The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  Trial of Lawson and Graffenried

  This sketch, made by a colleague of Christoph von Graffenried based on the Swiss baron’s description, shows him, the English surveyor John Lawson, and Graffenried’s African slave under guard while a shaman “conjures,” dancers wheel around a fire, and a council of Tuscarora elders decides their fate. (Burgerbibliothek Bern Mss. Muel. 466[1]p1)

  In the morning, they faced their third and final tribunal—a sign that the Indians were still undecided about their fate. They did not meet the challenge as a unified front, however. “I turned toward Mr. Lawson bitterly upbraiding him, saying his lack of foresight was the cause of our ruin,” Graffenried said. Spying an English-speaking Indian “dressed like a Christian,” Graffenried pulled him aside for some frantic, backdoor diplomacy. He was sorry, he said; obviously, this wasn’t his fault; he had threatened no one. The protestations seemed to fall on deaf ears.

  The two prisoners, plus one of Graffenried’s slaves, were stripped of their coats, tied hand and foot, and guarded by a hatchet-wielding Indian “in the most dignified and terrible posture that can be imagined,” as well as by four warriors armed with flintlocks. While women and children danced and a shaman conjured, the council met through the day and into the night. Graffenried, twisting around in his bonds, “made a short speech, telling of my innocence, and how if they did not spare me the mighty Queen of England would avenge my blood.”

  In the dark, Graffenried made his peace with God, tried to instruct his slave in proper contrition, and ignored the man who’d gotten them into such a mess. “Surveyor General Lawson, being a man of understanding though not of good life, I allowed to do his own devotions,” he said.

  The Tuscarora weighed more than just the sentences for the two whites and their slaves; it’s likely they were deciding whether the time had come to send a much more direct and pointed message to the English. They freed Graffenried and the slave, but Lawson was executed—just how, the baron did not know. “The threat had been made that he was to have his throat cut with a razor that was found in his sack,” Graffenried said, but later reports contended that Lawson was hanged, or—a morbid irony if true—slowly burned to death with pitch-pine slivers, exactly the way he had described in his book.

  That was just the beginning. More than five hundred fighters drawn from Hancock’s Tuscarora and a coalition of smaller tidewater tribes—the Neusiok, Coree, Mattamuskeet, Pamlico, and Machapungo, among others—swept the Neuse, Trent, and Roanoke River settlements on September 22, 1711, killing between 120 and 140 English, Swiss, and Palatine settlers and taking dozens captive. The Carolinians were shocked and badly unprepared. For most of the year, their attention had been fixed on an armed struggle between Hyde and his opponents, a dustup known as Cary’s Rebellion, which had been put down in July by British marines. Powder was short, there were no fortified refuges to which they could retreat, and by winter the residents of New Bern (which had been spared the initial attack because of Graffenried’s efforts) had burned their homes and fled rather than remain on the frontlines. Food, already in short supply because of a drought and the chaos of the rebellion, was so scarce that famine was a ready danger, and illness struck down so many that Governor Hyde “cannot find a member to advise with . . . nor Assembly that will meet to do business.” An attempted counterattack that winter resulted in a rout of the colonial militia and still more deaths.

  Not all the Tuscarora took up the hatchet, however. The northern Tuscarora towns between the Roanoke River and Albemarle Sound, generally united behind a teethha known as Tom Blount, stayed out of the fight. Blount had much closer relations with the colonists and had been instrumental in convincing the council to spare Graffenried. Now he sent emissaries to Virginia, testifying to Tuscarora friendship and even offering to help against their own people. Graffenried backed them up, and Virginia’s Indian traders spoke of their sincerity as well. Regardless—and to Governor Spotswood’s enormous frustration—the House of Burgesses voted to raise £20,000 “for carrying on a war against the Tuscaruro Nation in general, upon a bare Surmise that the whole Nation was concerned in the Massacre, tho’ it plainly appeared otherwise.” Only when it became clear that they didn’t have the money did the burgesses relent.

