Every story begins with a place and a time. It might be once upon a time. It might be on the afternoon of October 14, 1066 in the English county of East Sussex, or it might be a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
In this class, the place will be South Carolina. What we now call South Carolina is roughly in the shape of a diamond, lying northwest of the Savannah River, and, in the northwest corner of the state, south of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and then, to the north it follows an artificial set of boundaries separating South Carolina from North Carolina. The eastern boundary of the state is provided by the Atlantic Ocean. The state is about 260 miles wide from east to west and 200 miles wide from north to south. That makes it a fairly small state (40th in size among the 50 states), with a current population of 5.5 million, most of whom seem to be trying to merge onto Interstate 20 from Interstate 26 at any given time.
The boundaries between Georgia (to the west) and North Carolina (to the north) are fairly recent in origin, dating to the early 1700s and reflect political deals struck in Great Britain more than any real differences between South Carolina and its neighbors.
This story begins long, long ago. Precisely how long, long ago is subject to some debate but somewhere around fifteen thousand years ago the continents we now call North and South America were uninhabited by people. The world was a very different place at the time. For one thing, it was a lot colder. Great sheets of ice, some several miles thick, covered much of North America and Europe. Elephant-like animals called mammoths and mastodons roamed in what is now South Carolina. But people had not yet appeared. At least they had probably not appeared. There is some evidence that people lived in the Carolinas and other places in North America, but not very many of them and it is not clear where they came from or what happened to them. They appear not to have been related to modern Native Americans.
Sometime around 15,000 years before the present (BP), the easternmost point of Asia and the westernmost post of North America were connected by dry land. Although glaciers covered much of what is now Alaska and Canada, there was enough land for nomadic hunters and gatherers from Asia to move into what we now think of as the Americas. They rather quickly and (in a matter of centuries), spread from Alaska in the north to the southernmost point of South America. Over the generations, these hunters and gatherers developed into a vast number of tribes and nations, speaking different languages, observing different religious rituals, and organizing themselves in many different ways. By the time Europeans showed up in the Americas after 1492, native people in the Americas numbered as many as a hundred million people.
Some native cultures like the Aztec and Maya of Central America and the Inca of Peru developed agriculture and built which allowed them to build cities and, in the case of the Aztec especially, conquer and enslave their neighbors. Others lived by fishing and hunting, and gathering the many edible products of the fields and forest. Most of the tribes who made their home in the Carolinas combined hunting, fishing and farming to various degrees.
Life in America before 1492 was very different than life in Europe and Asia in the same period. Among other differences, native Americans tended to be a lot healthier than Europeans. This was for several reasons. The small number of people who had crossed into the Americas has been relatively healthy and had not brought many diseases with them. Furthermore, native Americans lived in small communities. Any disease that developed could run its course in that small community where people either recovered or not, but the disease did not have a chance to spread much beyond the local community.
Europeans, Asians, and Africans, on the other hand, were much more interconnected and had been suffering from hundreds of diseases unknown in the Americas. Most of these diseases, from measles to the plague, were caused by either bacteria or viruses. Over the centuries, most people of the “Old World” had developed a degree of immunity to these diseases. This means that most people could get infected but still recover. Native Americans, whose ancestors had not developed immunities, got far sicker and were far more likely to die from diseases Europeans, Asians, and Africans would usually recover from.
Europeans had also learned to domesticate certain animals: dogs, cattle, sheep, goats, horses, and chickens, among others. Americans had domesticated turkeys, llamas and alpacas, and probably brought domesticated dogs with them from Asia when they first arrived. Beyond that, the Americas had not provided many animals that could be domesticated. The American bison were, and are, difficult to control and not likely to be persuaded to be put in a harness to plow a field. Llamas and alpacas (from South America), had been domesticated long before Europeans arrived, but were too small to carry the kinds of loads horses and donkeys carry, nor could they be persuaded to pull a plow or cart.
