Episode Details

Before Carolina grew rich on rice, it grew rich on a commodity pulled out of the southern interior: people. Deerskins were the steady business, but slaves were where the money was — and the colony had something its neighbors did not, a short sea road to the Caribbean sugar islands that would buy human beings in any number. This episode follows the Indian slave trade as a market: how Carolina’s bottomless demand turned slaving from a limited business into the most profitable enterprise in the region, and lifted a displaced people called the Wes-to into the dominant power of the coast — before the same market destroyed them in a trade war among the English over who would profit.

It is the story of how that trade worked, of the raids that took apart a century of Spanish missions town by town, of the winter of 1704 when a former governor named James Moore reported the destruction of the A-pa-la-chee to his proprietors as a campaign that turned a profit without a penny of public cost — and of where the tens of thousands of captives went, and what their sale and their labor built. Between thirty and fifty thousand Native Americans were sold out through Charleston in fifty years. By 1708 a quarter of the colony’s slaves were Indian. This is the trade that made Carolina, and then helped pay for the African slavery that replaced it.