THE SOUTHERN FRONTIER IN QUEEN ANNE’S WAR

     AT the close of the seventeenth century South Carolina constituted the sole southern frontier of the English colonies in America, against the Spanish, the French, and several important tribes of Indians. Though but newly established and still among the weakest of the English plantations, this colony had already given proof of unusual enterprise. Neglected by the proprietors, unsupported by the crown, the colonists, of their own initiative, had pushed the first frontier of the province (the frontier of the Indian trade and Indian alliances) further into the wilderness than English traders elsewhere had ventured. From the first settlement in 1670 the Carolinians had been engaged in conflicts with their neighbors, the Spaniards of Florida.¹ Before the end of the century, they were in contact and keen rivalry with the French in the region of the Gulf and the lower Mississippi. The obscure struggles of Indian traders and their savage partizans on the farthest frontier of the English colonies made but small stir in a world absorbed in the momentous issue of the Spanish Succession. A few men only, in the outposts of the rival empires, understood that these incidents foreshadowed a contest for the richest prize of imperial ambition in America: the heart of the continent. It was on the southern frontier, in the course of Queen Anne’s War, that the conflict was first clearly joined for the control of the valley of the Mississippi.

     The success of the Carolinians among the southern Indians was due to a number of factors, physical, economic, political. In the first place, the position of South Carolina was more favorable to the development of the western trade than that of any other of the English colonies, with the possible exception of New York. The Appalachian range, so long a barrier to the expansion of Virginia and Maryland and Pennsylvania, was easily avoided by all but the Cherokee traders. Yet in the matter of location Carolina was less fortunate than Florida and Louisiana. Whereas the Spanish could reach the Lower Creek towns by the Apalachicola River, and the French, once Mobile was established, had direct water communication with the Alabama, Talapoosa, and Abihka, the Carolina traders had to convey their goods on the backs of Indian burdeners or on

pack-horses by an overland path which intersected nearly all the important rivers of southeastern America.² But even the possession of water-routes, and the ability which the Latins everywhere displayed in Indian diplomacy, were more than offset by another factor of crucial importance, the superiority of the English trade.

     In nearly all the articles of the Indian trade the goods which the English offered were more highly esteemed by the Indians, for quality and price, than the corresponding products of their rivals. The fundamental reason for the success of the English in the tortuous politics of the wilderness was concisely expressed by the first Indian agent of South Carolina. In 1708 Thomas Nairne asserted that “the English trade for cloath always atracts and maintains the obedience and friendship of the Indians, they Effect them most who sell best cheap”.³

     The South Carolina trade, moreover, was actively fostered by the provincial government. Indeed, the leaders in the government and in the trade were for the most part identical. Charges of unfair and monopolistic practices were freely made against the great traders who controlled the council and the assembly. But the frontier interests of men like Joseph Blake (deputy governor, 1695-1700) and James Moore (governor, 1700-1702) had a consequence for the colony unrecognized by their critics.⁴ At the end of the seventeenth century the Indian trade was weaving a web of alliances among tribes of Indians distant many hundred miles from Charles Town. Blake and his successor, active promoters of the trade, developed a conception of the destinies of the English in that quarter of America—an imperial vision—notably in advance of the parochial ideas of proprietors and provincials alike; in advance, too, of the notions of policy of the imperial government itself.

     When Joseph Blake became deputy governor at the end of 1695, the Indian trade of South Carolina was just entering on a phase of more than local importance. A decade before this, in 1684, the revolt of the Yamasee against the Florida government and their emigration from the province of Guale to the borders of South Carolina had turned the scale against the Spaniards in the coastal

region.⁵ Already the expulsion of the Westo from the lower Savannah had cleared the way for trade expansion southwestward, among the inland tribes. Their route protected against flank attack from St. Augustine, the Charles Town traders made rapid progress among the populous Oconee, Ocheese (Kawita and Kasihta), and Ocmulgee Indians seated on the upper Oconee and above the forks of the Altamaha.⁶ With her expanding Indian relations South Carolina became the centre of the traffic in Indian slaves, as well as in deer-skins, among the English colonies. When the early wars had exhausted the supply near the settlements the friendly Indians were encouraged to range farther afield, especially to the south, where slave-catching raids had the additional advantage of weakening the allies of the Spaniards. Timucuan Indians from the interior of Florida had long been bought from the Yamasee;⁷ and now the inland Indians found ready sale for captured Apalachee, from the province of Apalachee, which fronted the Gulf between the Suwanee and Apalachicola rivers—the richest and, strategically, the most important of the outlying Spanish provinces. The raiders were supplied with arms, incited, and even led by the traders who lived among them; retaliatory expeditions were headed by Spanish officers.⁸

