War in the Carolinas

      The Tuscarora of North Carolina were distantly related to the Iroquois of New York. They felt pressed by a combination of new settlers on their lands and more immediately by the highhanded tactics of the traders based in Charleston, who not only cheated them in trade but sometimes sold them into slavery. In 1711, when surveyors moved out to survey lands for the Swiss settlement that was to become New Bern, the Indians struck. North Carolina was so thinly settled that it could do little to defend itself. It called on Virginia, which held the Tuscarora in the north, but could not move against them in force; and South Carolina, which did provide the resources to put armies in the field. Over two years armies comprised of ten times as many Indians as white soldiers moved against the Tuscarora. In 1713, an army led by Colonel James Moore, Jr., won a three-day battle at the Tuscarora stronghold of Nohoroca. The English victory meant that the survivors of the Tuscarora moved north to join the Iroquois, which now became the Six Nations. White settlers poured into the vacuum.
 
The Tuscarora War was part of the slow movement of pushing the Indians westward, the grinding work that can be traced on maps as the new counties were formed behind the treaty lines. The Yamassee War was more complicated in origin, and had serious repercussions as far west as the Mississippi. There were only two colonies south of Virginia in 1715, the two proprietary colonies of North and South Carolina (Georgia had not yet been founded; Florida was Spanish). Once the Tuscarora had been driven north, there were six principal tribes in the southeast. In South Carolina, the Catawba lived in the north on the rivers that drained into the Atlantic, the Yamassee held the same position south of Charleston. The Yamassee had once been located further south, near the Spanish at Saint Augustine. Nervous about the fate of the Tuscarora, they renewed contacts with the Spanish and also with their kinsmen the Creek. The Creek at that time, perhaps 9,000 people in sixty villages, lived well beyond the lines of settlement between the upper Suwannee and the Alabama rivers, in an area where the rivers flowed south and the trading paths cut across them from east to west. Above the Creek were their chief rivals the 11,000 Cherokees, who lived east of the Tennessee river and traded with both Virginia and the Carolinas. The remaining two tribes, the Choctaw and the Chickasaw, were too far west to be immediately involved in this war.

In April of 1715, after the treaty of peace had been signed in Europe, the Yamassee massacred a group of Carolina traders in one of their own villages. The Creek and Catawba joined in the fray, moving first against the traders, then against the prosperous plantations around Charleston. The Carolinians blamed the Spanish in Saint Augustine and the French in distant Mobile for inciting the Indians, yet the Yamassee had plenty of reasons to resent the traders without considering outside influences. They were terribly in debt to the traders, who had begun selling the debtors' wives and children into slavery when they were unable to pay.

The militia fought valiantly. but understandably refused to defend anything but their own property. The assembly, terrified by the threat of the Indians, called for a mobile standing army of 1,200 men, of which 500 were to be blacks and another 100 to be friendly Indians. That they considered arming the blacks shows the magnitude of the danger.

The Catawba tried a direct assault in June of 1715, but were driven back by the militia under Captain George Chicken, and withdrew from the war. The Yamassee and the Creek got within twelve miles of Charleston before they were stopped. The Creek tried to pull in the Cherokee, but they supported the British. By the winter of 1715-1716 both Creek and Yamassee were seeking protection from the Spanish.

The results of the war were mixed. The Creek, who were not yet threatened by white settlers, learned from this that they could play the two European powers against each other. The settlers of South Carolina realized just how fragile was their hold on the land and just how expensive it was to wage war in America. In 1719 the proprietors gave up and turned the government over to a royal governor. The very real threat of further Indian risings, Spanish raiders from Saint Augustine, and the possibility of slave revolts as the proportion of black slaves to white masters grew ever greater as the eighteenth century passed, would keep the Carolinians out of most of the formal wars for the empire. Then too, the trading rivalry with Virginia became heated, and dark suspicions were voiced that Virginia was making money from the Carolinians misfortunes. This too made the assembly reluctant to vote to join in joint expeditions. The aftermath of the Yamassee War also drew the attention of the British government to the southern frontier, when it became only too obvious that the French were trying to encircle the British by coming down the Mississippi. The Tuscarora and Yamassee Wars, like the earlier King Philip's War in New England, had consequences out of proportion to the numbers of combatants.