Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of Colonial South Carolina by D. Andrew Johnson

Author:D. Andrew Johnson [D. Andrew Johnson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2024-07-08T20:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE Native Plantations, 1715–1740

In late 1726, representatives of South Carolina attempted to negotiate an end to the endemic warfare between factions of Cherokees and Creeks. For white South Carolinians, the Yamasee War ended with an uneasy peace between colonists and Creeks in 1717, but other Native polities, especially those of the Creeks and Cherokees, remained belligerent, and the relationship between the colony and the Creek Confederacy remained uneasy well into the 1720s. The Yamasees continued to attack the colony from Florida.1 Accordingly, the Cherokees’ relatively precarious geopolitical situation vis-à-vis Spanish and French colonies necessitated a closer relationship with South Carolina if they wanted access to the benefits, as they understood them, of European colonialism. But the weakened postwar British colony saw an advantage in promoting warfare between Carolina’s most powerful competitors in the region, a strategy laid out as early as 1717: “This makes the matter of great weight to us, how to hold both [Creeks and Cherokees] as our friends, for some time, and assist them in cutting one another’s throats without offending either.”2

This strategy worked well for close to a decade, but by 1726 the geopolitical calculus had changed. An alliance between Lower Creeks and Yamasees living near St. Augustine, along with the threat of war with the Spanish, gave colonists reason to attempt to bring the Creeks closer as allies. In so doing, they wanted to make the areas west of the colony safer because the Southeast was becoming more dangerous for Europeans. The leaders of South Carolina now pressed for peace between the Cherokees and the Creeks. The three parties arranged a council. The Cherokee delegation arrived in Charles Town first. More skeptical of the British and possessing more geopolitical power, the Creeks were slower to arrive. Sometimes, they reasoned, it is best to make a grand entrance.3

In the meantime, members of the Cherokee delegation, waiting in Charles Town, made an unsettling discovery: two Cherokee children were being held as slaves by white colonists. A Cherokee girl was being held by James McNobney and a boy by Sarah Bohannon. The Cherokee delegation, representing the colony’s strongest Native American ally, demanded the children be set free. But this simple demand pitted the British belief in private property against the geopolitical circumstances of the colony. In response, an assembly-appointed committee decided that the easiest solution would be for the colonial government to purchase the children and return them to the Cherokees. The Commons House thus attempted to turn the crisis into a market transaction, but the solution required the cooperation of Bohannon and McNobney. McNobney “absolutely refused on any account to part with the girl,” while Bohannon wanted to extort the colony for £170, an amount far exceeding the market price for claims on captive Native boys. The assembly took this demand as “the height of Arrogance” and “a gross imposition on the Public.” Colonial officials decided that two enslaved children were not worth straining the relations with the Cherokees. The problem was not that the children

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