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Hidden in Plain Sight: Maroon Life and Labor in Virginia's Dismal Swamp

2012; Frank Cass & Co.; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0144039x.2012.734090

1743-9523

Ted Maris-Wolf,

Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies

Abstract Nineteenth-century maroons in Virginia's Great Dismal Swamp formed communities within communities, whose members were set apart from others not so much by space (an impenetrable wilderness) but by the legal status they renounced, the fugitive status they embraced, and the common goal of creating meaningful lives neither fully within, nor completely apart from, surrounding slave society. The following analysis of one group of Great Dismal Swamp maroons offers scholars a new way to conceptualize marronage in nineteenth-century North America. Rather than look only to remote places for traces of maroon societies, researchers might also consider examining such communities in more settled areas, including centers of large-scale industrial operations, where fugitives carved out identities and negotiated their wages within a biracial labor system that relied upon and supported slavery. Acknowledgements The author thanks James Axtell, Gad Heuman, Ywone Edwards-Ingram, Jessica Krug, Michelle McKinley, Rachel Sarah O'Toole, Lydia Plath, Richard Price and the anonymous readers for Slavery & Abolition. Notes James Redpath, The Roving Editor: Or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States, ed. John R. McKivigan (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 241–6, esp. 243 (quotation); James Redpath, The Roving Editor: or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States (New York: A.B. Burdick, 1859), 288–95. Redpath's Roving Editor was published in March 1859, and Charlie's account was simultaneously printed verbatim in ‘The Dismal Swamp’, Frederick Douglass Papers, March 11, 1859, vol. 12, no. 13, p. 4. See also John McKivigan, Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 45; Tynes Cowan, ‘The Slave in the Swamp: Affects of Uncultivated Regions on Plantation Life’, in Keep Your Head to the Sky: Interpreting African American Home Ground, ed. Grey Gundaker and Cowan (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 200–1. On slave narratives as a literary genre, see Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-bellum Slave Narratives (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994); Lynn A. Casmier-Paz, ‘Slave Narratives and the Rhetoric of Author Portraiture’, New Literary History 34, no. 1 (Winter, 2003): 91–116. Herbert Aptheker, ‘Maroons Within the Present Limits of the United States’, Journal of Negro History 24, no. 2 (1939): 167–84. Historical archaeologists have made significant contributions to our understandings of the dynamics and possible locations of maroon communities in the Great Dismal Swamp. Elaine Nichols was the first to use archaeology to attempt to locate a maroon site in North America in her pioneering excavations of the swamp's Culpeper Island in 1987. See Nichols, ‘No Easy Run to Freedom: Maroons in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina and Virginia, 1677–1850’ (unpublished master's thesis, University of South Carolina, 1988). More recently, Daniel O. Sayers and the Great Dismal Swamp Landscape Study research team have continued to employ innovative methods to uncover the whereabouts and past worlds of the swamp's maroons. For example, see Sayers, ‘The Diasporic World of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1630–1860’ (PhD diss., the College of William and Mary, 2008); Sayers, Brendan Burke, and Aaron M. Henry, ‘The Political Economy of Exile in the Great Dismal Swamp’, Journal of Historical Archaeology 11, no. 1 (March 2007): 60–97; J. Brent Morris, ‘“Running Servants and All Others”: The Diverse and Elusive Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp’, in Voices from Within the Veil: African Americans and the Experience of Democracy, ed. William Alexander, Cassandra Newby-Alexander, and Charles Ford (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 85–112. For an excellent overview of North American maroons, see Timothy James Lockley, ed. Maroon Communities in South Carolina: A Documentary Record (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), esp. xvi–xi. On Garcia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, see Kathleen A. Deagan and Jane Landers, ‘Fort Mose: Earliest Free African-American Town in the United States’, in ‘I, Too, Am America’: Archaeological Studies of African-American Life, ed. Theresa Singleton (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1999); Landers, ‘Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose: A Free Black Town in Spanish Colonial Florida’, American Historical Review 95, no. 1 (February 1990): 9–30; Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, NC: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 450. See also Terry Weik, ‘The