"Something Cloudy in Their Looks": The Origins of the Yamasee War Reconsidered

William L. Ramsey

The Reverend Francis LeJau, writing from South Carolina early in 1712, remarked on the aloof manner of the "free Indians" living near his parish in Goose Creek. "They goe their own way," he observed, "and bring their children like themselves with little conversation among us but when they want something from us." He did not identify them by nation, but, whoever they were, he felt discomfited by "something cloudy in their looks." Few other Carolinians appear to have noticed those clouds; certainly no one else wrote about them. But LeJau was correct. There were clouds, and they had been gathering in the "looks" of southeastern Indians for several years. When the storm finally broke in April 1715, it nearly washed South Carolina off the map. Warriors from virtually every nation in the South, from the Catawbas and their piedmont neighbors in the Carolinas to the Choctaws of Mississippi, joined together in one of the most potent native coalitions ever to oppose the British in colonial North America.1	1
The Yamasee War, as it has come to be known, has long been recognized as one of the most important events in southern colonial history. According to the historian Gary B. Nash, Native American combatants came "as close to wiping out the European colonists as ever [they] came during the colonial period." Southeastern Indians destroyed most of South Carolina's plantation districts and came within a few miles of Charles Town (now Charleston) during the first year of the war. By 1718, when peace returned to much of the region, over four hundred colonists and an untold number of Native American warriors had perished, making the conflict a serious candidate for America's bloodiest war in proportion to the populations involved. The war spurred extensive tribal migrations and alliance realignments that changed the diplomatic and cultural landscape of the region for the remainder of the eighteenth century, and it led directly to the collapse of South Carolina's proprietary government in 1719. British imperial responses to the war, moreover, prompted the first calls for a buffer colony to protect Carolina's southern border against Indian or even French or Spanish attacks, which culminated in the establishment of Georgia in 1733. Recent work even indicates that the war ended South Carolina's experimentation with Indian slavery and committed the colony to an exclusive reliance on African labor from 1715 onward.2	2
Despite its significance, however, the Yamasee War has attracted surprisingly little scholarly attention over the last half century, and explicating its origins in particular remains very much open to debate. Early efforts to understand the causes of the war focused mainly on the inflammatory behavior of English traders. In its most sophisticated expression, crafted in 1925 by the historian Verner Crane, this approach viewed the war as a "far reaching revolt against the Carolinian trading regime" in which Native Americans across the South rose up in anger over the "tyrannies of the Charles Town traders." John R. Swanton, writing in the same decade, also felt that the "misconduct of some traders" had been the "immediate cause" of the war but went on to add that fears of enslavement may have prompted the Yamasees to action as well. Elements of those two versions were refined, interwoven, and reiterated for a generation and, indeed, continue to influence current scholarship in subtle ways. Yet they depend on a number of premises that do not bear modern scrutiny. First, the application of moralistic judgments concerning English trade behavior makes the mistake of assuming that what is just and proper in one culture will necessarily be recognized as such in another. Second, they err in presuming that a single, uniform cause of action operated everywhere, in the same way, throughout the entire region.3	. . .