Horses, donkeys, and cattle were especially valuable in that they could carry loads and do other work. This, and a great many other random things (such as the existence of grasses like wheat, barley, and rye), allowed Europeans and Asians to produce a lot more food than they might have otherwise, and all of this extra food allowed Europeans, Africans and Asians to organize themselves into very large political and social groups which we think of as cities, kingdoms, and empires. These large scale political organizations, much more than guns, would allow Europeans to conquer the New World after 1492 in very short order.
But that will come later. Back to the Americas.
The people of the First Nations lived in North and South America for fifteen thousand years (more or less) before the first Europeans showed up and ruined the fun. In that time, they developed religious, political, and economic systems every bit as complex as those developed in other parts of the world. In North America—north of Mexico—about 250 different languages were spoken. Many were related, but some were (and are) as different as English and Chinese. Pre-Columbian America was a complicated and interesting place.
Native American cultures in North America had been developing and changing since the first people from Asia crossed the Bering Land Bridge into the vastness of the Americas. During that time, nomadic hunter-gatherer communities had created increasingly sophisticated methods for hunting, fishing, growing food, building homes, going to war, making peace, raising families, teaching children, communicating with the gods, and all of the countless other things people do.
And although many tribes shared things in common, each community was different. They had different languages, religious ideas, and ways of life. Some hunted almost exclusively. Others grew corn, squash, and beans along with pumpkins, tomatoes, potatoes, and gourds and hunted only occasionally. Many traded with other tribes, sometimes at great distances. Lifestyles depended a great deal on the landscape and climate in which the tribe found itself. The Indians of the Great Plaines lived in teepees which had the great advantage of requiring very little wood (just a dozen tall poles) which was (and remains) in short supply on the prairie grasslands of the American West.
Indians of the Southern Woodlands participated in what anthropologists call Mississippian Culture. These Indians usually lived in large, fortified villages, usually along a river. They engaged in agriculture and were organized into chiefdoms, which meant that several villages were led by a single chief. One of the most visible remnants of these Indian communities are the temple mounds that dot the landscape where their villages once stood.
When Europeans began exploring the Carolinas in the sixteenth century, they found the region to be home to many native tribes, each unique in language, culture, and political organization.
Not that too many Europeans were paying much attention, and the results of this first contact were disastrous for the Indians. European diseases swept through villages and communities, sometimes killing everyone. The first European explorers saw these native people as either enemies to be cleared out of the way or as potential servants to be exploited. There was also a lot of talk about converting the Indians to Christianity. Some of the missionaries from Spain and France cared deeply for the Indians with whom they lived, and fought hard to defend them against abuse and exploitation, but too often, religion served as a justification for exploitation.
“European” is a broad term, and until the twentieth century, few people thought of themselves as “Europeans.” Rather, if we asked an average sixteenth century villager in South Yorkshire (in the north of England) “What are you”” he or she would likely say (depending on when you asked). I am a yeoman (that is, a free man), or a serf (an unfree person), or a knight, or a monk or a nun. They would probably also say, “I am a subject of the king of England (or, during the reign of Mary or Elizabeth, the queen). They would also add, “I am a Catholic” (or a Protestant, or perhaps a Puritan, though no one would have used that word to describe themselves), or possibly, “I am a Jew.” On the other hand, they might not have said any of those things about religion since at various times, being of a religion different than the king could have very unpleasant results. But generally, people did not think of themselves as English or Scottish or Spanish, though if asked they would acknowledge that, indeed, they spoke English or Spanish or French or any of the scores of other languages still spoken in Europe and the dozens more that have been all but forgotten. We call these identities “nationalities.” While we take our national identities as fundamental to who we are, they are of fairly recent invention. It was not until the nineteenth century that a subject of the king of England would say of himself, “I am a Scot!” or “I am English.” In fact, a subject of Queen Elizabeth II might be Welsh, Manx, Cornish, Irish, or, for that matter, Pakistani.
