Tea Sets and Tyranny. Steven C. Bullock

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