to oversee restitution. He commanded both Indian and European troops in Carolina’s attack on the Spanish city of St. Augustine the same year. Nairne joined with thirty-three Yamasees in 1703 in an attack on Indians allied with the Spanish in southern Florida, making the first recorded trip into the Everglades by a European.15
Nairne gained his first colony-wide office soon afterward, winning election to an ill-fated legislature that failed to sit in 1705. He finally joined the Commons House in 1707, becoming one of its most active members. Although he worked on a range of significant measures, he was particularly important in establishing regulation of the colony’s Indian trade. He achieved that goal in July 1707 with a bill that created the position of agent. Presumably to foil the governor, the new law specifically named him to the new post.16
The role of agent was important. The legislators (and all thoughtful Carolinians) knew that the colony’s survival depended on good relationships with nearby Indians. Numbering fewer than 6,000 Europeans and Africans in 1700, the southernmost English settlement on the mainland faced dangers on all sides. To the north, where North Carolina (still not fully differentiated from South Carolina) technically bordered on Virginia, Native groups like the Tuscarora divided them from the older colony’s settlements. To the south, what would become the British colony of Georgia would not be settled for decades. Spanish Florida lay farther south. To the west were Indian country and a revived French claim in Louisiana. As Nairne noted to Sunderland from the jail cell, Carolina was “a frontier, both against The French and Spaniards.”17
The threat of these European powers was even greater because of a major European conflict. Queen Anne’s War, as it came to be called in America, had already been going on for a half dozen years when Nairne became agent in 1707. It would last a half dozen more, ending only two years before Nairne’s death. Carolina’s fears about France and Spain were not unrealistic. The two countries had staged a sea-borne invasion of the colony’s capital in 1706 that lasted four days before it was repulsed. Nairne made his westward journey two years later to prepare a counterstrike against the increasingly active French, a work halted soon after his return because of rumors they were planning another direct attack on the province.18
These military and imperial issues could not be separated from relations with the Native Americans that surrounded and far outnumbered Carolina residents. As Nairne pointed out in 1705, the colony dealt with more Indians than any other British colony in America, perhaps “almost as many as all other English Government put together.” Nairne’s 1715 census of “all the Indian Nations that are subject to the Governmt. of South Carolina and solely traded with them” makes these connections clear. Despite years of population decline, he found twenty-one distinct Native groups operated within Carolina’s sphere of influence, some 27,000 Native people.19 Nearly 1,100 of these lived “Mixed with the English Settlements,” almost exactly one Indian for every ten Europeans and Africans in those areas. Except for the Creeks and the Cherokees, both hundreds of miles away, the Indian population around Carolina consisted of smaller nations numbering in the hundreds rather than the thousands, increasing the difficulties of maintaining good relations with all.20
A “breach of friendship between the Indians and us” would be disastrous, the legislature declared in 1707, leading to “the dreadfull Effects of an Indian Warr.” As Nairne warned Sunderland the following year, the French could make things “Intollerably Troublesom” by building alliances with the Indians from Mobile to Carolina. The resulting difficulties would endanger even the British colonies to the north of Carolina. Nairne had sought a similar large-scale coalition to oppose the French. Even smaller partnerships seemed essential. Nairne reassured potential settlers in 1710 that Carolina’s Indian allies could defeat any potential European threat. Nine years earlier the colony had even given the Yamasee a cannon.21
The representatives’ choice of Nairne to represent the colony in this perilous situation testified to their confidence in his leadership abilities. Nairne was an energetic man of action who found parts of the 1708 trip so tame that he spent his days with the hunters seeking game. But he was also thoughtful and deeply inquisitive. His 1710 pamphlet carefully noted both how much more a Carolina blacksmith typically made per day than a bricklayer (one shilling, six pence) and how many female pigs a new farm needed (four). He showed similar care in his work with Native Americans. As he told Sunderland, he sought “to have a very minute account, of all people as well Europeans, as Salvages, from Virginia to the Mouth of the Mississippi,” mastering the fine distinctions separating Saraws from Catapaws, Apalatchees from Apalatchicolas, Congrees from Corsaboys.22
Nairne offered Carolina more than practical expertise. Although he possessed a military man’s desire to push ahead and to make a clear distinction between allies and enemies, he was also deeply idealistic, compelled to oppose injustice, especially the unfair treatment of Indians. These characteristics shaped Nairne’s views of Native societies and his responses to the Europeans who worked within them.
Although the purpose of his 1708 trip to the west was primarily diplomatic and military, Nairne seized the opportunity to learn more about Indian life. Despite his long working relationship with more eastern Indians, Nairne seems to have been surprised at what he saw—societies with weak governments and hierarchies but strong societies. Already tired of a governor he found selfish and authoritarian (and who would soon throw him into jail), Nairne found that his trip raised these issues in new settings.
“Nothing can be farther than absolute monarchy,” Nairne observed at the start of the first extant letter. The Native societies he had visited so far possessed only “the shadow of an Aristocracy”: “One can hardly perceive that they have a king at all.” Since the community punished violations only by disapproval, the “Chief” and his “councellers” “never venture to sent out any order but what they’re sure will be obeyed.”23
Leadership in such a setting offered few rewards. Village chiefs (their “micos”) received little preferential treatment, perhaps an elevated seat in the town house, community preparation of his cornfield, and the first deer and bear taken when the town hunted together. They were “honest men,” Nairne decided, seeking to set “a good Example” rather than burdening people “to maintain a needless grandure.” But even this modest position seemed dangerous to the Ochesees and Tallapoosas he first visited. Observing a leader receiving a Carolina commission shake with fear, he learned that local Indians believed that “men of power and authority” were liable to supernatural attack.24
Government was stronger among the Chickasaws, the next major nation he visited, but there too the power of the village leader had “dwindled away to nothing.” Nairne described that shift in terms recalling English history. Tellingly referring to a “king” rather than his previous term “chief,” he suggested that “the king[‘]s own mismangment [had] brought his Authhority to be Disregarded” because, like the deposed James II in England, he had acted contrary to the “constitutions of their Government.” Nairne makes this comparison even clearer by using English political language. He termed the Indians’ view “that the Duties of king and people are reciprocal” “whiggish.”25
Besides this constrained leadership, Nairne also discovered an extraordinary lack of social hierarchy. Villagers worked and played together “without any marks of Destinction,” wearing the same clothing, eating the same food, and living in the same houses. Such equality, Nairne judges, was virtually unimaginable to European theorists. Even the most “republican” writer “could never contrive” such a system. Only the radical John Lilburne, the leader of the mid-seventeenth-century Civil War’s Leveller movement, would have felt comfortable there. “If this be not Compleat levelling” he declares, “I don[‘]t know what is.”26
As Nairne knew, European political theory scorned societies without strong government or clear hierarchies. He believed that he had found something different. Rather than being hopelessly disordered, Native peoples built other
