A Colonial Complex: South Carolina's Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War, 1680-1730 (review)

This important book reexamines the English and Indian Southeast during the crucial half century from 1680 to 1730, a period dominated by the Yamasee War (1715-1717). This was a conflict with a white mortality rate nearly double that of King Philip's War, and "engulfed not just a colony but an entire region . . . [with] three imperial powers and dozens of different Indian societies" (p. 305).

In an intelligent discussion of frontier historiography, Oatis argues that the New Western History, which rejects Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis to emphasize a methodology of "region-making," is too extreme in its dismissal of frontier processes as a transitional state on the way to a mature society. While recognizing regionalist Alan Gallay's study of The Indian Slave Trade (2002) as "the first comprehensive study of the Southeast in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries since Crane's Southern Frontier" (p. 5), Oatis is more attuned to the New Indian History, which has redefined the term "frontier" and brought into focus the dynamics of cultural interaction in a region of multiple societies, none exercising a monopoly of violence. Jack Forbes's concept of a "frontier complex" seems to make the best of both new methodologies.

Most modern historians put the blame for the Yamasee War on the abusive practices of the Indian traders. This is the reason that the proprietors chose to emphasize, although Oatis is attentive to other causes, such as: the Yamasees' declining numbers; the encroachment of white men onto the Port Royal reservation, threatening ten villages; the diminishing supplies of deer for the deerskin trade and of Florida mission Indians for the slave trade; and the Yamasees' growing conviction that the census-taking, fort-constructing, captive-buying government of South Carolina, which had already used the Shawnees to destroy the Westos, had ulterior designs on them. Apalachicolas on the Savannah River and Ocheses on the Ocmulgee River agreed that something must be done, but it was the Yamasees who dealt the first blow, attacking an embassy of South Carolinians at the head town of Pocotaligo, and then sending two war parties against nearby white settlements. As the conflagration spread, neither whites nor Indians presented a united front. While the Catawbas eventually sided with the Yamasees, the Cherokees came to the relief of South Carolina with more men than either Virginia and North Carolina elected to provide. Receiving the first reports of violence, South Carolinians imagined that the Spanish or French were behind it, but the war caught officials in St. Augustine, Pensacola, and Mobile by surprise, and they were clearly unprepared to deal with the fallout of Yamasee refugees at their gates and western Muskogeans at their trading posts, who appeared unannounced to trade their deerskins for guns and rum.

The Yamasee War remade the Southeast's settlement patterns, as native groups abandoned the coast between the Altamaha and Savannah rivers to rebuild their towns, with ditches and palisades, in safer river valleys. The war also furthered the process of ethnogenesis, as fragmented groups combined into new confederacies. Moreover, it checked South Carolina's "imperial offensive" long enough to allow the French to build Fort Toulouse in what would become Alabama, the Spanish to rebuild Fort San Marcos in the crook of Florida, and a new group of British colonists to settle Georgia. And, the author argues, the sheer unexpectedness of the attacks left the South Carolinians with a deep fear of slave insurrections.

Oatis's writing skills, powers of analysis, and command of the South Carolina materials are impressive, but A Colonial Complex tills a fenced field, advancing our knowledge of Southeastern history and ethnohistory to the edge of only one set of sources. The sections on Florida, a colony with its own history of Yamasee settlements, raids, and refugees, are weak; and while the author makes...