The 'noble savage' in chains: Indian slavery in colonial South Carolina, 1670--1735

Descriptions of free, noble Indians in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Carolina coexisted blithely with the reality that southeastern Indians were enslaved by the tens of thousands between 1670 and 1715. The Indian slave trade was an uneasy partnership between select Indian communities and colonial traders built on pre-existing traditions of captivity and slavery in both worlds. While created out of a mutual desire for economic exchange it was nonetheless fueled by imperial and intertribal geopolitical competition. Colonists and Indians were motivated not only by profit but also by a realization that enslavement was an effective way to rid themselves of enemies.;The Indian slave trade represented a brief period in which English and Indian economic and political motives collided more than they enmeshed. As slave wars intensified, Indian communities began to form confederacies to shield themselves from enslavement. But even as they responded to changing political dynamics, southeastern Indians who had trade alliances with South Carolina became vulnerable to slave wars and indebted to colonial traders. In 1715 most of the Indian communities in the region followed the lead of the Yamasees and Ochese Creeks and launched a revenge war against their traders and the colony they represented. Violating the tacit understanding of the Indian slave trade---that only enemies were enslaved---some traders had begun to enslave the kin of their Indian trading partners to recoup their debts. Southeastern Indians responded to colonial affronts with war, bringing the Indian slave trade, but not Indian enslavement, to its end.;But, even in the wake of the Yamasee War (1715-1717), Indians and colonists continued to enslave Indians. As the Indian slave trade rapidly declined, Indian slavery became a predominantly political system. As they had prior to British colonization, Indian communities continued to take war captives and Indian matriarchs continued to make some of these enemies slaves in their own towns. And as they had done from the outset of colonization, British men continued to promote the enslavement of Indians they deemed enemies. While slavery was also of cosmological and social importance for Indian clans, for the British it was remained largely part of their colonial strategy.