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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.”

The association between becoming Christian and emancipation from slavery was well rooted in Virginia where Anglo-Protestants had long assumed that being a Christian and being enslaved were incompatible and where, prior to the mid 1660s, enslaved African and Indigenous people who could demonstrate that they had undergone Christian baptism occasionally sued for their freedom and won. Before the solidification of ostensibly secular racial categories centered around white claims to supremacy, Christianity, or the lack thereof, was the primary determinant in who was and was not legally able to be enslaved. By the time of the Chesapeake Rebellion, however, it had been decades since Virginia had clarified that Christianity and slavery were compatible and conversion and baptism did nothing to change the new converts status as enslaved.

Nevertheless, in 1729, an Anglican minister named James Blair in Virginia expressed skepticism about the motives of enslaved Africans who converted to Christianity in a letter he wrote to the Bishop of London. Enslaved people were, on Blair’s account, “very desirous to become Christians; and in order to it come and give an account of the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed and the Ten Commandments, and so are baptized and frequent this church; and the Negro children are now commonly baptized.” However, he was suspicious. “I doubt not some of the Negroes are Sincere Converts; but the far greater part of them little mind the serious part, only and in hopes that they shall meet with so much the more respect, and that some time or other Christianity will help them to their freedom.”

The minister’s solution was, unsurprisingly, more theological education. “I hope their very coming to church,” he added, “will in time infuse into them some better principles than they have had.” Two years later, in the rebellion’s aftermath, Blair lamented, “it is certain that notwithstanding all the precaution we ministers took to assure them that Baptism altered nothing as to their servitude, or other temporal circumstances; yet they were willing to feed themselves with a secret fancy that it did, and that the King designed that all Christian should be made free.”

Despite his attempts to dismiss the association between Christian baptism and emancipation from slavery as foolish, the minister’s letters acknowledged that the Anglican Church was not the only source of spiritual authority, neither in the Dismal Swamp region of southeast Virginia and northeast North Carolina, nor anywhere else in the British Empire. Many of the Chesapeake rebels had their own notions about Christianity which were shaped by their broader understanding of the sources of spiritual and political power.

As early as the fifteenth century, Catholic Portuguese missionaries had brought Christianity into the Kongo/Angola region of West Africa, and the Kongo Kingdom had adapted Christianity as its official state religion in the early sixteenth century. After the Kongo Kingdom collapsed in 1710, in part due to civil wars fueled by the trans-Atlantic slave trade, BaKongo people made up most of the Africans enslaved by the English between 1710 and 1740. Historians have argued that among these enslaved Christians were the leaders of the Chesapeake Rebellion, and that they understood the rumors about emancipation through the lens of their Christian heritage. Sensitivity to the influence of BaKongo cosmology on Kongo Christianity provides useful context to that argument and can help us better understand the choices made by leaders of the rebellion.

When Christianity became the state religion in the Kingdom of the Kongo, Kongolese people did not abandon their cosmology; instead, they drew on its spiritual and intellectual resources to interpret Christianity. For example, in the KiKongo language the word “church” is translated as nzo a nkisi, which Portuguese missionaries understood to mean “house of the holy.” However, in its common usage, nzo a nkisi referred to a house of the dead, or a grave; and the Kongolese sometimes referred to Christian missionaries as a ngaga nzo a nkisi, or a “priest of the grave.” Within a broad BaKongo cosmology, Christianity became one resource for negotiating the ever-present forces of the dead.

According to the anthropologists John M. Janzen and Wyatt MacGaffey, “the world, in Kongo thought, is like two mountains opposed at their basis and separated by the ocean. At the rising and setting of the sun the living and the dead exchange day and night.” (34) The realm of the dead, called mpemba in KiKongo, is a kind of mirror opposite of that of the living that nonetheless pervades it. Bodies of water, whether they be the Congo River, the Atlantic Ocean, or the large freshwater Lake Drummond in the heart of the Dismal Swamp, were thought to separate the two realms, and their reflecting surfaces were understood as a place where one could peer into and encounter mpemba.

In addition to dwelling beneath the waters, the dead congregated in forests and heavily wooded areas, referred to as mfinda in KiKongo. Central to BaKongo cosmology was an awareness that the material world of earth and water and plants and animals was inseparable from and replete with the unseen realm of spiritual forces, especially the powerful dead. Trees, with their roots reaching down and out into the realm of the dead and their above-ground branches mirroring this pattern in the realm of the living, played an important role in connecting the spaces of the living and the dead.

Beyond the Dismal Swamp, these Kongolese understandings of the dead influenced black folklore in the South Carolina Lowcountry where, for example, forested swamps were associated with the land of the dead. Perhaps this is why, especially in swampy regions of the Americas, enslaved people from the Kongo region had a reputation for being quick to run away or rebel.

Nine years after the Chesapeake Rebellion in Virginia, an enslaved Kongolese man called Jemmy and about twenty other Kongo-affiliated enslaved people, gathered on a fall Sunday along the banks of the Stono River, near Charleston, South Carolina. There, they robbed a local store for guns and ammunition. Then, inspired by rumors that Spanish Catholics in Florida were promising freedom to fugitives from slavery in British colonies, the group began marching south towards St. Augustine and the Florida wetlands, killing white people and burning down houses along the way until their rebellion was suppressed by colonial forces.

