wrote up a
long thing about how to physically drain the swamp. Oh yeah,
now we get to the drain the swamp part, because
why not ever leave modern politics behind? And so he
writes this whole thing about how to drain the swamp.
But it wasn't him who tried to do it.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Instead, is that where the fucking dream the swamp the
shit comes from?
Speaker 2 (24:41):
So I don't know, I never thought about it and
I never write about it. Yeah, I mean I doubt
Trump was like specifically, like I'm talking about the Great
Dismal Swamp.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Oh no, No, he doesn't know anything about anything that's
ever happened in the history of the world.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Yeah, but this like goal to drain the swamp thing
is a huge par art of this era of colonial
history because people are really worried about this shit.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
No, it wouldn't make sense that that's where that originally started. God, Okay, And.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
So you know how like sometimes people look at Trump
as like in the far right is his aberration and
how far we've come far to the right of the
old original. Like, Nah, the first guy who tried to
drain the swamp, he was a guy you might have
heard of. He's maybe the most famous slaver in all
of history. He is so terrifying that he wore the
teeth of slaves in his own mouth like a cartoon villain.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Church fucking Washington and George Market It.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Is George fucking Washington, the guy who went on to
start the world's most powerful slave empire. George Washington and
his brother John and some other guys.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
Fuck fuck fuck okay to me, more n me more demore.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Yeah. In seventeen fifty three, the entire region was given
a four guys because that's the other thing is that
people were like, oh, private corporations run everything now in America,
and like that is the way America was founded. It
was actually really specifically in contrast to the way that
like the Catholic countries, which were not less evil, but
the Catholic colonies were more like everything's owned by the
church and the state and shit. Yeah, whereas like British
(26:08):
colonies were like, we have the such and such company
with shareholders and blah blah blah. You know. So they
gave the entire Great Dismal Swamp to four guys, not
the Washington's. They were just hired on at first.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
This is breaking my brain.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Continue, Yeah, In seventeen sixty two, the four Guys sent
an enslaved cruise to tame the swamp, and they hired
this thirty one year old white guy to help, a
guy named George Washington, and Washington incorporated a group called
Adventurers to Drain the Dismal Swamp, which is a genuinely
funny name to name a company.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
What.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
Okay, sorry, because I think he's into this idea of
like I'm a gentleman adventurer.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
You know, God, just the like romanticizing of this man
that this country has, this planet has done. When he's like,
that's your title, Yeah, that's your title, you fucking creep.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Yeah, he's just a cartoon villain. He runs a group
called Adventures to Drain It. Yeah, and later this is
renamed the Less Fun Dismal Swamp Company. The only thing
that was dismal was their chances of success h and
also the working conditions of the people who died enslaved
underneath them. Each of these bold adventurers was like, all right,
(27:24):
we're each going to donate five guys we owned to
get this done, and we'll all get super rich. But
they were all trying to outstingy each other, right, and
so they all sent their least capable guys, their like
least valuable people that they thought they owned. Old slave
Teath himself didn't even send five. He only sent two
guys he owned and forced to dig like dig ditches
(27:46):
in swamp water. A whole bunch of them ran away
to join the Maroons, including a couple with really cool names,
Jack Dismal and his wife Venus. And those are good names.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Those are good names.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
And we know at least Jack is going to ride
away into the sunset, happy and alive at the end
of this story. And I'm just assuming Venus does as well,
because I have no evidence of the contrary.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Cool fucking name Venus dismal.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
I know, I know I would. I'd be surprised if
I've never met anyone who goes by that. That's such
a good fucking name. The whole company was a failure.
It was a dismal failure, and well done. I love
how the swamp is dismal for slavers and evil civilization,
but it's actually good and amazing for the people resisting
these things. Unpaid workers kept dying or running away, and
(28:36):
the only money that the company made was by selling shingles,
and it did not drain the swamp, and it did
not even survey the swamp. Seventeen seventy five year olled
around and the Washington brothers, John and George had other
shit on their minds. Their fun little adventure of overseeing
a little death camp on the edge of a swamp
was over, like literally, their idea of a good time
(28:57):
is to go oversee a slave death camp. Anyway, I
don't like them. No, so they had to move on
to bigger things. They had a whole continent and later
world to destroy with the American Revolution. I've probably mentioned
it a few times on this show, but the leaders
of the American Revolution were doing it to protect their
right to expand their colonies into indigenous territories. And the
whole thing about democracy and freedom is a terrible, sinister farce,
(29:20):
a scam that they sold working people. But it's worth reiterating,
as author Mediebo Cadale put it, quote, some people think
that the United States of America is the greatest experiment
in democracy, but there has never been any democracy here.
Some people are in love with what they are told
America is. But when you look at history very carefully,
(29:42):
you will find that people whom I call freedom seekers
and resistors were constantly running away from America. I really
like that way of looking at it, being like, look,
we're sold this like bill of goods. We're told America's
land of freedom. Hey wait, why did all the black
people side with the British? Hey wait, you know, like
you just like slowly, it's not true, That's what I'm saying.
(30:04):
The British declared freedom for any enslaved person who fled
from the rebels. A group called Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment, fifteen
hundred strong, wore sashes that read Liberty to Slaves as
they went into battle against George Washington and his army
of slavery. And that is fucking cool. You're on the
right side of history if you are in a battle
(30:26):
wearing a fucking sash that reads liberty the slaves. Some
of George Washington's own slaves fought him in that war,
like Harry, who'd been kidnapped in Gambia and renamed Harry
by George Washington and fought on the British side as
Corporal Harry Washington. And he was as important of an
icon to the black soldiers fighting against the American Revolution
(30:49):
as George Washington was to the other side. And I
like that both sides. Out of Washington, it's likely that
a great number of this regiment came from the maroons
of the swamp. The main evidence that we have of
this is that so many of these soldiers had intimate
knowledge of the swamps. Basically, they were like, yeah, all
the people were just like knew all their ways in
(31:10):
and out of the swamps, so they're from there. The
enslaved people who've been set to drain the swamp escaped
en masse and fled for freedom or to go fight
against the Americans. Even after British forces abandoned the South,
the raids from the Dismal kept going. So like, the
British stopped trying to have a military presence around the
(31:32):
Dismal Swamp, but the Maroons kept going. They were like, nope,
we're fighting these fucking slave men, you know.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
And these were multi racial units. One landless white laborer
named Jeshiah Phillips led a black and white band of
fifty people in a gorilla struggle against the expansionist Americans.
Many of them were Maroons, and Maroons kept them safe.
When white men in the South were impressed into the
military to track down Phillips's band, they basically refused to.
(32:02):
Like all these people got like, hey, you're a militia,
now go track down that, like the white guy who's
leading a mixed race group of people against us or
a multiracial group against us. And people are like, now,
we're good, We're not tracking that guy down. We kind
of like him. A quarter of them deserted.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
That's so funny.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Yeah, Phillips himself was caught and hanged in seventeen seventy eight.
But one of the things that keeps going in this
story is that as soon as they like take out
one of the leaders, it stops nothing. And so that's
how you know, the leaders are more like symbolic in
figureheads rather than like indispensable. Sure, yeah, yeah, the band
kept going until the end of the war. The whole
(32:41):
Dismal Swamp region, not just the depths of it, was
completely uncontrollable by the US, and that guy Jack Dismal,
him and Corporal Harry Washington made it out on British
ships to freedom, and I assume Venus was with him,
but I don't know. Uck Yeah, yeah, because I'm not
clearly the British were the bad people like twenty years
(33:02):
ago at this point, I'm not trying. It's super hard
to fend them. But like they told the truth when
I said that not the.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Biggest villain in this very particular story.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
Yeah, they were like, hey, well, we'll set you free
if you fight for us, and then they did.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
And then they kept their word, which is crazy, I.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Know, like genuinely wouldn't be surprised all of that hadn't happened.
But yeah, and during the war, the population of Maroons
inside the swamp grew and grew sick, and for the
most part, they lived peaceful lives after that, though again
many of them joined great abolitionist conspiracies throughout the new country.
And we're going to get how like in another like
(33:38):
twenty years, they're gonna be like basically in a war
against the US. And so there's all these abolitionist conspiracies
going up and down the country. Literally there's word of
mouth campaigns organized by enslaved people. People were talking and organizing,
and what they were talking about, Sophie, is they were
talking about what a great deal on stuff they could
(33:59):
find have by listening to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
Oh good for them.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
It's only through podcasting that you hear the finest of
goods and services, such as the ones who support this
very show and we're back. So now you have this country,
the United States of America, and they didn't like that
(34:26):
a really big chunk of itself was a lawless land
of outlaws who kept stealing their quote unquote property aka themselves.
Like literally most of the records that we have about
like the number of people living there was the amount
of property damage done by their raids, which was number
of people who've left like slave labor camps. By seventeen ninety,
(34:49):
laws were passed by both Virginia and North Carolina to
build a canal through the swamp. They wanted to use
a private company, of course, because that's what the US
was founded on, and for a decade hundreds of enslaved
people worked and died building a canal, though they eventually
did successfully build a twenty two mile canal, which immediately
started getting used by radicals, which is kind of cool.
