On a Sunday morning in the fall of 1730, while plantation owners and overseers were in church, around 300 enslaved people gathered near Norfolk, Virginia. They elected leaders from among themselves and then fled south into the nearby Great Dismal Swamp, a 2,000 square mile forested wetland straddling southeast Virginia and northeast North Carolina. The leaders of what we now call the 1730 Chesapeake Rebellion, the largest enslaved uprising in colonial Virginia history, were recently enslaved Africans from the Kongo/Angola region of West Africa and the strategic choices they made were inspired by their shared BaKongo cosmology.
Within BaKongo thought, spiritual power and authority come from one’s ability to negotiate the powerful, often dangerous, fluid forces of the dead. The world of the living and the world of the dead mirror and influence each other and while the power of the dead could be experienced anywhere, the dead were especially concentrated in forested wetlands like the Dismal Swamp. Accessing the power of the dead was important for enslaved Kongolese people in the Americas because the dead could transform the fates of the living, and in doing so, provided a source of power that the Chesapeake rebels sought to harness to challenge that of enslavers.
The rebellion started with rumors, though no one knows for sure who started them. Virginia Governor William Gooch admitted that he could never determine “the first author.” But by fall of 1730, they were pervasive on plantations in southeast Virginia where Gooch reported hearing of “many meetings and Consultations of the Negros in several Parts of the Country in order to obtain their Freedom.”
The rumors, which had been circulating among enslaved communities in tidewater Virginia since 1729, suggested that the King of England had sent an order in the care of former Governor Alexander Spotswood to “sett all those slaves free that were Christians.” It was also rumored “that the order was suppressed,” by planters in Virginia so as not to lose control of the people they enslaved. This “notion,” Gooch wrote to the Bishop of London, “in their circumstances, [was] sufficient to incite them to Rebellion.”