“It is likely as fine-grained an account of the actions of the Yamasee War as we are to possess for decades.” —H-Net Reviews The southern frontier could be a cruel and unforgiving place during the early eighteenth century. The British colony of South Carolina was in proximity and traded with several Native American groups. The economic and military relationships between the colonialists and natives were always filled with tension but the Good Friday 1715 uprising surprised Carolinians by its swift brutality. Larry E. Ivers examines the ensuing lengthy war in This Torrent of Indians. Named for the Yamasees because they were the first to strike, the war persisted for thirteen years and powerfully influenced colonial American history. Ivers’s detailed narrative and analyses demonstrates the horror and cruelty of a war of survival. The organization, equipment, and tactics used by South Carolinians and Native Americans were influenced by the differing customs but both sides acted with savage determination to extinguish their foes. Ultimately, it was the individuals behind the tactics that determined the outcomes. Ivers shares stories from both sides of the battlefield—tales of the courageous, faint of heart, inept, and the upstanding. He also includes a detailed account of black and Native American slave soldiers serving with distinction alongside white soldiers in combat. Ivers gives us an original and fresh, ground-level account of that critical period, 1715 to 1728, when the southern frontier was a very dangerous place. “Comprehensive and highly readable . . . This book will be a classic of Southern history.” —Lawrence S. Rowland, Professor Emeritus, University of South Carolina at Beaufort

Archaeologists of South Carolina and Florida and historians of the Native South, Spanish Florida, and British Carolina address elusive questions about Yamasee identity, political and social networks, and the fate of the Yamasees after the Yamasee War.

The Yamasee War was a violent and bloody conflict between southeastern American Indian tribes and English colonists in South Carolina from 1715 to 1718. Ramsey's discussion of the war itself goes far beyond the coastal conflicts between Yamasees and Carolinians, however, and evaluates the regional diplomatic issues that drew Indian nations as far distant as the Choctaws in modern-day Mississippi into a far-flung anti-English alliance. In tracing the decline of Indian slavery within South Carolina during and after the war, the book reveals the shift in white racial ideology that responded to wa.

"This manuscript focuses on the interactions between Native Americans and European colonists during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, particularly the relationships that developed between the French and the Natchez, Chickasaw, and Choctaw peoples. Milne's history of the Lower Mississippi Valley and its peoples provides the most comprehensive and detailed account of the Natchez in particular, from La Salle's first encounter with what would become Louisiana to the ultimate disappearance of the Natchez by the end of the 1730s. In crafting this narrative, George Milne also analyzes the ways in which French attitudes about race and slavery influenced native North American Indians in the vicinity of French colonial settlements on the Gulf coast, and how in turn Native Americans adopted and/or resisted colonial ideology"--

In The Enslaved and Their Enslavers, Edward Pearson offers a sweeping history of slavery in South Carolina, from British settlement in 1670 to the dawn of the Civil War. For enslaved peoples, the shape of their daily lives depended primarily on the particular environment in which they lived and worked, and Pearson examines three distinctive settings in the province: the extensive rice and indigo plantations of the coastal plain; the streets, workshops, and wharves of Charleston; and the farms and estates of the upcountry. In doing so, he provides a fine-grained analysis of how enslaved laborers interacted with their enslavers in the workplace and other locations where they encountered one another as plantation agriculture came to dominate the colony. The Enslaved and Their Enslavers sets this portrait of early South Carolina against broader political events, economic developments, and social trends that also shaped the development of slavery in the region. For example, the outbreak of the American Revolution and the subsequent war against the British in the 1770s and early 1780s as well as the French and Haitian revolutions all had a profound impact on the institution's development, both in terms of what enslaved people drew from these events and how their enslavers responded to them. Throughout South Carolina's long history, enslaved people never accepted their enslavement passively and regularly demonstrated their fundamental opposition to the institution by engaging in acts of resistance, which ranged from vandalism to arson to escape, and, on rare occasions, organizing collectively against their oppression. Their attempts to subvert the institution in which they were held captive not only resulted in slaveowners tightening formal and informal mechanisms of control but also generated new forms of thinking about race and slavery among whites that eventually mutated into pro-slavery ideology and the myth of southern exceptionalism.

A Hidatsa Indian man, living in North Dakota at the turn of the century, relates the story of his life and the history and customs of his people.