Slavery's Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons

by Sylviane A. Diouf

The forgotten stories of America maroons—wilderness settlers evading discovery after escaping slaveryOver more than two centuries men, women, and children escaped from slavery to make the Southern wilderness their home. They hid in the mountains of Virginia and the low swamps of South Carolina; they stayed in the neighborhood or paddled their way to secluded places; they buried themselves underground or built comfortable settlements. Known as maroons, they lived on their own or set up communities in swamps or other areas where they were not likely to be discovered.Although well-known, feared, celebrated or demonized at the time, the maroons whose stories are the subject of this book have been forgotten, overlooked by academic research that has focused on the Caribbean and Latin America. Who the American maroons were, what led them to choose this way of life over alternatives, what forms of marronage they created, what their individual and collective lives were like, how they organized themselves to survive, and how their particular story fits into the larger narrative of slave resistance are questions that this book seeks to answer. To survive, the American maroons reinvented themselves, defied slave society, enforced their own definition of freedom and dared create their own alternative to what the country had delineated as being black men and women’s proper place. Audacious, self-confident, autonomous, sometimes self-sufficient, always self-governing; their very existence was a repudiation of the basic tenets of slavery.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Race, African American, Social Justice, American History, Anti Racist

418 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 1, 2013

Reviews

[Maxine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Slavery’s Exiles examines a little-known part of American history: marronage in America. Marronage refers to the flight from slavery and the subsequent survival of either individuals or groups in the wilderness. Much of what is known about escaped slaves in America deals with those who headed away from the south and the slave-holding states either to northern free states or, in many cases, Canada. This book tells the story of the Maroons, those who, for a variety of reasons including family, chose to stay and attempt to build a free life for themselves often in inhospitable swamps and caves in the south rather than live in bondage.

Author Sylviane A. Diouf does a marvelous job of describing the day-to-day lives of maroons. She looks at those who chose to stay on the borderlands near or even, in some cases, on the plantations as well as those who chose to escape further into the hinterlands in search of freedom. She examines the hardships they faced, the methods they developed for survival, how they lived and, in many cases, how they were caught and punished.

Using contemporaneous sources such as advertisements for escaped slaves and memoirs as well as other research documents, she draws a very detailed portrait of the lives of maroons with great insight and compassion. Given how little was written down by the maroons themselves or by others about their lives, the story is, by necessity, incomplete. However, that doesn’t make Diouf’s account any less compelling or interesting. This is a well-researched, well-documented portrait of the struggles these men and women were willing to endure to be free and is a fascinating read for anyone interested in the history of slavery in America.

[Beverly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a marvelous research study that informs about a very important missing piece of American history, slave resistance, and self-determination. This book does not leave any stone unturned as I was informed about the development of marronage in the South, borderland maroons, hinterland maroons, their everyday lives and much more. I appreciated how Diouf explored American marronage on the communal and individual levels. This helped to understand how marronage fit into the American landscape and social/economic/political conditions of the times. The stories of the individuals showcased the theory but most importantly illustrated the skills, intelligence and self-motivation to define themselves by their own terms and not to live under the control of others. One of the most fascinating aspects of learning about the everyday lives of maroons for me was about their dwelling structures – the caves and underground structures so close to those who were hunting them yet invisible. Lastly, I was also provided answers as to why this is not a topic as known as “runaways” – little sensationalism in the maroons’ daily lives, their autonomous survival without white involvement had little mass appeal, and southerners really did not want this known outside of their region because of their difficulty in capturing and eliminating maroons.
A must read for anyone who is interested in American history, slavery, and resistance to being enslaved. I look forward to this book winning many awards.

[Barbara Burd · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I lived in Virginia, I would hear stories about the maroon slaves who had lived in the Dismal Swamp. This piqued my interest about marronnage, but in researching the topic, I could find little about the lives of these slaves. Diouf's book fills in an important gap in the history of slavery in the United States. The research is extensive as the author has pieced together a narrative based on newspaper ads for runaway slaves, legal documents and some written accounts by maroon slaves or their families. The author tells the story chronologically and based on the differences between borderland and hinterland slaves. Each narrative is personal. Throughout the book I felt that the author was solving a mystery as she led us through the various documents that revealed the multi-faceted lives of the slaves. More important than living conditions, the author tries to piece together why certain saves were willing to face the hardships of living in caves or swamps under deplorable conditions rather than live in slavery. And why certain individuals would die rather than be taken back to the plantation. In trying to ascertain the psychological reasons for running away, Diouf gets a bit "preachy", but this is a small issue as she conveys the importance of freedom and the need for self-direction that motivated the maroon slaves.
I would strongly recommend this book for anyone interested in United States history, especially relating to history of slavery. Diouf covers the period from the 1600s to the Emancipation Proclamation, so this book provides both a broad historical overview and through the narratives, many personal stories of the slaves. The author presents many pages of endnotes to support her research. Overall, this is well-written, well-researched and a work of historical importance.
Also, having moved to the South Carolina coast a little over five years ago, I was intrigued by the stories from areas that I had visited or names I recognized. Much of the author's research involves the rice plantations and the areas around Charleston as well as the Dismal Swamp in Virginia and the plantations around New Orleans, all areas of some familiarity to me.

