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“Cutting one anothers Throats” British, Native, and African Violence in Early Carolina Matthew Jennings As the British, various native peoples, and enslaved Africans came into contact with one another in late-seventeenth-century Carolina, they exchanged a wide array of goods, diseases, and ideas. Some of these exchanges are relatively well understood: the Indian slave trade, the Muskogee-English deerskin trade, and the role of African expertise in European planters’ choice of rice as their colony’s staple have been the subject of important book-length studies.1 Less well known is the fact that British, African, and Native American cultures of violence collided with one another, and that all were reshaped by the force of the collision.2 To make matters more complicated, the world into which the English colony of Carolina was born had already been remade by violence many times over. Before the advent of the Europeans, indigenous towns clashed over resources, captives, tribute, and prestige. As the Spanish, French, and English entered the Americas, they brought new sorts of violence to bear on their indigenous enemies, and occasionally each other. The violence that took place along Carolina’s frontier was neither wholly native nor English nor African in its nature, and it was a microcosm of what happened when European violence met Native American violence. Violence and the Birth of Carolina The British conquered the southeast through a combination of shrewd diplomacy , exploitative trade, and warfare. They recruited armies of indigenous allies to debilitate the Spanish missions of Florida. They expanded their dominion with the forced assistance of thousands of Native American and later African American slaves, and they extended a violent slave labor regime based on precedents from the Chesapeake and the Caribbean. After some initial thoughts on English charters and violence, this chapter features several case studies of the burgeoning British (really Anglo-American) culture of violence: the Westo War; late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century mission raids; and early slavery. These case studies illuminate two themes. First, the British conquest remained frustratingly incomplete from an imperial perspective, as “subject” peoples such as interior Indian nations and enslaved Africans continued to “Cutting one anothers throats” 119 express their independence well into the eighteenth century. Second, at the imperial level the British did not believe their mode of colonization to be particularly violent. They saw “planting” as a more peaceful mode of claiming American territory than Spanish conquest. Carl Jacoby, writing about a nineteenth -century massacre, has argued that violence “often ends as a contest over meaning, as the participants struggle to articulate what has happened to them.”3 This contest is ongoing, and the perils of taking eighteenth-century Britons at their word regarding colonial violence are quite real. If we fail to recognize the violence associated with British colonization, we risk buying into a sanitized version of early American history. When the Lords Proprietors heard about their fledgling colony’s war against the Westos, they were disappointed. Accounts they received indicated that the war had begun under questionable circumstances, may have involved what they judged to be excessive cruelty, and threatened to wreck what the proprietors perceived to be a profitable peace. The distance between the proprietors and the planters was considerable—both in nautical miles and worldview—and the proprietors’ only recourse was to a series of strongly worded letters. One of these included a telling phrase: the proprietors in London reminded the colonists around Charles Town that “Peace is in the Interest of Planters.”4 The events surrounding the establishment and expansion of Carolina would seem to indicate that the opposite was true. Slave raiding, exploitative trade, and plantation violence made early Carolina a volatile, dangerous place. Yet individual colonists, if they had sufficient capital or credit to start plantations or if they could enter the Indian trade, could turn striking profits. Peace might eventually come to Carolina, but only after the consolidation of English rule on the coast, which would presumably entail violence or the threat of violence. Even then the plantation regime that took hold as the colony grew rested on the violent subjugation of African and indigenous slaves. From some perspectives , a “planters’ peace” was no peace at all. English documents do not usually emphasize the violence of colonization, even as they set the stage for imperial contests and conflict between native communities and colonists. The key documents of English Carolina’s earliest years often mention violence, at the very least. In 1665 Charles II granted the proprietors...

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