There was some outrage, and Long fled to the Cherokee. He and Wiggan had their trading licenses lifted for a time, but even the governor of South Carolina reportedly “seemed pleased with the Euchees being cut off and [said] that he knew no Reason why the Prisoners shoold not be Slaves.”
Burdened by debts they couldn’t pay, and with examples such as the Yuchi suggesting what might happen to them, the Yamasee and other tribes in the English sphere were deeply worried about the future. A census of Indian allies conducted by the English in early 1715, which found more than 28,000 Indians in 141 towns, looked to many of the freshly tallied subjects suspiciously like a run-up to mass enslavement. Talk of preemptive war was already flying among the villages, and there probably were some firmer plans for a coordinated attack being devised among the Creek. Then, into the middle of this already fraught situation fell a nasty, intensely bitter power struggle between Carolina’s two Indian agents, Thomas Nairne and John Wright, which set the whole thing alight.
Since Nairne had replaced Wright in the post in 1712, on allegations that Wright had abused his authority, the two had been at each other’s throats in a decidedly public way that split the colony. Traders and politicians formed factions backing one or the other; so did many of the Indian leaders with whom they dealt. As the two men dragged each other through the courts and before the Commons House, oversight of the traders evaporated, and the atmosphere became so toxic that the entire system of regulating Indian trade was on the verge of collapse. On top of that, a stalemate between the governor and the chief justice all but paralyzed the South Carolina government in the first days of April 1715, just as warnings of imminent attack by the Creek and other tribes, brought by breathless traders, reached Charles Town.
Spurred to action, Governor Charles Craven made a fatal mistake. Given the heated factionalism, and in the interest of seeking balance, he dispatched both Nairne and Wright to meet with the Yamasee in Pocotaligo, their principal town, about twenty miles north of Port Royal Sound. Nairne, speaking for the government, assured the Yamasee of English goodwill and their intention to resolve the Yamasee complaints against the traders. They all shook hands, and Nairne retired for the night.
Wright, however, apparently stayed up and conveyed a very different message to the Yamasee—“that the white men would come and fetch . . . the Yamasees in one night and that they would hang four of the head men and take all the rest of them for slaves.” Wright told the Yamasee they were acting like women, which “vex’d the great warrier’s.”
The situation must have been baffling to the Yamasee. Two men with whom they’d worked for years and who, in the past, had both spoken for the Carolina government, now painted starkly different pictures of colonial intentions. Governor Craven, who could have settled the matter, was trying to arrange a parley to reinforce Nairne’s message of reconciliation, but the Yamasee had no way of knowing this. They debated through the night, made up their minds, and painted themselves for war.
The next morning—April 15, Good Friday—the Yamasee and other settlement Indians killed all the traders they could find. One of the few survivors, shot through the neck and mouth, managed to swim across the channel to John Barnwell’s plantation and raise the alarm. Nairne suffered torture by fire for three days before he died. Wright also was killed, although no one is sure how.
Although the war started with the Yamasee and their neighbors along the Savannah River, it seems plain the Lower Creek were ready to lift the hatchet themselves, and once begun, the fighting spread rapidly throughout the Southeast. Ninety of the nearly one hundred English traders working in the region were killed in the weeks that followed, and plantations were sacked and burned as Carolinians fled for Charles Town. Three hundred of them, unsure of their security even there, crammed into a smuggler’s ship docked in the harbor.
Through the spring of 1715, the war rippled out to more distant tribes and confederacies, including the Catawba, Congaree, and other small groups along the Virginia border; the Cherokee in the mountains; the Upper Creek in what is now Alabama; and the Choctaw, whose land extended all the way to the Mississippi River. Each town, each council of leaders, had its own reasons for joining the fight. Although the Yamasee War took its name from the Natives who struck the first blow, it grew into the single largest American Indian uprising against any colonial power. Yet it was neither centrally planned nor centrally led. Even more than King Philip’s War forty years earlier, it was the combined expression of many grievances and opportunities that differed dramatically from one tribe or confederacy to another, as each wrestled with their own circumstances, eyed their alliances, weighed their risks, and made their own calculus between war and peace.