     Thus on the eve of the War of the Spanish Succession the relations between the colonists of South Carolina and Florida, already disturbed by disputes over title of possession, buccaneering, and runaway slaves, were further embittered by the expansion of the South Carolina Indian system. By aggressive, belligerent methods even in time of peace the Carolina traders threatened the maintenance of Spanish authority everywhere beyond the protection of a few weak and isolated garrisons. Florida was endangered, and with Florida another colony which existed as yet only in the purposes of Iberville and the French ministers: Louisiana.

     Throughout the last decade of the century the centre of the Carolina trade had remained at the forks of the Altamaha.⁹ Several years before the century’s close, however, the bolder traders had established their factories among the Alabama, Talapoosa, and Abihka, near the forks of the Alabama, and had laid in train an alliance with the Chickasaw, which, more than any other single factor, was destined to thwart the complete attainment of the French design in the lower Mississippi Valley. From the villages of the Choctaw, near the Tornbigbee, and of the Acolapissa, at the mouth of the Pearl, to the country of the Arkansas, west of the great river, and even as far as the Illinois, the Chickasaw, now that they were supplied with arms by the English, who bought their captives as slaves, became the scourge of the defenseless western tribes.¹⁰ The Chickasaw traders, of whom the chief were Thomas Welch and Anthony Dodsworth, sought also to extend their trade among the adjacent Indians. The most notable exploit in the early history of the western trade was the journey of Welch, in 1698, from Charles Town to the Quapaw village at the mouth of the Arkansas.¹¹ Within three decades from the planting of the colony—in a little more than fifteen years from the beginning of the western advance—the Carolinians had reached and even passed the Mississippi in their trading journeys.

     This achievement, without parallel in the English colonies, and rivalled only by the feats of the Canadian coureurs de bois, had been watched with close interest by the South Carolina government. It might have passed unnoted outside of the province, however, but for the emergence, as an international issue, of the question of the Mississippi.

     To England and the English colonies rumors were borne in 1698 of the French design to discover and settle the mouth of the Mississippi. Among the counter-measures proposed, the unsuccessful

attempt of Daniel Coxe, claimant of “Carolana” under the Heath patent, to plant an English colony to control the river, served only to hasten the French preparations.¹² Another project, put forward by Lord Bellomont of New York and Governor Nicholson of Virginia, had in view the promotion of trade with the trans-Appalachian Indians. Unfortunately Bellomont’s scheme for a conference of colonial governors for co-operation in Indian affairs and western policy, which was sanctioned by the Board of Trade, also miscarried.¹³ But as a result of the discussion it was becoming clearer that if the French were to be prevented from linking their settlements in Canada with the Gulf, trade with the distant Indians must be encouraged; and secondly, that the position of South Carolina gave that colony a unique advantage as a base for western expansion.¹⁴

     The alarm occasioned in the northern colonies and in England by Iberville’s enterprise was even keener in South Carolina, which had thereby become a frontier against the French as well as the Spanish and the Indians, and where the knowledge of a relatively easy communication with the Gulf and the lower Mississippi awakened fears of a speedy conquest by the French, or by the French and the Spaniards combined. The more timid settlers talked of removal to a safer region should the death of Charles II. unite the two crowns.¹⁵ Not till the spring of 1700 was it definitely known by the report of the traders that the French were in possession of the coveted region.¹⁶ In the meantime Blake, who had