The first Europeans to have an impact on the New World were the Spanish. This was mostly a matter of luck, since the Portuguese had been far more active in exploring the Atlantic than the Spanish. There are some suggestions that Portuguese fishermen may have been fishing off the Grand Banks of Canada well before Columbus (and like all good fishermen, kept the location secret). But, since the Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama had opened up a route to the riches of India and the Spice Islands in 1498, the Portuguese became less interested in the possibilities of trans-Atlantic colonization than in dominating the spice trade with India. The Portuguese and Spanish negotiated a set of treaties that gave the Spanish control of all of the lands in the Western Atlantic and the Portuguese control of the East. This is why Portuguese is the national language of Brazil while Spanish is spoken in most of the rest of Central and South America.
But Columbus, who was Italian, persuaded the Spanish monarchy to pay for his scheme to sail across the Atlantic in order to get to China, Japan, India, and the Spice Islands (We now call them the Maluka Islands of Indonesia). In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they were the only source of nutmeg in the world. Since Europe was a fairly tasteless place in the late middle ages, a shipload of nutmeg from the Spice Islands or peppercorn from India could make a trader fabulously rich. By claiming almost all of the New World, the Spanish monarchs and the daring explorers who sailed to America on their behalf, also hoped to become fabulously rich.
Although the Spanish laid claim to all of the Americas except Brazil, the French, Dutch, and English tended to ignore such claims. America was a big place, after all and except for the coastline, no one (no one who was not an Indian at any rate) had much idea at all what was to be found very far inland.
The trouble with claiming land in America in this era was that no one respected such claims unless they could be defended. That would lead to a failed attempt to settle the land in what is now South Carolina. In 1562, a group of French Huguenots (that is to say, French Protestants who suffered religious persecution in France) established a settlement they called Charlesfort on what is now Parris Island. By establishing a settlement, they were claiming the land for the French king even though it was already claimed by the Spanish.
The story of Charlesfort was unhappy and brief. The settlement consisted of only 28 men who hoped to be reinforced when their leader, Captain Jean Ribault, returned. Alas, he was arrested on his return to France and the settlers rebelled against the harsh discipline of their local commander, Captain Albert de Pierria. Pierre was killed and all but one of the settlers decided to build their own boat and set sail across the Atlantic for home. It was not a good trip. Without enough supplies, the men were reduced to cannibalism before they were rescued by an English ship. It might have been more convenient had the French and English been on better terms. They weren’t and it took even longer for the survivors of Charlesfort to get home to France.
The one Frenchman who remained—we don’t know his name—decided to make his home with a local Indian tribe. This was not at all uncommon. Spaniards and other Europeans often found that they liked the lifestyles of the native people. But things went badly for him too. Shortly after the French left for home, a Spanish force showed up to destroy the French fort and restate Spain’s claim to the region. The Frenchman living with the Indians was taken captive and brought as a prisoner back to Cuba. We have no idea what happened to him after that but it is unlikely that he lived happily ever after.
In 1566, the Spanish built another fort on top of the ruins of Charlesfort and established a town at the same location. They called the town Santa Elena. The town and the various forts that protected Santa Elena were abandoned a couple of times, rebuilt, and finally abandoned for good in 1587. By that time, the English were beginning to show an interest in the New World lands north of what the Spanish claimed as La Florida and south of the region the French were claiming in what would become Canada.
The settlement of America was determined by many things. It was a reflection of European politics and economics. Men (mostly men, at first) left Spain, France, or Britain to come to America because there seemed to be more opportunities to become rich, more freedom, and more land to claim for their own.
These earliest explorers and settlers did not come looking for freedom of religion for the most part. Spanish explorers were accompanied by Catholic priests who tried, with varying degrees of commitment, to convert the natives to the Christian faith. Religious tolerance was not valued highly among medieval Catholics (or Protestants for that matter). The Indians of the New World were pagans in the eyes of these European Christians. Unless they could be convinced to accept baptism, they would burn eternally in hell. Persuading them, sometimes forcefully, to convert to Christianity would, Christians felt, benefit their lost souls eternally.
That was the official line.
The Indians did not see things that way. Native American religions were diverse, but in general the focus was not on belief but on maintaining good relationships among people and between people and the natural world and people and the gods. Many Indians eventually accepted Roman Catholic baptism, while retaining the essential beliefs and stories of their ancestors.