  Virginia and the northern Tuscarora stayed out of the fight, but South Carolina finally came to the aid of its beleaguered neighbor. Some historians have argued that Hancock and the southern Tuscarora, having made their point with the September attacks, expected a negotiated settlement. If so, they were badly mistaken. South Carolina dispatched Colonel John Barnwell, a forty-year-old Irishman who’d come to the colony only a decade earlier, “out of a humor to goe to travel,” and parlayed his success in raiding the Spanish missions into ever greater roles in the government.

  Backing his force of thirty colonials were almost five hundred Natives from a variety of tribes. Most eventually slipped off as soon as they’d taken some slaves, but not “my brave Yamassees,” as he called the Indians that formed the heart of his auxiliaries and whose towns lay close to his plantation on Port Royal Island. Marching through winter floods, on roads so swampy they had to repeatedly rig ropes to haul out deeply mired horses, Barnwell’s men arrived in Tuscarora territory in late January, to find that their enemies had not been idle.

  Barnwell confronted a string of “small forts at about a miles distance from one another . . . I have seen 9 of these Forts and none of them a month old.” Egged on by the Yamasees, Barnwell’s men attacked the first one they encountered. Breaking in despite heavy fire, they were stunned to find that “within the Fort were two Houses stronger than the fort which did puzzle us and do the most damage.” The defenders, including desperate Tuscarora women who took up bows, “did not yield untill most of them were put to the sword.” Busy with executing the men, Barnwell complained that the Yamasees “got all the slaves & plunder, only one girl we gott.” A few days later, having swept through a large Coree village, they cooked and ate one of their Indian victims “to stimulate themselves still more.”

  Barnwell was the first to face the Tuscarora genius for improvised defense. If the small forts were a surprise, he got a genuine shock when he reached Hancock’s town of Catechna. The village was deserted; the men had withdrawn into a newly built fortification nearby, while the women and children were hiding in the swamps. This wasn’t the simple ring palisade of the Pequot’s Mystic Fort, and it was considerably more sophisticated than even the Narragansett’s Great Swamp fort, with its blockhouse and moat. At Catechna, the Tuscarora had built one of the most ambitious defensive works any Indian nation raised in the entire colonial era, and they’d done it in very little time.

  Perched along the banks of the Neuse, the fort was “strong as well by situation . . . as Workmanship,” Barnwell admitted. There were several layers to the defense. A jungle of large tree limbs surrounded the fort at some distance to slow assaulters. Inside this, the ground was spiked with “large reeds & canes to run into people’s legs.” A deep trench lay immediately outside the heavy palisade walls, which were peppered with two tiers of loopholes through which defenders could fire, and which they could then plug up for safety. Four round flankers built into the walls gave unobstructed lines of fire.

  Barnwell’s initial attacks—in which his Carolinian and Indian troops rushed the ditch in the pouring rain, hoping to bridge it with bundles of sticks known as fascines—withered under Tuscarora arrows and musket shot. So Barnwell settled into a siege, the fort’s one evident weakness being its lack of a ready water supply. After several days, the Tuscarora responded by torturing their English and German captives. After they killed an eight-year-old girl within earshot of South Carolina forces, Barnwell finally offered a truce.

  Although the Tuscarora didn’t know it, his men were low on food and almost out of ammunition. Barnwell agreed to withdraw, and the Tuscarora promised to relinquish their hostages. Marching twenty miles downriver, he waited for resupply from the North Carolina government he was su
pposed to be rescuing and for the Tuscarora to fulfill their end of the bargain. He was disappointed on both counts. After two impatient weeks, Barnwell marched his men back to Catechna and found that the Tuscarora had used the time to greatly expand the fort, encompassing the land from which he’d launched his first assault.

  Even worse, his meager North Carolina reinforcements showed up with no supplies, “without a dram, a bit of meese bisket or any kind of meat but hungry stomachs to devour my parcht corn flower,” Barnwell fumed. When the newcomers had the temerity to grouse about the food, Barnwell flew into such a rage “that I ordered one of their majors to be tyed neck and heels & kept him so, and whenever I heard a saucy word from any of them I immediately cutt him, for without this they are the most impertinent, imperious, cowardly Blockheads that ever God created & must be used like negros if you expect any good of them.”