The choices the Stono rebels made likely reflected the influence of BaKongo cosmology. As they marched, they beat drums and danced a war dance in accordance with Kongolese military cosmologies. Their choices also reflected their Kongo Christianity which was shaped by that cosmology. The rebellion broke out on a Catholic feast day devoted to the Virgin Mary and they fashioned banners that may have been affiliated with Kongolese celebrations of Mary. Marian devotion played an important role in Kongo Christianity. Her statues, for example, were often treated as minkisi which, in BaKongo thought, are materializations of the power of the dead, “agents” capable of protecting, healing, and harming.

This dynamic and evolving minkisi tradition inspired the use of ritual objects in the Americas like prendas in Cuba, pacquets-congo in Haiti, and conjure bags (sometimes known as “tricks” or “hands”) in the U.S. South. In a vast forested wetland like the Dismal Swamp, a skilled conjuror would find an ample supply of the roots, herbs, and animal parts required to construct conjure bags and therefore harness the power of the dead concentrated in the swamp and deploy it to transform the fates of the living. From this perspective, the decision of the Chesapeake rebels to flee into the Dismal Swamp might be understood to reflect the influence of their African cosmology just as the rumors that motivated their rebellion likely reflect their Kongo Christianity.

From the swamp, as John Brickell wrote in his 1737 The Natural History of North Carolina, the Chesapeake rebels “committed many outrages against the [white] Christians” of the region. Unfortunately, Brickell does not elaborate on these “outrages”, and Governor Gooch’s early dispatches to London regarding the rebellion were lost at sea. Perhaps the rebels raided nearby storehouses, stealing food and supplies, as Robin and Mingo had done in nearby Middlesex County in 1713. Or maybe they sought to kill planters and overseers in the region as Angola Peter and others had conspired to do along the lower James River before their wide-reaching plot was uncovered in 1710.

Whatever “outrages” occurred, alarmed enslavers and colonial officials responded quickly, sending out militias and recruiting local tributary Indians familiar with the swampy region, especially from the Pasquotank community, to suppress the rebellion. At least twenty-nine rebels were captured and executed. Those who evaded capture likely stayed hidden in the Dismal Swamp. Evidence of post-in-ground structures deep in the swamp interior, dated by archeologists to around 1730, may be a trace of the Chesapeake rebels. If so, it suggests that they intended to establish themselves relatively permanently in the swamp.

In the rebellion’s aftermath, Governor Gooch ordered that all overseers and militiamen “repairing to their respective Churches or Chappels on Sundays or Holy Days to carry with them their Arms to prevent any Surprise thereof in their absence when slaves are most at Liberty and have greatest opportunity for that purpose.” He also ordered regular patrols of the swampy region. The Dismal Swamp had long been considered a backwater “refuge for our renegades” by powerful Virginians, but in the aftermath of the 1730 Chesapeake Rebellion they increasingly associated it with the existential threat of enslaved rebellion. Many began talking of draining the swamp, though serious efforts to do so would not begin until the 1760s and would never be fully realized.

The Chesapeake Rebellion had exposed the limits of planter sovereignty in the region. Not only could they not hope to control the people they claimed as their property in the Dismal Swamp, they also could not control notions of spiritual authority, or even the meaning of Christianity, for the people they enslaved. By foregrounding the role of BaKongo inspiration, we can appreciate the Chesapeake Rebellion as one site of the broader enslaved and maroon struggles for not only political, but also social and spiritual, autonomy in the Greater Caribbean and throughout the Americas.

Further Reading:

Primary sources on the Chesapeake Rebellion include John Brickell’s The Natural History of North Carolina (1737) and correspondences between colonial officials and authorities in London which are archived in the Fulham Palace Papers in the Lambeth Palace Library in London. Secondary sources include Anthony Parent Jr.’s Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740 (2003) and Charles F. Irons’ The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (2008). On the use of Kongo (with a “K’) and associated terms see John M. Janzen’s essay, “Kongo Atlantic Diaspora” in obo in African Studies. On Kongo cosmology see John M. Janzen and Wyatt MacGaffey, An Anthology of Kongo Religion: Primary Texts from Lower Zaire (1974). A classic study on BaKongo influence in Africa and the Americas is Robert Farris Thompson’s Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (1984). My use of “inspiration” as a concept is inspired by Todd Ramón Ochoa’s Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba (2010). On the minksi (nkisi, sing.) tradition and its relationship to conjure bags in the U.S. South see Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African and Afro-Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (2007), especially the chapter titled “Minksi, Conjure Bags, and the African Atlantic Religious Complex.” My discussion here is also informed by John K. Thornton, “‘I Am the Subject of the King of Congo’: African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History 4 (1993). On the dead and forests, in particular, see Ras Michael Brown’s essay “‘Walk in the Feenda’: West-Central Africans and the Forests in the South Carolina-Georgia Lowcountry” in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora (2009), edited by Linda M. Heywood. On the Stono rebellion see Mark M. Smith’s  edited volume Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (2005); especially the interpretive essays by John K. Thornton and Mark M. Smith. Daniel Sayers’ A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp (2014) is the standard source on the archeological traces of maroon communities in the Dismal Swamp.

This article originally appeared in May 2025.

Ryne Beddard received his PhD in Religious Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill, with a concentration in Religion in the Americas. His research and writing focus on the intersection of religion, race, and place in the history of the U.S. South and Greater Caribbean.

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