Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool be Booted Cool Stuff. You're a weekly reminder that you too can live in the swamps and kill slavers. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and I guess this week you might have heard of her. It's Sophie Lickterman. Hi, Sophie, how are you?
What if they haven't heard of me.
Well, then I have done a poor job of Or maybe it's the first time you've listened to the show, That's what I'm saying. Yeah, well, in which case, Sophie Licktterman is also the producer of this show. And the reason that Sophie is the guest is because, as we record this, Los Angeles is having a bit of a fire problem, and some of that might have had to deal with the defunding of the fire department to fund
the police. But unfortunately, you can't shoot fire. I'm willing to bet that a lot of people have tried.
Oh, I'm so sure a lot of people have tried.
Yeah, it's really I mean, I grew up in Los Angeles, I'm very familiar with fire season. But you know, this level of wind that La has experienced, it's just like climate change. Is terrifying, and I'm so sorry to the people that have lost loved ones in their and their homes. We do have a list of mutual aid funds that people can donate to, Margaret, do you want to read those out?
Yeah, although I'll explain the reason that you're the guest is that our guest lives in LA and is okay, but is busy doing mutual aid, because that's the kind of guests we have on But this list of mutual aid venmos that people can donate to was vetted by Kozon Media's James Stout for the Los Angeles fires of twenty twenty five at People's Struggle. SFV Supplies and Distribution for the San Fernando Valley at Sundays Dash thirteen twelve. The you know one three one two. This is they
deliver supplies to encampments and things like that. K Town for All K T O w N F O R A l L does emergency supply distribution for the unhoused.
They're a wonderful mutual aid organization. I can't say enough nice things about K Town for All.
Hell Yeah, J Town Action, J T O W N A C T I O N. What you'd expect, well, except that it's the letter J, not like J A Y or something. J. Town Action does mutual aid to unhoused folks in Little Tokyo. Eight and A Street Solidarity a E T N A Street Solidarity does direct relief for the unhoused in the San Fernando Valley. Dykes are kosher, which is an important thing to know. But dikes R kosher is d y k E s A R e k O s h e R. I think we're also going to put this in the show notes, but I'm
still going to read them out. And they do mostly east side and skid row and they have three plus drivers doing that work. F T s l A and not there's a knockoff f T s l A dash. That's not who you're looking for. Ft s l A makes meals for firefighters. All Power Books a l l PO w R Books is community bookstore that distributes supplies. And Seventh Street Collective, which is s e v E n t H s T c O L l e c t i v E and that is a Long Beach emergency response preparation group. And one of the reasons
that donating directly to mutual aid groups. Is good is because the larger organizations, the ones that people from out of town know about to donate to, right, I'm not even going to necessarily knock them, but they tend to rely on actual on the ground mutual aid groups to do the sort of final mile problem anyway, And if you want to cut out the middleman and support direct mutual aid, you're gonna your dollars will go further and
they'll do it much faster. So you know that is I mean, I have a bias towards this, but I just like have found that to be true in my own limited experience with disaster response. But Sophie, I'm really excited about this week's episode. This has been on my list since the very beginning. This is like one of the cool history stories that made me care about cool history because this week we are going to talk about one of my favorite topics of all time, Maroon communities.
And normally I'd be like, have you heard of maroon communities? But you've been on the podcast as the producer, and I've done numerous episodes about maroon communities. But I'm like curious, Like I'm curious, you know, kind of what you come into it. Have you heard of the Great Dismal Swamp?
No? Hell yeah, And obviously you told me the topic beforehand, and I like did not look things up.
Yeah, which is good because that's the way it's supposed to be. I don't know why. I just find the format more fun that way.
It seems like a really good dinner party conversation that you're having where you're telling somebody an epic tale and they're like reacting to It's that's yeah.
Totally, totally. It's compared to like the I'm not trying to talk shit on other podcasts. Other podcasts are fine. I less enjoy when two experts on a subject talk about the thing, because then instead of one person representing the audience, it's just like listening to two instructors at the same time or whatever. Anyway, and that's why we use this format now everyone knows, because some of us prefer it. So we are not talking about just any
maroon community this week. We are talking about the granddaddy of United States maroon communities. For anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about when I say maroon community, Maroons are people who have self emancipated from slavery.
People free societies.
Yeah, well, basically just like the shit that when I say keeps me up at night, I mean in the positive way where it keeps me up at night, because I just like read about this shit for fun, and like anywhere there's been a community of like three or three thousand people trying to live free and succeeding. I just fucking love that shit. This one lasted for hundreds of years, and when I first heard about this, it
kind of changed how I understood us history. And yeah, it's been on my list since the very beginning of planning this show. Tell me, well, it's North Carolina's pride and joy. Although Virginia can claim it too. Lesser Virginia can claim it too. The Great Dismal Swamp. I have only been to the Great Dismal Swamp once I went for an Earth First gathering like twenty two years ago.
