University of Florida Thesis Or Dissertation Formatting

INDIANS, AFRICANS, AND BRITISH EXPANSION IN THE SOUTHEASTERN BORDERLANDS: 1670-1763

TIMOTHY DAVID FRITZ

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2014

To my parents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Over the course of the past decade numerous institutions and individuals have contributed the resources necessary for me to conduct the research contained in this dissertation. At the University of Florida, I have benefitted from the generous financial support of the History Graduate Society and the Graduate School. Specifically, I benefitted immeasurably from the Office of Minority and Graduate Programs’ Delores

Auzenne Dissertation Award and the Graduate School’s Dissertation Research Award.

A great number of librarians and archivists have also provided research support, helpful suggestions, and their expertise on the colonial southeast. I would first like to thank

Bernard Powers, Sherman Pyatt, and Marvin Dulaney, who first stimulated by interest in lowcountry culture as a graduate student at the Avery Research Center for African

American History and Culture at the College of Charleston.

Numerous scholars at various levels in my academic career have provided timely input that provided my research with direction and purpose. Chris Boucher, my thesis director at the College of Charleston, and Scott Poole, who served as the program director at the time of my graduation, helped me to apply my research interests to the source bases available and provided valuable feedback as members of my M.A. thesis committee. I would like to thank Ida Altman, Jessica Harland-Jacobs, James Davidson, and Jim Cusick for serving on my dissertation committee at the University of Florida and offering their own varying perspectives on my topic. Furthermore, this dissertation would not be complete without hours of thought provoking conversation with Jim Cusick, for whom I worked for two years as a research assistant in Florida history in Special

Collections at the University of Florida. The chairs of my dissertation committee, Jon

Sensbach and Juliana Barr, have shown patience with several of my more outlandish

ideas and offered advice on the profession that has already paid dividends. I wish to thank Kathleen Duval, Jane Landers, and Brett Rushforth for their comments on part of this dissertation presented at the Southern Historical Association annual meeting in

Mobile.

Lastly, I owe a debt of gratitude to my friends and colleagues throughout this process. From the College of Charleston, my friends Otis Pickett, Miles Smith, and

Charles Wexler were, and continue to be, a source of both encouragement and accountability. At the University of Florida I benefitted from several groups of people during the writing process. First, the leadership of the Gainesville School made this project stronger. Second, Anna Lankina, Reid Weber, Andrew Welton, Rebecca Devlin,

Brenden Kennedy, Rob Taber, Chris Woolley, Michael Gennaro, and other members of the History Department Dissertation Workshop spent numerous hours reading, correcting, and discussing all but one chapter of this dissertation. My gratitude for their feedback cannot be expressed within the limitations of this section of the document.

Members of my writing group, however, are the reason this project was completed in a timely manner. Erin Zavitz, Andrea Ferreira, Rachel Rothstein, Chris Ruehlen, and Rob

Taber spent several hours a week for ten months motivating each other to finish. I would like to thank Rob specifically, who wrote with me an average of sixteen hours a week and whose feedback has been the most influential to this dissertation.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... 9

ABSTRACT ...... 10

CHAPTER

1 DIVERSITY AND DELUSION, AN INTRODUCTION ...... 11

A Land of Milk and Honey ...... 11 A Great Many Sins ...... 12 Toward Understanding the Diversity of the Early South: Purpose and Goals ...... 16 Note on Sources ...... 20 Beyond Frontiers: Historical Models of the Diverse Early South ...... 21

2 THE TRI-RACIAL ORIGINS OF THE EARLY SOUTH ...... 24

Foundations of Contact ...... 24 Famine and Shipwrecks: Calamities and Contact in North America ...... 25 “Overly Skilled and Very Understanding:” The Impact of Atlantic Maroon Societies on English Colonization ...... 26 Atlantic Precedents: Joint Resistance in Brazil ...... 29 The Corporation of Adventurers: The Barbadian Diaspora and the Atlantic Slavery Experience ...... 31 Native Depopulation in La Florida: Westos and the Evolution of the Indian Slave Trade Epidemic ...... 43 Race and Population in the Southeastern Borderlands ...... 47

3 THE SOUTHEASTERN BORDERLANDS: CONCEPTIONS AND COMPETITION ...... 49

The Southeastern Borderlands ...... 49 Borderland Conceptions ...... 49 Providence in the Promised Land: Invasion and Migration ...... 52 Differing Goals ...... 54 Indigenous Perspectives ...... 55 Oceans Apart: Distance and Distortion of English Borderland Goals ...... 57 Carolinian Colonists ...... 61 View from London ...... 68 The Lords Proprietors ...... 71 The Borderlands Slave Trade ...... 73 Borderland Cultural Connections ...... 77 Borderland Migrations ...... 78

Indians, Africans, and Borderland Opportunities ...... 81

4 THE BORDERLANDS GOSPEL ...... 90

Baptized into Captivity ...... 90 Borderland Religion ...... 93 To Abjure Popish Heresies: Francis LeJau and Imperial Religion in the Southeastern Borderlands ...... 106 Whether or Not We Are to Answer for Grievous Sins ...... 108 African and Native Responses to the SPG in South Carolina ...... 117 Conclusions ...... 123

5 COERCED COMBAT...... 130

Necessary Risks ...... 130 Coerced Combat in Spanish America ...... 131 Foundations of English–Native Military Alliance ...... 135 English Use of African Soldiers: Justification and Results ...... 138 In Times of Alarm and Invasion: The Multiethnic Militia ...... 140 The Yamasee War ...... 142 Yamasee War Aftermath, African Slaves, and Borderland Relations ...... 144 The Military Aspects of the Black Majority in South Carolina ...... 147 A Buffer for the Garrison ...... 149 The War of Jenkins’ Ear and the Development of Anglo Identity ...... 152 Unified through Domination: Coerced Combat and the Formation of a Southern Colonial Identity ...... 155

6 INDIANS, AFRICANS, AND EXPANSION IN GEORGIA ...... 160

A Regular Colony of the Poor People ...... 160 New Strategies in the Borderlands ...... 162 Borders and Brothers ...... 164 Rendering the Colony of Georgia More Defensible ...... 166 Imperial Expansion: Población, Rumors, and Slavery ...... 169 Población ...... 170 Rumors ...... 173 Slavery: “No Man Maintains Himself by His Own labor” ...... 176 “Ringleader for Negroes”: Patrick Tailfer and the Malcontents ...... 179 Practical Defense: Colonial Support for the Trustees ...... 182 Echoes of the Stono Rebellion ...... 184 Slavery and the War of Jenkins’ Ear ...... 185 Stalemate and Slavery ...... 186 Slavery in Georgia ...... 188 Conclusion ...... 191

6 SEMINOLE LEGACY, A CONCLUSION ...... 193

Indian–African Relations in Georgia ...... 193 British Expansion and the Seminoles ...... 195 Summary ...... 197 Conclusion ...... 202

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 204

Manuscript Collections ...... 204 Published Primary Sources ...... 205 Secondary Sources ...... 208

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 223

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AGI Archive of the Indies

CL Clements Library, University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan

EP Egmont Papers, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens, Georgia

GDAH Georgia Department of Archives and History

GHS Georgia Historical Society

JCHA South Carolina Journal of the Commons House of Assembly

HML Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library

LCACSC Letters from the Clergy of the Anglican Church in South Carolina

PKYL P.K. Yonge Library, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida

SC Stetson Collection, microfilm held at the P.K. Yonge Library, Gainesville, Florida

SCDAH South Carolina Department of Archives and History

SCHS South Carolina Historical Society

SPG Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts

UGA University of Georgia

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

INDIANS, AFRICANS, AND BRITISH EXPANSION IN THE SOUTHEASTERN BORDERLANDS: 1670-1763

Timothy David Fritz

December 2014

Chair: Jon Sensbach Cochair: Juliana Barr Major: History

The coastal plain of the North American southeast that now forms the lowcountry regions of present day states of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida has long been the scene for the clashing ideologies of indigenous, African, and European people. The establishment of the British colony of South Carolina marked an acceleration of

European competition over a contested Native landscape. This dissertation argues that this European competition relied on Native American and African labor, and English and

Spanish colonists deployed competing strategies to manipulate the valuable relationship between them. Specifically, it examines the role indigenous allies and enslaved Africans played in the expansion of colonial South Carolina, wars with Spanish Florida, and the foundation of the Georgia colony. In recognizing the threat of Catholic Spanish

Floridians, white inhabitants of the South Carolina and Georgia colony developed an identity opposed to Catholic influence among their enslaved native and African laborers.

CHAPTER 1 DIVERSITY AND DELUSION, AN INTRODUCTION

A Land of Milk and Honey

The natural beauty of costal South Carolina has consistently attracted visitors from all over the world since the sixteenth century. Early descriptions of the landscape read much like extremely favorable, albeit exaggerated, tourism brochures, painting beautiful mental images of grand stands of oaks, pine, and cedar next to beaches overgrown with grapes and other fruit. South Carolina historian B.R. Carroll continued this laudatory trend into the 1830s by describing French explorer Jean Ribault and his crew, among the first European observers to the region, as “enraptured at beholding the sky rivalling in its richness the sunset of Italy, they were not less pleased at the purity and softness of the atmosphere, and at the crystal transparency of the sea.”1 American

Indians reportedly flocked to European ships, eager to trade a rich bounty of skins harvested from the thriving wildlife of the interior. Travel narratives detailing the natural resources waiting to be exploited in these lands sparked the economic imaginations of enterprising Europeans. The radiant imagery implies a promised land, and based on the region’s parallel latitude with the biblical land of Canaan, former governor of the colony

John Archdale indeed described it as such in 1707.2 More than a century after Ribault’s expedition and the failed French settlement on the Carolina coast, however, English colonists shipped much more than simple fruits from this land. They helped to create

1 B.R. Carroll, Historical Collections of South Carolina Vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1836), xxxv.

2 John Archdale, “A New Description of that Fertile and Pleasant Province of Carolina” in Alexander Salley, Narratives of Early South Carolina (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), 288.

systems of human labor exchange and cash crop agriculture that made the Carolina colonists among the richest citizens of the Atlantic World.

A Great Many Sins

Despite Ribault’s laudatory descriptions, the truth of the matter was that the heat of the South Carolina lowcountry was paralyzing for Europeans. Mosquito-infested summer humidity of the marshland lasted well into the fall. John Archdale’s description of the climate avoided mention of this fact, proclaiming instead that the winters were warmer than Virginia’s and the summers much more agreeable than that of Iberian colonies in South America. Thomas Nairne admitted in his 1710 promotional pamphlet that, “The heats of Carolina are indeed troublesome to strangers,” and that the only relief was found under the massive oak stands.3 These described conditions were ripe for quiet contemplation only for those not enslaved or working the land. Perhaps it was under such a shelter from the sun that an Anglican missionary wrote in 1708, “I fear it is but too true that the Slaves we have for necessary Service, (for our white Servants in a

Months time prove food for nothing at all) are the price of a great many sins, I pray that they may not be imputed to us.”4 He was acknowledging the origins of a South Carolina slave society, where colonial goals were doomed without Indian and African labor.

That Anglican missionary, Francis LeJau, further observed his surroundings on a

September day and recorded those words in a letter to the secretary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel back in England. He had arrived in Carolina earlier that

3 Thomas Nairne, A Letter from South Carolina Giving an Account of the Soil, Air, Product, Trade, Government, Laws, Religion, People, Military Strength, &C. of That Province : Together with the Manner and Necessary Charges of Settling a Plantation There, and the Annual Profit It Will Produce (London: A. Baldwin, 1710).

4 Francis LeJau to Secretary, September 15, 1708, in Frank Klingberg, ed., The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis LeJau, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 41.

year to serve as the rector at Saint Andrew’s Parish church in the settlement of Goose

Creek, just outside of Charleston. Goose Creek was a hub of activity in early South

Carolina, serving as a trading post for a growing, lucrative deerskin trade with Yamasee

Indians. LeJau was expected to educate and preach to the Yamasees, using his skills as an outdoorsman to gain native trust. The promotional literature of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century all focused primarily on the abundant natural resources of Carolina, and the ease at which English settlers could profit from them. But it would not be from their own labors. As LeJau wrote his letter, white settlers were well on their way to these advertised profits, because they had started to add to their Native slave holdings by acquiring enslaved Africans, imported directly from Africa nine years prior.5 Despite the seeming achievement of the English colonial goals to develop a bustling skin trade and fledgling cash crops such as rice and indigo, LeJau’s tone suggests misgivings about the price of success.

There are several factors that contributed to LeJau’s trepidation. These issues ranged from territorial disputes with Spaniards in St. Augustine, to fears of revolt by

South Carolina’s Native and African enslaved laborers. Both concerns were characteristic of South Carolina’s position within a southeastern borderland created by vying imperial powers. Following failed French attempts at settlement and the decline of the Spanish presence, the English King Charles II granted land for the colony a few days’ sail north of Spanish Florida to eight Lords Proprietors in 1663 in recognition of their loyalty during the restoration of the English monarchy three years earlier. In addition to producing wealth, the colony was also intended to serve as a buffer against

5 Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade to the Americas, Vol. 4 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1935), 243.

the Spanish fortifications and settlement at St. Augustine and against possible French encroachment from the west. In establishing this colony, English colonists joined French traders and Spanish settlers who, a century earlier, had entered into a dynamic relationship with the indigenous groups of the North American southeast. This European invasion of the Native south accelerated massive changes in Indian cultures following the collapse of Mississippian chiefdoms.

The economic pursuits of South Carolinians involved two systems of slavery that had explosive repercussions in this imperial borderland. First, as Carolina’s functional purpose at its founding was to support the English island colony of Barbados with both raw materials and labor, a robust Indian slave trade was developed to export Native labor to the Caribbean. Carolinians were not the first English people to engage in the use of Indian slaves in the South. Virginians had originally employed Westos in slaving wars in the 1660s, but within a decade the South Carolinians had taken control of the

Westo alliance and established a slave trade that ultimately engulfed the entire

Southeast. The growing exploitation of Native captive-taking resulted in disputes with

American Indian groups allied with Spaniards to the south beginning in 1686. LeJau made record of these hostilities in one of his first letters upon his arrival in Goose Creek, writing in April of 1708 that, “The Country is now apprehensive of another Invasion from

Havana, and of the Indians who came already twice upon our Frontiers and did mischief.”6 Among the enslaved Indians exported from Carolina were some taken captive in aggressive English raids of Spanish mission settlements as far south as

Apalachee, which was burned to the ground by English soldiers in 1708. Fierce

6 Francis LeJau to Secretary, April 22, 1708, in Klingberg, The Carolina Chronicle, 39.

European competition across multiple Native homelands resulted in many atrocities against southeastern Indians, violence that caused LeJau to fear that, “too many of the

Disorders happened here within these twelve Months are known abroad; One of the

Savannah Town’s Inhabitants went away from us some Months ago and are joined with our Enemies.”7 At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Carolinian colonists feared what they saw as indigenous defection could lead to a joint invasion by Spaniards and their Apalachee allies.

Carolinians also feared an internal threat from African slaves, who were directly imported from Africa beginning in 1699. As that first slave ship, Providence, docked at

Oyster Point, it inaugurated Charleston’s history as a key slave port that eventually served as the point of entry for up to a third of enslaved Africans over the next 150 years.8 As the African population expanded and eventually outnumbered white colonists, concerns rose over the best methods to ensure the compliance of the enslaved population. Religion was thought to produce the desired results, and indeed, throughout LeJau’s tenure, many enslaved Africans approached him asking for baptism.

He hesitated in several cases due to concerns over slaves’ possible involvement in rumored plots. As rice culture became entrenched in the Carolina lowcountry during the

1720s, concern rose among many colonists in Charleston that the majority of the colony’s population consisted of enslaved Africans. As for the Indian slaves whom

LeJau mentions, the Spanish offered a nearby refuge and freedom for African slaves in return for their conversion to Catholicism, creating a religious motivation that had

7 Ibid, 39.

8 Although the colony had several slaves from the first moment’s settlement, direct commerce with Africa did not begin until late 1698. Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade, 243.

particular appeal to some enslaved Africans who had prior exposure to Catholicism in their homelands.

The Spanish were well aware of the potential to exploit disgruntled, coerced laborers in order to weaken their English enemies. In some cases, enslaved Indians and

Africans labored together on the same Carolina plantations, and on many occasions, slave revolts involved Indians and Africans working together. Fugitive African slaves are known to have fought with the Yamasee in their attack on South Carolina in 1715, and following their defeat, these same Yamasee assisted Africans in escaping to Spanish

Florida. Despite their shared position as potential slaves to European colonists, Indians and Africans certainly were not automatic allies against oppression. African auxiliaries fought for the English against the Yamasee and other Spanish-allied Indians in both the

Yamasee War and the War of Jenkins Ear. Even as some Yamasee assisted fugitive

African slaves, other groups such as the Notchee aided the Carolinians in retrieving runaways and returning them to their owners. Complicated webs of nationalism, tradition, identity, loyalty, and religion influenced the terms of encounters with Africans in the Native south. Both the English and the Spanish understood that their success in the early American southeast hinged on the manipulation of coerced labor. As that labor possessed a varied mixture of ethnicities and allegiances, both European imperialist powers sought to control the relationship between Indians and Africans in order to weaken the other.

Toward Understanding the Diversity of the Early South: Purpose and Goals

This dissertation focuses on the interaction between Yamasee Indians and enslaved Africans in Spanish Florida and the developing British colonies of South

Carolina and Georgia. It seeks to highlight the role this relationship played in the Anglo-

Spanish rivalry of the early eighteenth century by examining mutual enslavement and coerced military service, and to contribute to the growing discussion of the origins of a multiethnic slave society that served as a foundation for the Old South. In doing so, it seeks to broaden the ways in which we conceive of the early American south and the development of plantation slavery, by illustrating the ways in which a "borderlands" environment was characterized by complex geopolitics among various Native American groups, enslaved Africans, Spanish settlers, and British colonists.9

For this dissertation, the term “southeastern borderlands” refers to the coastal lowcountry landscape in the present day states of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida where different groups competed for power and influence based primarily on alliances with other groups in the area. In order to demonstrate how British expansion in the

North American southeast was unique, this dissertation employs the borderland model to demonstrate the significance of intercultural contact, conflict, and collaboration characteristic of the region. Although the geographic area remains the same throughout this dissertation, the interaction between people changed and developed throughout the time period this study is centered upon. Prior to European arrival and subsequent intervention, the region was a zone of interaction between post-Mississippian towns discussed in Chapter Two. The political and economic relationships of the region were complicated by the arrival of Spanish and eventually British colonists whose competition with each other for native allies created a situation referenced in Chapter Three as the

9 Immediately prior to European arrival, it served as a Native borderland between the remnant of various Mississippian chiefdoms such as the Mocama, Timucua, and Guale. Europeans joined the dynamics beginning with the Spanish in Florida in 1513 and intensifying with various other colonization and piracy attempts by the French and Scottish before south and westward migration by English colonists from Virginia and the island of Barbados.

imperial borderlands. Chapters Four through Six examine how the introduction of large numbers of Africans engaged in the labor necessary to achieve European expectations of success and security in the imperial borderlands gave way to the tri-racial borderlands, where various people of different ethnicities could form relationships to best ensure their own well-being.

The Indian, African, and European inhabitants of the North American southeast each perceived the concept of borders differently. Native settlements often changed locations, so large scale geographic borders were not as influential as the paths of trade and alliance in everyday life. Beginning in the 1680s, borders for Africans marked realms in which freedom could be earned. Once in the Spanish realm of influence, former British slaves had a variety of options not available to them in South Carolina, and after 1750, Georgia. Border wars between the Spanish and British colonists also afforded Africans chances to win freedom through military service. European colonists viewed borders as lines and landmarks that marked the territory where they had the right to claim and occupy land, define trade dynamics, the servitude statuses of involuntary laborers, and profit from the combination thereof. Indigenous, Spanish, and

English groups all competed for the same resources, although they had different goals.

Additionally, neither group possessed the overwhelming population or force necessary to dominate the area, although there were many attempts at this by both indigenous and

European populations. Each group relied on their relationships with others in the area to survive and to an extent modeled their society off of these multicultural interactions and alliances.

In order to expand on this notion of a southeastern "borderland," this dissertation will explore how a society based on African American slavery developed out of a complex multi-ethnic region in three ways. First, an examination of correspondence between Spanish governors in Florida and English leadership in South Carolina with their respective metropoles, showcases the governing realities of Atlantic World colonization. Spanish and British colonists each utilized disparate methods in seeking to control the Indian trade and African laborers. Meanwhile, in the face of constant

European aggression, Native American groups sought alliances and confederations that would help them to preserve their influence and way of life, while Africans created their own networks of connection as they built North American cultures for themselves.

Putting the relationships between Indians and Africans at the center of an emerging new society is essential to understanding how that society built and defined itself in relation to regional and cultural elements they could not always control.

Second, this dissertation will examine the experiences of slavery by Indians and by Africans, to show how their mutual of enslavement laid the foundation for a slave society governed by real, and exaggerated, European fears of an alliance between

Native Americans and enslaved Africans. This part of the project examines the role

Indians played in African resistance and the methods by which churches, and the

Society of the Propagation of the Gospel in particular, sought to channel Indian-African cooperation into the desired compliance and contentment with their enslaved status, while also discouraging the lure of Catholic freedom in Spanish Florida.

Third, the dissertation will then take up the comparative case study of the neighboring Georgia colony which grew out of the contested space between South

Carolina and Florida in 1733, its development of plantation slavery, and its deployment of African slave labor against Spanish Florida. It will argue that security considerations just as much as economic developments determined the colonial development of

Georgia.

Note on Sources

This dissertation is built primarily upon four archival collections, the Records concerning the colony of South Carolina in the National Archives of the United Kingdom housed at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Letters from the

Clergy of the Anglican Church in South Carolina at the College of Charleston, the

Egmont Papers at the University of Georgia, and the printed Colonial Records of

Georgia. While these manuscripts provide valuable details surrounding military actions, church statistics, and the thoughts of leading figures in South Carolina and Georgia, they suffer from an inherent Eurocentric bias concerning the actions and motivations of

Africans and Native Americans in the early South. Accordingly, I have tried to ascertain the motives of coerced laborers within the context of the various situations presented in this dissertation by incorporating the circumstances of Indian and African interaction at any point in time. While this strategy allows for larger scale conclusions, certain aspects of the everyday lives of Yamasees and Africans living around and within the white settlements of South Carolina cannot be drawn out from this source base. The most glaring omission from this analysis is gender. More research is needed to address how gender affecting the likelihood of enslaved Africans finding indigenous allies after escaping slavery, and to examine the role of gender in creating intercultural networks of slave resistance.

Beyond Frontiers: Historical Models of the Diverse Early South

Despite significant shifts in historical models for African American history and

Native American history that began in the 1970s, the historiography of the multiethnic early southeast is still coming to terms with the tri-racial character of many military actions, colonial laws, and economic ventures.10 One of the first scholars to address the legacy of mixed cultures in the western hemisphere was Kenneth W. Porter. His 1932 study, published in the Journal of Negro History and entitled “Relations between

Negroes and Indians” opened the door for historians to study of what he described as the tri-racial borderlands in North America. Due to the nature of the source material, subsequent studies have focused on the antebellum era and beyond.11 This dissertation will focus on how Africans interacted with Indian groups, and how their motivations and

10 Richard Price established a model concerning slave movement from Africa to the New World. In The Birth of African American Culture, published in only two years after Black Majority in 1976, he argued that Africans were extracted and deposited at random points throughout the Americas, thus effectively blocking the transmission of African culture. His collaborative research with Sydney Mintz also assumes that Africans surviving the Middle Passage only had their bondage in common, and thus had to create a new culture upon arrival in their respective slave societies. This view was challenged by John Thornton in 1998, who argued for specific roles played by African cultures that survived the middle passage transition and seeks to revise Atlantic World history that assumes that Africans had no culture. He stresses that interest in the African background of mainstream American culture has influenced many scholars to study African history using anthropological methods that do not take contemporary historical literature into account.10 Thornton acknowledges that the debate about the role African culture played in the America continues to hinge on the degree in which the dehumanizing effects of slavery affected the ability of slaves to create and transmit their culture. Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African- American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992); John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

11 See also Katja May, African Americans and Native Americans in the Creek and Cherokee Nations, 1830s to 1920s: Collision and Collusion (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996); Lisa Bier, American Indians and African American People, Communities, and Interactions: An Annotated Bibliography, (Westport: Praeger, 2004); Tiya Miles and Sharon Holland, Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country (Durham, Duke University Press, 2006). Written sources are abundant concerning relations between Native Americans and African Americas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Much of the historical literature on this topic focuses on these relationships in the southern United States, including Oklahoma. Interaction in the early republic and antebellum periods is most notably discussed by Tiya Miles’ monographs and edited volumes focusing on the African Diaspora in a more modern “Indian Country.” The popular culture topic of the Black Indian in the twentieth century is primarily explored through genealogy and by cultural anthropologists. Few works study the formative years of this ethnic interaction.

migrations shaped the way European colonists viewed themselves and their place in imperial empire.

Prior to 1990, historical works seem to describe two separate worlds. The first world is that created by European colonists and enslaved Africans through rice cultivation, tobacco farming, and the indigo trade. The second world is one of changes in Native American society in response to the first. The scholarship of the last decade has begun to bring these separate historiographical worlds into a closer orbit with each other. Three books published in the last few years, Robbie Ethridge’s edited volume

Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone, Joseph Hall’s Zamumo’s Gifts, and William

Ramsey’s The Yamasee War, make headway in unifying the strands of southeastern colonial history. Ethridge’s volume proposes a framework called the Mississippian shatter zone for “integrating events and people from the Mississippi Valley to those in the Atlantic region into a single interactive world.”12 There have been several recent books on Indian slavery and captivity, most notably by Alan Gallay and Christina

Snyder, which focus on the growth of empire and changing Indian cultural notions more than the real and perceived impact of the Indians’ and Africans’ shared slavery experience.13 Meanwhile, there is a literature on Indian-African interactions, but much of it centers on nineteenth century, leaving earlier periods of contact unexplored.

Ramsey’s The Yamasee War seeks to correct the moralistic interpretations of the

Yamasee War as a just Indian uprising against abuses and misconduct by Carolina

12 Robbie Ethridge, Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 2.

13 Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of English Empire in the American South, 1670 – 1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

Indian traders.14 Ramsey suggests that this interpretation misses the main point of the war, which is that it stemmed from a broader misunderstanding among the English as well as unfavorable market forces in an emerging Atlantic World economy. For Ramsey, the war was the starting point for white colonists’ divide and rule strategy that sought to pit Indians and Africans against each other.15 It also effectively ended Indian slavery within Carolina and legally erased the term mustee, as a new law stated that only those completely Indian children could be classified as such, leaving all mixed children classified as negro. The law is indicative of the newly solidified racial attitudes in South

Carolina that prevailed for the next century, as the colonists alienated former Indian allies.16

14 Ramsey’s work falls within the conversation of Dan Usner, Alan Gallay, Tom Hatley, James Merrell, and Joseph Hall with his recent publication of Zamumo’s Gifts, which studies the native politics of power and political exchange as contrasted with European economic and imperial notions of trade. Joseph Hall, Zamumo’s Gifts: Indian – European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).

15 Willis, “Divide and Rule: Red, White, and Black, in the Southeast,” 157-176.

16 Ramsey, The Yamasee War, 223. Ramsey takes interesting steps to connect his work with the antebellum south by claiming that based on South Carolina’s handling of the post Yamasee War Indian trade, “it seems clear that Carolinians sought to regulate economic activity in order to preserve and control the colony’s social structure.”

CHAPTER 2 THE TRI-RACIAL ORIGINS OF THE EARLY SOUTH

Foundations of Contact

From the beginning of the European invasion of the Native South, Indian and

African interaction took place in a variety of forms and circumstances. However, it was cooperative action by Native Americans and Africans against European colonists that proved especially influential in shaping life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This chapter examines the interaction of Indians and Africans in episodes of early contact. It argues that, starting with early Spanish attempts to colonize the American

South, slave revolts and African cooperation with Indians lay at the heart of the region’s history. Many European colonists and African slaves did not travel directly to the Native

South from Europe or Africa, and their earlier experiences in South America and the

Caribbean became important in how these groups created communities both among themselves and with North American Indians. Thus, as white colonists traveled throughout the Atlantic World, they carried the knowledge and fear of past mistakes made in exploiting Native and African labor and, therefore, sought to avoid similar situations through the modification of comprehensive slave codes. Driven by horror at the often violent and disastrous results of Indian and African rebellions, European colonists who depended on slave labor from both groups sought to control their terms of encounter from the very founding of the Carolina colony.

The significance of tri-racial contact varied throughout its three major theatres,

North America, South America, and the Caribbean. Various episodes in each had different effects on how European settlers understood their priorities in the realm of plantation labor. In the early twentieth century, some historians believed that Indians

and Africans had similar goals in opposing European domination of the landscape and their lives and consequently were natural allies, but over time, more detailed analysis has shown that most cases of cooperation had far more pragmatic motives.

Famine and Shipwrecks: Calamities and Contact in North America

Spanish colonists had more experience in managing multiethnic populations throughout the Atlantic World than their English counterparts. When the Spaniard Lucas

Vázquez de Ayllón established a Spanish settlement in the Peedee region of what later became Carolina in the summer of 1526, he introduced Europeans and Africans to an already diverse and multiethnic human landscape. His settlement was short lived, and after only three months, disease claimed many lives, including Ayllón’s. The problems of disease and famine were compounded by attacks by local Native Americans who became increasingly aggravated by the foreign presence throughout the fall. Enslaved

Africans apparently used this instability to their advantage and rebelled in November, killing many Spanish colonists and forcing the Spanish survivors to flee to Hispaniola in

December 1526. 1 This revolt and subsequent flight to Indian country by enslaved

Africans follows a pattern also demonstrated later English colonization attempts.2 In the early stages of European colonization, Indians and Africans may have challenged

European designs with their own ends in mind but cooperated with one another when there were clear benefits to doing so.

1 Herbert Aptheker, Negro Slave Revolts in the United States, 1526-1860 (New York: International Publishers, 1969), 15.

2 Ibid, 17.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, the African population in the southeastern borderlands grew slowly. Spanish settlements in Florida began to expand beyond St. Augustine, established in 1565, as Catholic missions spread as far north as what became Virginia. Although St. Augustine’s black population was small compared to other European settlements in the Atlantic World, seven African slaves reportedly fled the town for the interior in 1603 and married Native American women.3 Four years later and several hundred miles to the north, Virginia was founded, and Africans arrived soon thereafter in 1619. Although not imported for the purpose of serving as lifelong slaves, these African indentured servants introduced a new element into the fragile Virginia colonial society. In 1622 and 1644, Native Americans waged anti-colonial wars that killed 350 and 500 English colonists, respectively. In both wars, white and African indentured servants joined Indian slaves in fleeing from the Virginia colony to the

Native-controlled interior.4 Thus, by 1650, a repeated pattern of Indian and African cooperative resistance emerged in both Spanish and English colonial settlements.

“Overly Skilled and Very Understanding:” The Impact of Atlantic Maroon Societies on English Colonization

In addition to the early episodes of contact in North America that set the stage for multiethnic interactions in the southeastern borderlands, various events in the

Caribbean taught the English how to respond to the threat of joint rebellion by Indians and Africans. These interactions in the early Southeast throughout the long century from

1526 to 1634 are notable because they strongly suggest the cultural roles that Indians

3 J. H. Johnston, "Documentary Evidence of the Relations of Negroes and Indians," The Journal of Negro History 14, no. 1 (Jan. 1929): 21-43.

4 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Movements in America (New York: Routledge, 1997), 4.

and Africans assumed as contact between them increased. The entradas of conquistadores like Ayllón and Narváez were important to instances of slave revolt and cultural exchange, respectively, but in both cases, the Africans and Europeans were very small in number.5 After arriving in southeastern North America, Europeans remained at the mercy of their Indian allies and trade partners in many ways but sought to control the Indian and African laborers they believed essential to their colonial endeavors in the Americas with methods perfected elsewhere in the Atlantic World.

Events in Hispaniola, Brazil, and, most importantly Barbados influenced the ways in which Europeans later responded to joint rebellion on the North American mainland.

Among the most common threads in the British Atlantic system was the trafficking of American Indians slaves throughout the Caribbean. From the early days of the Carolina colony until 1718, Indian slaves were a primary export, in addition to the less important exports of meat and naval stores. However, even as the exploitation of

Native labor depopulated land as the English colonists desired, it also served to acquaint Indian and African laborers with each other. Relationships between those two groups, the English recognized, could be disastrous for imperial goals, as best exemplified by the events beginning in 1519 known as Enriquillo’s Rebellion on the

Spanish-controlled island of Hispaniola. The Spanish response to this uprising proved typical of how European colonial authorities reacted to similar events. Once part of a powerful Native chiefdom first encountered by Christopher Columbus in 1492, Enrique’s people followed him into a more sparsely settled region of the island to the shores of the

5 Entradas were state sponsored expeditions into territories previously unknown to that state. Allyón’ coastal expedition and the Narváez led expedition that result is Cabeza De Vaca’s long odyssey across southern North America assisted by his Esteban the Moor as a translator, were both the scenes of simultaneous initial contact between Europeans, Africans, and Indians.

lake that now bears his name. Their flight followed a decline in population due to smallpox and reflected their fear of again being forced into service after the encomendero for whom they labored died.6 At this location, Enrique and the remnants of his kin survived and even flourished from 1519 to 1533 despite Spanish attempts to conquer them.7 After several unsuccessful military expeditions to eradicate the Native settlements, Spanish officials sought an end to hostilities among waning public support for Enrique’s capture. Historian Ida Altman points to the 1533 peace treaty that ended

Enrique’s maroon-settlement-based raids on Spanish property as the model for how

Europeans dealt with maroons from that point forward. The treaty contained an often replicated provision allowing the rebels to live and settle where they chose in exchange for returning any additional fugitive Indians or Africans who might find escape to them.8

Due to the decline of indigenous labor resulting from a decrease in the repartimiento on

Hispaniola and the accompanying shift to imported African labor, most maroons thereafter were black. Therefore, the experiences of Enrique and his people can be viewed as a microcosm of the shift in European concern from Native populations to

African slaves working gold mining for mineral wealth.

Enrique’s actions are notable for two main reasons related to European treatment of Indians and Africans. He was one of the last caciques and held some status in Spanish eyes because he had received a Franciscan education, a rarity

6 Originating in feudal Spain, the encomendero system was a labor arrangement in which a Spanish noble, or encomendero, would be “entrusted” with the oversight and protection of a native community living on lands granted to him, and that performed tasks of his bidding while paying tribute. The system was notorious for the abuse it inflicted on Native Americans.

7 Ida Altman, “The Revolt of Enriquillo and the Historiography of Early Spanish America,” The Americas 63, no. 4 (April 2007): 587-614.

8 Ibid. 613.

among the indigenous peoples of the island.9 Before the revolt, the Spanish recognized his Native nobility, and through his resistance, he was able to force the colonial authorities to accept limited notions of Native rights. Additionally, throughout his rebellion, Enrique’s settlement became a haven promising freedom for the defiant, as indicated by the regular flow of Natives, Africans, and mestizos, enslaved and free, who came to join it.10 The original group who fled to the interior numbered less than one hundred, but by 1533, the maroon settlement had several hundred members. Spanish officials realized that groups such as Enrique’s were helping increase the number of fugitive African slaves and described men like Sebastian Lemba as “over skilled and very understanding of the things of war and whom all obeyed and feared.”11 Therefore, maroon settlements not only drew African runaways to join the indigenous resistance movement but also encouraged Africans to form maroon communities of their own.

Atlantic Precedents: Joint Resistance in Brazil

Cooperation between Native Americans and Africans complicated European colonization goals across the Atlantic World, especially when fugitive Indians and

Africans formed independent communities outside the bounds of colonial influence. The study of such interactions in the early colonial South is significant in part because of their psychological impact on Europeans’ sense of security when attempting to colonize additional land. European settlements always faced the danger of violent Native attacks

9 Cacique is a Spanish transliteration of a Taino term for a local pre-Columbian chief or leader.

10 Altman, “The Revolt of Enriquillo and the Historiography of Early Spanish America,” 587.

11 Sebastian Lemba, a national hero in the Dominican Republic, was a pirate and leader of a prolonged slave rebellion and maroon society on Santo Domingo throughout the 1540s. The success of Lemba’s settlement and the military prowess he displayed in his raids encouraged other enslaved Africans and Indians to take similar steps to liberate themselves. Altman, “The Revolt of Enriquillo and the Historiography of Early Spanish America,” 611 – 612.

in which their captive slave labor might join. Massacres and rebellions causing significant casualties were common in the colonial societies predating South Carolina.

Perhaps the most well-known involved the maroon societies of Brazil, where Indian-

African interaction posed the chief security threat to Portuguese colonial society throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In addition to security issues, maroon societies in colonial Brazil shared commonalities with Indian and African collaboration in what became the United States, such as cultural blending through the establishment of multiethnic villages in the continental interior.12

As the events in Brazil were still a recent memory, the lessons learned by the

Portuguese undoubtedly were present in the minds of those organizing English colonies in North America. Colonial Brazil set the pattern for the development of a slave system that closely resembled that which would dominate the American South. Slave importation from Africa to Brazil began in earnest around 1550 with the arrival of 13,000 slaves, and by 1600, 15,000 slaves lived in the colony.13 As in the Caribbean, flight and marronage played major roles in the slave experience. They went hand in hand with, and sometimes were aided by, Native efforts to push back the European invaders.

Native strongholds in the interior posed a constant threat to the Portuguese provinces of southern Brazil.14

12 Nathaniel Millett, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and Their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013), 147-171.

13 R.K. Kent, “Palmares: An African State in Brazil” in Richard Price, Maroon Societies : Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, 3rd ed. (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 171.

14 Ibid, 170.

As enslaved Africans fled to the interior, entire cities of fugitive slaves, or kingdoms as called by Portuguese and Dutch soldiers, appeared and disappeared in different locations. Many such settlements mirrored the physical layout and social aspects of an African village. The most famous and enduring of these settlements was the quilumbo of Palmares, which boasted a population in the thousands, substantial fortifications, and a trained defense force.15 African maroons in Brazil both exploited the threat of Indian attack by staging escapes in times of overstretched security and formed relationships with Indians themselves. Some villages of Indians and Africans were linked by a belief in Santidade, a syncretic messianic religion which reportedly arose as early as 1613. Members of joint African-Indian villages were known to attack and raid

Portuguese settlements for cattle and other goods.16 Such ventures played an important role in forming later European security policies.