Archaeology of Maroon Societies in the Americas: Resistance, Cultural Continuity, and Transformation in the African Diaspora’, Historical Archaeology 31, no. 2 (1999): 81–92; Christopher C. Fennell, ‘Early African America and Archaeological Studies of Significance and Diversity’, Journal of Archaeological Research 19, no. 1 (March 2011): 1–49. See Richard Price, Maroon Societies (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Price, The Guiana Maroons: A Historical and Bibliographical Introduction (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Price, Alabi's World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Mavis Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655–1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration, and Betrayal (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1988); E. Kofi Agorsah, Maroon Heritage, Archaeological, Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives (Barbados: Canoe Press, 1994); Charles Orser, ‘Toward a Global Archaeology: An Example from Brazil’, Historical Archaeology 28, no. 1 (1994): 5–22; Berta E. Perez, ‘The Journey to Freedom: Maroon Forebears in Southern Venezuela’, Ethnohistory 47, nos 3–4 (summer/fall 2000); Michael Craton, Testing the Chains (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); Alvin O. Thompson, Flight to Freedom: African Runaways and Maroons in the Americas (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2006); Kenneth Bilby, True-Born Maroons (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2005); Kevin Mulroy, Freedom on the Border: The Seminole Maroons in Florida, the Indian Territory, Coahuila, and Texas (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2003). Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 328. Loren Schweninger is among the few who have challenged traditional conceptions of North American maroon communities. See Schweninger, ‘Maroonage and Flight: An Overview’, unpublished paper presented at ‘Unshackled Spaces: Fugitives from Slavery and Maroon Communities in the Americas’, Yale University, December 5, 2002 (quotation). Lockley, Maroon Communities, xvii. See Edward D. Wolf, ‘Between Slavery and Freedom: African Americans in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763–1863’, unpublished master's thesis (College of William and Mary, 2002); Ted Maris-Wolf, ‘Dismal Swamp Maroons’, in Encyclopedia of African American History, ed. Leslie M. Alexander and Walter C. Rucker, vol. 1 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2010), 378–80. Hugo Prosper Leaming, Hidden Americans: Maroons of Virginia and the Carolinas (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995); Jeffrey J. Crow, ‘Slave Rebelliousness and Social Conflict in North Carolina, 1775 to 1802’, William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 37, no. 1 (January 1980): 79–102; William Byrd, William Byrd's Histories of the Dividing Line betwixt Virginia and North Carolina (Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Historical Commission, 1929). J.F.D. Smyth, A Tour in the United States Containing an Account of the Present Situation of that Country …, (London: Printed for G. Robinson, 1784), 102. Virginia Gazette, June 23, 1768; Virginia Gazette, April 13, 1769. Elkanah Watson, Men and Times of the Revolution (New York: Dana and Company, 1856), 36–7. Johann David Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation, 1783–1784, trans. and ed. Alfred J. Morrison (Philadelphia: W.J. Campbell, 1911 [1784]), 99–100; Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 26–7. Peter C. Stewart, ‘Man and the Swamp: The Historical Dimension’, in The Great Dismal Swamp, ed. Paul W. Kirk (Charlottesville, VA: Published for the Old Dominion University Research Foundation by the University Press of Virginia, 1979), 61; Charles Royster, The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Land Company (New York: Knopf, 1999), 293; ‘Swamp, Dismal Land Co.’, tax receipt, October 7, 1837, Charles B. Dew and Martin Paul Schipper, eds., Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries: Series A; Selections from the Duke University Library, microform (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America, 1991), reel 20. George Newton, An Exhibition of the Dismal Swamp Canal: From its Commencement, its Progress, and the Improvements Contemplated by the President, Directors and Company. Submitted to the Consideration of the Members of the National Legislature (Norfolk, VA: T.G. Broughton, 1825), 6–7; Royster, Fabulous History. Royster, Fabulous History, 414. Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Berkeley, ‘Man and the Great Dismal’, Virginia Journal of Science 27, no. 3 (1976):158; John Tunis, Letter to Rob Sutter, December 8, 1829, Board of Public Works Collection, Library of Virginia (LVA) Mss, Richmond, VA. Letter of John Sherman, Secretary of the Treasury, Senate Misc. Document No. 89, Fiftieth Congress, second session, 1878, 68–9. Alexander Crosby Brown, The Dismal Swamp Canal (Chesapeake, VA: Norfolk County Historical Society of Chesapeake, 1967), 37. By the early nineteenth century, Lake Drummond had become a kind of romantic getaway, largely due to the publication of Thomas Moore's ‘A Ballad: The Lake of the Dismal Swamp’. In one contemporary newspaper article, a woman refers to the matchmaking of more than one dozen couples through ‘pleasure parties going to the lake’. See ‘Dismal Swamp’, The Daily Picayune, June 30, 1844, p. 4 (quotation). Luke Whele, Report of the President and Director of the Dismal Swamp Canal Company to the Board of Public Works, December 1819, December 2, 1819, Board of Public Works Collection, LVA Mss; Berkeley and Berkeley, Virginia Journal of Science 27: 158–60. Moses Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave in the United States of America, in William Loren Katz, ed., Five Slave Narratives: A Compendium (New York: Arno Press, 1968), 22–3; Willis Augustus Hodges, Free Man of Color (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1982), 40–2. Grandy, Narrative of the Life, 24. Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, ed. David Freeman Hawke (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), 46. Berkeley and Berkeley, Virginia Journal of Science 27: 162. Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Norfolk: Historic Southern Port (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1931), 183; Berkeley and Berkeley, Virginia Journal of Science 27: 163. David Hunter Strother, ‘The Dismal Swamp. Illustrated by Porte Crayon’, Harper's New Monthly Magazine 13, no. 56 (1856): 441–55, esp. 455. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, regular shipments of 40,000 to 50,000 two- and three-foot shingles left the swamp for markets in Suffolk, Virginia, and New York. See, for example, ‘Acct. Sales of Lumber Shipped & credited – on 1st May 1849’, Dew and Schipper, eds., Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries, reel 17; ‘MANIFEST of the CARGO on board the Sloop Eagle of Staten Island’, May 1,1805, Dew and Schipper, eds., Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries, reel 22. See also W.E. Trout, The Great Dismal Atlas: A Virginia Canals and Navigation Society River Atlas Project (Lexington, VA: Virginia Canals and Navigations Society, 1998), 21. Robert H. Reid, ‘History of the Dismal Swamp Land Company of Virginia’, unpublished master's thesis (Duke University, 1948), 127–8. Reid, ‘History of the Dismal Swamp’, 87, 89; Edmund Ruffin, ‘Observations Made during an Excursion to the Dismal Swamp’, Farmer's Register 4, no. 9 (1837): 513–21, esp. 517. ‘Swamp, Dismal Land Co.’, tax receipt, October 7, 1837, Dew and Shipper, eds., Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries, reel 20; Reid, ‘History of the Dismal Swamp’, 92, 118. Reid, ‘History of the Dismal Swamp’, 88; Grandy, Narrative of the Life, 8; Strother, Harper's New Monthly Magazine 13: 451. ‘Acct. of work in canal of sundry hands – $125.00, Sept. 11, 1852’, Dew and Schipper, eds., Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries, reel 17; Reid, ‘History of the Dismal Swamp’, 92, 118. See also Sandra L. Almasy, Nansemond County, Virginia, Census 1850 (Rome, NY: Kensington Glen Publishers, 1988), 51. Reid, ‘History of the Dismal Swamp’, 118. ‘Jericho Mill account for 1810’, December 31, 1810, Dew and Schipper, eds., Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries, reel 15. See, for example, ‘Hires of boys Billy Henry Dick – 1849’, January 1, 1849, Dew and Schipper, eds., Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries, reel 17. See also Reid, ‘History of the Dismal Swamp’, 89. From 1790 to 1860, hundreds of thousands of Virginians were sold into a thriving domestic slave trade from the upper South to the Deep South. See Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), esp. 159–244; Robert Gudmestad, A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2003); Steven Deyle, Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. 15–93. For an example of an account book detailing the sale and transfer of enslaved individuals from Southside Virginia to New Orleans, Louisiana, and Natchez, Mississippi, from 1835–1851, see Lunenburg County (VA) Beasley Jones and Wood Slave Trade Account Book, 1835–1851, Local Government Records Collection, Lunenburg County Court Records, Misc. microfilm reel #410, LVA. For enslaved people's use of hiring-out to avoid or delay sale in the domestic slave trade, see Calvin Schermerhorn, Money over Mastery, Family over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 108–110. See also Jonathan D. Martin, Divided Mastery: Slave Hiring in the American South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Sarah S. Hughes, ‘Slaves for Hire: The Allocation of Black Labor in Elizabeth City County, Virginia, 1782–1810’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3d. ser., 35, no. 2 (April 1978): 260–86. Max Grivno, Gleanings of Freedom: Free and Slave Labor along the