I had just gotten out of I don't know why I put in this thing about my own experience with it, but I did tell us I just got out of jail from a protest in DC.
Because this is a dinner party and we're having a really lovely conversation.
All right, totally, yeah, exactly and basically like after we all got out of jail, like they rest like seven hundred of us, and when we all got out of jail, a bunch of us just like walked into cars pretty much and headed down to northeastern North Carolina to go sleep in the swamps and talk about how to defend them with earth firsters.
Yeah.
I have some good memories from that trip. Like one time, one of the forest defenders from the West Coast was showing us how to climb trees, and the tree sits isn't a good story, is a bad story. And she got her breast caught in the descending device because she was climbing naked, and she and someone had to climb up and rescue her. And that put the fear of tree climbing into me.
Oh my god, I thought you were going to say there was like a nipple that flew off.
I was terrible.
No, no, god, everything they survived this, okay, Yeah, they were okay, The breast was okay, they were okay, Yeah, totally. There was like some bruising, but no, it actually was all right because they were able to like take the weight off of it right away. Yeah, But then they were just like stuck.
I thought you were about to say it was a flying nipple story. I had visuals that nobody should have.
Well we could. I mean I wish I was less honest, because that would be a better way to tell the story.
Yeah.
Yeah, but your moral magpie.
I know, I've learned that justice sensitivity is a neuro atypical trait, and now I understand why the world is the way it is, is that it's an atypical trait.
Yeah.
But also the thing I remember about that trip is a gigantic spider, Like I swear it was the size of my hand that was inside my tent.
That's a nope for me, thank you so much.
I know, I actually decided that I would rather sleep outside where if there were any spiders, they weren't stuck with me, and so I just like went and curled up my sleeping bag by the fire instead. But the main thing I remember about the Great Dismal Swamp was the story that one of the local organizers told of the history of the area of the Maroon communities.
Yeah.
But one thing about the Great Dismal Swamp is that I got so excited about it that I forgot to do the rest of the intro credits.
Where we're we're just fucking it up today.
I know it would have gone terribly if I hadn't pause to say that our audio engineers Rory Hi, Rory Hi, Rory, and our theme music was written for us by unwoman. But the main thing I remember about the Great Dismal Swamp was the story that the local organizers told of the history of the area, of the maroon communities, the folks who are often called swampers, which is a like, I don't want to mess with someone who that's their description.
I don't want that. It's not the prettiest title, you know, Yeah, but I wouldn't want to mess with a swamper.
No, definitely not.
As long as there's been oppression, there have been people who have learned that if you just live somewhere that is an absolute pain in the ass to build roads in, you can avoid that oppression the mountains. You know, it's across history. There's like anthropology, but about this the art of not being governed that I haven't finished reading yet. My dad read it, and my dad read it and was like, no, wonder you live in the mountains, But if where you live is hard to get in and
out of. Not even hard to live, but hard to get in and out of. You have less government overall. So people resisting the creation of nation states have fled to the mountains since forever. And it's like, why partisan struggle happens in the mountains or whatever. Swamps, Yeah, swamps are at least as much of a pain in the asses mountains, and they are full of huge spiders and you can't build anything there.
Apparently huge spiders.
Oh I know, it was probably only really the size of my palm, but that is still that's huge. That's too big for a spider for us, that's not good. Yeah, it's not the spider's fault that I feel that way, But it's just I have limits, you know. And it's less that it's impossible to live in these places, and more like it's impossible to set up state infrastructure and
methods of control and extract value from there. People live in mountains and swamps and shit, and they always have, but they're hard to project power into and they're hard to economically extract from. I mean, people do it. Don't get me wrong. I lived in I live in West Virginia. This is one of the most economically extracted from places in the country. But the way they do that is
they literally blow up the mountains. So whenever I research a topic for this show, I go through sort of an exploding head meme diagram of progressions of the versions of this story. There's the clickbait summary that's too pat and just too cool and too radical, and everyone is perfect politics and everything was great, and then I stumble upon the rejection of that story. I usually then on top of that find the real story, which is sort of usually a synthesis of the two. And that's how
this story was. I actually ended up back where I started, way more than I thought I would. The first story I heard about the Great Dismal Swamps was that it was a place where for centuries people fleeing enslavement, Indigenous people and poor white people lived in harmony, free from the rule of law, and waged war on the slave society around them. Clearly, I am drawn to this, right, that is a perfect story for me. There is nothing
wrong here, you know. And then I heard a counterpoint, which was still describing an amazing place, that the Maroon community the Dismal Swamp was there, but it wasn't some multi racial paradise. It was just a place where mostly black people lived, and it wasn't at war with the slave society. It was just trying to keep its head down and survive. That was the story that like replaced the initial story in my head. This was still this is where I was at when I started my research,
and I was like, well, I'm covering that. That sounds amazing, you know. But the thing is it was both of these things at different times for different people, over the course of hundreds of years, and they absolutely led endless raids and wars on slave society out of these swamps. So don't worry if that's what you're here for, there's
going to be raids. The short version of the story is for centuries, people escaping oppression, white, Black and indigenous, especially by the end mostly black, moved into the least hospitable part of the East Coast and built a multi generational community, or rather like dozens of different communities. They led raids on nearby plantations and they helped countless people escape to freedom. For the most part, they kept their
heads low rather than doing raids for survival. But there was like different communities that had different vibes around this.
