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

Forms of Marronage
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In 1549 a small group of Maroons in Peru, which included two Spaniards,
was harrying both urban and rural areas (Bowser 1974, 188). The United
States experienced a number of attacks by Black and White coalitions against
the slaveholding interests. In the 1780s a White robber led a group of about
fifty White and Black people, with whom he was causing havoc in the state
of Virginia; in 1818 in that same state thirty Black deserters, in league with a
group of White men, were harassing Princess Anne County. In 1861 a group
of Black runaways was said to be acting in concert with two Whites along
the Comite River in Louisiana; in 1863 White deserters from the Civil War
linked up with runaway Blacks in Alabama; in 1864, five hundred Union men,
deserters and Blacks were said to be carrying out raids in the vicinity of
Gainesville, Florida. In the same year, in North Carolina, gruesome tales
were told of some five hundred to six hundred runaway Blacks who had taken
advantage of the chaos caused by the Civil War to rove around the country
and wreak havoc, largely on White settlements. There was strong evidence
that White deserters from the Confederate Army were associated with them
in their depredations (Aptheker 1979, 153, 157, 164–65). White enslavers were
befuddled at the idea that members of their own ethnic group could be sleeping
with the enemy; ironically, they did not find it strange that they themselves
were doing so.
It seems to have been much easier in the United States than in most other
jurisdictions for White and Black deserters to forge alliances. Buckley (1998,
225), however, tells us that British soldiers who deserted also sometimes
joined Black Maroon groups:
One might suppose that white men would not leave the rude but familiar ways
of military life for a crude and dangerous existence among jungled hills teeming
with insect life. The fact that they did dramatically underscores the soldiers’ fear
of the garrison as a deathtrap. Nor would one today suppose that Europeans
would throw in their lot with desperate Maroon groups once they had deserted.
The official record also shows that captured groups of runaway slaves included
white deserters. Moreover, a number of these men roamed the interior of West
Indian islands for years with marauding Maroon bands of men and women. In
so doing they added their military knowledge to the developed extraordinary
skills of the Maroons as guerrilla fighters.
Buckley (ibid., 226) explains that while ethnic and colour differences
might have made White deserters and Black runaways unlikely companions,