[David Nichols · Rating 4 out of 5]

A crucial distinction between African-American slaves and their counterparts elsewhere in the hemisphere, as I noted in my review of Nathaniel Millett's recent book, was the apparent absence of runaway-slave communities in North America analogous to the maroon settlements of Jamaica and the quilombos of Brazil. A well-armed white majority and organized slave patrols made abscondance difficult for American slaves, and those who did flee their masters could take refuge in Northern cities or Canada, both safer options than the wilderness. Millett's short-lived Prospect Bluff maroon community seemed the exception that proved the rule.

I say “seemed” because Sylvane Diouf's new book, a deeply-researched thematic study of marronage within the early United States, has uncovered many more exceptions to the “no American maroons” rule – so many that it has invalidated the rule altogether. SLAVERY'S EXILES identifies maroon communities in Louisiana in the 1780s and 1820s; on Belleisle Island in the Savannah River in 1786-87; near Robeson County, North Carolina, in the 1850s; and most notably in the Dismal Swamp of southeastern Virginia, which by the 1830s provided refuge to 2,000-3,000 runaways (pp. 162, 190, 193, 211). These communities, which ranged in size from a few dozen to one hundred or so people, represented only one segment of the North American maroon population in the antebellum era, the segment Diouf calls “hinterland maroons.” Another large group of runaways, “borderland maroons,” lived near their former homes or families in “the wild land that bordered the farms and plantations” (p. 5), and had a rather different set of experiences from their hinterlands counterparts. This distinction proves one of the more important analytical insights of Diouf's book.

Both borderlanders and hinterlanders lived, necessarily, a dangerous and marginal existence. Officials in slave-owning colonies and states worried that maroons would endanger white settlements, as in Jamaica, and masters went to some trouble to capture runaways, employing Native Americans as slavecatchers and training hunting dogs to track and kill humans. Captured maroons faced the near certainty of dire punishment, usually severe whipping combined with the “pickling” of wounds in brine or turpentine. Yet even newly-arrived African immigrants, who knew nothing about the American environment and faced both hunger and social isolation, chose a dangerous and impoverished freedom over permanent servitude and social death (37, 45-50, 68, 258, 290-98).

One may overstate the isolation and impoverishment of marronage, particularly in the case of borderlands maroons. Plantation borderlands were familiar places to many slaves, who used these semi-wilderness areas for hunting and clandestine meetings, and borderlands maroons often ran to these interstitial refuges to live near family members separated by sale. Borderlanders created a subsistence economy reminiscent of Daniel Usner's “frontier-exchange economy,” hunting, poaching livestock, receiving aid from slave relatives and friends, and trading with whites and free blacks for flour, liquor, ammunition, and small luxuries (pp. 7, 73, 106-12, 117, 121-28). Their less isolated situations did require them to live in very small groups and carefully to hide their dwellings; the typical borderland maroon home was a dug-out cave.

Hinterlanders, meanwhile, lived in larger and more self-sufficient communities, usually small villages of up to 100 people, and relied on the corn, sweet potatoes, and livestock they raised and game they caught for subsistence. When attacked by militia or slave-catchers, some fought back – the Belleisle maroons in Georgia, for instance, had fortified their community – but most relied on flight to preserve their freedom. When not under attack, hinterlands maroons produced baskets, shingles, and honey for trade, or worked for wages on the Dismal Swamp canal, or even engaged in banditry, robbing farms and white travelers. (A sympathetic press compared one prominent maroon highwayman to the Venetian bandit Abaelino.) Even maroons who had quit the pale of white settlement remained connected to it by commerce and brigandage (pp. 145, 151, 193-97, 216, 228, 234-39.)

