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CHAPTER 2

The Treasons of Thomas Nairne

On June 24, 1708, South Carolina’s governor Nathaniel Johnson accused Captain Thomas Nairne of high treason. Nairne, the colony’s Indian agent, had just returned from a hazardous overland trip almost to the Mississippi River, seeking to head off French designs against the colony. The governor had begged him to undertake the journey, writing with the speaker of the legislature seven months before that they had “that Good Opinion of You to Prefer You to any other.” But the words (and certainly the sentiment) must have come from the speaker, for the relationship between Johnson and Nairne had long since broken down. Within weeks of the agent’s return, the governor decided Nairne was in league with the French. The arrest warrant charged him with endeavoring “to disinherit and Dethrone our Rightfull and Lawfull Sovereigne Lady Queen Ann, and to place in her Room the pretended Prince of Wales.”¹

Held without formal charges during the sweltering Charles Town summer (and freed from chains only by paying off his jailor), Nairne was released four months later only because he had won election to the colony’s legislature. Even then, however, the governor warned the Commons House about the accusation. Legislators first refused to seat Nairne and then took him into custody. After posting bail, Nairne fled to England. When he appeared before the Lords Proprietors, Carolina’s governing body, the members promoted rather than prosecuted him and encouraged him to write a tract extolling the colony. With his accuser Governor Johnson no longer in office and charges never formally filed, Nairne returned home in 1711 to resume his place as a legislator and (soon afterward) as the colony’s Indian agent.²

Nairne blamed the baseless treason accusation on the governor’s “hatred.” “This Countrey,” the Indian agent explained to a British official, has been “divided into two parties” since Johnson’s “reign” began three years before. Nairne himself belonged to the group opposed to the governor. As a legislator, Nairne had played a lead role in passing an Indian trading act over Johnson’s objections—before taking up the demanding post of agent it had created. Carolina’s ministers usually took Johnson’s side. But they shared Nairne’s frustration with the “unhappy divisions” of the colony’s public life. Carolinians, one clergyman wrote, were “miserably divided among themselves.”³

Carolina’s difficulties went beyond the disruptions caused by Governor Johnson. Six years after his removal in 1709, the Yamasee War threatened the colony’s very survival. Nairne, not surprisingly, participated in the conflict. Having gone to a village to hear Indian grievances in April 1715, he was taken in a surprise attack the next morning in the war’s first battle. He died after three days of excruciating torture.

Although Nairne never achieved, and perhaps never aspired to, the high positions held by Francis Nicholson, the Indian agent’s career may have been as extraordinary as the Virginia governor’s. Nairne worked with Native peoples almost his entire adult life, living (as contemporaries noted) “among the Indians” of southern Carolina, and traveling with them not only westward but south into the Everglades. As agent, he stood up to Carolinians who sought to exploit Natives. Nairne also participated in provincial politics, angering the governor because he both worked with Johnson’s enemies and broke with his fellow Anglicans to support their religious opponents. Nairne’s world, however, went even beyond Carolina and the southeastern part of the continent. He also saw himself as an active leader within the empire, seeking to extend British control over Florida and Louisiana, the centers of Spanish and French power in that part of the world. Undertaken in the middle of a major European war, his 1708 inland trip sought to build a Native coalition that could remove the French from their new settlement at Mobile.⁴

Each of these settings was deeply problematic. Connecting them—and an accused traitor—to the politics of politeness appears almost as challenging as navigating them in the first place. A man lying in a prison like “a dog in a hot hole,” or tied to a tree with lighted wooden splinters inserted in his body hardly seems a model of refinement.⁵ But Nairne himself applied a common set of concerns to each of these three seemingly distinct settings, an approach shaped by the emerging politics of politeness. His letters from Indian country in 1708 noted limited government and shocking levels of equality in each nation he visited. Two years later he celebrated the same characteristics in a pamphlet about Carolina itself. But Nairne did more than pay tribute to theories. He also worked to put them into practice by opposing not only the arbitrary French, but oppressive Carolinians as well. His fight against traders in Indian villages and the governor in Charles Town over their exploitation of Indians and religious minorities led directly to his time in prison.

