Episode Details

South Carolina in 1715 was not a colony of farms — it was a trading firm with a coastline, running the largest deerskin and Indian-slave operation in English America through a web of rough men who lived alone in the native towns. Its closest ally, the Yamasee, had been its sharpest slaving partner for a generation — until the deer thinned, the captives ran out, and the debt came due, collectable under the trade’s own logic in the bodies of their own people. This episode follows the engine to the morning it turned: the six Carolinians who walked into the Yamasee town of Pocotaligo on the eve of Good Friday to calm things down and went to sleep; the dawn that killed them, including Thomas Nairne, the Indian agent who understood the trade better than any man alive and was tortured to death by it; and the coordinated rising that cut down nine in ten of the colony’s traders and drove South Carolina to the edge of extinction. It is the story of a reckoning both sides had earned — and of a colony, ringed and outnumbered, waiting to learn which way the great inland nations would turn.