The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  Ayubale was the first stop in Moore’s sweep through the Apalachee missions. In the weeks ahead, he and his army, brushing aside Spanish counterattacks, stripped and plundered the Apalachee towns that resisted them. Those willing to pay a ransom, such as San Lorenzo de Ivitachuco, about three miles from Ayubale, bought their survival—in Ivitachuco’s case, with ten horseloads of food and the silver censers, patens, chalices, and other valuables from its church.

  By April, Moore was shepherding north thousands of Apalachees and other mission Indians. “I now have in my Company all the whole People of three Towns, and the greatest part of four more: we have totally destroyed all the people of two Towns,” he reported to the governor of Carolina. “The waiting for these People make my Marches slow; for I’m willing to bring away with me free, as many of the Indians as I can.”

  What Moore meant by “free” is a window into the tortured conventions of the day. The “free” Indians were those Apalachees who had surrendered, and who would be resettled hundreds of miles to the northeast, along the lower Savannah River, joining a growing community of displaced Natives protecting the colony’s southern flank and providing customers for its traders. Not all the Apalachee needed convincing. Tired of being the victims of English-sponsored attacks, some felt it was safer to live under Carolina’s protection instead of its sword. Even the royal governor of La Florida, José de Zúñiga y la Cerda, admitted that “the entire population of two [towns] accompanied them voluntarily.”

  But outnumbering the thirteen hundred or so “free” Indians were more than four thousand others, mostly women and children, who came from towns that had fought back and lost. Under the rules by which the slave trade was conducted, they were destined for the plantations of the Carolina Low Country or the slave markets of the Caribbean and New England. Besides producing a handsome profit for Moore and his Creek allies (who made additional raids in the months ahead), this campaign devastated the breadbasket of the Spanish mission system; so terrorized the remaining Apalachees that many fled west to French Mobile or Spanish Pensacola, or east to St. Augustine, reducing the province’s prewar population of more than eight thousand to barely a few hundred; and gave notice that Carolina was now a power to be reckoned with in the Southeast.

  The odds against Carolina rising so high, so quickly, were steep. History was against it. Spain and France had both tried and failed to settle the region, and the first English colony at Roanoke had famously perished. There were other desultory attempts by the English, who tried to send a small band of French Huguenot exiles to Carolina in the 1620s. That effort failed, as did another in the 1630s. Not until the 1650s did settlers from Virginia filter south into Albemarle Sound, followed by a formal colony beginning in 1670.

  The tiny English beachhead was wedged amid Spain’s extensive mission system to the south, French Louisiana to the southwest, and, most especially, powerful Native societies on all sides, whose strength, though diminished by disease, was still tremendous. Yet within just three decades, Carolina would leapfrog past Spain as the major colonial force in the region, dismantling the mission network, and through the colony’s booming traffic in Indian slaves, set off a chain reaction that would reshape virtually every aspect of the southern frontier.

  Slavery was not a new concept introduced by morally corrupt Europeans to innocent Indians. It had a long pre-contact history among southern chiefdoms, although the original scale was relatively small, and the understanding of what constituted slavery—among Mississippian Indians, a condition that could be transitory and might end in adoption, versus the usually permanent and hereditary status of slaves among Europeans—was markedly different.

  What was a radical change was the idea of a global slave trade, linking Native slave catchers deep in the interior of the American Southeast with middlemen in Carolina, sugar plantations in the West Indies, farmers and storekeepers in Boston, and manufacturers in England, who made the highest-quality trade goods available in the New World. (In this respect, it was similar to the African slave trade, which similarly bound captives, native middlemen, and traders in an international economy.) When it became clear that the English traders would give the best exchange not for beaver pelts or deerskins, but for human beings, virtually every tribe enthusiastically took to slave hunting. That the founders of Carolina had expressly forbade the trade made not the slightest difference to Englishmen such as Moore, and still less to their Indian partners, who saw a lucrative path to European goods. By 1715, it is estimated that the Carolinians and their Native allies had enslaved up to 51,000 Indians, perhaps a quarter of the entire population of the Southeast.