(35:11):
Itinerant abolitionist preachers used to coordinate rebellion, and abolitionist ships
would like show up, they'd like sail into the canal
to go find people were hiding out and put them
on boats and take them up to like Boston and shit,
which is fucking cool. The Dismal Swamp became a stopover
place for a lot of self emancipators after the United
(35:31):
States was founded, and all the while maroons are organizing
to attack the slave empire. And I was promising you,
how when like one leader goes down, there's this others
I'm gonna like I started tracking all of the names
of all the different leaders of bands.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
But yeah, who's up. Who's the next? Motherfucker?
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Tom Copper? One man. Tom Copper was a fugitive himself,
and he led at least thirty eight fighters on.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
The very based name of Tom Copper.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
I mean, like it's such a good though, like like
if you wanted to watch like a noir film about.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
It, Yeah, that character's day would be Tom Copper.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
Yeah, totally. Yeah, he led at least thirty eight fighters.
Those are the number that were like literally they all
wrote their name down on like a registry, but there's
almost certainly probably hundreds more.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
And when he was arrested, six Maroons arrived on horseback
and broke them out of jail.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
Fuck yeah, I knew we'd have a jail break in here.
I know, just had jailbreak energy. Let's go on a
horseback to where's this fucking movie?
Speaker 2 (36:34):
I know. God for the people who came and rescued
him were caught and ended up in prison in his place.
But you know, that's the thing you try and do
when you try and rescue your friends. And he did
get out. His army grew, he had captains one per
county who organized as well, and eventually one hundred Maroons
were caught and tortured and executed around eighteen oh two.
(36:57):
Exactly what happened to Tom Copper I think is lost
to him. Yeah, after he disappeared, a new Maroon military leader,
a preacher named General Peter, stepped up.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
They're just like picking the most generic male names of history. Peter, Paul, Tom,
I mean, like Phil, Mike, John.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
There was only like ten names for white or black
people in America for a very long time.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
You know, you know that's actually so fair. I'm like, oh, right,
are we just naming apostles? What's happening?
Speaker 2 (37:31):
Yeah, you just had you had to have a wasp name.
And if you didn't have a wasp, like, you didn't
have to be a wasp. You just had to have
a wasp name.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
And so during this time, when you have this, these
these people leading raids, the good whites of the South
were terrified. One guy wrote a newspaper saying, quote, we,
our wives, and our children were surrounded by desperadoes, white
and black, who perhaps would laugh at our calamity and
mock when our fear cometh, and you know what, I
(38:00):
would mock. When that man's fear comes, I join in.
And so they were like leading these raids but planning
this larger attack. They wanted to do an attack on
both North Carolina and Virginia on the same day with clubs, spikes,
(38:22):
and axes. They didn't have any guns.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
Yet, clubs, spikes and axes.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
Oh I I know, I don't even know what the
spikes were in this case, but.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Fuck it, I love it. Yeah, spikes and axes, let's go.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
Yeah, And the whole thing was coordinated by a network
of black preachers, and so later black churches and preachers
and shit are going to get like basically run out
of this part of the South. But for a while,
you basically like get a free black man who's a
preacher to go around and be like and the Lord said, hey,
next Wednesday, we're gonna and then after that and then
(38:55):
we're gonna do this other thing. You know. Yeah. Some
people were caught and gave up under torture. Others were
caught and stayed strong. There's like good lines about like
people being like, nah, I'm you're not getting anything out
of me, and like one guy was just like I'm
gonna laugh when when we come for you, you know. Yeah,
and uh, after General Peter, there was oh, we're gonna
(39:17):
get new names now, Pompy Little.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Okay, that's what I'm fucking talking about. That is a
cool fucking name. Pumpy Little. Let's go tell tell me
what Pompy Little did. Please, I'm I'm on board. Why
is this not a movie? And Pompy Little was a
picturesque man. He was more than six feet tall. People
were shorter back then. He was a giant of a man. Honey.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
He had a like I think he's the one. Oh no,
it was a later guy who had this scar across
his face. Maybe one of them had a scar across
his face when we had been shot by a bullet
and kept going, you know, and uh, he was completely fearless.
He fought with a long, double edged knife, and when
he would rob people, they'd be like, we're gonna tell
and give you a description. He was like, good, my
(40:01):
name's pomp and told people his name so that they
would be afraid of him.
Speaker 1 (40:07):
He's fucking cool.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
Yeah. Eventually he was shot and killed, but that man
lived free.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
Then in eighteen eighteen, a multi racial, mixed gender gang
of Maroons. This is the only one. I suspect all
of these were multiracial, mixed gender, but I like this
is the one where like specifically details that yeah, yeah,
they're like and then one of the women who was
among them was shot and killed in the raid. You know,
they declared themselves at war with nearby society and started
(40:36):
raiding farms and slave labor camps. Maroons would do shit
like basically they like go find the man who had
personally enslaved them, dragged them into the swamps, and beat
them to death with a club, like you imagine you
just like own a bunch of guys and then they
run away and you're like, oh, I'm sure that's the
end of that. Yeah, okay, Like and this is like
(40:57):
during the time when the South keeps trying to like,
oh they they're docile, they don't mind. It's just you know,
like nah.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
Nah, fuck around and find out.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
Yeah, oh this is wait here's ming Mingo is the
guy with the the scar across his face our next guy,
and I think Mingo is involved in the eighteen eighteen gang.
He was a bandit as people called him nam Mingo,
and one of the things that he did because the
local white people, like the poor ones, didn't really have
(41:28):
a problem with any of this, you know, because they
weren't being targeted because they didn't own people. So Mingo
would do murder for hire on slavers. Basically, some people
were like, like a white guy was like, hey, I
really want this slaver to die, and Mingo was like,
all right, well, I think it was like two hundred
bucks or something was the payment. But the method of
(41:48):
the payment, as best as I can tell, was not
give me money. It was go buy that guy and
set him free. Interesting, and so then they were like,
all right, we'll go kill that slaver that you don't
like in exchange for you, you know, giving us money
or doing this thing for us. This is the guy
who had a scar across his face from a bullet wound.
(42:10):
He was eventually betrayed by an associate, and it was
like kind of a sad story. He was like the
associate kind of waited until Mingo like shot his gun
off in celebration, and then the guy was like, hah,
your gun's empty and like jumped him. You know. Yeah.
When he was betrayed, he was put on trial and
everyone was outraged, although like a local town was totally
scandalized because, to quote J. Brent Morris, eight white men
(42:33):
admitted that Mingo had informed them of his plan to
kill the Princess Anne County sheriff, and none of them
had taken measures to stop him. And so basically it
just like everyone was fine with these guys. Not everyone,
obviously a lot of people were very unfine with these guys,
but the like the poor people who lived in the area,
including the poor white people.
Speaker 1 (42:51):
They were like, everything's cool. What do you mean.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Yeah, it was just that's just the guy who kills
rich people, like, don't fuck with Luigi, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:59):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
And while most of the local white population wasn't specifically
abolition so that's the other thing too, right, they didn't
have abolitionist politics. Their primary form of assistance to the Maroons,
besides the ones who were literally were Maroons themselves. And
part of these bandit gangs is that they had a
really strong no snitching culture.
Speaker 1 (43:22):
Oh okay, yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
When outsiders would come and they'd be like, hey, what's
in the swamps, people would be like, I heard of
a swamp. What are you talking about? There's nothing there,
you know, Because poor white rural people used to know
something about class solidarity and hating cops, and many of
them still do, but culture wars are trying to convince
them otherwise. That's what I say about that. Whenever a
(43:45):
Maroon leader went down, another stepped up. There was no
end to the raids for decades. Huge bounties would go up,
but people were like, we don't want to slave raid
the swamps. That's how you die.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
What's that mythical creature where you cut off the head
and another head grows back.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
Yeah. Yeah, they're the hydro of the swamps, which is
cool because hydros live in swamps. Oh my god, that's
fucking awesome.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
There you go.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
And one farmer at one point was like, all right,
let's get a posse together, let's go capture the slaves.
As soon as he announced his plan, maroons came into
his fields and shop dead, immediately dead in front of
his wife. Just were like you're dead now, and then
like walked away, see you, sir?
Speaker 1 (44:24):
Enjoy Hell.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Yeah. The people in charge of subduing the Maroons, like
the actual like officials, kept winding up dead too, like literally,
like they would like really leave the swamps to go
assassinate people, so I like them. Yeah, And this came
to a head and kind of ended when and this
is not nat Turner's fault, but when future friend of
(44:48):
the Pod Nat Turner led the most famous slaver vault
in US history, which was only twenty five miles east
of the swamps. Nat Turner led seventy folks on raids
and killed about sixty white people men, women, and children
before being stopped by a group of white vigilantes. Some
of the rebels made their way to the swamps in safety.
(45:10):
Nat Turner went underground. They didn't catch him for a
little while. He didn't go to the swamps actually, and
like he actually wasn't planning on using the swamps, but
everyone was convinced he was planning on using the swamps,
which he probably should have been planning on using the swamps.