The Corporation of Adventurers: The Barbadian Diaspora and the Atlantic Slavery Experience

Events in the island colony of Barbados provide powerful examples of the experiences that informed English responses to interactions between Indians and

Africans in Carolina and Georgia. Barbados saw the most slave rebellions in the

Caribbean, and consequently, its rulers meticulously formed slave codes. Slave revolts broke out in 1675 and 1692, and threats of rebellion were reported in 1683 and 1686.17

15 Ibid, 179.

16 Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550-1835 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 47.

17 Richard Dunn, "The Barbados Census of 1680: Profile of the Richest Colony in English America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 26, no. 1 (Jan 1969): 4-30. Dunn’s work on the Barbadian

Until the 2000s most scholarship on Barbadian slave revolts focused on enslaved

Africans. Recent studies have shown that Barbadian officials sometimes dealt with simultaneous African and Native American resistance. Given the intimate connections between Barbadians and Carolinians, these events certainly influenced English colonists’ assessment of their precarious situation in the southeastern borderlands.18

Barbados and South Carolina presented a remarkable number of similarities. For a time, Barbados was the richest colony in England’s Atlantic holdings, exporting more sugar than all other English islands combined. By 1680, enslaved Africans outnumbered whites 2 to 1, and the value of Barbadian sugar exports exceeded that of all exports from British North America as a whole.19 Similarly, by the eve of the American

Revolution, South Carolina became the richest English colony on the mainland, built on the backs of its rice-cultivating black majority, while the average wealth of white

Charlestonians reached as much as five times greater than that of their counterparts in

Boston and Philadelphia.20

In addition to economic and demographic similarities, direct ties also connected the English citizens of Barbados and South Carolina. Sir John Colleton was a leader of the Lords Proprietors, loyal members of Parliament who received a grant to settle

demographics and this very rare census opened the door for scholars to understand the backgrounds of some of the people key to the creation of a British Atlantic.

18 S. Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2006), 10-11, 83.

19 Dunn, "The Barbados Census of 1680: Profile of the Richest Colony in English America", 8.

20 Jack P. Greene, "Colonial South Carolina and the Caribbean Connection,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 88, no. 4 (October 1987): 201.

Carolina in 1663. He and fellow Lord Proprietor Anthony Ashley Cooper were also prominent landholders in overcrowded Barbados, both owning more than 200 acres as of 1673.21 Richard Dunn’s study of the 1680 Barbados census shows that thirteen of the fifteen confirmed Barbadians who immigrated to Carolina in 1679 secured grants of 200 acres or more and almost certainly purchased slaves in Barbados.22 Hence, during

Carolina’s early days, the African slaves also had experience in the harsh sugar cultivation. Indeed, almost half the English and more than half the Africans who arrived in Carolina in the first two years came from Barbados.23 Therefore, despite the wide disparities between them, white colonists shared common interests, and enslaved

Africans common concerns, as friends and family likely resided in both colonies.

The financial profits from slavery in Barbados encouraged those who settled

Carolina to replicate that lucrative system, although rice which ultimately became the primary cash crop was not commercially successful until 1690.24 In efforts to repeat that success, Carolina became the first mainland English colony to import Africans on a large scale and the only one to depend solely on their labor from its founding.25 This development is unsurprising considering that Colleton was appointed to the Council for

Foreign Plantations and the Royal African Company as a reward for his financial

21 Dunn, "The Barbados Census of 1680: Profile of the Richest Colony in English America,” 10.

22 Ibid, 10.

23 Greene, “Colonial South Carolina and the Caribbean Connection,” 152.

24 Greene, “Colonial South Carolina and the Caribbean Connection,” and Edward Rugemer, “The Development of Mastery and Race in the Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Caribbean during the Seventeenth Century,” The William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 3 (July 2013), 452.

25 Rugemer, “The Development of Mastery and Race in the Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Caribbean during the Seventeenth Century,” 104.

assistance in restoring Charles II to the throne of England.26 Membership in these two organizations gave Colleton a direct say in how English officials ran the colonies and the methods by which Africans were collected and transported from West Africa. These appointments added to Colleton’s extensive and profitable Barbadian expertise gained through managing African slave labor on the plantation. Combined with his vested personal economic interest in this system, this experience made Colleton an ideal leader for a colony based on slave produced exports. Demand increased in Europe for a specific type of rice known as Carolina Gold under the supervision of men such as

John Colleton’s sons Peter, who inherited his father’s proprietorship in 1666, and

James, who inherited his father’s land in Barbados and Carolina and served as governor of Carolina from 1686 to 1690. To meet this demand, the African slave population in South Carolina rose from 2,500 in 1710, to 5,000 in 1720, and 39,000 in

1730.27

Indigenous populations also affected the demographics of both colonies. When the English settled Barbados in 1627, the original Arawak population had been decimated by Spanish raids and Carib attacks—a pattern eerily similar to the decline in

26 “John Colleton” in Walter Edgar, The South Carolina Encyclopedia (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press), 2006. John Colleton was one of the inaugural members of the Council for Plantations established in 1660 for the purpose of consulting, supplying, and otherwise aiding the growth of English colonies around the world. Charles II believed that this council would be instrumental in regulating the growth and security of English colonies while bringing some uniformity and efficiency to the way new laws were applied. For a fuller explanation, see John Romeyn Broadhead, Documents Relative to the Colonial History of New York; Procured in Holland, England and France (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Company, 1858), 32. The Royal African Company was also established by Charles II in 1660, and run by his brother James, Duke of York, who eventually became King of England in 1685. This mercantile company trafficked slaves from West Africa for over seventy years, exercising a monopoly over the English slave trade for much of the period prior to 1700.

27 Greene, “Colonial South Carolina and the Caribbean Connection,” 206. For a more comprehensive look at South Carolinas African slave demographics, see Wood, Black Majority, 35-37, 45-47; Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. (New York: Norton, 1975).

the Native population of the Carolina lowcountry caused by English-sponsored Westo slave raids in the 1670s. These two factors resulted in a demographic shift as enslaved

Indians from the mainland were shipped to Barbados to work as agricultural laborers.

According to colonist Henry Winthrop, a mixture of indigenous and African labor powered the growth of the Barbadian economy from the colony’s very beginning.28 Due to these labor demographics, the writers of slave codes likely took their cue from elsewhere in the Caribbean and designed the codes to control both Indians and

Africans in order to prevent the very real threat of a joint rebellion, as occurred in Brazil and Hispaniola. The replication of slave codes from elsewhere in the Caribbean was a common occurrence, though exact documentary connections are scarce for the British

Caribbean. A French slave code called the Code Noir was created in March 1685 to clarify how systems of Indian and African slavery should operate. Though it did not address who should be enslaved and how it should be done, it focused on making the system the most profitable. It was based in local ordinances to control Africans and

Indians through a system of punishments and rewards thought to create the ideal balance of white security and enslaved productivity.29

28 Rugemer, “The Development of Mastery and Race in the Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Caribbean during the Seventeenth Century,” 433. Henry Winthrop was the son of John Winthrop, founder and first governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony. In early 1627, Henry sailed with the founder and first governor of Barbados, Captain Henry Powell, to the island, but left two years later after unsuccessful attempts to start a plantation.

29 The most comprehensive study in this area is that of Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 122-132. Developed from the 1660s and leading up to the Edit of 1685, the Code Noir was perfected during the same time period as the most comprehensive of the slave codes in Barbados were being written. The Code Noir restricted the use of potential weapons, established a pass system, was enforceable in several Atlantic World locations, and responded to transgressions with exceeding violence.

English slave codes on Barbados were not nearly as ambiguous on the actual process of enslavement as the French Code Noir, which focused only on making the

French Caribbean system work most efficiently for its colonists while taking the process of enslavement for granted.30 The English slave codes issued in Barbados1636 represented the first attempt to codify the slave status of non-Europeans.31 The law exempted white settlers from lifelong slavery and dictated that Indians and Africans sold in Barbados must serve for life unless a contract to the contrary was made before sale; thus, during the first decade of English settlement on the island, a distinction was already made between those serving for life and those under contract as indentured servants. Interestingly, the language of this provision indicates that members of the

South Carolina Grand Council did not necessarily assume that all Indians and Africans who arrived on the island would be slaves, leaving room for the fluidity in servitude status in the diverse Atlantic World.32

Innovators in addressing ethnicity and slave status, the English colonists on

Barbados also dealt with many challenges to their domination even before they were

30 Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, 125.

31 Rugemer, “The Development of Mastery and Race in the Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Caribbean during the Seventeenth Century,” 433.

32 Peter Wood notes that the pervasive employment of African slavery as the primary labor method in South Carolina was by no means a foregone conclusion. Of the many factors that limited the quick growth of African slavery, price was chief among them. Any savvy white Barbadian understood that while African was a better long term investment, the startup costs were prohibitive. Wood states that, “The additional costs and responsibility of such a purchase had limited appeal in a frontier colony where money was scare, risks were high, and the future nature of the economy was still uncertain. Wood, Black Majority, 48.

outnumbered by Africans in 1660.33 Reports of rebellion in 1648 and a plot by Africans to become “Masters of the Island” in 1649 led to changes in the slave code in 1652 that increased severity of punishments for slaves and addressed the behaviors of indentured servants. A joint revolt in 1655 even involved both Irish indentured servants and enslaved Africans. That same year, English colonists gained control of Jamaica from the Spanish and quickly adapted its slave code to the Barbados model. During the successful English invasion of the southeastern North American lowcountry over the next four decades, Barbadian colonists sought to use their Atlantic World knowledge to create a Carolina colony based on slave legislation that reflected their own Barbadian experience.34

The communication networks of the English Atlantic World become especially clear when examining English policies crafted in response to Indian and African wars of resistance. Historian Linford Fisher explored the simultaneous passage in Barbados in

1676 of an act to prohibit the importation of enslaved Indians from New England following King Philip’s War and of a slave act responding to a planned African uprising uncovered in 1675.35 Officials enacted the 1676 Act of Negroes at the same time that they had the leaders of the slave uprising executed.36 This act sought to address many

33 Russell Menard, Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 25.

34 Rugemer, “The Development of Mastery and Race in the Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Caribbean during the Seventeenth Century,” 452. Jamaican codes better suited Carolinian geography.

35 Linford Fisher, “Dangerous Designes”: The 1676 Barbados Act to Prohibit New England Slave Importation, The William and Mary Quarterly 71, no, 1 (January 2014): 99-124.

36 Sir Robert Hermann Schomburgk, The History of Barbados: Comprising a Geographical and Statistical Description of the Island; a Sketch of the Historical Events Since the Settlement; and an Account of Its Geology and Natural Productions (London: F. Cass, 1971), 296. The Coromantee

circumstances believed to have facilitated organization of the revolt; it prohibited musical instruments and weapons among slaves, declared it a capital offense for slaves to destroy property, banned slaves from traveling without a pass from a white colonist, and forbade training African slaves in a trade. The law also ended the practice of loaning out skilled slaves in order to limit contacts and communication among the slave population.37 Although these provisions appear typical of labor control in slave societies,

Fisher notes that, in this same law, the colonial assembly also prohibited the importation of enslaved Indians from New England. Indian slaves were thought to be a greater threat than African because of the Indians’ successful and devastating war against

English colonists in New England; the intensity of that judgment can been seen in the stiff penalties for violating it.38 The 1676 Act of Negroes might have also been a response to the feared potential of powerful Indians and Africans joining together in revolt.39

The Barbadians who relocated to South Carolina throughout the 1680s came from a society regulated by numerous slave acts written in response to the actual slave rebellions on the island, and the specter of cooperative Indian-African slave rebellion based on events elsewhere in the Caribbean. Even before Barbados had a black

Conspiracy was a plan, three years in the making, to seize control of the island through African modes of communication not instantly noticeable by the English settlers.

37 Fisher, “Dangerous Designes,” 110.

38 Ibid,114.

39 According to William Stapleton, Governor of the Leeward Islands, other sites of Indian and African collaboration an armed revolt against white colonists also occurred on Nevis, Antigua, St. Vincent, Dominica, and St. Lucia. Fisher, “Dangerous Designes,” 118.

majority, multiple reports of slave rebellions and joint revolts of indentured servants led to modifications in the slave code throughout the 1650s that led to closer supervision of

African slaves and limited interaction with indentured servants. Still, even with demonstrated success in cooperative rebellion from enslaved Africans, Barbadian planters deemed it practical to continue to import African slaves to the point that they outnumbered white colonists in the midst of these threatening events.

A number of events occurred in the 1670s that set the stage for the manner in which English colonists in South Carolina addressed the joint enslavement and the threat of cooperative rebellion between Indians and Africans. King Phillips War in New

England from 1675 – 1678 led Barbadians to restrict the import of Indian slaves from that region, not only due to what were believed to be problems stemming from their exposure to Christianity, but because of the additional demonstrated capacity of Indian and Africans to engage in cooperative rebellion as seen in both Brazil and Hispaniola.

The Barbadians believed the best defense against joint rebellions in this case, was the outright elimination of the less profitable demographic. In South Carolina, although

Indians and Africans were often slaved together, early colonists tried to mitigate the potential of rebellion exporting many Indians for enslavement in elsewhere in

Caribbean. South Carolina’s Goose Creek Men, a group of Barbadian planters influenced by these events who settled in St. James parish in an area called Goose

Creek, were directly involved in addressing this threat through their participation in the

Indian slave trade and their influence in the colonial legislature that granted them power to help create the first slave codes in South Carolina. By the time the African slave population grew to substantial levels in connection to the rise in rice cultivation in the

first few decades of the eighteenth century, the numbers of enslaved Indians within

South Carolina were much lower. The Slave Act of 1676 in Barbados created in response to the 1675 Coromantee Conspiracy, the most specific of the responses to rebellions on the island since 1652 to what was considered the most disastrous and wide ranging of slave rebellion plots, occurred just three years before the initial wave of

Barbadian emigration to South Carolina. The outlawing of musical instruments among slaves because they were correctly believed to be instruments of communication and coordination in the 1675 plot clearly denotes a fear of slave rebellion across large geographic areas, and the 1676 Slave Act’s stipulation that slaves no longer be hired out for their skills was clearly an attempt to limit their geographic mobility. Once colonists arrived in South Carolina, the potential profits of those who could afford

African slaves were too tempting and aggressive planters brought their slaves to remote locations in the colony, open to attacks from Spanish Florida. The result of these

Spanish raids were the transfer of Carolinian fears upon their European imperial competitors, whom they blamed for tampering with their slave labor and inhibiting their profits and denying them the rightful spoils of English citizenship. South Carolinians tapped their Barbadian experience to limit the disastrous potential of Indian – African cooperation through limiting contact and creating new enemies.

Barbadians were very successful by the standards of the wealthy British

Caribbean and sought to replicate that success whenever possible. The black majority that characterized Barbados in 1660 was largely responsible for this success, and it was the Barbadians’ familiarity with this demographic that helped South Carolina become the first true slave society of British North America. Many in Barbados moved to South

Carolina once they could afford the substantial initial investment in enslaved African labor. Although the collective experience of this success also came with extensive practice in manipulating the labor force responsible for such financial gains, this familiarity did not yield comfort. Instead, it was the source of constant fear of both financial ruin and personal injury. The balance of financial gain and personal security was one weighed daily by white Barbadians, and one that transferred to South Carolina as evidenced by its bold southward expansion in the 1680s.

The timing of these events is crucial to understanding how Carolinians sought to protect themselves both from the people they oppressed within and around their colony and from the Spanish colonists who they believed had gained an imperial advantage through relationships with Indians and Africans. Amid these growing fears, a powerful faction of former Barbadians known as the Goose Creek Men sought to gain control of the Indian trade in South Carolina. The same settlers to whom LeJau came to minister in the early 1700s, they understood themselves as espousing Anglican beliefs. Before

LeJau’s missionary work among the Creek and Yamasee surrounding St. Andrew’s parish, these former Barbadian parishioners strongly opposed spreading the gospel among the indigenous peoples of the lowcountry. This is because they were part of a particularly opinionated Anglican community on Barbados that actually blamed the

Puritans for spreading religion and causing King Phillips War, stating that Puritan confidence stemmed from a sense of morality and justice.40

The Goose Creek Men were influential in the South Carolina colonial legislature as well, and sought to include Indians in the definition of slavery in their proposed 1691

40 Fisher, “Dangerous Designes,” 116. This rationale would later be used in other eighteenth century South Carolina laws that stipulate that conversion does not equal freedom.

adaptation of a 1684 Jamaican code.41 The Lord Proprietors rejected all laws from the

1691 assembly, contributing to a political rift that Governor Joseph Blake could not handle.42 Under Archdale, the assembly attempted to modify the slave code again in

1696, giving an official definition of a runaway slave and including mulattos on the list of groups who could be enslaved.43

These laws also reflect the reality of European imperialistic competition from the

Spanish at St. Augustine. Following a series of raids on the perimeter of English colony, the Anglicans at Goose Creek were so anxious to prevent fugitive slaves from fleeing to

Spanish Florida that they castrated three escaped slaves for attempting to flee south in

1697, as the 1696 slave act demanded.44 Increased scrutiny of the control of slaves in

1696 coincided with Archdale’s appointment as a unifying governor. He encouraged viewing the Spanish and Natives as a common enemy in order to create a common

41 Rugemer, “The Development of Mastery and Race in the Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Caribbean during the Seventeenth Century,” 452. South Carolina, The Statutes at Large of South Carolina (Columbia, S.C.: A.S. Johnston, 1841), 7:343.

42 This 1691 statute was the first to address slavery in South Carolina. It was passed during contentious political factionalism that saw Seth Sothell, a proprietor associated with the Goose Creek Men, seize control of the colonial government. The following four years were filled with insult and accusations between the Lords Proprietors and the Goose Creek Men that rendered the South Carolina’s government almost useless, except that both sides agreed on the important of continuously issuing new slave codes that regulated the relationship between white colonists, and enslaved Indians and Africans. Amid the fighting, the original slave act was renewed in 1693 and 1695. L.H. Roper, “The 1701 ‘Act for the Better Ordering of Slaves’: Reconsidering the History of Slavery in Proprietary South Carolina,” The William and Mary Quarterly 3, Vol. 64, no. 2 (Apr. 2007): 395-418, 398.

43 John Archdale was another proprietor. He was sent to South Carolina in 1696 for the purpose of unifying the factions, but with orders to annul all laws passed by Sothell and the Goose Creek Men. The one of the laws they agreed on was the one regulating slavery. A replacement for the slave code passed by Sothell in 1691 and renewed every two years after that until 1695, was passed in 1696 and renewed in 1701. Roper contends that 1696 version of the act was not based on a paternalistic sense of control as exemplified by later laws around the southern English colonies, but out of a suspicion that all slaves, Indian and African, would rebel whenever they for the chance. Roper, “The 1701 ‘Act for the Better Ordering of Slaves’: Reconsidering the History of Slavery in Proprietary South Carolina,” 398-401. Though Roper does not specifically identify the Barbadian experience in his reasoning for this particular instance, the recent rebellions and migrations from that island should not be overlooked.

44 Rugemer, “The Development of Mastery and Race,” 455.

identity for South Carolinians and to heal divisions between the Lords Proprietors and the Goose Creek men, who competed for primacy in the Indian Trade after the elimination of the Westo.45 Therefore, a vision of a unified South Carolinian identity based on borderland realities arose out of the collective English Atlantic World experience. This identity stood opposed to Spanish presence, dedicated to the intense punishment of any African slaves who attempted to reach them, and against missionary work among Natives. This self-assessment served a crucial function in the expansion of slavery in the borderlands and was influential in the formation of a southern British

North American identity beginning with the coming War of Jenkins’ Ear.

Native Depopulation in La Florida: Westos and the Evolution of the Indian Slave Trade Epidemic

The founding of Carolina inaugurated a new struggle for some Natives

Americans in southeastern North America. In addition to occupying Native lands, the fledgling colony quickly made the export of Indian slaves a major component of its economy. The Carolina colony also served as a military buffer against the Spanish, and the colonists in Charles Town found themselves much closer to St. Augustine than in the friendly ports of Virginia. Furthermore, Cooper aimed to found South Carolina at a site called Santa Elena on present-day Parris Island, which not only was an early presidio of Florida but also the site of Catholic conversion efforts among the Guale

45 Historian L.H. Roper contends that the factionalism between the Goose Creek Men and the Lords Proprietors actually encouraged slave resistance to the point that periodic modifications of the slave code were necessary reminders of the proper relationships between white colonists and enslaved Africans. Roper, “The 1701 Act for the Better Ordering of Slaves,” 395-418, 395.

Indians from 1566 to 1587.46 Religious activities as far north as Parris Island had ceased only in 1655 under continuing Native pressure and Westo attacks.47

The Westos are of great significance to the dynamics of the southeastern borderlands. They hailed from Lake Erie at the beginning of the seventeenth century, where the Iroquois called them the Riquehronnons and the French la Nation de Chat.48

Beginning in 1640, this tribe became involved in the fur trade between the

Susquehannocks and Virginians through Abraham Wood, the commander of Fort

Henry.49 In 1656, this group appeared along the borders of the colony of Virginia, where armed with advanced European weaponry, they conducted English-sponsored slave raids on other Native American peoples to procure labor for tobacco plantations.50 The

Guales viewed the Westos as a terror, and the Westos’s targeting of Spanish-allied

Indians made them a source of animosity between the English and Spanish. The

46 Santa Elena was an early capital of Florida, founded by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and intended to be the main of Spanish settlement in the area. It was built on the site of Frenchman Jean Ribault’s fort originally constructed in 1562. The good harbor made it a popular choice for European colonization, but early English settlers instead chose a spot further north with the intention of eventually building a more extensive settlement at Santa Elena. By 1684, a group of Yamasees led by their leader Altamaha settled in the near the marshes at the mouth of the Savannah River and formed trade relationships with the Stuart Town, a Scottish settlement founded that same year by Lord Henry Cardross at Santa Elena, which the British then referred to as Port Royal. From this location, Altamaha led slave raids against the Timucua and inspired other native groups to relocate closer to the Carolinians as well, thus enhancing the coalescence of the Yamasee is South Carolina and solidifying their position as important trade partners and allies to the Scottish. The Yamasee – Stuart Town alliance also contributed to increasing tension between South Carolina’s Scottish and English settlers, however. Stephen Oatis, A Colonial Complex: South Carolina’s Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War, 1680-1730, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 26-27.

47 Verner Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670-1732 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), 5.

48 Eric Bowne, The Westo Indians: Slave Traders of the Early Colonial South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 38.

49 Ibid, 2.

50 Ibid, 2.

Westos received firearms in return for beaver pelts, making them one of the most technologically advanced groups in the region. In 1674, South Carolinian diplomat and explorer Dr. Henry Woodward described the Westos as “well provided with arms, ammunition, tradeing cloath and other trade from the northward for which at set times of the year they truck drest deare skins furrs and young Indian slaves.”51 As the slave- operated Virginia tobacco industry became more profitable, the demand for slaves increased, and so did business for the Westos.

When the South Carolinian colonists arrived in 1670, they found coastal Indian tribes ravaged by the Westos. That year, a Carolinian observer noted that “[t]hese

Indians of the Carolina coast, understanding our business to St. Helena told us that ye

Westoes a ranging sort of people reputed to be the man eaters and ruinated that place and killed several of those Indians, destroyed and burnth their habitations.”52 Proprietor

John Lord Carteret expressed alarm that the Westos were as close as Kiawah Island, a mere day’s journey south of Charles Town. In a letter to Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury and one of the few Lords Proprietors in Carolina, his deputy and early settler Stephen

Bull reported that the local Cusabo “do seem to be very low pleased at our settleage, expecting protection under us which we have promised against another sort of Indian

51 “A Faithful Relation of my Westoe Voyage,” by Henry Woodward in, Alexander Samuel Salley, Narratives of Early Carolina, 1650-1708 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), 132.

52 “Mr. Carteret’s Relation,” in Langdon Cheves ed., The Shaftesbury Papers and Other Records Relating to Carolina and the First Settlement on the Ashley Prior to the Year 1676, in South Carolina Historical Society, Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society (South Carolina Historical Society, 1857), 167.

that lives backwards in an interior body and war against all Indians. They are called the

Westo.”53

Carolinian colonists desired skins and food as trade goods, but during the land grant process, the Lords Proprietors did not leave indigenous tribes the land necessary to support this trade.54 Therefore, at the time of English settlement of Charles Town, coastal Indian tribes faced a shortage of land. Their desperation for survival amplified the Westos’ impact on the region. Although both other Native groups and Europeans encroached on the coastal tribes’ territory, many such as the Kiawah welcomed English settlers as an ally against the Westos, even though such an alliance rendered them dependent on the British.

The Westos’ domination of the local Indian tribes made them a primary target of

South Carolina’s diplomatic relations. English colonists knew that they had to form a peace treaty with the Westos not only for economic benefits but also for security.

Influential Goose Creek planter Maurice Matthews wrote to Lord Ashley in 1671 about this very issue:

“Indians of the Carolina coast are afraid of the footstep of the Westo, a sort of people that live up to the westward which they say, eat people, and are great warriors. The general letters will form of treaties and matters of

53 “Stephen Bull to Lord Ashley,” The Shaftesbury Papers, Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society, 194. Stephen Bull was also very involved in negotiating treaties with the coastal Carolina groups like the Etiwan. “The Bull Family of South Carolina,” The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine Vol. 1, no. 1 (Jan. 1900), 77.

54 Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 44.

peace we have had of late with them before winter comes in I hope to God that there will be a greater discovery made amongst them.”55

Therefore, the Westos and their history in South Carolina are important to the racial dynamics in the southeastern borderlands because they precipitated a fundamental change in the Anglo-run Native American slave system.56 The Westos took up the Indian slave trade to replace the beaver trade after the Iroquois pushed them from the Great Lakes region. In 1659, the Westos moved to what became southern

Georgia to raid the Spanish territories and, by the mid-1660s, set up a more permanent site on the banks of the Savannah River. From this location, the Westos were perfectly situated to influence the borderland dynamics by establishing the human trade which

Carolinians needed to supply Barbados at the expense of the Spanish in Florida.

Consequently, the Westos helped depopulate and open land for Anglo expansion by selling inhabitants such as the Guales, Kiawahs, and other coastal tribes to the English as slaves. This system left coastal Indians eager for English protection but without the land necessary to be considered valuable by the colonists.

Race and Population in the Southeastern Borderlands

The decline in the Spanish presence in the land that became South Carolina in

1670 and eventually Georgia in 1733 was due in no small part to the increase in English trade with various Native American groups such as the Westos, first by Virginia in the

55 “Maurice Matthews to Lord Ashley,” The Shaftesbury Papers, Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society, 334.

56 Slavery in North America before the arrival of Europeans was not equated with race. Some Native customs called for the violent torture and execution of most male war captives, while women and children were often adopted into the capturing tribe. Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 317.

1660s and later by Carolina in the 1680s.57 The Indian slave trade served a secondary purpose, easing settlement of the Carolina interior through depopulation by taking captive and selling as slaves many Native groups in the region. The demand for slaves also supported higher English demand for land to cultivate, and the depopulation caused by the slaving wars made that land easier to acquire. The influence of the

Atlantic World systems of exchange which increased importation of enslaved Africans to the Carolina colony in particular, however, intensified and eventually altered this cycle.

The waning of the slaving wars and the resulting rise in enslaved African labor made the

Spanish-allied Indians significantly less affected by British imperial expansion. Instead of leading to improved relations between English and Spanish colonists, however, the growing population of enslaved labor in increasingly remote areas by the 1730s actually served to strengthen Spanish resistance by providing potential soldiers in the form of disgruntled Africans. Furthermore, the involvement of Africans in the operation of the

Indian slave trade eventually led to, and even funded, armed hostilities between

Spanish settlers, British colonists, and their neighboring Natives.

57 The Westo devastated the Guale and Mocama people who during the mid-seventeenth century made of significant chiefdoms on what became the Georgia coast. John Worth, Struggle for the Georgia Coast (University of Alabama Press: Tuscaloosa, 2007), 9-55.

CHAPTER 3 THE SOUTHEASTERN BORDERLANDS: CONCEPTIONS AND COMPETITION

The Southeastern Borderlands

The arrival of Carolinian colonists intensified an already competitive struggle for resources among Native Americans in the Southeastern borderlands.1 Following the collapse of the Mississippian chiefdoms and amid the devastation of virgin soil epidemics, the indigenous people of this region sought to control the most productive agricultural lands. The Spanish’s arrival in the sixteenth century created new trade opportunities for many groups while coercing others into the agricultural Spanish mission system. Aiming to imitate Spanish success, French and English colonists gradually encroached onto the Native South.2 Consequently, in addition to Native groups forming alliances with each other to combat European imperialism and retain influence, competing European colonists added to this tenuous situation by creating new trade partnerships for goods which could give a Native group an advantage over another.

Borderland Conceptions

For most of the twentieth century in historical scholarship, the term borderlands was loosely applied to geographic areas depicted on a political map to adjust for the uncertainties surrounding the markings of borders, unclear European ruling entities, or

1 For a more complete discussion of how Native cultures competed for resources prior to European intervention, see Joseph Hall, Zamumo’s Gifts: Indian – European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 12-32; Stephen Oatis, A Colonial Complex: South Carolina’s Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War, 1680-1730, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 14-15.

2 Two important works on the Anglo-Indian deer trade with the Creek and the greater trade with Indian groups, see Kathryn H. Braund, Deerskins and Duffels: The Creek Indian Trade with Anglo America, 1685-1815 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), and Robert Paulett, Mapping the Southeastern Anglo-Indian Trade, 1732-1795 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).

perhaps even a misunderstanding of the true scope of Native political power and the realistic struggle for influence of a region. The borderlands grew out of response to

Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, which consigned intercultural interaction to a broad singular model. As this model was refined, Stephen Oatis and others have explained, this model evolved to combine the cultural dynamics of a frontier and geographic realities of a region and apply them to human interaction in an area of undefined power relations.3 In this dissertation the borderlands concept proves useful for understanding how these disparate groups of Spanish settlers, British sponsored colonists of various nationalities, and several groups of Africans and Indians understood the world around them and interacted with it. Thus, in the case of the colonial southeast, a European invasion of a Native south and the ensuing intentional and unintentional exchanges of all people involved makes the borderlands the best model to assess the strategies and behaviors of those people who inhabited these landscapes.

As Europeans and Africans added to the diversity of the early South, they also brought new goals, aspirations, and methods to exploit the landscape. The borderland’s residents all experienced the competition to gain influence and to establish a way of life differently. This chapter explores how each group conceived of their surroundings as a borderland environment. These borderlands were shaped by the struggle among various Indian and European groups to acquire the power and influence needed to achieve their particular goals. These goals varied, and the history of this region is also characterized by groups operating on the edge of European empire: the English, who sought to gain what they viewed as their inherent right to own property and prosper from

3 Oatis, A Colonial Complex, 1-11.

it, and the Spanish of St. Augustine, who aimed to defend their area of influence from

English encroachment and to maintain Catholic mission systems among the indigenous people who survived increasingly aggressive English actions. As European forces struggled to flourish in indigenous homelands, they helped construct a unique setting in which imperial success depended upon Indians and Africans and the manipulation of the relations between them. Achieving these goals often required English colonists in particular, to take matters into their own hands by ignoring international treaties, illegally settling land, trading weapons with the Spanish, or even aiding pirates. Therefore, this chapter will also discuss how various factions of English colonists, their metropolitan backers, and Spanish settlers navigated the political ocean between the colonial experience in North America and the desires of royal leadership.4 The conflicting goals of all borderland residents and the imperial desire to control Indians and Africans sparked population migrations which offered opportunities for members of these two groups who lived within the tenuous reach of English influence. This chapter argues that, although the English strategies devised to encourage African and indigenous compliance and reduce threats from the Spanish caused conflict among English colonists, these strategies were crucial in the formation of an Anglo identity specific to the lowcountry of southeastern North America influenced by population migrations, border disputes, and rebellion by the enslaved. Interactions between Indians and

Africans in the southeastern borderlands also impacted the structures of lowcountry society.

4 For a detailed account of political factionalism in early South Carolina, see L.H. Roper, Conceiving Carolina: Proprietors, Planters, and Plots, 1662-1729. This dissertation focuses on manipulations of Indians’ and Africans’ relationship with each other, but Roper focuses more on recreating the political world in which such interactions took place rather than focusing of the behavior of Indians and Africans themselves.

Providence in the Promised Land: Invasion and Migration

The interaction of various European, African, and Native groups resulted in large population migrations similar to estranged indigenous patterns of resource use and alliance. Settlement patterns in the southeast were in constant flux, continuing movements initiated thousands of years before the fifteenth-century European invasion from the Atlantic. The Spanish became the first Europeans involved in this web of movement after the collapse of the Mississippian chiefdoms. The Native American population gradually declined in the century following the entradas of Spanish conquistadors which left the coastal lowcountry with a less clearly dominant occupant than during the Mississippian period. The Spanish mission system helped to support declining chiefdoms from the Florida peninsula as far north as Virginia.5

Through a relationship with the Westo, English colonists were also involved with indigenous migrations. In the decade before the establishment of the Carolina colony,

Westo raiding for slaves for the English Virginian colonists for use in the Virginia tidewater, and beyond to locations throughout the Caribbean, decimated the coastal homeland of the remnants of the Spanish allied Guale chiefdom, including a surprise attack in 1661 that devastated the Guale countryside and likely led to the abandonment of the mission by the following June of 1662, according to anthropologist John Worth.

This attack involved anywhere from 500 to 2,000 Westo Indians accompanied by British

5 In fact, until the Spanish withdrawal to Cuba in 1763, they played a role in the preservation of lines of chiefly kinship among the Guale and Mocambo. John Worth, The Struggle for the Georgia Coast (University of Alabama Press: Tuscaloosa, 2007), xiv.

“men with guns” in a reported 200 canoes on the Altamaha River.6 Those who survived this attack fled to a mission on Sapelo Island, followed closely by their Westo aggressors. In their hasty pursuit, they constructed a doomed vessel which carried up to seventy warriors, all of whom perished when the current took them out to sea. They

“drowned in view of everyone, with no little sentiment from the enemy, though the said people being amongst those of most valor.”7 Historian Charles Hudson suggests these and other refugees who arrived in the following months might have later reorganized at

Mission San Joseph de Sapala with the indigenous group known as the Yamasees, who played an important role in the borderlands theater of the Anglo-Spanish rivalry.8

Other than transient Native American groups such as the Shawnee occupying the Savannah River valley, the English who arrived in 1670 found the Guale territory inhabited by numerous smaller groups who, for a variety of reasons, did not retreat to

St. Augustine when the Spanish withdrew their mission operations among the Guale in response to the English-sponsored Westo slave raids. The remaining Native groups soon became dependent on trading activities out of Charles Town. These mid- seventeenth century migrations were partially responsible for English perceptions of the land as relatively uninhabited at the time of the establishment of Charles Town. In addition to the demographic fact that the land was sparely populated, leaders in

Carolina attributed to divine providence what they believed to be favorably small Native populations. Governor John Archdale explicitly states in a 1707 pamphlet intended to

6 Governor Aranguiz y Cotes to the Crown, November 15, 1661, in Worth, The Struggle for the Georgia Coast, 15.

7 Ibid, 16.

8 Robbie Ethridge and Charles Hudson ed., The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540-1760 (University Press of Mississippi: Jackson, 1998).

resolve sectional divides in South Carolina that “the hand of God was eminently seen in the thinning of the Indians.”9 An early combination of Atlantic World religious and economic forces, specifically Spanish Franciscan missionizing activities and Virginian colonization efforts, resulted in massive population shifts among indigenous people in the disputed land area between the thirty-first and thirty-second parallels. These forces set the stage for conflicting views of who held the right to control this land; neither

European power possessed the occupying force necessary to do so, and the Native groups who inhabited the region frequently migrated among locations and experienced significant population decline.

Differing Goals

The differing goals and experiences of the English colonists in South Carolina complicate efforts to identify a unifying ideological conception of the southeastern borderlands; indeed, it is these very divergent experiences that made the cultural interactions of this region unique. For example, noted English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke was an influential leader in the planning of the Carolina colony and served as its first secretary. Although the colonists ignored most of Locke’s laws, they did promptly apply his notions of property, especially that slave owners held absolute power over their indentured servants and slaves and that improving the land

9 John Archdale, “A New Description of that Fertile and Pleasant Province of Carolina” (Printed for John Wyat at the Rose in St. Paul’s Churchyard: London, 1707), in Alexander Salley, Narratives of Early South Carolina (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), 285. Archdale cites the history of the Westo to explain his beliefs. He incorrectly attributed Westo brutality and slave raiding to an “unusual civil war” among the Savannah, arguing that the Savannah’s survival was due to their inherent kindness toward the English and ignoring that the Westo were exterminated by angry traders from South Carolina in 1680. Archdale was at a loss as to why “it at other times pleased the almighty God to send unusual sicknesses amongst them, as the Smallpox, etc, to lessen their numbers.” He believed that the English had “little Indian blood to answer for” compared to the Spaniards whom he describes as being only slightly less barbaric than the Natives.

granted the right of ownership.10 Therefore, English colonists countered Spanish land claims in what became Carolina and eventually Georgia by expanding as soon as practical and by improving the land. Expansion, by means legal or illegal, thus was perceived as an imperial English duty. The 1670 Treaty of Madrid ended most disputes over territorial claims by establishing the border of British North America near Hilton

Head Island, but European boundaries in Native lands were not practical or realistic, and were difficult to enforce. This precarious situation resulted in military drills and fears of a surprise Spanish attack dominating the early years of the Carolina settlement.11

Indigenous Perspectives

Native American conceptions of the southeastern borderlands differed from those of the Spanish and English, although most Indian groups in the region saw the value in forming alliances with one or the other and sometimes both European groups.

Mississippian societies had been in decline before the European arrival that accelerated the collapse of that system.12 However, the principles of gift giving, trade, and power through prestige remained central to Native culture throughout sustained interactions with Europeans and Africans until the Yamasee War of 1715. Initially, the late

Mississippian chiefdoms treated the Spanish as potential tools for acquiring prestige.

For example, when the colonization of Florida began in earnest in the late sixteenth

10 David Armitage, “John Locke, Carolina, and Two Treatises of Government,” Political Theory 32 No. 5 (October 2004), 602-627.

11 October 4, 1671 in John Sitgreaves Green, 1828-1881, South Carolina Grand Council Journal, 1671-1883, (34/367 OvrSz), South Carolina Historical Society (hereafter SCHS).

12 Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 1-9.

century, the Indians saw the Spanish mission system as engaging in reciprocal gift giving according to Mississippian norms.13 The mission system allowed the Native groups to preserve certain aspects of their political power in the wake of epidemics and political instability. The Spaniards faced the difficult task of balancing gifts with profit as trade expanded to include deerskin trade between inland Native groups and Havana.

Native leaders maintained old political ties, but these new trade opportunities enabled the common people to create new connections on their own.14

For European imperial powers, the competition for the southeastern borderlands would be won first by controlling the land and secondly by controlling the Indian trade.

