ENSLAVED NATIVE AMERICANS AND THE MAKING OF COLONIAL SOUTH CAROLINA. By D. Andrew Johnson. Johns Hopkins University Press. 240 pages. $54.95.
Most Americans recognize the importance of African slavery in the United States because it has been widely studied and is associated with well-known events such as the Civil War. The story of Native American enslavement is unfortunately less well-known. Historian D. Andrew Johnson's "Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of Colonial South Carolina" insightfully explores this phenomenon through a scholar's lens. Using an Atlantic framework for the period 1670-1739, he contends the enslavement of Native Americans enabled Carolina's survival and shaped the contours of its early economy, including plantation-based rice production.
Native American enslavement in the English Atlantic antedated Carolina's 1670 settlement and was well established in Massachusetts, Virginia and Barbados. In 1664, Barbadians tried establishing a colony near Cape Fear. It failed largely because attempts to capture and sell Native people into Atlantic markets provoked retaliatory attacks and the project's abandonment. Many leaders here, including John Yeamans who knew about Native enslavement, later settled Charles Town.
Commercial contact with Europeans in the northeast colonies produced warfare between Native peoples. Access to guns and new fighting strategies to maximize captives for sale reverberated as far south as Spanish Florida as Native people relocated pursuing captives, guns or safety. Johnson shows this volatile situation enabled the Kiawah Cassique to persuade settlers to locate Charles Town at Albemarle Point; he also hoped to gain an ally against slave trading Westos tribe nearer Port Royal.
Settler efforts to raise food created warfare with the Kussos in 1671, which Johnson contends was Carolina's initial foray into selling indigenous people into Atlantic markets. From these beginnings South Carolina became "the largest exporter of enslaved Indigenous peoples in eastern North America" for the next half-century.
This commerce produced dramatically shifting international relations and volatile colonial politics. Johnson shows that although the Westos were potential enemies, in 1674 the Proprietors traded with them as fearsome slavers and tried unsuccessfully to create a trading monopoly through them. The new arrangement expanded Native American enslavement in Carolina.
To counteract the Proprietor-Westos alliance, Carolina's Goose Creek Men cultivated the Westos' enemies. The warfare eventuating in 1680 between the two indigenous groups was also the product of conflicts between two powerful colonial interests. The Westos were vanquished during the war, English slave traders gained potential Native partners and control over this trade remained contentious between the Proprietors and the Goose Creek Men.
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In 1680, Charles Town relocated to its peninsular site pursuing commercial opportunities, but the settlement still struggled to produce sufficient food. To solve this problem, in the early 1680s indigenous people were increasingly forced into field labor for their knowledge of what Johnson calls the "maize and pease complex." This involved interlacing crops such as legumes, maize (corn) and squash with complimentary characteristics to maximize production. Through this strategy Carolina met its domestic food needs and produced a surplus for intercolonial trade.
Ironically, early Carolina supplied meat, agricultural products and naval stores to Atlantic plantation societies but could not become one without lucrative exportable staples. Johnson argues Carolina's "economic niche" was selling indigenous people into Atlantic markets then deftly explains how this led Charles Town to become a pirate haven in the 1680s and 1690s.
When in 1683 pirates sacked the Spanish town of Veracruz many plundered captives were brought to Charles Town. Frequently, Carolina officials and others were accused of harboring pirates and purchasing their stolen loot including kidnapped slaves. Trade was Carolina's raison d'etre and this illicit form existed because both Royal and Proprietary authority were weak here.
Governor James Moore's administration, 1700-1703, illustrates how personal interest could supersede the colony's. Moore a Goose Creek man and slaver of Native people used Queen Anne's War, 1702-1713, to justify what became a disastrous assault on St. Augustine. Despite the military failure and potential damage to the fur trade, Moore and others profited handsomely from Native captives they sold.
The zenith of Native American enslavement was reached during the first decades of the 18th century and precipitated the Tuscarora and Yamasee Wars, 1711-1717. Johnson doesn't cover these conflicts in great detail; he's interested in their destructive consequences. The warfare decimated the ranks of colonial traders, shattered their network for trafficking in Native people and accelerated nascent trends toward economic diversification through rice cultivation.
Although experimentation with rice occurred in the 1690s, Johnson demonstrates its rise to preeminence in the early 18th century resulted from weather patterns in 1708-09 which produced poor wheat harvests and skyrocketing prices in England and bumper rice crops in Carolina. The year 1709 was the first in which Carolina exported over 1 million pounds of rice.
Not surprisingly, Johnson identifies the Goose Creek area as one of the earliest centers of commercial rice production because Goose Creek men accumulated capital to become planters by previously enslaving Native people. This period also witnessed the volume of African people imported to Carolina rise substantially and their origins change from the intercolonial trade to direct routes from West Africa.
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Johnson substantiates the long-term impact of indigenous people as this society was rapidly reducing its dependence on Native labor. Carolina expanded rice exports, but continued reliance on indigenous agricultural strategies enabled settlers to produce and export maize and legumes throughout the Atlantic World.
Johnson finds that plantations practicing the maize and pease complex tended to include Native Americans and especially Native women who were notable for their traditional agricultural skills. Some believed the ideal field labor force should be evenly divided between African men and Native women and, during this era, planters seemed more reluctant to sell Native women compared to African women.
Even on plantations without any Native people, their techniques were used to grow easily cultivated, nutrient-dense foods while maximizing staple production. This was especially important, as Johnson shows, during rice production's earliest phase before the task system began.
The nature of his sources will not allow Johnson to provide much information on individual enslaved people, although the book ends with a highly speculative recreation of the life of a Tuscarora woman.
This perceptive study shows connections between notable events often seen as disparate. It will appeal to specialists who wish to learn how this "Other Slavery" shaped the complex relations between English settlers, Native people and Africans and the evolution of early South Carolina in the Atlantic world.