I haven't I've only read what the Great Dismal Swamp
books has to say about Nat Turner. I haven't read
the books about Nat Turner what they have to say
about him yet. But white people lost their fucking mind
(45:34):
and started massacring black people after not Turner, two hundred people,
two hundred black people were like randomly killed, and then
their heads were put on pikes alongside.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
The road, and like this, fucking Christ, it.
Speaker 2 (45:45):
Was a fucking massacre. And then the entire country, especially
the South, like mobilizes against this threat of an outright
slave revolution because Haiti had just had one thirty years earlier,
and Haiti's revolution shook the western world to its core.
And then yeah, yeah, yeah, and so in this area,
now every white man was expected to be ready to
(46:07):
be pressed into a militia at anytime. Hunting maroons became
a full time job for some people.
Speaker 3 (46:13):
But get a hobby, Jesus Christ, learn how to do
a cross stitch, learn how to grow some crops, and oh, well,
they can't do that, mine your business.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
Yeah, And they started trying to burn people out of
the swamps. They would set fires on parts of it
to flush people out to recapture. But even despite this
huge concerted effort, this was not super effective. Even dogs
can't really track scents deep into the swamps. And you
kind of couldn't pay people enough to go hunting for
(46:45):
people in the deeper parts of the Great Dismal because
you'll just.
Speaker 1 (46:50):
Die alligators, spiders, snakes, disease, yep.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
Yeah, And angry Maroons.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
Yeah, not to mention what's waiting for you when you
get there.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
Yeah. But while very few Maroons were captured during this period,
the raids did more or less cease. This seems have
kind of ended the like periphery Maroon bandit culture. For
the last thirty or so years of the Maroon community's
existence until the very end when they go back to war,
(47:20):
folks mostly just wanted to survive. People on the outside
assumed that the swamps were more or less empty now
because they thought that the bandits on the periphery were
all the people there. This was not the case. The
Northern abolitionists started making a huge deal out of the
Great Dismal Swamp, and so the struggle that came out
of the swamp continued, but it became a propaganda thing instead.
(47:42):
This is where abolitionism is really starting to come into
its own and you know, I mean soon enough it's
going to mobilize a war. And did kill the slavers,
But the abolitionists are like, look, here's evidence that black
people self emancipate and live without white masters. Frederick Douglas
wrote quote that hundreds of slaves prefer the danger and
(48:06):
darkness of the dismal Swamps to the homes and plantations
of their Christian masters is proof that they dread the
wolfish propensities of the slaveholder more than they dread the
real wolf. That man could write.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:22):
Harriet Beecher Stowe, who's the abolitionist author of Uncle Tom's Cabin,
wrote another book that was quite popular in the nineteenth century,
but its largely forgotten today. It's called Dread, A Tale
of the Great Dismal Swamp, and it's about a guy
named Dread, which is also a good name.
Speaker 3 (48:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:38):
And this book is openly like let's go to war
for abolition. It celebrates the Maroon as a revolutionary, pointing
out accurately that it will take fire and blood to
end the evil of slavery. And no white person loved
Maroon communities more than John Brown, who believed that Maroon
gorillas were the key to ending slavery, the Great Dismal
(49:01):
Swamp Maroons. He may or may not have been planning
to retreat to the swamp after his raid on Harper's Ferry,
It's not entirely certain. And you know, the Civil War
breaks out and the Maroons are all over that shit
many join Union forces, like as soon as black people
are allowed into the forces or whatever, and like many
of them like flee north in order to join, right,
(49:25):
many joined as soon as the Union troops got a
foothold in the south. Many waged a gorilla war in
the South, whether for the Union army or not. There
were irregular units called buffaloes that were made up of
Confederate deserters, white unionists, and black fighters all fighting side
by side. And these people fucking.
Speaker 1 (49:46):
Ruled, yes, fucking cool.
Speaker 2 (49:48):
They would just march around, freeing people and killing Confederates
and they just like walking through the South being like nah,
fuck this, and uh, Confederates in the area rode all
this stuff. That was like it would be a piece
of cake to go be up in the battlefields in
the north instead of instead of being down here with
this shit. Oh shit, and uh yeah, because they would
(50:12):
like it was just a gorilla war. And then the
other side knew that. I mean both sides knew some
of the territory. I'm not trying to be like the
white Confederates were like complete no nothings, but like although
they were probably in the political party, the know nothings.
But that's unrelated Maroons also sheltered Southern Unionists and Confederate
draft dodgers. Hundreds of Maroons that didn't go fight directly
(50:33):
went and got jobs unloading cargo for the Union army
in nearby ports. Maroons were scouts for passing units. One
of the main things that Maroons ended up doing was
like hunting, especially wild hogs, and teaching others how to
hunt in order to supplement military rations. And the war
was won for the Union near the Dismal Swamp even
before it was one else anywhere else in the South.
(50:55):
And so as soon as the buffaloes like had that
shit on lock, they just started moving further and further afield,
just rest gieing people and killing Confederates. And then the
war ended, and some swampers set out towards the rest
of the world now that they had, you know, won
their freedom, and many others just stayed put. And that's
the story of two hundred years of resistance to slavery
(51:18):
from a mostly black but tri racial alliance of rebels
living in a cool last place, hanging out with spiders
and killing Confederates.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
It's like, why do we need, you know, A remake
of a movie seventeen times when this is like the
literal perfect movie script.
Speaker 2 (51:36):
I know, especially once you start tying in the Union
Army and all that shit. You can even kind of
get some patriotism into it if you want, because the
US was the right side of the fucking Civil War,
Like you know.
Speaker 1 (51:45):
I mean, like, what are we doing here?
Speaker 2 (51:46):
This could be Yeah, I would watch the fucking like
four seasons of this shit. At least, That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (51:53):
Say.
Speaker 1 (51:54):
It might not even be a movie. It could be
a whole series. Yeah, like honestly whole series and like
the like it's like it's like real life The Walking Dead, honestly.
Speaker 2 (52:04):
Totally Yeah, people living dangerous, hard, short lives in beautiful
found communities. That is that is literally the zombie apocalypse
dream of the Walking Dead, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (52:16):
Yeah, Well, thanks for telling me this story, Magpie.
Speaker 2 (52:19):
Yeah, thanks for thanks for being a guest instead of
just a producer. Sorry that your hometown's on fire.
Speaker 1 (52:25):
Thanks And if you you want to hear more of
me being a guest, I recently did my friend Sarah
Marshall's You Are Good podcast where we talk about the
movie The Other Woman, and it's me not talking about
anything historical or news or anything upsetting. So if you
want to hear me giggle with my friend, check it out.
(52:46):
If you want to hear more of what we already
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Speaker 2 (52:52):
And if you like the ad transitions but not the ads,
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I'm pretty I do listen to podcasts that aren't just
cool Zone Media, but I listen to more cool Zone
(53:12):
Media than anything else. And thanks, you get it without
the ads. Currently can only get it with iPhone and
Sophie is hard at work about fixing that. Yeah, it'll
be soon. Cool Well, next week join us for another
dude thing about some of the stuff. I don't know
what it's going to be yet, because I could so
sucked up into one topic that I can't plan out
(53:33):
anything else. I just entirely monofocused every week. It is
kind of beautiful.
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Hi everyone, Hi, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is
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Visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the Iheartmedio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts. I think you're
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome back to cool people who did cool stuff.
You're a weekly reminder that sometimes people beat people to
death with clubs, but in a good way, like when
those people had enslaved them. I'm your host, Margaro Kiljoy
and my guest today is Sophie.
Speaker 1 (00:21):
Hi.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Hi, Sophie, Hi, You ever beaten A Nope, I'm not
gonna ask that.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Anderson and Truman are here. They say hello, Oh amazing. Yep.
Everyone say hi to Anderson, Rentron Truman.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Yeah, you better do it.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
They can't hear you say it louder.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Yeah. Also, people should say hi to Rory, our audio engineer. Hi, Rory,
Hi Roy. And that's our guest Sophie, who's also our producer.
And our theme musical was written for us byon Woman.
And this is part two in a two parter about
the Great Dismal Swamp Maroons, who were a multi century
resisted project to the slave empire of the United States
(01:03):
of America. When you pick like one topic and sort
of deep dive and just realize even like everything ties
into the fact that it's this like slave economy, just
like every little piece of it, even the poor white
people who end up siding with them. It still ties
into the fact that it's a slave economy, Like it's
just like such a overwhelming fact of American history.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
A Marca sucks scay Mass country.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah, some good people here, you know. Yeah, So we
just had Carrie's Rebellion. The Leveler Quaker Republic has fallen,
and many of the people fled into the swamps, the
Great Dismal Swamp. Not long after, in seventeen eleven, the
(01:45):
tusc Aurora, which is that confederacy of three different tribes
that folks have been working with who lived a bit
further inland from the swamp, went to war against the colonies.