For those Indians in closest contact with the Carolinians, debt, the loss of hunting land, trader abuses, and fear of slavery were likely the important sparks. The Yamasee were repaying “Oppressions, Grievances & Provocacons Offer’d to those Indians,” said Dr. Francis Le Jau, an Anglican minister in Goose Creek. “In my humble Judgmt the Chief Cause of [what] we suffer are our Crying Sins.” But for many of the Indians on the colonial periphery—those insulated from the Carolinians by distance and with access to goods from the French, the Spanish, and Virginia—the war may simply have been an opportunity in which fairly modest risks were outweighed by the potential for plunder and slaves. It was an opportunity, too, for Carolina’s opponents; not only did the French and Spanish spur on their Indian allies, but some Carolinians accused Virginia’s traders of doing the same.
The Carolina frontier essentially emptied, with the English huddled at Charles Town and a few other places where they had some measure of protection. Leaders throughout the English colonies watched the unfolding events there with unease; no one knew how far the repercussions might travel or which of their own Indian allies or enemies might be pulled into the conflict. As far north as New York, colonial envoys were urgently meeting with the Five Nations to ensure that they remained out of the fight. The Iroquois had long raided the Catawba and Cherokee, and their involvement could exacerbate an already complex situation.
South Carolina mustered its militia, hastily built a series of blockhouses and stockades in which to base their troops, and suffered several humiliating defeats, as well as one or two victories in rare pitched battles. They received some outside help; North Carolina sent a small contingent that included northern Tuscaroras, while Virginia and Massachusetts sent guns and powder. (Virginia also offered to send three hundred soldiers—but only if South Carolina sent an equal number of African slave women to replace them.) Facing stronger colonial defenses, the Indians fell back on their traditional lightning raids, but slowly the tide began to turn, especially after a Carolinian expedition south into Guale Province chased many of the Yamasee back to the protection of St. Augustine.
The Catawba swapped sides several times, first proclaiming their willingness to support the English, then joining in the attacks, and finally—after a walloping ambush by Carolina militia and armed black slaves—offering to fight on the colony’s side. The Chickasaw, too, seem to have had second thoughts; they publicly blamed the April murders of Carolina traders in their villages on rogue Choctaws, although it seems more likely they simply changed their minds after striking those initial blows.
Similarly, the Cherokee were divided about the war. Some of the Lower Cherokee towns, those closest to Carolina, had participated in the early raids, while others, especially the Overhill communities across the mountains, argued for peace with the English. Sensing an opening, “the Old Rabbit,” Eleazar Wiggan, offered—for the right price—to carry South Carolina’s peace overtures to the Cherokee, with whom he successfully brokered a tentative deal.
Such frontier diplomacy was a minefield of overlapping and conflicting interests, as evidenced by the incident at Tugaloo, as the English called the Lower Cherokee town of Dugilu´yı̆. Hoping to ratify Wiggan’s deal with the Cherokee, the Carolinians had sent three hundred men under James Moore Jr. to meet with t
he chiefs. While there, they learned that a contingent of Upper Creeks, invited by the Cherokee, were on their way to discuss peace. But at Tugaloo, the English found eleven dead Creek headmen and a twelfth about to be put to death by the Cherokee. The Cherokee story was that a huge war party of Creeks and Yamasees was nearby, waiting to ambush the English, but no sign of such a force was ever seen.
No one has ever been able to determine the truth of what happened—whether the Creek were really interested in peace and were lured into a trap, or whether they were lobbying the Cherokee for an alliance against the whites. The murders may well have been the result of pro-English factions among the divided Cherokee trying to force their opponents’ hands. The Cherokee may even, as they claimed, have foiled what would have been a devastating ambush against Moore’s troops. Whatever the underlying cause, the killings at Tugaloo precipitated war between the Creek and Cherokee that lasted for almost forty years, and they forced the Cherokee to ally themselves more closely with the Carolinians.