Yeah, that's step two on the don't mess with us checklist is we won't bother you if you don't bother us.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, And I can only imagine there was like some pretty annoying conversations in between these two groups where they're like, could you please stop raiding? Whenever you raid, they raid back, and people are like, yeah, but I want to go kill the guy who owned me, And people are like that's fair, valid, but yeah, yeah, both
sides have a point, you know. Yeah, but we don't have a lot of records of what they actually talked about internally because well, I'll talk about it they didn't. Yeah yeah. And then like even less than basically this was like they chose to be in the dark place on them be swamps.
Yeah, bad, bad place for things to not disintegrate.
Yeah, totally. Oh yeah, that's probably like endless journals that just oh man, that are swamp I know, I want to read them.
Yeah.
By the time of the Civil War or during the Civil War, they were in a gorilla war against the Confederacy, and they put their lives on the line to help other people find their freedom again and again because the maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp were some of the coolest people in American history. The problem is we mostly
have conjecture. In the past twenty years or so, there have been more archaeological expeditions which confirmed a lot of what people had been conjecturing, but we still don't really know all the details. One abolition is journalist of the nineteenth century named Edmund Jackson visited the place and he wound up writing, quote, how long this colony has existed, what is the amount of its population? What portion of the colonists are now fugitives? And what are descendants of fugitives?
Are questions not easily determined, And we kind of just don't have any better answers now than we did then. Well, we have slightly better answers now because after the end of the Civil War some of the people left, and then they talked about what they did. You know, they're like, oh, yeah, I lived in the swamps for four years, or oh I grew up there or whatever, you know, but only a couple of those stories, fair enough. What they didn't have in the swamps was advertisements. I actually don't know
how they knew what products and services to enjoy. They might not even have that's not sure. I do know they had products and services because there's archaeological evidence of an instrument maker who lived there, which is the coolest job ever. There's the guy who just made banjos in the swamp for people who are rating slave society amazing. So this show is sponsored by di y Banjo's only if you promise to attack slavers, but it's also sponsored
by all of this other stuff. And we're back, We're bad. I like Banjo's. One time I was talking to this person and I was like, I don't know if you remember me, and she was like, of course I remember you, Magpie. You taught me how to play banjo. And I looked at her. This is a period of my life where I drank a lot and I said I knew how to play banjo.
Ah, that's amazing.
Because apparently at some point I had learned how to play banjo, and then, while drunk at a party, shown this person how to play Banjo's amazing. Completely forgotten that that happened.
Good for you, Magpie, Thanks thanks.
And that's why drinking and your early twenties leads to a lot of stories that you can't tell because you don't know them anyway. So for most of the people living in the swamp, anti maroon laws meant that it would be one hundred percent legal for people to just outright murder them for like centuries. Basically, like if you live in the swamp, someone could just like come by and shoot you and get away with it, right, So they they kept pretty closed lipped about what they were
up to. People didn't want to talk much about the huge multi century crime they were all committing together. And my lord, if you're going to do a good crime, it should be multi century bad crimes. You should just keep them short.
That's so funny.
It's so funny. There are two books that are my main sources for this. Both came out in twenty twenty two. I wish I knew what that. Neither one references the other, but I'm like, I'm so curious. One is the sort of main history book on the subject. It is called Dismal Freedom by Jay Brent Morris, and it seems to be the main historical book collecting all the evidence that we have. It comes out from University of North Carolina Press.
