The Yamasee War: Carolina, the Indian Slave Trade, and the Uprising That Nearly Ended a Colony

Before rice, Carolina ran on deerskins and captives. The hides went to London by the tens of thousands to become gloves and bookbindings. The Indian captives were sold at the same Charles Town wharves and shipped to the sugar islands. Both trades moved along the same paths, through the same traders, and both ran on credit.

On a wet morning on the Edisto, a trader named Samuel Warner sits over his ledger. Each line holds a hunter's name and what he still owes after his hides are weighed, and the debt is nearly always larger than the hides. Two Yamasee men wait at his door. Their people had come north out of the old Spanish mission country to settle the lowcountry rivers because Carolina wanted them there, as a wall against St. Augustine and as hunters, scouts and soldiers. Now the deer were running thin, English cattle were in their fields, and the debts could never be paid.

In April 1715 the Yamasee killed the traders in their towns, and within weeks the colony was fighting for its life. What followed crowded refugees into Charles Town, forced the Cherokee to choose a side, sent the Yamasee south to Florida and helped draw the Creek towns into a confederacy, before a hard peace and a Southeast remade.

Carolina survived. The colony that had grown rich selling its neighbors turned to Africa for the labor it needed next.