Tensions were high between the two groups. They both had
valid points. Indigenous people were accused of harboring runaway slaves,
while settlers were you know, stealing Tuscarora land and sending
(02:09):
out surveyors to map to put towns in where it
wasn't theirs, and also just showing up and stealing people
and selling them. So really again, just complicated thing, you know,
just a complicated conflict that we certainly couldn't take signs
and I can't do it and even pretend the Tuscarora
(02:31):
people and their allies, including a bunch of African and
mixed race Maroons, went to war. Oh, because you already
even have even at this point, there's already some Maroons
in those swamps. There's already people who just like I
ran away, and a ton more of them are about
to arrive. But like, so they went to war and
they're basically their goal was to kidnap enough white landowners
(02:51):
to exchange them back for their loved ones.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
Cool.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Again, no historical or current parallels at all. And the
first day they went through and killed like one hundred
and thirty white people, mostly white land owning men, and
kidnapped a ton of people because they were trying to
do this hostage exchange thing. The governor tried to raise
up a militia, but the albumarl of white people were like, no,
we're We're good. The tusker are. They're not mad at us,
(03:18):
they're mad at the other white people. They're mad at
the rich people and the like landowners, and shit, we're
not going to fuck with them. Besides, we're mostly Quakers,
so we're not doing it. So it was a South
Carolina militia alongside allied indigenous fighters who put down the rebellion.
Really yeah, they had to bring them in from elsewhere.
And then also, like, I mean, the other thing about
(03:40):
the history of the destruction of indigenous peoples in the
United States is or the place that became the United
States is using dividing conquer tactics and getting one group
to fight against the other group.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
You know.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Yeah, but it wasn't all like crush rebellion. The two
sides sued for peace and they had a truce and
they agreed to release all their hostages. So the Tuscarora
released all their hostages. The English were like, why would
we do what we said we were going to do,
and they didn't. Instead, they sold their hostages into slavery,
(04:14):
fucking clown asque country, Fucking.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
A stupid place we live in.
Speaker 2 (04:19):
So the Tuscara went back to war. They were like,
all right, well, we had a truce and you didn't
do it. So they attacked more of the slave labor camps.
But unfortunately the divide and conqueror was like real close
to home. They told the chief of the northern Tuscarora,
it was kind of divided into two groups, told them
that he would rule over the southern Tuscarora too if
he would join the English in the war, and that happened.
(04:43):
So hundreds of southern Tuscarora and their allies laid up
in a fort for a last stand, and a ton
of them were slaughtered or sold into slavery. At this point,
the majority of the Tuscarora went north and joined the
Iroquois Confederacy, which is that massive democra project that is
way way more interesting in radical and democratic than the
(05:03):
US has ever been or will be. But a whole
lot of the Tuscarora people, as well as the Machapunga
and presumably other allies, they couldn't make it north because
they were blocked by soldiers. So where do they go?
They went into the swamps, and the Yamassee people from
South Carolina had been a major tool of the English
(05:24):
in the war against the Tuscarora. Within months of helping
put down the revolt of the Tuscarora, they had their
own revolt because they realized that they were on the
wrong side and that they weren't getting treated any better.
And they have the Yamassee War, which lasted another two years.
So now the swamps have the pesky leveler whites and
blacks they have fighting indigenous people and they've all been
(05:47):
driven into the swamps. Because of all that slave labor
and plantation culture could move into the area more freely.
So basically the like the cool vibe of North Carolina
is going away quickly, right, numbers of enslaved people skyrocketed.
Laws against black and indigenous people voting were passed. Black
(06:08):
people from Virginia started making their way into the swamps
also at this point, and they're fleeing the slave labor
camps where they've been imprisoned. And the thing is people
were helping them do it. Like the thing that is
like it wasn't just like, oh, I'm going to go
run into the swamps and hope for the best. Right,
these swamps are a pretty literal maze, right, and the
(06:28):
wrong path will kill you. So they were met by
other Maroons who navigated them in Oh it's cool. Yeah,
they had this whole elaborate system.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
Because if you don't like, you're fucked right, Like, yeah,
it's not this is not a nice concrete path, this
is swamp.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Yeah, And it's not even just like, oh, I'm going
to walk through some like knee high muck. It's like
I'm walking through nee high muck. Now I'm over my head.
There's an alligator you.
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Know right, Oh in that giant spider that you talked about.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Oh yeah, like literally later on, basically, the colonial media,
or I guess it was the United States media. The
slave media was like, God, this sounds like something that anyway. Whatever.
The slave media was like, there's snakes in there. Don't
go in there. There's snakes, you know, stay here and
grow stuff for us instead of hanging out with snakes.
(07:21):
I mean there were lots of venomous snakes in there.
It was a really rough place, you know. And overall,
the most common form of resistance that the Maroons did
sort of universally was they helped others find their way in.
And we also have some evidence that basically once you
were helped in, they would set you up. The people
who live there. You're not necessarily like joining in. It's
(07:43):
not like, oh, we all live in one big, happy
commune or like one big city in the middle and whatever.
But they're like, oh, okay, we'll set you up. Well,
we know where all the spots of land are. Archaeological
evidence is that over this entire region, like almost all
of the dry island areas had like multiple buildings and
like was like people were living there, you know, yeah,
(08:04):
And so they get you set up when you get in,
and soon enough you have multi generational communities scattered all
throughout the swamps. Some are in the edges, still interacting
with the regular world. Some are deep inside the swamps.
Many people spend their entire lives without leaving the swamps. Theoretically,
we don't know a ton about their lives. There's like
the stuff that people are able to conjecture, and the
numbers are pretty unknown. The main estimate that people have
(08:27):
is like two to three thousand over the course of centuries,
like not total, but at any given time. But those
are the estimates of like the militias chasing Nat Turner later.
So there's no reason to believe those estimates. Like we
don't know, we don't know when people live there. A
lot of them wild people went, according to the Governor
(08:49):
of Virginia, every single day. The Governor of Virginia said
about the dismal quote, great numbers of loose and disorderly
people daily flock thither, which is, I want to be wherever,
great numbers of loosen disorderly people greatly daily flock thither,
even if I don't say it. And so the Great
Dismal Swamp became a maroon community, not just any maroon community,
(09:12):
but the largest and longest lasting and most influential in
US history. As history of Medievo cadal I put it, quote,
the Great Dismal Swamp was a regional magnet to the oppressed,
the dispossessed, the defiant, the rebellious, and those who refused
to be bound by the conventions of hierarchical society. Swamps
were places where no horses or dogs could be used
(09:33):
to hunt them down, and where tobacco production simply could
not take place. They were places of peace, where loved
ones could not be bought or sold. These were places
where freedom seekers could build the intimately democratic communities where
they could survive and thrive. Wow, I know, it's just
like I such a like people do amazing shit in
(09:55):
really bad situations. You know. Yeah, sometimes it almost seems
like it doesn't really, but sometimes it seems like it
takes a real bad situation before people do really amazing shit.
But actually people would have been doing this amazing shit
if there hadn't been the terrible stuff either, So I
don't know. They lived in swamp cabins on the islands
of dry Land. They raised livestock and crops. The Maroons
(10:18):
had their own internal economy. Archaeologists are aware of at
least one person building musical instruments. Most of their life
was concerned with daily life, not waging war against slave society.
But there were like multiple anthropologists of like, there's like
four different classifications of Maroons in there. There's like the
deep maroon people who are like, I'm never going anywhere,
(10:39):
and then there's the people who kind of live in
the periphery and mostly raid and like. So you can't
really easily say, like, oh, everyone wanted to be left alone.
The people want to be left alone went to the
damn middle, and the people who wanted to hang out
on the edge and like kill people they didn't like
lived on the edge and kill people they didn't like.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
You know, that makes sense.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
It's just logical something for everyone.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
As for the word maroon, maroon was originally a Spanish
term for the cattle that escaped from early settlers and
went feral. By the fifteen forties, it was applied to
people and by the fifteen seventies, it appeared in English
and the colonial Americans the government wasn't really a big
fan of this thing that was happening. They were like,
we don't even know where the line between the two
(11:18):
of our colonies is who's in charge? And this is
like literally they would have this problem where they'd want
to go and raid or they'd want to strike back
right against the raiders, but they kind of didn't because
they didn't know whose territory it was, because they didn't
know if it was Virginia North Carolina. And the existence
of maroonage was really uncomfortable for white slavers because it
(11:39):
was a beacon for enslave people, absolutely, but also because
it didn't sit right with the lies that slavers told.
Slavers in the US at the time would claim shit
that like, oh, black people are naturally docile, or they
can't survive without benevolent white owners, and the Great Dismal
Swamp was just a counter example, and they weren't happy
(12:02):
with it. Historian J. Brent Morris put it like this quote,
Maroon voices demand a reassessment of the meaning of freedom.
Maroonage in the Dismal represented an alternative to a life
of enslavement. It also represented a choice, in most cases
to live free lives in the swamp in the south
(12:23):
rather than seeking it in a free state or Canada.
