60199616-flight-to-freedom-african-runaways-and-maroons-in-the-americas

Establishment of Maroon Communities
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Guillermo Rivas up to today is that enslaved persons used to say to their
overlords: “If you continue to mistreat me I will tell Guillermo.” Dutertre
(1667–71, 2:498) notes that in the French Caribbean, even before sugar had
become “king”, planters were torn about disciplining their human chattels
because of the fear that they would make off into the forest. One member of
the Jamaican plantocracy expressed similar views in the 1730s, in the days
when the Leeward and Windward Maroons were still rampant (Campbell
1990, 80). In 1825, George Hyde, a Coloured merchant in Belize, echoed the
same sentiments (Bolland 2003, 73).
Aptheker (1979, 160) cites a complaint that Maroon activities contributed
to slave insubordination in North Carolina, in Sampson, Bladen, Onslow,
Jones, New Hanover and Dublin counties, from September through December
1830. Slaveholders complained that their enslaved charges had become virtually
ungovernable, going and coming as they pleased, and, when anyone
attempted to discipline them, absconding to the woods where they stayed for
months, stealing cattle, sheep and hogs and committing other outrages.
As noted above, Maroon activities led to the complete abandonment of
many plantations, especially those within the eye of the Maroon storm, and
discouraged would-be planters and investors from undertaking pioneer plantations
in some of the most fertile areas of the country. This was exemplified
in Suriname and Jamaica, reinforcing planter views that Maroons were a
plague on the body politic. Various governors of Jamaica wrote about the
impact of Maroon depredations on the outlying settlements, some of which
had become overrun by trees and bushes (Campbell 1990, 142). In 1734, for
instance, the colonial legislature recorded that twenty-seven colonists were
forced to abandon their lands in certain parts of the country because a large
number of insurgent Blacks attacked them frequently, plundered and burned
their houses, and wounded some of them and killed others (ibid, 60).
Governor Hunter had warned the legislature a few years earlier that because
of recent setbacks to military expeditions sent against the Maroons, the latter
appeared to be growing in numbers and audacity, and were likely to pose such
a threat that some of the settlements might have to be abandoned to them
(ibid., 61). Occasionally, Maroons actually occupied abandoned plantations,
as happened in Jamaica around 1733 when a group of them took over three
plantations within eight miles of Port Antonio (ibid., 79). 27 The Jamaican
experience arguably replicated, on a grander scale, the experience of other
plantation colonies.