  But Barnwell did manage to acquire some light artillery, and although they had little powder, the English “contrived several sorts of Ingenious Fireworks, & a mortar to throw them.” Day after day, the Carolinians and Yamasees dug trenches, lobbed mortars, and tried a number of times to burn down the walls of the fort, without success. Digging nearer to the palisade, they were stunned to find that the Tuscarora had been tunneling, too, intercepting their lines. “This siege for variety of action, salleys, attempts to be relieved from without, can’t I believe be parallelled against Indians,” Barnwell told his superiors.

  For ten days, just forty-six Tuscarora men and a few “hardy boys that could draw bow” held almost three hundred Yamasee warriors and Carolina militiamen at bay. Short on rations and powder, Barnwell called another truce and got terms from the Indians—a return of captives, the delivery of highborn Tuscarora hostages, and an agreement to turn over Hancock and three other war leaders (who, the Tuscarora said, were in Virginia). The Tuscarora also agreed to “quit all pretentions to planting, Fishing, hunting or ranging to all Lands lying between Neuse River and Cape Fear.” Finally, and perhaps to Barnwell most important, they agreed to tear down the bastions at Catechna and “never to build more Forts.”

  Barnwell raised the English ensign over Catechna, declared victory, and went home, where he was nicknamed “Tuscarora Jack.” To a lot of people, though, it looked like an inglorious English retreat. Worse, Barnwell’s Yamasees, under a flag of truce, seized hundreds of Tuscaroras to sell as slaves, thus reigniting the war. The fighting went badly for the colony. By the autumn of 1712, North Carolina—rudderless after the death of Governor Hyde in a yellow fever outbreak—was again calling for help.

  South Carolina sent another army north, commanded this time by James Moore Jr., son of the former governor, with thirty-three Carolinians and nine hundred Indians—Yamasees, Apalachees, Catawbas, and Cherokees from the western mountains. Moore’s forces labored through unusually deep snows, then became trapped for months by more bad weather in Albemarle, where, once again, the North Carolinians offered thin hospitality. “I want words to express the miserable state of this poore Countrey,” said Thomas Pollock, the council president who was running the colony. He blamed the lack of preparation and supplies on “the ignorance and obstinacy of our Assembly.” Moore’s troops and Indians ate whatever they could beg, borrow, or steal from the surrounding countryside. “The destructions his indians make here of our Catle & Corne is intollerable,” Pollock said, “so that some of the people here have been semingly more ready to ryse upe against them than march out against the enemy.”

  The Tuscarora and their allies had plenty of warning. They focused their collective attention on a new stronghold upriver of Catechna, at the town of Neoheroka, located along Contentnea Creek close to present-day Snow Hill, North Carolina. When Moore and his army finally arrived, around the beginning of March, they found themselves arrayed against a fort even more elaborate than the one that had stymied Barnwell. The Tuscarora had learned from their mistakes; they had trenched and covered a route to the creek for water and had dug bunkers for shelter during mortar attacks. They were confident enough this time that instead of sending their women and children to hide in a swamp, they kept them inside with the men.

  Like Barnwell, Moore settled in for classic siege warfare, digging a huge, zigzag trench to get safely within range, then erecting blockhouses of his own and drawing up artillery. Move and countermove; as Moore’s men dug their way closer, the Tuscarora extended their own trenches to block them. Only after weeks of preparation did the English finally launch what turned into a three-day assault. Sappers undermined the Tuscarora walls and set off explosive charges, but the bad powder did little damage. Instead, the attackers managed to bludgeon their way through the defenses at several points, burning parts of the wall and bastions, then fighting vicious, almost urban warfare from trench to trench and house to house. The Tuscarora kept falling back to new, improvised defensive positions, making the colonials and their Indian allies pay dearly for each foot they advanced.

  But in the end, the Tuscarora had put too much faith in their walls. Surrounded, and with their entire population trapped within the fort, they suffered a crushing defeat. Moore wrote to Pollock with the news: “Of ye Enemies Destroyed is as follows—Prisoners 392, Scolps 192, out of ye said fort—& att Least 200 Kill’d & Burnt In ye fort—& 166 Kill’d & taken out of ye fort on ye Scout.” Almost a thousand Tuscaroras had been killed or captured, the seven hundred or so survivors bound for slavery. (One of the captives proved to be a furious emissary from the Seneca, who, having been ransomed from his Indian captor for a princely sum, was ferried back to New York on an English ship, with fulsome apologies from the nervous Carolinians.)