warned an officer sent from St. Augustine that he intended to make good the English title to Pensacola Bay, occupied by the Spanish in November, 1698,¹⁷ had also despatched a group of traders by way of the Cherokee country and the Tennessee River to lay claim to the Mississippi and to challenge the French control.¹⁸ Confident that the influence which he had won among the southwestern tribes must prevail, he only awaited information from his agents before transmitting to the English government definite proposals for displacing the French. His death in 1700 interrupted these activities. As deputy governor and at the same time magnate of the Indian trade he had “ingeniously laid” the design for “the Enlargement of the Dominion of the Crown of England” in accordance with the inclusive terms of the proprietary charter.¹⁹ It was left to his successor, James Moore, an adventurous explorer and trader, to formulate a scheme for the conquest of the region of the Gulf and the lower Mississippi.

     By 1700 the extent and the character of the English interest among the western Indians were well understood by the French. Iberville, who had anticipated English opposition, but had not f ore-seen the direction of the attack, was impressed with the need of devising a comprehensive programme of resistance. In his first measures, however, he underrated the difficulties. A plan for the forcible expulsion of the English traders from among the Chickasaw soon proved impossible of execution.²⁰ The attempt of Iberville and the French ministry to persuade the Spaniards, now ruled by a Bourbon, that only the cession of Pensacola to France could check the advance of the Carolinians toward the mine-country, failed to overcome the jealous regard of government and people for the integrity of their colonial empire.²¹ In default of Pensacola, Mobile was established, avowedly as a point of support for the Indians allied with the French and the Spanish.²² The central object of Iberville’s frontier policy was the promotion of a general peace among the southern Indians, based on friendship and trade with the French. Negotiations with the Chickasaw, begun by Tonti in 1700, were brought to a head only after two years. Meantime

there had occurred a crucial event in the frontier history of Louisiana: the conclusion of an alliance with the Choctaw.²³ The traditional enmity between the Choctaw, the most numerous nation of southwestern Indians, and the Chickasaw, the most aggressive, which was the raison d’être of the alliance, proved in the event to be fatal to the success of Iberville’s programme of pacification. In 1702, however, at a great council at Mobile, the Choctaw and the Chickasaw were reconciled, and were promised an ample trade from a factory to be planted in their midst. Shortly the truce was extended to include other tribes, notably the Illinois and the Alabama.²⁴

     Iberville’s policy was not purely defensive. It looked beyond the immediate security of Louisiana to the expansion of the French interest among the Indians “au côté du Caroline”, and to co-operation with the Spanish of Florida to strike at the flank of the English advance. A grandiose scheme for the rearrangement of the southern Indians, including the Cherokee, so as to expose the southern frontier of the English colonies, was distinctly impracticable. Something, however, was actually accomplished toward co-ordinating French and Spanish policy. In January, 1702, Iberville strongly advised that the Apalachee Indians be engaged to oppose by force the progress of the English and their allies. His counsel was accepted, and as an earnest of a more aggressive strategy, an expedition of several hundred Indians and Spaniards was prepared to go against the English Indians in August. But the latter had warning of the intended attack; headed by their traders they advanced to the Flint River and routed the invaders.²⁵

     More was involved in this frontier skirmish—the prelude to Queen Anne’s War on the southern frontier—than in the familiar quarrels between the Carolinians and the Spanish of Florida. In effect it was the first blow struck by the English for the control of the Mississippi Valley. There was no doubt in the mind of Governor James Moore that the unity of policy which Iberville sought to attain was a fact to be reckoned with in the English programme.

     In August, 1702, before the expected news of a declaration of war had reached Carolina, Governor Moore in an address to the Commons House of Assembly urged “the takeing of St. Augustin before it be strengthened with French forses”. He added: “This

wee believe will open to us an easie and plaine way to Remove the French (a no less dangerous Enemy in time of peace then warr) from their settlement on the south (sic) side of the Bay of Appalatia.”²⁶ A hastily planned expedition was launched against St. Augustine in the fall. The town was soon reduced, but for lack of mortars the siege of the castle was prolonged until relief arrived from Havana.²⁷ In spite of the burden of debt imposed upon the province by the unsuccessful campaign of 1702, tentative plans were laid for a second expedition in co-operation with Her Majesty’s naval forces. In a letter to Admiral Whetstone of January 28, 1703, the governor and assembly outlined the larger objects of their strategy.

