This Insurgent Ground

Black Women, Marronage, and Rebellion in the Great Dismal Swamp

Kathryn Benjamin Golden

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781469697970
  9781469697963
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469691565
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Out of the Great Dismal Swamp, a huge morass of swampland along the Eastern Seaboard straddling Virginia and North Carolina, there emerged a distinct culture of enslaved insurgency and fugitive subversion. Maroons who fled enslavement and resettled in wilderness spaces utilized the deep interior swamps to establish permanent, multigenerational autonomous communities. Historian Kathryn Benjamin Golden reveals for the first time the role of Black women in these maroon communities and locates them in the forests, swamps, and records where they previously evaded detection and attention.

This Insurgent Ground centers the Black women who aided, supported, led, and nurtured maroon movements in the Great Dismal Swamp as they collaborated with enslaved people in rebellion. Throughout the region, Black women resisted the injustices of reproductive violence, sexual assault, and desecrated motherhoods. Acting as agents of counterintelligence, participants in defensive violence and militant strategy, and mothers and providers of alternative autonomous communities, these women dared to redirect and repossess their energies and their bodies in absolute defiance of the very economic workings of slavery and in refusal of borders, bondage, confinement, and capture.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction Women in Motion
• One The Insurgent Ecology of the Great Dismal Swamp
• Two Venus’s Choice: Tidewater Women on the Run
• Three “They Bid Defiance to Any Force Whatever”: Maroon Women and Defensive Violence
• Four “Armed in the Great Swamp”: Enslaved Women and Organized Rebellion
• Five Hearthstones of Their Communities: Maroon Women and Insurgent Life in the Deep Swamp
• Epilogue Black Women’s Insurgent Movement and the Future
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index