From the Indian’s perspective, the first contact with Europeans was completely unexpected, akin to our having a space ship full of fantastic aliens with unimaginable powers landing in the school parking lot. Are they enemies? Friends? Are they dangerous? Should we kill the whole lot of them or invite them to lunch? Is there any way we can benefit from being the first to make their acquaintance or should we encourage them to move on. (Mars is very nice! You should visit Mars, or if not there, then how about Las Vegas?)
Most of the coastal tribes who first made contact with Europeans quickly discovered that these strange people had some very cool toys and even better tools and were willing to swap them for things the Indians had in abundance. Europeans brought knives made of steel, pots made of iron and copper, glass beads, rum, and cloth made of wool.
The Indians wanted these wonderful things (as much as we would want the unexpected wonders from an alien spaceship). Some tribes in Mexico and Central America had gold and silver trinkets that made the Spaniards eyes glow with greed but that the Indians used to make toys for their children. Value is always a matter of perspective, after all.
But mostly, the Indians had land that the Spanish (and French and English and Portuguese and Dutch) wanted. The land could grow crops unknown in Europe—Sugar and tobacco became the major cash crops—and in some exceedingly unfortunate regions of Mexico and South America, the ground produced gold and silver. Agriculture and mining both demanded lots of labor. Those Indians who survived small pox and measles, were often condemned to laboring on land once their own in order to produce wealth for Europe’s economy.
North America has very little gold, and although early explorers of North America spent years looking for gold deposits that local Indians promised them were “Not here, but over there in the land of my enemies. Go look for gold there and leave us alone.”
Flakes of gold are indeed scattered in the creeks and streams of North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, mostly in the mountains. But the first discovery of gold in North America took place In 1799, when the son of a former Hessian soldier who had decided to stay in America after the Revolution, found a yellow rock in a creek on the family farm. John Reed, the farmer, thought it a harmless oddity and used the 17 pound rock as a door stop. After three years of such undignified service, the rock was sold to a jeweler in Fayetteville, North Carolina for the gratifying sum of $3.50. It was just a rock, after all. Reed did okay for himself. When he discovered that he had given away a fortune for the price of a new suit, he got busy. With most of his neighbors, he started looking for gold in the creeks and streams on his land and, finding a fair amount, became a very wealthy man. A gold mine was eventually established on his farm which you can still visit and, if you feel lucky, pan for gold.
The point here, of course, is that the little gold to be found in North America would not be discovered until long after the Spanish had given up on the whole continent and given it over to the French and English to fight over.
In the meantime, the early explorers of North America were looking for, and not finding, gold.This was frustrating, but these early explorers were determined to make their fortunes one way or another.
Hernando De Soto had made a reputation and a fortune as a conquistador in Mexico and South America, and in 1539 moved his small army (about 500 soldiers) from what is now Tampa Bay, Florida toward the north. The army of explorers traveled through Florida and Georgia and, in 1540 crossed the Savannah River into South Carolina. Moving east, he encountered the Indian town of Cofitachequi which was built near the modern city of Camden, South Carolina.
De Soto’s methods were brutal. Although his small army was vastly outnumbered by the many tribes he encountered, most of the villages he came to were small. With his army, primitive firearms, steel swords, and horses, he could over-awe many opponents who wanted to block his way forward. De Soto demanded slaves from local chiefs. He used these slaves to carry supplies for his army. He also depended on Indians to serve as guides through the forest and as translators who could speak the languages of neighboring peoples. One of these Indians, a young man named Perico proved himself to be remarkably gifted at learning other languages and traveled with De Soto’s army throughout much of the South.
De Soto’s goal was straightforward. His small army could not conquer so vast a land as “La Florida” (by which he meant all of North America), but it could explore and lay claim to the land and people of the region as a way of warning other European powers to stay away.
Spaniards of the Sixteenth Century were no more immoral, greedy, or bloodthirsty than any other people, and they did not generally look at what they were doing as wrong. But they did see things very differently than we do, and practices we might find horrifying and impossible to explain, they took for granted as normal practice.