     If it Pleaseth God to Give us Success, it is a Matter of that Great Consequence that if to that Wee ad the conquest of a small Spanish Town called Pancicola, and a new french Collony. . . .Both, Sea Port Towns. . . .It will make her Majestie Absolute and Soveraigne Lady of all the Maine as farr as the River Mischisipi, which if effected the Collony of Carolina will be of the Greatest Vallue to the Crown of England of any of her Majesties Plantations on the Maine except Virginia by ading a Great Revenue to the Crown, for one halfe of all the Canadian Trade for furrs and Skinns must necessarily come this way, besides a vast Trade of furrs and Skinns—extended as far as the above mentioned River, Mischisipi, which is now interrupted by those Two little Towns.²⁸

     Five months later Colonel Robert Quary, a colonial customs official with pronounced imperial ideas, whose former residence in South Carolina had familiarized him with the problems of the southern frontier, wrote from New York to the Board of Trade emphasizing in similar fashion the relation of the Florida campaign to the larger question of continental dominion.²⁹

     Quary and Moore saw farther into the future of the inter-colonial conflict than most of their contemporaries. Moore had been discredited by the St. Augustine fiasco; he was succeeded by a capable but unimaginative soldier, without the keen interest of the recent governors in frontier policy. At the beginning of his government, however, Sir Nathaniel Johnson gave his sanction to a blow at the Spanish interest which reaped a larger measure of success than any other military enterprise of the war, and which was definitely directed against Louisiana as well as Florida: the Apalachee expedition of 1704.

     In 1702 and 1703 the progress which the French were making among the Alabama and Talapoosa, and more especially the potential danger to the “Coweta” (Kawita) and Yamasee, revealed by the abortive Spanish-Apalachee attack of 1702, awakened anxiety among the Carolinians for the stability of their Indian system. A general movement northward of the tribes which composed the bulwark of the province seemed imminent. Measures to protect these Indians and to confirm them in the places in which they lived repeatedly engaged the attention of the government. It was at length determined, at the solicitation of the assembly, to despatch a force of a thousand friendly Indians and fifty whites under the recent governor, James Moore, to assist the Kawita by attacking the Spanish frontier province of Apalache.³⁰ On January 14, 1704, Moore successfully stormed the first and strongest fort, at Ayubale. The invaders then captured one post after another until the rich province with its flourishing missions was almost completely ravaged and subdued. Besides many Indians killed in battle, or carried away as slaves, three hundred men and a thousand women and children who had submitted were persuaded to remove to the neighborhood of Savannah Town to strengthen the immediate frontier of South Carolina. By this energetic proceeding Moore destroyed the chief weapon upon which the Spanish and French had relied for offensive action against Carolina, before it could be made really effective. “Before this Expedition”, Moore informed the proprietors, “we were more afraid of the Spaniards of Apalatchee and their Indians in Conjunction with the French of Mississippi, and their Indians doing us Harm by Land, than of any Forces of the Enemy by Sea. This has wholly disabled them from attempting anything against Us by Land”.³¹

     The immediate consequence of the new security against inland assault was an increased activity of the Carolinians on the Louisiana frontier. Already the Charles Town traders, with the aid of Moore’s government, had undermined the weakest support of Iberville’s structure of alliances, the friendly understanding with the Alabama Indians. It had early been recognized by the English that the amity of the tribes seated at the forks of the Alabama was essential to the western expansion of their trade; and between 1701 and 1703 efforts had been put forth to counteract the advantage enjoyed by the French in their control of the water-routes. An effect had soon been produced. In May, 1703, the French traders had been waylaid and murdered by the Alabama.³² The hostilities thus begun continued nine years. Punitive expeditions from Mobile accomplished little; somewhat more effective were the attacks of the French Indians spurred on by liberal offers of reward for scalps and captives.³³ Meanwhile the Alabama war greatly facilitated the work of the South Carolina traders, who, on the farthest frontier of the English colonies, advanced hand in hand their own profit and the political interests of their province.