Maroon Voices also remind us that freedom was not just
an accomplishment after passage along the underground railroad, but a
maroonage process sustained by their own heroic efforts. And a
lot of both of these books that I read about
this really wanted to kind of hit home. I think
in kind of contrast the way that American history is
taught that even the underground railroad, like people kind of
(12:46):
like the underground railroad, the white people kind of like
the underground railroad because it's like, oh, we went and
helped people. And it's true, the people who did the
underground railroad are fucking heroes, right, but then what yeah,
totally that's a And also like they were freeing themselves
with help, right, not sure, just pure people without agency
(13:08):
you can't rescue themselves. And the existence of maroons. The
self emancipation is a big evidence of that. And people
talk about basically anyone, including the people who use the
underground railroad, are self emancipating. And I really like that
way of framing it. It's also true that, yeah, people
would get north and nearly you're free, welcome to capitalism,
work a job, or die, you know. Yep. Literally half
(13:30):
the arguments that the abolitionists made against slavery were economic,
that it was cheaper to not take care of people's health. Yeah,
everything that seems like it should be good is bad. Like,
for example, that Ben Franklin thing where he's like, let's
make America white. It was an argument against transporting people
from Africa, right, because he didn't want more black people,
(13:52):
because he wanted America pure and white, and so it
was sort of an anti slavery argument for the aliens.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Yeah, oh that breaks my brain.
Speaker 2 (14:02):
Yep. Fucking eighteenth century politics in the US are wacky. Yeah,
nineteenth century, twenty whatever politics. The swamps stood in the
way of colonization. It was untameable, it was unplawable, it
was full of disease. It actually probably wasn't really full
of disease, but they believed in the miasma theory of
disease at the time. I mean, I'm sure the mosquitoes
(14:24):
were carrying some diseases. I'm sure it wasn't a super
healthy place. But they thought literally like disease like grew
up out of the water.
Speaker 1 (14:31):
Not ideal, but also really good to scare people off.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Yeah, that's a good point, they probably, Yeah, there's diseases
here in snakes, you know, stay the hell away from us.
Speaker 1 (14:42):
Which is like, probably true, but maybe not as extreme
as they wanted people who they wanted to keep out
to think.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Right, Yeah, totally. And so the idea of this untamable
nature was an affront to the very idea of enlightenment
rational Western thought. Nature has to be subdivided and controlled.
But the swamp refused them, and so the people who
lived in it were themselves sort of inherently outlaws, even
the ones who weren't fugitives, because they were living in
(15:12):
this uncontrollable space and they lived as outlaws. The first
raids out of the swamp were in seventeen oh nine.
They robbed storehouses and started picking off farm animals that
were close to the swamp. Also in seventeen oh nine,
they started planning a slave revolt from the swamps, one
that I don't know a ton about, but it happened.
In seventeen oh nine, Black and indigenous people started getting
(15:35):
ready for revolt. Its leaders were hanged, drawn and quartered,
including a man named Angola Peter, but neither of Virginia
or North Carolina was sure of who was in charge
of subduing revolts because no one knew where the line is.
But don't worry one bold man just kidding. He sucked
and he's kind of a coward.
Speaker 1 (15:55):
I was like, it was, like, what podcast am I on?
Speaker 2 (15:57):
H Yeah, yeah, will Bird the second? If there was
a show about bad people?
Speaker 1 (16:02):
O fucking way.
Speaker 2 (16:04):
Yeah. Could you imagine being named the second instead of Junior?
Speaker 1 (16:10):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Like, I'm sorry, you don't get to be uh the
number until you're at least the third. You're just gonna
have to suck it up for a generation. Kiddo, you
are William Bird Junior.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
That's so fucking funny.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
In seventeen twenty eight, he went into Survey the Place.
He was a wealthy Virginia planter who wanted to know
exactly where the line between good and noble Virginia and
bad and rebellious North Carolina was. He was one of
the worst people I've ever read about. He was absolutely
brutal to the people he owned. He was so afraid
of slaver volt that he tortured and sexually assaulted everyone
(16:44):
he owned just to make sure they would never revolt God.
And then here's the part that makes him like not
just terrible, but like fucking poetically terrible. Starting in seventeen
oh nine, I think when he's like a kid, he
had recurring nightmares about slaver volts. And the way that
these nightmares happen is that there is a great fireball
(17:06):
in the sky over Virginia that represents divine wrath against slavery.
Imagine having that dream and then being like, I'm probably
the good guy here. I have dreams where God is
going to burn me up for my evil. Better go
mistreat these people. It's through his accounts that we get
(17:28):
some of the first written record of the people living
in the swamp. So this is like when I say
that the record is like kind of fucked up, this
is the first guy who like went in and talked
to people who lived there.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:38):
So unreliable narrator, I know.
Speaker 2 (17:41):
But what's so funny is I think he's so in
his own head that he doesn't occur to him to
have lied in.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
This case, because he sure so weird.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
He starts on the coast and then with a bunch
of surveyors he starts heading west inland. And the people
he met there were terrible and barbarous people. After all,
they shared work equally between men and women. Oh, this
is the thing that's going to come up again and again.
But it's like really subtext because women are written out
of all history, right, Well, you know who else is
(18:12):
written out of history? Advertisers. There is not actually a
lot of record of the advertisers of old newspapers. I
sometimes look, I don't always find it because one thing
that I absolutely did start noticing Isbister doing a radical
podcast with mainstream advertisers, is that old radical newspapers absolutely
at advertisers because you actually need to pay to get
things out there. And I'm in part of a long,
(18:34):
noble tradition of pivoting to ads like these ones. And
we're back. So obviously you talk about at the time
how women are written out of history. But one of
the things that's come up everything I've read about the
(18:54):
dismal swamp, they're like not marking the gender of what's
happening overall. I mean, they are some times are talking
about women who are enslaved who fled there and stuff
also right, but it seems like almost everything, including the
fighting that I'm going to talk about, happening, was fairly
probably not fifty to fifty gender split, but was like
(19:15):
a substantially more egalitarian thing than what was happening outside. Specifically,
when Bird Junior is in there, he's like, is terrible
here they share work equally between men and women, I know,
And like he's also like almost mad that they offer
(19:35):
anyone runaway slave or common criminal alike, not just a
place to stay, but help them get a good spot
of dry land. Like one family also that probably had
a fugitive for a father, because he was asking like,
oh do y'all do and they're all like, oh, we're
all born free. But then like dad just like kind
of kept hiding, you know, yeah, because he was because
he's a fugitive. That family where the dad was a fugitive,
(19:59):
still took in this like white survey team and gave
them a place to stay and fed them because they
are good fucking people, like probably two good of people.
You know. If they just drowned all of these men,
the world would have been a better place. Allegedly, so
Bird dedicated his life to destroying that man and everyone
(20:19):
like him, like only a slaver colonizer can do. Thanks
for the dinner.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
What a fucking asshole.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
He wrote this long piece about how if this society
of slaves wasn't destroyed, like murdered in its cradle, it
would likely become a new Rome.
Speaker 1 (20:36):
What a weird fucking motherfucking dude.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Okay, yeah, Bird Junior is a strange man. He compares
the Maroons to Romulus and Remus, the two twins who
founded Rome. But negatively he's like, oh, we better stop this.
Like he this man knows he's on the wrong side.
He sees fireballs. And they kept telling him, all the
(21:01):
people he stayed with, they kept telling him in no
uncertain terms that if he and his men kept going
into the real heart of the swamps, they would never return.
This was maybe a friendly warning, and maybe it was
all like, get the fuck out of here, don't blow
up our spot.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
When they going got tough, the rich guy got going.
His crew went on without him to survey in the
interior of the swamp. He went around and waited for
them to come out the other side, and then to
try and take all the credit for doing the survey. Like,
if you're gonna be a gentleman adventurer, asshole, at least
go do the adventure. You know, I just don't like
(21:43):
this man.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
No, he's awful. Fuck him.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
His crew survived, but they only made it like a
mile or two a day while they're trying to survey
the swamps. Eventually, after eight days, they ran short on
supplies and they gave up on surveying and just booked
it west, trying not to die. And even then they
were still only able to make it like four miles
a day across this terrain. Only two years later, the
(22:07):
largest colonial era slave rebellion popped off, the Chesapeake Rebellion
of seventeen thirty. And this one is interesting. We know
way more about this one, or I know way more
about this one than I did about the seventeen oh
nine one. Basically, someone probably an enslaved person, started a
rumor that the king had declared that anyone baptized Christian
(22:28):
was now going to be freed from slavery, and so
hundreds of people felt the local officials were refusing the
king's orders to free them. They were like no, no, no,
the kings had were free. Now we heard a rumor
like I'm Christian, you gotta let me go, which is
what it used to be, right right, And so they
started drilling in units, getting ready for a fight because
(22:51):
they had been given legitimacy by the king, which is
such an interesting like most of the other rebellions didn't
feel like they needed this. They were like that man
thinks he owned me, let's kill him, you know. But
it was an effective way to get hundreds of people together.
They started drilling, getting ready for a fight, and it
was broken up and the rebels fled into the swamps,
and from there they led a gorilla struggle for years.
(23:15):
And that asshole Bird yeah, Bird Junior, Yeah yeah, maybe
Bird Senior was a little better, but I doubt it.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Oh goddage, still far.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Far from the tree.
Speaker 1 (23:24):
What did he do? What did he do?
