Brothers Born of One Mother: British–Native American Relations in the Colonial Southeast

3. “To Protect Them and Their Wives and Children”: Women and War

 3 “To Protect Them and Their Wives and Children” women and war Although men most often conducted military campaigns,warfare affected all members of society: male and female, young and old. Yet most portrayals of Anglo-Indian conflict, scholarly and otherwise, focus narrowly on diplomatic or strategic considerations. Popular myths and Hollywood movies have ingrained into the American psyche the image of European soldiers and Indian warriors engaged in hand-to-hand combat. If women appear at all in these scenarios, it is as victims of atrocities or patient wives waiting at home for their men’s return. The reality of the late seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury southeast, however, does not fit this picture. Both British and native women were far more intimately involved in frontier warfare than is usually recognized. War meant a number of things for women, who might become war supporters (or occasionally even fighters), victims, captives, or widows. In addition, because women often could be found in areas embroiled in conflict, Indian and British men had to contend with their presence. Men in both societies struggled to find appropriate ways of defending their own communities in the unfamiliar and shifting world of the colonial frontier. Englishmen and Indians shared a common assumption: men and warriors were responsible for providing protection for their families. This expectation provided the foundation for a diplomatic rhetoric in which the defense of families became a significant international concern.Male political leaders from both native and British societies met to negotiate matters relating to the treatment of women and children. These discussions might take a couple of different forms. Enemies, and sometimes even allies, faulted one another for their abuse of noncombatants, demanding redress or threatening retaliation.“Friends,” on the other hand, might offer assistance in defending one another, exhibiting concern for the welfare of the wives and children of the other. As is so often the case in violent conflicts, atrocities contributed to the view of the other as savage. Englishmen and Indians observed different conventions Women and War 85 regarding the treatment of captives and which community members were legitimate targets of martial hostilities. Both sides routinely committed abuses that were all but guaranteed to create bitterness and produce long-term diplomatic difficulties. Native men grew to fear the English as enslavers of their families, threatening the alliances that both sought to maintain. Englishmen defined native men as savage murderers of women and children, often using this notion to justify their own violations of the rules of “civilized” warfare. By the mid-eighteenth century, British officials began to argue not only that native men were savages but also that they failed to adequately protect their own women and children. This conclusion served as a justification for subjecting native people to imperial authority as colonial leaders sought to usurp native men’s responsibility for the protection of Indian women and children. European and Indian Laws of Nations By the time the Carolinas and Georgia were settled, general European rules of warfare, both written and unwritten, demanded that“certain categories of persons —the Weak, the defenseless, and the holy—should be protected.” In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Hugo Grotius’s The Rights of War and Peace: Including the Law of Nature and of Nations (1625) and later Emmerich de Vattel’s The Law of Nations; or, Principles of the Law of Nature, Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns (1758), codified the rule of “civilized warfare” for Europeans. Women, children, and the elderly were to be exempt from hostilities.¹ The violence of war was to be reserved for soldiers. However, European warfare often failed to live up to the ideal, and atrocities occurred on a regular basis.² In Ireland, English writers justified killing women and children of “savage” nations, maintaining that such steps were necessary when dealing with peoples unfamiliar with the rules of civilized warfare and lacking in Christian virtue. It was better to deal a decisive blow quickly using whatever tactics were necessary, they argued, than to prolong a war in which a “savage” enemy might commit even greater atrocities. This precedent was then transferred to the New World.³ Unlimited warfare and a reliance on irregular troops persisted in the colonies long after they had fallen out of favor in Europe. Colonists regularly used scorched-earth tactics and targeted noncombatants when fighting Indian tribes and French and Spanish settlers. By the time the...