Given how much original, ground-breaking research went into Diouf's book, one may readily overlook the extent to which SLAVERY'S EXILES often functions more like an info-dump than an analytical essay. It is a credit to the author's vision and hard work that her work raises many questions for future researchers, including some that seem basic but will certainly prove difficult to answer: Approximately how many maroons were there in the southern United States? (Diouf's dispersed borderlands-maroon population will be very difficult to enumerate, absent some geographical or ecological analysis combined with a lot of guesswork.) Did maroon communities and populations fluctuate over time, and if so, what factors contributed to this change? (Diouf implies that the American Revolution produced a lot of maroons; I suspect the War of 1812 did too.) Did the availability of other options for runaways – namely, the free states and Canada – really make marronage a less attractive option for North American runaways, and what made American runaways choose these different options? Given how many other talented people are working in the fields of early American history and slavery studies, I suspect it will not be long before we have answers to these questions.

[Jenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

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This book is an interesting and informative account of slave maroons in the United States. I tend to be interested in books that pertain to slavery, so I was pretty excited to read this book.

I had no prior knowledge of slave maroons, whether in the United States or other countries, when I began reading this book. The author does a really nice job of breaking things down for a reader who has never heard of the topic before without dumbing the subject down. There is a perfect amount of story and cold, hard facts in this book, making it easy to immerse into and enjoy.

By the end of the book I felt that I had really learned a lot. The author covers seemingly everything about slave maroons in the United States, without making things to repetitive. The chapters also tie nicely together, allowing all of the details to flow into a comprehensive storyline. There is a lot of information in this book but it is presented in an easy to understand manner.

The writing in this book is really well done. The author does a fantastic job of merging direct quotes smoothly into the story. I loved how, especially at the beginning of the book, each chapter starts with a direct quote describing roughly what the chapter would focus on. I thought that was a unique and pleasant touch to the story. I also enjoyed how the author managed to avoid excess description but managed to convey an informative story to the reader, which is the true mark of an excellent nonfiction book.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. It was everything that I had expected and was looking for.

Received this book for review purposes via NetGalley.

[Mandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this painstakingly and thoroughly researched book, American historian Sylviane A. Diouf introduces the reader to an area of history that up to now had been little documented and largely ignored. Certainly it was all new to me, and I was both intrigued and moved to find out more. It covers the story of the maroons, those slaves who escaped to the southern wilderness in an attempt to live as free men and women. They settled as best they could, as individuals or in small communities, in the most inhospitable environments, and although their efforts were often doomed to failure, some did manage to survive for some time and even engaged in farming and animal husbandry to some extent.
This is an area of slave resistance that has not been explored until now. We are familiar with slave runaways and the Underground Railroad and the histories of slaves who escaped to the North or Canada. But the lives of those who simply disappeared into the wilderness has remained hidden. Little was written down, and there are very few first-hand accounts. Diouf has pieced together her narrative from newspaper advertisements for runaways and legal documents and the very few slave narratives that do exist.
The author has written an extremely interesting and informative book, of great historical importance. She explains her subject clearly and does not expect prior knowledge. The book is certainly of significance for scholars and academics, although the general reader, like myself, might find it a little too detailed and repetitious. However, this is not to distract form the book’s worth, and I am very glad to have learnt so much about this important subject.

[Andrew Pemberton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Slavery's Exiles is a refreshing addition to not just the field of marronage, but the field of African American slave resistance writ large. Diouf categorizes North American maroon spatially, the borderland and the hinterland, and, similar to Ira Berlin, divides the maroon experience by generation. The experiences of maroons varied greatly depending on how far they were from the plantations in which they fled. For instance, borderland maroons lived in silence and depended greatly on the networks of trust they maintained with their kin who remained on the plantations (a relationship not unknown to masters). The hinterland maroons found strength in numbers, as more hands meant more labor and means to survive. These hinterland maroons established societies far out from plantations and found ways to sustain themselves. In any case, as Diouf argues, the maroons had to be pragmatic, creative, and fiercely brave to survive on their own. They had to reinvent society, adapt to and overcome their environments, and establish their own social orders in a world that demonized blackness.
As Diouf notes, North American marronage is a highly overlooked topic. Studies focus on the Caribbean and Latin America, while Herbert Aptheker's 1939 article remains the vanguard of scholarship on North American maroons. Nevertheless, Diouf breathes life into these forgotten tales, utilizing newspapers, runaway slave ads, slave narratives, and legal papers to reconstruct this history--a daunting task. She executes this beautifully, putting together a text that is not too encyclopedic, yet not overly academic.

