Carolina in Crisis: Cherokees, Colonists, and Slaves in the American Southeast, 1756–1763 by Daniel J. Tortora (review)

While discussing some of the generally accepted issues that led to the American Revolution, one of my colleagues took a step back and wondered aloud how different many historical narratives there might be if they considered what Native Americans were up to in the years leading up to this conflict. Daniel J. Tortora artfully takes up this line of inquiry in Carolina in Crisis: Cherokees, Colonists, and Slaves in the American Southeast, 1756–1763. Using South Carolina as a lens, Tortora makes a compelling case for the need to take the actions, thoughts, and cultural underpinnings of Indian peoples (in this case the Cherokee) more seriously when thinking about why colonists decided to split from Great Britain. Using both the Seven Years’ War and the Anglo-Cherokee War as backdrops, Tortora argues that Cherokee “motivations, divisions, and decisions” during this time period not only “shaped white fears, tensions, and plans” in South Carolina but also deepened fissures between the colony’s elites, backcountry and lowcountry whites, and free and enslaved African Americans (5). In addition to exacerbating issues within the colony, the disagreements that arose between colonists and British officials over Cherokee affairs, Tortora concludes, also primed the colony for revolution (9).

Tortora relies on eighteenth-century newspapers, correspondences, and speeches to carry readers chronologically through the events that transformed South Carolina between 1756 and 1763. He begins his study by looking at the imperial struggles that led to the Seven Years’ War and the economic and political factors that complicated Cherokee-British relations. Tortora then looks at Cherokee participation in British campaigns against Fort Duquesne in the late 1750s. He shows how the death of thirty-seven Cherokee warriors at the hands of “allied” white Virginians led to the undoing of South Carolina’s Indian relations and, eventually, all out war. Tortora spends the rest of the book deconstructing the motivations and military tactics of colonists and Cherokees alike. Unwillingness on the part of colonial officials to take cultural issues into account when negotiating truce, he argues, consistently intensified rifts between white colonists and Indians. Tortora’s attention to Cherokee culture, however, shines brightly. Readers will walk away with a sense of how the wars affected Cherokee towns and gender dynamics.

Though Cherokee warriors enjoyed moderate success during the war (e.g., the capture of British Fort Loudoun), the mid-eighteenth century, Tortora shows, proved “an unmitigated disaster for the Cherokee people” (1). Tortora uses the writings of eighteenth-century ethnographer James Adair and transcriptions of speeches delivered by Cherokee leaders to effectively illustrate how dwindling supplies, starvation, smallpox outbreaks, and frontier violence succeeded in leaving Cherokee men and women, regardless of their feelings toward South Carolina’s Indian policy, exhausted. In late 1761, Cherokee delegates and colonial officials signed a treaty that undermined Cherokee sovereignty and, as Tortora carefully highlights, escalated a “war of words” between British authorities and colonial elites in the South Carolina Gazette over the handling (and mishandling) of Cherokee relations (157). Squabbles over Cherokee affairs, as well as the Crown’s perceived willingness to hold Cherokee interests above those of white frontiersmen and elites, Tortora convincingly posits, “set the stage for Revolution” (171).

The research Tortora presents is tremendous. With so many working parts, however, certain aspects of his study are woefully underdeveloped. His attention to South Carolina’s enslaved African Americans is disappointingly brief considering the book’s subtitle. While the individuals who appear in this study seem to have benefited from the frontier violence that left white colonists distracted and disoriented, it would have been interesting to see Tortora render South Carolina’s African American communities, and the decisions they made, in sharper relief (this omission is likely a product of limited source material). Tortora does a better job illuminating his study’s Revolutionary connections. This topic is also where he makes his most original contribution to the historiography. Tortora successfully...