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.By 1700 newand alien groups were beginning to arrive.In 1704 5 a colony of Huguenots, escapingfrom crowded conditions in Virginia, joined the settlements.And in 1710 a colony ofSwiss and Germans formed a separate settlement somewhat to the south, on the NeuseRiver.Some of these new settlers were religious radicals Baptists, Anabaptists, andMennonites seeking refuge from a strict Protestant regime in Bern, Switzerland.But tothis original group had been added several hundred of the 10,000 refugees from thesouthwest Rhineland who had arrived in England in 1710 and had then scattered intoremote corners of the British world some to Ireland, some to the Schoharie Valley ofNew York, some to the backcountry of Pennsylvania, some to the pine woods of NorthCarolina.So the northern Carolina settlement of a few thousand souls was being peopled quiterandomly from several quite different sources.The inhabitants, living in rough, scruffyclearings at the edges of pine forests and in dwellings even cruder than those of theChesapeake farmers, were engaged in tobacco-growing, mixed farming, and cattle-raising.They were few in number; they formed no towns of any size; and they nourishedno gentry leadership.Their still primitive settlements were highly unstable, and thecommissioners, as they left, must have wondered if they would survive at all.For theestablishment of New Bern, North Carolina, had touched off an Indian war, which brokeout in September 1711 and raged for two years.It would end, after orgies of atrocities onboth sides, with the neighboring Tuscarora tribes decimated and driven off the land.Thatit was won at all that is, that the northern Carolina settlements survived at all wasdue in part to the help provided by the southern Carolina settlements.Several expeditions A domesday book for the periphery 17of southern Carolinians together with warlike Indian allies marched across the 300 milesof unmapped forests that separated the two regions, through veritable jungles andscarcely passable swamp land, to help repel the Tuscaroras attacks in the north.12These southern Carolinians had come from a tiny but surprisingly prosperouscommunity centered on the port of Charles Town, at the juncture of the Ashley andCooper rivers.In 1703, in this southernmost British settlement there were just over 7,000inhabitants (somewhat more than lived in the northern area).It was a population strangelyproportioned: almost half were black slaves, Indians, or white indentured servants.Thefree whites a mere 3,600 were the product of a straggling immigration, chiefly fromBarbados.Desperately attempting to wring profits from the wild land, they wereexperimenting with raising silkworms, cotton, flax, and rice while developing forestindustries and raising cattle.Their way of life, at the turn of the century, was primitive.Working in the semitropical climate side by side with their black and Indian slaves, theyshared at times a common undertaking as members of an interracial family unit, but itwas a unit that was explosive with half-controlled tensions, fears, and hostilities.Miscegenation was common-place; mulatto and mustee (mixed Negro and Indian)children were everywhere; and manumission was frequent-of mulatto children and ofblack and Indian women (not men).These were no tender, affectionate relationships.Thiswas a brutal, half-primitive world of bushwhacking frontiersmen, who can t bepersuaded, the Anglican missionary Francis Le Jau, reported in 1709, that Negroes andIndians are otherwise than beasts, and use them like such. So Mary Stafford, a youngwoman who, with her husband, had fled England for South Carolina to escape their debts,wrote in 1711 that there were good possibilities in the colony for those who could geta few slaves and can beat them well to make them work hard.[T]here is no living herewithout. 13It was in fact the South Carolinians toughness, their crudeness, and their fierceConquistador-like zest for profits that made possible their major source of gain.For theIndian trade was their Potosí, and it was an enterprise of ferocious, often bloody,exploitation.In the early 1700s there were at least 200 white traders working out ofCharles Town.They organized caravans of twenty or thirty pack horses which they led orsent not merely 145 miles inland to a central Indian transfer point near present-dayColumbia, South Carolina, but deep into southern Georgia to barter with whateverruthlessness was effective with the Creek tribes, and all the way across Georgia, acrossAlabama, and across Mississippi, on treks that took a year or more, to reach theChickasaw tribes on the Mississippi River.By 1700 an average of 54,000 deerskins werebeing exported annually to England from the still primitive settlements in southernCarolina cargoes worth a small fortune
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