It's more of a history book. The other book is called Intimate Direct Democracy by Mediebo Cadale, and it is more of a social history. It presents where the Maroons of the Swamp stood as practitioners of direct democracy and egalitarian social structuring, and like kind of how they tied into the larger abolitionist and anti colonial struggle that was happening at the time. They're both good. There's this huge
swamp called the Great Dismal Swamp. It straddles the border from North Carolina to Lesser Virginia, sometimes referred to as Virginia by people who don't live in West Virginia. I'm trying to start a fight between two states, but no one else here actually calls regular virgin way. I've decided that West Virginia, which is my adopted home and not
where I am from. So I'm kind of opposer saying this, but because it exists because it didn't want to fight for the Confederacy, I'm like, well, it's clearly Greater Virginia, and so I don't know why Virginia it gets to be Regular Virginia and West Virginia has to be West Virginia. I think there's West Virginia and then Lesser Virginia. That's my theory.
Hagpie, what the fuck? I know, stop trying to make people fight.
Well, it's particularly bad right now because as I'm recording this, people and in Lesser Virginia don't have any running water because of an ice storm, or at least in Richmond, Virginia. And oh I did it. I slipped up in Richmond Lesser Virginia. They don't have any running water right now. Wow, So sorry about y'all's water situation. Anyway, there's a swamp. It crosses between well, at the time it was just Virginia, and by at the time it didn't have any name.
Well whatever, Anyway, I'm gonna cover a lot of history. The Carolinas don't even exist at the start of this story. Big swamp used to be about two thousand square miles, which is a meaningless number to me until I looked it up. Do you have any sense of how big two thousand square miles is?
No?
I have. That does not compute in my brain. Ever.
I know if someone could say twelve thousand square miles or twelve million square miles and they could be the same size, and I would not go, you know, hold.
On two thousand. It's a Delaware miles. I don't think about Delaware ever, no offense.
Oh right, I'm from well, not there, but close enough. It's a it's more than a Rhode Island.
Wait, I'm looking at a graphic.
For those other people that don't think about it, it says.
You know, but it's a terrible graphic. I take it back. I don't care about that graphic.
To comparing it to like a number of dinosaurs something that.
Just doesn't matter. How big is two thousand square miles.
That's more than a mosquito could fly at a fortnight.
That's nothing. None of these things do anything for me.
All right, Well, Rhode Island is like fifteen hundred, but you all have states that are the size of like Europe.
Yeah, I was gonna say, I'm a West Coast galley. Los Angeles is five hundred square miles, so you're telling me it is four four lays. So that's large and in charge.
Yeah, that's also wild that LA is a third the size of one of the states.
But anyway, but also like one of the top three economies in the world.
Yeah, no, it makes sense. These days, there's about a thousand square miles left overall of the swamp, but the actual portion of it that is like truly the untouched and protected swamp, is way smaller than that, because everything that happens in the United States is the story of the loss of ecosystems. Yep. Originally it ran all the way from the Chesapeake Bay up north to the album Maral sound in the South, which I clearly probably know
how to pronounce. I didn't look it up, so I'm probably wrong, which is annoying because it's a word that's gonna come up again and again, and if you're from that area, you're gonna get just like slightly grouch. Here with me every time I say album Marley, album Marl, album Marl. I'm going with album Marle. See how it goes. Not all of the swamp was completely impenetrable, but a lot of it was. And like these days, the I've read like anecdotal stories whenever people are trying to talk
about how remote the Dismal Swamp is. Yeah, they say that special forces like parachute in the middle of it to test their metal against nature. Well that's nice, yeah, but they're doing it against the tiny version m so they ain't got nothing on an old maroon. It's the first place I ever saw intact old growth forest besides like an old oak tree here or there or whatever,
because I am not an West Coast girling. The swamp is a wonderful place and people have been fleeing there since the very first white people showed up anywhere near it. People have been fleeing into this swamp since before English people showed up.
That's wild.
Yeah, people have been living near and alongside the swamp for a really long ass time. There's archaeological evidence of settlement in the area by the early woodlanda culture about which little is known. By the sixteenth century, about a dozen different peoples lived in the swamp, and these were generally smaller tribes, clans, nations that were less prosperous than like the Cherokee who lived just west of them. And the first white settlement in the area did not last.
In fact, it sort of presages the rest of the story. About six hundred or seven hundred Spanish folk showed up in fifteen twenty five with one hundred and slaved Africans in tow and the trip went badly for the white
people in that group. From the beginning, their flagship ran aground the indigenous interpreters they brought along with them, pieced out and took off into the forest, and the settlers built a settlement called San Miguel de Gualdape, and they had the first known slave re volt in North America, pre dating even the English showing up, because all the settlers were starving and they were arguing, like, it's funny because it it also predates, like, well, I'll get to
the complicated nature of how the slave trade started in North America and like how like sixteen nineteen was the first time that like unfree Africans arrived or whatever, and so we're sti talking about like one hundred years before that. Cool, But all the settlers were starving and they're arguing, like, hey, should we go back home? And they started in fighting, and the guy who wanted to stay was arrested by the people who wanted to leave, and the enslaved people
were like, the fuck all this. They actually rescued the leader, the one who was arrested, set fired to a bunch of the buildings, and then fucked off into the woods to join the local indigenous people. And that's the end of anyone hearing about them. They had a successful slaver vault and disappeared to go live in the woods with people who liked them.
