Marcus P. Nevius is author of City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763-1856, (Georgia, 2020). His current book project is provisionally titled The Revolution from Below: A Story of Race and Slavery in the Old Dominion, 1760s to the 1790s.

Nevius has conducted research for Revolution from Below in a number of archives to date, including the Liverpool Central Records Office, the Swem Library at the College of William and Mary, and the Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mt. Vernon. The present phase of this project will center upon research in the Henry Clinton Papers held at the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.

The manuscript in progress features the community of sixty or so enslaved people at Dismal Plantation (DP) and Dismal Town (DT), the first slave labor camp established by the Dismal Swamp Company (DSC) in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. This slave labor driven enterprise comprising DP and DT depended upon company agent and overseer’s abilities to extract labor, often by force and certainly by coercion, from the more than fifty enslaved people at the site over a forty-year period. In the end, the rice plantation that the DSC members envisioned in the 1760s was not to be. In part due to the disruptions of the American Revolution (1775-1783), but more directly the result of slave resistance at DP and DT, the DSC shifted operations at the site to timber production in the 1780s.

As told in City of Refuge, this move foreshadowed the swamp’s future as a center of slave-produced timber products that accrued to the DSC’s benefit well into the nineteenth century. Revolution from Below seeks to engage historiographies at the intersection of the study of race and revolutionary change (and continuity) in the history of the late British imperial era in North America and in the history of the early United States. Yet, it is also an interesting history that brings together well-known historical actors, no less known than George Washington, with newly emergent histories of enslaved people whose stories remain challenging to recover from archival silence.