Carolina fought back, somewhat ineffectively at first, and remained in a weakened state when Catawbas and others attacked the colony from the north later that spring. Yamasees and their allies achieved nearly complete surprise on Easter Weekend 1715, killing traders in their towns and attacking outlying English plantations, ostensibly as payback for unscrupulous trading practices. Then he sets the pieces in motion and the lengthy conflict comes into sharp focus. Ivers attempts to accomplish something that none of these other texts have, namely, a blow-by-blow account of the campaigns of the war, and in this task, the work succeeds admirably.Īfter a brief introduction and a chapter that deals with the days or warnings and rumors immediately prior to the outbreak of the war, Ivers pauses the narrative to explain, in parallel fashion, how South Carolina and the Native Southeast had developed in the years prior to the war. The field of Yamasee War studies flowered with the publication of Steven J. Oatis's A Colonial Complex : South Carolina's Frontiers in the Era of the Yamasee War, 1680-1730 and William L. Ramsey's The Yamasee War : A Study of Culture, Economy and Conflict in the Colonial South, which appeared in 20 respectively. Larry E. Ivers's This Torrent of Indians joins a short, but growing, stack: Alan Gallay's Bancroft Prize-winning The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 (2003) features a chapter on the war, and it plays a prominent role in Steven Hahn's Invention of the Creek Nation, 1670-1763 (2004).

Milling's 1940 Red Carolinians, or even the 1969 reprint, can there possibly be?), the Yamasee War has garnered renewed scholarly attention in the early twenty-first century. Reviewed by Matthew Jennings (Middle Georgia State University, Macon)Īfter languishing in near obscurity for decades (how many copies of Columbia physician Chapman J. This Torrent of Indians: War on the Southern Frontier, 1715-1728.Ĭolumbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2016.

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