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  • Carolina in Crisis: Cherokees, Colonists, and Slaves in the American Southeast, 1756–1763 By Daniel J. Tortora
  • Paul Kelton
Carolina in Crisis: Cherokees, Colonists, and Slaves in the American Southeast, 1756–1763. By Daniel J. Tortora (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2015) 288pp. $29.99 paper $28.99 e-book

In late 1758, the British Empire’s relationship with one of its most important allies—the Cherokee Nation—collapsed. Settlers killed several Cherokee warriors as they returned from helping the British against the French in the Ohio Valley. When kinsmen of the slain men retaliated, Gov. William Henry Lyttelton of South Carolina escalated a war that continued until 1761. Tortora skillfully narrates this story with a particular focus on the disastrous consequences that reverberated for many years after the conflict: Numerous backcountry settlers were killed or captured; Cherokees suffered terrible casualties from British invasions that left survivors homeless and hungry; South Carolinian leaders became divided and anxiety-ridden as real and imagined slave resistance increased; and British officials became perplexed as South Carolina’s elites remained dissatisfied with the accomplishments of the war and resented efforts to bring peace and order to the frontier that appeared to favor indigenous peoples over colonists. [End Page 599]

It is on this last point—what Tortora touts as a “bridge to the rich scholarship on the southern campaigns of the American Revolution” (3)—that Carolina in Crisis stands out. Other historians have written about the Anglo-Cherokee War, but all of them have come up short in connecting it to larger historiographical debates regarding the rupture of relations between American colonists and imperial officials. The Anglo- Cherokee War indeed has proven to be a sideshow to the larger Seven Years’ War drama between Great Britain and France. Tortora’s analysis, however, points to a new and refreshing direction in understanding the importance of the conflict as setting the stage for the American Revolution in South Carolina.

Tortora draws from an impressive array of primary sources. Other than John Oliphant, in Peace and War on the Anglo-Cherokee Frontier, 1756–63 (Baton Rouge, 2001), no historian, to this reviewer’s knowledge, has examined Major General James Grant in the Ballindalloch Papers and Lord Jeffery Amherst Papers to the extent that Tortora has. By doing so, Tortora is able to illustrate the tensions and animosities that existed between British military officers and provincial elites. Readers interested in an interdisciplinary methodology, however, will not find one in Carolina in Crisis. The work builds on a traditional set of sources to connect military and political history; it delves into neither the ethnohistory nor the historical memory of either Euro-Americans or Cherokees. Tortora, however, does not claim to take an interdisciplinary approach, and its absence does not detract from his accomplishments.

Tortora answers a question that has previously proven to be an enigma: Why should historians outside of the few who write about Cherokees care about the Anglo-Cherokee War? The book adds to a growing body of literature on the frontier dimensions of the American Revolution’s origins, including Woody Holton’s Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Williamsburg, 1999) and Patrick Griffin’s American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York, 2007). Much more work needs to be done on this broader subject, but Carolina in Crisis makes a significant contribution to this larger effort.

Paul Kelton
University of Kansas
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