  The war sputtered on for another two years, but never again did the southern Tuscarora and their allies fight behind walls. They depended instead on classic hit-and-run raids and the safety of deep swamps, trying to evade the English and Tom Blount’s northern Tuscarora.

  For the southern Tuscarora, the only way to peace seemed to be exile. Since their plea to settle in Pennsylvania had been denied, they turned now to their distant Iroquoian cousins in the Five Nations, who had been acting as advocates on their behalf for some time. Village by village, family by family, hundreds of Tuscaroras shouldered their belongings and trudged north on the paths running along the eastern flank of the Appalachians, resettling in New York and along the Susquehanna Valley in Pennsylvania. There, by the early 1720s, they were formally adopted into the Iroquois confederacy, which would thereafter call itself the Six Nations.

  With the Tuscarora threat fading after Moore’s victory, South Carolina settled back to the business of slaves and deerskins. Although the Yamasees who had accompanied both Tuscarora expeditions enjoyed a windfall from their captives, they and the other so-called settlement Indians were having a harder and harder time making ends meet. Overhunting and the spread of English plantations throughout the coastal plain made deer harder to come by, at a time when Yamasee demand for trade goods was skyrocketing. Traders were happy to extend obscene amounts of credit. By 1711, the four hundred men in the Yamasee villages alone owed a collective debt—much of it for rum—equal to 100,000 deerskins, almost a year’s worth of exports from South Carolina as a whole.

  Given the value of slaves—a single Indian man was worth more than a season’s worth of deerskins—additional raids would have made sense, but as with deer, the supply of captives was drying up. Yamasee raids into Florida in the previous decade had driven away most of the Spanish Indians, including the Apalachee and Timucua, leaving the Yamasee without a ready source for new slaves. There was “not now so much as one Village with ten Houses in it, in all Florida, that is subject to the Spanish,” said Indian agent Thomas Nairne. English traders were receiving slaves from French-held areas to the west, but they came from the Upper Creek and other inland groups, not from the Yamasee, Savannah, Apalachee, Lower Creek, and other settlement Indians, who found themselves in an economic vise.

  The traders, always abusive, were becoming increasingly rapacious. Extended
families and villages were being held responsible for repaying individual debts, and failing that, the traders might simply enslave the debtor or his relations. This wasn’t strictly legal, and such antics were often overturned by the colony’s Commissioners of the Indian Trade, who heard a litany of complaints from the Yamasee and other tribes. Some of the behavior was puerile, such as traders who sent “sum of their Indians 2 or 300 miles with a leter to each other that hath litle in it only to call one another names and full of debauchery.” John Wright, whom Nairne had replaced as Indian agent, “when out among the Indians have a great numbers only to wait on and carry his lugage and packs of skins,” charged a Virginia trader, “purely out of ostentation[,] saying in my hearing hee would make them honour him as their Governour.”

  Other traders were considerably more sinister, such as Alexander Long, a trader among the Cherokee, and his friend Eleazar Wiggan, whom the Indians called “the Old Rabbit,” after a character in Cherokee folktales. Hard-bitten even by frontier standards—Long once detonated a batch of gunpowder, blowing up an Indian at whom he was angry—they goaded the Cherokee into attacking the Yuchi town of Chestowee, near the mouth of the Hiwassee River. That the Yuchi were friendly trading partners with the English made no difference; they were a small community, and some of them were in debt to Long. The Yuchi were about to learn a cardinal rule of dealing with the Carolinians: never become more valuable as a slave than as a customer.

  Long had been lobbying for an attack on Chestowee for years—a Yuchi had thrashed him in a fight, and he wasn’t one to forget a grudge—and so he concocted a spurious “order” from the South Carolina government demanding that the Cherokee “cut off the said Town.” (In fact, another trader was on his way with instructions expressly forbidding such an assault, but he arrived too late.) The Yuchi, confronted with the prospect of bondage, gathered everyone in the town’s central ceremonial house. The men killed their children and wives “to prevent their falling into the Hands of the Cherikees,” then committed suicide. To the traders’ disgust, only six Yuchis survived to be captured.