The massive and foreboding Great Dismal Swamp sprawls over 2,000
square miles and spills over parts of Virginia and North Carolina.
From the early seventeenth century, the nearly impassable Dismal
frustrated settlement. However, what may have been an impediment to
the expansion of slave society became an essential sanctuary for many
of those who sought to escape it. In the depths of the Dismal,
thousands of maroons—people who had emancipated themselves from
enslavement and settled beyond the reach of enslavers—established
new lives of freedom in a landscape deemed worthless and inaccessible
by whites.
Dismal Freedom
unearths the stories of these maroons, their lives, and their
struggles for liberation. Drawing from newly discovered primary
sources and archeological evidence that suggests far more extensive
maroon settlement than historians have previously imagined,
award-winning author J. Brent Morris uncovers one of the most
exciting yet neglected stories of American history. This is the story
of resilient, proud, and determined people who made the Great Dismal
Swamp their free home and sanctuary and who played an outsized role
in undermining slavery through the Civil War.
