I made the mistake of reading this one when putting together a 4 week course on Medieval Africa for my high schoolers, prepping 3 other new courses on American History for them, and running an online course on American History for a tech school. This book took forever. Something like four weeks or more. Much of this is me. See above and 5:00 mornings, leaving me constantly tired. I have no idea how much of it is the book.

Like many academic tomes, the super exciting stories included could have been better highlighted. But it's worth it for those stories and the resulting reconception of enslavement and resistence. Pick this up and read it. Put it in front of students.

Dismal Freedom is a heroic effort to write a history of a people who left almost no written records - the inhabitants living in the Great Dismal Swamp in eastern Virginia & North Carolina from the 17th century to the Civil War. These people were mostly Blacks who escaped from enslavement, although there also some Indigenous Americans and even a few whites.

Morris relies on archeological work in the Swamp alongside what few historical accounts are available to tell a story of communities scattered throughout the area, some with extremely little contact with the world outside, and others somewhat integrated with the surrounding settlements. Sometimes this "integration" involved raids and theft from surrounding farms and plantations; other times it meant trade, religious gatherings, even employment.

Equally interesting is Morris' account of the impact of the Dismal Swamp on the popular imagination in both the North and the South. The very existence of a Black settlement was a psychological threat to the South, who feared crime and revolt out of proportion to the actual size of the Swamp population. Similarly, abolitionists in the North romanticized the Swamp's dwellers and also looked to them to lead the Enslaved into revolt.

All in all, a worthwhile book for anyone interested in American History.

This is a book about a topic that was not familiar to me, not I daresay it would be familiar to the general population not close to the places in the book. Throughout learning about slavery and how the enslaved escaped to freedom, I never learned about the existence of this swamp and how so many enslaved people managed to escape and live in this huge swamp.
One thing that I found particularly interesting was the explanation and discussion of the different layers and types of maroonage that existed within the swamp. The way that the different layers of maroonage co-existed and worked with each other to survive was incredible to read about.
Perhaps the most documented types of marooners in the book were the ones that marooned and stayed along the edges and outskirts of the swamp either to use it as a passageway to freedom in the North or because their families were still enslaved and they wanted to stay nearer to them.
But some marooners that there is still not much known about even now are the deep marooners that made it to some of the deepest parts of the Dismal Swamp and then never left. These people created isolated communities that thrived deep in the swamp and archeologists are still studying today.
There is no part of history that is too small to learn about and this is a part of history that should really be talked about and taught more.