That's crazy.
Yeah, that's the that's the true story of the founding of America. By fifteen twenty seven, one hundred and fifty Spanish survivors went back home. It was not a successful settlement. In sixteen oh seven, the English people showed up founded Jamestown, the first permanent settlement by the English in North America. And within two fucking years people were already rebelling. Like when there was like only like one hundred people there, people were fucking off and running into the woods.
Incredibly cool.
Yeah, because they brought a bunch of indentured servants with them. About two thirds or three quarters of the people who were in the first wave of English settlements were indentured servants and legally unfree. This isn't slavery. And people like to argue like crazy about that, mostly white people who want to feel oppressed. But you don't have to argue that indentured servitude to slavery in order to feel oppressed. The indentured servants, who were all white at first, they
were oppressed. It was a fucked up and unfree situation. By sixteen oh nine, they started running away and joining the Powatans, which is a confederation of indigenous group that the English had imediately shown up and murdered and enslaved and shit like. Literally, by the end of this first century of English settlement, ninety percent of the Powatan population is gone and the rest will be scattered. Wow, it would be really fun to teach American.
History because it's just such a It'd be like it would have been my dream history teacher.
I would have had a real hard time sticking to the syllabus if it was provided to me by the state, because like, I didn't learn that, Like when they first showed up, immediately people were like, not a hell with this, you know, I'm not starving for you rich people, like because in sixteen o nine to sixteen ten was the starving Time in Jamestown. I probably did learn about this in school. I just didn't care because these people didn't
feel like the protagonists to me. You know, Yeah, people were starving to death, thus the name starving Time, and they ate dogs and people and it was bad. So people were like, well, I could die for you, the guy who owns my contract or I could get the fuck out of here and go into the woods and hang out with these people who are perfectly nice. And so they fled, not all of them, but a ton of them fled despite being told they would be executed if they were caught.
Do love an or they're like, yeah, I could do that thing that sounds really fucking awful, or literally anything else.
Yeah, high risk, high reward, get the fuck out of here. And also, at some point there's no risk because you're just dead either way, you know, right. I was gonna write that all these first indentured servants who fled were white, because black people weren't transported to the British colonies until sixteen nineteen, and the first ones were indentured servants. But these folks weren't white yet because whiteness is a social
category didn't exist in older conceptions of slavery. You could enslave people for life if they were a different religion than you. If they converted to Christianity, you were supposed to set them free. This is obviously not a good system, right, but it has a convert to Christianity, get free. Loophole, like wasn't going to work for people, specifically the Spanish
and the Portuguese colonies, the Catholic colonies. By sixteen fifty, you have hereditary, lifelong enslavement based on race in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. English people were like, well, that sounds good for the economy. Sign us up. That's my
British accent. I can't do a British accent. And they did this when Charles the Second was restorative throne after the English Civil War, which you can listen to our episode about the Levelers if you want to hear more about that, and the king Charles the Second was like, hell, yeah, let's do the slave trade thing. Sign us up and we'll talk more about Charles the Second in a little bit. Don't worry. I know you're like, I hope there's more
Charles the Second in here. Even before that, the English settlers were like, you know, it sucks that we go through all this work to get these people here and like make them work for us without paying them, but then we have to let them go at the end of it, Like where's the where's the profit in that? Besides the prophit I've already gotten out of them, So why don't we just come up with loopholes where if
people do anything we dislike, we extend their contracts. By sixteen forty two, you have runaway labor laws, which means fugitive slave laws in America are literally older than slavery in the colonies. The idea that like, if a worker runs away, you're gonna hunt them down and maybe kill them is really really baked into this country.
Jesus Christ, I fucking hate America.
Yeah, for any strong American patriots, you're not gonna like this episode.
Yeah, pool should ask USA scam ass country.
It absolutely is a scam country. That's like the core of so much of what the stuff that relates to.
All this scam ass country.
By the sixteen sixties, you have race based slavery in the US going off like crazy, And I want to go on a rabbit hole down. The wildest thing I learned on the side while researching all of this.
Like at a dinner party, would you have like a side story?
Oh, this is great side question?
