URI_Research _Magazine_Momentum_Spring_2020_Melissa-McCarthy

Fifteen years ago, Marcus Nevius was an undergraduate student riding around North Carolina. As he explored the state, he wandered its vast pine forests and explored the long history of slavery in the United States. Nevius, now a University of Rhode Island (URI) assistant professor of history, discussed just how complex the slavery and black resistance were with a scholar named Freddie Parker, professor emeritus of history, North Carolina Central University. This discussion would be what Nevius calls the “seed corn” of a decade’s worth of work researching the complex relationship between self-emancipated slaves and nearby slave labor driven timber camps. The outcome was his new book, published in February 2020, City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763 – 1856 . According to Nevius, well before the Civil War, there was a massive swamp that straddled two states: Virginia and North Carolina. It covered an area of approximately 2,000 square miles, roughly the size of Delaware, and was known as the Great Dismal Swamp. It was also a place of a small economy in early American history. Nevius says that some of the richest men in America surveyed the area, including a young George Washington. Ultimately, the profusion of pine trees became the best source of income. Companies developing that timber industry were also among the region’s largest slave holders.

Nevius says he discovered that: “Any of the extractive enterprises that Washington’s generation and any of the successive generations sought to create in the Great Dismal Swamp were fully dependent on slave labor. This created a significant agency for the slaves.” Some of the slaves not only escaped into the Swamp, but also created small communities that engaged in unofficial trade in goods and provisions with the neighboring companies, a process referred to as petit marronage . Part of his research for City of Refuge involved joining a field school of archaeologists, led by Daniel O. Sayers, associate professor and Department of

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