Browsing by Author "Johnson, Andrew Andrew"

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    Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of South Carolina, 1659–1739
    (2018-04-18) Johnson, Andrew Andrew; Sidbury, James; Goetz, Rebecca A.
    This dissertation argues for the importance of enslaved Native Americans in the history of early South Carolina. European colonists were forced to draw from captives originating in North America and Africa if they wanted to use enslaved labor since South Carolina was a site of slaving from two continents. Many colonists ended up a polyglot African/Native American population to coerce labor from in their economic pursuits. The gendered dynamics of the trans-Atlantic (more male) and Native American (more female) captive trades led to opportunities for marriage between enslaved people from both continents, whose offspring were called “Mustees.” By understanding the place of enslaved Native Americans—making up a full quarter of the enslaved population of South Carolina in the early eighteenth century—this dissertation argues for drastically different interpretations of the workings of the captive trades and the development of the colonial state, the social and spatial development of enslaved society, the development of plantation management, and finally the formation of a creole culture. I propose a transformative understanding of the entangled histories of the peoples who made up the enslaved population of early South Carolina and how they came together through circumstance to forge a new culture from their accumulated knowledge and experience by intertwining the histories of enslaved Native Americans and Africans. This dissertation is interdisciplinary in method, utilizing an ambitious approach with history, sociology, anthropology, and geography. Enslaved Native Americans have been erased from the broader histories of enslavement in the Americas and I am writing them back into the narrative, not as a first chapter, giving way to African slavery, but as important actors in their own right. My project therefore undercuts racist teleologies undergirding popular assumptions of both the inevitability of the disappearance of Native American peoples as well as chattel slavery in the Americas as being only the history of African peoples.