  The result was cataclysmic. From Cape Fear south to the Florida Keys and west to the Mississippi, almost every society—French, Spanish, English, and dozens of Indian nations encompassing hundreds of thousands of people—was shaken by war, disease, waves of refugees, and cultural chaos. In the space of barely half a century, the Indian slave trade radically altered the face of the South, emptying enormous and once heavily populated regions; smashing established Indian societies and scattering the survivors, who blended into new tribes and confederacies; shipping tens of thousands of people into bondage in distant lands; and crushing the Spanish mission system

  It also lifted the English Carolinians on a rising tide of wealth, power, and political success they could scarcely have imagined, permitting them to handily crush one Indian revolt. But then their Native allies, fearful of becoming slaves themselves, turned against them and, in the single greatest Indian uprising in colonial history, came within a whisker of wiping the Carolinians off the map.

  For James Moore, the expedition against the Apalachee promised several benefits. Not only would it burnish his political reputation, tarnished when he launched a futile assault on St. Augustine in 1702, but it was also likely to pay off handsomely in terms of slaves, although he was officially instructed to “gain [by] all peaceable means if possible the Appalaches to our interest.” But those orders were a fig leaf. There was no public money to pay for the undertaking, meaning that everyone—Moore, the members of the Commons House of Assembly, and probably many of the Creeks who joined him—knew that the only way he could recoup his expenses was through booty and slaves. Peace would be very much a secondary consideration.

  Although the Spanish had initially established military outposts as far inland as what is now eastern Tennessee, these had largely been abandoned by 1570, and Spain’s focus turned instead to creating a network of Franciscan missions. By the 1650s, these missions stretched from the province of Guale, along the Georgia coast, to Timucua in northern Florida, Apalachee in what is the modern Florida Panhandle, and Mayaca-Jororo in central Florida. The well-fortified castillo at St. Augustine anchored Spanish interests in the region, while the missions, especially the food-producing region of Apalachee, supported colonial activities throughout La Florida.

  The Apalachee had been among the first southeastern Indians to encounter the Spanish, having mauled (and scalped) Hernando de Soto’s men in 1539. At one point, the Apalachee had fired their own town of Ivitachuco rather than have it fall into Spanish hands. By the turn of the eighteenth century, however, most Apalachees had become devout Catholics—although at the same time, they lived in a Native society whose structure was little changed from the prehistoric Mississippian culture, built around chiefdoms ruled by hereditary leaders known as holahtas. The defiant town of Ivitachuco that de Soto had encountered had become the quiet village of San Lorenzo de Ivitachuco, home to a doctrina, or central church, whose leader, Don Patricio Hinachuba, had bribed Moore with silver treasures and ten loads of food. Despite his Hispanic name and fluency in spoken and written Spanish, Hinachuba was able to trace his lineage back, holahta by holahta, into the dim pre-Spanish past, even as he begged Governor Zúñiga for arms and a dozen soldiers to defend God, “the crown of my king, and the many children of this village.”

  The Spanish had, in a way, simply grafted themselves onto a society already wel
l suited to the colonial demands of food production and institutionalized labor. Unlike the English, who populated their colonies with farmers and tradesmen, the Spanish immigrants consisted of soldiers, religious leaders, and bureaucrats, supported by a royal subsidy, or situado, and fed by the maize, squash, and bean fields of the mission Indians, without which they would have starved.

  Apalachee Province was one of the richest farming areas in Spanish Florida, and whether they liked it or not, the Apalachee were important cogs in the Spanish repartimiento system. Leaders such as Hinachuba were responsible for filling annual labor quotas, providing human beasts of burden to cart food and other commodities along the footpaths that wound hundreds of miles through forests, across rivers such as the Río San Juan de Guacara (today’s Suwannee), and around cypress swamps. The work was not only backbreaking; it was also dangerous. In one baggage train comprising two hundred Apalachee men hauling tons of corn to St. Augustine, all but ten eventually died of hunger and fatigue.