Figure 5. The sections of this 1711 map of Carolina published in London portray the elements of Thomas Nairne’s world. The main map moves from Johnson’s plantation in the upper right down to Charles Town and then south to St. Helena’s Island, where Nairne lived. The upper left places Carolina within the southeastern part of the continent. A small map beneath shows St. Augustine, where Nairne had fought with Carolinians and Indians against the Spanish. A Compleat Description of the Province of Carolina in 3 Parts (London: Edward Crisp, 1711). Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

Nairne’s Carolina was dangerous—more hostile to politeness than Virginia under Nicholson only a few years before (Johnson’s tenure began two years before Nicholson’s removal). In both colonies, adherents of the Church of England claimed an important role in governing, opponents of the governor called for moderation, and rulers were accused (as Nairne not surprisingly said of Johnson) of acting “arbitrarily.” But Nicholson’s opponents successfully challenged his authoritarianism by using the ideals of politeness, values that also helped them lead an increasingly settled society. Carolina was more troubled, more diverse religiously, and more immersed in the ferocious divisions of contemporary English political culture. It was also more dependent on Native Americans both for military protection from hostile Spanish and French settlements and for the English colony’s brutal and destabilizing trade in Indian slaves.⁶

Not surprisingly, Nairne’s concerns were not precisely the same as those of Virginia gentry or London theorists. Caught in a world dominated by the powerful, Nairne not surprisingly spoke less often about building up elite authority. His work in Indian villages or his time in a Carolina jail cell furthermore did not allow fussy attention to elegant equipage. A life living among Native peoples, he wrote in 1705, was not well suited for “the nice delicate sort.”⁷

Rather than avoiding difficult situations, Nairne characteristically sought them out—and attempted to improve them. There is no occupation “more great and noble than that of a Soldier,” Nairne wrote two years after his imprisonment. He hastened to add, however, that this commendation applied only to the soldier who imitates “the Ancient Heroes,” who “makes it his Business to destroy Monsters, … and root out Oppression from the Face of the Earth.” It was an idealistic vision, one that he himself sought to fulfill. Even more extraordinarily, the values he attempted to defend were shaped less by ancient mythology or medieval chivalry than by the politics of politeness, by a vision of restrained power that sought social harmony not just among Carolinians but the Indian peoples that lived among and around them.⁸

Having come of age in the late seventeenth century, Nairne’s connection with polite ideas was perhaps not especially surprising. But his commitment to these values was extraordinary, an allegiance that spanned three distinctive settings—Indian country, Carolina politics, and the British empire—that each posed significant challenges to his ideals. Nairne’s willingness to pursue these goals within such hostile environments suggests that politeness was as important to him as it was to men and women who lived among what he called English “Delicacy.”⁹

Figure 6. Noted as the work of “Capt Tho. Nairn,” the upper part of the 1711 map of Carolina is almost certainly based on his 1708 map. It shows Carolina on the edge of an expanse of land controlled in part by the French and the Spanish, but primarily by the region’s numerous Indians. Nairne notes the number of warriors in each nation, as well as the more important paths among them, including the route he took on his 1708 trip. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

Indian Country

In 1708, Nairne wrote a letter to the British secretary of state, the earl of Sunderland, offering advice about empire and Indian affairs. Nairne did not know Sunderland, who had probably never even heard of the agent, but Nairne still wanted to ensure that the southeastern part of the continent would not be neglected in the coming peace negotiations with the French (negotiations that, despite rumors at the time, would not begin for several years). The lengthy letter emphasized the importance of the region and its Indians to British interests. An enclosed map detailed the numbers and locations of the peoples of the southeast part of the American mainland. Covering an area stretching from Carolina south to Spanish Florida and west to the new French settlement at Mobile, Nairne’s chart gave special attention to the many Indians who controlled the areas between these European settlements. Together the material offered the fullest account of the region’s human geography then available.¹⁰

Nairne’s letter was dated July 10, more than two weeks after he was imprisoned. Yet he gave no indication of his difficulties, describing himself not as a victim of oppression but as an “an Agent, and Intenerary Justice, among the Indians.” Careful attention to self-presentation was essential to Nairne’s activities. As agent he singlehandedly mediated endless disputes between traders and natives in Indian villages. On his westward journey a few months before, he had traveled across barely charted territories to the Great Village of the Choctaws, Carolina’s long-time foes. And a few months later, he traveled even farther to London, where, despite being a fugitive and an accused traitor, he earned the confidence of Carolina’s proprietors.¹¹

Nairne, however, was not a chameleon, simply fitting into his surroundings. He was also committed to encouraging the relationships recommended by the politics of politeness. Some of these ideals, he believed, were already at work in Native villages he had seen on his western trip, a view that only added to his outrage at European traders who took advantage of their power to treat Indians selfishly and arbitrarily.

