Episode Details

South Carolina had won its battles and was still losing its war. Eight months after the Good Friday massacre, the colony was ringed, starving, and unable to finish a fight it could not afford to lose — and its survival came down to three hundred men marching into the mountains to ask an alliance of the Cherokee, a people who owed them nothing and had already killed Carolina’s soldiers once. This episode follows the war to its turn: Governor Craven’s militia on the open field at Salkehatchie; Colonel Maurice Moore and George Chicken in the most ancient town in the Cherokee country; the Creek envoys who came to argue the other way; and the killing at Tugaloo on January 27th, 1716 that broke the coalition and saved the colony — a decision made in a council where no Englishman was allowed to sit. It is the story of how the Yamasee War remade Carolina: the Indian slave trade dead, African slavery rising to replace it, the proprietors thrown off in 1719, and a kingmaker nation holding the balance of a continent.