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

38 Flight to Freedom
Schwartz 1983, 410–11), and notably in Haiti in 1790–91, on the eve of the
servile uprising. 5 It is therefore not difficult to envisage some of them opting
out of White-dominated society and joining the ranks of the Maroons, but
we shall never know how many of them did so.
A number of them sympathized with the Maroons’ cause and sometimes
assisted them in harassing their common oppressors. Official government
sources in Venezuela in 1732 spoke to the extensive, strong links between
communities of free persons and Andresote, the feared Maroon leader (Brito
Figueroa 1985, 209). Those who actually made the transition from sympathizers,
spies or helpers to Maroons might have been fleeing punishments or
debts, joining friends or relatives who had absconded, or seeking revenge. In
1826 the Urubu quilombo in Brazil comprised an undisclosed number of persons
who had attained freedom before joining it (Reis 1993, 57). A 1768 record
from South Carolina declared that the colonial forces had battled against a
large number of Mulattoes, Mustees, and free Blacks (Aptheker 1979, 153). In
1811 Charles Deslondes, a free Black, led an uprising in Louisiana that
involved some four hundred enslaved persons (Blassingame 1979, 216).
Aptheker (1979, 157–58) writes that the activities of many Maroon groups in
Onslow, Carteret and Bladen Counties, North Carolina, allied with some
free Blacks, reached the dimension of a rebellion in the summer of 1821. Plans
were in train for a concerted assault involving these various groups and
enslaved persons against the slaveholders. Patrick Carroll (1977, 501) states
that free Blacks married to Maroons formed part of the Mandinga-Amapa
settlement in Mexico.
At the same time, most free persons eschewed all contacts and activities
that would associate them, in peoples’ minds even if not objectively, with
enslaved persons or Maroons. They were therefore trapped by their own
ideological stance as much as by the pervasive nature of the slavery system,
which reached well beyond the physical contours of the plantations.
Slave society was riddled with contradictions. One of the most significant
was the existence of increasing numbers of poor Whites originating in the
earliest days of colonialism in the Americas. The United States, Mexico,
Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba and Puerto Rico had large
numbers of them. Many were sent out to the Americas as convicts and insurgents
and were often described in very pejorative terms such as riffraff, trash,
garbage, scum, and refuse (Goslinga 1985, 231; Thompson 1987, 74, 84;
Handler 1974, 73). Josiah Child commented that