After Nairne had been imprisoned for ten weeks with little prospect of release, more than sixty residents of his home county of Colleton petitioned the governor to grant bail. Nairne was no traitor, they argued. He had fought for the queen “with great bravery & zeal,” served in the legislature “faithfully,” and labored “with equall Currage and Diligence … among the Indians.” Keeping him from his work “for the Safety of the country,” they predicted, would lead to “many bad consequences.” The commendation (which petitioners assured the governor was shared by “the generallity” of the county) went beyond mere words. They also offered bond in the substantial sum of £10,000, several times the colony’s annual budget.¹²

As his neighbors noted, Nairne had by 1708 became an important figure in the colony. Formerly an active legislator, he had become North Carolina’s sole representative in Indian country. His expertise in dealing with Native peoples made him a significant figure in defending against attacks from both nearby Indian nations and more distant (but sometimes more troubling) European powers.

Though Nairne failed to mention his imprisonment to Sunderland, he truthfully represented himself as someone who worked “among the Indians.” He had already gained local reputation as a dependable figure in Indian affairs when he first appears in the legislative records (bearing the first of many subsequent misspellings of his name). In 1701 the legislature noted Nairne as the center of a local “allarum” system on the edge of Indian country. In the event of an attack, the watch-house guard on the Savannah River was to go first “to Cap’t Nearnes.” After warning a nearby settlement, the “2 white men & Six Indjans” were then to “return … and follow his ord’rs.”¹³

Nairne’s life before the creation of this plan remains obscure. Born in Scotland, he had arrived in Carolina by 1695, when he appeared as a witness to the will of a recently deceased Carolinian who had moved from London. Nairne soon afterward married the Scottish-born widow. The marriage suggests that he was an adult by that year—although perhaps not much beyond twenty-one since he was serving in the demanding role of Indian agent on his death two decades later.¹⁴

By the turn of the century, Nairne lived in Colleton County, the province’s most southern settlement, working among the Yamasee Indians who lived nearby. He accompanied a number of them to the legislature in 1702 so they could complain about “the abuses done to [them] by the Indjan Traders.” The legislators accepted the charge—and appointed Nairne 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 sorts of connections. Friendship became a formal institution, created and confirmed by a ritual that, like a wedding, included presents between families, an “entertainment,” and some characteristics of kinship. Time-constrained travelers could perform a more limited “Freind dance” that included exchanging weapons and clothing. These bonds, Nairne was surprised to find, could even be created between men and women.²⁷

Nairne’s interest in the connections that held together Native societies also led him to make the first extended European investigation of the clan system. These ties, he wrote, had “pu[zz]led” him at first. Despite being separated by different languages and “constant quarells,” Indians recognized kinship ties with people throughout the entire southeast, even in nations they otherwise considered enemies. These clans, Nairne noted, were not simply anthropological curiosities. Carolinian traders took Indian “mistresses” in the villages where they worked, not only to connect themselves with her family and the local community, but to make “relations in each Village, from Charles Town to the Missisipi.”²⁸

The clan system also shed light on contemporary European political discussions. The smaller Indian societies he visited, he argued, tested the argument that parental power was the foundation of monarchical authority. John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, published less than two decades before, had challenged this belief using logic, theory, and biblical example. Nairne’s discussion rested instead on Indian prohibitions against marrying inside one’s own clan. As a result, Nairne noted, even the smallest new society could not operate for long without bringing in members outside the authority of a single father. As another late seventeenth-century political theorist, Algernon Sidney, had argued of all legitimate governments, Indian polities required the “consent of a willing people.” Nairne’s speculation about the origin of this prohibition, however, extends his discussion further. He suggests it also meant to encourage respectful social ties, “a politick contrivance” not only to “keep peace” but “to encrease Freindship”—in short, an example of the politics of politeness.²⁹