With no decisive victories, the Yamasee War lurched to a messy, drawn-out conclusion. As there was no unified Indian leadership, there could be no single treaty of peace, although most hostilities were over by 1717. The Cherokee alliance caused many colonists to breathe a sigh of relief, as did subsequent pacts with some of the Creek—whom the Carolinians immediately began to rearm, knowing they would use the guns against the province’s ostensible allies, the Cherokee. “How to hold both as our friends . . . and assist them in cutting one another’s throats without offending either” was how one colonist described “the game we intend to play if possible.”
Almost forgotten today, the Yamasee War nearly accomplished what no other Native war of resistance did—elimination of a colonial threat. Even in the regional conflagration that was King Philip’s War, there was never any real danger that New England as a European entity would be extinguished. During the early months of the Yamasee War, however, South Carolina’s Indian enemies pushed the settlers to the very edge of the continent, and it’s easy to imagine that with a few more lucky strokes, they might have smothered the colony entirely.
Although it survived, the war left South Carolina dramatically changed. The burned plantations and ruined farms could be rebuilt, but the Indians who had once served as a buffer on the colony’s southern border, and whose trade fueled its economy, had largely left. Carolinians saw their frontier greatly contracted and their flanks vulnerable to incursions from the French and Spanish, along with their Indian allies. Palatines and other Protestant immigrants, who were beginning to flood into other parts of English America, shied away from the Carolinas, sailing instead for places such as Pennsylvania, which had for decades maintained relative peace with its Native neighbors.
South Carolinians tried to pick up the pieces. John Barnwell reached out to the Yamasee, who had once been his neighbors and comrades-in-arms and who continued to raid the colony. In 1719, he made a dangerous, clandestine visit to Spanish Florida, hoping to arrange a meeting with the Huspaw King, the Yamasee chief who many believe launched the war, but with whom Barnwell had once been friends. His message was carried by three Indians, one of whom was the king’s relative.
The Huspaw King arrived at St. Augustine borne in a sedan chair and preceded by drums and trumpets, but “in such a temper, that they durst not deliver their errand.” In fact, the Spanish had placed the king at the head of five hundred Indians, who were at that moment moving by land and canoe to attack settlers on the Edisto River. Barnwell scratched out an urgent warning. “Our Southward will be exposed to dreadfull depradations,” he wrote to the governor, sending the note ahead by fast boat but knowing he was already too late. “I fear much because I perceive ye smoaks of ye land parties to be a head of me this day.”
Barnwell’s attempts to broker a rapprochement with the Yamasee were just one string in his fiddle. He saw that South Carolina’s safety depended on a populated, defended frontier, which he tried to fill by promoting colonization of “the Golden Islands” south of the Savannah River. (This was part of a larger scheme, dubbed the Margravate of Azilia, to settle indebted English immigrants between the Savannah and Altamaha rivers.) Tuscarora Jack beat the drum as the colony’s agent in England, where a royal governor was about to take control of Carolina from the lords proprietors following a colonial revolt, and his observation that the French, who had designs on the Altamaha, used frontier forts to great advantage struck home.
In 1721, Barnwell led an expedition to the Altamaha to build Fort King George—a check on French and Spanish interests and the first step toward founding Georgia twelve years later. Georgia was exactly the kind of barrier colony that Tuscarora Jack had long argued for, but he did not live to see it, having died in 1724, at the age of fifty-three.
The Carolina of 1724 was a very different place from the one Barnwell had first known. Immediately after the Yamasee War, the Native slave trade all but collapsed, and traffic in deerskins, furs, and corn shrank to a ghost of its earlier self. Huddled in the Low Country amid the smoldering ruins of their vast farms, Carolinians turned away from the interior, channeling their money and energy into raising indigo and especially rice.