     From 1703 to 1715 the French policy was of necessity largely defensive. That this policy was successful in its main object, though not in detail—that the new establishment was enabled to survive the assaults of the Carolinians and their allies—was due primarily to the adroit Indian management of Iberville’s brother and successor, Bienville. Through French youths whom he sent to live among the Indians behind Mobile, Bienville kept in touch with the rapidly shifting currents of Indian politics. By flattery, by “caresses”, he made good in part the meagreness of French presents and the insufficiency of the French trade.³⁴ Yet from time to time Bienville’s

skill was severely tested. The poverty of the colony played directly into the hands of its enemies. Funds set aside for Indian presents and trade had to be used for the maintenance of the garrisons. The building of the post promised to the Chickasaw in 1702, and impatiently demanded by the Indians, was postponed. In this juncture the English, by cultivating the Chickasaw seated among the upper Creeks, and by liberal presents to their kinsmen, were imperilling the central object of the French policy, the pacification of the southwestern tribes. In 1705 hostilities occurred between the Chickasaw and the Choctaw, and in 1706 the patched-up truce was definitely broken.³³ Though the French for a number of years retained a party among the Chickasaw, the English re-established their control over the majority of the nation. The Chickasaw and their neighbors the Yazoo were added to the Talapoosa, the Alabama, and the other tribes which the English had been using with disastrous effect in their assaults upon the allies of the French. In the autumn of 1705, for instance, the Choctaw had been raided by three or four thousand Carolina Indians, headed by several Englishmen, their villages and fields ravaged, and many prisoners carried away. Among the weaker tribes a veritable reign of terror was now instituted. The Tohome and Mobilians north of Mobile were exposed to constant attack. In 1706 the Taensa and Tunica were compelled to remove nearer the mouth of the Mississippi.³⁶ A climax in the English offensive was reached in 1707-1708 when Pensacola town was burned, and an elaborate intrigue was set in motion for the destruction of Mobile and Louisiana.

     The reduction of the Florida Indians after the Apalachee expedition had been even more thorough than the harrying of the allies of the French. The remnants of the Apalachee, with the Tawasa and the Chatta, were forced by the Creeks to flee to the protection of Mobile. In peninsular Florida only the walls of St. Augustine furnished security against the attacks of the English and their Indians.³⁷ These now made so bold as to press their slave-catching raids as far into the interior as the “broken land” of the

Everglades³⁸ Close to the Louisiana frontier the isolated outpost of Pensacola invited attack. In the summer of 1707 Pensacola town was destroyed in a surprise assault by a body of Talapoosa under English leaders, and the fort itself just escaped capture. In November Pensacola was again invested, but the siege was raised when Bienville, with characteristic promptness, headed party of French and Indians for its relief.³⁹

     In 1707 the Carolinians were aiming at a more difficult prize than Pensacola, and one more essential to their ultimate object—at Mobile, the key to the control of the eastern Gulf region and the lower Mississippi. The programme adopted by the assembly was conceived by Thomas Welch, the veteran Chickasaw trader, and by Thomas Nairne, the first official Indian agent of the province.⁴⁰ In the autumn of 1707 both Nairne and Welch urged that an attempt be made to win over the French Indians, particularly the Choctaw, as a preliminary to an attack on Mobile.⁴⁵ In the assembly the proposal found support as the most practicable method to remove the French, an object regarded as “of absolute necessity”, especially since the Spanish-French sea-attack on Charles Town in 1706. Plans for an expedition to fall upon the French from the Talapoosa were made contingent upon the success of Nairne and Welch in seducing the western Indians.⁴² In the spring Nairne “ventured his life and made a peace with the Choctaws”; while Welch summoned a council at the Yazoo of the chief river tribes—Arkansas, Tourima, Taensa, Natchez, and Koroa—with similar results. Unfortunately for the larger English design, their further proposals for

(1) assistance or neutrality in an attack on Mobile, and (2) the removal of the tribes which formed the bulwark of the French colony to the Tennessee river, in order to divert the fur-trade of the upper Mississippi to Carolina, were rejected. This partial failure of the English diplomacy (a failure which precluded an assault on Mobile) was mainly due to the energy and adroitness of Bienville, who had taken prompt measures to counteract the influence on the western Indians of English presents and arguments.⁴³