All right. So, not only was Benjamin Franklin very racist, especially in his youth, he goes abolitionist near the end of his life, but like he believed that we should keep America white. So that are you ready for this? So that we could look good to space aliens, sir, literal outer space aliens living on Mars and Venus is why we should make America white, Sir. I'm gonna read you the quote.
Sir.
Ben Franklin wrote a piece in seventeen fifty one called Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind. In it, he lays out the colonial American mindset of race. And I think because I actually started reading this piece because I was trying to understand the colonial conceptions of racial categories, right yeah, because I started talking about how the people who ran away were black and tawny, and I was like, what the fuck is tawny? Why do why is a new
racial category being But I'll tell you about tawny. According to Ben Franklin quote, the number of purely white people in the world is proportionately very small. All of Africa is black or tawny. Asia is chiefly tawny, America exclusive of newcomers wholly so. And in Europe the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians, and Swedes are generally what we call a swarthy complexion, as are the Germans. Also, Yeah, that's right, the fucking Swedes and Germans aren't white. That's how fucking anyway.
Crazy.
The Saxons only accepted who with the English make the principal body of white people on the face of the Earth. I could wish their numbers were increased. And while we are as I may call it scouring our planet by clearing America of woods and so making this side of our globe reflect a brighter light to the eyes of inhabitants in Mars or Venus, Why should we, in the
sight of superior beings, darken its people. Why increase the suns of Africa by planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity by excluding all blacks and tawnis of increasing the lovely white and red. But perhaps I am partial to the complexion of my country, for such of partiality is natural to mankind. So like, he's doing so many things here.
Heday, he's all over the place, and just like so stupid and like, ah, okay, yeah, what do you go. I'm like a bathel if you just threw I know, I know, there's so much going on here.
Ramble so much ramble rmble.
I love the like, well, everyone's racist for their own race. That's not true. You have to teach kids that race exists and that they should hate people for looking different, you know, correct, correct, And he makes up four races and he puts everyone in them from a scale of bad to good. Yeah, black, tawny, swarthy, and white. And he's saying that English people are whiter than Swedish people by complexion, which is just funny.
Guy's I'm like this guy, Ben Franklin. It's like I keep forgetting that it's that it's Ben Franklin and not just some random asshole. He's, you know, mister elite asshole, mister mister ceo of asshole them.
I know. And he's like the science man who's on our money, right yeah, And so he's developing this race science in order to make us more beautiful to aliens. And I was thinking, like, this has to be a literary device, right, and like on some level it is. But apparently a lot of the Founding fathers real all about that alien thing. I mean, to be fair, like it's pretty reasonable to be like, well, those other worlds there might be aliens there. I'm not. I'm not mad
at him for believing it. But you shouldn't do racism to look good to aliens, correct, especially if your hypothesis is that everyone thinks that the way they look is the best. Well, then why would aliens like any of us at all? If everyone's racist like you? Anyway?
America scam mass country. We have an American mass country speaking of scams? Is that what you're about to do? No?
No, All of our products are individually hand vetted by no one an algorithm. Here's the ads.
And rebeca ya.
But we're not at Ben Franklin Times yet, We're still in sixteen ten of Jamestown. I just had to skip ahead one hundred years because I got really excited about.
That guy in the Aliens, like at a dinner party, telling a story out of order.
Just funny because like during the course of my week, on an average week, I talked to at least one of my friends and excitedly tell them the story. And that actually helps me figure out which parts are like the exciting parts, you know, the part that I can't wait to tell my friend, you know. Absolutely so when indentured servants in Virginia were like, I'm good, I don't
want to be owned by a guy. For another several years, they fled south southern coastal Virginia aka near the swamps, became the place for people who wanted to actually live free. And it was interesting because it was even understood then, right because like in America scam propaganda, you get told like, live free means exploit other people's labor and become rich, because that's what the founding fathers were all about. Sure, it was even understood by a lot of people then.
To live free was not to live.
Wealthy, to live sustainably.
If you want to be wealthy, you stay in Plantation Town. Yeah.
Sustainably yeah.
If you want to live free where people don't tell each other what to do and you all just get along with each other, you go into what would have been called the Indian territories, you go into you know, you go outside the colonies. So in order to live free, you don't want to have a state at all. So there's this whole uncolonized region between English Virginia and Spanish Florida, and that's where people white and black went for decades
before the founding of the Carolinas. Some went into the swamps themselves and formed the start of what later became the Dismal Swamp Maroon communities. Others more of them settled around the area, especially around the Albemarle Sound. You'd think I would looked it up during a break, but I didn't.