Mason-Dixon Line, 1790–1860 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 5. See, for example, ‘(7) Shingle Bill $279.47 – May 5th. 1849 – ’, Dew and Schipper, eds., Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries, reel 17; ‘(15) Shingle Bill $230.35 July 14th. 1849 – ’, Dew and Schipper, eds., Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries, reel 17; ‘(4) Shingle Bill $568.55 Decbr 14th. 1850’, Dew and Schipper, eds., Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries, reel 17; ‘(8) Shingle Bill $693.84 May 17th. 1851’, Dew and Schipper, eds., Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries, reel 17; ‘(9) Shingle Bill $399.01 May 24th. 1851’, Dew and Schipper, eds., Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries, reel 17. See Todd L. Savitt, ‘Slave Life Insurance in Virginia and North Carolina’, Journal of Southern History 43, no. 4 (November 1977): 583–600, esp. 583, 591; Robert S. Starobin, Industrial Slavery in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 63; Reid, ‘History of the Dismal Swamp’, 118. Timothy Lockley has meticulously examined the variety and complexity of relationships among African Americans and whites in various settings in and around lowcountry Georgia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Accordingly to Lockley, in some instances, poor white farmers and slaves seemed to work ‘almost on the same footing’, strengthening personal relationships that ‘could engender a biracial interaction that subverted the interests of the white elite’. See Lockley, Lines in the Sand, 36, 121. Jeff Forret observes in antebellum North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia that ‘Slaves and poor whites sometimes worked together, whether harmoniously or otherwise, and relaxed with one another in their leisure time, occasionally in church but more often in a more profane and overwhelmingly male subculture of drinking and gambling’. The male subculture described by Forret might very well depict the dominant culture in a biracial, nearly all-male industrial space like the Dismal Swamp. See Forret, Race Relations at the Margins: Slaves and Poor Whites in the Antebellum Southern Countryside (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 14. In rural antebellum Maryland, Max Grivno likewise concludes, ‘Workforces were often patchwork affairs stitched together from farmhands whose varied backgrounds and legal statuses defied or at least muddied the neat distinctions between slavery and freedom’. See Grivno, Gleanings of Freedom, 26. Seth Rockman notes a similar phenomenon in urban Maryland in the Early National period, in which ‘No poor man looking for a job in Baltimore could dwell on the consequences of performing manual labor for wages alongside slaves’. He adds, ‘Free black men were also in no financial position to refuse such work, even as their labor might blur the thin line between African American slavery and freedom’. See Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 52–3. In his exhaustive study of free black life in nineteenth-century Prince Edward County, Virginia, Melvin Patrick Ely carefully notes, ‘Distinctions of race did still count’, despite the fact that black and white laborers often ‘did the same work for the same pay’, and, in ‘many cases, they did it together’. See Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 112–13, 124. Olmsted's account of swamp maroon life is more general than those of Charlie and Strother; it is unclear as to which shingle company he describes. Nonetheless, it appears to corroborate Charlie's and Strother's accounts and offers a more complete picture of interaction and exchange among maroons, slaves, and laborers in the Land Company swamp. Frederick Law Olmsted, ‘The South Letters on the Productions, Industry, and Resources of the Southern States. Number Thirteen’, New-York Daily Times, April 23, 1853. Strother, Harper's New Monthly Magazine 13: 451. Redpath, Roving Editor, 291. Vincent Brown, ‘Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery’, The American Historical Review 114, no. 5 (December 2009): 1231–49, quotation 1245. Ibid., 1246. Brown, American Historical Review 114: 1231 (quotation). Redpath, Roving Editor, 293. Ibid., 293 (quotations). I take the phrase ‘free by a thread’ from the title of an important collection of essays regarding maroons in Brazil. See João José Reis and Flávio dos Santos Gomes, Liberdade por um fio: história dos quilombos no Brasil (São Paulo, Brazil: Companhia das Letras, 1996). For a contemporary account of the capture of fugitive slaves somewhere in the Dismal Swamp, see ‘Slaves in the Dismal Swamp’, The North Star, March 31, 1848, vol. 1, no. 14, p. 3. Walter Johnson's emphasis on ‘the occasions of action: the material conditions of “agency”’ is particularly useful in conceiving the everyday realities of Dismal Swamp maroons in the nineteenth century. Johnson writes that ‘we might try to understand enslaved people's actions and ideas as, at