Success in both arenas required deftly negotiating the myriad peoples and exploiting the resources of the coastal plain, to which the labor of Indians and eventually that of

Africans was key. European interaction served as both a catalyst of conflict and an instrument of influence. Furthermore, as Native groups established relations with the

English and Spanish, contact with the Africans associated with both European groups provided opportunities for Indians to preserve their existence through deliberate modifications of the labor systems, to maintain their identity through cultural adaptation, and to sustain their freedom and way of life by taking advantage of the conflicts between the European powers. The Spanish and English diplomatic methods and labor systems clashed, and Indians and Africans learned to skillfully negotiate between the two.

13 Ibid, 1-9.

14 Joseph Hall, Zamumo’s Gifts: Indian – European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 33-54. Spanish newcomers allowed Native people who were not in positions of power to subvert the top-down approach to regional trade that signified the Mississippian political system by forging trade relationships Spanish colonists one on one.

Oceans Apart: Distance and Distortion of English Borderland Goals

The southeastern borderlands were an unlikely site for European colonial ideologies to play out in the late seventeenth century compared to the valuable

Caribbean colonies, which were far more profitable and had greater strategic importance. Regardless of location, though, both European nations expected their colonists to follow the leadership of the mother country. English and Spanish leadership did not always share the perspective of their colonies, especially concerning how to control this contested space and to appropriately subjugate Native and African peoples.

The Atlantic Ocean presented both a physical and a psychological barrier between colonists and their mother country. The long voyage across the ocean created new perspectives, and those who survived the journey experienced circumstances few citizens in their home countries could imagine. Therefore, in many cases, the ocean separated the colonial experience from metropolitan expectations. Spanish and English colonists living in a Native world had to accomplish imperial goals while simultaneously maintaining relationships with indigenous people necessary for survival. Spain and

England’s intermittent wars both against and in alliance with each other often complicated such relations for European colonists. The European residents of the southeastern borderlands operated on the edge of empire and had to balance managing indigenous relations and African slave labor with meeting the geopolitical demands of the Atlantic World. Furthermore, the fragmented structure of English proprietary colonies supported few shared perceptions of the colonial agenda among the everyday settlers, governing bodies, and royal heads of state. Each group viewed the borderlands situation differently.

Spanish colonists viewed the borderlands situation much differently than the

English. The Spanish’s aims were not the control of land and production of lucrative cash crops. The settlement of Charles Town at Albemarle Point in 1670 immediately forced the Spanish in Florida into a defensive posture. They viewed the establishment of the Carolina colony as intrusion into Spanish Guale territory, which stretched northward from Florida beyond the Altamaha River.15 In addition to rogue English colonists burning properties in the northernmost Spanish settlements, the English alliance with the Westos did not go unnoticed. The Spanish did not sit idly as the

Indians within their sphere of influence were terrorized. Indeed, some of the early retaliations against the English colonists in South Carolina featured Indian and African cooperation and catalyzed further similar operations, leading to the creation of a black militia in 1683 which lasted until the 1750s.16

Spanish officials in Florida also responded to English intrusions into their territory by planning a naval assault on the new English settlement of Port Royal by Spanish

Indians and Africans in 1686.17 Edward Randolph, the royal surveyor general in the

English colonies, reported to the British Board of Trade that this attack involved more than one hundred soldiers. The attackers plundered the plantations of Edisto Island and

Port Royal, taking thirteen slaves from Governor Joseph Morton’s plantation. Of these, two appear to have chosen to return to South Carolina. When Morton petitioned

15 This territory was named for the Guale chiefdom that dominated the area and its sea islands prior to European arrival.

16 Jane Landers, "Gracia Real De Santa Teresa De Mose: A Free Black Town in Spanish Colonial Florida," The American Historical Review 95, no. 1 (Feb. 1990): 9-30.

17 The land on which Port Royal sat was called Santa Elena by the Spanish and briefly served as the capital of Florida during the 1570s. Mismanagement by Spanish leadership and poor relations with local Native Americans led to its abandonment by the Spanish in 1576.

Governor Diego de Quiroga of St. Augustine for the return of the remaining eleven

Africans, he refused to do so without an order from the King of Spain.18 The Spanish

Governor Quiroga also reported that an unspecified number of fugitive African slaves arrived in 1688, followed by ten more in 1689 with their owners in pursuit. 19 In allowing these fugitive slaves to establish new lives in St. Augustine, the Spanish colonists gained workers for their own brand of coerced labor for an indefinite period of time.20

This issue remained contentious in later years, with South Carolina Governor James

Colleton calling for the return of runaway slaves from Florida as a gesture of goodwill.21

Spanish colonists viewed the borderlands as a defensive strategy, whose contested space protected the transport of goods from other locations in the Atlantic World. This strategy depended not on overwhelming Spanish might but on the successful deployment of a military force consisting largely of Native American and African soldiers, many of whom had escaped from English colonies. In fact, over the period from the 1686 raid until the opening battles of the War of Jenkins’ Ear in 1739, Spanish forces in Florida successfully integrated escaped slaves into their military forces. In addition to spreading rumors of the freedom to be found during the 1680s, the official sanctuary policy remained beneficial to the Spanish. These African soldiers were so

18 Letters of Edward Randolph to the Board of Trade, 1699 in Salley, Narratives of Early Carolina, 1650-1708 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967), 205.

19 Irene Wright, “Dispatches of Spanish Officials Bearing on the Free Negro Settlement of Gracia Real De Santa Teresa De Mose, Florida,” The Journal of Negro History 9, no. 2 (Apr. 1924): 145.

20 These fugitive slaves helped make up the population of Gracia Real de Mose, the first free black town in North America.

21 Verner Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670-1732 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), 33.

familiar with the Carolinian landscape and its enslaved laborers that Spanish officials even considered using them to officially incite slave rebellions.22

Florida was far from being the crown jewel of Spanish America, settlement around St. Augustine served mostly logistical purposes. Conducting operations in

Florida as early as 1513, the Spanish involved themselves in the Native landscape in such a way that the expansion of physical European settlement was not required to achieve their goal of guarding the Florida Straits to keep their treasure galleons safe from pirates and other threats. The withdrawal of Spanish missionaries from the Guale chiefdom, however, opened that region to occupation by the English. By 1720, South

Carolina official James Sutherland described the colony and its landscape as “very pleasant and plentiful, being well stored with corn, cattle, rice, grapes, and all other kinds of fruit.”23 Despite relative success in achieving the goals set by the Lords

Proprietors, the first half century of South Carolina’s existence did not pass without serious conflict. The course of the colony was charted by normal colonists who were not bound by imperial agenda, sought profit through legal and illegal trade activities, and measured success as determined by notions of control over the relationship between

Indians and Africans.

This competitive reality affected how English colonists viewed and defined themselves. Primarily motivated by control of the land and its profits, those who

22 A list outlying the benefits of the use of fugitive slave soldiers in 1731 reveals that Spanish Governors Benavides and Montiano both considered these subversive tactics. May 28, 1731, Santo Domingo 837, Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI), 943-949; Diana Reigelsperger, “Interethnic Relations and Settlement on the Spanish Florida Frontier, 1688-1763,” (PhD diss., University of Florida, 2013), 249.

23 Letter from James Sutherland to “My Lord”, 1720, William R. Coe collection, 1699-1741, (Manuscript 1150.00), SCHS.

colonized the southeastern borderlands were far more concerned with expansion than their New England and Chesapeake neighbors. Many Lords Proprietors of Carolina tried to increase sugar production in Barbados by trading for Indian slaves. After the

Yamasee War ended in 1717, exporting Indian labor from the Carolina colony was no longer practical, and rice became its most marketable commodity. The lowcountry marsh was especially useful for rice production, as were the enslaved Africans who came to predominate in English settlements. Therefore, English colonists sought to control as much land suitable for growing rice as possible. This put them squarely in a borderlands struggle that had started among Indian groups but expanded to include the

Spanish, English, and at times the French.24

Carolinian Colonists

A variety of factors influenced the everyday decisions of southeastern borderlands residents due to the constant proximity of others with competing interests and comparable resources. In the face of constant European aggression, Native

American groups continuously formed alliances and confederations in order to preserve their influence and way of life. European manipulation of Native alliances was crucial to defending the arbitrary colonial borders within Native space, which to an extent acknowledged that neither the Spanish nor British could control the lowcountry on their own terms. For all parties involved, the best hope for control lay in favorable trade and physical occupation of geographic space. English and Spanish sponsored settlers

24 The arrival of Europeans certainly did not initiate the dynamics of the borderlands, they merely added to them. Spanish and English definitions of borders were largely irrelevant to who controlled the region, be that Native or European. Settlement patterns do in fact prove that English colonists did not respect the borders established by their own leadership. Control of various areas usually came from whoever physically occupied it, and English sponsored Westo slaving excursions eased English attempts and control of the coastal regions by helping to depopulating the area of the Guale Indians who acknowledged this region as their home.

attempted to maintain the upper hand through constant vigilance of changes in Native polity and measured their success by the power they exerted through their Indian allies.

Moreover, the notions of success held by both groups of North American colonists did not necessarily align with the intentions of their metropole nor represent the views or opinions of the enslaved Africans who accompanied them.

From 1670 until around 1740, a considerable amount of varying opinions among several parties within the growing British Empire marked the first seventy years of South

Carolina’s existence, a situation only complicated by the establishment of the Georgia colony to the south in 1733. The early settlers of the two colonies could not have been more different: South Carolinians sought to build on riches attained in Barbados, while

Georgians were the “worthy poor” desiring to build lives free from debt.25 However, the

English crown viewed both as buffer colonies against Spanish Florida. In the early years of South Carolina’s settlement, the English government was anxious, sending several queries for intelligence on how Florida’s strength and position influenced Britain’s potential success in the Indian trade. The most serious of these queries asks “what advantage might it be to the Government of Carolina to have this place taken from the

Spaniards annexed and by what means this might be most easily accomplished,” suggesting a mindset favoring invasion.26 Although coming in the midst of forty-two years of relative peace between Spain and England, this inquiry indicates an aggressive posture and suggests some form of British support for military activities conducted by

25 This is the term used by Oglethorpe and promotional literature for Georgia to describe the type of colonists they were looking for. People who worked hard but were in debt, former prisoners, and other cast offs were sought to create a colony untainted by the laziness that was thought by Oglethorpe to be a symptom of wealth and slave holding.

26 “Letter to the Right Honourable the Lords Commissioner for Trade and Plantations,” 1719, William R. Coe Collection, SCHS.

the proprietary colony.27 The colony leaders were aware of these metropolitan expectations and at times used them to obtain funds to meet the colony’s own goals. A

1685 letter to England requesting funding to entertain Yamasees familiar with Florida gives the rationale that “it being much our concern lyeing opon the frontier to know the

Spaniards actings, motions, and intension.”28 Colonial officials recognized when strategies to increase their profit coincided with geopolitical concerns, and in this instance, they sought financial assistance to construct profitable trade relationships with more potential to be lucrative than an invasion of Spanish Florida.29

In the early eighteenth century, the backcountry pine forests of the Carolina colony were slowly being cleared by a burgeoning naval stores industry. In the wake of this deforestation, successful farms were established, enabling English colonists to experiment with new crops such as rice and indigo that became regional staples over

27 The Carolina colony was intended to serve as a buffer between English North American colonies and Spanish Florida, even though it was founded during a time of official peace between the end of the second Anglo-Spanish War in 1660 and the start of the War of Spanish Succession in 1702. The language used in this correspondence is evidence that, even during a period of official peace, English colonial possessions were valued first and foremost for their strategic military importance, regardless of which private group held the charter. At times, these interests coincided, and at other times, they conflicted. This pattern is a defining characteristic not only of the colonial experience but also of the borderlands reality which required the Lords Proprietors to weigh the crown’s wishes and concerns against the more practical trade alliances with Native Americans and the expansionist strategies needed to maximize agricultural profits.

28 Hamilton, Montgomerie, Cardrosse, and Will Dunlop to Unknown “Honored Sir”, January 10, 1685, Records in the British Public Record Office Relating to South Carolina 1685-1690, SCDAH.

29 Geopolitical concerns in this case meant that aggressive expansion by Carolinians meant that the land seized could be used to construct forts to grant the English strategic advantage in their frequents wars with the Spanish. Forts like these eventually came to include Fort King George, and other fortifications in the landscape that later became the Georgia colony. John Barnwell, the influential planter and military leader responsible for Fort King George’s construction in 1721 was particularly savvy in aligning the private goals of colonists with the British parliament. In fact, he was one of the major petitioners for the ousting of the Lord Proprietors and the transfer of South Carolina to royal control. For more on the military aspects of South Carolina’s military plans for the Altamaha River area, see Larry Ivers, British Drums on the Southern Frontier: The Military Colonization of Georgia, 1733-1749 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1974).

the next few decades.30 As a result, the financial allure of slave labor and massive agricultural production was strong enough to prompt many settlers to forego due process to obtain lands and break the law en masse. The appeal of profit outweighed the fiscal responsibility to pay the quitrents required of other colonies. Homestead fraud was also common across South Carolina, as rapid expansion at times led the proliferation of schemes to defraud rightful owners of unoccupied property. One colonist complained that these squatters could not produce their deeds to the property when challenged, often claiming that they had been lost in a fire at some unspecified earlier time.31 While fires were indeed both common and destructive, the frequency with which this excuse was used betrayed its improbability, demonstrating the bold desperation that drove the aggressive expansion of British influence in the southeastern borderlands.

Eager settlers aspiring either to replicate their Barbadian success or simply to have a fresh start on lands that appeared unoccupied viewed the physical landscape of the borderlands as theirs for the taking. The deforestation of the coastal plain served the dual purpose of supplying naval stores and opening land for cattle to export throughout the English Caribbean. Therefore, settlers greatly desired to control lands, even those firmly within Spanish territory. Some English colonists chose to expand far southward of

Charleston and Port Royal and close to the Altamaha River. This area not only was far within the Yamasee homeland but also frequently claimed by both Spanish and English officials. These colonists who desired to reside outside the reach not only of Spanish

30 Efforts to grow sugar, as in the more profitable British Caribbean colonies, ended in dismal failure. The climate was also not suitable for Carolinians to emulate Virginian success in tobacco.

31 Undated Letter, William R. Coe collection, SCHS.

and English imperial influence, but also of enforcement by local authorities, operated in a borderlands environment in which they could take advantage of the lack of colonial oversight to pursue their own goals without regard for Indian trade regulations or

European treaties. This borderland environment permitted these ambitious colonists to engage independent and often illicit trade with any group they desired and demonstrates how colonists negotiated for their own benefit.

English colonists living on the edge of South Carolina took advantage of lack of government oversight typical of the borderlands in two ways concerning land acquisition. First, to supplement income from the production of the land, they could forsake any notion of imperial loyalty and trade with Spaniards or even pirates. When these pirates attacked Spanish settlements or ships, Spanish officials targeted the

Carolinian colonists known to have assisted them, putting the Grand Council of South

Carolina in the awkward position of defending disobedient colonists and appearing to have no control over its people. Common from 1685 to 1715, such trade was noticed by the colonial office in Whitehall in 1687 but still greatly troubled leading merchants in

South Carolina after 1710. For example, merchant Joseph Boone, along with military leader John Barnwell, pleaded with the Lords Commission of Trade and Plantations to address the illegal trade of “small arms, great guns, or any other military stores, whereby they may be better enabled to fit out their privateers.”32

Second, and equally contributing to the tension between European powers, some colonists went so far as to claim these disputed lands by force. The Carolina lowcountry

32 Craven, Paltino, and Albermarle to James Colleton Esq. and the Grand Council, BPRO, Whitehall March 3 1687, Records in the British Public Record Office Relating to South Carolina 1685- 1690, South Carolina Department of Archives and History (hereafter SCDAH).

became so crowded that, by 1687, it was not unusual for outlying settlers to make military plans independent of both local leadership and royal preferences. Such settlers invoked a clause in Carolina’s charter that permitted colonists the “power to pursue those that have invaded us even without the bounds of our Province.”33 This policy was clearly intended to supply military support for colonists in a borderland environment where armed conflict was common and expected—not to wage “an invasive war upon the King of Spain’s subject within his own territories,”34 suggesting that limits applied to opportunistic warfare in the borderlands.

Enforcement of diplomatic agreements, international partnerships, and colonial law originating from across the Atlantic was extremely difficult on the peripheries of empire. If English borderland colonists often did not accept the Lords Proprietors’ laws, it follows that they were even more defiant of Spanish claims to the region amid the lack of direct threat or enforcement. In March 1687, Carolina officials reported receiving intelligence from Havana that a joint Spanish force of “Spaniards, Indians, and Mulattos have fallen upon the out skirts of our settlement.”35 These officials realized that this force likely was retaliation for their inability to control aggressive colonists who,

“notwithstanding the King’s commands and our own repeated orders to the contrary, have burned and robbed the houses of some Spaniards” in conjunction with pirates.36

33 Craven, Paltino, and Albermarle to James Colleton Esq. and the Grand Council, Whitehall March 3 1687, Records in the British Public Record Office Relating to South Carolina 1685-1690 (hereafter BRPO), SCDAH. The clause is best exemplified through “An Act to Levy and Impresse men Armed for the defiance of the Government,” October 15, 1686.

34 Ibid, Records in the British Public Record Office Relating to South Carolina 1685-1690, SCDAH.

35 March 3 1687, BPRO 1685-1960, SCDAH

36 Ibid, BPRO, SCDAH.

England and Spain were frequently at war throughout the seventeenth century, increasing the seriousness of even the most random and reckless armed skirmishes between English colonists and Spanish forces in the southeastern borderlands. In

March 1687, the colonial government of South Carolina was alerted of possible

Spanish-allied soldiers and learned that some rogue colonists had abused policy by occupying land within Spanish territory. The Carolinian officials quickly distanced themselves from these unsanctioned activities by overzealous colonists. In the South

Carolina’s Grand Council report to London, the colonial officials dismissed these settlers as outliers, claiming that “no rational man can think that the Subjects of any Prince may be permitted without his leave or consent to make war on any of his Allies for the

Reparation of their private injuries or any other cause.”37 The English suspected the

Spanish of having similar provisions for military support and reacted cautiously to rumors of war, performing due diligence to ensure that the Spanish government had sanctioned any attack before retaliating.38 The March 1687 report of Spanish soldiers was not deemed credible. Interestingly, the primary reason for the Carolina official’s doubts is that it came from “a single information of a mulatto.”39 English colonists might have been skeptical of the notion of racial diversity in the Spanish military leadership, despite numerous deployments of soldiers with black and mixed ethnicity elsewhere in

37 Ibid, BPRO, SCDAH.

38 The Spanish at St. Augustine were also especially interested in rumors. Spanish prisoners taken during the battles of 1706 claimed that the timing of those attacks was based on rumors that disease had reduced the English population. The prisoners explain that, because of the reports of disease, Spanish officials did not believe that other English colonies would be willing to provide aid. Rumors could affect military tactics across over 1,000 miles. “An Account of the Invasion of the South Carolina by the French and Spaniards in the Month of August 1706,” Letters to the Secretary of State, Colonial Office Series 5/382 (hereafter CO5/382), BPRO, SCDAH.

39 Ibid, Letters to the Secretary of State, BPRO, SCDAH.

the Atlantic Word.40 More likely, however, the colonists chose not to start wars based on a single piece of intelligence. The importance of such checks and balances to both sides shows that operating on the edge of imperial influence not only decreased sense of security but also heightened feelings of individualism and self-reliance.

View from London

Unlike many English colonists intent on pursuing personal wealth, London viewed the South Carolina colony as part of a larger vision for British influence in the

Atlantic World. South Carolina colonial officials thus had to navigate the political space between managing their colonists and, when necessary, aligning their actions with the goals and strategies of the British metropole to benefit the Lords Proprietors themselves. An example of this delicate balance occurred after the skirmishes of the late seventeenth century. In 1702, the Lords Proprietors believed that the occupation of

St. Augustine would be in their best interests, and as the British and Spanish were at war, the Carolina Grand Council played off the geopolitical realities of the Atlantic World in an attempt to garner royal support for the destruction of the Spanish settlement of

Apalachee and for the first siege of St. Augustine. The council warned the British secretary of state that, “if we become masters of the castle, it is impossible for us to keep it for long without her majesty in her princely wisdom.”41

40 These events hint at a greater debate over African and eventually African American military service. Doubts over aptitude and performance kept the United States Armed Forces segregated until 1947. Beginning with the War of Jenkins’ Ear and James Oglethorpe’s argument of the necessity of African military participation to ensure a system of African slavery, the debate over black military service usually centered on necessity and social impact. In British colonial America, the arming of black soldiers was often necessary, but leaders feared that such service would lead to a sense of entitlement or expectations of freedom that would threaten the social order.

41 “From the Council Board at Charles Town,” November 26, 1702, Letters to the Secretary of State, C05/382, BPRO, SCDAH.

Due to South Carolina’s connection with Barbados, royal officials in London saw the colony as a component of a larger Caribbean strategy that changed several times from 1710 to 1740 as after concluding hostilities with the Spanish and French in 1706, the English often found themselves at war with the Spanish.42 Indian slave trading from

Carolina to the Caribbean intensified after the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, escalating the destructive captive-taking practices on the North American mainland that played a significant role in sparking the Yamasee War which nearly pushed English settlers from

South Carolina. This war effectively ended large-scale trafficking of Indian labor and forced many former Native allies of South Carolina to retreat to Spanish Florida.

Many in England who already felt that Britain was far behind other European powers in American colonization were anxious for the crown to expand its holdings in the New World. Increasing the sphere of British influence proved difficult during the

Anglo-Spanish War, especially after the Treaty of Seville allowed Spanish officers to board and inspect British ships to verify compliance with Asiento regulations.43 At times, this concession led to the seizure of British ships, cargo, and currency. Such actions infuriated citizens of the British Empire who painted the Spanish as reckless aggressors and pirates, despite Robert Walpole’s support for them in the War of Polish Succession.

When British soldiers were deployed to Gibraltar and the West Indies, Spain annulled the Asiento and seized all British ships in Spanish ports. These events heightened tensions across Europe, and added significance to the everyday interactions of

42 For a full discussion on South Carolina’s position in a wider British Caribbean, see also Matthew Mulcahy, Hubs of Empire: The Southeastern Lowcountry and the British Caribbean (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2014), and Max Edelson, Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).

43 The Asiento was a Spanish policy which was allowed slave traders affiliated with other countries to supply Spanish markets with enslaved labor.

borderland colonists who were struggling with the Stono Rebellion, which many South

Carolinian’s blamed on Spanish influence on their enslaved Africans. It also raised the alarm in military buffer colony of Georgia, where James Oglethorpe was already marshalling support for an invasion of Florida based on a developing unifying vision of a lowcountry society based on slave labor and free from Spanish tampering, which is the topic of Chapter Five of this dissertation.

By 1739, British politicians were delivering fiery speeches, outraged that thirty years of treaty negotiations had not put Britain in a stronger position in the Atlantic

World. The seizure of British ships was viewed as an “insult to the British colours.”44 The failure by South Carolina and the new colony of Georgia to remove the Spanish from the southeastern borderlands was considered both a military failure and a national disgrace. The public believed that Britain had missed its opportunity because “had the

Spaniards been attacked last year in New Spain, we should have found them unprovided, their Garrisons without men, and their fortifications out of repair.”45

Political speeches provide useful insight into the perceptions of British citizens in

Europe and expose a disconnection with colonial reality. The same speech that attacked a lack of British aggression also presumed that the new colony of Georgia is

“naked and defenseless.”46 This speech protested the Convention of Pardo, whose second article prohibited St. Augustine and Georgia from building new forts in an

44 “The speech of the right hon. The l--d v-sc--nt g-ge, against the convention with Spain,” 1739, London Magazine: or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer, 8:194.

45 Ibid, 295.

46 Ibid, 296. This assumption was far from reality. Two years earlier, in 1737, Oglethorpe successfully persuaded King George II to place a military regiment under his command despite his limited military experience.

attempt to deescalate the rising tensions that eventually broke out into the War of

Jenkins’ Ear.47 The popular contemporary British periodical the General Magazine regarded the British agreement not to increase defenses as a conspiracy in which the

British crown had secretly succumbed to Spanish displeasure at Georgia’s establishment and planned to do nothing if it were invaded. In reality, Georgia’s founder,

General James Oglethorpe, in 1739 rallied colonists from throughout British North

America to support his plan to lay siege to St. Augustine—one of the most aggressive actions possible in this situation. From 1670 to 1740, British metropolitan opinions drastically diverged from the realities of the Southeastern borderlands.

The Lords Proprietors

Distance also appeared to dilute the power and urgency of the Lords Proprietors’ instructions from London during the early years of the Carolina settlement and to obscure public perception throughout the eighteenth century. Perhaps best exemplified by the early Virginians’ search for gold, perceived notions of success did not often match reality. Exaggerated Spanish travel accounts misled Virginian colonists who found harsh and grueling the work they were led to believe would be simple and profitable. The Virginia tidewater had very little gold and the reality of even simple agricultural success in a coastal marshland was almost unattainable without significant indigenous assistance. Early English colonists sought to emulate Spanish success in integrating into native patterns of exchange, and although Virginians had already engaged the Westo in supplementing their human labor supply, Carolinian colonists’

47 The War of Jenkins’ Ear broke out between England and Spain over disputed claims to land between the Georgia colony and Spanish Florida and over differing perceptions of piracy off the southeastern coast of North America and in the Caribbean. The conflict is named after English Captain Robert Jenkins, whose ear was cut off by a Spanish privateer who accused him of piracy. This act galvanized English support for armed aggression against Spanish Florida.

initial forays into the Indian trade encountered difficulty. In partial fulfillment of the agricultural needs of Barbados, early Indian trade was regulated directly by the Lords

Proprietors and revolved around food production. Serious problems with this policy emerged during the first year of the Carolina colony. In September 1671, a dispute occurred over the theft of corn by Kussoe Indians who “upon every high occasion have and do threaten the cities of all or any of our people.”48 The leadership in South Carolina immediately assumed that the Kussoe “intend for and with the Spaniards to cut off the

English people in this place.”49 As a security measure, the colony implemented drastic regulations detrimental to the Indian trade. Based on the governor Joseph West’s belief

“that the said Indians are endangering and contriving the destruction of the settlement and his majesties subjects therein,” open war was declared.50 The following month, most colonists began military drills in preparation for an expected assault. Although they viewed their actions as necessary to maintain a foothold against the Spanish, war was declared against the Kussoe Indians and “their friends.”51 Unfamiliar with the area,

South Carolinians openly admitted that they did not know who the Spanish’s supposed

Indian allies were. The English settlers went so far as to forbid any Natives from entering colonial settlements, including their only allies, the Westo.52

Aggressive English settlement in the lowcountry did not advance without consequences. The Spanish did try to enforce their claims to the southern parts of

48 September 27, 1671, South Carolina Grand Council Journal, SCHS.

49 Ibid, South Carolina Grand Council Journal, SCHS.

50 Ibid, South Carolina Grand Council Journal, SCHS.

51 Ibid, South Carolina Grand Council Journal, SCHS.

52 Undated Letter in 1674, South Carolina Grand Council Journal, SCHS.

South Carolina which eventually became Georgia in 1733. Throughout the 1690s,

Spanish-allied Indians and a small number of black Floridians raided English settlements on the edge of the colony in a style of warfare typical of the southeastern borderlands. As neither European group had the power to conduct direct assaults with their own soldiers, they relied on coerced Native American and African labor.

The Borderlands Slave Trade

Indian and African labor was crucial to the development of the southeastern borderlands. Although benefiting mostly English colonists, the dual enslavement of

Indians and Africans had repercussions throughout the region, including Native migration and African slave resistance. North Carolina, and later Georgia, did not immediately produce the raw export goods needed to attract slave ships, so places such as South Carolina took the lead in the satisfying the regional need for imported human labor. In addition to the port at Charleston, the slave markets at Oyster Point served as a major export center of Native American captives to British islands throughout the Caribbean. This unique hybrid of Native and African slave trading and its larger market of several mainland and island colonies allowed the intrepid Carolina merchant to build a small fortune by combining the trade of goods from Indians with a larger trade in human chattel throughout the lowcountry. These actions are unsurprising given that many settlers hailed most recently from Barbados, and four of the Lords

Proprietors who controlled Carolina belonged to the Royal African Company. Those who had been successful in the Caribbean were eager to be successful in Carolina, building their own fortunes, local reputation, and political future through slave importation.

Colonists in the Carolina borderlands followed the model of slavery as practiced by Virginia. Founded roughly a half century earlier in 1607, the Virginia colony found success in slave-based tobacco production. Carolina, with a similar climate and topography, was intended to replicate Virginia’s success, rather than find a new crop or experiment with a new source of labor. The Lords Proprietors offered incentives for early colonists to assist in building a slave-based society, giving land concessions to families who immigrated with large households including slaves. Locke included this provision in his original Fundamental Constitution of South Carolina, which offered owners 20 acres for male slaves and 10 for female slaves brought during the first year of the colony.53 Such policies demonstrate early notions which based property ownership on the useful production of land.54

African and Indian slave systems grew during the first fifty years of Carolina’s existence, and after the Yamasee War, African slavery catalyzed serious demographic changes. The first African slave reportedly arrived in November 1670, and small-scale slave trade with the Spanish started in 1674.55 Large-scale, direct slave trade with Africa did not begin until after 1698, but slave importation to South Carolina increased quickly to meet demand stemming from rapid expansion based on the successful cultivation of indigo and eventually the popular Carolina Gold strand of rice.56 For example, the

53 Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America Volume 4 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Inst, 1935), 242. “Brief Description of Carolina,” in B.R. Carroll, Historical Collections of South Carolina Volume II, 15.

54 Locke perfected and explained these ideas in Two Treatises on Government, published in 1689.

55 May 23, 1674, “Instructions to Mr. Perceval,” Historical Collections of South Carolina Volume V, 442.

56 “Book Miscellaneous Records, 1694-1704,” Probate Office, Charleston, South Carolina.

colony imported twenty-four Africans in 1706, but 604, more than twenty times the earlier number, in 1724.57 By 1726, Carolina’s African slave population neared 40,000.

This economic success had broad demographic results, laying the foundation for a large enslaved African population that alarmed English settlers as early as 1698.58 To balance the labor required to ensure agricultural profits with the need to create less dangerous demographics, an act was passed in 1698 to encourage a desired ratio of one white servant to every six enslaved Africans.59 Indian slaves were not included in these calculations.

The growth of slave importation supplemented the successful Indian slave trade.

Despite the increasing number of enslaved Africans in South Carolina during the last decade of the seventeenth century, Native Americans still accounted for more than twenty-five percent of the slave labor force in South Carolina in 1709.60 This mixture presented unique opportunities to colonists who combined Atlantic slave importation with trade ventures among the Yamasee and Creek. Trading firms capitalized on these opportunities; for example, Hill and Guerard used their profitable slave-trading routes from the River Gambia to finance their trade among the Creek Indians throughout the late 1730s. These connections fueled the need for labor and the thirst for expansion

57 “Negroes Imported into South Carolina, 1706-1724,” Report of the Committee of the Commons House of Assembly of the Province of South Carolina on the State of the Paper Currency of the said Province, (London, 1937).

58 “Journal of the Board of Trade, 1726,” Colonial Office 391: 35, 170-171.

59 “Act for the Encouragement of the Importation of White Servants, 1698” in Thomas Cooper, The Statutes at Large of South Carolina Vol. 2-6 Containing Acts of South Carolina from 1682 to 1838 Both Inclusive. Columbia, S.C.: A.S. Johnston, 1841, Vol. II, 153-156, no 177.

60 Governor and Council of South Carolina to the Board of Trade, September 17, 1709, in Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade, 256.

even as the British attempted to maximize their influence in the Southeast by establishing the Georgia colony in 1733 and simultaneously building alliances with potential Native American allies in the event of escalating hostilities with Spanish

Florida. The financial opportunities enabled by slave imports directly benefitted the

Lords Proprietors, fueled English expansion into the Spanish-claimed countryside, and in many ways financed the Indian trade that South Carolinians used to make connections and gain prestige within various Native communities.

Although trading firms involved in both the Indian and African slave trades facilitated the relationships with Natives necessary to expand colonial settlements with a degree of security from Indian attack, South Carolina’s African slave importation also increased tensions with the Spanish. In fact, English financial success in the disputed lands made both Native Americans and enslaved Africans crucial players in the

European imperial struggle. The flourishing of slavery in the tidal marshes of the lowcountry created an English need for more coastal land to grow the increasingly popular cash crops of rice and indigo. The most desirable land for this purpose lay in the sparsely populated regions south of the Savannah River. The Yamasee War had decimated the Native population in this region, and many Indian survivors fled to

Spanish Florida, leading the Carolinians to believe that they could occupy this land with little resistance from Natives and from the Lords Proprietors, who were slowly losing control. To ensure the success of this venture, a tax imposed on the Indian trade from

1720 directly funded Barnwell’s military colonization of the land surrounding the

Altamaha River, an area much closer to St. Augustine than the boundaries drawn by the

1670 Treaty of Madrid. 61 The tax supported the construction of forts intended to protect a projected influx of new English settlers who eventually formed the Georgia colony in

1733. The money spent by South Carolina on defense was more than recompensed due to an Indian policy that kept the South Carolina Indian trade profitable. This trade, however, also had the unintended consequence of spurring cultural exchange between

Indians and Africans, whom the English sought to control.

Borderland Cultural Connections

Carolinians initially sought to appease Native Americans through profitable trade which often involved Indian interactions with Africans, despite the divide-and-rule strategy by which the English generally sought to minimize interactions between these two oppressed peoples. Official practices could be changed if they would maximize profits, a tendency that proved detrimental to Carolina’s security in the Yamasee War.

Efficient trade with Indians required the use of some slave labor, and English traders relied on Africans’ linguistic skills. Trade records document many instances of multicultural interaction during the burgeoning Indian trade in the colonial frontier. The

Journal of the Commissioners of the Indian Trade from 1710 to 1718 reveals that business deals between traders frequently involved enslaved Africans who assisted in transporting cargo. In one instance, Captain Bartholomew Gallard gave slaves to another trader to row a boat up the Peedee River to trade with the Wineau Indians in

1716.62 Enslaved Africans quite commonly worked as oarsmen. The rivers of South

61 “Commissioner of Trade Collection, September 1, 1720, Military Expenses for John Barnwell”, in the William R. Coe Collection, SCHS.

62 South Carolina, Board of Commissioners of the Indian Trade, William L. McDowell, and South Carolina. Archives Dept, Journals of the Commissioners of the Indian Trade, September 20, 1710-August 29, 1718, (Columbia: South Carolina Archives Dept., 1955), 92.

Carolina were the highways of trade during the colonial period, so some traders had to travel more than a hundred miles on water with their trade goods loaded on boats.

Moreover, Native Americans and enslaved Africans were both put to work in factories, trading posts, and leather-carving enterprises, in many cases creating shared experiences. Soldier-turned-trader John Barnwell had a slave named Robin employed in the “the Storehouse and Trade in Charles Town, at the rate of four pounds per month, while in that service.”63 Robin held this position several times. Barnwell also acquired a mustee boy, a child of mixed Native American and African ethnicity, to assist in the trade and be educated for nineteen years.64 Colonel Parris employed an African to receive trade goods from members of the Cherokee nation.65 An African slave named

Timboe also became an accomplished interpreter employed in the trade with Creek

Indians.66 Cultural exchange and racial mixing increased as the English–Indian trade flourished.67 This unique situation created interesting cross-cultural connections that reached far beyond the boundaries of white settlement.

Borderland Migrations

Slave rebellion emerged as an additional unintended consequence of agricultural success and English geographic expansion. A larger slave population, some African

63 Journals of the Commissioners of the Indian Trade, 170.

64 Journals of the Commissioners of the Indian Trade, 251.

65 Journals of the Commissioners of the Indian Trade, 252.

66 J. Leitch Wright, The Only Land They Knew: The Tragic Story of the American Indians in the Old South (New York; London: Free Press; Collier Macmillan, 1981), 250.

67 Tim Fulford and Kevin Hutchings, Native Americans and Anglo-American Culture, 1750-1850: The Indian Atlantic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), describe cultural brokers as “people who used their rare expertise in both cultures to negotiate, for themselves and for the people they led, strategic and material advantage, but who also knew enough to achieve effective compromise and working partnerships. They were able to impersonate the people of the other side to their own people.”

slaves’ familiarity with the surrounding Native communities, and perhaps most importantly, the increasing proximity of the southward-spreading plantations of South

Carolina to the Spanish all contributed to the enslaved population’s resistance to the

English lowcountry slave system. Despite the advantages of receiving Native refugees who could be used as soldiers against the English after the Yamasee War, the Spanish had no desire to see a similar uprising among the Indians in their territory. Spanish officials were as suspicious of Indian and African interaction as the English. Though laws forbidding fraternization by Native and African individuals existed throughout the history of Spanish America, Floridian colonists found themselves in a precarious situation. Historically, Indians did not accept blindly their role as laborers or the payment of tribute to the Spanish across the Atlantic World, but the Spanish military relied on them in the construction of Florida’s defenses.68 This practice conveniently offered escaped English slaves sanctuary and serviceable labor in defense of the Spanish, but it also increased the population of potential allies for the local Indians. After the

Yamasee War, the Spanish governor enacted new legislation and settlement policies to decrease the likelihood of an uprising while still using escaped slaves to defend against the English.

Native groups established trade relationships with Europeans on an opportunistic basis. The maintenance of economic ties required mutual respect and positive social relations, symbolized by actions such as reciprocal gift giving. When the English broke these protocols, Indians engaged in war. Members of these formerly English-allied

68 Spanish colonists in Florida experienced this firsthand in 1597, when the Guale rebelled against Spanish missionary efforts and Mission Santa Catalina de Guale, located on the southern portion of what is now St. Catherine’s Island in Georgia.

Indian groups who fled southward after the Yamasee War, however, belonged to some of the same groups that had aided in the English-directed destruction of Apalachee and attack on St. Augustine in 1702. This migration was understandably problematic for the

Spanish colonists. Before the war, Indian refugees lived close to St. Augustine under armed guard.69 After the war, these camps were moved to various town sites roughly grouped by language, because the Indians were not then perceived as a threat due to their recent conflict with the British. As the number of fugitive African slaves arriving at

St. Augustine increased, however, officials ensured that new African arrivals were kept separate from the new Indian villages. Laws limiting Africans’ presence in Indian villages to three days were strengthened upon the establishment of the first free black town in North America known as Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, or simply as

Fort Mose.

