The Maroons: The History and Legacy of African Descendants Who Formed Free Settlements across the Americas

The Underground Railroad is one of the most taught topics to young schoolchildren, and every American is familiar with the idea of fugitive slaves escaping to Canada and the North with the help of determined abolitionists and even former escaped slaves like Harriet Tubman. The secrecy involved in the Underground Railroad made it one of the most mysterious aspects of the mid-19th century in America, to the extent that claims spread that 100,000 slaves had escaped via the Underground Railroad. Of course, from a practical standpoint, the Underground Railroad had to remain covert not only for the sake of thousands of slaves, but for a small army of men and women of every race, religion and economic class who put themselves in peril on an ongoing basis throughout the first half of the 19th century, and in the years leading up to the war. 

Of course, a fairly common form of resistance was running away and seeking hiding places in environments where slave catchers experienced difficulty. Slaves who ran and hid out, or who made their own settlements, were called maroons, from the Spanish word cimarron, which means “wild” or “untamed.” The term that historians commonly use to describe this is marronage, adapted from the French word maron, meaning the same as maroon. Marronage took two forms, grand and petty. Grand marronage was permanent, with escapees joining together to establish lasting settlements in inaccessible areas in mountains and swamps, sometimes preferring death rather than being caught and enslaved again.