Slavery's Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons

Slavery's Exiles documents the largely forgotten histories of American maroons—enslaved people who escaped and established settlements in wilderness areas to evade recapture. Over more than two centuries, men, women, and children fled slavery to create lives in the Southern wilderness, hiding in Virginia's mountains, South Carolina's swamps, and other remote locations. Some remained near their former homes while others traveled to isolated areas, building underground shelters or established communities. Though feared and known during their time, American maroons have been largely overlooked by academic scholarship, which has concentrated on Caribbean and Latin American marronage. This book examines who these maroons were, why they chose this path, what forms of resistance they developed, how they organized their communities, and how their experiences fit into broader patterns of slave resistance. To survive, American maroons reinvented themselves and created their own definitions of freedom, establishing alternative ways of living that directly contradicted slavery's fundamental principles. Their autonomy, self-governance, and existence itself represented a repudiation of slavery's core tenets.