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96 { CHAPTER FOUR } Col. John Barnwell The Opportunist It took almost a month for news of the September 22 attacks to reach Charles Town, South Carolina. A black slave named Fenwick began spreading a rather sketchy account of an Indian attack in North Carolina , but no one knew how he learned of it or even exactly what he told. Nevertheless, his story worried the citizens of that thriving town and they wanted solid news. Then Christopher Gale arrived in Charles Town on October 26, 1711.1 Gale was in Bath when the Machapungas attacked. Governor Hyde had then sent him to South Carolina to appeal to that colony for help. Within weeks Gale was standing before South Carolina ’s Governor Robert Gibbes and the colonial assembly, and he laid it on thick. He told how the Tuscaroras and Core Indians had attacked without warning, killing 130 settlers. How they killed the Neville family, then laid out the men’s bodies with pillows under their heads and Mrs. Neville placed in a position of prayer. How the Senecas planned to come down this winter and join the Tuscaroras to make war not just on North Carolina but on South Carolina as well. The stunned Governor Gibbes and assembly listened in horror. Rev. Dr. Francis Le Jau, an Anglican minister in Charles Town, deplored the Indian attacks, but heard that the Indians “were oppress’d and had no justice done to them when they asked for it, some suspect they were set on by a discontented party.”2 After making his case and coordinating plans with South Carolina, Gale sailed back to North Carolina. And then the trouble started.3 Y South Carolina was a much different colony than North Carolina in 1711. For one thing, it was prosperous. Blessed with a deepwater port, Charles Town was already a beautiful, bustling place, the largest town Col. John Barnwell / 97 in the English colonies south of Philadelphia. It far outshone North Carolina’s towns of Bath and New Bern. The Low Country surrounding Charles Town produced large quantities of rice and indigo, and South Carolina rice planters were absolutely the wealthiest men in England’s North American colonies. It certainly attracted its fair share of visitors and migrants. John Lawson went there in 1701 to start his trip across the Carolinas. South Carolina had also been settled differently than North Carolina. Most of the early migrants to North Carolina had been small farmers, traders, workers, even a good number of fugitives coming out of Virginia or Maryland. Thomas Pollock and William Brice showed that money could be made in North Carolina, but the colony’s lack of a deepwater port kept wealthy numbers in check. South Carolina had been settled by migrants from England’s Caribbean colony of Barbados. The small island of Barbados in the Lesser Antilles was a “sugar colony,” meaning its whole economy was given over to the production of sugar. Europe and its colonies discovered they had a sweet tooth along with a taste for the rum that sugar produced, so Barbadian sugar planters also became fabulously rich. This attracted more men who wanted to make it big. By the 1660s almost all available land on Barbados had been taken up for sugar plantations. It was this that sent Sir John Colleton and others on expeditions to what would become South Carolina in hopes of finding another Barbados. It was not long before the small settlement at the mouth of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers was catching the overflow from Barbados. However, the problem with Barbadian sugar production, besides taking up land and destroying the forests, was that it ran on slave labor. Sugar production ate up slaves at a phenomenal rate. Working in extreme heat and humidity, slaves planted and tended sugarcane, harvested it using machetes , crushed the stalks, boiled the juice into molasses, and created the valuable granulated sugar, all while underfed, overworked, and infected with disease. A slave’s life did not last long on Barbados. But Barbadian planters wanted, needed slaves, and on a continuous basis. As early as the 1640s, the island planters began buying African slaves from Dutch merchants. But when a sugar plantation’s army of slaves dwindled, then anyone would do. As migrants from Barbados settled in South Carolina, they brought this Barbadian outlook on slavery with them and so affected South Carolina in several ways. First, it made the colony overwhelmingly amenable to chattel slavery in which one human being...

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