They cleared their own land

What happened

In 1729 a band of slaves left a new plantation on the James River and went west into the mountains. Governor William Gooch told the Board of Trade that they took their clothes, bedding and working tools, and some arms and powder, and that they began to clear land to plant. They wanted a farm of their own beyond the last settlement. Their owners went after them with a group of men and caught them in a fight in which one slave was wounded. Rothbard tells it as a settlement destroyed after a pitched battle, the survivors sent back to bondage. His point is why Virginia cared. The runaways had harmed no one, but a free community of former slaves in the hills was a standing reproach, a beacon light for every field hand in the colony (CiL, p. 586). Gooch feared the same thing in his own words, that a few such settlers would soon be joined by other runaways and become dangerous neighbors for the frontier, like the maroons of Jamaica. His answer was to strengthen and train the militia. The runaways of 1729 left no names in the record, and the picture gives them faces. Rothbard sets the episode inside a chapter of whippings, slave patrols and hangings, where every rising of these years, in 1722, 1723, 1730 and 1755, was met with new and harsher laws.