Nairne displays these ideals even more clearly in a comparison among tribes he visited. The Chickasaw, he noted, looked and carried themselves better than the less-wealthy eastern nations of the Tallapoosas and Ochesses, much as British “men of Quality” differ from “peasants.” Yet Nairne did not consider the Chickasaws superior. Although outwardly more impressive, they were also so “arrogant” they could not “be[a]r the least affront.” Carolinians, he recommended, would need to make allowance for the “roughness of [the Chickasaws’] temper” until they could be made more “pliable.” Fortunately, their eastern neighbors were more “mannerly and Complaesant,” more “quiet and good Natured.”³⁰

Although Nairne admired Native societies, he was not uncritical. He noted that they lacked “religion, law or useful Arts.” Their government was “mean” and inadequate, especially because it lacked a mechanism for punishing crimes. The last seemed so significant that Nairne paid a subordinate leader to visit nearby villages and encourage them to impose “punishments.” Still, he argued, Indian governments were “much better than none at all.”³¹

In praising limited governments and social cohesion, Nairne was partly playing to his audience. His first letter was addressed to Thomas Smith, speaker of Carolina’s Commons House. Smith was a central leader of the Dissenters’ Party, a group that had allied itself with British Whigs (including Nairne’s jail-cell correspondent Sunderland) to oppose Governor Johnson’s authoritarian actions.³² Nairne’s account of “Whiggish” Indians may also have sought to build sympathy for Native Americans. But Nairne’s letters did not simply seek to curry favor from his colleagues—or to encourage them to support his Indian policies. Nairne did more than theorize about restrained power, sympathetic interaction, and good nature. As agent, he attempted to make them a reality.

In 1705, Nairne called on English leaders to sponsor a missionary among the Indians surrounding South Carolina. Such a person, he wrote, could gain their “fidelity & friendship,” allowing Carolinians to learn more about attitudes and events in Indian country. Indians themselves would gain greater “Ease and Satisfaction” by having “a good man live among them … who would be a Protector to represent their Grievances to.” Nairne recognized that this would be a challenging assignment. Besides being willing to take up the “hardship & Troubles” of living among the Indians, the missionary could not be allowed to profit from his position. He would instead need to be “disinterested from all the wrangles of Trade.”³³

Two years later, Nairne took up the task himself. Although the new post of Indian agent did not include religious responsibilities, it sought to fulfill the goals he had sketched out earlier. Although he too was barred from the Indian trade, Nairne threw himself into the role of “Protector,” displaying the missionary zeal he had expected from an English priest. The new agent worked so hard to restrain the attempts of European traders to take advantage of Indians that some came to see him as a traitor to his nation.

The position of agent that Nairne shaped first in the legislature and then in the field gave him legal oversight over the Carolinian middlemen who operated in Indian villages. These traders exchanged European goods for deerskins and slaves in transactions that formed the largest single part of Carolina’s economy. But, as Nairne recognized, this commerce also shaped the colony’s military and diplomatic ties. The region’s Native peoples, he explained in a 1708 letter, chose their allies in large part based on trade, generally aligning themselves with the European trading partners that “sell them the best pennyworths.” Though the French had offered substantial presents to gain the favor of the Chickasaw, he noted, the group had maintained their loyalties to Carolina because of its “much beter trade.”³⁴

Despite its importance, however, the Indian trade that contributed so much to Carolina’s economy and its security was not committed to the hands of self-denying missionaries or seasoned diplomats seeking the broader public good. Instead, the colony’s commerce was carried out by a somewhat less reassuring group of one or two hundred traders. These men, who generally worked for wealthy Charles Town merchants and planters, could be thoughtful and responsible. Thomas Welch advised the legislature on dealing with the French in 1707 and then accompanied Nairne on the outward-bound leg of his journey. He then headed even farther west to the nations along the Mississippi. But many traders richly deserved their reputation for disreputable behavior. As Nairne noted in 1708, their actions “hath been much and long complained of.” Traders defied Carolina’s authority, refusing to take out the licenses required by the trade reform act, pretending not to have seen governor’s orders when they were inconvenient, and even tearing up official notices after they were served.³⁵

Traders were no more respectful to Indians. Even though they lived in Native villages for much of the year, establishing themselves by taking an Indian mistress and thereby claiming membership in family, village, and clan, they often refused to accept community expectations. The Board of Commissioners established by the trade act heard numerous cases against traders, including such misdeeds as taking “a young Indian against her Will for his Wife” and attacking an Indian he suspected of involvement with his sexual partner. After John Frazer had been accused of attacking a town’s leader, another trader called in to testify noted that it was common knowledge that Frazier “was apt to beat and abuse the Indians.”³⁶