once, fiercely determined – hedged in, limited, and shaped by the material conditions of their enslavement – and insistently transcendent – productive of new, creative, vibrant, and sustaining forms of human being, commonality, and, ultimately, solidarity’. See Richard Follett, Eric Foner, and Walter Johnson, Slavery's Ghost: The Problem of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 27–28. A number of contemporary African Americans referred to an extensive word-of-mouth network, a ‘grapevine telegraph’, which free and enslaved people employed in Southern communities to transmit important news and information during the first half of the nineteenth century. See, for example, Norman R. Yetman, ed., When I Was a Slave: Memoirs from the Slave Narrative Collection (New York, 2002), 47 (‘grapevine telegraph’). See also Berlin, Generations of Captivity, 189, 202. Redpath, Roving Editor, 288–95. On petit marronage, see Price, Maroon Societies, 3, 24, 105, 107, 110–11, 115, 132, 149. John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger describe enslaved people's propensity toward absenteeism and ‘lying out’ in Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 97–109, 100 (quotation). See, for example, Berta E. Perez, ‘The Journey to Freedom: Maroon Forebears in Southern Venezuela’, Ethnohistory 47, nos. 3–4 (summer/fall 2000); Thompson, Flight to Freedom. Charles Orser, ‘Toward a Global Historical Archaeology: An Example from Brazil’, Historical Archaeology 28, no. 1 (1994): 5–22; Orser, ‘Beneath the Material Surface of Things: Commodities, Artifacts, and Slave Plantations’, Contemporary Archaeology in Theory: A Reader, ed. Robert W. Preucel and Ian Hodder (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 189–201. See also Wolf, ‘Between Slavery and Freedom’, esp. 62–106. Redpath, Roving Editor, 293. Ruffin, Farmer's Register 4: 519–20. Strother, Harper's New Monthly Magazine 13: 448. It should be noted that Pierce and Reed, as well as Skeeter, appeared in the Nansemond County, Virginia, census records of 1850. See Almasy, Nansemond County, 39, 51, 55. A ‘Joseph Sketer’ appears in several weekly shingle-getting reports of the early 1850s as an assistant to Land Company agent Joseph Holladay. See ‘(9) Shingle Bill $399.01 May 24th. 1851’, Dew and Schipper, eds., Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries, reel 17; ‘(10) Shingle Bill 318.65 Jun 1st 1851’, Dew and Schipper, eds., Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries, reel 17. Strother's descriptions of those he met in the swamp, like many of his narrative's details, were remarkably accurate; see Jack Temple Kirby, Poquosin: A Study of Rural Landscape and Society (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 151–61. Reid, ‘History of the Dismal Swamp’, 102, 109, 116–17. David S. Cecelski concludes that ‘the Dismal Swamp Land Company was constantly tempted to hire runaways’. See Cecelski, The Waterman's Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 131. ‘Quarterly Report for Fourth Quarter of 1836’, Dew and Schipper, eds., Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries, reel 16. ‘No. 14 $88.65’, Dew and Schipper, eds., Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries, reel 21. ‘(29) Jos. Holladay acct $212.00 Jany 7th. 1852’, Dew and Schipper, eds., Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries, reel 21. Although this receipt might list payments to legitimate hires, the system whereby company agents could draft receipts to themselves provided a potential means for masking illicit payments to undocumented workers, including maroons. See, for example, ‘No. 1. $53.20’ and ‘No 5 $10.37’, Dew and Schipper, eds., Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries, reel 21. See, for example, ‘Account of two feet shingles got in 1810’, Dew and Schipper, eds., Slavery in Antebellum Southern Industries, reel 15. Strother, Harper's New Monthly Magazine 13: 451. Tommy Bogger, Free Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia, 1790–1860 (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 84. Similarly, Max Grivno observes in the nineteenth-century Middle Atlantic that ‘When it came to recruiting laborers, those seeking help showed a marked indifference toward the ethnicity, race, and legal status of their hands. Bosses viewed their laborers, whether bought or hired, as an interchangeable commodity’. See Grivno, Gleanings of Freedom, 26. Hahn, Political Worlds of Slavery, 26. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 207, 212. Karen Cook-Bell, ‘Rice, Resistance, and Forced Transatlantic Communities: (Re) Envisioning the African Diaspora in Low Country Georgia, 1750–1800’, Journal of African American History 95, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 157–82. Hahn, Political Worlds of Slavery, 30. Ibid., 34. Additional informationNotes on contributorsTed Maris-WolfTed Maris-Wolf is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, PO Box 42531, Lafayette, LA 70504-2531, USA.