Indian slaves, who accounted for one-quarter of all the captive labor in the colony before the war, dwindled in number, while imports of African slaves—many of them familiar with rice production in their home countries—soared. The number of black slaves entering South Carolina increased almost tenfold immediately following the Yamasee War and continued to rise steadily through the decade that followed. A war caused in large measure by the trafficking in one group of human beings had, in an unexpected way, caused the proliferation of the trade in a different group—and in a very real sense hastened the birth of the Old South economy of slave-supported plantations that would endure until the Civil War. What we speak of as the “antebellum” South—that is, the South, literally, “before the war”—was nothing of the sort. It was a “between-war” South, lasting a century and a half.
Although many Indians took part in the war, it’s perhaps fitting that the Yamasee gave it their name. From their creation out of the splinters of fractured chiefdoms, through their seesawing fortunes between Spanish and English spheres, to the moment when they decided to fight instead of risk enslavement, they are emblematic of the bewildering changes that beset the Natives of the Southeast. But unlike such great Indian confederacies as the Creek, which arose from the chaos of the late sixteenth century with enough unity to withstand the buffeting, or the Tuscarora and Shawnee, who left the Southeast for what they hoped would be better homes in exile, the Yamasee did not find a way through the thickets. Pinned between the failing Spanish and the resurgent English and their Indian allies, open once again to attacks and assaults, the Yamasee were whittled down by death and captivity. When the Spanish finally withdrew from Florida in the 1760s, it appears that the last handful of Indians still claiming the Yamasee name went with them—sailing on Spanish ships for Cuba and Mexico, and out of history.
PART III
“WE THAT CAME OUT OF THIS GROUND”
Chapter 8
“One Head One Mouth, and One Heart”
When the winter ice and snow melted, the runoff from thousands of square miles of forest wilderness in the Allegheny Mountains flowed down countless steep-walled valleys, feeding the monster known, to the handful of English traders who had seen it, as the Ohio River. At one particular bend, the river piled up the scarred, waterlogged trunks of immense trees, barkless and silvered with age and abrasion. The village that sat on a high bluff above that bend was, appropriately, called Logstown.
Now it was early autumn, and the Ohio was running smooth and placid, the kind of forgiving river on which travelers could paddle to the center current at dusk, lash their canoes together, and sleep through the night without fear of rocks or rapids. The air in Logstown was cool; humid with weeks of rain; and heavy with smoke and the odors of simmering corn mush and bear fat, damp old blankets and deerskin
s, and wet camp dogs. Logstown wasn’t much to look at—a collection of sixty or seventy log or bark cabins clustered near a more substantial trading house—but it was a wonder to listen to. The chatter that filled the air was a babel of tongues reflecting the town’s accidental nature—a place where the exiles of many Indian nations (from the Carolinas to the Great Lakes, Delaware Bay to the mountains of New England and the edges of the buffalo prairies) had created a community of necessity.
It was September 1748, and Conrad Weiser was feeling weak. Strong stomach cramps had kept him confined to his bed for some time, and he’d allowed himself to be bled in the hope it would purge his bad humors. He finally felt well enough to proceed with the task that had brought him from his quiet farm, a day’s ride from Philadelphia, hundreds of miles across the hazy mountains to the far edge of what was known simply as the “back parts.”
The lives and histories of Weiser and the three men with whom he sat, in the rough trading house at Logstown, around a smoldering fire, knotted up many of the threads of frontier reality in the mid-eighteenth century. Perhaps no one in the so-called Middle Colonies was as adept at navigating the overlapping worlds of Natives and colonists as Conrad Weiser, a man in his early fifties who spoke English and the Iroquois dialects with a German accent, having been adopted by the Mohawk as a teenager and applying himself thereafter to the study of Indian cultures. He was Pennsylvania’s provincial interpreter—its primary diplomat to the Six Nations, who had given him the name Tarachiawagon, meaning “Holder of the Heavens.” More recently, he had been known as Brother Enoch, having for some years dropped out of secular life to become a monk in the strange, pietist sect of a charismatic preacher, but Indian politics had pulled him out of the cloister and back into the woods.
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