Reviews in American History

Reviews in American History 31.2 (2003) 192-203

The Older South?

Peter Silver

Alan Gallay. The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717.New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002. xviii + 444 pp. Maps, tables, notes, and index. $45.00.

Along with ships, hogs, smallpox scars, and other things more easily seen, a pervasive edginess, rising at times to fright, seems to have been something most early modern colonies had in common. Like huge experiments assembled by a blend of coercion and inadvertence,the Atlantic colonies put together new assortments of Indians, Europeans, and Africans, each with their own idioms in language and religion. These uneasy jumbles made for a dread of sneaking dangers—a feeling of living on some sort of verge—that marked colonial cultures from Pernambuco to Québec. One cannot understand the tense little world of seventeenth-century Barbados, for example, without understanding the two kinds of fear at its foundation. There English America's first sugar planters—like their heirs throughout the hemisphere, only more so—lived in steady horror of revolt and tried by vicious punishments to instill a counter-terror in their slaves. Nor, without taking into account the fear that accompanied colony-making's social collisions, could one quite explain the New England witchcraft crisis of 1692, which played out in an atmosphere alive with the fear of attacks not only by the devil but by his Indian allies. This seems truer still of the New York City "slave conspiracy" panic in the summer of 1741, when mysterious fires made magistrates worry that "most of the Negroes in Town were corrupted" in a vast Afro-Catholic plot to sack Manhattan, a worry that led to mass arrests and the burning or hanging of thirty-four people. ¹

Alan Gallay's new book takes for its subject an American colonial history even more fearful than most: that of the Southeast from the settlement of South Carolina in 1670 to the colony's near destruction in the Yamasee War of 1715-17. Carolina's Fundamental Constitutions of 1670 were written mostly by John Locke, in his role as secretary and friend to Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, first baron Ashley and founder-proprietor of both Carolina and the early Whig movement. (Both men soon had further titles: Ashley as earl of Shaftesbury, Locke as a landgrave in Carolina's newly concocted peerage.) [End Page 192] They had imagined a serenely aristocratic Whig nirvana, with religious toleration even for pagans—although "the Natives of that Place . . . are utterly Strangers to Christianity," the founding documents gently stressed, the Indians' "Idolatry, Ignorance, or Mistake, gives us no right to expel, or use them ill." Instead Carolina rapidly degenerated into a raw-edged dystopia like nothing so much as the state of nature their grim elder, Hobbes, had described: a dark kingdom ruled by cruelty, partiality, pride, revenge, and gain, where most would know "continuall feare." Gallay's study is informed by an electric vision of a quarter-continent transfigured by violence and greed—forces he sees embodied, above all, in South Carolina's armies and Indian traders—and it encompasses every variety of catastrophe and loss: invasions, counter-invasions, rebellions, epidemics, and large-scale enslavement. His investigation reveals a place so wretched that it seems a fitting cultural parent for the brutalities of African lowcountry slavery with which scholars have become familiar since Peter H. Wood's Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (1974). It also makes it impossible to assume, as historians once did, that "Indian slavery never became an important institution in the colonies." Gallay sees the trade in Indian slaves as easily "the most important factor affecting" the early South, for he believes it caused the creation of the plantation system; stirred up wars and migrations that made new Indian confederations and forced the integration of a distinctively Southern economy and culture; and even gave birth to the "imperial mind-set" that would so affect the fortunes of Hanoverian Britain (pp. 7, 156). ^2...