Two miles north of St. Augustine on the banks of Mose Creek, this town served as a fort to supplement military operations out of the main defense facility on the

Matanzas River, Castillo de San Marcos. According to Spanish records, the Fort Mose was established in 1738 to settle runaway slaves who had fled to Florida over the preceding five decades seeking freedom through Catholic conversion. The town is described as initially having thirty-eight married men and their children, who were expected to be instructed in the Catholic faith by Dr. Joseph Leon. In later years, the fort held more than seventy-five former enslaved men and their families. Instead of completely freeing these runaway slaves, Spanish officials forbade them from leaving

69 Juan de Ayala y Escobar to king, April 18, 1717, Archivo General de Indias (hereafter AGI), Santo Domingo (hereafter SD) 843, Stetson Collection (hereafter SC), P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History, University of Florida, Gainesville.

Florida and employed them in harassing the English.70 Fort Mose’s residents were also expected to grow crops to supplement St. Augustine.71

Indians, Africans, and Borderland Opportunities

For the Spanish to manage their populations in the borderlands environment, new Indian and African towns remained separated, despite the importance of the groups’ cooperation to St. Augustine’s wellbeing. Both types of settlements served similar purposes in the colonial Florida system: defense and provision. Indians worked as scouts and supplied intelligence from throughout Spanish America. Africans supplemented the labor force of the constantly undermanned Castillo de San Marcos and operated patrol boats based at the riverside Fort Mose. The network of African and

Indian towns reflected a modified mission arrangement. The layout of Gracia Real de

Santa Teresa de Mose strongly resembled that of Indian settlements, even in the architecture. Additionally, the land surrounding these towns was used similarly to produce specific crops for the Spanish. The government structure, too, was the same; each village had its own leaders and a priest assigned to instruct the inhabitants in catechism. Borderland realities, however, proved too powerful for the strictest of

Spanish policies. Sustained interactions were already giving rise to multicultural communities; as evidence, many fugitive African slaves arriving at Fort Mose who intended to join the militia were already married to Yamasee women and were permitted to continue in those relationships. Defensive necessity ruled the day, and manning Fort

70 Governor Benavides to the Crown, February 23, 1730 (58-1-31, Doc. No. 18), AGI. Irene Wright, “Dispatches of Spanish Officials Bearing on the Free Negro Settlement of Gracia Real De Santa Teresa De Mose, Florida,” The Journal of Negro History 9, no. 2 (April 1924): 146.

71 Unsigned Document, June 10, 1738 (58-1-31, Doc. No. 62), AGI. Wright, "Dispatches of Spanish Officials Bearing on the Free Negro Settlement of Gracia Real De Santa Teresa De Mose, Florida," 147.

Mose remained the most important military priority. The black militia fought with distinction and secured the only real Spanish victory in the War of Jenkins’ Ear when, against English General James Oglethorpe, they recaptured their own fort during the siege of St. Augustine. The black militia was essential to the defense of the colony, despite Spanish fears about the connections between Africans and Indians.

Africans from Florida likely enticed other slaves in South Carolina to flee south to

Spanish territory during the 1686 raid, and as the slave population and resistance rose in South Carolina, flight to St. Augustine became a serious, viable option. Starting around 1690, South Carolina’s slave population increased as did rice production. In

1708, white colonists were outnumbered by enslaved Africans 4,080 to 4,100. By 1673,

90,000 Africans were in lands of the lowcountry. Slave rebellions occurred in 1711 and

1714, then three times in 1739.72 Fugitive slaves first reached Florida of their own will in

1688 and 1689. They were granted sanctuary and eventually freedom, although they were not permitted to leave Florida. This model of freedom became the new Spanish policy, though African slaves did not mount another successful attempt to reach St.

Augustine until 1724.73 Meanwhile, black soldiers earned fame for their defense of the

Florida colony, and some Spanish officials suggested that blacks in Florida be used to entice runaways from Carolina.74

72 Samuel Proctor and Bicentennial Commission of Florida, Eighteenth-Century Florida and its Borderlands, 2.

73 Governor Benavides to the Crown, November 2, 1725 (58-1-29, Doc. No. 84, duplicated in 58- 1-31, Doc. No. 3), AGI. Wright, “Dispatches of Spanish Officials Bearing on the Free Negro Settlement of Gracia Real De Santa Teresa De Mose, Florida,” 145.

74 Governor Montiano to the Crown, February 16, 1739 (58-1-31, Doc. No. 73), AGI. Wright, “Dispatches of Spanish Officials Bearing on the Free Negro Settlement of Gracia Real De Santa Teresa De Mose, Florida,” 147.

Religious sanctuary in Spanish Florida served as one means by which a connection between Native American and African cultures was formed. The Guale

Indians became fully integrated into the Spanish colonial model as mission Indians during the early seventeenth century. When Africans began to arrive in the latter half of the seventeenth century, they underwent transformations similar to the Indians in order to secure their freedom and survival in this new colonial order. Several commonalities exist between the types of activities and roles these two groups played in St. Augustine.

The Spanish mission structure allowed for the preservation of the chiefdom political structure. Both Indians and Africans were given farmland to provide for themselves and to farm produce to sell in St. Augustine. Both settlements were located north of the city.

The Spanish in Florida paid English slave owners the value of the slaves and set the

Africans free, establishing a precedent that in 1731 hardened into a policy of no return or financial compensation for the English.75 Indians allied with the Spaniards likely spread knowledge of this policy throughout the borderlands during slave-capture raids across the plantations of lowcountry South Carolina in the 1720s.

Although no direct evidence attests to Native American involvement in the many slave plots, numerous accounts imply such, linking the two groups. Reverend Francis

LeJau, a Protestant who oversaw a massive ministry to Indians and Africans in the

Goose Creek region outside Charleston, uncovered a subversive plot among his followers in 1713. Of the decade’s turbulence and rebellious spirit, a report to the king of

75 Council for the Indies to the King, April 12, 1731 (86-5-21, Doc. No. 33), AGI. Wright, “Dispatches of Spanish Officials Bearing on the Free Negro Settlement of Gracia Real De Santa Teresa De Mose, Florida,” 146.

England proclaims, “black slaves … have lately attempted and were very near succeeding in a new revolution, which would probably have been attended by the utter extirpation of all your Majesty’s subjects in this province.”76 Africans from Florida assisted the Indian coalition in the Yamasee War, and after the Native defeat, the

Yamasee tribe relocated to Spanish territory to the south. Colonists from the border regions of South Carolina confirmed that escaped slaves aided both Yamasee and

Creek in border raids.77

By 1720, South Carolina had a black majority. The coastal tribes that survived the Westo extermination had all but disappeared during the Yamasee War. Tribes such as the Combahees and Ashepoos who lived south of Port Royal barely numbered 800 before the war and are scarcely mentioned again in the historical record. These tribes sided with the British in the war and sustained heavy losses, as the bulk of the fighting took place on their lands.78 Further complicating the situation, the war came during an economic depression for the English American colonies which lasted from 1715 until

1720. The economic stress also affected the English community during this period.79

Colonial resources were stretched thin, and a number of enslaved Africans seized this opportunity to stage escapes. Letters from colonists to various parties in London

76 Representation of the Lord’s Commissioners for Trade and Plantations to King, September 8, 1721 in Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1969), 176.

77 Crane, The Southern Frontier, 1670-1732, 184.

78 Peter Wood, “Changing Population of the Colonial South” in Peter H. Wood, Gregory A. Waselkov, and M. Thomas Hatley, Powhatan's Mantle : Indians in the Colonial Southeast (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 47.

79 Herbert Aptheker, Negro Slave Revolts in the United States, 1526-1860 (New York: International Publishers, 1939), 174.

mention the suspicion that various slaves proposed the destruction of Charleston in return for the Indians at Savanna Town aiding their passage to St. Augustine. An anonymous colonist reported on June 24, 1720 that “14 of them are now at Savanna

Towne. … Whites and Indians will be executed as soon as they come down they thought to get to St. Augustine.”80

As the Spanish underestimated the fluidity and adaptability of Indians and

Africans in the frontier, the Carolinians miscalculated the resilience of African cultures on the plantations. South Carolina had a black majority a full two decades before the

Stono Rebellion. Although this development should have caused major concern among colonists, such fears were alleviated by the slaves’ recent military service and the relative lack of visible dissent among the enslaved African population. The black majority, though, was evidence of an increasingly self-replicating labor force. With each generation born in South Carolina, the enslaved population became more accustomed to colonial society. However, familiarity did not mean contentment with slavery, as

English colonists hoped. Instead, this creolization meant that African structures of fictive kinship and communication were adapted to new needs. The slave population undoubtedly was aware of the freedom offered in Spanish Florida and of the state of the imperial standoff along the southern colonial frontier.81

80 Collections of the South Carolina Historical Society 1857 in Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 17.

81 Creolization also correlates with the literacy of some slaves. Mark Smith adds an African cultural factor to his analysis and contends that the rebellion was deliberately timed to coincide with a Catholic holiday concerning the Virgin Mary, which was also celebrated in Africa with white banners and drums. Peter Wood describes how all these factors intersected to create the bloodiest slave revolt in North America to that point. Wood places the revolt in its proper context in South Carolina history and explains how enslaved Africans under a literate leader would have chosen early September as an optimal opportunity for a successful revolt. He cites events such as the smallpox epidemic, a new security act which would later require most whites to be armed on Sundays, recent Spanish propaganda, and the

The Stono Rebellion was among the bloodiest slave uprisings in southern history. Motivated by the goal to travel to “St. Augustine for a reception afterward,” this carefully planned operation took place on Sunday, September 9, 1739, “not twenty miles from Charles Town, in which they massacred twenty-three whites after the most cruel and barbarous Manner to be conceived.”82 After securing guns and other weapons from a store, the rebels headed south toward the newly established Fort Mose, though they probably did not know details about it its location with certainty. On the road from

Charleston, the rebels killed many white slave owners while possibly recruiting nearly

100 additional enslaved Africans. Unfortunately, Lt. Gov. William Bull, who was returning from Granville County, encountered them along the road, raised an alarm, and sent a white militia force to track down and destroy the rebels.83 More than thirty

Africans managed to escape, but many were hunted down in the following weeks.84

Carolinian colonists quickly realized how dangerous enslaved African labor truly could be. The violence and potential success of the Stono Rebellion catalyzed sweeping changes in the slave system in South Carolina. Indians’ and Africans’ exploitation of a trade system involving them both drew the ire of European colonists

presence of most whites in church as reasons for the timing of the rebellion. Perhaps most importantly, Wood points to the successful escapes of some slaves to St. Augustine in the preceding years. Developing African culture, as described by Mintz and Price, was integral to the execution of the Stono Rebellion. Mark Smith, Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2005).

82 “Report of the Committee Appointed to Enquire into the Causes of the Disappointment of Success in the Late Expedition against St. Augustine,” in South Carolina, J. H. Easterby, R. Nicholas Olsberg, and Terry W. Lipscomb, The Journal of the Commons House of Assembly (hereafter JCHA) (Columbia: Historical Commission of South Carolina, 1951), 83-84.

83 Ibid, 84.

84 “Stono Rebellion” in Walter B. Edgar, Thomas Vincent Gilson, and Humanities Council SC, The South Carolina Encyclopedia (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 2006), 933.

upon both groups. As the Creeks and Yamasees struck back in the Yamasee War and enslaved Africans became bolder, the British responded with stricter legislation. In addition to work-week labor regulations, crackdowns on the number of slaves in workgroups, and the prohibition of literacy education, South Carolina officials sought to remove what had been an important ally for slaves: Native American cooperation. Slave patrols on land, rivers, and marshland attempted to block any possible routes of black migration. Less than a month after the Stono Rebellion, South Carolina Lieutenant

Governor William Bull wrote in a letter that he intended to “encourage some Indians by a suitable reward to pursue and if possible to bring back the Deserters, and while the

Indians are thus Employed they would be in the way ready to intercept other that might attempt to follow.”85 On April 13, 1744, the Journal of South Carolina reports the government accepted a slave retrieval bid from the Notchee Indians. On July 5, this agreement was implemented against a potential maroon village in forests of South

Carolina which, as Governor James Glen stated, set “a very dangerous example for their brethren in subjection.”86

The coastal plains of the North American southeast underwent unique experiences within the colonization of the Americas. The region’s multicultural demographic realities supported intense, sustained intercultural interaction, negotiation, and exchange for almost a century from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century. This contested landscape was the object of a multitude of imperial dreams, private goals, unfortunate circumstances, and cultural regenerations. These forces and

85 Lt.Gov. Sir William Bull to the Board of Trade, Charleston, October 5, 1939, Sainsbury Transcripts, BPRO 1711-1782, SCDAH.

86 Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts, 195.

the people motivated by them combined to form a borderlands community in which competing cultures were so defined by their relationships with the surrounding cultures that they all became part of the foundation for the Old South which emerged after the

American Revolution. The ideologies that define the Old South, with its seemingly monolithic culture as a slave society, were in fact constructed by the divergent expectations of Native Americans and enslaved Africans and by Spanish and English adjustments to the realities faced while attempting to exploit resources and increase their influence in the expanding Atlantic World.

The legal, social, and economic structures of the Old South were refined from

1670 to 1750 through an exploitative system of Indian trade and African slavery both informed and perfected as an unintended consequence of Spanish, English, and Native competition. The Native and Atlantic worlds collided, creating an environment in which manipulation of multiethnic relations was crucial to a society’s survival. Instead of the outright elimination of opposing societies seen elsewhere in South America and the

Caribbean, the balance of power in borderlands community remained surprisingly neutral, although manifested in different forms. Natives exercised power through economic exchange and alliances, while Africans provided critical labor and became the subjects of ideas of ownership and occupation that the English used to exploit both

Native territory and land claimed by the Spanish. At the same time, the Spanish used religion to attract enslaved soldiers and longstanding Native relations to counteract

English-sponsored aggression. All groups possessed their own conceptions of the borderlands, were affected by the Indian and African slave trades that directly

influenced migration patterns, and adjusted their understanding of themselves and those around them in response to these migrations.

CHAPTER 4 THE BORDERLANDS GOSPEL

Baptized into Captivity

The European invasion of the North American southeast resembled the collision of continental plates during an earthquake, unleashing a tumultuous series of events that shattered and re-created the cultural conceptions, cosmologies, and customs of people groups from three continents. This collision reverberated across the Atlantic

World among religions as diverse as the skin tones of their practitioners. As the many groups of the borderlands adapted to the presence of their new neighbors, European colonials sought to use religion as a tool of compromise and control, particularly in efforts to civilize both Native Americans and enslaved Africans. Many Spanish and

English colonists saw missionary efforts as essential for good government and healthy trade relations because the Christian work ethic produced hard-working people, who contributed to the economic vigor of the colonial enterprise.1

1 Early American religious history began with a preoccupation with Puritan New England and a focus on the effect of their proselytization and lifestyle. Records such as church attendance and the correspondence of ministers has created studies that focus on a primarily Anglophone populations. Native communities surrounding these Puritan settlements are seldom discussed in much of the religious scholarship. The voice of any possible black slaves is equally silenced. Colonial America, however, was a much more diverse place than the historiography of early New England suggests, especially in its southern portions where black demographic majorities were the norm by the early eighteenth century. Studies similar to that of Jesuits in New France have not been conducted elsewhere in early modern North America. The Jesuit Relations reveals how proselytization efforts among the natives of the area were intended to create Christian converts who would be good allies and economic partners. The religious scholarship of New France and the missions of the southwest surpass that of the colonial southeast in both scope and quantity. Allan Greer, The Jesuit Relations: Natives and Missionaries in Seventeenth-Century North America (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000). Similarly, though religious historians have studied the changing goals of Christian efforts among African slave populations leading up to the American Revolution and the Civil War, little work has been done in a way that respects the tri- racial origins of the region. Oftentimes, the missionaries’ targets consisted of Native Americans and enslaved Africans together, and at other times separately. From the missions of St. Augustine, to Anglican missionaries in South Carolina, when it came to initial efforts to spread the gospel, non- European groups were lumped into the same group. Historians suggest that the collusion of these two groups was seen as a security risk by European colonial governments.

This chapter argues that the competition for coerced labor in the southeastern borderlands influenced the message and methods of the Church of England’s missionary wing, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts

(hereafter referred to as the SPG) in South Carolina with repercussions for everyday interactions between Indians and Africans, ranging from changes in everyday labor to armed conflict. In historian Margaret Szasz’s study of Indian education in the American colonies, she argues that efforts to educate Indian youth were governed by a combination of pressures originating in the deerskin and Indian slave trades, as well as warfare unique to the Carolinas and Georgia.2 This chapter put those pressures into its proper borderlands context as an undertaking that needed was influenced by territorial pressures and religious alternatives offered in Spanish Florida. Furthermore, this chapter contends that the evolving conversion tactics and religious message employed by SPG ministers, such as Francis LeJau, were shaped by pressures unique to the southeastern borderlands and essential to constructing the temporal and social space in which Indians and Africans interacted in South Carolina’s St. James parish. These tactics were particularly influential in how the English colonists conceptualized methods

2 Margaret Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607-1783 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 129. Szasz’s greater argument is that Indian schooling throughout all American colonies was constantly defined and redefined by cultural exchange and influence by various regional variations of this exchange. S. Charles Bolton also discussed the efforts of individual missionaries to minister to both Indians and Africans up to the American, but variation in exposure to religion among indigenous people throughout the region, the influence of Catholicism among enslaved Africans is largely in ignored his analysis. S. Charles Bolton, Southern Anglicanism (Westwood, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1982), 102 – 120. For an organizational discussion of Anglicanism in Early America, see James Bell, The Imperial Origins of the King’s Church in Early America, 1607-1783 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). For a more recent discussion of SPG efforts among indigenous Americans and people of African descent worldwide, see also Daniel O’Connor, Three Centuries of Mission: The United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel 1701-2000 (New York: Continuum, 2000), 31-46.

to use these oppressed populations against nonallied Native groups and the Spanish in

Florida.3

The manner in which the residents of Goose Creek, the chief settlement of the parish, responded to SPG efforts is of particular interest because of the heavy concentration of white colonists there who were either born into or built significant fortunes in Barbados. As discussed in Chapter Two, the political faction known as the

Goose Creek Men was very influential in both the Indian trade and colonial assembly, and therefore held significant sway over military decisions directed against the Spanish and their allied Indians. Furthermore, their experience in Barbados was characterized by prohibitions on Indian slavery due to the disastrous effects of King Phillips War on the New England colonies, as well as the passage of legislation to restrict slave actions specifically based on a fear of the Indian and African cooperation in slave revolts discussed in Chapter Two. The SPG’s work among free Indians, and enslaved Indians and Africans helped shaped the ways that these former Barbadian colonists understood the Spanish threat and also influenced the colony’s Indian policy. These conceptions of borderland threats helped establish the attitudes that governed South Carolina’s response to the Yamasee War of 1715 and the eventual War of Jenkins’ Ear of 1739, discussed in Chapter Five.

3 British North American religion differed in variety, as initial migrants were Catholic, Anglican, or Presbyterian. Further migration inland by various groups led to great diversity of religious practice, and at time competition. Carla Pestana asserts that encounters with Indians and Africans changed the way institutions operated, with an increase in proselytizing and a simplification typical of what happens when religion is released into the Atlantic world. She concludes that both religion and the early modern Atlantic were shaped by each other and that neither Anglicans nor any form of British Protestantism survived in the New World. Carla Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 159-186.

Borderland Religion

European powers’ various ideas about how to manipulate religion are especially evident in how the colonial authorities influenced and regulated the relationships between Indians and Africans across the southeast. These religious conceptions were first deployed by Catholic Jesuits and Franciscans in Spanish Florida in the sixteenth century and achieved varying degrees of influence. The Spanish were well ahead of the

British, making the first religious forays into the Native world during the exploration of

Florida in the early sixteenth century. Spanish religious institutions had a great impact on Native American existence, although the Spanish mission system did not dominate at the outset. The character of indigenous societies “determined which Spanish institutions would flourish and which would wither.”4 Sedentary Indians provided the labor necessary for the Spanish to create settlements in places such as St. Augustine and the La Chua savannah, but other Native groups who more violently resisted

European interference allowed the Spanish to erect only forts staffed by soldiers in places such as the Guale region.

Papal bulls throughout the sixteenth century established for Spanish colonists that Native Americans were capable of understanding the Catholic faith, emboldening

Jesuits and Franciscans to seek high numbers of conversions, as measured by baptisms in Florida as they were elsewhere in Spanish America.5 Archeologist Jerald

4 David Weber, Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven: Yale University, 1992), 13.

5 Weber’s discussion of the “Conquistadores of the Spirit” examines the Franciscan approach to conversion efforts in Spanish Florida. He states that, “Franciscans had come to America with a militant vision that rivaled the more worldly dreams of the conquistadores.” Weber, Spanish Frontier in North America, 94.

Milanich argues that the Spanish tactic of missionizing Indians to create good Catholic subjects was intended to make local Indians believe that the Spanish colonial system was designed to benefit them. Milanich references the strategies of Father Juan Rogel to demonstrate the process of offering leaders gifts and food in hopes that their conversion would inspire likewise actions among their people. The sprawling nature of

Florida led Jesuits to initially believe that missionary efforts there would be extremely difficult. The goal of the later Franciscans, who followed the Jesuits and constructed missions across the southeast, was to “save the souls of the Indians while shaping their minds and controlling their bodies, all in support of Spanish interests.”6

Missionaries manipulated the religious message in Florida in a unique way by segregating the mission landscape. As a goal of the mission system was to civilize peoples through conversion, Pope Pius V instructed that the local Indians be shielded from the vices of the Spaniards.7 This order led to the development of a system with separate commonwealths for Indians and Spaniards. A pass system regulated travel between towns, and mestizos, blacks, and mulattos were not permitted to stay in an

Indian village for more than three days. Spanish officials sought to quarantine Natives from outside influence under the pretense of serving their best interests. This segregation was maintained even as the black population of Florida began to increase because of the spread of plantations and the arrival of fugitive slaves from the British colonies to the north. Traveling friars delivered religious instruction across the

6 Jerald Milanich, Laboring in the Fields of the Lord (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), 4, 130.

7 Weber, Spanish Frontier, 111.

countryside, and in some cases such as St. Augustine, black and Native settlements were assigned their own ministers.

The Catholic Church played an especially important role in how Spanish officials governed the black commonwealth. Historian Jane Landers claims that, although no large-scale, organized missionary efforts were initiated among the Africans in Florida,

Catholic officials generally agreed that religion was a good way to civilize subordinate peoples, keep order, and guard against slave rebellions. According to Landers, the conversion process for fugitive slaves fleeing the British colonies for refuge in Spanish

Florida was more personal than for Native Americans. After professing the Catholic faith in return for sanctuary, some of these fugitives lived with Catholics charged with their religious education. Religion was an important element in Fort Mose, a black settlement established in response to the ever increasing number of fugitive slaves making their way to Spanish Florida after the establishment of the Carolina colony in 1670. The town had a chapel where its inhabitants worshipped when they did not join the black townspeople in St. Augustine. The Catholic faith created links in the black community through organized brotherhood societies, godparentage, and burial rituals.8

In early eighteenth-century South Carolina, meanwhile, colonial officials had different ideas about how to best influence Indian and African behavior through religion and displayed a greater curiosity about matters of religion than most members of the colony. Although most colonists were dissenters, South Carolina established the Church

8 Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 107- 135.

of England as its state church in 1706.9 There was no Anglican diocese in the Western

Hemisphere, so ministers destined for service in the colony were ordained by the bishop in London. In 1698, Reverend Thomas Bray, who was well acquainted with the

American colonies from holding the position of commissary of Maryland in 1696, petitioned King James II for a private charter for the SPG to establish churches, provide spiritual support for colonists, missionize Indians, and create schools and libraries—all activities believed to strengthen colonial life. King William II signed the charter authorizing the organization in 1701.10 The SPG was especially influential in the organization of South Carolina because it was sponsored by the state, and its parishes served as the primary centers of civil government as well. The SPG’s message in South

Carolina provides a window into everyday life in the southeast. The letters of various lowcountry missionaries illustrate the European colonists’ lack of influence over their

Native neighbors and the depths of concern driving missionary efforts among coerced

Indian and African laborers in response to various regional and Atlantic World events.

Christianity did not play as large a role in British motivations for colonization. This is partially because various colonies had specific aims and new world colonization lacked an overall strategy. Carla Pestana’s article on religion in the British Atlantic attempts to consolidate the received wisdom on the role of religion. She argues that

Christianity dramatically transformed the Atlantic world and intended to solidify loyalty

9 George W. Williams ed., “Letters From The Clergy Of The Anglican Church In South Carolina,” Special Collections at the Addlestone Library of the College of Charleston, SC., 3 (hereafter LCACSC). The Church Act of 1706 established ten of the eventual twenty three parishes that made up the colony at the time when the Anglican Church was disestablished by a new state constitution during the American Revolution in 1778.

10 Williams, LCACSC, 2.

and tie all involved peoples to the crown. It was intended not as a link so much among people, as a connection to the European metropolis. Pestana contends that this link never materialized, however, as Native Americans largely rejected Christianity and initially serious efforts were not made to tend to the spiritual needs of enslaved

Africans.11

Although most Protestant denominations intensified missionary efforts during the

First Great Awakening, only the Anglican Church, through the SPG, made any organized effort to minister to any beyond white colonists during the early period of the

British presence in the borderlands. Bray understood that the organized efforts to convert Indians to Christianity were severely lacking compared to those of Catholics under French and Spanish colonial strategy. The dynamic in South Carolina was altered by the arrival of Anglican minister Francis LeJau in 1706, who paid far more attention to the complex aspects and implications of both African and Indian conversion and desired to give religious education to groups outside the Carolinians’ immediate sphere of influence. The records kept by this SPG missionary detail his attempts at proselytization and explain the difficulties he encountered in his unique, multicultural mission.12

Despite their own self-perception as a benevolent organization, the SPG in South

Carolina, however, should not be considered as an entirely charitable enterprise for

Indians and Africans. One of the Church of England’s first acts in 1696 was to use

11 She also suggests that “radicals” seized on its teachings for their own ends. Carla Pestana, “Religion” in Armitage and Braddock eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, 69-89.

12 Annette Laing’s article “Heathens and Infidels” sheds light on LeJau’s encounter with Portuguese influenced slaves. She confirms that SPG records are virtually the only reference on contact between organized missionary efforts of the Anglicans to convert Africans, and unfortunately, they do not do a good job of measuring the African response. Annette Laing, ““Heathens and Infidels?” African Christianization and Anglicanism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1700-1750,” Religion & American Culture 12, no. 2 (2002): 197-228.

public funds to purchase slaves to assist ministers.13 Despite LeJau’s personal desire to minister to the enslaved, neither he nor the Anglican Church opposed slavery in general or believed Natives and African slaves had the capacity for full citizenship. Historian

Travis Glasson believes this seeming discrepancy resulted from religious notions of human difference, or what he calls ethnic theology.14 In African-dominated slave societies, Anglicanism was linked to slavery at the governmental level, demonstrating an intellectual and material commitment to the slave system within missionary work.

This connection is evident in the SPG’s purchase of the Codrington Plantation in

Barbados in 1710. Enslaved Africans’ labor at Codrington funded missionary efforts, and at times, slaves were ordered to act as missionaries themselves.15

The relationship between Indians and Africans in the American southeast altered the mainstream strategies of the Anglican Church in rapidly expanding colonies such as

South Carolina. This borderland environment was characterized by continuously shifting alliances, territorial disputes, and a struggle for power between indigenous and

European cultures in order to achieve their goals. SPG missionaries competed for the attention not only of white colonists but also of their African slaves and Native American allies. For the latter two groups, the SPG also had to contend with the imperial pull of

Spanish alliance and the Catholic Church. Although the SPG had missions among

13 Undated Act of Assembly, Circa 1696, American Materials in the Archive of the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1635 – 1812, Series A Letterbooks (hereafter cited as SPG Series A), Volume VIII, Rhodes House Library of Oxford University, p. 414-419, in LCACSC, 22.

14 Glasson believes these ideals resemble the gospel of submission that became commonplace in the new American republic. Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 44-47.

15 Glasson claims that the SPG migrated away from ideas of men like LeJau, who sought to reform slavery, and transformed into an enterprise shaped by slavery. Glasson, Mastering Christianity, 141-170.

northern Native Americans such as the Mohawk where they also competed with

Catholic ideals, individual SPG missionaries, in a manner similar to European colonists on the edge of empire, operated according to their own best interests, adjusting their strategies in order to lessen Catholic influence, maintain colonial security through good relations with the Yamasee Indians, and minimize African slave rebellions amid the growing plantation landscape.

Samuel Thomas, the first SPG missionary assigned to South Carolina, became a key player in these efforts immediately upon his arrival at Goose Creek in 1702. After a harrowing journey from London that claimed all of his money and nearly his life and left him bedridden for six weeks, Thomas soon found himself in the role of diplomat and negotiator. Among his first orders of business was to deliver a gift from the SPG to the

Yamasee Indians in order to open a dialogue he hoped would lead to the opportunity to minister to the Yamasee in their own towns.16 Such gift-giving rituals reflected longstanding indigenous traditions, which Spanish and English colonists adopted, and a borderland dynamic in which Europeans could not accomplish certain goals without the successful use of the cultural norms of other societies. At the time, however, the

Yamasee were fully engaged in a military alliance with the English against the Spanish and their Apalachee allies during the early battles of the southern American front of

Queen Anne’s War, and were “not at leasure to attend instruction.”17

Thomas’s struggles during Queen Anne’s War illustrate that, from the start, the

SPG mission’s efforts in the southern English colonies were subject to the geopolitical

16 Samuel Thomas to Dr. Bray at Chelsea, January 20, 1702, SPG Series A, Volume 1, Letter LXXXVI, Rhodes House Library of Oxford University, in LCACSC, 25.

17 Ibid, LCACSC, 25.

and fiscal realities of extensive Native and European warfare. SPG missions in other

American colonies and in the Caribbean did not contend simultaneously with Native warfare and the impending threat of attack from nearby European colonists to the scale that Thomas and LeJau faced from 1702 from 1741 during Queen Anne’s War, the

Yamasee and Tuscarora Wars, and the War of Jenkins Ear, which were fought in the same geographic region and waged by many of the same individuals. These consistencies resulted in longstanding tensions that established limits and governed both Native and European behavior on the southeastern borderlands for almost half of the eighteenth century.

Queen Anne’s War uniquely affected the political landscape of the southeastern borderlands and had a direct impact on Thomas’ goals. Unlike in the other theatres of the war, his target Yamasee audience lay not only outside the small sphere of

Carolinian influence but also in a region north of the Spanish and northeast of the

French which held little interest for European plans. Charleston was a growing settlement in the warzone, so both the threat and the reality of Spanish attacks affected almost every aspect of colonial life, from business to religion. During an English siege of

St. Augustine shortly before Thomas arrived, members of the South Carolina militia set several of their own ships ablaze in the Matanzas River, causing serious damage, under the justification that they would have fallen into Spanish possession had they not been destroyed. In early 1703, a public tax was levied to raise £10,000 to compensate the owners of these vessels.18 This level of alarm over the potential devastation from this war further disrupted trade and led to tightening of South Carolina’s budget in general.

18 Samuel Thomas, Carolina, to Dr. Woodward, Minister of Poplar near London, January 29, 1703, SPG Series A, Volume I, Letter LXXXIII, in LCASC, 26.

100

Thomas noted that such fiscal restraints made colonists reluctant to fund his work among the Yamasee.19

Queen Anne’s War also exacerbated longstanding tensions between Catholics and Protestants, both hindering and aiding the SPG outreach in the borderlands. Almost a year after Thomas’ arrival, he was about to visit Goose Creek, presumably to fulfil his commitment to Yamasee proselytization. However a newly appointed Governor James

Moore, a military captain and leader of the Goose Creek Men, cautioned Thomas against entering the Native interior for the time being. As a veteran of anti-Spanish warfare in the borderlands, Moore had a keen understanding of the fluid Indian alliances that created the regional geopolitical dynamics. He had led the unsuccessful attack and siege of St. Augustine in 1702 and had substantial military assistance from Yamasee soldiers. He likely made the decision to burn the ships which occasioned the very tax that dampened South Carolinians’ enthusiasm for financing SPG efforts in the colony in

1703. Moore knew the colony could ill afford to lose valuable Yamasee allies, who were a primary component in attacks against Spanish colonists and their allied Indians.

Moreover, the English-allied Yamasee bore the brunt of overland Spanish assaults throughout Queen Anne’s War. Moore also understood that many indigenous residents had refused Catholic instruction and fled the expanding missions spreading northward among the Guale in the present-day state of Georgia. He correctly assumed that the

Yamasee were averse to having European religion forced upon them and did not distinguish between Protestant and Catholic. Edward Marston, then rector of St. Phillips

Church in Charlestown, reported that Moore informed Thomas that a missionary effort

19 Samuel Thomas, Carolina, to Dr. Woodward, Minister of Poplar near London, January 29, 1703, SPG Series A, Volume I, Letter LXXXIII, in LCASC, 26.

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to the Yamasee during wartime was especially ill advised, claiming that the Yamasee

“revolted to us against Spain because they would not be Christian; if we require it they will return to Spain.”20

Queen Anne’s War eventually aided the SPG in ways that Thomas could not have foreseen and influenced its interactions with Indians and Africans for decades. If

Thomas planned to minister among Yamasee possibly already exposed to Catholicism, then the barriers created by the war were merely short-term inconveniences. Moore’s anti-Spanish expeditions throughout the conflict, culminating in the burning of

Apalachee missions in western Florida in 1704, resulted in the destruction of the remaining Sea Islands and mainland missions down to the immediate vicinity of St.

Augustine, ending the physical Catholic presence in those areas. Ideological resistance supported by physical missions was minimized, positioning the English to be the best and dominant European ally for remaining Natives in the area. When the war ended,

South Carolina enacted a policy to provide financial support for missionary activities among these refugees, not necessarily for the care of their souls, but to deter further

Catholic influence, in addition to the belief that religion created good behavior.21

Consequently, many Yamasees relocated closer to Charleston after the war, creating a Native population contemporaries described as the “greatest number of

20 Edward Marston, Charlestown to Rev. Dr. Thomas Bray, Charlestown, February 2, 1703, SPG Series A, Volume I, Letter LX, LCACSC, 27.

21 The stereotypical belief that Native North Americans lived a savage lifestyle meant that white colonists recognized “Spanish friars’ good influence upon the Indians.” Thomas Nairne, South Carolina, to Marston, sent to Bishop of London by Robt Stevens, August, 20 1705, SPG Series A, Volume II, Enclosed in Letter CLVI, LCACSC, 34. This good influence was primarily based on perceived likelihood of obedience, something especially important since the number of Indians who moved closer to Charlestown after the war reportedly rivaled that of the white population itself.

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Indians subject to this government of any in America.”22 The influx of Indians allowed the SPG to be directly involved in what Anglican leadership had desired for the colony’s official church: to directly serve as an additional link between subjects and empire.23

Thomas Nairne, a leading planter from the southwestern region of the colony and an amateur anthropologist who would later become South Carolina’s official Indian agent, suggested that a permanent missionary operating independently of Indian traders be stationed among the Yamasee to act as a representative and advocate for them.24

Thus, the international SPG mission in South Carolina was coopted to serve the colony’s primary purpose: financial gain. For his own purposes, Nairne believed that the

Yamasees would be “more serviceable to the English if they became Christian.”25 In this statement, Nairne directly stated a belief that developed into an axiom for South

Carolinians concerning the usefulness of Indians and Africans to the colony. In both the

Indian trade and the use of slave soldiers for military defense, Christianity was viewed as a way to ensure productive relationships with these groups. It was not considered a path to freedom or independence.

Thomas’s initial difficulties helped to partially reorient the SPG’s focus in South

Carolina to Africans on the plantations.26 As if Queen Anne’s War in the borderlands

22 Thomas Nairne, South Carolina, to Marston, August 20, 1705, LCACSC, 34.

23 Carla Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 5-7.

24 Nairne, who was integral in bringing Thomas to the colony to begin with, later became Indian agent for South Carolina and has the unfortunate distinction of being the first to die in the Yamasee War.

25 Robert Stevens to Society, August 20 1705, SPG Series A, Volume II, Letter CLVI, LCACSC, 35.

26 Thomas Nairne, South Carolina, to Marston, August 20, 1705, LCACSC, 34.

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were not challenge enough, translating Christian concepts such as God and heaven into the Yamasee language to Thomas’s satisfaction proved too difficult. Defending against criticism of his job performance from Edward Marston in 1706 four years after the war broke out, Thomas wrote that he chose to focus on domestic residents, instead of the

Yamasee, because he “found as great numbers of Heathens who stood in equal need of Christian Instruction and were much more capable of receiving it than these Indians, I mean the Negroe and Indians Slaves in our Parishes.”27 In the early years of Thomas’ ministry, African slaves appear to have been the most receptive to his message in a colony where “[p]eople are more concerned with getting money that with Books or learning.”28 In early 1703, white colonists appeared more interested in the Anabaptists than in the Church of England.29 Added to this struggle was the general public’s mockery of Thomas’ concern for converting Africans. Nairne reported that “[a]ll Carolina laughs at that untruth” of African potential for baptism.30 Thomas countered that men such as Nairne “who pretend to a great zeal for propagating Christianity among the

Yamonsea Indians, have not evinced the least Christian concern for their own ignorant slaves at home, of which they have many residing in their houses and so might with much ease be instructed.”31

27 Defense by Samuel Thomas to SPG, June 21, 1706, “Letters of Rev. Samuel Thomas,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, Vol. 4, no. 4 (Oct. 1904): 39-54, 28.

28 Edward Marston, Charlestown to Rev. Dr. Thomas Bray, Charlestown, February 2, 1703, LCACSC, 28.

29 Nicholas Thomas, Charleston to Archbishop Tenison, Fulham Papers, Lambeth Palace Library, Volume IX, p. 1-2, LCACSC, 28.

30 Thomas Nairne, South Carolina, to Marston, August 20, 1705, LCACSC, 34. Defense by Samuel Thomas to SPG, June 21, 1706, “Letters of Rev. Samuel Thomas,” 28, 39-54.

31 Ibid, 39-54.

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Through the SPG, some Indians and African slaves in South Carolina shared a common experience of education, in addition to plantation labor. Education was another goal of the SPG, and as the war prevented Thomas from accomplishing his first objective of preaching among the Yamasee, he decided to focus on strategies for educating the slaves of the colony. When not engaged in distributing anti-Anabaptist tracts and setting up the church in Goose Creek, Thomas braved opposition from white colonists and used what time he had available to find Africans suitable for baptism, marking his first successful conversions in 1704.32 As he settled into his position at

Goose Creek and interacted more with African and Indian slaves, he was encouraged by “the prospect of bringing many of the Indian and Negroe slaves to the knowledge and practice of Christianity.” 33 He stated in December 1705 that many slaves were

“willing to prepare themselves for it in learning to read for which they redeem time from their labour.”34 Although the SPG wanted to alleviate certain harsh aspects of the slave trade, the interest Thomas found among slaves stemmed from his inadvertent granting of opportunities for a reprieve from work and the acquisition of an advantage on the plantation by learning the English language. Colonial authorities discouraged this method of ministry due to disruptions in labor, not because of perceived threats from

Indian and African interaction. Though the documentary record does not speak directly to this beyond Thomas’ successor excitement over the ease of future Christian

32 Samuel Thomas, Study at Sir Nathaniel Johnston’s, Governor of Carolina, to Dr. Woodward and the Society, March 10, 1704, SPG Series A, Volume I, Letter CLXXX, LCACSC, 30.

