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ChApter 7 Violence in the Era of the Yamasee War On April 15, 1715, Thomas Nairne, one of South Carolina’s leading Indian traders, was put to death at Pocotaligo, the principal Yamasee town. Nairne was one of nearly one hundred white traders killed at the outset of what later historians would call the Yamasee War, but Nairne’s death has made headlines in the centuries since because it was public spectacle. According to one account, recalled by an eyewitness who reported it to Carolina’s attorney general, George Rodd, Yamasees burst into the place Nairne was sleeping, took him to the town square, tied him up, and burned him slowly to death, perhaps by inserting splinters under his skin and lighting them. Just the night before, Nairne and English negotiators had been working to assure the Yamasees of their peaceful intentions. The morning found the English killed, captured, or running for their lives and the Yamasees poised to lead a complex network of regional alliances, each made up of independent actors, against the English.1 Complex factors drove the Yamasees to kill Thomas Nairne, and to dispatch him in the manner they chose, but most of those factors can be traced back to the world of violence that the English created as they exploited the land, resources, and people of the Southeast with scant regard for the possible consequences. In short, the English culture of violence had brought on the Yamasee War. The conflict would eventually include not just Yamasees but also diverse native communities from across the Southeast, white soldiers from North Carolina and Virginia, and African slaves.2 The costs to South Carolina’s white population were high—in terms of percentage of population killed, the Yamasee War may have been more deadly than the now-famous King Philip’s War—but the cost to the Yamasees was even higher. Over four hundred white colonists perished during the war, and many fled to the relative safety of Charles Town.3 The “Yamasee Lands,” or “Indian Lands,” would remain unoccupied for some time and then would function mainly as a buffer until the establishment of the English colony of Georgia assumed that role.4 The Native American communities surrounding Charles Town lost thousands of people. The remnants of the Yamasees moved south to the Spanish at St. Augustine. The remnants of those remnants would eventually move with the Spanish when they abandoned that 138 Violence in the Era of the Yamasee War outpost and headed for Cuba and Mexico in 1763.5 The Yamasees gradually ceased to exist as a political entity, having been wiped off the map by English Carolina and its allied Native peoples, including bands of settlement Indians, Cherokees, and eventually some Creek towns. The upheaval had the long-term effect of helping to consolidate the English conquest of the region, even as it turned the English away from one of the institutions that had made that conquest possible. The war effectively brought an end to Carolina’s Indian slave trade.6 South Carolina’s elites seemed to recognize that trouble with the Indian trade could lead to violence, but the legal evolution of the trade featured a fair amount of trial and error. Laws concerning the trade were bound up in the factional struggle between proprietors, governors, and colonists. By a 1663 charter granted by Charles II, trade with native peoples was the business of the proprietors. Subsequent proprietary proclamations reiterated the point, which seems to indicate that the proprietors were not really in control. In 1707, the Commons House of Assembly made a claim for its supremacy in matters of trade. Sir Nathaniel Johnson, the appointed governor, and his council rejected the measure. The Commons threatened to withhold funds for the defense of Charles Town, and soon the act “For Regulating the Indian Trade and making it Safe to the Public” was in effect. The goal behind the legislation, besides increasing the power of the Commons at the expense of the proprietors, was to limit the sorts of abuses that could lead to violence. The 1707 act also created a board of nine commissioners and the office of Indian agent. The agent was to live in Carolina’s native backcountry ten months out of the year.7 Thomas Nairne was one of the first men to serve in the position of agent, and his importance to relations between native communities and English Carolina cannot be overstated. Nairne was probably born in northeastern Scotland...

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