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3 { INTRODUCTION } The Makings of a War Even God seemed to hate North Carolina. Evidence of this appeared definite by the late summer of 1711. When King Charles II granted the colony to the Lords Proprietors back in 1663, these eight English lords imagined a steady flow of American wealth into their pockets. Now almost fifty years later, North Carolina was one of the poorer, if not the poorest, of England’s North American colonies. A major part of the problem was water. On the one hand, the colony was blessed with plenty of it, including several big rivers as well as the huge Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds. Yet it was cursed because the waters were too shallow for large ships. And so North Carolina had no deepwater port. That meant trade and commerce lagged badly when compared to Virginia to the north and South Carolina below. North Carolina’s colonial population was small but politically divided, having just emerged from a vicious internal rebellion that stopped just short of civil war. Hurricanes hit in the summer, nor’easters in the winter, while diseases such as smallpox, yellow fever, and malaria frequently visited with deadly results. People did not live long in this hot, soggy country. And though the Lords Proprietors encouraged immigration and settlement, the powerful Tuscarora Indian nation sat just west of the line of settlement and so blocked expansion toward the Piedmont and south to the Cape Fear River. Nor had the Indians of eastern North Carolina bargained for what they were getting in 1711. Most of the Algonquian-speaking Chowans, Pasquatanks , Hatteras, Poteskeets, and Yeopims, once the masters of the Albemarle , had become defeated tributaries to the colonial government. The Iroquoian-speaking Tuscaroras, Meherrins, Cores, Neuse, Pamlicos, Bear River Indians, and Weetock Indians, most of whom had not yet tasted defeat at the hands of the English, were seeing their lives changed for the 4 / Introduction worse. Their ancestors, along with the shallow waters of the sounds, had repelled Sir Walter Raleigh’s colonization attempts on Roanoke Island in the 1580s. But with the creation of the Carolina colony in 1663, the Indians saw a tremendous influx of English settlers, most moving south out of Virginia. By 1711, the Indians of eastern North Carolina had seen their political independence challenged, their lands taken, their beliefs ridiculed, and their dignity ruffled. They also found themselves slowly drawn into a dependence on English traders and the guns, ammunition, metal goods, rum, and other merchandise only the Europeans could supply . The condition of the colony in late summer 1711, the disunity and turbulent politics, its small but dispersed population, made many Indians think it was a perfect time to right those wrongs. In a way, the conditions that provoked the Tuscarora War in 1711 were a problem of geology. Over the eons, the land from just south of Chesapeake Bay down to the White Oak River, encompassing all of what was then North Carolina, had been slowly sinking. Rivers such as the Chowan and Roanoke, the Tar-Pamlico and the Neuse, racing off the Carolina Piedmont slowed down when they hit the low coastal plain then widened to create the Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds. As these rivers lost momentum , they deposited silt at their mouths as a series of sandy barrier islands broken by shifting shallow inlets. These “outer banks,” as they would come to be called, bottled up the sounds and so created an inland sea of shallow, brackish water that the Roanoke Indians called “Occam.” So eastern North Carolina became a water world of soggy land cut by rivers and streams, pockmarked with swamps, marshes, and pocosins. Fertile uplands existed but they sat like islands amid sodden ground and water. And with the waters so shallow, colonial economic development lagged. Conversely, for the Indian peoples of eastern North Carolina, the land and waters provided a bountiful home.1 By the 1650s, as Virginia’s settler population increased and good lands became expensive, some Englishmen looked south to what would become North Carolina. It could be a difficult trek. One had to struggle through the Great Dismal Swamp and pass through many Indian towns and territories , some not that excited about white people tramping across their lands. But North Carolina’s remoteness appealed to some Englishmen. If it was hard to get to North Carolina, then it was hard for authorities back in Virginia or London to get there as well. By the early 1660s, hundreds of settlers...

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