33 Account by Samuel Thomas, London, to the SPG, December 21, 1705, “Letters of Rev. Samuel Thomas,” 31-39. Thomas also asked the SPG for African slaves to help him work his plot, since local support for Anglican ministers was underwhelming.

34 Ibid, 31-39.

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instruction due to the observation Indian children already spoke English, learning

English together would have created communication paths between the exploited groups of Indians and Africans.35 The SPG’s expanding mission after Queen Anne’s

War led to increasing interaction between Indian and Africans during times of religious instruction, perhaps their first sustained contact outside the few plantations that used both Indian and African slaves.36

To Abjure Popish Heresies: Francis LeJau and Imperial Religion in the Southeastern Borderlands

In 1706, the SPG marked a pivotal year in its South Carolina mission. Samuel

Thomas, the first SPG missionary, died of yellow fever ten days before the arrival of his replacement in Goose Creek, Dr. Francis LeJau. A Huguenot dissenter who became

Anglican after fleeing King Louis the XIV, LeJau entered the SPG and was sent to St.

Kitts before being assigned to South Carolina in 1706 at age 40. His letters are a valuable resource and among the best contemporary accounts of the South Carolina backcountry in the crucial years before the Yamasee War.37 His letters to his superiors

35 LeJau to the Secretary, October 20, 1709, in Frank Klingberg, The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis Le Jau, 1706-1717 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 61.

36 Robert Stevens to Society, LCACSC, 35. This sustained contact represents the first recorded instance of the possibility of regular contact between Indians and Africans outside of the supervision and regulation of the plantation. Structures existed for instances like this one to be repeated elsewhere, but there is not extant evidence to that effect outside of Goose Creek, and even there the African slaves attending instruction numbered less than ten in 1704, though that number was up to 1000 in 1705. Unfortunately, there is no way to know if Thomas’ methods would have achieved his own goals. Historian Peter McCandless noted that Samuel Thomas was the first SPG missionary to arrive and South Carolina and also the first to die there. Thomas succumbed to the yellow fever epidemic that ravaged the colony in 1706, joining a deadly trend of yellow fever casualties that also claimed the lives of several of his successors. Francis LeJau noted that four SPG missionaries died within an eighteen month period in 1717, and he himself died from it later that year. Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 51.

37 Glasson, Mastering Christianity, 41-72. There are not many books on the American activities of the SPG and Laing’s 2002 article specifically studies South Carolina, but Travis Glasson’s monograph, Mastering Christianity, offers much needed insight on SPG doctrine and activities. Glasson argues that SPG efforts were driven by a belief in human difference based on religious principles, and saw slavery as

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detail daily life, in addition to lamenting the problems faced in converting enslaved

Africans and local Native Americans in the Goose Creek district. To LeJau, the acceptance of the gift of faith required a firm mastery of doctrine, which his flock’s behavior did not seem to indicate. Throughout his correspondence with the SPG secretary, LeJau repeatedly reported vague successes among ministering to Indians and Africans, but he did not provide many specifics concerning how they accepted and utilized the information.38 Like Thomas, LeJau was deeply disturbed by slaveholders’ lack of effort to instruct their slaves in the Anglican tradition, or any faith at all. Still,

LeJau’s letters make him appear to rely on the assessment of these very slaveholders when considering his efforts among Indians and Africans. White colonists were also the source of grievances surrounding Native conversion. Indian traders abused trade laws and often showed themselves to be untrustworthy, a trait which Native communities extended to all white colonists and fueled a Creek and Yamasee revolt in 1715 that nearly destroyed the whole colony and effectively ended peaceful proselytizing within

Indian towns. White South Carolinians performed actions contrary to those values preached by LeJau, which Indians consequently rejected. Finally, over more than a decade of service, LeJau often mentioned doctrinal disagreements with African slaves exposed to the “papist” faith before their arrival in North America. The strategies he a tool to meet their objectives. He contends that most enslaved Africans across the British Atlantic points of contact studied, rejected Anglicanism. Specifically, he cites a SPG owned plantation as a reason of this rejection, because the slaves there equated missionaries with their bondage. This book functions as a history of ideologies of human difference, and argues that although religion had an impact on ideas of race, religious stances on the topic were far from set concrete. See also Annette Laing, ““Heathens and Infidels?” African Christianization and Anglicanism in the South Carolina Low Country, 1700- 1750,” Religion & American Culture 12, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 197-228.

38 Laing, “Heathens and Infidels?,” 199. Laing argues that many historians of the early South incorrectly assumed that African slaves rejected Anglicanism based on conversion statistics. Instead, she references the work of John Thornton, which shows that exposure to Catholic Christianity in Africa would not have led enslaved Africans to totally reject Anglicanism due to practice or ritual.

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employed often responded to borderland events, such as the Yamasee War and fears of Spanish attack, making his missionary efforts a factor in English imperialism.

Whether or Not We Are to Answer for Grievous Sins

Although broader geopolitical developments helped solidify the alliance between various indigenous groups and European colonists, the same circumstances that excited Thomas by increasing the number of potential converts in the immediate vicinity of Goose Creek did not afford his successor the expected progress. The Church Act of

1706 established the Anglican Church as the state church of South Carolina amid rising profits from Indian trading and agricultural pursuits. Whereas Thomas might have seen opportunity in the growing numbers of free Indians and enslaved Indians and Africans,

LeJau encountered limitations stemming from their involvement in the colonial enterprise. Traders lowered the credibility of the church through questionable trading practices with Indians, while slave owners managed their slaves in order to achieve maximum efficiency, leaving no time for the religious education the SPG proposed.

The obstacles LeJau faced when proselytizing among Indians and Africans within white colonial settlements resulted from South Carolina’s involvement in the Atlantic

World economy. The deerskin trade and exports of enslaved North Americans to British

Caribbean colonies formed the foundation of South Carolina’s economy before the ascendancy of indigo and rice as cash crops. Though not directly related, the deerskin trade declined during the first half of the eighteenth century as the number of enslaved

Africans in the colony increased. These unique, disparate labor and economic circumstances characterizing the southeastern borderlands and Atlantic Worlds were crucial to the relationship between Indians and Africans in South Carolina, because they were the primary components of the regional framework within which SPG missionaries

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operated. For example, historians noted that South Carolina exported up to 54,000 buckskins a year between 1699 and 1715—the most active years of SPG missionaries’ efforts to convert and educate Indians and Africans together before major events, such as the Yamasee War and Stono Rebellion discussed in Chapter Three, complicated their efforts.39

Indian traders carried great influence within Carolinian society because their highly profitable enterprise directly affected diplomatic relationships with Indians. Many

South Carolina traders who did business with Creek and Yamasee Indians weakened such diplomatic relationships. Poor decisions did more than change diplomatic agreements; they had an impact on everyday life for many white colonists. The deerskin trade reached its height as LeJau took over for Thomas in Goose Creek. Even though traders could influence alliances, the SPG believed that conversions and Christian education could solidify Native partnerships. According to LeJau, bad business practices hindered SPG success by diluting its message in Indian communities. In addition, “[i]t is reported by some of our Inhabitants lately gone on Indian Trading that they excited them to make War amongst themselves to get Slaves which they give for our European Goods.”40

After Thomas’ lack of progress among the Yamasee, LeJau employed a new strategy combining missionary work among new, local free and enslaved Indians with the outreach Thomas could not conduct. During his second year in Goose Creek, LeJau attempted “to get some free Indians to live with me and wou’d Cloath them but they will

39 Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, 130.

40 LeJau to Secretary, September 15, 1708, Frank J. Klingberg, The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis LeJau, 1706-1717 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 41.

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not consent to it, nor part with their Children tho’ they lead miserable poor lives.”41 In this effort, LeJau tried to realize the SPG’s purpose of combining “imperial evangelism with philanthropic benevolence and the power of a royal charter with the force of private initiative” by fully controlling the environment in which select Indians adults and children received Christian instruction.42 In 1708 and 1709, LeJau tried to assess which Indians and Africans represented the most efficient use of his time. By November 1708, several

Africans approached him for Christian baptism, which he would not perform without

“proof of their good life by the Testimony of their Masters.”43 He still lamented that

“[w]ars prompted by some of our Traders to get Slaves for their profit” impeded similar progress among the Yamasee.44 In the last half of 1709, however, LeJau believed that he was progressing well, reporting to his superiors that “I see with an incredible joy the fervor of several of those poor Slaves” and declaring that Indian “souls are fit Materials which may be easily polish’t.”45 He remained convinced, though, “that if anything opposes the publishing of the Gospel among the Indians it shall be the manner how our

Indian Trade is carryed on.”46 Indian traders’ behavior appeared to be an obstacle to

SPG success, but LeJau turned it into an asset by lobbying for support due to the constant need for alliances amid the ever-present rivalry with the Spaniards.

41 Ibid, 41.

42 Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, 133.

43 LeJau to Secretary, November 15, 1708, Klingberg, The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis LeJau, 48.

44 Ibid, 48.

45 Francis LeJau, St. James’s Parish, Goose Creek, to the Society, October 20, 1709, SPG Series A, Volume V, 133-140, LCACSC, 97. The original of this letter is in the SPG Papers, Lambeth Palace Library, Volume I, 251-252.

46 Ibid, 251-252.

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LeJau gained more support from white colonists once he positioned his missionary work as part of a logical method to ensure the safety of South Carolina.

Starting in December 1708, LeJau set aside one day of the week, in addition to the

Sabbath, for Christian education. He was aware that the culture of profit on the colony’s growing plantations made slaveholders reluctant to grant any slaves time off from work.

LeJau proposed that slaves take turns coming to him in order to minimize time away from the plantation. He requested that only those slaves whose masters believed would be receptive to the Christian message be permitted to attend.47 LeJau built goodwill for his mission by arguing that aggressive proselytization was necessary to keep pace with the Spaniards. He argued that indigenous towns desired “to have Clergymen living in their Settlements,” as was the custom when the Yamasee were allied with the

Spanish.48

Queen Anne’s War aided LeJau’s and the SPG’s objectives in two ways. First, in the aftermath of the war, his argument that the Spaniards satisfied a desire among

Natives that the English did not must have alarmed those concerned about the rapid increase of Indians hostile to the English only a few years earlier. These arguments found an especially receptive audience in outlying areas such as Goose Creek, whose residents LeJau reported in August 1709 to be concerned about renewed attacks from

Florida.49 Displaying his growing familiarity with the lowcountry, LeJau addressed his

47 LeJau to Secretary, February 18, 1709, Klingberg, The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis LeJau, 50.

48 LeJau to Secretary, March 22, 1709, Klingberg, The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis LeJau, 55.

49 LeJau to Secretary, August 5, 1709, Klingberg, The Carolina Chronicle of Dr. Francis LeJau, 56.

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superiors and community in language that simultaneously reiterated the threat of

Spanish influence, reassured white colonists, and supported the importance and practicality of his missionary efforts. He stated that “[i]nterpreters I found many grown persons among them had been baptized by Spanish Priests, and have Christian

Names, and told me, if they had Priests, as they call them, they wou’d use them very well.”50 He intended this statement to relieve the region’s sense of alarm by arguing that he could solidify an alliance and decrease the danger of Yamasee involvement in a

Spanish attack through his method of educating free Indians, enslaved Natives, and

African slaves in rotation. He hoped that slaveholders would weigh external threats against the internal threat of disloyal slaves and decide in his favor. Such decisions would free LeJau to conduct his work, instead of pleading with white colonists, and, most importantly, give him progress to report to the bishop in London.

LeJau believed that the loss of Yamasee lives in Queen Anne’s War would aid the reception of his message. He understood the importance of oral tradition among

North American cultures and the fracturing of the Yamasee that accompanied the establishment of South Carolina. In this context, he believed his methods to be a crucial component in assimilation. LeJau also held the opinion that the free Indians around the

St. James parish “ingeniously own they have forgot most of their traditions since the

Establishment of this Colony, they keep their Festivals and can tell but little of the reasons: their Old Men are dead.”51 LeJau believed that he could exploit this cultural erosion and that the time was right to do so. Not only did misconduct in the Indian trade

50 Ibid, 56.

51 Francis LeJau to Secretary, June 13, 1710, SPG Series A, Volume V, LCACSC, 110.

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lessen this potential, but traders baptized Indians themselves though they had no right to do so. LeJau certainly would have been uneasy with actions of which he clearly disapproved being associated with the religious principles he wished to impart. Gideon

Johnston, the SPG commissary for South Carolina, agreed with traders that converting free Indians by living among them was close to an impossible task, although Johnston himself could not think of any greater factor that could “[o]bstruct it more; than the

Scandalous Lives of those very Traders, who are a Wretched sort of Men.”52 In 1713,

Johnston even tried to become a commissioner of the Indian Trade that he “might in that Post have an opportunity of informing my self about the Indians belonging to us, and of knowing the disposition they might be in from time to time, with respect to

Christianity.”53 His political connections, specifically the speaker of the Lower House of

Assembly, assured him that he “should not be denied a request that was grounded upon so good and Christian a Motive.” Johnston, though, was well aware that “no minister should ever sit among them.”54

The Yamasee alliance with the English in the Tuscarora War lent credence to

LeJau’s earlier claims that missionary work encouraged goodwill and military alliance.

He reported at the conclusion of the war in 1712 that the Yamasee “Nation has behaved herself very well in our Late Expedition against the Tuscaroras, who had murdered our

52 Gideon Johnston to the Secretary, July 5, 1710, SPG Series A, Volume V, Letter CLVIII, LCACSC, 134.

53 Gideon Johnston’s Explanation of Instructions by the Clergy of South Carolina, Charles Town, March 4, 1713, SPG Series A, Volume 8, Number 11, 476-503, LCACSC, 187.

54 Ibid, 476-503, LCACSC, 187.

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Renoque Neighbours and with whom Peace was lately concluded.”55 He used this opportunity to press his point, offering a practical plan to build upon the goodwill: using

John Barnwell’s land grant, which bordered a Yamasee settlement, as a school. In a letter to the bishop in London explaining his recent discovery of the method by which

Indian slaves were obtained, LeJau seeks to use the Anglican church’s position as the state church in South Carolina to end the dishonest practices of slave traders:

“It appears they do not care to have Clergymen so near them who doubtless would never approve those perpetual warrs they promote amongst the Indians for the onely reason of making slaves to pay for their trading goods; and what slaves! Poor women and children, for the men taken prisoners are burnt most barbarously.”56

In addition to Barnwell and the bishop, LeJau carefully submitted his request to people of influence throughout the colony, perhaps with the aims of urging increased oversight of the Indian trade and alleviating the suffering of plantation slaves, a topic on which

SPG missionaries elsewhere in the Atlantic world were also focusing. Unfortunately for

LeJau, a 1712 slave rebellion originally suspected of connections to SPG missionary

Elias Neau’s school in New York complicated plans for educational development.

The notion of educating Indians and Africans together, though practical considering its perceived benefit to plantation labor efficiency, was contentious even before the 1712 New York slave rebellion raised fears across British North America.

Missionaries were astute observers of colonial social life but could not regulate it in any discernible way. Despite his dedication, LeJau did not possess any firsthand understanding of Native or African culture and relied on the word of slave owners. Even

55 Francis LeJau to Henry Compton, Bishop of London, May 27, 1712, Fulham Palace Manuscripts; Library of Congress Transcript, South Carolina No. 10, LCACSC, 184. The original letter is in the Fulham Papers, Lambeth Palace Library, Volume IX, 31-32.

56 Ibid, 31-32.

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when slaves inquired about baptism, he did so only when he had “proof of their good life by the Testimony of their Masters.” Disagreeing with some slave owners that slave conversions were essential, especially among Africans, LeJau fervently believed that his teachings would “prevent horrid Crimes and Confusions amongst Negroes and

Indian Slaves for the future.”57

Starting in 1709, he established a system where “[m]any Negroes and Indian slaves are actually instructed and under Tryal in order to be admitted to the Holy

Baptism.”58 During his first four years in Goose Creek, LeJau desired to fulfill the SPG’s goal to establish schools to instruct the children of the province. South Carolina lagged far behind other British North American colonies in education, but his enthusiasm for the education of Indian and African children increased as he learned more about the potential for educating non-European students. In 1710, LeJau observed that “[t]he

Indian Children of our Neighbourhood speak English, there is hope that in Process of time they may be Instructed” and believed that they “in time will like better things.”59 He did not think that education of coerced laborers and their offspring should be conducted lightly, though, and he frequently reevaluated the situation amid rising tensions with the

Indian trade. Earlier in 1710, he wrote that “[w]e want a Schoolmaster in my parish for our White peoples Children but as for the Negroes or Indians with all submission I wou’d desire that such a thing shou’d be taken into Consideration as the importance of the

57 LeJau to the Secretary, June 13, 1710, Klingberg, The Carolina Chronicle, 76.

58 Francis LeJau to the Secretary, February 18, 1709, SPG Series A Volume 4, 241-245, LCACSC, 91. The original of this letter is in the SPG Papers, Lambeth Palace Library; Volume I, 239-240.

59 LeJau to the Secretary, June 13, 1710, Klingberg, The Carolina Chronicle, 76.

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matter and the Consequences wch. May follow do deserve.”60 Time was a major limiting factor in LeJau’s efforts to educate and assimilate free Indian children, in addition to

Indian and African slaves. He did not expect plantation owners to go to the trouble of dividing their Indian and African slaves for instruction by ethnicity, especially given their reluctance to send him slaves at all. The tension between LeJau and his white parishioners forced him to educate what Indians and Africans he could at the same time. Given that English literacy was viewed as an important step in understanding

Christianity and therefore was part of the curriculum, LeJau was very aware of the potential threat he was creating: educated slaves could undermine the whole system.

Slave owners responded to the SPG’s mission to educate their African slaves in a variety of ways, some more realistic than others. LeJau described these owners as

“so well perswaded [against him] that what they do is well as to be very angry when their Mistakes are shewn to them and they will find Cunning Arguments to oppose truth itself.”61 The physical setting of a church was just as social as it was religious and reinforced social class through elements such as seating arrangements. The presence of enslaved Africans in the church building offended many Anglican parishioners, who asked questions such as “Is it possible that any of my slaves could go to heaven, and must I see them there?”62 Although many SPG missionaries held similar notions of racial difference and did not always disagree with the public about such concerns, they

60 LeJau to the Secretary, February 1, 1710, Klingberg, The Carolina Chronicle, 69.

61 Francis LeJau to the Secretary, February 18, 1709, SPG Series A Volume 4, 241-245, LCACSC, 91. The original of this letter is in the SPG Papers, Lambeth Palace Library; Volume I, 239-240.

62 LeJau to the Secretary, September 18, 1711, SPG Series A, Volume 6, LCACSC, 167. The original of this letter is in the SPG Papers, Lambeth Palace Library; Volume XVII, 60-61.

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must have been frustrated by the opposition to slaves attending church with white settlers on Sundays as well as their religious instruction at all other times.63

African and Native Responses to the SPG in South Carolina

The documentary record clearly attests to the structure of the SPG mission in

Goose Creek allowing for regular and sustained interaction between free and enslaved

Yamasee and enslaved Africans under the watchful eye of Samuel Thomas and Francis

Le Jau. Both men spent considerable amounts of time explaining the benefits to their superiors in London, and convincing their parishioners of the utility of religious education among the non-white inhabitants of South Carolina. Appeals for this undertaking invoked such powerful forces as imperial duty, the allure of monetary benefits of increased slave production for fledging planters, and the threat of

Catholicism from Spanish Florida contaminating any possible notions of loyalty among the colony’s coerced laborers. The evidence is less clear, however, concerning how the

Anglican message was received by Indians and Africans.

Part of this interpretative problem stems from the fact that the Anglican Church varied by location. SPG letters demonstrate that every parish was run as differently as their individual ministers’ personalities. Much of the variation can be attributed to demographics, as the Indian and African population varies according to historic native settlement locations and colonial agriculture, respectively. St. James Parish and Goose

Creek were on the edge of South Carolina’s northwestern white population distribution.

Residents of this area were far more likely to have sustained contact with Yamasees and a number of Indian traders were based there. Though a majority of African and

63 Travis Glasson, Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 88.

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Indian slaves did not attend church, LeJau in particular reported that several Africans attended his services. Whether by the requirement of their masters, or an attempt to secure political advantages, the church in Goose Creek had sustained African attendance throughout LeJau’s tenure.64

The Native and African response to Anglican missions is also difficult to gauge as a result of varying definitions of what it means to be Anglican. Some ministers had more tolerance that others when it came to observed behaviors. Le Jau faithfully reported two developments when it came to religious benchmarks for Indians and

Africans, the number of people asking about baptism, and the number of people seeking communion because these actions encompassed his definition of what it meant to act like an Anglican. For enslaved Africans, however, Laing notes that if that message resonated within individuals who never acted outwardly upon it, or who were unable to convince their masters that they were worthy of religious instruction, their response is lost to history. As the work of John Thornton and others has shown, from

1710-1740, a significant number of imported African slaves originated in Angola, which at the time included the Kingdom of Kongo and included thousands of captives taken in the Kongolese civil wars.65 Elements of those wars were fought based on the utilization of Christianity as a method cultural change, and thus these individuals would not have been strangers to Christianity.66 Thus, an African approach to Anglicanism would have been spiritually inclusive. Furthermore, If slaveholders were concerned that they would

64 Laing, “Heathens and Infidels?,” 211-213

65 John Thornton, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684-1706 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 210-214.

66 Laing, “Heathen and Infidels?,” 209.

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lose valuable production if their workers were off the plantation receiving religious instruction, than it is plausible that Indians and Africans slaves were drawn to

Anglicanism for the exact same reason. Laing argues that for enslaved Africans at least,

Anglican religion was viewed as a tool to influence everyday life as opposed to a statement of opposition to their current condition or an attempt to be involved in white society.67

The interest of the Yamasee in the Anglican Church is further complicated the impacts of imperial rivalry in the southeast as well as the cultural challenges resulting from European ethnocentrism in the Indian trade. Scattered mentions by Indians of all people descending from one man and a woman made from his rib and reference to a worldwide flood, provide the only indication to how Anglican Christianity may have been received, though these instances do not speak to how these commonalities were acted upon or if they increased church membership.68 Historian Alan Gallay notes that other than the Yamasee prince sent to England for education and eventual ministry work back in South Carolina, neither slave nor free Indians were at church often due to their involvement in slaving wars, defense of the colony, or other military entanglement resulting from their involvement with the South Carolina government.69 The issues led

LeJau to focus more on the conversion of enslaved Africans.70

67 Ibid, 200.

68 Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 238.

69 Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade, 239.

70 LeJau’s linguistic curiosity made him an anomaly among the broad spectrum of Anglican missionaries in the British colonies. His attitudes concerning the influence of Spanish Catholicism also go against many SPG missionaries throughout the rest of the eighteenth century. Laura Stevens contends that most other members of the SPG used the Spanish Black Legend to fuel British perceptions of

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As well, enslaved Africans spent the time they had to themselves in a variety of ways. Many grew crops for their own subsistence, while others visited family members on other plantations. LeJau complained that, “[t]heir working upon Sundays for their maintenance and their having Wives or Husbands at a great Distance from their

Masters Plantations, in my humble Judgement dos much harm and hinders much good.”71 He was frustrated by these habits because they implied that, even if he were to persuade slave owners to allow their slaves to receive instruction and even if he achieved what he saw as measures of progress such as the number of baptisms, he could not surpass the pull of family ties in importance. At times, LeJau viewed as idle and criminal the ways that some enslaved Africans spent the free time afforded to them by the task system of slave labor. He referenced this stereotype in his appeals to slaves’ owners, reasoning that it would be more productive for slaves to learn religion.

After four years, he finally reported success with this reasoning, having “at last rendered the Masters sensible of their own Advantage in that respect.”72 Although the impact of his efforts on slave behavior are impossible to know, LeJau takes credit for what he believes to be an increase in productivity, claiming that those enslaved Africans who attended his sessions “do better for their Masters profit than formerly, for they are taught to serve out of Christian Love & Duty.”73

superiority. Stevens contends that despite widespread interest, the SPG’s inability to convert large numbers on Indians was based a lack of resources stemming from the SPG’s large and varied mission. Laura Stevens, The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 111-116.

71 Francis LeJau, St. James’s Parish, Goose Creek, to Society, March 22, 1709, SPG Series A, Volume IV, 390-395, LCACSC, 92.

72 LeJau to the Secretary, June 13, 1710, Klingberg, The Carolina Chronicle, 76.

73 LeJau to the Secretary, June 13, 1710, Klingberg, The Carolina Chronicle, 76.

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Fully aware of the opposition from white colonists in the St. James parish to the education of young African slaves, LeJau employed the same rationales he used to argue for increased missionary work among the Yamasee, appealing to fears over imperial rivalries and attack from within. In the case of the growing African slave population, white colonists feared that Catholic slaves from West Africa would be inclined to join enslaved Africans fleeing to Spanish Florida. In a security concern, it was doubted whether such individuals would fight for South Carolina in the event of Spanish attack.

LeJau’s misgivings about Catholic sentiments among enslaved Africans had direct relevance to the military defense of the colony. Spanish Captain Don Juan de la

Valle, in a list outlining the advantages of offering freedom to fugitive English slaves, explains that all of the runaway slaves who arrived since 1718 received Catholic instruction, defended St. Augustine with distinction against English attacks, and were exemplary leaders for local Indians. In fact, one of the reasons for continuing the policy was to encourage Christian Indians to comply with Spanish goals in a similar manner.74

Furthermore, De la Valle believed that the success of drawing the Yamasee away could be replicated with South Carolina’s enslaved African population.75

74 Don Joseph Patino to Consejo de Indias, April 25, 1731, SD 837; Capitan don Juan de la Valle, May 28, 1731 SD 837; Manuel de Montiano to Juan Franciso de Guemes y Horcasitas, January 17, 1740, SC 87-1-3; Diana Reigelsperger, “Interethnic Relations and Settlement on the Florida Frontier,” (PhD diss., University of Florida, 2013), 249. Reigelsperger points out that this comment of the positive influence of black militiamen is one of the few instances where the documentary record addresses the interaction between Indians and Africans in Spanish Florida.

75 Capitan don Juan de la Valle, May 28, 1731, SD 837.

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The English, and LeJau specifically, correctly suspected that Spanish defense tactics were in large part based on the acquisition, conversion, and armament of South

Carolinian slaves. Therefore, during the first half of the eighteenth century, the South

Carolina General Assembly passed a series of laws authorizing arming enslaved

Africans. Such legislation undoubtedly sparked discussions of which enslaved individuals this force should consist. The militia acts urged any trusted and available slaves to muster, but many slave owners did not agree with LeJau’s notions of religion ensuring social compliance. LeJau praised several slaves as obedient, sober, and good examples to their brethren in captivity and, at times, even contrasted their behavior with that of white colonists. Though many slave owners did not recognize their Indian and

African slaves as fully rational thinkers, they feared that Christianity could be mistaken as a path to freedom, at least for their black laborers. Many of LeJau’s white parishioners clearly stated their disdain at attending church with black slaves. To meet such opposition, LeJau created a special pledge for black converts to make it clear that adoption of Christianity did not grant freedom. The South Carolina government went a step further, passing a law in 1711 stating that “no persons may neglect to baptize their negroes or slaves, or suffer them to be baptized” and that, despite confessions of faith,

“they shall not thereby be manumitted or set free … and continue in the same state and condition, that he or they was in before the making of this act.”76 The private and public spheres were united in this regulation of religion as it related to security threats.

White colonists also determined who was fit for military service by observation of slave behavior. They applied different criteria to Africans then Indians. In LeJau’s

76 Published American Colonial Records, “South Carolina Colonial Records,” (New Haven, Conn: Research Publications), 229.

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discussion of the steps necessary for conversion, the extra steps and longer observation period appeared to apply mostly to black slaves, not Native ones. LeJau does not say why this is, and his reported baptism statistics on each group were similar.77

Conclusions

While LeJau was chiefly concerned with Native retribution for mistreatment both on and off the plantation, his letters reveal that, in the fifteen years before the Yamasee

War, his white parishioners worried most about security threats from enslaved Africans.

The Creek and Yamasee were viewed as valued partners in the deerskin trade and powerful allies against other Native groups, as demonstrated by the Yamasee alliance against the Tuscarora in 1712. In these southeastern borderlands, Europeans competing for power and influence among indigenous homelands viewed the

Christianization of Native Americans as a civilizing measure and the regulation of the gospel among black slaves as a security measure. South Carolinian colonists relied upon Natives as partners in capturing runaway slaves, such those who caused a great commotion in 1711 and were recovered by Natives, while men such as LeJau naively believed that the power of the gospel prevented black slaves in Goose Creek from participating in a 1714 slave revolt. So while religion was believed by some colonists to be a tool of social control, it was not a direct component of any divisive strategy used against Indians and Africans. Instead, the teachings of the Anglican Church functioned as a supplement to the divide and conquer aspects of employing Indians in returning

77 In the absence of documentary evidence, Glasson’s notions of ethnic theology provide conceptual speculation as to why Natives may have been viewed as more reliable for military defense beyond the fact that white colonists had prior experience with Indian auxiliaries.

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runaway slaves, although it was not likely intentional. Neither missionaries, planters, nor

South Carolina officials spoke to this issue beyond agreeing that in no way was salvation to be a path to freedom or greater participation in colonial society.

LeJau knew that arming slaves created discomfort but argued that the Catholic

Church had instilled good habits which could be used to slaveholders’ advantage, reporting as an example that a slave who professed Catholicism was “[t]he best Scholar of all the Negroes in my Parish and a very sober and honest Liver.”78 In 1710, he observed that “I have in this parish a few Negroe Slaves and were born and baptized among the Portuguese, but speak very good English, they come to Church and are well instructed so as to express a great desire to receive H. Communion amongst us.”79

Although LeJau made progress, baptizing several African men by June 1710, he believed children’s Christian education to be key to creating loyal, docile slaves. He estimated that, of the 500 enslaved Africans in the St. James Parish, over half were children.80

LeJau achieved moderate success in conducting religious education for Indians and Africans before his death in 1717, though never at the level he envisioned. He convinced only a few slaveholders to allow him approximately a half-hour weekly to educate slaves, though at times the number of attendees exceeded fifty.81 LeJau meticulously listed various causes of the SPG plan not being fulfilled, ranging from bad weather to unreasonableness of masters. The behavior of the slaveholders of the St.

78 LeJau to Secretary, February 1, 1710, Klingberg, The Carolina Chronicle, 69.

79 Ibid, 69.

80 LeJau to Secretary, June 13, 1710, Klingberg, The Carolina Chronicle, 76.

81 Ibid, 76.

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James parish was the most significant limiting factor, for at times, the severity of the punishments for what LeJau believed were minor transgressions made enslaved

Indians and Africans fearful of showing any desire but to work as much as possible, even if the proposed respite was Christian education. One planter kept a male slave in chains for days after he fell asleep and mishandled a package of rice, causing a raft to fall into a river.82 This man had been baptized recently based on his master’s testimony to his good, honest reputation. Events such as this demonstrated that being a Christian did not spare slaves the harshest punishments. Despite LeJau’s detailed reports to

London, it appears that he did not convince slaveholders that his education program created any increase in productivity. The long-term success of his education program cannot be analyzed due to the Yamasee War’s catastrophic impact on the lowcountry.

After that conflict, LeJau’s successor Robert Ludlam reported in 1723 that although

2,000 enslaved Africans and 500 enslaved Indians attended communion in St. James parish, nothing was done for their spiritual education outside the regular church service, bringing an end to such efforts at Goose Creek.83 In St. Thomas parish neighboring

Goose Creek to the south, SPG missionary Thomas Hassell acknowledged Indian and

African capacity to learn but claimed that “irreligious people obstruct[ed] it.”84

82 Francis LeJau to the Secretary, February 23, 1713, SPG Series A, Volume VIII, 428-432, LCACSC, 200.

83 Robert Ludlam, St. James’s, Goose Creek Parish, August 1,1723, LCACSC, 366.

84 Thomas Hassell, St. Thomas’ Parish, to the Secretary, May 12, 1726, SPG Series A, Volume XIX, 314-315; also copied in SPG Series B, volume IV, 373-374, LCACSC, 382. Other references to Hassell’s work in joint education are made in Richard Ludlam, St. James’s Parish, Goose Creek, to the Secretary, March 22, 1725, SPG Series A, Volume XIX, 62-63, LCACSC, 375 and Thomas Hassell, St. Thomas’ Parish, to the Secretary, May 12, 1726, SPG Series A, Volume XIX, 314-315, LCACSC, 382.

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The documentary record does not speak much to the specifics of Indian and

African interaction on the growing plantations of South Carolina in the first half of the eighteenth century. South Carolinians maintained a lively trade of enslaved indigenous people to the Caribbean and the northern colonies of British North America. Colonists in

Goose Creek were very involved with this trade, and prior to the Yamasee War they kept many of these slaves for work on their own plantations. The SPG reports more specific figures concerning the number of enslaved Africans in St. James parish and

Goose Creek likely had the highest number of both enslaved Indians and Africans laboring in the rice fields. Even after the Yamasee War for the most part curtailed the

Indian slave trade, runaway slave advertisements from the period leading up to the War of Jenkins’ Ear, roughly around 1732 to 1740, demonstrate that the highest number of reported runaway slaves of mixed Indian and African ancestry escaped from Goose

Creek. It is unlikely that circumstances allowed for mixed ancestry reproduction prior to arrival in South Carolina, and given the sharp decrease in enslaved Indians after the

Yamasee War - though also a function of population distribution given that St. James had the second highest number population after Charleston until the 1730s - these reports also suggest that joint Indian and African slavery perhaps occurred more regularly in St. James parish than in other areas in South Carolina. LeJau educated both Indians and Africans at the same time, and his personal interest in learning common Indian languages like Savannah combined with his desire to teach the sacraments in English, likely created an environment where Indians and Africans learned parts of each other’s languages as well. For these reasons, examining the

SPG’s work among Indian and African population in Goose Creek provides the best

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chance at understanding at least the circumstances in which these two groups interacted throughout the colony as a whole, if not the details or results of those situations.

The SPG was the only English religious organization to attempt large-scale conversions of free Indians and enslaved Indians and Africans at the same time and in the same place. SPG missionaries’ level of access to these individuals was dictated by

European imperial rivalries, Indian alliances, demographic shifts caused by Queen

Anne’s War, and the introduction of systems of labor for efficient rice production. These factors were unique to the southeastern borderlands, as were the responses of Francis

LeJau and other colonials. Missionaries such as Elias Neau in New York failed to make inroads among Indians because it was easier to reach Indians and African within white settlements—not because of Europeans wars involving Native allies. Only in South

Carolina was missionary work among non-Christians connected not only to fears of internal slave rebellion but also to external attack from Spanish Florida. Slave owners originally resisted the education of their enslaved Africans mainly because of the challenge to the social order and feared drop in rice production, but LeJau exposed the deeper threat of Spanish influence within English settlements that would have resonated within the prior colonial experience in Barbados for many leading figures in the community. Furthermore, though direct evidence supports a loss in productivity being of higher importance than white colonists being fearful of giving Indians and

African an additional theatre for interaction, the tone of LeJau’s correspondence suggest that this fact does not completely exclude the possibility that other colonists harbored negative feelings about certain aspects of the gathering. In June of 1710,

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LeJau reported that the “Most Pious among their Masters stay also and hear” his preaching to the Indians and Africans.85 Any fear was probably neutralized by extensive white supervision, which LeJau welcomed in hopes that some of his preaching would find receptive ears among those white colonists who attended the slave meetings.

LeJau also mentions, however, that “others not so zealous wou'd find fault, if possible, their Murmerings sometimes reach my Ears,” meaning that other colonists took exception to what he was doing though no further detail is provided.86 LeJau’s focus was on social control as well, and with the slave owners in attendance, he preached against Catholic tenets and proposed ideas that he thought planters approved of. For instance, he proposed ideas he deemed

“very easy to be done and will prevent horrid Crimes and Confusions amongst Negroes and Indian Slaves for the future, that none of those that are not yet marryed presume to do it without his Masters consent, and likewise those that are now Marryed do not part without the like Consent.”87

Ironically, with the removal of the omnipresent threat of Spanish attack in other slave societies such as Barbados, Christian education for African slaves was much more successful. The response of colonists in the St. James and St. Thomas parishes to the work of SPG missionaries based on their unique security and social order concerns demonstrates the seriousness with which they perceived the threat raised by the relationship between Indians and Africans. A unique combination of Atlantic World experiences with Indians and Africans as lived by white colonists and missionaries in

85 LeJau to the Secretary, June 13, 1710, SPG Series A, Volume 5, LCACSC, 110.

86 Ibid, 110.

87 Ibid, 110.

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turn helped form a unified response by South Carolina’s leaders to Atlantic World imperial rivalries in the southeastern borderlands through the creation of conscription methods that excluded Christianity as a path to freedom, but encouraged it as a measure of trust.

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CHAPTER 5 COERCED COMBAT

Necessary Risks

Before European intervention in the southeastern borderlands, the region was long the site of Native American rivalries and alliance. Here, Mississippian chiefdoms extracted tribute, waged war when necessary, and were mobile when it suited their purposes. The mobility of the early south, however, did not end with the shattering of

Mississippian society but, rather, expanded to include other citizens of the Atlantic

World. To European colonists, the “New World” appeared ripe with resources destined to enrich the European metropoles, but the labor necessary to capture, extract, and defend these investments far exceeded the Europeans’ capabilities. In the southeastern borderlands, the primary components in the European labor systems were Indians and

Africans.

The arrival of Europeans and Africans in the North American Southeast not only sparked cultural exchanges which lasted for centuries but also changed the land use and labor systems in the region. In 1565, the Spanish thought it prudent to establish St.

Augustine to guard their treasure galleons traveling along the Atlantic coast, while decades later, the English sought to extend their developing plantation enterprises southward and so established Charles Town in 1670, only a few days’ journey from the

Spanish forts of North Florida. The success of the Iberian and English colonization strategies depended largely upon the successful use of Native and African labor.

Spanish and English leaders attempted to gain assistance from common Indian groups and the Spanish competed for each English controlled African labor, both slave and free, through a variety of tactics. Indian and African labor was especially useful in the

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defense of European settlements and disputed imperial boundaries from the 1680s through various wars which pitted kingdoms of Spain and England against each other.

