"The Accursed Swamp:" The Ambiguity of the Sacred and the Great Dismal Swamp, ca. 1660-1860

This project explores the history of the Great Dismal Swamp between the mid-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. I examine the swamp’s evolving relationship to the dominant social structures of colonial and antebellum North Carolina and Virginia as they shifted from indigenous sovereignty based in usufruct rights, to English sovereignty self-justified by Anglo-Protestant claims to supremacy, and then to the emergence of racial whiteness in the Americas and sovereignty self-justified by white claims to supremacy. During this period, I argue, the Dismal Swamp became an ambiguously sacred site pulsing with radical possibilities for disrupting, or reifying, those dominant social hierarchies, largely because of the secretive communities of fugitives from colonial violence and slavery who sheltered therein, and the legendary reputation they developed. In this project, the history of the Dismal Swamp as an ambiguously sacred site becomes a case study for exploring the dynamic and contested “logics of relations” which sustained social hierarchies in the region (and throughout the Atlantic world more broadly), as those hierarchies shifted from “religious” to ostensibly “secular” frameworks.