Speaker 2 (23:26):
He was really worried about the Maroons. He was considered
the world's leading expert on them because he'd met some
of them and survived to tell the tale, because they'd
fed him and housed him and informed him about dangers.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
This fuck.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Yeah, Jamaico was in an all out Maroon war at
the time, which I hope it covered more one day,
and Bird was like, really worried about the maroons. I
think he was also a little bit worried about his
own career and posterity. He advocated for the end of
the Transatlantic slave trade. Here's more of the people doing
everything you think is good is secretly bad.
Speaker 1 (23:57):
Yeah, what's what's the what's the uh?
Speaker 2 (23:59):
He was like, we need to end the Transatlantic slave
trade because Africans are more likely to maroon than seasoned
That gets Air quotes African Americans who'd been born into slavery.
It's about like three times more common for people who
were born in Africa to maroon than people who were
born in the United States. And so he was like,
(24:19):
I'm going to write up this. He wrote up a
long thing about how to physically drain the swamp. Oh yeah,
now we get to the drain the swamp part, because
why not ever leave modern politics behind? And so he
writes this whole thing about how to drain the swamp.
But it wasn't him who tried to do it.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
Instead, is that where the fucking dream the swamp the
shit comes from?
Speaker 2 (24:41):
So I don't know, I never thought about it and
I never write about it. Yeah, I mean I doubt
Trump was like specifically, like I'm talking about the Great
Dismal Swamp.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Oh no, No, he doesn't know anything about anything that's
ever happened in the history of the world.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
Yeah, but this like goal to drain the swamp thing
is a huge par art of this era of colonial
history because people are really worried about this shit.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
No, it wouldn't make sense that that's where that originally started. God, Okay, And.
Speaker 2 (25:09):
So you know how like sometimes people look at Trump
as like in the far right is his aberration and
how far we've come far to the right of the
old original. Like, Nah, the first guy who tried to
drain the swamp, he was a guy you might have
heard of. He's maybe the most famous slaver in all
of history. He is so terrifying that he wore the
teeth of slaves in his own mouth like a cartoon villain.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Church fucking Washington and George Market It.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
Is George fucking Washington, the guy who went on to
start the world's most powerful slave empire. George Washington and
his brother John and some other guys.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
Fuck fuck fuck okay to me, more n me more demore.
Speaker 2 (25:46):
Yeah. In seventeen fifty three, the entire region was given
a four guys because that's the other thing is that
people were like, oh, private corporations run everything now in America,
and like that is the way America was founded. It
was actually really specifically in contrast to the way that
like the Catholic countries, which were not less evil, but
the Catholic colonies were more like everything's owned by the
church and the state and shit. Yeah, whereas like British
(26:08):
colonies were like, we have the such and such company
with shareholders and blah blah blah. You know. So they
gave the entire Great Dismal Swamp to four guys, not
the Washington's. They were just hired on at first.
Speaker 1 (26:21):
This is breaking my brain.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Continue, Yeah, In seventeen sixty two, the four Guys sent
an enslaved cruise to tame the swamp, and they hired
this thirty one year old white guy to help, a
guy named George Washington, and Washington incorporated a group called
Adventurers to Drain the Dismal Swamp, which is a genuinely
funny name to name a company.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
What.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
Okay, sorry, because I think he's into this idea of
like I'm a gentleman adventurer.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
You know, God, just the like romanticizing of this man
that this country has, this planet has done. When he's like,
that's your title, Yeah, that's your title, you fucking creep.
Speaker 2 (27:03):
Yeah, he's just a cartoon villain. He runs a group
called Adventures to Drain It. Yeah, and later this is
renamed the Less Fun Dismal Swamp Company. The only thing
that was dismal was their chances of success h and
also the working conditions of the people who died enslaved
underneath them. Each of these bold adventurers was like, all right,
(27:24):
we're each going to donate five guys we owned to
get this done, and we'll all get super rich. But
they were all trying to outstingy each other, right, and
so they all sent their least capable guys, their like
least valuable people that they thought they owned. Old slave
Teath himself didn't even send five. He only sent two
guys he owned and forced to dig like dig ditches
(27:46):
in swamp water. A whole bunch of them ran away
to join the Maroons, including a couple with really cool names,
Jack Dismal and his wife Venus. And those are good names.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Those are good names.
Speaker 2 (27:58):
And we know at least Jack is going to ride
away into the sunset, happy and alive at the end
of this story. And I'm just assuming Venus does as well,
because I have no evidence of the contrary.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Cool fucking name Venus dismal.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
I know, I know I would. I'd be surprised if
I've never met anyone who goes by that. That's such
a good fucking name. The whole company was a failure.
It was a dismal failure, and well done. I love
how the swamp is dismal for slavers and evil civilization,
but it's actually good and amazing for the people resisting
these things. Unpaid workers kept dying or running away, and
(28:36):
the only money that the company made was by selling shingles,
and it did not drain the swamp, and it did
not even survey the swamp. Seventeen seventy five year olled
around and the Washington brothers, John and George had other
shit on their minds. Their fun little adventure of overseeing
a little death camp on the edge of a swamp
was over, like literally, their idea of a good time
(28:57):
is to go oversee a slave death camp. Anyway, I
don't like them. No, so they had to move on
to bigger things. They had a whole continent and later
world to destroy with the American Revolution. I've probably mentioned
it a few times on this show, but the leaders
of the American Revolution were doing it to protect their
right to expand their colonies into indigenous territories. And the
whole thing about democracy and freedom is a terrible, sinister farce,
(29:20):
a scam that they sold working people. But it's worth reiterating,
as author Mediebo Cadale put it, quote, some people think
that the United States of America is the greatest experiment
in democracy, but there has never been any democracy here.
Some people are in love with what they are told
America is. But when you look at history very carefully,
(29:42):
you will find that people whom I call freedom seekers
and resistors were constantly running away from America. I really
like that way of looking at it, being like, look,
we're sold this like bill of goods. We're told America's
land of freedom. Hey wait, why did all the black
people side with the British? Hey wait, you know, like
you just like slowly, it's not true, That's what I'm saying.
(30:04):
The British declared freedom for any enslaved person who fled
from the rebels. A group called Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment, fifteen
hundred strong, wore sashes that read Liberty to Slaves as
they went into battle against George Washington and his army
of slavery. And that is fucking cool. You're on the
right side of history if you are in a battle
(30:26):
wearing a fucking sash that reads liberty the slaves. Some
of George Washington's own slaves fought him in that war,
like Harry, who'd been kidnapped in Gambia and renamed Harry
by George Washington and fought on the British side as
Corporal Harry Washington. And he was as important of an
icon to the black soldiers fighting against the American Revolution
(30:49):
as George Washington was to the other side. And I
like that both sides. Out of Washington, it's likely that
a great number of this regiment came from the maroons
of the swamp. The main evidence that we have of
this is that so many of these soldiers had intimate
knowledge of the swamps. Basically, they were like, yeah, all
the people were just like knew all their ways in
(31:10):
and out of the swamps, so they're from there. The
enslaved people who've been set to drain the swamp escaped
en masse and fled for freedom or to go fight
against the Americans. Even after British forces abandoned the South,
the raids from the Dismal kept going. So like, the
British stopped trying to have a military presence around the
(31:32):
Dismal Swamp, but the Maroons kept going. They were like, nope,
we're fighting these fucking slave men, you know.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
And these were multi racial units. One landless white laborer
named Jeshiah Phillips led a black and white band of
fifty people in a gorilla struggle against the expansionist Americans.
Many of them were Maroons, and Maroons kept them safe.
When white men in the South were impressed into the
military to track down Phillips's band, they basically refused to.
(32:02):
Like all these people got like, hey, you're a militia,
now go track down that, like the white guy who's
leading a mixed race group of people against us or
a multiracial group against us. And people are like, now,
we're good, We're not tracking that guy down. We kind
of like him. A quarter of them deserted.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
That's so funny.
Speaker 2 (32:21):
Yeah, Phillips himself was caught and hanged in seventeen seventy eight.
But one of the things that keeps going in this
story is that as soon as they like take out
one of the leaders, it stops nothing. And so that's
how you know, the leaders are more like symbolic in
figureheads rather than like indispensable. Sure, yeah, yeah, the band
kept going until the end of the war. The whole
(32:41):
Dismal Swamp region, not just the depths of it, was
completely uncontrollable by the US, and that guy Jack Dismal,
him and Corporal Harry Washington made it out on British
ships to freedom, and I assume Venus was with him,
but I don't know. Uck Yeah, yeah, because I'm not
clearly the British were the bad people like twenty years
(33:02):
ago at this point, I'm not trying. It's super hard
to fend them. But like they told the truth when
I said that not the.
Speaker 1 (33:07):
Biggest villain in this very particular story.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
Yeah, they were like, hey, well, we'll set you free
if you fight for us, and then they did.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
And then they kept their word, which is crazy, I.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
Know, like genuinely wouldn't be surprised all of that hadn't happened.
But yeah, and during the war, the population of Maroons
inside the swamp grew and grew sick, and for the
most part, they lived peaceful lives after that, though again
many of them joined great abolitionist conspiracies throughout the new country.