Traders also challenged the accepted standards of the slave trade. Customary Native practices such as the sorting of captives during the first several days after the return of a war party or the institution of a peace chief who discouraged fighting often seemed only barriers to further profits. Traders provided guns, ammunition, and encouragement for raids in return for a portion of the captives (and the right to sell the others). Less scrupulous traders even sponsored attacks on Carolina’s allies. The trader James Child arranged an attack on friendly Cherokee villages in 1706, an action that deeply troubled legislators and spurred the desire for reform. Nairne called Child’s actions “kidnapping.”³⁷

The office of agent created by the Indian Trade Act passed the next year responded to these concerns. His job, Nairne explained a year later, was to “do justice, among the traders and Indians, [and] to redress all abuses.” Nairne, not surprisingly, took these responsibilities seriously. He quickly arrested Child and intervened in a variety of other cases. Some traders grew so upset at these actions that they began to complain to the governor, even accusing the agent undermining the governor’s authority to Indians. Although Nairne’s statements probably involved explanations of the new system of legal oversight, which placed control of the trade under a Board of Commissioners rather than the governor, Johnson took the traders’ complaints seriously. He sent them to the legislature in fall 1707. Within a few months traders were willing to go even farther. They now swore that Nairne was disloyal not only to the governor but to the queen herself. By then, the agent seemed to be not a protector but a betrayer, a traitor.³⁸

Nairne, however, had few doubts about his actions, believing strongly that he was doing what was best for both Indians and Carolina. He gave little credit to these accusations, in part because he knew the character of his accusers, particularly the two who ended up extending the earlier complaints into more specific testimony in June 1708 that provided the pretext that spurred the governor into action. Nairne explained his lack of concern in a later letter to Sunderland. He wrote off one of the men as a “perfect Lunatick.” Nairne noted that he had jailed the other, John Dixon, a few years before, for bestiality, on the complaint of a trader who witnessed Dixon “Buggering a Brown Bitch.” Perhaps aware that the story might seem improbable, Nairne had his allies get a deposition from the witness (along with testimony from an innkeeper who had heard the offender explain how to have sex with a cat). Despite his conviction, Dixon continued to work in Native villages for years after Nairne’s own arrest—and continuing to challenge his authority even after he returned from England.³⁹

In contrast to the casual cruelty of many traders (to animals as well as humans), Nairne treated Native peoples with respect. The Board of Commissioners heard many complaints about traders, but almost none about Nairne. This was not simply the result of the agent’s official position. John Wright, who took over as agent after Nairne’s arrest, was willing to challenge traders in ways that Johnson, whose son-in-law was a major figure in the Indian trade, resisted. But Wright’s relationships soon became deeply problematic. After he was removed in favor of the returned Nairne in 1712, Wright began a seemingly endless series of complaints and suits against the board. His experiences with Indians were even more fraught. Like Nicholson in Virginia, Wright attempted to establish his authority through aggressive demands for obedience. He forced large numbers of Native Americans to wait on him and carry his effects when he traveled, seeking, he explained, to “make them Honour him as their Governor.” The leaders of a Yamasee village complained of Wright’s demands that they provide a lot for a house in its center, and even that residents cut the timber for him.⁴⁰ Even after he was removed as agent, Wright’s continued dealings with the nation proved troubled. He told a group of Yamasee, one their leaders noted later, that their men were “like women,” and that the Carolinians would capture them all “in one night,” kill their “head men,” and “take all the rest of them for Slaves.” The Yamasee were not the only Native people to resent this severity. Angered at their dealings with Wright, the Albama decided to ally themselves instead with the French.⁴¹

Nairne, by contrast, avoided such harshness. The commissioners eagerly sought his return to his position as agent as soon as he returned from England. Less than nine months after he arrived, he agreed to serve as a special commissioner for the Yamasee, perhaps because his seat in the legislature kept him from serving as general agent. Nairne took up the broader position by the end of the year. The relieved commissioners were glad to be rid of the troublesome Wright, but they also made it clear they were pleased to have Nairne back. They were “fully satisfied with your Capacity and Diligence,” they wrote, certain that that he lacked neither “Art nor Adress to manage” relations with the Indians.⁴²

