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Slavery represented the opposite of freedom. In the period of human history variously known as the modern era or the Age of Discovery, this form of unfree labor would mark the landscape in critical ways. It is believed that slavery not only provided the economic foundations of the modern world, it helped establish the limits of freedom. In other words, slavery was required to remind citizens what freedom actually meant. __NOTOC__

In order to fully appreciate the idea of revolt among enslaved Africans in the United States, we must first understand the practice of marronage. Marronage encompassed the idea of creating levels of separation from the slave society and the creation of alternative modes of living. In order to accomplish the creation of these societies, enslaved Africans had to run away—hence the term, “marronage,” an English derivation of the Spanish term for runaway cattle, cimarrones. In creating alternative communities in the mountains and in the swamps of the New World, enslaved Africans practiced freedom on their own terms, liquidating the relationships of master-slave that defined their existence in the world of the enslavers. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley calls this “the first principle of African resistance.”<ref>Robin D.G. Kelley, "Do Black Lives Matter?," https://vimeo.com/116111740</ref> It represented the most immediate and available form of recreating the life interrupted by the experience of the Middle Passage and chattel slavery. Flight was not easy, but it perfectly captured the intent behind Black resistance to slavery: to live on one’s own terms.

Slavery in the Western hemisphere did not begin in what is now considered the continental United States. There were earlier instances of Africans being manacled and brought to places like Nueva Espana (Mexico), Central America, Brazil, and the islands in the Caribbean Sea. In those places we see the consistency of maroon communities. However, it is only recently that we have begun to learn a great deal about the existence of maroon communities in what became the continental United States. In places like the Great Dismal Swamp, which covers Southeastern Virginia and Northeastern North Carolina, the swamplands of South Carolina and Georgia, the Bas du Flueve in Louisiana, and the Florida territory, peoples of African descent established maroon communities that offered a place to live as free peoples in the midst of a slave society. Throughout the 17th-18th centuries, these provided viable alternatives to not only slavery but represented a better option for securing freedom than outright revolt. Though revolts were often launched from these settlements, the point was not the overthrow of the system but the creation of another kind way of living that was available to all. However, in the United States as in all places in the New World, maroon communities were thereafter attacked as they became threats to the slave regime. This intensified the propensity to revolt.