And we're going to get how like in another like
(33:38):
twenty years, they're gonna be like basically in a war
against the US. And so there's all these abolitionist conspiracies
going up and down the country. Literally there's word of
mouth campaigns organized by enslaved people. People were talking and organizing,
and what they were talking about, Sophie, is they were
talking about what a great deal on stuff they could
(33:59):
find have by listening to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
Oh good for them.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
It's only through podcasting that you hear the finest of
goods and services, such as the ones who support this
very show and we're back. So now you have this country,
the United States of America, and they didn't like that
(34:26):
a really big chunk of itself was a lawless land
of outlaws who kept stealing their quote unquote property aka themselves.
Like literally most of the records that we have about
like the number of people living there was the amount
of property damage done by their raids, which was number
of people who've left like slave labor camps. By seventeen ninety,
(34:49):
laws were passed by both Virginia and North Carolina to
build a canal through the swamp. They wanted to use
a private company, of course, because that's what the US
was founded on, and for a decade hundreds of enslaved
people worked and died building a canal, though they eventually
did successfully build a twenty two mile canal, which immediately
started getting used by radicals, which is kind of cool.
(35:11):
Itinerant abolitionist preachers used to coordinate rebellion, and abolitionist ships
would like show up, they'd like sail into the canal
to go find people were hiding out and put them
on boats and take them up to like Boston and shit,
which is fucking cool. The Dismal Swamp became a stopover
place for a lot of self emancipators after the United
(35:31):
States was founded, and all the while maroons are organizing
to attack the slave empire. And I was promising you,
how when like one leader goes down, there's this others
I'm gonna like I started tracking all of the names
of all the different leaders of bands.
Speaker 1 (35:46):
But yeah, who's up. Who's the next? Motherfucker?
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Tom Copper? One man. Tom Copper was a fugitive himself,
and he led at least thirty eight fighters on.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
The very based name of Tom Copper.
Speaker 2 (35:59):
I mean, like it's such a good though, like like
if you wanted to watch like a noir film about.
Speaker 1 (36:04):
It, Yeah, that character's day would be Tom Copper.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
Yeah, totally. Yeah, he led at least thirty eight fighters.
Those are the number that were like literally they all
wrote their name down on like a registry, but there's
almost certainly probably hundreds more.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
And when he was arrested, six Maroons arrived on horseback
and broke them out of jail.
Speaker 1 (36:24):
Fuck yeah, I knew we'd have a jail break in here.
I know, just had jailbreak energy. Let's go on a
horseback to where's this fucking movie?
Speaker 2 (36:34):
I know. God for the people who came and rescued
him were caught and ended up in prison in his place.
But you know, that's the thing you try and do
when you try and rescue your friends. And he did
get out. His army grew, he had captains one per
county who organized as well, and eventually one hundred Maroons
were caught and tortured and executed around eighteen oh two.
(36:57):
Exactly what happened to Tom Copper I think is lost
to him. Yeah, after he disappeared, a new Maroon military leader,
a preacher named General Peter, stepped up.
Speaker 1 (37:08):
They're just like picking the most generic male names of history. Peter, Paul, Tom,
I mean, like Phil, Mike, John.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
There was only like ten names for white or black
people in America for a very long time.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
You know, you know that's actually so fair. I'm like, oh, right,
are we just naming apostles? What's happening?
Speaker 2 (37:31):
Yeah, you just had you had to have a wasp name.
And if you didn't have a wasp, like, you didn't
have to be a wasp. You just had to have
a wasp name.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
And so during this time, when you have this, these
these people leading raids, the good whites of the South
were terrified. One guy wrote a newspaper saying, quote, we,
our wives, and our children were surrounded by desperadoes, white
and black, who perhaps would laugh at our calamity and
mock when our fear cometh, and you know what, I
(38:00):
would mock. When that man's fear comes, I join in.
And so they were like leading these raids but planning
this larger attack. They wanted to do an attack on
both North Carolina and Virginia on the same day with clubs, spikes,
(38:22):
and axes. They didn't have any guns.
Speaker 1 (38:23):
Yet, clubs, spikes and axes.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
Oh I I know, I don't even know what the
spikes were in this case, but.
Speaker 1 (38:30):
Fuck it, I love it. Yeah, spikes and axes, let's go.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
Yeah, And the whole thing was coordinated by a network
of black preachers, and so later black churches and preachers
and shit are going to get like basically run out
of this part of the South. But for a while,
you basically like get a free black man who's a
preacher to go around and be like and the Lord said, hey,
next Wednesday, we're gonna and then after that and then
(38:55):
we're gonna do this other thing. You know. Yeah. Some
people were caught and gave up under torture. Others were
caught and stayed strong. There's like good lines about like
people being like, nah, I'm you're not getting anything out
of me, and like one guy was just like I'm
gonna laugh when when we come for you, you know. Yeah,
and uh, after General Peter, there was oh, we're gonna
(39:17):
get new names now, Pompy Little.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
Okay, that's what I'm fucking talking about. That is a
cool fucking name. Pumpy Little. Let's go tell tell me
what Pompy Little did. Please, I'm I'm on board. Why
is this not a movie? And Pompy Little was a
picturesque man. He was more than six feet tall. People
were shorter back then. He was a giant of a man. Honey.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
He had a like I think he's the one. Oh no,
it was a later guy who had this scar across
his face. Maybe one of them had a scar across
his face when we had been shot by a bullet
and kept going, you know, and uh, he was completely fearless.
He fought with a long, double edged knife, and when
he would rob people, they'd be like, we're gonna tell
and give you a description. He was like, good, my
(40:01):
name's pomp and told people his name so that they
would be afraid of him.
Speaker 1 (40:07):
He's fucking cool.
Speaker 2 (40:09):
Yeah. Eventually he was shot and killed, but that man
lived free.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:15):
Then in eighteen eighteen, a multi racial, mixed gender gang
of Maroons. This is the only one. I suspect all
of these were multiracial, mixed gender, but I like this
is the one where like specifically details that yeah, yeah,
they're like and then one of the women who was
among them was shot and killed in the raid. You know,
they declared themselves at war with nearby society and started
(40:36):
raiding farms and slave labor camps. Maroons would do shit
like basically they like go find the man who had
personally enslaved them, dragged them into the swamps, and beat
them to death with a club, like you imagine you
just like own a bunch of guys and then they
run away and you're like, oh, I'm sure that's the
end of that. Yeah, okay, Like and this is like
(40:57):
during the time when the South keeps trying to like,
oh they they're docile, they don't mind. It's just you know,
like nah.
Speaker 1 (41:06):
Nah, fuck around and find out.
Speaker 2 (41:08):
Yeah, oh this is wait here's ming Mingo is the
guy with the the scar across his face our next guy,
and I think Mingo is involved in the eighteen eighteen gang.
He was a bandit as people called him nam Mingo,
and one of the things that he did because the
local white people, like the poor ones, didn't really have
(41:28):
a problem with any of this, you know, because they
weren't being targeted because they didn't own people. So Mingo
would do murder for hire on slavers. Basically, some people
were like, like a white guy was like, hey, I
really want this slaver to die, and Mingo was like,
all right, well, I think it was like two hundred
bucks or something was the payment. But the method of
(41:48):
the payment, as best as I can tell, was not
give me money. It was go buy that guy and
set him free. Interesting, and so then they were like,
all right, we'll go kill that slaver that you don't
like in exchange for you, you know, giving us money
or doing this thing for us. This is the guy
who had a scar across his face from a bullet wound.
(42:10):
He was eventually betrayed by an associate, and it was
like kind of a sad story. He was like the
associate kind of waited until Mingo like shot his gun
off in celebration, and then the guy was like, hah,
your gun's empty and like jumped him. You know. Yeah.
When he was betrayed, he was put on trial and
everyone was outraged, although like a local town was totally
scandalized because, to quote J. Brent Morris, eight white men
(42:33):
admitted that Mingo had informed them of his plan to
kill the Princess Anne County sheriff, and none of them
had taken measures to stop him. And so basically it
just like everyone was fine with these guys. Not everyone,
obviously a lot of people were very unfine with these guys,
but the like the poor people who lived in the area,
including the poor white people.
Speaker 1 (42:51):
They were like, everything's cool. What do you mean.
Speaker 2 (42:53):
Yeah, it was just that's just the guy who kills
rich people, like, don't fuck with Luigi, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:59):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
And while most of the local white population wasn't specifically
abolition so that's the other thing too, right, they didn't
have abolitionist politics. Their primary form of assistance to the Maroons,
besides the ones who were literally were Maroons themselves. And
part of these bandit gangs is that they had a
really strong no snitching culture.
Speaker 1 (43:22):
Oh okay, yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:24):
When outsiders would come and they'd be like, hey, what's
in the swamps, people would be like, I heard of
a swamp. What are you talking about? There's nothing there,
you know, Because poor white rural people used to know
something about class solidarity and hating cops, and many of
them still do, but culture wars are trying to convince
them otherwise. That's what I say about that. Whenever a
(43:45):
Maroon leader went down, another stepped up. There was no
end to the raids for decades. Huge bounties would go up,
but people were like, we don't want to slave raid
the swamps. That's how you die.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
What's that mythical creature where you cut off the head
and another head grows back.
