George Dawes Greene, Sylviane Diouf, and Paul Pressly on Black Resistance on the Savannah

After the Revolutionary War, many Black soldiers from Savannah who had fought on the British side refused to return to slavery. Instead, they joined a community of maroons—fugitives from slavery—and built a hidden fortified village in the forbidding swamps of the Savannah River. They cultivated crops and gardens, fought off the Georgia militia, and grew to become the largest maroon community in the United States. When they were finally defeated in battle by an alliance of the Georgia and South Carolina militias, many escaped, made their way to Florida and were granted asylum by the King of Spain. George Dawes Green wrote about this hidden fortress in his acclaimed new novel The Kingdoms of Savannah. But this story isn’t fiction—although, like so many true stories of the Black resistance in Georgia, it’s not widely known, and the site of the fortress remains archeologically unexplored.

SYLVIANE DIOUF, one of the pre-eminent scholars of US maroon history, PAUL PRESSLY, renowned historian of Colonial Georgia, and GEORGE DAWES GREEN, novelist and founder of The Moth, discuss the almost unbelievable story of the Fortress: its dramatic history, why that history has been repressed, and the bright prospects for its archeological recovery.