Borderland visions: maroons and outlyers in early American history

Monthly Review, Sept, 2002 by Mark A. Lause

Among the whites I was nothing but a poor journeyman tailor, and never could be any thing else....There's a great deal of talk about liberty, equality, and such great things, among white people; but the divil a bit of liberty or equality did I ever find till I came amongst the Indians... [T]here's no one to drive you, nor can you drive any body but yourself, and that's what I call liberty and equality.

--White Workingman living among the Seminoles [ca. 1830] (1)

In 1893, the Columbian Exposition at Chicago celebrated the western world's discovery and occupation of the Americas. Against that backdrop, a convention of the new historical profession heard Frederick Jackson Turner's persuasive "frontier thesis," which ascribed the pervasiveness of such acquisitive and individualist values to a specifically American experience. Here, he argued, an ongoing process of white settlement that had lasted for generations had shaped a New World.

This view of a national experience actually had implications far more profound than a mere celebratory homage to western civilization. Underlying this locally rather brief transition were thousands of years of occupation by native peoples, who shared little of those values, and that very process of white settlement implied a transitional, multiracial experience. Beyond the line of settlement, fugitive slaves and their descendants, as well as Indians, established maroon communities, which offered an alternative to the capitalist standards, values, and beliefs imposed by the dominant classes, who believed that the nature of white settlement was immutably determined by "human nature." Unlike most of the socialist communities, these maroons grew from the struggles of nonwhites as well as whites. Almost from their inception, they inspired a series of proposals for new, racially-mixed nations independent from the ethos of the Old World. Moreover, their very existence helped shape the course of early American histor y. (2)

Some seven million people resided in the present United States at the time the Europeans reached the New World. These descended from the migrations that came by way of the Siberian-Alaskan coastal plain around 12,000 to 15,000 years ago, though small parties may have arrived earlier and by other means. Their long physical isolation left them exceptionally vulnerable to diseases like smallpox, to which Eurasian and African peoples had been developing immunities. With the resumption of direct contact, these epidemics carried off between 80 and 95 percent of the native peoples in one of the greatest tragedies in human history. By the time most of the newcomers directly encountered Indians, they found only the shattered remains of the peoples and cultures that had been here.

To compensate for the lack of an adequate indigenous labor force, the Europeans began the mass importation of Africans. Starting on the Caribbean islands, where relatively few natives survived, some of the growing population of slaves began escaping into the wilderness. Eventually, large numbers of runaways of both sexes began clustering in the swamps, mountains, and other isolated areas where they eluded easy discovery and dispersal. They built homes, raised crops and livestock, organized their defenses, and, provided a place to which others might flee. American slaveholding societies, by their existence, created these maroons. (3)

The British initially explored various means of countering Spanish and Portuguese power in the New World, including an alliance with Indians and slave resisters. As early as 1572, Sir Francis Drake found about three thousand "valiant Negros fled from their cruel masters the Spaniards," with whom the English raided Spanish settlements in Central America, freeing hundreds more. Two years later, Richard Hakluyt, another British strategist suggested a more permanent alliance with the maroons "whoe woulde joyne with us...and have begonne to doo it already in diverse places..." (4)

However, the later English colonization of what became the United States created a similar problem. They found little use for the sparse native population on the mainland and generally pursued a rigorous policy of driving them westward. Entire villages of Indians withdrew to more isolated areas. Later, runaway slaves--and whites in flight from their society--joined these "outlyers" or formed their own societies where they did not previously exist. Through the 1600s, maroon communities clustered in places like the Great Dismal Swamp on the Virginia and North Carolina border; in the coastal marshlands of South Carolina and Georgia, and among the Seminole people in what was Spanish Florida. As the eighteenth century pushed some English settlements towards the highlands, refugees reached groups like the Cherokees in western Carolina.

Among the sell-exiled whites who turned up among the Cherokee was Christian Gottlieb Priber. A native of Zittau, Germany, he had studied law at the University of Erfurt, and, in 1722, began a legal practice and married. Captivated by the literary utopianism of the continental Enlightenment, Priber decided to head for America, with the intention of bringing his family over later. Arriving at Charleston in 1735, he brought a trunk of books, paper, and ink five hundred miles west into the Appalachians where he took up residence among Cherokee at Great Tellico. He "made himself master of their Tongue...trimm'd his hair in the indian manner & painted as they did going generally almost naked except a shirt & a Flap," and took as a wife Clogoittah, the daughter of the local chief, Moytoy. He taught the Cherokees about weights and measures and metallurgy, and urged them to construct a coalition of Indian nations and to play off ties with the French against the English, with the ultimate goal of an American "Kingdom o f Paradise" based on the equal rights of Indians, Africans, and women. South Carolina put a price on his head in 1739, and, four years later, a group of Creeks delivered him to the English in Georgia. (5) In prison at Frederica, he died, the first proponent of an independent united America.