  Because the Spaniards would not supply the Apalachee with muskets, they were ripe for the picking by English-armed Indians from the interior, such as the Creek. Not a single tribe, the Creek were an alliance of many different people drawn together by the depopulation, war, and political upheaval of the late seventeenth century. They eventually consolidated into the Lower Creek in the east, across what is now Georgia, and the Upper Creek along the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers, in modern Alabama. The southern and eastern fringe of their land bordered the Apalachee and Timucua mission provinces—fertile slave-hunting grounds.

  The slave trade had long troubled the lords proprietors, eight powerful men to whom King Charles II had granted control of Carolina in 1663. The issue of slavery itself was of little concern to them. Their gripe was that the trade, which rarely differentiated between local allies and distant enemies, lined the pockets of colonials such as Moore while robbing the proprietors of customers—and thus profits that should accrue to them through their monopoly of the trade in deerskins and pelts.

  From England, Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe and a prolific pamphleteer, attacked Moore for “having already almost utterly ruin’d the Trade for Skins and Furs . . . and turn’d it into a Trade of Indian or Slave-making . . . a Trade so odious and abominable, that every other Colony in America (altho’ they have equal temptation) abhor to follow.” Defoe’s ire had more to do with Moore’s High-Church persecution of non-Anglicans, including Presbyterians, Quakers, and Baptists—known in Carolina as Dissenters—than with his enthusiasm for human trafficking. Many other colonies had embraced this “odious and abominable” trade, but none had done so with such complete and utter abandon. Nor had any perfected the use of almost every instrument of public policy to maximize profit as had the Goose Creek Men, who had settled along their namesake waterway near Charles Town.

  Even compared with some of the spectacularly venal behavior in colonies such as Virginia, the actions of the Goose Creek Men took the prize. They were, in a very real sense, a brutal trading cabal masquerading as a government. Early Carolina, concluded one historian, was “a dark kingdom ruled by cruelty, partiality, pride, revenge, and gain.”

  It wasn’t supposed to be that way. On paper, at least, Carolina was going to be an enlightened Elysium. The “Fundamental Constitutions” proposed in 1669 were an odd mix of democratic, monarchic, and feudal ideas, blending religious tolerance with state-sponsored Anglicanism, creating two categories of landed nobility, and codifying systems of serfdom and slavery—yet guaranteeing even small landholders a voice in the government and the right to vote by secret ballot.

  In practice, however, Carolina’s utopian dream was hijacked right out of the blocks by avarice and political factionalism, and the Fundamental Constitutions were never ratified. From the very start, divisions arose between northern Carolina, with settlements around Albemarle and Cape Fear, and the southern power center at Charles Town, laid out in 1670 at the confluence of the Ashley and Cooper rivers. Most of the influential southern Carolinians came from Barbados, where slave-based plantations were already well established.

  Barbadian planters weren’t the only colonists. Carolina attracted a bewildering array of people, in part because of its early religious tolerance. English Dissenters joined Protestant French Huguenots, who were early players in the Indian trade, while Sephardim from Spain and Portugal established what would eventually become the largest Jewish community in the New World. A boatload of Scots founded Stuart’s Town on Port Royal Sound, where earlier French and Spanish settlements had failed. Up and down the Carolina coast, pirates (both English and Huguenot) preying on Spanish ships and missions operated out of snug and secret harbors.

  Taken as a whole, the Carolinian leaders were, in the words of the Anglican envoy Gideon Johnson, “the vilest race of men upon the earth. They have neither honor, nor honesty, nor religion enough to entitle them to any tolerable character, being a perfect medley or hotch-potch, made up of bankrupt pirates, decayed libertines, sectaries, and enthusiasts of all sorts . . . the most factious and seditious people in the whole world.”

  Not only did the Carolinians ignore the utopian constitution, they ignored the lords proprietors’ pointed instructions to keep their hands off the local Indians, whose goodwill was considered essential for security and trade. Instead, they immediately began buying war captives offered by neighboring tribes, either using them as plantation labor or selling them to slaveholders in the West Indies.