[JRT · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Maroons’ continued subsistence was greatly dependent on the solidarity of the many, but their very existence hinges in the betrayal of a few.” This quote sums up the “dangerous and precarious” nature of maroon life in the American South, as expertly detailed in this book. “Slavery’s Exiles” breaks ground in its analysis of marronage in the United States, shedding light on the specific types of marronage, its allure and limitations, and its ultimate legacy. The author does a great job situating the real and practical concerns of maroons within the larger struggle against slavery and white domination. In doing so, the book shows how and why some enslaved Africans chose separation from not just plantation life, but from white society more generally.

This book highlights the conundrum that Black people in the Western Hemisphere have always faced—whether and how to ensure survival, versus whether and how to pursue Black self-determination. This was particularly true for maroons, who had to make seemingly impossible life choices that often pitted individual survival against collective survival and general Black autonomy. I really enjoyed the comparative analysis of the choices that newly arrived continental Africans made versus those of Africans born in the South.

This book succeeds in no small part because it provides a trove of information that reframes marronage in the United States, and drives home the point that enslaved Africans in the American South were not docile nor accepting of their lot. They were ambitious and forward thinking in the ways they went about achieving a modicum of “freedom.”

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a scholarly book, and so may be denser than the average reader wants, but its outstanding and the evidence/stories are compelling. It’s organized well and the argument is strong and clear. Maroons weren’t ideological revolutionary Diouf argues, but they undermined the economy and monolithic power of the Southern whites. They led rich and flexible lives, and were constant examples of what people would go through to have liberty. She describes the different geographic contexts for maroons, from ones that lived close to plantations/whites/enslaved people, to those who lived far on the fringes. It’s an amazing book.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slavery's Exile is a truly interesting read. It can be technical at times, but it brings to light a little known history on American slavery. The maroons( African American slaves who escaped slavery and created their own communities in the American wilderness), are very little known in American history books. This book gives a great account of what life was like for maroons and the author debunks many of the myths that surround maroons and slavery. Good historical read!

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bettie's Books

[Julia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fascinating subject but reads like a painful dissertation. Mostly broad generalizations about the communities.

[Geve_ · Rating 5 out of 5]

The research this author undertook to compile the information in this book is just incredible. She pieced together stories from so many sources I am just amazed. Though dry at points, this book was incredibly informative. Some of the sections droned a bit, with many repeated examples of some component of maroon life that didn't always "flow" for comfortable reading. It felt like a textbook or journal article at times, and I found myself re-reading passages to get everything out of it. There were other parts that read like full on stories, where the background was much more well documented. This book covers almost any aspect of maroon existence I could imagine asking about, but still left me wanting to learn more. Disappointing that there isn't more documentation, and the author suggests more archaeological research in areas where maroons likely lived and sheltered is needed. To think there could be so much evidence around the southern US that is yet to be discovered is both tantalizing and tragic to think about.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slavery's Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons is an interesting book about the escaped slaves in the early times of the south in the United States. I found this book well researched and well documented on a subject I never knew about. I never heard of the American Maroons before and found how determined these people were to survive in their own communities. I really enjoyed this book, though I did find a bit repetitive at times. I would recommend it to those who want to read more about American history.

[Heather Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful researched and very informative book on the subject of the Maroons. The Maroons are people who escaped slavery and lived in the swamps of South Carolina and the Mountains of Virginia. This is almost a unknown subject and this book explains everything. I hope schools will put this in their library.

[Naomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important study of American marronage, one that complicates previous studies of Caribbean and South American maroon societies, and enriches current understandings of American slavery.

[Chase · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting content-wise. Execution was a little dry, but covers a very little known aspect of American history

[Larkin Tackett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jesmyn Ward’s novel, Let Us Descend, includes a Maroon character and referred to this research. The stories of the escaped slaves and the lives they built in exile are really important to be told and to understand.

“They were separatists; they opted out and exiled themselves. Although they wanted to see an end to slavery, their primary goal was to obtain the kind of freedom and self rule that could not be found within the framework of a nonslaveholding, but still white dominated society.”

The author continues, “… in their pursuit of freedom and autonomy they created and developed new forms of life as they retreated from but still measured themselves against a terrorist system and took advantage of a challenging environment. They knew it was a rewarding, but complicated enterprise; they put their lives on the line, every day, to be free. Overall, therefore forgotten story is one of courage and resourcefulness, hardships, endured, and freedom won.