This history of this time feels a little bit blurry, So I'm gonna I'm not gonna say this next little bit with the most confidence, but I referenced everything they could right Over the course of the sixteen hundreds people fleeing colonial government went to the Albemarle Sound and was now North Carolina, the southern end of the Great Dismal Swamp. There they formed an independent assembly of people, the albamarl Assembly. I told you I was going to say this name
a lot. And they worked within the Tuscarora Confederacy, which was a confederacy of three tribes in the area. And they had a culture built on a galitarian values, like avoiding the idea of having rich landowners who control everything. And they also wanted to avoid racism between white, black, and indigenous people, so they had a tri racial setup, and that is going to play a huge part in everything that is to come and as part of why, it's just like, I don't know, it's such a cool story.
The Anglican Church was largely kept out of the region. People practiced and it wasn't a big deal, and you'd have like priests or pastors or whatever, but they'd like practice in private because the Anglican Church was seen as like basically an institute of the state and they didn't
want that there. Quaker mission Quakers mentioned, sorry, yep, no, yeah, yeah, this is like actually North Carolina is heavily Quaker at this time because they had more religious freedom, especially once you actually have a yeah Carolina in a couple of decades. But yeah, yeah, so everyone take a drink. Quakers were mentioned, and Quaker's found more acceptance there.
Sick.
By the sixteen sixties, King Charles the Second, who I told you I was going to come back to he was ruling in England and he granted Carolinas to a bunch of English people, even though it wasn't his to give away. Imagine doing that.
Why do they do that? Yeah, why do they think that's? Okay?
Just imagine just imagine somebody being you know, let's go even like super basic.
Okay, let's go potatoes. It's it's fucking good people to close up.
You have just made a magical, delicious, let's go baked potato for one, and you have your fork and you're about to take a bite of it.
And not only do they take your potato, but they take your fork and give it to some guy you've never met.
I know, I know, and like and not not a hungry guy.
Not a hungry not not a guy who's hungry, not a guy who doesn't have a baked potato or a.
Fork, a guy who has a lot of potatoes, guy who's drowning of potatoes and forks, yeah, and all the fixins.
Yeah, and uh, just like you're like, excuse me, that's my potato.
That's my fucking potato, motherfucker.
Yeah.
And then and then.
They're like, oh, was this your potato? Well, now I'm gonna call it New York potato.
Or totally we're gonna name it after Sophie. We stole your potato.
Yeah, I took my Sofie potato, and now they're gonna call it.
I don't know, Harry, Well, they might still call it a Sophie potato forever, but or your descendants will have to fight for to rename Sophie Potato but not actually be given back to them.
Yeah yeah, anyway, Uh so yeah Carolina, no, no, no, no, this is a good this is a good side quest and uh we're both hungry. I think is also part of what's happening. Definitely Carolina now has a government, but
for decades longer, several generations. The album Marl Assembly continues its a galitarian, anti authoritarian ways because power projection is a very different, like it's a very different thing to be like I'm in charge and then have a way to tell people you're in charge and make that happen. A lot of anthropology is like literally around the study of like, but could the king tell anyone what to do? You know?
Well, I love when I love when some guy that's definitely not in charge tries to tell people they're in charge, and then someone else who's actually in charge just walks in the room and everybody realizes this is that that person's in charge. It's one of my favorite scenarios.
That is the vibe of what's happening in Northern Carolina right now. Because okay, because Carolina was the entire region between Virginia and Florida is like one big entity, and it was. The government was in Charleston, which was far to the south of Northern Carolina and like not easy to travel. So in Northern Carolina and people are like, all right, whatever we're doing. For a couple decades, people
are just kind of doing whatever they want. Yeah, it gains a reputation Northern Carolina as a rogues harbor, which is always a good time. If you have a choice between living in a rogu's harbor and not living in a rogues harbor, you should live in a rogue's harbor.
So my dog's called my house.
Yeah, exactly. The governor of Virginia around this time said, quote, as regards our neighbor, North Carolina is and always was the sink of America, the refuge of our renegades until in better order, it is a danger to us. So if you live in North Carolina, you should have some pride about that. It was full of quote pirates and runaway servants, and it didn't have a government. I mean, it did have a government, but not one that was good at projecting power. And the Arbor Marlay Assembly is
doing its thing. And someone complained at the time that quote, all sorts of people, even servants, negroes, Aliens, Jews, and common sailors were admitted to vote. So hey, the first place that black people were able to vote in North America probably was the Assembly around the Sound, because you had a sort of democratic thing actually happening, unlike whatever. Anyway, I'll talk more about the American Revolution later when we
get to it. And this place was sometimes referred to disparagingly as the Quaker Leveler Republic, and that is not a bad thing to be at all. And in this case levelers for people haven't listened to my episode about the Levelers. They're this English radical group that was trying to level the difference between the rich and the poor, which we need right now. But this place, with the Assembly,
it was not an outright utopia. There were slavers there and there were enslaved people, the substantially fewer than elsewhere. One historian I read talked about how it managed to stay oddly egalitarian despite some people owning each other, like wasn't trying to be like and it's totally fine now, right, but there just like was a difference between plantation culture and like the comparison it used I think they talked about being like on both ends of the saw cutting.