  Although the Goose Creek Men and their like were raising rice and other crops on their Low Country plantations, the real riches of Carolina—slaves and deerskins—were supplied by Native middlemen. Beavers, the mainstay of the northern fur trade, weren’t as common in the South, but white-tailed deer were everywhere, exciting wonder from the earliest years of exploration. In the 1580s, Thomas Hariot at Roanoke wrote, “Deareskinnes dressed after the manner of Chamoes or undressed are to be had of the naturall inhabitants thousands yeerely by way of trafficke for trifles: and no more wast or spoyle of Deare then is and hath beene ordinarily in time before.”

  A century later, Thomas Ashe said that white-tailed deer were still in “such infinite Herds, that the whole Country seems but one continued Park.” A single Indian, Ashe said, might bring in as many as two hundred skins a years, and by the turn of the eighteenth century, Carolina was exporting more than sixty thousand skins a year through Charles Town. By 1706, that number had almost doubled. A single hide would bring a pair of scissors or thirty round musket balls; five, a broad-hoe blade; sixteen, a woolen blanket; and thirty, a medium-weight “half-thick” coat. A musket required thirty-five skins. For the traders, the markup was immense; a hoe blade that cost six shillings to make and import turned a profit of more than 400 percent. Eventually, the term “buckskin”—shortened to “buck”—became frontier slang for American currency.

  Valuable as deerskins were, Indian slaves were far more so. A single slave might bring as much in English goods as a winter’s worth of deerskins, which explains the lengths to which Carolina traders went to get them and the eagerness with which Natives set about capturing their enemies. This last was a key point; although proprietary policy forbade slaving, it made an exception for those taken in war. Slavery was already a fact of daily life in Indian society, but with the opening of English trade, the scale on which it was practiced ballooned.

  The first Indian group to take up commercial slaving were the Westo. Originally from the southern shore of Lake Erie, they became embroiled in the trade-driven conflicts over access to furs and European goods known today as the Beaver Wars, which engulfed the Northeast and Great Lakes region in the mid-1600s. These incredibly violent wars played out largely outside the direct view of European chroniclers, so what little we know about them comes mostly from haunting, blood-soaked stories handed down by the survivors.

  Landscape of the Tuscarora and Yamasee Wars, 1711–1715:

  (Modern boundaries added.)

  Driven south to the up
per James River by 1656, the breakaway Erie befriended the Virginia colonists, who armed them with muskets, named them the Rickohockan, and facilitated their entry into the nascent slave trade. Moving once again, this time to the upper Savannah River in the 1660s, they chased many Natives to the protection of the French in the lower Mississippi Valley and the Spanish missions along the coast. Such security was mostly academic, however. Now known as the Westo, they destroyed the mission at Santo Domingo de Talaje, along the Altamaha River, and swept through what is now inland Georgia.

  Refugees from the Westo raids were washing up throughout the South. In 1663, the Spaniards noted the arrival in Guale Province of a group they called the Yamasis, or Yamasee—not a tribe in the usual sense, but a composite people thrown together by circumstance, most coming from the defunct chiefdoms of central Georgia. The Yamasee’s ranks continued to swell as fresh Westo attacks drove them to the missions, where even the annual labor drafts of the repartimiento system seemed at first preferable to endless raids and the risk of death or enslavement. Similar fracturing and coalescing was occurring throughout the region—among the Catawba confederacy in the Carolina-Virginia borderlands, the Cherokee in the mountains, the Chickasaw and Choctaw to the west, and especially the Creek, whose newly cemented coalitions controlled a large area of the South.

  After a rocky start, the Westo had come to terms with the Carolinians—a nearer, surer source of English goods than Virginia, and a ready outlet for their slaves. Again and again, they and English-backed pirates struck at Guale, now the northern rim of the Spanish system, until the last outpost there fell in 1684. But having the Westo as neighbors was a double-edged sword for Carolina. Although they provided a convenient source of slaves and skins, their ferocious presence blocked access to trade with any of the other tribes farther inland.