Carolina

“Since my last,” Nairne wrote to Sunderland in July 1708, “my ffortunes have mett with a strange turn.” His previous message, with the map of Indian territory, had actually been sent from the same jail cell only two weeks earlier. His revelation of his plight was similarly studied. Having learned, he stated, that Sunderland was “an enemy to all illegall and unjust oppressions,” he had the confidence to “begg yr. Ldsp’s protection” from the “present Governor” of South Carolina. Ever since the beginning of Johnson’s “reign,” he explained, the province had been “divided,” with the governor’s party the “most violent.” Nairne had fallen prey to men who “often use their power to crush others.”⁴³

Nairne’s complaints about a governor ruling “arbitrarily” would have seemed much more familiar to Sunderland than the discussion of Indian affairs that followed. But Nairne believed his difficulties in both locations raised the same issues. His discussion of Carolina life, prepared a year after Johnson’s 1709 dismissal, highlights the same limited government and social harmony he had noted in Native communities. Nairne held that both Johnson and the Indian traders undermined these values by seeking their self-interest at the expense of the community’s health and safety. In Carolina as well as Indian country, Nairne believed, his opponents failed to treat less powerful people with respect and concern.

The disputes between Nairne and Johnson involved more than their personal differences. Nairne and Johnson, and the factions they belonged to in Carolina (and that they associated with in England), proposed different means of establishing the political stability so lacking in England and its empire. Even as the Indian agent sought to make broader connections, the more restrictive governor typically attempted to declare Nairne an alien and an unfaithful Anglican even before calling him a traitor. As a look at Sunderland’s relationship with these same issues reveals, the battles between Nairne and Johnson were fought on terrain also being contested in contemporary British politics.

A little less than two years after he feared dying in a jail cell, Nairne was considerably more optimistic. Having successfully moved to London (and with Johnson no longer in office), Nairne published a 1710 pamphlet encouraging people to move to Carolina. The author presented himself anonymously as a “Swiss Gentleman” who had emigrated and now led a “quiet peaceable life.” This new persona, however, did not signal new preoccupations. Nairne’s praise for Carolina’s government and society recall his earlier work in Indian country, his difficulties with the former governor, and the politics of politeness.⁴⁴

Freed from Johnson’s attacks, Nairne had personal reasons to feel satisfied. But he was also convinced that Carolina’s limited government and healthy society would be deeply appealing to continental Europeans. Nairne believed the Yamasee had been similarly drawn to the colony. They had left Spanish Florida, a minister who had talked with him reported in 1705, “to live under the mild Government of the English.”⁴⁵

Nairne ranges widely in the pamphlet, offering advice on costs and planting as well as careful estimates of the size of racial and religious groups, not surprising from a man who took censuses and made maps in his previous position as Indian agent. But Nairne also includes an extensive celebration of Carolina’s commitment to the restrained government and social harmony he had already previously observed in letters from Indian country. While continental European societies subjected their inhabitants to “the Caprice and absolute Pleasure of a[n] … Intendant,” he argued, Carolina was “founded upon the generous Principles of civil and religious Liberty.” Further legislation had helped secure those “valuable Privileges.” As a result, Carolina’s legal rules rather than the “arbitrary Decisions of the Governours and Judges” defined “the Measure and Bounds of Power.” Admittedly, “politick Diseases” and “Mismangements” could still develop. “But Liberty is so well and legally established” in Carolina that the people could “throw off” these difficulties “and restore the Publick to a State of Health.”⁴⁶

Nairne’s account paid particular attention to Carolina’s legal system. He admitted that collusion between a “bad Governour, Judge, and Attorney General” working with corrupt witnesses could “easily” create “frivilous,” “unjust,” or “illegal” prosecutions. But convictions, he pointed out, required similarly corrupt juries—and Carolina was well prepared to resist that possibility. Nairne lovingly details the colony’s complex rituals of jury selection, 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 power, English law sought to include them. England and Scotland had long been separate countries under a common sovereign, but Scotland had recently refused to ratify English plans to name a successor to Queen Anne if (as seemed likely) she remained childless. This resistance spurred attempts to maintain the tie between the two nations. Supported by the queen, the English government recommended a full political union, creating the 1705 Alien Act to push their northern neighbors to agree. After Scotland was committed to negotiations, the English government repealed the act’s punitive measures in December 1705 (probably too late to have been transmitted to Carolina before the formation of the legislature in early January 1706).⁵⁸