You know, it was like old timey saws where you cut down a tree with like a two person saw. You know, you're going to be like everyone's equal when you're holding the saw. It's the kind of vibe that they claimed again, it's slavery, it's bad, right.
Yeah.
They also, despite allowing that, they had this policy of allowing runaways, including runaway and slave people to come and stay there and be unharrassed. So even though some people weren't free there, other people were harbored as fugitives from It seems messy, that's what it seems like. It seems messy. And then like debtors, they pass this law that when you show up your debt is a racer, like we're not gonna no one can come and get you for your debt. And I was a little bit like, well,
what's that about. Is it like, oh, you went bankrupt. I think that's a reference to indentured servitude because that's your death.
Oh okay that that yeah, yeah, that seems logical.
And the radical vibe of the area started to ebb. By sixteen ninety or so, what.
An excellent sentence you wrote there. The radical vibe of the area started to ed by sixteen ninety or so, just like, what a great sentence, thank you, thank you.
Feel like people.
Don't realize how hard it is to like write about history and make it sound like uniquely your own. But yeah, like the radical vibe of the area started to ebb by sixteen ninety or so.
So Magpie and writing a script where you know you're going to read it aloud and you want it to sound natural when you read it aloud. It is like a had to compliment that I refuse to go back and listen to my first episodes.
They don't exist. What do you mean?
Oh yeah, what I want? Yeah, although some of them are good, but yeah, yeah. But by sixteen ninety nine, an Anglican deputy governor declared the Church of England is the official state religion of the Carolinas and made everyone pay a tax to support the church. Worse than that, he came up with a way to drive the Quakers out of office because they did this thing where they decided that all officials needed to swear an oath to the new Queen Anne of England and Quakers are forbidden
by the religion from swearing oaths. And the reason is kind of cool. Quakers are already forbidden to lie, So you can't swear an oath saying you're telling the truth because that implies you ever lie, so like you're always telling the truth. Therefore you can't swear an oath.
Okay.
So all of the Quakers were kicked out of office in the Carolinas, and you get this tiny uprising called Carry's Rebellion, where the people being ousted from power tried really hard not to be ousted from power, and the Royal Navy intervened. I had this whole thing where I was like writing in paragraphs and paragraphs about this, but then I was like, Okay, Kerrie's Rebellion is absolutely a
side quest here. And the Royal Navy intervened, and the Quaker leveler Republic fell, and the people who'd been living for generations in this anti authoritarian, anti racist settlement, some of them fled into the less settled interior of the state, but others fled into the great dismal Swamp, and they probably weren't alone there even already. Certainly they were about to not be alone there at all. Because a ton more people are going to come and they're going to
lead gorilla wars against slavery for centuries. But we're not going to talk about it today. We're going to talk about it on Wednesday. But first, well, how are we feeling? I guess we haven't really gotten to the maroons yet. We've just gotten to some people.
I mean, it's a context episode. It's great.
Oh yeah, that's right, I forgot I still do that. Yep.
Fuck Ben Franklin, I'm having a good time.
Yeah, well, anything you want to plug here at the end of the first episode.
It's a great question. I mean the organizations we plugged at the top and then yeah, uh, you know, just follow all the cool Zone Media shows at cool Zone Media on Blue Sky, Twitter and Instagram.
Yeah, And I'll say, if you're looking at all this stuff happening elsewhere, maybe you don't live in Texas or Richmond or LA right now, but you're looking and you're like, oh, that's going to eventually happen where I'm at, or maybe it already has, or maybe you do live in one of those places. There's never a wrong time to start
getting prepared. And I think that I guess This is a plug for my other podcast, Live Like the World Is Dying, in which I talk alongside other co hosts about preparedness and how it's not just like a right wing people and bunkers thing, but it's not as intimidating
as you think it is. To get started. Really at the very beginning, preparedness looks like try and have about three days where the food, water, and power for like cell phones, you know, like battery banks or whatever, like little tiny ones in your house, plus a go bag ready to go in case of emergencies. That's the that's the start, you know, and that'll get you through a lot. And by being individually prepared, you are in a better
position to help the communities around you. So that's that's what I'll say here at the end of this episode. And if you're living through a hard time, good luck, and I hope we're all able to take care of each other and support mutual aid and see you Wednesday.
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