Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Brett Rushforth, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture

In 1703, French cartographer Guillaume Delisle produced a map of North America unprecedented in its detail and accuracy. Published in Paris, the map gained instant recognition throughout Europe as the most reliable synthesis of available data on the continent's land, waterways, and peoples. In his new book on the Indian slave trade in the colonial Southeast, Alan Gallay invokes Delisle's map as a metaphor for his work. "We can identify with his task," he writes, "as we reconstruct a distant world that we cannot visit, and attempt to make a representation that is coherent and valuable" (p. ix).	1
Although earlier works contain most of the details about slave raiding at individual times and places, Gallay's The Indian Slave Trade provides the first comprehensive map of Carolina's Indian slave system. Bringing coherence to the topic of this southern slave trade is no small task. Spanning half a century and reaching into Spanish Florida, French Louisiana, and the Carolina interior, the trade involved three competing colonial powers and hundreds of Indian villages. Gallay draws connections among the diverse peoples and places of the colonial Southeast to reveal the contours of a slave trade more pervasive and destructive than previously imagined.	2
As the book's subtitle suggests, Gallay argues that Indian slavery played a central role in the rise of the English empire in the early South. Carolinians consistently used "slaving expeditions as a tool for imperial growth" (p. 164), targeting Indian peoples allied with the Spanish and French to weaken their European enemies. The most successful application of this strategy came between 1702 and 1706 when the colony provisioned its allies for massive slave raids against Florida's mission Indians. In addition to decimating Florida's mission system, the raiders returned with thousands of captives to sell to Carolina traders. Thus, although the expedition failed to conquer the Spanish at St. Augustine, it accomplished an important imperial aim while generating massive profits from the resulting slave sales. From this experience, writes Gallay, Carolinians "learned that they could make greater profits by attacking and enslaving a European foe's allies than by assaulting the Europeans directly" (p. 197).	3
That lesson would prove to be a dangerous one. During Queen Anne's War, Carolinians hoped to destroy the fledgling French Louisiana. French weakness made them easy targets for a naval attack at Mobile, the success of which could have prevented the development of a strong French colony in the South. Rather than pursue this option, however, Carolina's officials preferred to profit from slaving raids by continuing to support the Chickasaw against the French-allied Choctaw. By doing this, Gallay concludes, the Carolinians ensured a continued friendship between the French and the Choctaw and missed their best opportunity to defeat the French and thus expand their trade and settlement westward.	4
Slavers' greed also hindered efforts by Carolina's proprietors to abolish or regulate Indian slavery. Although the proprietors demanded, as early as 1671–1672, that "no Indian upon any occasion or pretense whatsoever is to be made a Slave" (p. 49), none of the colony's traders complied. Recognizing their inability to ban the trade, the proprietors then tried unsuccessfully to limit its scale, but governors and assemblymen who profited from slave exports refused to punish errant traders. A rapid proliferation of slave raids throughout the region resulted in a series of Indian wars in the 1710s. "Carolina's inability to control its traders and bring justice to Indian relations," Gallay suggests, "led to the near destruction of the colony in a few short years" (p. 287).	. . .