beginning with a young child choosing the names to be called from a triple-locked box whose keys are held by three different people. Another child picks a smaller number from that group to serve when the court assembles. This “noble Law,” Nairne noted, prevented the “Ruin” of people who had incurred the “Malice or Displeasure” from a powerful official.47
Nairne’s confidence seems surprising from someone who had suffered so much from Carolina’s governor and legal system. But these earlier difficulties perhaps inform the pamphlet’s discussion. Despite his prolonged imprisonment Nairne had always remained certain he would prevail in court. Even though Johnson had made the law “a strange sort of Proteus capable of putting on all shapes and figures,” Nairne had sought not an end to the prosecution itself, but release on bail and assurance of a speedy trial. Even the governor, Nairne believed, knew conviction was impossible. He was certain that no Carolina jury would “hang a kitten” upon such evidence.48
Nairne’s account describes a society as healthy as its legal system. Carolinians were more “generous” than any other group, seldom showing any signs of “Moroseness and Sullenness of Temper.” Even though they had been persecuted in France, Huguenots were “belov’d by the English.” European servants were “treated with as much Gentleness as any where in the World.” Even orphans were generally taken in by the wealthy. Nairne attributed some of this compassion to Carolina’s ministers, who he praises for “refining those Dispositions that were otherwise rude and untractable”—in other words, making people more polished, complaisant, and polite.49
Nairne’s celebration of Carolina seems to have been sincere, not an attempt to impress his sponsors or his readers. He had displayed similar attitudes in letters from Indian country two years before. Both discussions were deeply concerned with the power of leaders and proper limits. Both celebrated social cohesion developed without coercive rulers and institutions. Nairne had preferred the more sociable Tallapoosas to the haughty Chickasaws—and he praised Carolina itself for the same good qualities, looking to the health of the society (or at least of its free people) more than to the power of its leaders. Such broader measures of politeness led him to recover his optimism even after both he and Carolina itself had suffered through Johnson’s “violent” rule.50
Nairne called Johnson arbitrary and violent. The governor’s opinion of Nairne was even worse. The 1708 treason charge capped a history of accusations that had begun five years before and grown more intense over time. The first evidence of these suspicions came when the governor dismissed Nairne’s request to provide religious instruction for Indians. Johnson next attempted to keep the future Indian agent out of the legislature. These disputes went beyond specific personal and political differences. They also drew on issues that had been part of British discussions about both politics and politeness. Many of these concern can be seen even in the first recorded interaction between the two.
The Reverend Samuel Thomas arrived in Carolina on Christmas day 1702 fully expecting to work with the Yamasee Indians. He had been sent by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, a new organization seeking to strengthen the Church of England by supporting ministers within the empire. Nairne, who had been the first to suggest the idea, invited the new minister to live with him.51
Unfortunately for Nairne’s plans, Thomas called upon the governor before going to Nairne’s house. The young man was received “with great Kindness” and “extraordinary respect and civility”—and warned that his plans were dangerously naïve. The governor considered living among the Yamasee hazardous. Thomas could be captured by “Spanish Indians” who might sell him into slavery or, worse yet, burn him alive. Even if he remained safe, he was unlikely to succeed since the Yamasee language was too “barbarous” to communicate the truths of Christianity. Thomas would be better advised to stay at the governor’s house near the Cooper River, serving as his chaplain and holding daily services in the household, while also ministering to the other planters in the colony’s wealthiest neighborhood.52
Despite Nairne’s assurances that he would be safe, Thomas chose to stay with the governor. The decision was not surprising. Johnson was one of the colony’s wealthiest men and certainly its most prominent. His household, Thomas noted, was “very large, with many servants and slaves,” in part because he had been accumulating large tracts of Carolina land even before settling there in 1689. Thomas must have been even more impressed by Johnson himself, a former member of Parliament who had been honored with a knighthood.53
Nairne, not surprisingly, was less pleased. The Society’s “good & charitable intentions,” he complained, had been “quite P[er]verted.” Thomas’s contention that he was working primarily with Africans (and thus fulfilling his plan to work with “Heathens”) was a laughable “untruth.” Even if it were accurate, the idea that the “People who have the best Estates in this Country” needed financial assistance to educate their slaves was “highly base & dishonorable.” Wealthy planters should pay for such instruction themselves rather than “Spunging upon the Society whose Charity ought rather to be employed to help them who are not otherwise able to help themselves.” With Thomas lured away from working among Indians, Nairne proposed a new plan for the same purpose to be paid for by shared sacrifices from the crown, the Proprietors, and Indian traders. Rather than simply replacing the waylaid Thomas, he recommended bringing in a half dozen ministers to live among the Indians.54
The incident reveals some characteristic differences between Johnson and Nairne. By bringing Thomas into his neighborhood, into his very household, the governor sought to strengthen both the older institutions of church and state, and traditional distributions of power. Nairne by contrast attempted to bring the marginal Yamasee literally into communion with white Carolinians, even with the staunchly Anglican governor. Nairne similarly emphasized elite responsibility to sacrifice for their community, the idea of “reciprocall” obligations he attributed to British Whigs and American Chickasaws. This goal of broader inclusion (although not without limits) was also central to the politics of politeness. Rather than seeking to discipline society strictly, it insisted that good order and authority could be strengthened by broadening the boundaries of concern.55
Figure 7. Sir Nathaniel Johnson, governor of South Carolina, wears both armor and lace, displaying his military role and social rank. The image was painted in 1705, the year before the French and Spanish invaded Charleston—and three years before he imprisoned his nemesis Thomas Nairne. Gibbes Museum of Art. © Image Gibbes Museum of Art/Carolina Art Association. Artist unknown.
Although there is no evidence that the dispute over the Thomas case became public, or even that Johnson or Nairne contacted each other directly, the governor clearly knew about the future Indian agent’s complaints—or at least his broader opposition to Johnson’s plans. A few months after Nairne proposed a plan for further missionaries, the two came into conflict over a very different issue, this time in Carolina’s late 1705 legislative elections. After Nairne was declared a winner, the governor (as he would in 1708) intervened with the legislature to oppose seating him. Johnson even threatened to punish the sheriff who certified the election. Nairne could not serve, Johnson argued, because a recent English law had made him ineligible.56
The governor’s argument was problematic. It was, first of all, wrong about the specifics of the law. Passed in February 1705 (allowing plenty of time for text to arrive in Carolina), the act declared that after December of that year Scots would be barred from receiving “any Benefit or Advantage of a Natural-born Subject of England.” But its first sentence explicitly excluded from these provisions Scots who were “now settled Inhabitants within the Kingdom of England, or the Dominions thereunto belonging,” a clause that clearly included Nairne.57 Johnson’s application of the law disregarded not only its specifics, but its intent. Whereas the governor used it to exclude Scots from