To a planter who could not understand why a maroon did not return even when he was hungry, had frostbite, and suffered hard times the latter simply replied, ‘I tasted how it is to be free, en I didn’ come back.’”

[Holly]

Returned at 46% completion. Extremely long, but an interesting look into something that's rarely discussed.

[Elizabeth Birr · Rating 3 out of 5]

The content is important and valuable for historical documentation of slavery, but it read like a textbook and I ended up skimming large portions.

[Sonnet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Library Journal Review [Library Journal 139, no. 4 (March 2014): 98]:

Slavery is, of course, recognized as a terrible part of our nation’s past. While we may see the obvious effects that it has had on American society, we don’t always see the direct influences it had on the development of our federal government, much though we recognize its role in the subject of states’ rights. Ericson (public & international affairs, George Mason Univ.; The Debate over Slavery) refocuses readers on just how the institution of slavery shaped American government and a broad swathe of federal policies. It can be hard to see the positive outcomes from a part of history that most Americans would rather forget, but Ericson does a good job of showing the reader both the negative and positive outcomes. Having undertaken extensive research, he has a firm grasp of the topic and does a solid job of sharing his knowledge with the reader.

Verdict Ultimately, this is a well-written book that takes a new approach to slavery’s impact in the United States, making it a strong addition to any collections on slavery, American political history, and antebellum America.

[Felicity Gibson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slavery's Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons
by Sylviane A. Diouf


A truly amazing book which reads as a textbook on the subject of the Maroons. There is so much detail that it will amaze you and also haunt you. It is not comfortable reading.
The subject matter is about the men, women and children who escaped from slavery to make the Southern wilderness their home. They hid in the swamps of South Carolina and the mountains of Virginia. They stayed hidden in their neighbourhoods or paddled their way to hidden places. They even buried themselves underground. T he book is meticulously detailed. As part of a history section in a school Library this book should be one of the first on the shelf. It is part of Black History and also part of early American history. I found this book fascinating. It needed to be read in parts over a period of time. Excellence as a reference book. I give this book 4 Stars.

[Asta Schmitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating, heavy stuff. This impressive book is dense in information and requires constant focus because of it. Which is why halfway through I put it to the side for a long time; there was too much going on in my life to give it the attention it needed. But it's exactly the scope of the research and the many details that make this book so interesting. You really get an idea of what it must have been like to be alive during American slavery. And from a different perspective than the great-men-doing-great-things school of history writing.

The author uses many different sources and she didn't limit herself to those in the English language. That seems a contributing factor to why this book gives both a broader and deeper picture than most of the many books on American slavery I've read.

[Cara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unfortunately the library only had this book available as an audio book, and I am so much better at taking in concepts when I read vs. just listening. Nevertheless, this book was remarkable in large part because of the individual, human stories described. The stories of what drove enslaved people to seek refuge in the swamps and the woods just outside their plantations, the hardships they endured there, and how they were supported by those remaining on the plantations were all testaments to their strength of will and survival instincts. I also appreciated the idea of maroonage as a way to reject white plantation capitalism — there’s definitely something appealing in the idea of escaping into the woods and finding your own way to live outside of society’s strictures even today.

[Rosemarie · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://rosemariecawkwell.wordpress.co...

Well researched, with a wealth of information, and an extensive bibliography, this book is suitable for the interested amateur and the serious student. An interesting introduction to the subject. There were only one or two small niggles – there are no maps, which I feel would be helpful for those unfamiliar with the areas mentioned, and also I think a glossary of relevant terms would help as well.

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating and little-known story of the men, women and children who escaped slavery to live in the woods and swamps of the US South. They were given the name "Maroons." Usually they stayed in the South because they wanted to live near still-enslaved family and friends, who supported them. This is a well-researched story, whose facts are hard to uncover. If you are interested in slavery in the South this is a whole new facet.

[David Pierce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly researched and captivating, this book is a good read. I have some books I dedicate myself to start and complete in the short term. I placed this book beside my chair and I slowly read from it everyday and absorbed it. I will probably read it again in the future. I live in Eastern North Carolina, it is heartbreaking to realize this happened where I have lived all of my life.

[Teresa · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Diouf fills in any hole left by my education (and I presume yours too)-she goes into great detail defining maroonage, the types of maroonage and how the communities were formed and sustained. "
read more: http://likeiamfeasting.blogspot.com/2...

[Linda]

PW

[amy]

Enjoying an interview with the author on the Kojo Nnamdi Show (2/17/14)