These wars include the War of Spanish Succession from 1701 - 1713, the War of

Quadruple Alliance from 1718 - 1720, the Anglo Spanish War of 1727 - 1729, and finally the War of Jenkins’ Ear from 1739-1748. South Carolina was also challenged by the

Yamasee and other Indian groups in the Yamasee War from 1715-1717. This chapter explores the internal colonial threats that were met with coerced military defense labor, such as the use of African slaves against the Yamasee in 1715, and examines the role of Native alliances and the processes that regulated African military service. It argues that through various local and imperial policies, Spanish and British authorities attempted to control the terms of encounter between Africans and Native Americans for their own security.1 These policies in turn created a very narrow path for freedom for enslaved Africans while also having the unintended result of arming Yamasee Indians for revolt against South Carolina.

Coerced Combat in Spanish America

Amid the contested space of the southeastern borderlands beginning in 1670,

English colonists tried to force exploited African people to acculturate and submit to slave society first in South Carolina, and then Georgia after 1750. Certain contradictions, however, remained inherent in this slave system. Whether consciously or not, the slave-owning class accepted the humanity of the people whom they wished to reduce and relied on their skills and reasoning, especially in the area of armed

1 For a comparative discussion of the irony of arming slaves broadly throughout history, see Christopher Leslie Brown and Philip D. Morgan eds., Arming Slaves From Classical Times to the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

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defense. Despite Native discontent locally and slave rebellions raging as far north as

New York, the governments of the English colonies of South Carolina and Georgia chose to risk arming African and Indian slaves to protect their emerging slave system.

Africans, in particular, were conscripted to fight in the Yamasee War and the War of

Jenkins’ Ear. To protect their physical holdings, English colonists had to militarize their human property. These concepts of conscription have many historical precedents, and throughout the Atlantic World, the military skills of both Native Americans and enslaved

Africans were valuable commodities. Helping construct fortifications and participating in armed conflict, these two groups represented one of the largest but necessary risks for the Spanish and, to a lesser extent, the British colonies in the Americas. Ironically, the

English in the southeastern borderlands armed slaves in the name of protecting the slave system.2

The presence of both Indians and Africans throughout early modern Spanish

America was strongly related to labor needs and the Spanish constantly adapted their control structure to crush maroons and the incessant and equally adaptive resistance by enslaved Africans.3 Whether participating in armed conflict against indigenous peoples

2 For a discussion of the impact of applied African military engineering knowledge to South Carolina defenses, see Peter H. Wood, ""It was a Negro Taught them", a New Look at African Labor in Early South Carolina." Journal of Asian and African Studies 9, no. 3 (Jul 01, 1974): 159-179.

3 Matthew Restall and Jane Landers, “The African Experience in Early Spanish America,” The Americas 57, no. 2 (Oct. 2000): 167-170, 168. For the Spanish, military service and slave rebellion demonstrated acceptance or rejection of the Spanish–imposed labor system. African or mulatto soldiers often fought before Spanish troops in battles to defeat indigenous peoples, as in Costa Rica in 1650 where the Spanish recognized that they could not defeat Native peoples on their own and frequently drafted both Africans and Indians to assist in their military endeavors. In the essay “Black Soldiers, Red Paint,” Restall shows that Natives and Africans initially opposed each other, while in “Black Conquistadores,” he acknowledges that the military service of Africans was not without risk to the Spanish. Matthew Restall, “Black Soldiers, Native Soldiers,” in Beyond Black and Red (Albuquerque: University of Mexico Press, 2005), 15. Matthew Restall, “Black Conquistadors: Armed Africans in Early Spanish America,” The Americas 57, no 2 (Oct. 2000): 171-205, 200.

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as conquistadores or with Natives as multicultural brothers in arms, Africans usually occupied a military–related position in early Spanish American conquest. Africans were unique in this context because they were not fully accepted in Spanish society but participated fully in colonizing activities.4 Similarly, Africans were excluded from Indian prestige positions but formed working relationships with Natives where the Spanish could not. Despite these exclusions, enslaved Africans were present in almost every aspect of these new Spanish societies. Indians and Africans labored together in mining, sugar, and other enterprises, positioning these two groups in similar classes as social stratification began to develop.5 The creation of mixed–race social classes and military companies formed along the same racial lines meant that, in North America, arming

Indians and Africans together did not represent the same level of compromise for the

Spanish as for the English.6 A system of social stratification that included those of mixed

Indian and African ancestry did not materialize in the British Atlantic experience.

4 Restall’s edited volume Beyond Black and Red serves as an introduction to the many directions research in this field is taking. The introductory chapter, “Black Slaves, Red Paint,” describes the themes and central divisions within the field. Relations between Native Americans and Africans were not always cooperative, and their similar positions in the Spanish social structure did not make them automatic allies. Restall calls this division the “harmony–hostility dialectic,” which emerges in studies on every theme of Native–African interaction, from military service to marronage and mutual forced labor to identity.

5 Kris Lane, in “Africans and Natives in the Mines of Spanish America,” in Beyond Black and Red: African–Native Relations in Colonial Latin America, ed. Matthew Restall (Albuquerque: University of Mexico Press, 2005), 159–184, mentions many points of contact during the tough slave labor experiences in the mines which supported Spanish wealth. From the sharing of Native religious advice to the sharing of drug use, intercultural interaction spread from the gold mines of Honduras and Mexico to the silver mines of the Andes. Lane argues that the particular dynamics of mining camps connected Indians and Africans through rebellion and sexual unions, which sometimes included marriage.

6 Jack Forbes, Black Africans and Native Americans: Color, Race, and Caste in the Evolution of Red–Black Peoples (Oxford, UK; New York, NY, USA: Blackwell, 1988), 2. A social system based on skin color, not hard lines of race, relied on a system of racialized language to enforce social stratification. Jack Forbes traced the origin of terms such as mustee, zambo, and half-breed and found that they all meant different things at different times but mainly have referred to people of Indian–African descent. He notes that capturing intermediate colors and finding accurate descriptive terms always has been problematic and that color classification of human beings is impractical. Due to such difficulties, census data is often incorrect.

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Racialized language and customs that incorporated such structures were not existent in

South Carolina and Georgia, a fact that created a much sharper divide between the privileges of free and slave and that did not provide a path out of slavery based on marriage or parentage. Instead, these structures were reversed. Having a mother of

African descent only confirmed slave status and the only way out was legal manumission by the slave owner, or in the case of the slave soldiers discussed in this chapter, militia acts that granted freedom as a reward for taking lives on the southeastern battlefields.

The existence of a mixed race class in Spanish America did not mean that interethnic fraternization was encouraged. Restrictions on interracial socializing existed in Spanish America, but they were relatively ineffective. Furthermore, mixed social classes were not as important in Spanish Florida because the demographics did not support them. Africans initially were rare in Florida; in 1604, there were only thirty-four

“negroes.”7 Slave labor was not needed as much there because Florida lacked significant natural resources, and the colony served primarily as a military logistics fort and a base for converting indigenous residents of the region. Spanish farms appeared

St. Augustine in 1565, and Catholic missions spread into what became southern

Virginia.

As a result of Florida’s unique purpose in Spanish America and the related demographic structure that did not emphasize the presence of black soldiers to conquer

Native empires. The English–allied Westo Indians appeared in 1656 on the boundaries of the Virginia colony and, armed with advanced British weaponry, conducted slave

7 Samuel Proctor and Bicentennial Commission of Florida, Eighteenth-Century Florida and its Borderlands (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1975), 2.

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raids on other Native American peoples in the northern Spanish territories, decimating the populations of tribute–paying indigenous people in the Guale territory.8 To defend against these new threats, the Spanish began construction of Castillo de San Marcos in

1672, a short time after the English established themselves a mere two days’ sail to the north in Charles Town. Both the Spanish avoidance of black troops to conquer Indians in Florida and the English instigation of Indian slaving wars were strategies unique to the southeastern borderlands. Imperial rivalry caused both the Spanish and English to reconsider their use of indigenous and African exploited labor in different ways.9

Foundations of English–Native Military Alliance

Establishing Native military alliances was one of the first orders of business in

European colonizing activities in the Americans. South Carolina’s colonial government formed relationships with Cusabo and Notchee to return escaped slaves, and with

Westo and Yamasee to enslave Spanish allied Guale and Mocama.10 During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in the southeast Spanish, English, and Indians lived in closer proximity than anywhere else in the early modern world, save the Isthmus of Panama.11 As neither the Spanish nor the English were self-sufficient and the

8 Eric Bowne, The Westo Indians: Slave Traders of the Early Colonial South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 2.

9 Jane Landers discusses further the challenges and benefits of arming the black inhabitants of Spanish Florida in the Arming Slaves collection. Jane Landers, “Transforming Bondsmen into Vassals: Arming Slaves in Colonial Spanish America,” in Brown and Morgan eds, Arming Slaves, 120-145.

10 South Carolina slave acts in 1696 and 1701 specified that twenty shillings be offered to any Indians or other African slaves who helped retrieve fugitive slaves. L.H. Roper, “The 1701 ‘Act for the Better Ordering of Slaves’: Reconsidering the History of Slavery in Proprietary South Carolina”, The William and Mary Quarterly 3 Vol. 64, no. 2 (April 2007): 395-418, 402.

11 John Tepaske, “The Fugitive Slave: Intercolonial Rivalry and Spanish Slave Policy, 1687- 1764,” in Samuel Proctor ed., Eighteenth Century Florida and Its Borderlands (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1975), 2.

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settlements of both received funding from the mother country, Native military knowledge and expertise were essential advantages during the imperial European warfare of the seventeenth century.12 The competitive nature of the southeastern borderlands discussed in Chapter Three prompted the Lord Proprietors to urge the Carolinian landgraves to “take Great Care that the Indians be not abused” and that they be brought

“over to your part for your better protection and defense.”13 South Carolinians had learned from earlier colonies that abusing indigenous populations was dangerous to defense and security, although the Carolinians were blind to how their own transgressions in this area led to the Yamasee War. Maintaining peace with local

Yamasee, Cusabo, and other groups was important for intelligence purposes because the Carolinian leadership believed that successful manipulation of the Indian trade could lead to acquiring valuable information from other Native groups with close relationships to the Spanish.14 In addition to providing military intelligence, Indian alliances also reinforced internal colonial security by assisting in the slave patrols intended to discourage and apprehend runaway African slaves. Natives were especially useful during the same time period a particularly large influx of colonists from Barbados in the early 1690s. In 1692, the Commons House of Assembly passed a law prohibiting the importation of any enslaved Africans thought to be involved in slave rebellion plots in

12 Ibid, 2.

13 “Instructions for our Governor Sr. Nathaniel Johnson Knight our Governour of South and North Carolina, 1702,” in Commissions and Instructions from the Lords Proprietors to Public Officials of South Carolina: 1685-1715, ed. Alexander Salley (Columbia: The State Company, 1916), 169.

14 January 10, 1685, in Alexander Salley ed., Records in the BPRO, SCDAH.

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Barbados.15 In 1693, the Assembly went a step further and contracted with Natives to retrieve fugitive slaves, believing that Indians would “be of great use to ye Inhabitants for our province for the fetching of such Negroe Slaves as shall Runn form their masters.”16 This legislation allowed the Indian groups indigenous to South Carolina to help assuage the former Barbadians’ fear of African slave insurrection.

In addition to military aims, slaving wars conducted first by the Westos and then, to a lesser degree, by the Yamasees largely accomplished the English goals to weaken the Spanish mission structures of control and to reduce Native resistance to English land occupation by causing indigenous population decline among Guale and Mocama.

Archeological studies at the Sandridge 9CF17 site offer evidence that, during the second half of the seventeenth century, the sedentary Spanish mission structure in coastal Georgia was transformed to one characterized by temporary mobile settlements. At the Sandridge site on the Lower Ocmulgee River, European artifacts among stamped ceramics similar to those produced by the Altamaha culture suggest a

“brief but intensive settlement of displaced Natives.”17 Archeologists believe that this site could have served three uses, all related to slave raiding. One, Sandridge was a resting place for raiding Yamasee returning to the town of Tama in 1686.18 Second, Sandridge was a base from which the Westo harassed Spanish–allied Indians and attacked

15 “A Bill for the Better Ordering of Slaves and Prohibiting the Importation of Such Slaves as have been Concerned in Any Plot in Barbados January 14, 1692,” in J.H. Easterby, The Journal of the Commons House of Assembly (Columbia: Historical Commission of South Carolina, 1951), 57.

16 June 5, 1695 in Salley ed., Records in the BPRO, SCDAH.

17 Dennis B. Blanton and Robert A. DeVillar, Archeological Encounters with Georgia’s Spanish Period, 1526–1700: New Findings and Perspectives (Kennesaw, Ga.: Society for Georgia Archaeology, 2010), 13.

18 Blanton and DeVillar, Archeological Encounters, 13.

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Mission Santo Domingo de Talaje as early as 1659.19 Third, Sandridge was an early

Yamasee refugee settlement dating from before they became English allies and were subjected to Westo raids.20 In each case, this settlement in coastal Georgia indicates that Natives conducted military action in alliance with Europeans in the geographic space between English and Spanish settlements.

English Use of African Soldiers: Justification and Results

Fifty years before the establishment of the border colony of Georgia in 1733, the

Spanish in Florida viewed the 1670 founding of the Carolina colony as an intrusion into their North American territory. Not long after Charles Town gained footing among the lowcountry marshes, Queen Anne’s War saw the British destroying Spanish missions and joint Floridian forces of Indian and Black soldiers raiding the southern edges of

English territory. The destruction of property and the kidnapping of enslaved Africans and Indians caused great financial loss to some Carolinians, who did not then maintain a standing army. Instead, the settler was expected to be both citizen and soldier. South

Carolinians deemed the lack of protection in this area a necessary risk because access to fresh water was needed for experimentation with new crops. The cultivation of this land often required the use of abundant Indian and African slave labor, so they, too, were essential to the defense of the colony.21

19 Ibid.,17.

20 Ibid.,18.

21 The English attempted to exploit Native warfare in two different ways. Edward Cashin describes the first and, in many ways, easiest method in Guardians of the Valley on the English use of local Chickasaws as guardians of the Savannah River valley in the aftermath of the bloody Yamasee War. Cashin integrated the story of an outlying band of warriors, the Chickasaws of the Savannah River, and their crucial military role in the geopolitics of the Savannah River valley into the history European imperialism in the colonial south. Edward Cashin, Guardians of the Valley: Chickasaws in Colonial South Carolina and Georgia, (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), x.

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Before the massive increase in African slave populations at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the English colonists in South Carolina attempted to ally with certain

Indian groups in order to take advantage of and transform the traditional captive–taking rituals practiced for generations before European contact22. As part of their trade strategies, the English sought to incorporate themselves into Indian warfare and to instigate slaving wars. They wanted Indians such as the Westo to trade their slaves as chattel, a concept foreign to southeastern Native Americans at the time.23 The management of African slave labor was rife with apparent contradictions in colonial defense during the early eighteenth century, when the African slave population and the profitability of their activities were growing due to the rising value of naval stores and rice.24 This borderlands slave system was in large part based on real and imagined principles concerning labor and race.25

22 See also Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).

23 This plan did not always work, however, as William Ramsey explains in his monograph The Yamasee War. Ramsey suggests that the interpretation of the war as resulting from simple trade abuses misses the main causes: a broader misunderstanding among the English and unfavorable market forces in the emerging Atlantic World economy. Based on the records of the Commissioner of the Indian Trade, he contends these “abuses” were cultural, economic, and social misunderstandings over such issues as gender roles, notions of credit and property ownership, and changes in the process of Native enslavement. Ramsey states that, “Southeastern Indians were forced to alter their habits in order to meet the increasingly ardent and specific demands of the market. The process was coerced, moreover, by the credit power of English traders, and their behavior in turn was often a credit-generated reflex.” William Ramsey, The Yamasee War: A Study of Culture, Economy, and Conflict in the Colonial South (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 78.

24 In 1708 the estimated population of South Carolina was 9,580, with 42.8 percent of African descent compared to 42.6 percent white and 14.6 percent Native American. Robert V. Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in America before 1776: A Survey of Census Data (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 157.

25 Colonists believed that the outcome of these risks depended on how well they manipulated the relationship between Natives and Africans, a concept Matthew Restall calls the harmony–hostility dialectic. Restall, “Black Slaves, Red Paint,” 4.

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In Times of Alarm and Invasion: The Multiethnic Militia

Throughout the first decade of the eighteenth century as South Carolinians sought to solidify their position in the southeastern borderlands, they still found themselves dependent on African and Indian spies and scouts for military success against the Spanish. Though no full-scale battles against Spanish regulars occurred until the War of Jenkins’ Ear in 1739, Carolinian military leaders began to experiment seriously with arming African slaves during the War of Spanish Succession after an attempted invasion of Charleston by French and Spanish naval forces in 1706. Even when the Indian and African slaves in South Carolina numbered 5,500 and White colonists only 3,080, military officials still were willing to arm slaves to create up to a 1:1 ratio with the 950 White members of the militia “in times of allarum and invasion.”26

These soldiers, along with 500 Yamasee, were armed with guns and lances. These wartime measures suggest that English colonists showed little concern for rebellion or anti-White violence by Indians and Africans during this period, despite probable encouragement from the invading armies.27

The lack of consideration for rebellion amongst coerced laborers is evidence that borderland colonists naively believed that, despite being prone to barbarous and savage behavior, enslaved African individuals could be trusted to serve under arms and to participate in the construction of defenses. The trend in most British North American

26 Letter to Lords Proprietors, September 17, 1708, in Salley, Records in the BPRO, 203–210, SCDAH.

27 The shortsightedness of English colonists in South Carolina concerning their potential to revolt based on acquired information is discussed in detail in Alejandra Dubcovsky, “Connected Worlds: Communication Networks in the Colonial Southeast, 1513-1740,” (PhD diss., University of California – Berkeley, 2011), 170. A discussion of how such networks operated is provided in Chapter Six of this dissertation.

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colonies was to ban Black slaves from military activity, but after the decimation of the

Spanish settlement of Apalachee during Queen Anne’s War in 1702, South Carolinians perceived the threat of raids from the south as a serious enough to warrant “An Act for

Raising and Enlisting Such Slaves as shall be Thought Serviceable to this Province in

Time of Alarms” in 1704. A 1703 law allowed the militarization of African slave labor only within Charles Town, because the dense White population could quickly quell any attempt at rebellion. In this context, the 1704 law appears significant because it permitted the militia service of Indian and African slaves in isolated areas where they could switch sides with potentially devastating results. Slave revolts among the conscripted were thought to be minimized by arming only slaves whom their owners believed to be trustworthy. Such trust could be based on any factor from work ethic to sincere religious devotion. Understanding who was reliable was crucial to defense, as threats from the Spanish prompted South Carolina officials to renew similar militia acts in 1706 and 1708.

The Spanish themselves, however, did not hesitate to use joint military forces of

Indians and Africans to harass English interests in the Southeastern borderlands.

Throughout mainland America and the Caribbean, the Spanish recognized that they could not defeat Native peoples on their own and frequently drafted both Africans and

Indians to assist in their military endeavors during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.28 Through various acts and regulations, Spanish and British authorities

28 Jane Landers states in an essay on the issue of arming slaves in Spanish America that, “together, Spaniards and the Africans among them formed a specialized and limited pool of experienced expeditionaries circulating throughout the Circum-Caribbean on exploratory treks, slaving voyages, and full-blown wars of conquest.” Landers argues elsewhere that Black militias were been especially useful to accomplishing Spanish goals in Florida. Jane Landers, “Transforming Bondsmen into Vassals: Arming Slaves in Colonial Spanish America,” in Arming Slaves: From Classical Times to the Modern Age, eds. Christopher Brown and Philip Morgan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 121.

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attempted to control the terms of encounter between Africans and Native Americans.

Such encounters varied in environment from silver mines to tobacco fields and in nature from public works construction to militia duties.

The Yamasee War

The Yamasee War from 1715 to 1717 exposed many of the problems inherent in relying on Indians and Africans for military assistance. The most important problem for

English military leaders was determining which individuals were loyal to English defense. In this war, several Native American groups engaged in a surprise attack on

South Carolina.29 This attack had clear origins in the Indian trade, but militarily the

Yamasee had earned praise from men such as John Barnwell for their assistance in dealing with the Tuscarora just three years prior before their attack on the colony.

Colonial leaders and Indian traders assumed that such demonstrations of military loyalty demonstrated compliance with the status quo. Thomas Nairne, chief Indian agent for

South Carolina, believed that he had resolved any grievances when he visited the

Yamasee town of Pocotaligo on April 14, 1715, only to be executed in the opening conflict. As South Carolina came under attack on multiple fronts, Barnwell deployed mixed forces of White, Black, and what he assumed were loyal Indians, as prescribed under the militia acts.30 In such chaos, arming enslaved Africans was a risk he had to take, even though a slave rebellion had broken out as recently as the previous year.

Enslaved Africans comprised thirty percent of the standing army created for an

29 William Ramsey argues that the causes of the Yamasee War, “represented a marked departure from prevailing seventeenth century patterns of exchange and from continuing French and Spanish models.” The stress from southeastern Indians being forced to meet an increasingly specific market based on credit encouraged a credit based reflex. Ramsey, The Yamasee War, 78.

30 David Lee Johnson, “The Yamasee War,” (M.A. Thesis, University of South Carolina, 1980), 93. Wood, Black Majority, 124-130.

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emergency such as this. A third of the Goose Creek militia which fought under Captain

George Chicken was of African descent, as well. Even “trusted” Indians, like a former

Indian slave turned military scout for good behavior who betrayed South Carolinian forces in the midst of battle, could betray the British at any time.31 This individual was complicit in an ambush by hostile Indians forces that left almost a quarter of that company dead. Events such as these demonstrated that colonial methods of judging loyalty were inadequate and contributed to an overinflated feeling of confidence and security.32

As discussed in Chapter Four, the South Carolina militia acts of 1704 appear to be designed around compensation and social control, rather than religion. A 1703 version of the act promised freedom to slaves who killed an enemy combatant, along with minimal compensation for constructing fortifications. Ironically, this implies that

African slaves were offered freedom for taking lives but forced to remain in servitude for accepting Christianity. During the Yamasee War, as selected African men joined White colonists in military maneuvers across the colony, slave owners tried to avoid further antagonizing their armed slaves by declining to fulfill a demand from Virginians f or 130

African women as compensation for military assistance in the conflict. In addition to being too steep a price, it was thought that giving away enslaved African women would

31 Throughout the Yamasee War, South Carolinians loosely referred to the Native military agressors Southern and Northern Indians. The Southern Indians included the Yamasee, Euchees, Savannah, Apalachees, and Lower Creeks, while the Northern Indians usually included the Catawba and their allies. Several of these groups were former English allies, and amid such generalizations, identifying who was loyal was a difficult task for white colonists. Ramsey, The Yamasee War, 101-102.

32 Peter Wood first addressed arming slaves in South Carolina in Black Majority, emphasizing the role that prior military experience by enslaved Africans played in the ironic reliability of slave soldiers as a method of defending South Carolina. Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York: Knopf, 1974), 124-130.

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have disastrous consequences when the slave soldiers returned. Several small slave revolts in the five years before the Yamasee War added to the urgency of these attempts at social control. Slave owners did not want to further upset a slave population which they viewed as critical to their security during the Yamasee War because they realized that their supposed Creek and Yamasee alliances were fragile.

The Yamasee War resulted in changes in the Indian trade. Although various cultural misunderstandings and trade abuses were responsible for the conflict, the

British quickly blamed Spanish meddling with “their Indians” as a root cause. In this borderland, competition for economic supremacy was stiff, and South Carolinians understood that they needed to take greater measures to protect their trade routes and partners. The decline in Indian slavery following the Yamasee War, as well health concerns among white soldiers in the marshland, resulted in Africans helping in the construction of Fort King George on the Altamaha River in 1721, though they did not fight within South Carolina after the war. Involving slaves in military endeavors was a risk these colonists believed they had weighed, despite the recent shock of the coordinated Indian invasion. Successful escapes by black slaves to St. Augustine throughout the 1720s were a lingering concern, but the new fort and increased funding for slave patrols were the best efforts the British could make to stop the trend.

Negotiations with the Spanish to return escaped slaves proved mostly unsuccessful.

Yamasee War Aftermath, African Slaves, and Borderland Relations

In the wake of the Yamasee War, Indian policy and the use of African slaves became intimately related. In South Carolina, the Lords Proprietors’ inability to prevent this uprising, to protect many colonists’ investments in plantations, and to end the war without significant assistance from other colonists and Indian allies such as the

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Cherokee and arming African slaves resulted in a revolt against their leadership.

Although few English civilians died, the financial loss was significant. Much of the fertile marshland home to rice–growing plantations became battlefields in the Yamasee War, and even after the Indian defeat, colonists were hesitant to begin the “resettling of many deserted plantations.”33 Not only did English colonists fear murder and capture; they were also acutely aware that the African slaves needed to make plantations profitable were targets of the Spanish, who “plentifully provide them with Arms, Ammunition, and

Provisions which they could not procure any where else.”34 English colonists were willing to go to war with the Spanish over this security threat and to petition the King for

“the necessary powers and instructions to be sent to the Government of Carolina as may effectually authorize them to attack their enemies, the Yamasees, or other Indians at war with Carolina.”35

After the Yamasee War altered South Carolina’s coerced labor pool by virtually eliminating large–scale Indian slavery, African slaves began to dominate the lowcountry’s growing number of plantations. The establishment of rice cultivation in the last decade of the seventeenth century had significant repercussions for borderland relations, particularly in the areas of profit and English identity. First, the overwhelming

Yamasee defeat in 1717 sent many but not all Yamasees fleeing southward to St.

Augustine, where the Spanish used them in assaults against South Carolina. The

33 “Extract of Mr. Boone and Mr. Berisford’s Memorial,” Letters of the South Carolina Secretary of State, CO. 5/382, SCDAH.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

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Spanish appeared to have always been seeking ways to destabilize Carolinian security, and the outbreak of the War of the Quadruple Alliance in 1718 allowed them to use their new Yamasee allies in fresh attacks on the southernmost English plantations without violating any major treaties.36 In this context, a joint force of Spanish and Indian soldiers attacked St. Helena’s Island in August of 1720.37 While the Yamasee War neutralized the major threat to the English from Yamasee and Lower Creek Indians, Native refugees from this conflict now had the support of the resources of Spanish Florida and participated in skirmishes leading up to the full–scale War of Jenkins’ Ear in 1739. In these changes, English colonists lost established trade partners and saw a temporary decline in both trade and cash crop profits, as well as a shift in military resources.

Yamasee soldiers once had accompanied the English in the burning of Apalachee in

1702 and had been valuable military allies in the early decades of the South Carolina colony, but now served a similar purpose in Spanish Florida.38

Second, the shift from Native to African labor and growing market demand for rice increased the value of African slaves. The loss of valuable slave labor was of paramount concern to the always profit–minded South Carolinians. The report of the attack in August 1720 emphasized the loss of slaves “taken prisoner” over the death of

36 The War of the Quadruple Alliance was a 1718–1720 European war fought by Spain, Great Britain, France, the Holy Roman Empire, the Dutch Republic, and Savoy. Colonial conflict in the southeastern borderlands was merely a peripheral theatre. Both Spanish and English colonists used this conflict to justify military actions.

37 St. Helena’s Island is roughly seventy-five miles south of Charleston, adjacent to the modern day town of Beaufort. The initial attacks of the Yamasee War took place in the vicinity of the island, and the English survivors of the assault on Port Royal fled to Charles Town by sea. Several old Yamasee towns were in the area, giving any Spanish–allied Yamasees involved in the 1720 attack the advantage of familiarity with the both the terrain and the layout of English settlements. “Extract of a Letter from Carolina to Col. Barnwell, August 19, 1720,” Letters of the South Carolina Secretary of State, CO. 5/382, SCDAH.

38 Chapter Six provided a deeper discussion of Spanish plans for Yamasees and fugitive slaves.

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a White colonist.39 Of the slaves taken, three or four reportedly belonged to Colonel

John “Tuscarora Jack” Barnwell, leader of the English forces against in the Tuscarora

War a few years earlier.40 The English and Spanish acknowledged the value of the slaves in this exchange in different ways. The English cited the loss of property as the main reason why “we must never expect to live peaceably whilst the Spaniards are in control of St. Augustine,” while the Spanish demonstrated what they viewed as the true objects of value: They returned fifty White captives taken in the same raid a few days later under a flag of truce but kept the African slaves.41 Colonial officials equated such actions with piracy and saw this raid as the latest in a recent rash of ship seizures extending north along the Atlantic coast as far as New York. Although South Carolina operated independently of other colonies, this attack marked one of the first instances in which the loss of slave labor to the Spanish was considered a problem for all the

English colonies in North America. English colonists viewed this event as an obstacle to realizing their English rights to profit and property and resorted to arming that property in order to protect their way of life.

The Military Aspects of the Black Majority in South Carolina

South Carolina had a Black majority a full two decades before the Stono

Rebellion in 1739. Although this should have presented a cause for major concern

39 “Extract of a Letter from Carolina to Col. Barnwell, August 19, 1720,” Letters of the South Carolina Secretary of State, CO. 5/382, SCDAH.

40 The 1711–1715 Tuscarora War was fought by the Tuscarora of North Carolina and their Natives allies against English settlers and their European and Native allies, which included the Yamasee, Cherokee, and German and Dutch colonists living in North Carolina. This long, violent war ended with English victory and Tuscarora either being removed to a reservation or migrating north to join the Iroquois Confederation as its sixth nation.

41 “Extract of a Letter from Carolina to Col. Barnwell, August 19, 1720.”

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among colonists, their minds were soothed by their slaves’ recent military service and the relative lack of visible major dissent within the enslaved African population. The black majority, though, was evidence of an increasingly self-replicating labor force. With each generation born in South Carolina, the African population became more accustomed to colonial society. This did not mean, however, that the enslaved were content with their position, as White colonists hoped. Instead, African structures of fictive kinship and communication were adapted to new needs, including the formation of communication networks. Such networks served many purposes, allowed for dissemination of information that transcended illiteracy among the enslaved, and not only spanned multiple plantations but also included Spanish Florida. Such communication networks helped make South Carolina’s slave population aware of the presence of Spanish Florida and the state of the imperial standoff in the southeast.42

The shift towards arming Africans in South Carolina became problematic for security and order in that colony. In the two decades following the Yamasee War, the

English armed slaves, assuming that the four hundred enslaved Africans’ defense of their masters and the colony during the Yamasee conflict was evidence of their acculturation into the slave system. However, the Stono Rebellion served as a painful

42 The existence of these networks also helps illuminate the circumstances surrounding the timing of the Stono Rebellion. Historians have grappled with these issues for quite some time. Mark Smith adds an African cultural factor to the analysis and contends that the rebellion was deliberately timed to coincide with a Catholic holiday of the Virgin Mary, which was also celebrated in Africa with white banners and drums. Peter Wood’s essay on the Stono Rebellion explains how all these factors intersected to create the then-bloodiest slave revolt in North America. He places the revolt in its proper context in South Carolina’s history and explains how enslaved Africans under a literate leader would have chosen an early September timeframe as the best opportunity for a successful revolt. Wood cites as reasons for the timing of the rebellion events such as the smallpox epidemic, the new security act that later would require most Whites to be armed on Sundays, recent Spanish propaganda, and the fact that most Whites would also be in church. Perhaps most importantly, Wood points to runaways’ recent successful escapes to St. Augustine. Mark M. Smith, Stono: Documenting and Interpreting a Southern Slave Revolt (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005).

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reminder to the contrary. Surprisingly, although the rebellion resulted in a major overhaul of the South Carolina slave code, it did not render all African slaves untrustworthy. Colonists remained hopeful and were somewhat reassured by the loyalty of some enslaved Africans during this event. Those slaves thought to have fought valiantly against the Stono rebels were honored with cash payments and new clothes, and a slave named July was even granted his freedom as reward for killing a rebel.43

British colonists held up such individuals as examples of the usefulness of loyal slaves both at home near Charlestown and in isolated areas. The compensation they received reflected past rewards given to enslaved Africans who aided in defense of the colony and served as a model for slave involvement in the War of Jenkins’ Ear. This new war brought renewed threats from Spanish Florida, the greatest of them an official offer of freedom for fugitive slaves in return for Catholic conversion and military service.

A Buffer for the Garrison

Non-European military service was essential to English colonial expansion southward, as demonstrated in the establishment of the Georgia colony. In the six decades before the 1730s, colonists in South Carolina assumed the responsibility of conducting military assaults and defense against Spanish Florida. The Lords Proprietors were far more interested in quick profits than large–scale imperialism and did not make significant investments in fortifications on the southern edge of White settlement. In

1719, however, James Moore Jr. became provisional governor of the colony following

43 Oglethorpe’s accounts of the War of Jenkins’ Ear also mention a man named July as an important scout. Given July’s newfound fame as an example of loyalty in the face of extreme rebellion the previous year, he likely was used by Oglethorpe in his military campaigns if Oglethorpe truly believed in the reasoning for the siege of St. Augustine he presented to the rest of British North American in his calls for military assistance. J.H. Easterby ed., The Journal of the Commons House of Assembly Vol. 2, (Columbia: Historical Commission of South Carolina, 1951), 65.

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the removal of the Lords Proprietors from power and the placement of South Carolina under the control of the British government. One of Moore’s primary goals was the construction of forts along the Altamaha River, which lay south of the Savannah River, the colony’s official southern border. Here, it was planned “that a Regular Colony of the said poor people be Settled and Established in the Southern Frontiers of Carolina.”44 In

1732, this settlement became the Georgia colony. Its leader James Oglethorpe was one of first to risk arming slaves and pioneered the placement of Indian and African soldiers under a single command in a full–scale assault of the Spanish.

Oglethorpe planned the Georgia colony in concert with South Carolina’s colonial leadership and English traders established in the region targeted for settlement.

Oglethorpe understood that he was entering a disputed area with active military actions.

Therefore, he sought to establish good relations with the indigenous people of

Yamacraw Bluff, his preferred settlement site, before arriving with his ship of colonists.

He asked the Yamacraw Indians and their chief Tomochichi, relatives of the Lower

Creek, for blessing and permission to settle Savannah. Oglethorpe wished to avoid hostilities similar to those South Carolinians experienced in the Yamasee War, as the original charter for the colony states that,

our Provinces in North America have been frequently Ravaged by Indian Enemies more Especially that of South Carolina which in the late war by the neighbouring Savages was laid wast with Fire and Sword and great numbers of the English Inhabitants miserably Massacred And our Loving Subjects who now Inhabit these by reason of the Smallness of their numbers will in case of any new war be Exposed to the like Calamities in

44 “Original Charter for Establishing the Colony of Georgia, June 9, 1732,” Georgia Department of Archives and History (hereafter GDAH).

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as much as their whole Southern Frontier continueth unsettled and lieth open to the said Savages.45

From its founding, Georgia was expected to be in close relationship with South

Carolina. Initially, slavery in Georgia was illegal to prevent economic competition from the slave–operated plantations of South Carolina from being a distraction. In contrast to

South Carolina’s wealth and industry, Georgia was intended to stand an example of what hard work and offering poor individuals the opportunity to create a life for themselves could achieve. Oglethorpe and the Trustees for the Establishment of the

Colony of Georgia in America, a group of British nobles who operated the colony until

1752, wanted it to focus on the production of silk, grapes, and other goods whose efficient production was not enhanced by slave labor. Georgia also took the lead in military operations. All of Moore’s southern forts were included in a wide swath of land

“which lies from the most Northern Stream of a River there comonly called the

Savannah all along the Sea Coast to the Southward unto the most Southern Stream of a certain other great water or River called the Alatamaha and Westward from the heads of the said Rivers.”46 The heads of these rivers were firmly within Native settlements, so

Indian cooperation was especially crucial to Oglethorpe’s domestic and military success.

Oglethorpe’s shrewd diplomacy among the Yamacraw directly influenced the participation of Native soldiers during the 1740 siege of St. Augustine during the War of

Jenkins’ Ear. After work to construct the city of Savannah began, Oglethorpe escorted

Tomochichi and his nephew Tooanahowi to London to meet the king in hopes of

45 Ibid.

46 “Original Charter for Establishing the Colony of Georgia, June 9, 1732,” GDAH.

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forming a stronger bond with the Natives than the South Carolinians. Indeed, during the siege, Oglethorpe “sent Commissions into the Creek Nation from when I have received advice that there is two hundred Men, along with whom is Tooanahowi, that are marched against the Floridians. I have sent an Express to permit and order them to attack the Spaniards, and I believe they will strike the first Blow.”47 Even after these

Indians agreed to help, Oglethorpe financially invested in securing their long–term assistance; when “the Indians were tired with the Heats and bad Weather,” he gave

“large Sums to get them to stay a few days.”48 As these military alliances paid off,

Oglethorpe also leveraged Indian assistance in order to expedite aid from South

Carolinians, expressing hope that the “People of Carolina will give the necessary

Assistance that we may begin with the Siege of Augustine before more Troops arrive there from Cuba.”49 Oglethorpe’s Native military alliances were an important motivator for South Carolinians to aid in the assault on St. Augustine but did not have the same impact as his request for that colony’s enslaved labor.

The War of Jenkins’ Ear and the Development of Anglo Identity

As governor of the new Georgia colony, Oglethorpe sought the use of Africans from South Carolina to fully implement his extensive battle plans to take St. Augustine in

1740. Carolinians, though, were wary of arming African slaves in the wake of the Stono

Rebellion, which was the largest slave revolt in the British American colonies before the

47 “Extract of General Oglethorpe’s Letter to Lieutenant Governor Bull, September, 27, 1739,” South Carolina Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, Vol. 3.

48 Unaddressed Letter from Oglethorpe from Camp in Florida, July 19, 1740, South Carolina Journal of the Commons House of Assembly, Vol. 3, 147.

49 “Extract of General Oglethorpe’s Letter to Lieutenant Governor Bull, September 27, 1739,” in Mills and Lane eds., General Oglethorpe’s Georgia: Colonial Letters, 1733–1743 (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1975).

