The Yamasee War: A Study of Culture, Economy, and Conflict in the Colonial South

2. Indian Slaves in the Carolina Low Country

2. Indian Slaves in the Carolina Low Country When John Norris wrote a promotional tract in 1712 encouraging British settlers to make their way to South Carolina, he emphasized the ease with which a profitable plantation could be established. All it would take, he assured his readers, was “fifteen Indian women to work in the field” and three more to work as cooks.1 At the time, Carolina’s slave population included a sizable percentage of Native American slaves, about 25 percent, far more than in any other mainland British colony, and Norris clearly expected that pattern to continue. It apparently mattered little to him whether white Carolinians victimized Indian or African laborers. Nor did he seem to consider the colony’s multiracial slave population unusual. South Carolina’s example was, however, unique, and American Indians were not the interchangeable cogs in the plantation system that Norris advertised them to be. Although Africans and Indians worked side by side on low-country plantations for several decades, demographic factors set them apart in significant ways. Enslaved Indian populations, for instance, exhibited a profoundly different gender composition, skewed heavily toward women and children, while African slaves were predominantly male during early generations. The two groups also encountered different reproductive realities and may have faced very different processes of acculturation, involving for Native Americans the need to adapt not only to European culture but to African culture as well.2 In addition, the presence of Indian slaves sometimes forced colonialplantersandofficialstorespondtoauniquesetofproblems that did not present themselves with respect to African slavery in the lower South. As discussed in the previous chapter, Carolinians participated in the enslavement process of Native Americans to an extent they did not with African slaves, and they often found it a difficult and imperfect process, amenable to complaint and revision . In reversing slave status and restoring “wrongly” enslaved Indians to freedom, Carolinians responded to a range of motives and considerations that diverged in several ways from patterns of African slave emancipation. The resulting boundary between freedom and slavery for Indians followed a course of its own and became remarkably tangled in some cases. In this chapter I argue that Indian slavery as it existed in South Carolina prior to the Yamasee War posed specific problems for Carolinians. By analyzing the practical complexities of the prewar slave regime, I seek to establish a point of reference for understanding in turn the colony’s wartime and postwar responses to those problems. demographic profile The problem of quantifying Indian slavery in the Carolina low country is complicated by the scarcity of archival resources from Carolina’s early years. Probate records from the proprietary period are too scanty to reconstruct a complete and precise portrait of the rise of Indian or even African slavery. Those records that do exist fall into two categories, which may be used to supplement each other: wills and postmortem inventories. The most numerous records for the years between 1690 and 1720 are the wills, which number about 170. By contrast, there are only about sixty postmortem inventories for the entire proprietary period.3 Indian Slaves in the Carolina Low Country 35 Despite this paucity of archival records, it is possible to make a few general observations about the composition of the enslaved population during the last decade of the seventeenth century. A survey of South Carolina wills indicates that between 1690 and 1694 about 13 percent of all households owned some number of African slaves. The number of households owning African slaves increased significantly between 1695 and 1699, however, to about 26 percent. On the other hand, the number of households owning Indian slaves fluctuated between 4 and 6 percent over the same period, suggesting that Indian slavery served only as an ancillary form of labor during Carolina’s earliest years. These figures indicate that ownership of slaves was not as widespread during the 1690s as it would soon become. It should be stressed as well that the rates of household ownership of African and Indian slaves are not mutually exclusive figures. Most households that owned Indian slaves also owned African slaves.4 The twenty-seven surviving postmortem inventories from this decade tell a story similar to that in the wills. Although there is a significant wealth bias in this record series, as only those estates valuable enough to require systematic appraisal are included, Indians still appear to have been...