It was generally accepted that all the lands of the earth belonged to God, and that God was represented on earth by Christian monarchs—the kings and queens of Europe. This meant as well that non-Christians had no claim to the land on which they lived that need be respected by Christian rulers. This left Christian rulers free to lay claim to whatever territory they could conquer, as long as it was not under the rule of a Christian sovereign. That is why Columbus felt free to plant the banner of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain in the New World he had rather accidentally discovered. We all know that Columbus did not “really” discover America and that he thought he was somewhere off the coast of Japan or China. But because these territories were governed by non-Christian monarchs, he felt free to lay claim to them. Had he really been on Chinese or Japanese territory, his claims would have been meaningless, since the emperors of those territories had the power to brush such absurd claims aside. As it was, the Taino Indians of the Caribbean, while initially puzzled by the strange behavior of these blonde and bearded people in really big canoes, soon found that the freedoms they had enjoyed on their island paradises were vanishing before their eyes. Worse, the good health they had enjoyed disappeared as well, as European diseases began to destroy their lives as well as their communities. By 1520, ninety percent of the native people of the Caribbean had died of disease. The remnant were enslaved. Most intermarried with Europeans and Africans, leaving but a shadow of the world that once had existed there. Today, descendants of the Taino, Carib, and other Caribbean tribes are scattered throughout Puerto Rico, Cuba and other parts of Latin America. A few maintain their Native American identities and traditions, but doing so is difficult, especially in the island nations of the Caribbean where African and European traditions dominate.
De Soto’s plan was simple enough. He would take a company of five hundred Spanish soldiers, along with horses and pigs (to provide the occasional barbecue dinner) north through Florida into the unknown country that De Soto hoped would hold gold and silver and treasures unimagined.
It is hard for modern Americans to imagine the courage this would have taken on the part of De Soto and his army of explorers. Though no Europeans had ever walked there before, De Soto was not traveling through unbroken wilderness. For the most part, his army passed over well-worn footpaths that had been used by generations of Indians to travel between towns. De Soto had heard stories from the Indians of a fabulously wealthy town to the north called Cofitachequi. The female chief appears to have ruled a large area of central South Carolina and there were rumors that she received tribute from her many subjects in gold coin. The Spanish had heard of this town from the young man they were using as their native guide, Perico. He appears to have been from Cofitachequi, and promised to take the Spanish there.
In the 21st century, a trip from Tampa Bay, Florida to Camden, South Carolina (the site of the town of Cofitachequi) requires a day of driving on the interstates with occasional stops for fast food and restrooms. In the sixteenth century, a trip like that was difficult and dangerous and would require months of slogging through swampland and dense forest, and because the Spanish had already gotten a reputation for capturing people as slaves and for taking whatever corn or other supplies they wanted from local Indian villages, they faced opposition—and occasional attack—at every step.
After months of travel, De Soto’s small force arrived in Cofitachequi where they were introduced to a woman whom they referred to as the Lady of Cofitachequi. She was either the chief or a niece of the chief, and she showed the Spanish great hospitality. She had no gold, but she agreed to give the Spanish what treasures she did have, freshwater pearls and sparkling sheets of mica.
The mica was useless to the Spanish, but they helped themselves to hundreds of pounds of pearls, including those used to cover the bodies of the dead, and headed north looking for more treasure. Because they had also eaten most of the corn the people of Cofitachequi had been saving for the winter, De Soto thought it prudent to take a hostage with him. He took the Lady of Cofitachequi and some of her servants and left town for the northwest. The Lady was eager to get these Spaniards away from her own people, so she told them of treasures to be had to the west and managed to lead them into the high mountains of the Blue Ridge before excusing herself one evening (along with one of her maids), to go into a thicket to relieve herself. She and the maid took off running, escaped the Spanish and made their way home. De Soto continued looking for treasure and in the process explored much of the American Southeast as far west as Texas. De Soto himself never made it home. He died of a fever in Arkansas or Louisiana and was quietly buried (or perhaps his body was weighted down and pushed into the Mississippi River).