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American Revolution. Despite these reservations, Oglethorpe constructed a plan of attack which granted critical roles to Indians and Africans. Not only did he arm 800

Black soldiers, enslaved Africans from South Carolina he called pioneers in the aftermath of Stono; he justified his incursion into Florida as revenge against Spaniards who “favor the revolting of the Negroes.”50 Oglethorpe thought such an appeal for enslaved manpower was necessary because he did not believe that his own colony could sustain the loss of a large number of White men, and they had no enslaved

Africans of their own to use as cannon fodder. To South Carolina Lieutenant Governor

William Bull, Oglethorpe promised he was “willing myself to do all that I possible can for annoying the Enemy, as his Majesty has ordered, and shall spare no personal Labour nor Danger towards freeing Carolina of a Place from whence their Negroes are encouraged to massacre their Masters.”51 Bull, who had discovered the Stono Rebellion in progress and rallied militia forces to put it down only weeks earlier, agreed with

Oglethorpe’s assessment of the complications and disorder encouraged by the mere existence of St. Augustine and Fort Mose. Bull lobbied colonial legislators to approve

Oglethorpe’s plan until late 1739, when the South Carolina Commons House of

Assembly agreed

that the Protection which our deserted Slaves have met with by the Spaniards at Augustine, has encouraged many others to make the like Attempts; and even to rise in Rebellion; and that the Demolition of the Place would, in a very great Measure, tend to free us from the like Danger for the Future, as well as from other Inconveniencies which his Majesty’s

50 “Oglethorpe to the Duke of Newcastle,” in Mills and Lane eds., General Oglethorpe’s Georgia: Colonial Letters, 1733–1743 (Savannah: Beehive Press, 1975), 441.

51 “1740,” South Carolina et al., Journal of the Commons House, 160.

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Subjects of this Province have been, and are exposed to from the Garrison.52

The members of the House believed that the public would also approve, promising

“50,000 pounds Current Money of this Province, to be raised and defrayed by the Public of this Province.”53 The pledge of such a large amount indicated the fragile, vulnerable mindset of White colonists of South Carolina. The public was willing to pay to arm a slave population despite their recent demonstration of a capacity for violent revolt during the Stono Rebellion.

To justify the arming of enslaved Africans, South Carolinians sought to manipulate the relationship between Indians and Africans and to change the colony’s demographics through taxes and incentives. To deter rebellion during the War of

Jenkins’ Ear, John Fenwicke proposed

that the Indians should be encouraged in such Manner as to induce them always to offer their Service whenever this Government may have occasion for them. We propose that 50 pounds be paid to Titus and 25 to Simon, over and besides the Encouragement intended for the other Indians. And more especially as the Sum of 50 pounds per head for all rebellious Negroes taken and brought down alive, and 25 pounds per Head for all killed, was proposed and assured, as an Encouragement to the Southern Indians.54

South Carolinian officials also used this opportunity to create taxes they hoped would even out the ratio of White colonists to African slaves, viewed both as a liability and as an economic resource. The Commons House of Assembly proposed two major plans to reduce the ratio. The first, “A Bill for the Better Strengthening of this Province

52 Ibid, 20.

53 Ibid, 20.

54 Ibid., 76.

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by Granting to his Majesty certain Taxes and Impositions on the Purchasers of Negroes

Imported,” intended to at least temporarily discourage the large–scale importation of

African slaves.55 Second, a bill “to increase the number of White persons in the province” contained provisions to better organize White indentured servitude and to get

White landowners who relied on slave labor more involved in the defense of the colony.56 The bill required everyone owning more than ten male slaves to find one able,

White man for the militia, and anyone who owned more than 20,000 acres to find one man to fight, plus one more for every 1,000 acres over 20,000. If owners did not comply, their sons age sixteen and older would be forced to fight. If a large landowner had no sons, he would be fined six pounds per month, with the proceeds going to fund the slave patrols. After the Stono Rebellion, the internal security of South Carolina society assumed a fiscal dimension that required the militarization of human property and effectively provided for a financial penalty for amassing such property.

Unified through Domination: Coerced Combat and the Formation of a Southern Colonial Identity

Oglethorpe viewed the War of Jenkins’ Ear as a geopolitical struggle to ensure that the British achieved and maintained an economic advantage in the Indian trade and the planned exports from Georgia of silk, flax, hemp, and wine. In self-promoting letters to the Georgia Trustees, colonial officials described Georgia’s potential as in time becoming “of vast consequence to the British Nation, nobody can tell as yet what great

55 Ibid., 168.

56 Ibid., 25.

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Riches there may be in the Bowells of the Earth within that colony.”57 Letters from colonial leaders to English officials argued that victory would “secure the trade and navigation of all this part of his majesties dominions, and make it no hard matter to intercept Spanish ships in their passage through the Gulf of Florida.”58 To help ensure the success of his colony, Oglethorpe requested help from as far as New York, citing lingering concerns from that colony’s slave revolt in 1712 as the primary reason they should help.59 He did his utmost to present himself as an advocate for slave control and the maintenance of social order and submitted requests for manpower from South

Carolina and New York, claiming to protect those colonies’ slave system and economic security. Ironically, in 1735, Georgia officials passed an act that explicitly outlawed

African slavery, citing as primary reasons the proximity of the Spanish and the fear that it would degrade the value of White labor and lead to class stratification and debt troubles. Regardless of the outcome of the War of Jenkins’ Ear, Oglethorpe saw the use of enslaved African military power as important because it gave colonists throughout

British North America a sense of security regarding their enslaved populations. To this

Georgia governor, protecting the emerging southern economy and way of life was essential.

Reeling in the aftermath of the Stono Rebellion and anxious to eliminate the

Spanish threat many South Carolinians blamed for the insurrection, Bull in 1740 agreed

57 Copy of a Letter from Mr. Samuel Eveleigh to Mr. Martyn at Carolina, February 8, 1735, Egmont Collection, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries.

58 Mills and Lane eds., General Oglethorpe’s Georgia Vol 1, “William Byrd to the Earl of Egmont, 8 August 1739.”

59 “Oglethorpe to the Duke of Newcastle,” Mills and Lane eds., General Oglethorpe’s Georgia Vol 1, 457.

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to the largest deployment of enslaved soldiers in the region’s history. Oglethorpe’s

Black soldiers were paid, likely in an attempt to limit defections once the forces reached

Florida. In February 1740, the South Carolina Commons House of Assembly decided to raise “the Sum of 120,000 pounds towards assisting General Oglethorpe in an

Expedition against St. Augustine, there be Provision made, that the Allowance or Pay for such Slaves [as] shall be employed in the Public Service on that Undertaking, shall be 10 pounds Currency per Month for each, the Owners running all Hazzards that may attend the same.”60 Hiring slaves for specialized skills had become common practice in southern cities, but paying slaves, along with issuing them firearms, demonstrates the desperation of the colonial officials who took such a risk. South Carolina approved funds to pay the pioneers and their White officers, even though the ratio of 160 White officers to 800 Black soldiers violated the colony’s own guidelines for Black military service.

Additionally, the Commons House of Assembly encouraged White soldiers to take their slaves with them, offering an insurance policy at the public’s expense “that any person who shall go on the Expedition against St. Augustine may carry any Number of Negro

Men, they shall think fit, and in Case any such Negro shall be killed in the intended

Expedition, the Public shall allow a sum not exceeding 250 pounds per head.”61 If slave owners sent their slaves to fight but did not participate themselves, however, they assumed all risk regarding possible flight to St. Augustine.62 This warning was necessary. Such risks were realized in August 1739 when Black laborers constructing

60 Easterby ed., JCHA, 195.

61 Ibid, 309.

62 Ibid, 195.

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British forts escaped to Florida. The Spanish reported that 100 enslaved Africans constructing an English fort rebelled and scattered around the countryside. At least two of these rebels sought directions to Fort Mose from Spanish–allied Indians nearby.63

Once full–scale war began, however, switching sides became difficult, and mass defections did not occur during the unsuccessful siege of St. Augustine. The British forces abandoned their mission and retreated to the safety of the Georgia marshes to prepare for a counterattack before Black soldiers had the chance to consider joining their brethren at Fort Mose.

Massive rebellions by the South Carolina slave soldiers did not occur during the siege of St. Augustine, but the decision to allow them to participate in such warfare demonstrates that laws limiting the ratio of White to Black soldiers were primarily internal security measures intended to reduce the number of armed, enslaved Africans within the colony itself. The threat of mass defection and rebellion was certainly present, as Spanish Governor Montiano considered inciting a slave rebellion in the midst of the war in 1740. Montiano’s plan specified that freedom and land would be granted in return for military actions against the potential rebel slaves’ former owners.64 The Council of the Indies overruled this proposal, directly resulting in Oglethorpe’s gamble in arming slaves paying off. Safeguards based on white to black ratios intended to quell any chance of rebellion would likely have been ineffective in Spanish territory and with

Spanish military support. Oglethorpe, who was aware of the potential of sanctuary

63 Manuel de Montinao, Manuel Joseph de Justis, and Cornélis Dewitt Willcox, Letters of Montiano: Siege of St. Agustine (Savannah, Ga: Savannah Morning News, 1909), 32.

64 Diana Reigelsperger, “Interethnic Relations and Settlement on the Florida Frontier: 1668-1763,” (PhD diss., University of Florida, 2013), 251.

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policies, making the decision to take the fight all the way to St. Augustine demonstrates that such safeguards were not as important as destroying a haven for fugitive slaves.

European imperialistic competition for influence and resources in Native

American homelands led British colonists to seek out and arm loyal African slaves and trusted Indians to defend a system that ensured their continued servitude and exploitation. Almost one third of the army formed for the Yamasee War was Black, but as the Black slave population grew after that war, South Carolina officials authorized the use of enslaved soldiers only in increasingly remote locations. Along with a tempered

Christian message designed to inspire loyalty while protecting slavery, the arming of enslaved Africans by 1740 was recognized by the British as essential not only to defend against Indians and other Europeans but also to minimize slave rebellions. The costs of

Indian wars, the Stono Rebellion, and a fire that ravaged Charles Town made compromising on their human investments worth peace of mind at home to South

Carolinians. In eliminating both Spanish influence and Native threats, defense was paramount.

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CHAPTER 6 INDIANS, AFRICANS, AND EXPANSION IN GEORGIA

A Regular Colony of the Poor People

On February 12, 1733, the 200-ton English frigate Anne completed a long journey across the Atlantic Ocean from England and down the Carolinian coast, stopping at Charles Town and Beaufort. The ship finally landed at a rocky bluff named

Yamacraw, overlooking the tidal flats near the mouth of the Savannah River. On that day, the colony of Georgia began, led by James Edward Oglethorpe, a member of the

British Parliament and representative of a philanthropic group known as the Trustees for

Establishing the Colony of Georgia in America. Oglethorpe was chosen to ensure the fulfilment of the Trustees’ threefold mission of starting a colony for the worthy poor, creating a center of silk production, and establishing a new buffer zone out of the southernmost portions of South Carolina, between the French at Fort Toulouse in what is now upper Alabama and the Spanish at St. Augustine. As a military buffer zone, the

Georgia colony initially retained its military character in the manner of its settlement and the importance of the militia and the social order, especially relationships with Indians and Africans.

During the new colony’s first year of existence, it was battle tested in the War of

Jenkins’ Ear, discussed in Chapter Five, during which Oglethorpe skillfully orchestrated the assistance of Indian allies and the conscription of African slaves from other colonies.

The colony leadership’s tight control of Native alliances and African soldiers was based on the collective borderland experiences of South Carolina. Less than two decades after the Yamasee War, Oglethorpe acted cautiously in negotiating with the local Yamacraw and other Creek Indians the specifics of white expansion into the countryside.

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Additionally, the 1739 Stono Rebellion reinforced the Trustees’ controversial ban on slavery at the time of Georgia’s founding. The Trustees attempted to create a colony based on lessons learned from South Carolina’s mistakes, but due to an inability to effectively achieve their goals—namely, to maintain their ban on slavery—the Trustees gradually lost control of the colony, which become more like South Carolina with every passing year.

This chapter argues that, from Georgia’s role in the War of Jenkins’ Ear through

1750, the dynamics of the southeastern borderlands shaped Georgia into a center for the development of a British North American identity based on the profits of slavery.

That war lessened the potency and frequency of Spanish raids, creating an environment ripe for the development of slavery in Georgia. However, the subsequent increase in the number of African slaves in Georgia also provided a supply of settlers for the Spanish población policy intended to shore up the outlying areas of Florida. This chapter discusses how, after 1732, the Spanish took the lead in manipulating Indian and African cooperation in response to the southward expansion of British colonists’ efforts to do the same during the War of Jenkins’ Ear.

Indeed, the stated purposes of creating the Georgia colony stemmed from the need for security against Indians after the Yamasee War and the Spaniards who harbored them as well as the desire to make poor British citizens more useful to the

British Commonwealth. Additionally, the Georgia Charter sanctioned and encouraged the policy of defense throughout settlement. Colonists in the southernmost parts of

South Carolina which became Georgia in 1733 were small in number and, “as their whole southern frontier continueth unsettled, and lieth open to the said savages,” were

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vulnerable to attack if left in this isolated condition.1 The Georgia colony was to supplement the small numbers of these distant settlers by “receiving, managing and disposing of the contributions” of poor people and debtors from around the British

Empire.2 Contemporary promotional materials linked the employment and settlement of the less fortunate to the beliefs that “the Wealth of a Nation consists in the Number of her People” and that the noncontributing poor must be placed in situations where they could work and thus become useful to the British Empire.3 Benjamin Martyn, secretary for the Trustees and author of a 1733 tract boasting of the trade advantages possible from supporting the infant Georgia colony, attributed the success of fellow borderland

French and Spanish colonists in undermining British colonization to the proper application of these principles. At its founding, Georgia embodied hopes for imperial security and a bold plan to bolster trade through a massive social welfare experiment.

No other colony was created to fulfil both governmental and private goals to such a degree.

New Strategies in the Borderlands

Relations between Indians and Africans in Georgia were different than in other southern colonies. Rather than brewing rebellions or instigating wars, Georgia assumed a proactive stance towards governance due to its position as the youngest English colony. Georgia could tailor its government policies based on lessons learned through trial and error by the twelve older colonies, particularly South Carolina and Virginia.

1 Charter of the Colony and Proceedings of the Trustees, 1732 – 1752, Georgia Department of Archives and History (GDAH).

2 Ibid.

3 Benjamin Martyn, Reasons for Establishing the Colony of Georgia (London: W Meadows, 1733), 3.

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Oglethorpe and other colonial leaders went to great lengths in their attempts to prevent the conditions that sparked the Yamasee War against South Carolina. Georgia’s early success was based on peaceful economic relationships with the local Native American tribes. From the start of the colony, government policies, including military protection and eventually Christian education, addressed the Tomochichi and Yamacraw Indians.

Georgia’s strict policies on Indian trading practices, diplomatic dedication to peace with

Indians, and the strict prohibition of African slavery were all reactions to early Indian–

African relations and were aggressively enforced to avoid the multicultural conflict which had become characteristic of the southeastern borderlands.

Achieving the full ambitions of the Georgia colony required the manipulation of the still unsettled southeastern borderland region. In St. Augustine, Governor Manuel de

Montiano was not pleased with the increased British militarization to the north, and the

War of Jenkins’ Ear soon emerged from these tensions. In 1733, during Georgia’s beginnings as a military supplement to South Carolina, the Trustees deliberately distinguished themselves from their sister colony. They attempted to build a separate identity for Georgia based on how Indians and Africans were incorporated into the colony’s social and economic life.

The close association with South Carolina meant that Georgia inherited that colony’s failures and successes in the Indian trade. South Carolina’s primary failure was a series of cultural and economic violations perpetrated by its Indian traders which resulted in the outbreak of the Yamasee War. As a result of the war, full trade relations between the Creeks and South Carolina were not resumed until November 1717 with the signing of a new treaty and trade agreement. The agreement set new trade rates

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and contained a clause promising the Creeks ammunition for use against any enemy tribe not at peace with the English. As the Westo migrations which cleared the land of many Native American inhabitants paved the way for English expansion, the Creek’s westward migration cleared the lands south of Georgia of obstacles to runaway slaves en route to St. Augustine.

Georgia’s inherited successes from South Carolina were manifested in

Oglethorpe’s relationship with Tomochichi, chief of the Yamacraw Indians, who considered the bluff of the same name as their home. Uniquely, neither the Natives nor the colonists in Georgia needed an introduction to the other. In fact, they expected each other. Oglethorpe selected the Yamacraw site based on the South Carolina governor’s recommendation of the area’s receptive indigenous inhabitants and strategic position.

Meanwhile, Tomochichi anticipated and hoped for the expansion of British settlements in order to regain prestige among the Lower Creek confederacy by negotiating new trade agreements.4 These two men engaged in a relationship crucial to the survival of the new colony.

Borders and Brothers

The founding of the Georgia colony in the North American southeast exacerbated borderland tensions, such as control of labor, warfare, economic competition, and disputed boundaries. The latter two problems, however, occurred between two British colonies. In the 1730s, the existence of both Georgia and South Carolina still depended on good trade relations for economic prosperity and on the manipulation of labor for

4 Julie Anne Sweet, Negotiating for Georgia: British Creek Relations in the Trustee Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), 21.

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internal security. Rice production helped South Carolina prosper, but the restructuring of the Indian trade after the Yamasee War drove Carolinian traders further into the Native interior, across the land that eventually became Georgia in search of productive trade agreements.

When the Trustees sought to supplement Georgia’s planned exports of hemp, flax, silk, and wine—all of which take several years to turn profits—with Indian trade which would serve the dual purpose of creating military allies, the colony experienced conflict with established South Carolina traders. In 1738, the Trustees met to address complaints filed by South Carolina with the Board of Trade in England. Some time before, the Board of Trade had required Georgia to license South Carolinian traders who came recommended by the governor and Council of South Carolina and to exempt these traders from a £5 registration fee. Inter-colonial competition is clear in the

Trustees’ decision to respond quickly before the Board of Trade issued a ruling they could not overturn. Analyzing a secretly acquired copy of the report, the Trustees crafted a response to the king, emphasizing the importance of the Indian trade and how

“fatal it would be to our colony, and the Indian Trade in general” if changes to the trade were made before “the bounds of Georgia and South Carolina should be adjusted.”5

Bureaucracy was the primary source of this disagreement, but the Trustees’ response had a resentful tone. The monetary loss was minor, but the Trustees saw a much more important issue in their desire to separate their colony from the infamous legacy of South Carolina’s traders and to handle their own affairs. The Trustees’ feared that Georgia’s trade would “become entirely subject to the pleasure of South Carolina”

5 Transactions on the Trustees of Georgia 1738 – 1741, Georgia Colonial Records, General Records of the Trustees of Georgia, GDAH.

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and merely an adjunct to South Carolina’s trading enterprise because of the sheer numbers of traders from that colony.6 The “Act of settling the Indian Trade for the mutual satisfaction of both Provinces,” presented by the Trustees with the intention of preventing South Carolina from exerting unequal economic influence, suggested that the commissioners of Indian trade for both colonies should work together to set the number of traders based on the number of Indian towns and to split the number of licensed traders allowed in Georgia equally between the two colonies.7 Georgia’s early success resulted not only from its relationship with Indians but also from mutually accepted borders with its fellow British colony.

Rendering the Colony of Georgia More Defensible

Slavery stands as another area in which Georgia carved out an identity distinct from South Carolina. In 1734, a slave insurrection in New Jersey spurred calls for a limited, three-year ban on slavery in Georgia.8 At that time, monthly slave imports to neighboring South Carolina from Guinea topped 650 Africans, and influential

Charlestown merchant and Indian trader Samuel Eveleigh pushed for a temporary ban on slave importation because slaves in South Carolina outnumbered slaves in New

Jersey 10 to 1, giving Georgians much more to fear if a similar event occurred.9 In

6 Ibid.

7 Ibid.

8 Samuel Eveleigh to James Oglethorpe at South Carolina, August 5, 1734, Egmont Manuscripts (hereafter EM), Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library (hereafter HML), University of Georgia (hereafter UGA), 94.

9 Ibid, 94. Eveleigh was an entrepreneur whose success in the deerskin trade paved away for his extensive involvements in the import of manufactured goods. He served in the Commons House of Assembly in 1707, as Commissioner of the Indian Trade from 1712 to 1715, and as a member of the Royal Council from 1725 to 1727. Julie Anne Sweet, “An Encourager of Industry: Samuel Eveleigh and His Influence on the Southeastern Indian Trade,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 112, No. 1/2 (January - April 2011): 5-7.

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February 1735, the British Board of Trade considered three acts, including two intended to strengthen Georgia’s borderland position through the regulation of external and internal relations with Indians and Africans, respectively.10 The “Act for rendering the

Colony of Georgia more defensible by prohibiting the Importation of and use of black slaves or Negroes into the same”11 was found legal and even praiseworthy and approved by the Board of Trade in April 1735. This legislation banned bringing persons of African descent into the colony because of fears that they would cause rebellions and side with foreigners during wars, which “might occasion the utter ruin” of Georgia.12

Initial penalties included a fine, but those found with Africans after June 24, 1735, were subject to having those individuals confiscated and sold to support the colony.13

Georgia’s prohibition of slavery represented another reaction to how Indian–

African relations had proved detrimental to security and the southern plantation economy in other colonies. Silk, whose production could not be efficiently aided by

10 Sweet, “An Encourager for Industry,” 10-16. The ambitious Eveleigh, who understood the dynamics of the borderland relations with Indian’s and Spaniards more than almost anyone, also had suggestions in the area of strengthening Georgia’s trade. Julie Anne Sweet has outlined the way Eveleigh’s schemes influenced developments in his home South Carolina as well as Georgia. Eveleigh suggested that a fort be constructed at the confluence of the Ocmulgee and Oconee River at the stop where the Altamaha River, one of the largest eastern North America begins. The fort was to be constructed at his expense if the Trustees would agree to grant him exclusive rights to using it as a trading post. Eveleigh understood that the pitch to the Trustees needed to incorporate the greater goals of defense against Spanish incursion and the change at new Indian treaties. Although the Trustees’ declined his initial offer, Eveleigh continued to make suggestions for the better governance of the colony. Although the Trustees never commented directly on the issue, Eveleigh’s continued push for slavery, in many cases for construction purposes, could imply support for the fort to be built be enslaved Africans as well, as Fort King George eventually was. Several slaves escaped to Spanish Florida during that fort’s construction, a situation the Trustees obviously hoped to avoid.

11 Copy of the Report of the Board of Trade upon three acts prepared by the Trustees for establishing Georgia, February 1, 1735, Microfilm Reel C 192729: Vol I, Charter of the Colony and Proceedings of the Trustees, 1732 – 1752, GDAH.

12 An Act for rendering the Colony of Georgia more defensible by prohibiting the Importation of and use of black slaves or Negroes into the same, Allen D. Candler ed., Records for the State of Georgia Vol. I, 53.

13 Ibid, 53.

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slave labor, was initially intended to be the colony’s primary export; therefore, it was thought that early Georgians could do without enslaved Africans. The Trustees of

Georgia believed that, “as it is obvious to common sense, and is confessed by those who have been most engaged in it that nothing can be raised so soon as Silk.”14 The

Trustees desired that the colonists of Georgia perform the tasks of crop cultivation without slave labor. The Trustees were “impatient to see the People engaged in earnest about raising such products as will be of great and immediate benefit to themselves … and set themselves heartily to work in planting their mulberry trees.”15 Ballots determined work schedules and duties, and all colonists were expected to carry their own weight.16 In addition to strict Indian trade regulations, slavery was banned during the first twenty years of Georgia’s existence.

A closer look at Georgia’s 1735 ban on African slaves reveals a deeper difference from South Carolina than the mere prohibition on Africans’ presence. Another goal of the act was to make to colony more defensible, which implies a completely different wartime role for enslaved Africans. In direct opposition to South Carolina’s militia acts which sanctioned and encouraged black military participation (see Chapter

Five), Georgia law stated that only English and Christian slaves could be relied upon for defense. Georgians did not introduce any clauses to ensure that Christian slaves understood that they would not be freed by virtue of their religion, because Oglethorpe

14 Harman Verelst to William Stephens, December 12, 1736 in Kenneth Coleman and Allen D. Candler eds., Trustees' Letter Book 1732-1738 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 251.

15 Ibid, 251.

16 Ibid, 251.

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found it much more useful to outlaw any and all black presence after 1735. When South

Carolinians involved in physically constructing the colony brought their slaves to assist,

Oglethorpe saw this as setting a bad example for his colonists, whom the Trustees expected to focus on crops that could not be efficiently aided by slave labor. In addition, during the infancy of the colony, large populations of coerced African laborers were considered to be targets of the Spanish.

Imperial Expansion: Población, Rumors, and Slavery

Neither Spanish nor English colonists could exert significant control over the southeastern borderlands. The Native Americans whose homelands Europeans invaded remained integral to European strategies for occupation of this land. In addition, the presence of Africans, sometimes free in Florida and mostly enslaved in South Carolina and eventually Georgia, was necessary for effective defense. Both Spanish and English colonists crafted strategies to best exercise conflicting claims to Native lands between the Altamaha and St. John’s rivers. In Spanish Florida, this concept of expansion through reoccupying lands control over which they had lost for security purposes was called población. The English relied on the creation of Georgia based on the concepts presented in the Barnwell plan. While población was an active policy throughout the history of Spanish Florida, the settlement of Georgia, first by South Carolinians and eventually by new colonists, injected a new dynamic into relationships with area Indians, such as the Yamasee and Creek, and provided opportunities for enslaved Africans to escape and achieve freedom under the sanctuary policies of Spanish Florida. Vast communication networks spawned rumors which forced imperial powers to adjust their plans. The adaptation of and conflicts between these strategies characterized ethnic

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and geopolitical relations in the borderlands from the conclusion of the Yamasee War, through the War of Jenkins’ Ear and the 1740s, until Georgia permitted slavery in 1750.

Población

Although Georgia officials managed to avoid the negative consequences of

Indian–African collusion, they still faced threats from the multicultural Spanish settlement complex at St. Augustine. Población let these groups be involved in Spanish society in Florida in ways that English colonies did not. Indian slavery was prohibited in

Florida, and recently freed blacks, or fugitivos, had more, albeit still limited, opportunities.17 The Spanish empire had trouble recruiting volunteers as pobladores to settle the countryside around St. Augustine and could not bend Native populations to its will. Consequently, allied Indian missions and free black towns, such as Fort Mose, became highly important in Spanish attempts to maintain its land claims through occupation—a strategy at which the English were far more proficient from the late seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century.18 In 1737, the Georgia Trustees believed that, at the request of Yamasee refugees, the Spanish had built several forts in British-claimed territory, a defiant reminder of the attack that had almost destroyed South Carolina.19

English colonists’ treatment of Indians and Africans created ideal populations for población. As discussed in Chapter Three, Westo slave raids sent Native refugees

17 There were more opportunities for these fugitive slaves who were granted freedom, but not all Carolina escapees were fortunate enough to be freed.

18 25 Secretary don Fernando Trivino, February 23, 1744, SD 1020; Juez de Indias en Canarias, Account of families remitted to the Americas, 1718-1765, February 18, 1765, Santo Domingo 1020. Diana Reigelsperger, “Interethnic Relations and Settlement on the Florida Frontier: 1668-1763,” (PhD diss., 2013), 34.

19 Benjamin Martyn to Secretary of State the Duke of Newcastle, February 9, 1737, Westminster, Colonial Office 5/667, 10-12, in Kenneth Coleman and Allen Candler eds., The Colonial Records of Georgia XXXIX, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 173.

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southward, and after the Yamasee War ensured South Carolinian reliance on enslaved

African labor, some people of African descent found their way to St. Augustine, starting in 1687. From 1693, the repopulation policy stipulated that all fugitive slaves reaching

Florida were to be granted their freedom and resettled for the purposes of defense.20

This policy created a viable opportunity for freedom for enslaved Africans in the

Carolinas, who continued to stream southward and provide soldiers for the Spanish black militia until the Spanish vacated Florida in 1763.

Fort Mose in Florida was a genuine security threat to British North America, in some ways worse than the maroon societies the Portuguese faced in colonial Brazil due to Mose’s fortification and training with firearms. The Africans and Indians of St.

Augustine were experienced in battle and well-armed and trained. Fort Mose possibly was established as a defensive measure in direct response to the founding of Georgia.

Georgia was established in 1733, Fort Mose in 1738, and diplomatic talks between

Spain and Britain ceased in 1739.21 The freedom policy offered at Fort Mose was developed and its appeal increased as Georgia grew stronger over the next two decades. Spanish Indians continued to conduct raids on Georgia and bring captured slaves to St. Augustine to be freed and resettled. Chapter Three discusses how

Oglethorpe used these kidnappings to rally forces against the Spanish in the War of

Jenkins’ Ear. English colonists’ sentiments and motivations during that conflict were driven by the Spanish-arranged relationship between Indians and Africans, specifically between the Yamasee and enslaved Africans. This relationship helped set the tone of

20 Cédula, November 7, 1693, SC 58-1-26; Governor Zuñiga y Cerda to King, October 10, 1699, SD 844; Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, 24-25.

21 Sweet, Negotiating for Georgia, 142.

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battle, recruitment efforts, and funding requests. Yamasee involvement in stealing slaves whom English considered property was considered a significant violation of

Georgia and South Carolina colonists’ rights as Englishmen. Many white colonists took personal affront at the Yamasee involvement in 1715 attacks on South Carolina.

Georgia’s expansion toward Spanish Florida roused the Spaniards, prompting a renewal of raids and new attempts to staff the Spanish army with more Native

Americans and fugitive slaves of African descent. England’s agreement with Spain in the Convention of El Pardo did not solve the controversy over the lands south of

Georgia, which both countries claimed. The original goal of the convention was to establish a neutral territory between Spanish and English territory, from the Altamaha

River to an island called San Juan, near the mouth of the St. John’s River. The treaty called for a board of commissioners to determine the exact location of the border. In the preceding months, however, Oglethorpe had started construction on forts south of the mouth of the Altamaha.22 England never ratified the agreement, and its southern North

American colonies resumed an aggressive military posture toward Florida. Oglethorpe saw a need to secure defenses against the Spanish by using Native allies. His attendance at a meeting of various Indian groups at the Creek town of Coweta in 1739 concluded with pledges of anti-Spanish action by the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek and a renewed trade agreement with Georgia. The Indians also granted the

British title to all lands south to the St. Johns River, which served as the Georgia–

Spanish Florida border.23

22 David Lee Russell, Oglethorpe and Colonial Georgia: A History, 1733-1783, (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co, 2006), 62.

23 Ibid, 31.

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Rumors

Georgia leaders cultivated valuable alliances with Indians and relied heavily on rumors provided by the Creeks. As a military colony, Georgia considered both strategic surveillance and military intelligence provided by Native allies essential advantages. In the years leading up to the War of Jenkins’ Ear, Georgia did not have the population necessary for substantial self-defense or even effective vigilance. Oglethorpe considered the Creeks to be his subordinates and believed that they guarded the southern edges of white settlement. About ten months after the initial settlement at

Yamacraw, Oglethorpe engaged in calculated treaty negotiations with the Creek in

December 1733 in reaction to the threat not only of a Spanish attack but also of a possible Spanish settlement on what was recognized as the Georgia side of the

Altamaha River.24 The rumor was substantiated by Creek reports that a gunboat of 130 men belonging to that supposed new settlement fired upon them about forty miles south of the Georgia border.25 Oglethorpe still regarded the reports as rumor, however, writing to John Lord Viscount Percival, the first Earl of Egmont and president of the Trustees that “I cannot believe that the Spaniards would venture it but at the same time will not be too secure.”26 Oglethorpe planned to investigate the next day and report his findings to South Carolina Governor Robert Johnson.

Rumors such as these were especially influential in this borderland region where

European colonists living on the edge of empire with limited resources had to rely on

24 “Copy of a Letter from Mr. Oglethorpe at Savannah to the Trustees without date, but wrote about December 1733,” Egmont Papers, (hereafter EP) 51-56, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library (hereafter HML), University of Georgia (hereafter UGA).

25 Ibid, 56.

26 Ibid, 56.

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alliances with the Natives upon whose land they were encroaching. Groups such as the

Creek had the power to craft these rumors as they desired, and white colonists had to weigh their responses against the resources available to them. In this case, Oglethorpe doubted the validity of the Creek story but could also ill afford the consequences of

Spanish activity in his fledging colony. He felt compelled to use his limited forces to investigate and to alert the South Carolinians if the rumor were true. Their military assistance was essential to repelling any Spanish forces because of the small size of the military force Oglethorpe could muster in his own colony and the unavailability of enslaved Africans to arm.27

When possible, Oglethorpe attempted to create settlement plans for Georgia that did not rely heavily on Creek informants. At the same time, he commanded exact surveys of the surrounding landscape and carefully considered what land was better suited for military use than economic pursuits through African slave labor.28 Oglethorpe thus initially took every opportunity to avoid reliance upon African labor or Indian intelligence, though these opportunities were rare and often unfruitful. A plan to create remote white settlements could open the door to Indian and African collusion against white Georgians, a possibility Oglethorpe thought best avoided entirely. South Carolina military leader and planter John Barnwell first presented the strategy of a system of settlements for defensive purposes in 1721 in response to the loss of the Yamasees as allies after the Yamasee War. When Johnson was installed as the first royal governor of

27 Shane Runyon, “Borders and Rumors: The Georgia Frontier in the Atlantic World,” (PhD diss., University of Florida, 2005), 89-129.

28 Copy of a letter from Mr. Beaufain to from Purysburg to Mr. Simond, January 23, 1734, EP, HML, UGA, 64. On a surveying trip up the Savannah River in 1734, Oglethorpe and his assistant remarked on lands suited for rice cultivation as undesirable.

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South Carolina, Swiss merchant Jean Pierre Purry petitioned the Duke of Newcastle to allow a settlement of Swiss colonists in South Carolina; this became Purrysburg in

1731. As a result of the cooperative relationship between South Carolina and Georgia,

Oglethorpe’s adaptation of the township plan led Georgia officials to consider using the

Trustees’ financial resources to support towns outside the boundaries of Georgia, “so as to make this a strong fence against the incursions of the French or Spanish Indians, and even of the French and Spanish themselves.”29 Purrysburg was such a settlement, but the Georgia Trustees did not appropriate funds for it, and by 1733, it struggled with health and housing issues and never prospered.

While the communication networks carried rumors about the flight of fugitive slaves from British North American plantations, white colonists were often kept on the margins of communication. White South Carolinians had been aware of fugitive slaves’ attempts to reach Florida throughout the first three decades of the eighteenth century— one of the reasons for establishing the Georgia colony in the first place—but enslaved

Africans often received this information before their white colonial counterparts. Even merchants, such as Captain James Howell, with connections among the Spanish who often docked on the island of San Juan, reported the Spanish proclamation that all slaves who arrived in St. Augustine would be declared free only after many fugitive slaves had already completed the journey.30 Captain Howell made these revelations in a sworn affidavit upon raising the alarm about an impending Spanish attack in April 1738.

29 Ibid, 65.

30 Captain James Howell’s Affidavit of the Spaniards Design to Attack Georgia, South Carolina Council Chamber, April 21, 1738, EP, HML, UGA. Alejandra Dubcovsky, “Connected Worlds: Communication Networks in the Colonial Southeast, 1513-1740,” (PhD diss., University of California – Berkeley, 2011).

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In his travels in Spanish territory, Howell reported witnessing a significant marshalling of forces consisting of more than 40 ships and up to 7,000 Indian and Spanish soldiers, with a rumored 1,500 French Canadians set to join them upon the demand for Georgia’s surrender and evacuation.31 Howell’s information was confirmed by several others who saw significant threats in the number of Indians allied to the Spanish and the freedom proclamation’s appeal to enslaved Africans.32

Slavery: “No Man Maintains Himself by His Own labor”

While the specifics of población were far from ideal for Native and African borderland residents, association with the Spanish empire at the least provided an alternative for those marginalized by slavery in English colonial society in South

Carolina and Georgia. As the Barbadians of Goose Creek feared, the danger of Indian and African collusion remained, and the life available to them in Florida was enticing.

Georgia’s 1735 prohibition of slavery was intended to curb what had become a steady stream of southward-bound Indian, African, and mixed Indian and African—or Mustee— slaves. Eveleigh cautioned the Trustees later that year that “[I] am positive that that

Commodity [rice] can't be produced by white people. Because the Work is too laborious, the heat very intent, and the Whites can't work in the wett at that Season as Negrs do to weed the Rice.”33 Along with the desire to employ African slaves in the clearing of land,

Eveleigh captured the sentiment that certain aspects of building commercial and public infrastructure were too difficult. This attitude, summed up by prospective planter Robert

Williams’ claim that “No main maintains himself by his own labor,” combined with the

31 Ibid, Captain James Howell’s Affidavit, EP, UGA.

32 Herman Verelst to Lord John Viscount Percival, June 17, 1738, EP, HML, UGA.

33 Samuel Eveleigh to the Trustees, September 10, 1735, EP, HML, UGA.

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loaning of Indian and African slaves from South Carolina, gave slaves new opportunities to escape British North America and decreased the distance they needed to travel to reach Florida.34 The South Carolina Gazette, Charles Town’s colonial-era newspaper, reported the escape of three loaned African slaves in February 1733, a mere two months after Georgia’s founding. Such events had the potential to fulfil the Trustees’ documented concern that enslaved Africans “might desert to the Spaniards, might cause war with the Indians as at Carolina.”35

Despite the illegality of slavery, the issue was raised constantly. The Trustees tried to motivate colonists to prosper from their own efforts. Nearly ten years after the colony’s founding, however, people such Benjamin Martyn were still asking William

Stephens on behalf of the colonists if there were any chance of "permitting the use of

Negroes, as then some gentlemen of eminence and trade have delivered their opinions in favor of them, under proper limitations and rejections" and inquiring "how the Negroes can be admitted, consistently with the safety of the province.”36 The Trustees constantly had to battle the desires of their own colonists, in addition to outside forces. The allure of slavery, especially the particularly lucrative plantation economy, beckoned these

“worthy poor” and debtors from across the Savannah River. Colonists who settled

Georgia came from the lowest levels of English society and were eager to take advantage of new opportunities to acquire wealth in the New World. Colonial officials

34 Thomas Stevens Journal, 1:1, HML, UGA.

35 Thomas Stevens Journal, 1:1, HML, UGA.

36 Harman Verelst to William Stephens, December 1, 1736 in Kenneth Coleman and Allen D. Candler eds., Trustees' Letter Book 1732-1738 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 251.

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did their best to remain separate from South Carolina’s dealings. However, the Court

Records of Georgia report that:

Some of the People of Augusta have Plantations on the Carolina Side of the River, as well as in Georgia, where they find it most advantageous to settle, and carry on the Trade with the Indians, together with making great Improvements on their Lands; by such Means they have an Opportunity of sliding to two or three Negroes now and then at a Pinch into their Plantations, where during their skulking awhile (which is not hard to conceive, considering the great Extent of the Township of Augusta, by reason of large Tracts of land) they are not presently to be discovered.37

Oglethorpe knew that the slave economy and riches of Charles Town would tempt his colonists, possibly why no settlers were allowed to leave the ship during the short time it was docked in South Carolina on the initial journey from England to Yamacraw Bluff.

South Carolina’s use of the Creeks in slave retrieval proved unreliable because

Georgian colonists who illegally imported African slaves worked against them.

