D. Andrew Johnson's ambitious and tightly focused book will interest early Americanists working on enslavement, food, and water in early America. In Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of Colonial South Carolina, Johnson aims to bridge between histories of enslavement: on the one hand, about Native Americans (including Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, Cusabos, Onondagas, Pamunkeys, Powhatans, Rickahockans, Savannahs, Tuscaroras, and Yamasees) and, on the other hand, about people of African descent (primarily Gambians, Angolans, and Eboes). He successfully achieves his aims by exploring plantation management, crop production, and harbours, rivers, creeks, and marshes in South Carolina. For context, Johnson's narrative reaches north to draw on the Powhatan sachem Opechancanough's 1622 and 1644 attacks on the Virginia colony, and the waging of the Pequot War further afield, in the places that became New England. These are conflicts which scholars including J. Frederick Fausz, Carville Earle, Karen Kupperman, Alfred Cave, Michael LaCombe, Katherine Grandjean, and Carla Cevasco have characterized as resource struggles during periods of increased scarcity. Johnson employs these events to explain how and why English migrants—who came to include Carolina colonists—increasingly justified their participation in the Indigenous slave trade and began taking captives to sell to other colonies. Johnson observes, ‘As was often the case in new colonial beachheads, conflict between Europeans and Indigenous people arose from colonists' inability to feed themselves and their subsequent reliance on Native people's generosity and willingness to provide the food the colonists demanded’ (37–38). He develops this idea with his discussion of the Kussos. In 1671, Kussos—probably responding to colonists' cattle destroying their agricultural fields—began taking colonists' crops from the ground. Colonists retaliated by enslaving them. South Carolina's ‘new colonial beachheads’ endured for several decades in this messy history, because the colony and its people moved during an extended period of political instability at home and abroad. Johnson convincingly reads the colony's original location on the Kiawah River, its limited inland access, and its sandbar-riddled harbour as a reflection of local geopolitics: of Cussabo peoples' fears of Westo slave raiders, which informed colonists' decisions to make their colony relatively inaccessible. His reinterpretation of the colony's relocation to Oyster Point helpfully situates Charles Town in a larger network of Native American towns and nations that regularly relocated—as scholars including Kathryn Braund, Steven Hahn, and Elizabeth Ellis have observed. Before the eighteenth century, then, colonial governors changed rapidly while select colonists acquired wealth by selling enslaved Native Americans to other Atlantic markets. By the 1710s, the Indigenous slave trade had become less profitable and less practicable: because disease, enslavement, and warfare reduced the population and available captives and because of survivors' increased capacity to meet slave traders with force. Whilst colonists continued to hold Native Americans in bondage past this time, they also relied more on enslaved African labour and, simultaneously, began to collapse the racial categories that they documented. Johnson shows how South Carolina was ‘made’ by revealing the overlap between colonial administrators, pirates, and slavers as early as the 1630s and by thinking about the knowledge of food production. Early colonists sold enslaved Indigenous people to pirates and privateers working for the Providence Island Company in exchange for enslaved Africans. Colonists gained additional ideas about enslaving Indigenous captives following the arrival of colonists from Barbados and Bermuda. Enslaved Native Americans produced crops. Those who exported crops and people got rich; a majority of the colony's governors between 1670 and 1750 ‘were either slavers of Native people or the sons of those slavers’ (87). Johnson's close studies of several of these colonists suggest that enslaved Indigenous women and children, who made up the majority enslaved population, were almost certainly the first to intercrop maize (what today we call corn) and a variety of legumes (hence ‘pease’) for enslavers. These crops required relatively little labour and produced a lot when intercropped. Johnson writes that women and children created this ‘maize and pease complex’ on which colonists depended, adding the history of their labour and ‘agricultural technology’ to what historians already know about the knowledge of enslaved West Africans (xiv, 5). All of this happened before enslaved Africans taught colonists to manage water to produce rice. Enslaved Native Americans thus connects the dots between Native American enslavement in early South Carolina and the colony's agricultural complex in the era before rice and indigo. Johnson enmeshes these histories by writing about sources and waterways. He offers useful insights about the archival records constituting the history of the Carolinas, including the probate inventories that became more specific under Crown control of the colony in the 1720s, and the silences in inventories, mortgages, and bills of sale that, by the mid-eighteenth century, were eliding the presence of enslaved Native Americans by designating them under identities for people racialized as Black. This book adeptly imagines the colony's land and water over time. For readers accustomed to seeing Charles Town as a place from whence Native American deerskins departed and enslaved Africans arrived, Johnson offers an earlier ‘export hub of captive Native Americans’ (11). He interprets the colony's other waterways before the 1720s as interspersed with plantations: spread out, inland ports of agricultural production that were well-capitalized and situated to facilitate easy river transportation. They tended to be ‘at sites where deep water met dry ground’ and were thus relatively unusual places in the geography of the lowcountry (34). Johnson argues that although Carolina colonists sought to accumulate wealth, historians have been too eager to assume that they did so by obtaining land and controlling water. Only much later did the people living inland on Goose Creek and the Kiawah River use enslaved African labour and procure the knowledge to grow inland rice in swamps. Johnson is very good at thinking about plants, but saying slightly more about animals would have further sharpened this study of elided people and their work. He is probably right that the ranching of domesticated animals was a skill that few enslaved Native American men possessed, but on this particular point, he loses focus on the Indigenous women constituting his book. He might have benefited from thinking more about Creek cattle-ranching practices, including those of Mary Musgrove, who was raised in South Carolina, enslaved Native Americans and people of African descent, and became one of the Georgia colony's chief beef suppliers. This historian is tempted to encourage scholars to think about adding beef to Johnson's maize and pease complex, but is eager to see them build on Johnson's exciting book.
Rachel B. Herrmann (Thu,) studied this question.