     After this defeat Nairne set to work to create the necessary condition for the success of future efforts to extend “the English American empire” in the southwest—the education of the English colonial authorities in the strategy of the southern frontier. Hitherto the home government was not only without a policy for the southern frontier, but without the data upon which to construct a policy. In 1708, in a notable memorial which he accompanied by a map of the country from Virginia to the mouth of the Mississippi,⁴⁴ Nairne urged that in the expected treaty of peace due weight be given to the western claims of Carolina, based upon her ancient trade with the Indians behind Mobile. The advantages to be expected from planting a new English colony in the south or southwest he discussed in the spacious tone of a frontiersman who had “had a personall view of most of those parts”. His most practical counsel was to the effect that the French design in the west could be checked “only by trading and other management”; and “that this province being a frontier, both against the French and Span’d, ought not to be Neglected”.

     It was not until a destructive Indian war had imperilled the results of three decades of expansion, that Nairne’s arguments, repeated by others, won the ear of the home government. In the meantime Nairne, a dissenter, whose administration of the Indian act had brought him into conflict with Sir Nathaniel Johnson, had been disgraced and driven from office by the governor and the Church party.⁴³ For several years thereafter the frontier policy of the provincial government lacked the aggressive and imaginative qualities which Nairne, like Blake and Moore before him, had imparted to it. Under the combined strain of maladroit management,

the licentious conduct of the traders, and the skillful diplomacy of Bienville, the South Carolina Indian system was beginning to show ominous signs of weakness. The first break occurred in 1712, when the French succeeded in making peace with the Alabama Indians.⁴⁶ But the Carolinians, alarmed by the “aparant danger . . . from the conjunction of . . . the Choctaws and Chickisaws.”,⁴⁷ had already resumed their western offensive. Although the province was engaged at the time in helping to suppress the troublesome Tuscarora rising in North Carolina, energy remained for an effective prosecution of the Indian trade and for a vigorous renewal of the partizan warfare which was the characteristic method of the Carolinian advance. With the reopening of the Choctaw-Chickasaw feud in 1711, the assembly equipped an expedition of thirteen hundred Creek Indians, under Captain Theophilus Hastings, which marched through the Choctaw country, burning, killing, taking prisoners. A smaller force of Chickasaw, under Welch, joined this assault on their old enemies, now the main support of the French colony.⁴⁸ The year was one of achievement for the frontier forces of Carolina. John Barnwell, reporting the success of his North Carolina expedition, in February, 1712, congratulated Governor Craven on the “hon’r and Glory of virtuous South Carolina whose armies are the same winter gathering Laurells from the Cape Florida and from the Bay of Spiritta Sancta even to the Borders of Virginia”.⁴⁹

     The hope voiced by Nairne in 1708 that in the terms of peace “the English American empire” in the southwest might “not be unreasonably Crampt up” was not disappointed in 1713. To be sure, the southern frontier was not specifically mentioned in the treaties of Utrecht; but the lack of defined boundaries made it possible for the English colonists to continue to assert their old inclusive claims, based on the charter and on the Indian trade. The French, at all events, found the Carolinians quite as uncomfortable neighbors in peace as in war. In vain La Mothe Cadillac invited Governor Craven to co-operate in establishing a general peace among the southern Indians, English and French alike; to withdraw his traders from the nations which had traded first with the French; and to comply with the spirit of the peace by preventing

those traders from instigating slave-catching raids among the French allies.⁵⁰ After 1713 there was no longer question of an attack on Mobile, but in the field of Indian politics and in partizan warfare the two years ending in 1715 marked the climax of the first English effort to displace the French in the Mississippi Valley.