Johnson’s attempt to block Nairne’s rise is particularly telling because it followed patterns set in English politics. The 1707 Act of Union, creating Great Britain out of England and Scotland, was not universally popular. While Whigs largely supported it, their Tory political opponents were more skeptical, in part because they were too invested in preaching obedience to the monarch to find considering a distant German relative to succeed Anne fully acceptable. Some Tories continued to feel similar discomfort about the Glorious Revolution, even though it was by then a settled reality. Tories also disliked the prospect of bringing the non-Anglican Church of Scotland into the nation, a development less troubling for the Whigs, who relied on the support of Dissenters and Church of England moderates. The earl of Sunderland played an important role in each of these events. Not only was he a member of the powerful Whig “Junto” that led the party in these years, but he had served as one of the commissioners that negotiated the pact with Scotland and as the party’s manager when the House of Lords considered the resulting 1707 Act of Union.⁵⁹

Whereas Nairne turned to a Whig for help in 1708, Johnson owed his earlier elevation to the governorship to a Tory. John Grenville, a staunch supporter of the Church of England, had taken over as head of the Lords Proprietors in 1701. He joined the Privy Council the same year, appointed by the recently crowned Queen Anne in her quest to strengthen the previously out-of-favor Tories. Under Grenville’s leadership, the Proprietors made Johnson governor in 1702. The following year, Grenville received a peerage, making him a counterweight to the enthusiastic Whig, Sunderland. Johnson lost his position as governor only after Grenville stepped down.⁶⁰

Having dismissed Nairne’s concerns about Indians in 1702–1703 and labeled him an alien in 1706, Nathaniel Johnson soon came to see Nairne as even more dangerous. He was not simply someone who did not belong but someone who defied the obligation to belong, less an outsider than a traitor. Although it was not until mid–1708 that Johnson charged Nairne with being a false Briton, the governor and his allies had previously considered him an unfaithful Anglican. The two issues were closely related. Nairne’s letter to Sunderland suggests that his resistance to the governor’s deeply controversial religious policies was one of the central causes of the antagonism that culminated in the treason charge.

The intersection of religious loyalties and politics had been central to Nairne’s first election to the Commons House in 1705, a process that proved difficult at every stage. Even finding candidates to run in Nairne’s Colleton County had been problematic. Only a few residents were both eligible and willing. Even fewer voted. The only surviving account of the election notes that fourteen people appeared on the Colleton ballot and ten people went to the polls. These problems only grew worse when the Commons House met in January 1706. Eventually so few legislators agreed to take the oaths prescribed by recent laws that it became impossible for the assembly to meet. The governor dissolved the session and called new elections for the following month.⁶¹

Johnson’s attempt to exclude his opponent Nairne had been part of his attempt to strengthen the Church of England. He had taken the post, he told a minister in 1708, for religious reasons. Normally, the minister reported, Johnson “wou’d Scorn such a poor and precarious Government as this is, were not the Preservation & Establishmt of the Church a Consideration Superior to all others.”⁶²

This religious concern went beyond the personal attention and encouragement shown by his Virginia counterpart, Francis Nicholson. The Carolina governor also wanted to give the church and its members greater political power. He began by calling for extending religious restrictions. Officials in England had long been required to take the Anglican sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. These rules, however, had been so loosely enforced that less rigid Dissenters could meet the legal requirements simply by participating irregularly in the Anglican rite. Angered by the ruse, zealous Anglicans introduced the controversial Occasional Conformity Bill banning the practice in 1702, the year Johnson took up the governorship. Two years later, Johnson called for a similar measure in Carolina, pushing it through a lower house that had not yet fully assembled. Although the new law largely brought the colony only into line with older English practice, it applied to a very different setting. Attendance at the Anglican sacrament could be more easily monitored in Carolina, with its handful of churches. Even more important, unlike in England, church members were a minority in Carolina. Johnson’s measure, explicitly declaring its intent to keep “persons of different persuasions” out of the Commons House, at one stroke banned both a majority of voters and a substantial proportion of sitting assembly members from serving in the future. Later that year Johnson used the new power granted to Anglicans to pass a bill providing their church with tax support.⁶³