As the population of Georgia grew during the first decade of the colony’s existence, so did calls for allowing slavery. Proponents of slavery centered their arguments on economic reasons. In December 1734, the Trustees’ court recorder

Thomas Christie complained to Oglethorpe that restrictions on African slaves drove up the prices of land on the South Carolina side of the Savannah River, while Georgian colonists served merely as a military buffer for South Carolinians’ wealth.38 In addition,

Christie argued that slave labor allowed South Carolinians to offer better prices on corn and rice, limiting would-be Georgia planters’ options for making profits (precisely the situation the Trustees desired).39 The next month, Eveleigh, who had supported at least

37 Court Records of Georgia in Coleman and Candler eds., Trustees' Letter Book, 257.

38 Thomas Christie to Mr. Oglethorpe, December 14, 1734, EP, 147.

39 Ibid, 147.

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a limited ban on slavery, wrote to the Trustees, attempting to sway their opinion on a longer slavery ban for the good of the colony. “For without Negroes,” Eveleigh wrote in early 1735, “you can’t have there any produce Sufficient to load Vessels and without that no Trade can be carry’d on there to Satisfaction.”40 Eveleigh reasoned that the

Trustees’ naiveté about slavery stemmed from the fact that a majority of Trustees had never left England and so lacked the general consensus among colonists that Georgia could “never be a place of any great Consequence without Negroes.”41 The calls for slavery did not cease but set up an ideological battle throughout the 1730s between a small group of pro-slavery colonists known as the malcontents and anti-slavery colonists led by Oglethorpe and comprised of the colonists living closet to Florida, such as the Highland Scots at Darien.

“Ringleader for Negroes”: Patrick Tailfer and the Malcontents

The malcontents, as a group of influential pro-slavery landowners in Georgia came to be called, first expressed detailed concerns about the prohibition on slavery to the Trustees in the summer of 1735. Their leader, Patrick Tailfer, bluntly stated that improving land in Georgia “is next to an impossibility without Negroes.”42 The malcontents’ arguments for slavery centered on white settlers’ inability to handle the

Georgia climate and consequent need for more clothing to work the fields, which created a burdensome expense for employing white laborers. Furthermore, the malcontents believed that enslaved Africans could both grow and subsist on salt, Indian

40 Samuel Eveleigh to Mr. Martyn at South Carolina, January 20 1735, EP, HML, UGA, 193.

41 Ibid, 194.

42 Patrick Tailfer and Others to the Trustees, Undated but Received August 27, 1735, EP, HML, UGA, 942.

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corn, and potatoes, making the financial burden of maintaining slaves minimal. They also argued that the five-year term of indenture for white servants was insufficient after factoring in their recovery from frequent illnesses.43 The malcontents concluded their plea with a proposal to use slaves only in clearing land, beating rice, and producing naval stores, supporting the Trustees’ goal of making indigent English citizens productive for the empire. The malcontents also appealed to the Trustees’ sense of pride, pointing out South Carolinians’ competitive advantage of cheap labor, which let them always undersell Georgia.44

The malcontents’ plans certainly had profitable implications and even fit into schemes for defense against the Spaniards, although they created an ideal situation for enslaved Africans to escape. These proposed plans for slave-aided clearing of land would speed expansion and provide a buffer of settlements, similar to the Barnwell plan proposed when the area was still part of South Carolina. The malcontents’ wishes also dovetailed with Eveleigh’s suggestion for a trading post in the area. Eveleigh, a leader in buckskin exports in South Carolina, would have benefitted from the production of export goods, in addition to those provided by the Indian trade. The additional landowners could also supply the white population needed to staff the militia. Oglethorpe’s acceptance of Barnwell’s settlement doctrine, however, did not appear to extend to more southerly locations on the Altamaha, such as Darien. In fact, the Trustees continued to strongly oppose these strategies because of the Spanish threat, lack of

43 Ibid, 942.

44 Ibid, 942.

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control over Creek actions so close to Spanish settlements, and threat of runaway slaves.45

As the rumors of possible Spanish attacks increased, the Trustees decided to scale back some elements of the southward expansion in their original plans. By the

Trustees’ own admission, the center of Georgia’s settlement in 1736 was already too confined by the Savannah River.46 They were well aware that the Spanish historically claimed title to the former Guale territory, although they lacked both the numbers and the influence to occupy it.47 Raids and counter-raids marked the extent of political negotiations between the two European crowns in America. Furthermore, neither group could even carry out these raids without the help of Indians. Therefore, the English proceeded very carefully, negotiating every detail of expansion with the Creeks.48

The elevated threat level also put on hold infrastructure plans, and the Trustees ordered Oglethorpe to immediately cease construction on a road from Savannah to

Darien. This road was deemed too expensive, but the Trustees believed that the logistical advantages of the road were outweighed by the strategic drawback of allowing

“insults from the Spaniards at St. Augustine, who may be induced to make an Attack when the Passage is laid open for them; whereas at present the thickness of the

45 Benjamin Martyn to James Oglethorpe, June 10, 1736, Colonial Office, 5/566, 224-232, in Coleman and Candler eds., The Colonial Records of Georgia the State of Georgia XXI, 98-102.

46 Ibid, 98-102.

47 Antonio de Arrredondo and Herbert E. Bolton, Historical Proof of Spain's Title to Georgia (Berkeley: University of California Press), 225-226.

48 John Juricek, Colonial Georgia and the Creeks: Anglo-Indian Diplomacy on the Southern Frontier, 1733-1763, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010). Juricek notes that because Georgia was the final English colony to be stablished in North America, early Georgia colonists were moving into a region with a long history of Indian and white relations of the French, Spanish and English South Carolinian varieties. See also Julie Anne Sweet, Negotiating for Georgia: British-Creek Relations in the Trustee Era, 1733-1752 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 1-9.

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Woods, and the Difficulty of passing the Savanahs is a Protection and Defense against any such attacks.”49 Similarly, the Trustees ordered the evacuation of St. Simons Island and the resettlement of its residents in Savannah because the strategic weakness of the island was thought to be “an Invitation to the Spaniards to disturb it.”50 Both Darien and

St. Simons were prime sports for rice cultivation and exceptional candidates for improvement by slave labor, but if the Trustees were willing to take such drastic measures based on rumors, then they certainly were unwilling to further destabilize the situation with presence of enslaved Africans. The conflict between these views of how to best ensure Georgia’s security and survival continued until the legalization of slavery in 1750.

Practical Defense: Colonial Support for the Trustees

Historian Betty Wood notes that colonists such as Tailfer, Eveleigh, and others who agreed with the malcontents’ petition in 1738 mostly lived in Savannah and were almost equally comprised of charity settlers and adventurers.51 All were of English or

Lowland Scot descent. Those more inclined to support the Trustees lived closer to the multiethnic población settlements of Florida. The Highland Scots who settled Darien, the southernmost outpost of the English colonies in North America, were especially opposed to slavery in Georgia for the same reasons presented by the Trustees. In addition, the Highland Scots were directly affected by modifications to the Trustees’ plans for southward expansion. Although the road from Savannah to Darien provided

49 Benjamin Martyn to James Oglethorpe, June 10, 1736, Colonial Office 5/566, 224-232 in Coleman and Candler eds., The Colonial Records of Georgia XXI, 98-102.

50 Ibid, 98-102.

51 Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 29-31.

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logistical relief, the Highland Scots would have been the first to be attacked had the

Spanish forces used the road for military purposes. Accordingly, in January 1739,

Highland Scot colonist John Cuthbert petitioned the Earl of Egmont to oppose the arguments made by Tailfer the previous year. Darien residents were very aware of

Spanish policies to reassert their historic claims to the region through the recruitment of

Indian and African slaves in the lowcountry. The presence of enslaved Africans required

Darien residents “to keep a guard duty at least as severe as when we expected a daily invasion.”52 Cuthbert focused on the practical, everyday concerns of colonists on the edge of empire, stating that “[t]he nearest of the Spaniard who have proclaimed freedom to all Slaves who run away from their masters makes it impossible for us to keep them without more labour in guarding them, than what would we would be at to do their work.”53 Concurring with Cuthbert’s assessment of the security threat, Oglethorpe also believed that, “if Negroes could be allowed, this Colony must be immediatly destroyed, for it would be impossible to prevent them deserting to the Spaniards our near neighbours, who give freedom, Land, and protection to all run-away Negroes.”54

Oglethorpe agreed that slavery enabled idleness, pointing out that many fighting for slavery sought a new source of coerced labor after their servants had recently

52 John Cuthbert to Percival, New Iverness, January 3,1738, EP, HML, UGA.

53 Ibid. The Darien Petition has been the subject of scholarly attention due to anti-slavery language that resembled that of later abolitionist effort. Chief among these is the statement that “Its shocking to Humane Nature that any race of Mankind and their prosperity should be sentenced to perpetual slavery, nor in justice can we think otherwise of it then that they are thrown amongst us to be our Scourge one day of other for our sins, and as freedom to them must be as dear as to us, what a scene of horror must it bring about, but the longer it is unexecuted the bloody scene must be the greater.” For more information, see Harvey H. Jackson, “The Darien Antislavery Petition of 1739 and the Georgia Plan,” William and Mary Quarterly 3, Vol. 34, no. 4 (Oct. 1977): 618-31.

54 Oglethorpe, At Camp on St. Simons, January 16, 1739, EP.

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completed their term of indenture.55 Oglethorpe hoped that a continued ban would force those who wanted slaves to simply leave the colony.

Echoes of the Stono Rebellion

The events of the Stono Rebellion in September 1739, discussed in Chapter

Three, did not go unnoticed in Georgia. Amidst that colony’s debate over slavery, the

Stono Rebellion served as the most effective cautionary tale against involuntary human bondage and most obvious symbolic way Georgia could distinguish itself from its sister colony, which was slowly gaining a competitive lead. Thomas Stephens incorporated the events at Stono into his arguments against slavery in Georgia. He understood that rivers could not prevent slaves from escaping. Additionally, if slavery were permitted, many would be bought and loaned from South Carolina, providing another opportunity for them to escape to St. Augustine “under pretense of going to Georgia.”56 South

Carolinians blamed Spanish meddling among their slave population for the insurrection, and while the documentary record does not provide a direct link to the proposed schemes of De la Valle and Montiano (overruled by the Council of the Indies in 1731), an official invitation from the Spanish empire, of course, was not needed for enslaved

Africans to act in their own interests.57 Just as rumors transmitted by Oglethorpe’s

Lower Creek allies informed Trustee leadership, communication networks on lowcountry plantations influenced the actions of enslaved Africans.

55 Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 30. Wood also notes that Oglethorpe’s response showed a rare concern for the wellbeing of Africans who would be subject to losing their freedom to support white idleness.

56 Thomas Stevens Journal, 1:7, HML, UGA.

57 Don Joseph Patiño to Consejo de Indias, April 25, 1731, Santo Domingo 837. Reigelsperger, “Interethnic Relations on the Florida Frontier,” 251.

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Networks formed by fugitive slaves functioned across Native landscapes and

European settlement. In a study of multicultural communication networks in the southeast, historian Alejandra Dubcovsky illustrates how, during the 1706 Spanish and

French attack on Charles Town, slaves who deserted Carolinian lines provided valuable information about English tactics.58 Similar situations likely would have occurred as enslaved Africans made their way to Spanish Florida, seeking land of their own and serving in the black militia from the 1680s onward, and as they were captured in one of the many skirmishes in more extensive European-based warfare (see Chapter Two).59

There is no way to know to what extent, if any, the Spanish military leadership used military intelligence from southward-bound fugitive slaves or whether they were instructed to spread the word about the various iterations of the sanctuary policy. It is clear, however, that lowcountry slaves were well aware of the possibilities at Fort Mose and incorporated them into their individual quests to eliminate the conditions of their bondage. The very existence of Fort Mose stood as a threat to South Carolinian property and Georgian security and was a major contributing factor to arguments against slavery.

Slavery and the War of Jenkins’ Ear

The Spanish población strategy and the communication network strengthened by it were more powerful than Oglethorpe’s best arguments against slavery. The Spanish were recognized as a threat to English colonists’ financial wellbeing, particularly their investments in human labor, and the War of Jenkins’ War (see Chapter Five) provided

58 Alejandra Dubcovsky, “Connected Worlds: Communication Networks in the Colonial Southeast, 1513-1740,” (PhD diss., University of California – Berkeley, 2011), 170.

59 Reigelsperger, “Interethnic Relations and Settlement on the Florida Frontier,” 244.

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Oglethorpe with the change he needed to eliminate this threat. The demographics of his fighting force, however, represented a huge compromise with English colonists’ racial sensibilities. African slaves’ presence in the borderlands threatened English security due to Spanish policies intended to increase slaves’ desire for freedom and escape, but security was not possible without arming Africans in defense of the slave system itself.

The Georgia Charter specifically stated that enslaved Africans would not be reliable in the defense of Georgia. Oglethorpe managed to avoid technically violating the charter by arming slaves from elsewhere in British North America, but this tactic clearly conflicted with the charter’s spirt of charity and hard work. The strongest imperial intentions were always limited by Anglo or Spanish colonists’ inability to impose their will without the substantial employment of Indian and African assistance. Wartime measures caused Oglethorpe to gather inter-colonial support and African soldiers based on an emerging, unifying, yet contradictory in his own colony, vision of a British North

American lowcountry society based on slave-produced profits. Thus, the dynamics of the borderlands allowed competing European imperial powers to influence the development of the other’s North American identity through alliances with Indians and adaptation to the demands of Africans seeking freedom.

Stalemate and Slavery

The War of Jenkins’ Ear ended in a relative stalemate, but it is noteworthy that, despite experience fighting in Spanish Florida and witnessing the free black town of Fort

Mose, English-held slaves did not defect on a large scale. This occurrence provided more ammunition for the malcontents’ arguments for slavery. Arming slaves did not appear to have a negative effect in Georgia, though fugitive slaves from South Carolina continued to make their way to Florida, and Spanish raids into Georgia persisted. In 186

1741, the Trustees’ accountant Harman Verelst wrote Oglethorpe that “[m]ost of the

Members of Parliament from the account of the Trustees laid before the House are convinced that Negroes would at present endanger the Province.”60 Georgia’s officials had paid close attention to the negative consequences of slavery in neighboring South

Carolina. If possible, the Trustees were committed to preventing reoccurrences of massacres like the Stono Rebellion. Verelst wrote to William Stephens that, “as for tenures of land now so capable of satisfying all reasonable people who wish well to themselves and families and the danger of Negroes so great while the Spaniards are at

St. Augustine and in Florida, that prohibition of them continues absolutely necessary.”61

The Trustees’ securities priorities shifted to Creek alliances in 1742, when they received a letter from Oglethorpe about peace proposals from the Indians which involved British interests.62 The Trustees responded favorably to Native American peace plans and agreed that the issue was of “national consequence.”63 They informed

Oglethorpe that “[y]ou have done a very beneficial act, in making peace with the

Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Creeks, and that Lt. Gov Clarke’s designs are … of greatest importance and security to all the British settlement in North America.”64 This statement reveals Georgia’s unique position and importance to the rest of British North

America. As a military buffer colony, Georgia’s relationships with different groups and

60 Harman Verelst to James Oglethorpe, April 27, 1741 in Kenneth Coleman, Trustees' Letter Book, 1738-1745 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 175.

61 Harman Verelst to William Stephens, June 6, 1741 in Coleman, Trustees' Letter Book, 183.

62 Benjamin Martyn to Andrew Stone, July 26, 1742 in Coleman, Trustees' Letter Book, 251.

63 Benjamin Martyn to Lt. Gov George Clarke, August 7, 1742 in Coleman, Trustees' Letter Book, 255.

64 Herman Verelst to James Oglethorpe, August 9, 1742 in Coleman, Trustees' Letter Book, 256.

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nations on the borderlands affected the security of all American colonies. These particular peace plans were forwarded to the Duke of Newcastle, one of the British secretaries of state, for consideration as the Crown’s official Indian policy.65

Slavery in Georgia

Georgia’s slow economic success opened the colony to criticism on both sides of the Atlantic, from the malcontents in North America to members of the British House of

Commons in London. A constant stream of promotional literature sent by Thomas

Stephens and Patrick Tailfer directly to British lawmakers created pressure on the

Trustees to explain their project to make productive colonists of poor British citizens at significant public expense. This war of words prompted the Trustees to conduct an introspective survey of their goals in 1742, which resulted in slight alterations to the labor code banning the presence of enslaved Africans.66 In addition to the Highland

Scots at Darien who petitioned against slavery due to security concerns about the

Spanish, opposition to the malcontents also came from the Salzburger settlers at

Ebenezer, who disliked that the effort to supervise slaves detracted from their successful implementation of the Trustees’ plans for silk manufacturing and their own efforts to grow and export red pine.67 As the War of Jenkins’ Ear led into the War of

Austrian Succession, the British and Spanish crowns shifted their focus to the widening scale of war in Europe. Wood argues that at this point in 1742, only as the military reasons for the ban on slavery diminished did the malcontents push for a full repeal of

65 Herman Verelst to James Oglethorpe, August 9, 1742 in Coleman and Candler eds., Trustees' Letter Book, 251.

66 Allen Candler, Lucian Lamar Knight, Kenneth Coleman, and Milton Ready, The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia (Atlanta, Ga: Franklin Print. and Pub. Co, 1904), 57.

67 Betty Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 68.

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the Act of 1735.68 Thus, even the pro-slavery elements in Georgia were molded by borderlands security concerns about the Spanish and their plans to entice African runaways and Native allies to migrate south.

The malcontents dropped their formal petitions in 1743, but the scattered use of slaves in Augusta by the mid-1740s implied that the ban was close to falling even without formal opposition. The lack of Oglethorpe’s physical presence after 1743 as a deterrent also emboldened those who desired slaves. Such colonists were also encouraged by the end of constant Spanish hostility and the “general peace” established along the border of Georgia and Florida after 1744. This development removed the main reason why southern Georgia’s Highland Scot colonists opposed slavery. The concerns of the Salzburgers at Ebenezer were soon drowned out by South

Carolinians who had long desired the prime rice lands along the lower Savannah River.

When the Trustees lifted the ban on slavery in 1750 and looked to establish a slave code to govern modifications to the labor system, the experiences of the Stono

Rebellion were foremost in the minds of expanding Carolinians. These concerns dovetailed with the malcontents’ pro-slavery argument that slave labor could be efficiently managed by controlling the ratio of white colonists to enslaved Africans. To do so, the Trustees imposed a fine intended to prevent a black demographic majority but not impose a financial burden on individual colonists’ ability to own multiple slaves. The desired ratio was one white man to every four slaves.

The allowance of these few African slaves into Georgia opened the door to their military use. Despite Oglethorpe and the Trustees’ sincere belief that most Africans

68 Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 75.

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were not useful for military defense, Oglethorpe’s tactics and employment of enslaved combat labor in the War of Jenkins’ Ear, combined with the lack of large-scale rebellions and defections of enslaved African soldiers, allowed for Georgia’s post-1750 slaves to be included in new plans for military defense prescribed in the 1755 “Act for Regulating the Militia of the Province and the better Defence of the Same.” This act is significant for

Indian and Africans relations in the southeastern borderlands for two main reasons.

First, the militia act was intended to counter the colonial nuisance of maroons in areas of the colony vulnerable to indigenous attacks. Fears of collaboration meant that the militia also served as a slave patrol. Second, and perhaps most ironically, the act authorized the arming of slaves against maroon and Native threats, arguing that some slaves could be trusted for such a task. The wording of the slave acts acknowledged that not all slaves were suitable for militia duty, but there is no strong evidence of any measure to determine who could be relied upon for military labor. Unlike in Goose

Creek, religion played little role in this situation. Although Georgia’s 1755 Slave Act encouraged instruction of slaves in Christian principles, the potential for salvation possibly leading to notions of freedom among the enslaved was not even discussed.

Similarly to South Carolina, however, Georgia implemented a rewards system to encourage loyalty on the battlefield. This act stipulated that any slaves who killed or captured an enemy combatant with a white colonist as a witness would receive their freedom. In addition, acts of valor were rewarded with new clothes along and relief from the duties of slave labor on the anniversary of the acts. Despite the increasing

Carolinian presence in the colony, Georgia modified its tactics for organizing slave labor for public benefit based on changed relations with the Yamasee Indians and the

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decreased military threat from Florida. If the military threat from Spanish Florida lessened, the allure of a better life for enslaved Africans who reached Florida did not.

Spanish población policies continued to entice fugitive slaves. The first major slave code in Georgia explicitly addressed this problem, offering cash rewards for the return of runaway slaves which increased the further south that slaves were apprehended.

Conclusion

New strategies to dominate the southeastern borderlands based on the lessons learned from South Carolina were largely ineffective. The Trustees were eventually removed from power, and their declining influence was met by the increasing practice of slavery by local colonists. White colonists needed Indian and African labor to survive in the region. Without either, Georgia was an economic failure in its early years. Betty

Wood observed that, during the Trustee era, a colony based on indentured servitude could not be economically self-sustaining, and a buffer colony to the Spanish could not be effective with enslaved Africans present.69 South Carolina’s experience was influential in the formation of the Georgia slave system, although the Georgia system did not entirely replicate it.

The Slave Act of 1750 permitting slavery in Georgia was crafted carefully, taking into consideration borderland concerns. First, runaway policies specifically targeted enslaved Africans’ relationship with Indians. One law stated that:

Whereas from the neighborhood of Augustine and the encouragement there given to Runaway Slaves it is much to be feared that many Negroes will be tempted to desert their masters ... any White person or Indian of

69 Wood, Slavery in Colonial Georgia, 88-109.

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Indians … shall be intituled to a Reward of Five pounds Sterling … and for every scalp ... one pound Sterling.70

Second, care was taken not to replicate South Carolina’s unfavorable slave demographics. One white servant between the ages of 20 to 55 was required for every four male slaves. To prevent the hiring out of slaves which could provide opportunities for escape, the slave code prohibited enslaved Africans from learning a trade—a provision reminiscent of the 1676 slave legislation in Barbados. As in South Carolina, a hefty import tax was imposed to discourage slave purchases, as well as requirements that 1,000 mulberry trees be planted on ever hundred acres and that, for every four males, there must be one female taught to wind the silk in order to encourage the industry of all involved. Collectively, these guidelines demonstrate how ethnic ratios were manipulated to avoid events such as the Stono Rebellion, how rewards for Natives were designed to prevent reoccurrences of the problems of the Yamasee War, and how maroons were targeted because of fears they would ally with Spanish Florida. The development of Georgia merely created a new theatre for the dynamics of the southeastern borderlands to play out.

70 Court Records of Georgia in Coleman and Candler eds., Trustees' Letter Book, 273.

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CHAPTER 7 SEMINOLE LEGACY, A CONCLUSION

Indian–African Relations in Georgia

Although for fifteen years the Georgia colony made slavery illegal, the practice of

African slavery continued along the border with South Carolina. Spanish documents suggest that St. Augustine was a major destination for fugitive slaves both before and after Georgia’s 1735–1750 ban on slavery. The persistent practice of slavery on the

South Carolina border by ambitious individuals guilty of “sliding to two or three Negroes now and then at a Pinch into their Plantations” also presented enticing opportunities for illegally held slaves to flee to Indian country.1 The very enforcement of the Slave Act of

1735, which targeted the presence of individuals of African descent in Georgia, caused many free mulattos and enslaved Africans to flee the colony.

During the 1740s, many court cases in the area of Fort Augusta concerned runaway slaves.2 It is possible that these enslaved Africans were stolen and smuggled across the Savannah River from South Carolina or that runaway slaves took advantage of Augusta’s high level of trade with the Creeks to negotiate refuge among them. When fugitive African slaves sought refuge in Indian country, Native communities chose to help them escape, incorporated them into the Native community, or returned them to

European colonists. However, both the Cherokee and the Creek treated returning slaves as a source of income, not a diplomatic obligation.3 There is no direct evidence

1 Court Records of Georgia, Vol. 4, in Coleman and Candler eds., Trustees' Letter Book, 271.

2 Ibid, 271.

3 Patrick Riordan, “Seminole Genesis: Native Americans, African Americans, and Colonists on the Southern Frontier from Prehistory through the Colonial Era,” (PhD diss., Florida State University: 1996), 244.

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of any cooperation between Creeks and enslaved Africans in Georgia during the 1740s, expect for the explicit stipulation in the Slave Act of 1750 that mulattos and mestizos be assigned slave or free status based on their mother’s status, absent any proof that they were free before that act went into effect.4 This law suggested that colonial officials had concerns about a population of mixed Native and African ancestry and that such individuals might be common, despite a prohibition on their presence during the previous fifteen years.5

As this dissertation has shown, Indians and Africans were quite familiar with each other as a result of various tactics the British used to expand throughout the lowcountry of the North American southeast, and the British and Spanish used various methods to manipulate the relationship between Africans and Indians. Although these two

European imperial forces did not control how Native communities responded to African inhabitants of the southeast, the British employed Native individuals to retrieve runaway slaves, and the Spanish encouraged their Indian allies to raid and kidnap enslaved

Africans from South Carolina and Georgia. Spanish Florida became a proven destination for fugitive slaves who fled from South Carolina and eventually Georgia.

However, most opportunities for southward escaping Africans to have contact with Indian towns between Charles Town and St. Augustine were curtailed by Queen

Anne’s War and the Creek-British alliance, which destroyed and enslaved the majority of Spanish-allied Native communities in north Florida.6 The waves of fugitive slaves

4 Kenneth Coleman and Allen Candler eds., The Colonial Records of Georgia XVIII (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 103-104.

5 Franklyn Milledge Bennett, “Black Other The Identities of Racially Mixed Native Americans in Northeastern Georgia,” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1999), 44.

6 Riordan, “Seminole Genesis,” 235.

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arriving in St. Augustine during the 1720s likely did not encounter a favorable Native presence until they were firmly with the Spanish sphere of influence south of St. Mary’s

River. The Yamasees in the area southward from the Edisto River to the Savannah

River were allied with the British until 1715, and those who survived the Yamasee War fled to St. Augustine. Westward flight from South Carolina and the utilization of other escape routes to Native communities, such as the Cherokee settlements, occurred during the first half of the eighteen century but intensified only with the reintroduction of slavery in Georgia and the elimination of Spanish control of St. Augustine.

British Expansion and the Seminoles

The unsuccessful Spanish attack on Georgia at the Battle of Bloody Marsh decreased hostility on the Florida mainland and southern British mainland colonies during the War of Jenkins’ Ear led not only to a military stalemate but also economic stagnation in Georgia and South Carolina. Maritime warfare increased colonists’ losses to privateers and damaged the market for South Carolina’s rice exports. Historian

Patrick Riordan argued that the price of rice dropped fifty percent between 1738 and

1740.7 Georgia’s naval stores and deer skins exports also suffered, which led South

Carolinians to compensate by shifting to a focus on indigo by 1745. James Oglethorpe’s absence from the region after 1743 gave encouragement to ending Georgia’s ban on slavery in 1750 and westward migration from Georgia and South Carolina.

The increased slave population in these new areas of English habitation gave the

British, Spanish, and French the opportunity to increase their diplomatic missions with the Lower Creek, who relocated their center of settlement from the Altamaha River

7 Ibid, 194. Riordan also states that the price naval stores and deer skins fell an additional sixty percent when the war expanded to include the French.

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Valley to the Chattahoochee River Valley in the 1710s. By the mid-eighteenth century, the Oconee band of Creeks separated from mainstream Creek affairs and relocated to

Apalachee and Cuscowilla in Spanish Florida to take advantage of trading opportunities.8 The Cuscowilla settlement was led by Cowkeeper, a Creek leader who had participated in the siege of St. Augustine under James Oglethorpe in 1740. The

Creeks’ alliance with the British made the Oconee’s move to Spanish territory during the

1754–1763 Great War of Empire contentious, but the end of that war saw the removal of many Spanish colonists and former slaves from Fort Mose to Cuba. The remote location of the Oconee settlement eventually gave rise to the emergence of the late eighteenth-century Seminoles, who found post-Spanish Florida to be an ideal haven from European influence, much as fugitive slaves had in earlier decades. Some former black slaves found refuge among the Seminoles, who gained popularity as a destination for runaway slaves from the time slavery was permitted in Georgia in 1750 until the destruction of the maroon fort at Prospect Bluff by the United States Navy in 1816.

Although the Spanish had offered freedom to British runaway slaves since the late seventeenth century, British Indian agents found runaway African slaves sheltered by Oconee chiefs not incorporated into Spanish society at St. Augustine as early as

1725.9 Such events demonstrate that, even after the British took possession of Florida in 1763, the official end of sanctuary offers for fugitive slaves did not mean that freedom from British slavery could not be found in Florida. The 1763 Treaty of Paris signaled the

8 Riordan, 195. The Apalachee site was at the same location as the old Spanish mission around Lake Miccosukee in Jefferson Country, Florida. The Spanish regarrisoned the area and even sent new settlers to the area. Cuscowilla, or Alachua, was located on the site of present day Payne’s Prairie south of Gainesville, Florida.

9 Kenneth Porter, The Black Seminoles, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 4.

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beginning of Indian–African interactions within in a maroon environment in the British colonies.

The Seminole settlements of North Florida welcomed black refugees into various areas of Native society. Before 1763, immediate freedom in Fort Mose or St. Augustine was not a certainty, so some escaped slaves who made it to Florida chose to live among Indians. Cowkeeper’s descendants at Cuscowilla were less sympathetic to

British demands for the return of such individuals and welcomed fugitive slaves in greater numbers than their predecessor. When not adopted as family members, black villagers were integrated into Seminole social life. Even as the Seminoles began to purchase slaves during the British occupation from 1763 to 1783, slave communities were organized into a tribute system granting them similar autonomy to that experienced by earlier black refugees at Mose. In the second period of Spanish occupation beginning in 1784, Seminoles and Africans, similar to the reestablished Fort

Mose, served as a military buffer to what had become American encroachment.

Scattered maroon communities of escaped African slaves allied with Seminole towns continued to fight American expansion until 1858. Together, these Indians and descendants of former slaves forged an identity of unrelenting opposition to the southward spread of a growing plantation society that threatened to disrupt their economic opportunities and re-enslave some members of this growing cultural unit.

Summary

This dissertation focuses on the expansion of British colonial society in the southeastern borderlands. Specifically, this dissertation argues that the imposition of an

Anglo–Caribbean model of social control of coerced Indian and African labor evolved alongside changes in relations between those two groups and the dynamics of their 197

interaction with the Spanish in Florida from the establishment of South Carolina in 1670 until the end of the first Spanish period in 1763. In addition, Spanish responses to the

British use of Indians and Africans in expansion played a crucial role in the formation of the southern British lowcountry identity as a slave society.

South Carolina’s strategies for keeping social order among its non-European inhabitants were initially influenced by its relationship with Barbados. In the 1670s, the

European population of Barbados began to overwhelm the ability of the land to maintain a profitable, robust sugar economy. Consequently, most of the island was dedicated to the production of sugar as a cash crop through the labor of native and African slaves, and additional land was needed for agriculture. South Carolina cleared land to provide the food Barbados needed and engaged in a slave trade with local Indians to provide laborers for the Barbadian sugar plantations. The British-sparked slaving wars, however, caused many indigenous residents to seek refuge among the Spanish in

Florida, who viewed South Carolina as a violation of their territory. As rice was introduced to the colony, the subsequent British expansion further aggravated Spanish settlers. British colonists engaged in a wide range of schemes to acquire additional land for rice cultivation, including but not limited to squatting on vacant land and skirmishing with the Spanish. As colonists occupied land through both legal and illegal means, demand for enslaved African labor to fuel South Carolina’s geographic and economic expansion rose.

At the same time, events in Barbados led some Carolinians to fear the slave labor on which they had based their new colony. Barbados was the first British colony to import Africans on a large scale, and South Carolinians expected to reap great

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economic benefits using similar methods. News of King Phillip’s War, however, sparked fears of similar displays of anti-British authority and prompted Barbadians to restrict the importation of Indians from New England. In addition, a planned rebellion by African slaves on Barbados uncovered in 1675 led to laws which limited slaves’ education and mobility and targeted Christian doctrines which white Barbadians suspected to be a motivator for freedom. As Barbadians migrated to South Carolina during the following decade, the colony adopted this code in 1691 in an attempt to control Indian and African slaves throughout the lowcountry.

In the North American southeast, South Carolinians’ strategies of control were challenged by Spanish colonists and Native groups, such as the Westo, Creek, and

Yamasee, whose land British colonists sought to claim. Therefore, Chapter Two of this dissertation, “The Tri-Racial Origins of the Early South,” provides an overview of the landscapes, people, and interactions that characterized the southeastern borderlands and argues that Spanish and English settlers’ success hinged on manipulating Indian and African laborers and controlling the terms of encounter between the two. Both the

English and the Spanish operated at the mercy of American Indians whose homelands they claimed. The European groups also relied heavily on the coerced labor of Natives and Africans brought across the Atlantic. Labor systems helped to define the English community and influenced colonists’ lives, particularly their sense of security and religion. Independent and collective relationships with Indians and Africans, who accounted for eighty-eight percent of the Carolinian population in 1710, helped to establish the foundations of colonial life in South Carolina and eventually Georgia.10

10 Thomas Nairne, A Letter from South Carolina, (London: A. Baldwin, 1710).

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Due to such demographics, plans to pacify, control, and ultimately profit from the labor of Indians and Africans dominated the minds of early colonial leaders and later proved essential to emerging notions of southern colonial identify. In the southeastern borderlands, Indian and African interaction was essential to the building of an Atlantic community in a process Atlantic historian J.H. Elliot describes as “the creation, destruction, and re-creation of communities as a result of the movement, across and around the Atlantic basin, of people, commodities, cultural practices, and ideas.”11

Chapter Three, “The Southeastern Borderlands: Conceptions and Competition” defines what constituted the southeastern borderlands for the purposes of this study and explores the disparate conceptions and experiences of all parties involved. This chapter highlights the competition for resources among the English, Spanish, Native

Americans, and various factions of these groups. Most importantly, this chapter explains how the Atlantic World collided with southeastern Native cultures so as to produce a unique situation in the Americas—various European imperialistic plans to manipulate a formidable Native population while simultaneously expanding and occupying land through African slave labor and controlling the relationships between the subjugated

Indian and African groups.

Samuel Thomas and Francis LeJau, Anglican missionaries associated with the

SPG, proposed using religion as a means to obtain the compliance South Carolinians desired from their Indian and African slaves in Goose Creek, the center of St. James

Parish. Chapter Four examined the formulation of a “Borderlands Gospel” by exploring

11 John Elliot, “Atlantic History, A circumnavigation”, in David Armitage and Michael Braddick eds.. The British Atlantic World, 1800-1800, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 254.

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Anglican missionary efforts, specifically among Indian and African slaves in South

Carolina, and touching upon Spanish Catholic missions. LeJau’s efforts had two major impacts on Indian–African relations and British expansion. His dedication to the

Christian education of free and enslaved Indians and enslaved Africans allowed members of both groups to regularly interact outside plantation labor. Although planters remained wary that the Anglican message could spark notions of freedom among the enslaved, LeJau’s personal interest in education and linguistics created an environment ripe for cultural exchange, permitting Europeans, Natives, and Africans to learn each other’s language as they studied Anglican doctrine.

LeJau’s second major impact was that, in his efforts to convince planters that

Christian instruction would prevent crimes by the enslaved and increase labor production, he pointed out the Spanish had employed these methods with great success. He identified African slaves and Yamasee Indians who had had contact and experience among the Spaniards in Florida as the most responsive to discipline and education. Through his reasoning that the spread of Spanish Catholicism among Goose

Creek Indians and enslaved Africans could create sympathy for the Spanish, LeJau exposed how European competition for empire influenced the residents of St. James

Parish, including many powerful colonial legislators, traders, and, most importantly, former Barbadians. LeJau represented an ideological shift among colonists from seeing

Anglican Christianity as an inspiration for resistance toward viewing religion as a device for social control through the careful supervision of religious teaching, the imposition of pledges denying freedom to baptized enslaved Africans, and the promotion of Native

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loyalty through religious instruction. These methods for control proved essential identifying enslaved individuals to serve in South Carolina’s colonial militia.

Between the Yamasee War and the Stono Rebellion, Native and African challenges to British authority sometimes had devastating results, but the use of coerced labor remained essential to British expansion and aggression against the

Spanish and their Indian allies in the southeastern borderlands. Chapter Five, “Coerced

Combat,” argues that the necessity of arming slaves to defend the new Georgia colony during this period was ironic because of the numerous challenges posed by enslaved people to English colonization strategies. Arming slaves, though, was necessary for the security of Spanish and English settlements, especially during times of significant armed revolt. This chapter highlights the perceived notions of risk and reward in expanding

English colonial society in South Carolina and Georgia and Oglethorpe’s arguments that pushing the Spanish from Florida would support not only his own colony’s economic success but also the larger region’s continued prosperity from slave labor.

Despite Oglethorpe’s reasoning for using Indians and Africans against the

Spanish, his own colony legalized slavery as the War of Jenkins’ Ear wound down in

1748. Chapter Six, “New Identities: Georgia and the Establishment of the Old South,” discusses the shift in Georgia’s slave policies as result of its position as a military border colony established to enable the worthy poor to make something of themselves after the end of large-scale hostilities with the Spanish.

Conclusion

British methods to control relations between Yamasees, Creeks, and Africans to support and accelerate their expansion into the southeastern borderlands instilled a legacy of resistance to the economic models, social constructs, and conditions of 202

servitude forced upon them. The level of British colonists’ reliance on coerced and slave labor from Indians and Africans made both groups prime targets for Spanish attempts to sabotage British colonial experiments. The legacy of this imperial competition was

Spanish support of southward flight by Natives and fugitive slaves, which created an environment in which these groups could continue to oppose American expansion. The political and social conditions created by these conflicts were ripe for the coalescence of many Muskogean Indian groups between 1670-1763, like the Creeks and Yamasees.

Furthermore, people of common interest formed communities that crossed ethnic lines and transcended bands of servitude, as seen in the Seminoles separation from the

Creeks, integration of other natives fleeing European encroachment on indigenous homelands, and the incorporation of free and enslaved African Americans into the

Seminole community. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the individuals of diverse circumstances who comprised the Seminoles fought wars, entered into treaties, and formed trade network in efforts to remain free of American influence on their affairs through southward flight. This migration represented a borderlands pattern that remained long after the borderlands ceased to exist as a result of international borders being decided, controlled, and enforced.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Timothy David Fritz was born in Atlanta, Georgia and was raised in Riverdale,

Georgia. After attending the United States Air Force Academy and Southern

Polytechnic State University, he moved to Greensboro, North Carolina where graduated from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in 2005 with a Bachelor of Arts in history. He went on to graduate with a Master of Arts in history from the joint program at the College of Charleston and The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina in the summer of 2008. Living in Charleston sparked his interest in the early history of the region, and Timothy continued his education at the University of Florida, where he received his Ph.D. in history in 2014.

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