Although many European monarchs and their subjects were interested in making their fortunes in the New World, the three kingdoms that would have the greatest influence there were the Spanish, French, and English. Their strategies and goals differed somewhat, as did their cultures. In general, the Spanish, who had the great advantage of having arrived in the New World first, came initially looking for gold and silver, which they found in great abundance in Mexico. Laying claim to the entire New World, they wanted to, in no particular order, convert the Indians to Christianity, and become fabulously wealthy by bringing shiploads of gold and silver home to Spain (or sending it the rest of the way around the world to the Philippines where it was exchanged for spices, silks and other treasures from East Asia). Except for the Portuguese claim to Brazil, the Spanish dominated the New World from Florida and the American Southwest to the far end of South America. For awhile, the kings of Spain were the richest and most powerful in the world. But nothing lasts forever.
The French wanted in on the New World, but could not hope to compete with the Spanish in Mexico and Central America. They focused their attention to the northern parts of the continent in what we think of as Canada and laid claim as well to the lands drained by the Missouri River (what would eventually become known as the Louisiana Purchase). New Orleans became one of the greatest French speaking cities in North America and allowed the French to control access to the Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri Rivers—a huge swath of North America.
The French brought farmers to the New World, but most of France’s interest was in trading with the Indians. North America might not have had much gold or silver, but the landscape was rich with beaver, mink, fox, martin, bear and other fur bearing animals whose coats could meet the growing European demand for luxury goods. French traders were happy to exchange guns, rum, and other European goods for furs. The Indian tribes were more than happy to push farther and farther into the forest, killing far more animals than they had ever killed before. Before long, animals once common along the east coast of North America were becoming scarce there, and tribes that had co-existed for centuries began to fight for control of the increasingly scarce resources.
The English were happy to trade with the Indians and did not object too much to enslaving Native Americans to do the farm labor. But by and large, the English came to America to farm, to settle as families, to build towns and lives for themselves and their posterity. Some were hoping for religious freedom for themselves, and some wanted to get rich in America and return home to England to enjoy their wealth, but the vast majority of settlers in what became “British America” came to stay.
Ironically, English settlers proved far more disastrous to Native American culture than did Spaniards or the French. The Spanish needed Indian labor. The French needed Indian trading partners. The English needed the Indians not at all and simply wanted them to move out of the way.
Conflict between Native People and settlers was inevitable as long as both wanted to live on the same land. The Indians lost these conflicts for several reasons. In the first generation after contact, Indians were extremely vulnerable to European and African diseases. After the Great Dying, however, the survivors were able to pass on their resistance to the next generation and the generations after that.
Europeans had also developed tools that gave them an enormous advantage over the Indians. This was a fairly recent event. When the Vikings showed up in the New World eight hundred years earlier, they had no real technical advantages over the Indians. Both fought with and worked with essentially the same equipment. As a result, the vastly outnumbered Vikings realized that settlements in the New World were impossible in the face of Native opposition, so they left.
But in the meantime, Europeans had invented or borrowed from the Chinese, technologies that would give them a big advantage. These included the ability to make steel, without which firearms would have been impossible. Steel (which is made of iron and carbon) also made for better farming tools, knives, pots and pans.
Indians throughout the Americas made most of their tools from stone, especially flint and obsidian which can be made extremely sharp but has a tendency to break (where steel simply bends). Many tribes produced beautiful and effective clay pots, but lacked the technology to make metal pots. The big advantage of metal pottery is that, while clay pots cannot be put directly over a fire to cook something, metal pots can. Not surprisingly, iron and copper pots and kettles became valuable trade items when Europeans introduced them.
KEY IDEAS:
The native people of North America had developed many complex cultures. Some lived by hunting and gathering, others primarily by farming, and some by a combination of both. Most native people lived in small villages, though some were nomadic. Most were governed by tribal chiefs.
The French, Spanish, and English were all interested in staking a claim to land in the New World While these European kingdoms shared many goals in common, the English were most interested in farming. Their relations with the native people of North America were often hostile, the primary conflict being over control over land that both groups wanted.