Southern History Series: The Yamasee War

Editor’s Note: This is a work in progress.

In previous articles in the Southern History Series, we have explored the race war which broke out between the Powhatan Indians and English settlers in Virginia and the race war that was King Philip’s War between the Wampanoag Indians and the Puritans in New England. These race wars were decisive in shaping White racial attitudes toward the Indians in both regions.

The pacifist Quakers in Pennsylvania dealt with the racial threat posed by the local Indians by inviting the Scots-Irish to settle the Pennsylvania backcountry and establish a buffer state between Philadelphia and the local Indians. This allowed them to preserve their consciences intact without having to get their hands dirty. It was the Scots-Irish who spearheaded the colonization of the Southern backcountry from Pennsylvania to Georgia and who engaged in the most brutal conflicts with the Indians. It is important to keep in mind when exploring this era that no one on the Southern frontier in the late 17th and early 18th centuries had read Locke and that the fancy theories of the Enlightenment didn’t begin to gain traction in the American colonies until the American Revolution. By this point, the men of the “East” were largely shielded from racial conflict with the “savages” by the men of the “West.”

In terms of Indian policy, there were already regional cultural differences on display in colonial America: the Puritans attempted to convert the Indians and assimilate them into a multiracial Calvinist New England and set up praying towns for them which were destroyed in King Philip’s War, the Quakers invited the Scots-Irish and the Germans to settle their western frontier, the Virginians initially tried to get along with the Indians until the 1622 Jamestown Massacre and further south in Carolina (the colony was only later split into South Carolina and North Carolina) the Indians were dealt with largely by enslaving them as the original workforce in the colony or selling them to slave traders in the Caribbean.

The following excerpts come from Robert M. Weir’s book Colonial South Carolina: A History:

“Concluding a report in 1770, he observed, “I cannot quit the Indians without mentioning an observation that has often raised my wonder. That in this province, settled in 1670 … then swarming with tribes of Indians, there remains now, except the few Catawbas, nothing of them but their names, within three hundred miles of our sea coast; … nor [is there] any accounting for their extinction by war or pestilence equal to the effect.” Expecting the same thing, whatever it was, to befall the Catawbas, he soon tried to make arrangements for his nephew to acquire their lands.”

In 1670, South Carolina had been teeming with Indians, but they had largely disappeared from the colony by the 1740s. The Indians of South Carolina were decimated by European diseases and alcoholism. They were also quarrelsome and destroyed each other in tribal warfare. A large part of it though was due to the fact that South Carolina was established from the outset as a Slave Society:

“South Carolinians were the Indian slave traders of the North American continent. In fact, so many Indian slaves were exported from the colony that in 1715 Connecticut and some of the other New England colonies specifically barred their importation from Carolina. Historians have therefore frequently assumed that most captured Indians were sent to the Caribbean and elsewhere. Undoubtedly many were, but substantial numbers also remained in the province. In 1708, for example, the total slave population was approximately 4,500; 1,400, or about one-third, were Indians. …

Like other diseases, alcoholism struck Indians especially hard. Why is not yet entirely clear. What is certain, though, is that some Indians continued to live among White settlements in South Carolina. Traces of them appeared in the record, especially in the seventeenth century, when they commonly served as hunters who, it was said, would keep a planter’s table supplied with game for a mere trifle. By the 1740s, however, some ministers were reporting that there were few if any Indians left in their parishes.”