Speaker 2 (44:01):
Yeah. Yeah, they're the hydro of the swamps, which is
cool because hydros live in swamps. Oh my god, that's
fucking awesome.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
There you go.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
And one farmer at one point was like, all right,
let's get a posse together, let's go capture the slaves.
As soon as he announced his plan, maroons came into
his fields and shop dead, immediately dead in front of
his wife. Just were like you're dead now, and then
like walked away, see you, sir?
Speaker 1 (44:24):
Enjoy Hell.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Yeah. The people in charge of subduing the Maroons, like
the actual like officials, kept winding up dead too, like literally,
like they would like really leave the swamps to go
assassinate people, so I like them. Yeah, And this came
to a head and kind of ended when and this
is not nat Turner's fault, but when future friend of
(44:48):
the Pod Nat Turner led the most famous slaver vault
in US history, which was only twenty five miles east
of the swamps. Nat Turner led seventy folks on raids
and killed about sixty white people men, women, and children
before being stopped by a group of white vigilantes. Some
of the rebels made their way to the swamps in safety.
(45:10):
Nat Turner went underground. They didn't catch him for a
little while. He didn't go to the swamps actually, and
like he actually wasn't planning on using the swamps, but
everyone was convinced he was planning on using the swamps,
which he probably should have been planning on using the swamps.
I haven't I've only read what the Great Dismal Swamp
books has to say about Nat Turner. I haven't read
the books about Nat Turner what they have to say
about him yet. But white people lost their fucking mind
(45:34):
and started massacring black people after not Turner, two hundred people,
two hundred black people were like randomly killed, and then
their heads were put on pikes alongside.
Speaker 1 (45:43):
The road, and like this, fucking Christ, it.
Speaker 2 (45:45):
Was a fucking massacre. And then the entire country, especially
the South, like mobilizes against this threat of an outright
slave revolution because Haiti had just had one thirty years earlier,
and Haiti's revolution shook the western world to its core.
And then yeah, yeah, yeah, and so in this area,
now every white man was expected to be ready to
(46:07):
be pressed into a militia at anytime. Hunting maroons became
a full time job for some people.
Speaker 3 (46:13):
But get a hobby, Jesus Christ, learn how to do
a cross stitch, learn how to grow some crops, and oh, well,
they can't do that, mine your business.
Speaker 2 (46:23):
Yeah, And they started trying to burn people out of
the swamps. They would set fires on parts of it
to flush people out to recapture. But even despite this
huge concerted effort, this was not super effective. Even dogs
can't really track scents deep into the swamps. And you
kind of couldn't pay people enough to go hunting for
(46:45):
people in the deeper parts of the Great Dismal because
you'll just.
Speaker 1 (46:50):
Die alligators, spiders, snakes, disease, yep.
Speaker 2 (46:53):
Yeah, And angry Maroons.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
Yeah, not to mention what's waiting for you when you
get there.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
Yeah. But while very few Maroons were captured during this period,
the raids did more or less cease. This seems have
kind of ended the like periphery Maroon bandit culture. For
the last thirty or so years of the Maroon community's
existence until the very end when they go back to war,
(47:20):
folks mostly just wanted to survive. People on the outside
assumed that the swamps were more or less empty now
because they thought that the bandits on the periphery were
all the people there. This was not the case. The
Northern abolitionists started making a huge deal out of the
Great Dismal Swamp, and so the struggle that came out
of the swamp continued, but it became a propaganda thing instead.
(47:42):
This is where abolitionism is really starting to come into
its own and you know, I mean soon enough it's
going to mobilize a war. And did kill the slavers,
But the abolitionists are like, look, here's evidence that black
people self emancipate and live without white masters. Frederick Douglas
wrote quote that hundreds of slaves prefer the danger and
(48:06):
darkness of the dismal Swamps to the homes and plantations
of their Christian masters is proof that they dread the
wolfish propensities of the slaveholder more than they dread the
real wolf. That man could write.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:22):
Harriet Beecher Stowe, who's the abolitionist author of Uncle Tom's Cabin,
wrote another book that was quite popular in the nineteenth century,
but its largely forgotten today. It's called Dread, A Tale
of the Great Dismal Swamp, and it's about a guy
named Dread, which is also a good name.
Speaker 3 (48:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:38):
And this book is openly like let's go to war
for abolition. It celebrates the Maroon as a revolutionary, pointing
out accurately that it will take fire and blood to
end the evil of slavery. And no white person loved
Maroon communities more than John Brown, who believed that Maroon
gorillas were the key to ending slavery, the Great Dismal
(49:01):
Swamp Maroons. He may or may not have been planning
to retreat to the swamp after his raid on Harper's Ferry,
It's not entirely certain. And you know, the Civil War
breaks out and the Maroons are all over that shit
many join Union forces, like as soon as black people
are allowed into the forces or whatever, and like many
of them like flee north in order to join, right,
(49:25):
many joined as soon as the Union troops got a
foothold in the south. Many waged a gorilla war in
the South, whether for the Union army or not. There
were irregular units called buffaloes that were made up of
Confederate deserters, white unionists, and black fighters all fighting side
by side. And these people fucking.
Speaker 1 (49:46):
Ruled, yes, fucking cool.
Speaker 2 (49:48):
They would just march around, freeing people and killing Confederates
and they just like walking through the South being like nah,
fuck this, and uh, Confederates in the area rode all
this stuff. That was like it would be a piece
of cake to go be up in the battlefields in
the north instead of instead of being down here with
this shit. Oh shit, and uh yeah, because they would
(50:12):
like it was just a gorilla war. And then the
other side knew that. I mean both sides knew some
of the territory. I'm not trying to be like the
white Confederates were like complete no nothings, but like although
they were probably in the political party, the know nothings.
But that's unrelated Maroons also sheltered Southern Unionists and Confederate
draft dodgers. Hundreds of Maroons that didn't go fight directly
(50:33):
went and got jobs unloading cargo for the Union army
in nearby ports. Maroons were scouts for passing units. One
of the main things that Maroons ended up doing was
like hunting, especially wild hogs, and teaching others how to
hunt in order to supplement military rations. And the war
was won for the Union near the Dismal Swamp even
before it was one else anywhere else in the South.
(50:55):
And so as soon as the buffaloes like had that
shit on lock, they just started moving further and further afield,
just rest gieing people and killing Confederates. And then the
war ended, and some swampers set out towards the rest
of the world now that they had, you know, won
their freedom, and many others just stayed put. And that's
the story of two hundred years of resistance to slavery
(51:18):
from a mostly black but tri racial alliance of rebels
living in a cool last place, hanging out with spiders
and killing Confederates.
Speaker 1 (51:26):
It's like, why do we need, you know, A remake
of a movie seventeen times when this is like the
literal perfect movie script.
Speaker 2 (51:36):
I know, especially once you start tying in the Union
Army and all that shit. You can even kind of
get some patriotism into it if you want, because the
US was the right side of the fucking Civil War,
Like you know.
Speaker 1 (51:45):
I mean, like, what are we doing here?
Speaker 2 (51:46):
This could be Yeah, I would watch the fucking like
four seasons of this shit. At least, That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 3 (51:53):
Say.
Speaker 1 (51:54):
It might not even be a movie. It could be
a whole series. Yeah, like honestly whole series and like
the like it's like it's like real life The Walking Dead, honestly.
Speaker 2 (52:04):
Totally Yeah, people living dangerous, hard, short lives in beautiful
found communities. That is that is literally the zombie apocalypse
dream of the Walking Dead, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1 (52:16):
Yeah, Well, thanks for telling me this story, Magpie.
Speaker 2 (52:19):
Yeah, thanks for thanks for being a guest instead of
just a producer. Sorry that your hometown's on fire.
Speaker 1 (52:25):
Thanks And if you you want to hear more of
me being a guest, I recently did my friend Sarah
Marshall's You Are Good podcast where we talk about the
movie The Other Woman, and it's me not talking about
anything historical or news or anything upsetting. So if you
want to hear me giggle with my friend, check it out.
(52:46):
If you want to hear more of what we already
do at cool Zone Media or cool zone media dot com.
Speaker 2 (52:52):
And if you like the ad transitions but not the ads,
have I got a service for you. This isn't an
ad transition, it's sort of it is, but it's me
promoting cooler Zone Media, which is the same podcasts from
cool Zone Media, but without the ads. And I don't know,
I'm pretty I do listen to podcasts that aren't just
cool Zone Media, but I listen to more cool Zone
(53:12):
Media than anything else. And thanks, you get it without
the ads. Currently can only get it with iPhone and
Sophie is hard at work about fixing that. Yeah, it'll
be soon. Cool Well, next week join us for another
dude thing about some of the stuff. I don't know
what it's going to be yet, because I could so
sucked up into one topic that I can't plan out
(53:33):
anything else. I just entirely monofocused every week. It is
kind of beautiful.
Speaker 3 (53:39):
Hi everyone, Hi, Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is
a production of cool Zone Media for more podcasts and
cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1 (53:51):
Visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the Iheartmedio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts. I think you're
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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