The European conflicts in North America put incredible pressure on Indian peoples to choose sides. It was increasingly difficult for native peoples in colonized areas to remain autonomous, yet Indian nations were not simply pawns of European powers. Some sought European allies against their native enemies, and most improved their situation by gaining cloth, metal tools, guns, or horses from their European trading partners. However, many Indian nations suffered growing internal conflicts as war, trade, and colonial expansion increased the power of male warriors. In societies like the Cherokee and Iroquois, in which older women had long held significant economic and political authority, the rising power of young men threatened traditional gender and generational relations. In addition, struggles between the English and the French often fostered conflict among Indian peoples, reinforcing grievances that existed before European settlement.
The tensions among Indians escalated during the late seventeenth century as southern tribes like the Tuscarora, Yamasee, Creek, Cherokee, Caddo, and Choctaw gained European goods, including guns. As deer disappeared from the Carolinas and the lower Mississippi valley, the most precious commodity for trade became Indian captives sold as slaves. Indians had always taken captives in war, but some of those captives had been adopted into the victorious nation. Now, however, war was almost constant in some areas, and captives were more valuable for sale as slaves than as adopted tribesmen. Moreover, slave raiding occurred outside formal conflicts, intensifying hostilities across the southern region.
Still, during the 1710s, some southern Indians tried to develop a pan-Indian alliance similar to that forged by New England Indians in the 1670s (see chapter 2). First, a group of Tuscarora warriors, hoping to gain support from other tribes, launched an attack on North Carolina settlements in September 1711. Over the next several months, hundreds of settlers were killed and hundreds more fled. However, South Carolina colonists came to the aid of their North Carolina countrymen and persuaded Indian allies among the Yamasee, Catawba, and Cherokee nations to join forces against the Tuscaroras. Although some of these allies had traditionally been enemies, they now cooperated. Meanwhile political leaders in North Carolina convinced a competing group of Tuscaroras to ally with the colonists. By 1713 the war was largely over, and in 1715 the Tuscaroras signed a peace treaty and forfeited their lands. Many then migrated north and were accepted as the sixth nation of the Iroquois Confederacy.
See Document 3.2 to read a Tuscarora appeal to British colonial officials.
The end of the war did not mean peace in the Carolinas, however. For the next two years, fierce battles erupted between a Yamasee-led coalition and the South Carolina militia. The Yamasee people remained deeply in debt to British merchants even as the trade in deerskins and slaves moved farther west. They thus secured allies among the Creeks and launched an all-out effort to force the British out. The Yamasee War marked the Indians’ most serious challenge to European dominance. Indeed, it was even bloodier than King Philip’s War. The British gained victory only after the Cherokees switched their allegiance to the colonists in early 1716 and thus ended the possibility of a major Creek offensive. The final Indian nations withdrew from the conflict in 1717, and a fragile peace followed.
The Yamasee War did not oust the British, but it did transform the political landscape of native North America. In its aftermath, the Creek and Catawba tribes emerged as powerful new confederations, the Cherokees became the major trading partner of the British, and the Yamasee nation was seriously weakened. And as the Cherokees allied with the British, the Creek and the Caddo tribes strengthened their alliance with the French. Meanwhile many Yamasees migrated to Spanish Florida, joining the Seminole nation.
Despite the British victory, colonists on the Carolina frontier faced raids on their settlements for decades to come. In the 1720s and 1730s, settlers in the Middle Atlantic colonies also experienced fierce resistance to their westward expansion. And attacks on New Englanders along the Canadian frontier periodically disrupted settlement there. Still, many Indian tribes were pushed out of their homelands. As they resettled in new regions, they alternately allied and fought with native peoples already living there. At the same time, the trade in Indian slaves expanded in the west as the French and the Spanish competed for economic partners and military allies.