     Nairne had been restored to the principal Indian agency in 1712, and had promptly won the praise of the Indian commissioners for “capacity and diligence” displayed in negotiations with the western Indians. In 1713 he sent goods among. the Choctaw, seeking to renew the relations he had established in 1707 with this all-important tribe.⁵¹ It was another than Nairne, however, who was made active director of the new enterprise for the conversion of all the southern Indians to the English trade and alliance. This semiofficial Indian diplomat was a certain Price Hughes, Esq., “an English Gent., who had a particular fancy of rambling among the Indians”—such was the character given him by Spotswood of Virginia. By testimony of Cadillac, “il etoit ingénieur, et géographe”; and, moreover, “homme d’esprit”⁵² In 1713 and 1714-1715 he was encouraged by the provincial government to undertake highly important missions among the western tribes. His commission from Governor Craven set forth the sweeping claims of Blake and Moore and Nairne to the Mississippi, and to the country westward as far as the Spanish settlements. As a result of his efforts, in co-operation with the traders, new factories were established; a firmer league was formed with the Chickasaw; and even the Choctaw (with the exception of two loyal villages which fled to Mobile) were persuaded to desert the French alliance. Of the Mississippi River Indians, the Yazoo had long inclined toward the English; and now the Natchez as well admitted Carolina traders to their villages, and joined in raids on the weaker tribes down-stream. While the Cherokee were endeavoring to convert the Illinois to the English trade, Hughes and the Carolinians on the Mississippi were intriguing with the French voyageurs to the same purpose. Had Hughes succeeded in his further measures, there was a real prospect that the highway of trade and communication between Canada and Louisiana would be closed. The French authorities were informed that this enterprising “mylord Anglais” planned to visit the tribes of the Red River, and then to descend to the mouth of the

Mississippi, hoping to win, by presents and trade (the potent instruments of English expansion), the friendship of the Huma, the Bayogoula, the Chawasha, and the Acolapissa.⁵³

     At precisely that juncture, in 1715, when the Carolina Indian system had reached its farthest extension, the ambitious structure of alliances suddenly crumbled; and in the crash which followed the province itself narrowly escaped destruction. The arrest of Hughes at Manchac by the French, his release, and his murder in the woods between Pensacola and the upper Creek country,⁵⁴ occurred simultaneously with the outbreak of the Yamasee-Creek rising—one of the most dangerous Indian attacks sustained by any of the English colonies. The Carolinians naturally saw a connection between the collapse of their western project (precipitated by the watchful activity of Bienville) and the greater calamity which spread massacre and destruction from the plantations on the Stono and the Santee to the trading factories among the distant Chickasaw; they believed that the French and the Spaniards were the instigators of the Indian war.⁵⁵ In reality the disaster was largely, if not solely, due to the long accumulating evils of an ill-regulated Indian trade.⁵⁶ But the Spanish and the French were not slow to take advantage of their neighbors’ extremity. When, after two anxious years, the attacks on the settlements had been suppressed, the wavering Cherokee secured in their allegiance, communication reopened with the loyal Chickasaw, and an uncertain peace concluded with the Creeks, the situation on the southern frontier had been seriously altered in a sense unfavorable to English ambitions.

With the desertion of the Yamasee to Florida, and the removal of the lower Creeks from the upper waters of the Altamaha to the Chattahoochee, the Spaniards, from negligible rivals, had become formidable contenders for the alliance of the Creek Indians. The French, moreover, had recovered their control of the Mississippi River tribes, and by planting Alabama Fort (Fort Toulouse) at the forks of the Alabama River, had secured the most valuable strategic position in the southern Indian country.

     In one important respect, however, the position of South Carolina as the southern frontier of the English colonies was markedly improved as a result of the Indian war. The English colonial authorities had at length been forced to recognize the existence of an imperial problem in that quarter of America with which the proprietary government had been unable to cope. By slow degrees, as control of the province passed to the crown, the point of view developed by Blake and Moore and Nairne, and now set forth by the Carolina agents—that South Carolina was “a Barrier and might be made a Bulwark to all his Majesties Colonys on the South West part of the Continent”⁵⁷—was impressed upon the Board of Trade and the Privy Council. The first concrete result of outstanding importance—the culmination of a series of efforts to strengthen the southern frontier against the French as well as the Spanish—was the establishment of the march colony of Georgia.

     By 1733 it had become axiomatic that the crux of the intercolonial contest in America was the control of the Mississippi Valley, a theorem first demonstrated on the southern frontier in Queen Anne’s War.

VERNER W. CRANE