On April 15, 1715, which was Good Friday, the Yamasee and their allies rose against South Carolina. It is the most dangerous year the colony ever had, and it set the terms of everything that followed in the Lowcountry, including the Dorchester County this series is set in.
Why it started
Deer had become scarce, and Yamasee debts to colonial traders kept growing. Planters wanted Yamasee land for rice. Trader abuses and the Indian slave trade added pressure. By one account the colony had taken as many as 50,000 Native people into slavery before 1715.
The sequence
April 14, 1715: A South Carolina delegation at Pocotaligo was attacked in the night. April 15: The war began, killing the colonial agents Nairne, Wright, Warner and Bray, and Yamasee war parties struck Port Royal and St. Bartholomew’s Parish. Colonists fled to Charles Town, where food ran short. In June a settlement at Goose Creek, the neighborhood of today’s Summerville and Ladson, was largely abandoned after an ambush.
The tide turned that summer. Governor Craven’s militia won at Salkehatchie, and the Battle of the Ponds on June 13 pushed the Catawba toward peace. In early 1716 the Cherokee allied with the colony. The last Native fighters withdrew in 1717, and treaties followed that year.
The Cusabo and Etiwan in the middle
The Lowcountry peoples were split. In spring 1715 the Etiwan sided with South Carolina and helped defend Port Royal. By July they had switched and joined the war against the colonists. Other Cusabo fought for the colony. When the war ended, survivors scattered, many joining the Catawba or the Muscogee.
What it changed
The Yamasee lost about a quarter of their population in the first year. The war accelerated South Carolina’s turn from Indian slavery to African slavery: households holding Native slaves fell from 26 percent in 1714 to 2 percent in 1730. It pushed the colony from proprietary rule toward crown control, completed in 1729. It also opened the way for Georgia, because the Yamasee were gone from the Savannah River. The county that grew up inland, with its churches, camp meetings and plantations, was built on the settled land of this war.
A note on scope: the sources reviewed for this page do not describe fighting inside present-day Dorchester County itself, so this page does not claim any. Old Dorchester, the colonial town on the Ashley, existed by this date and sat in the war’s region.
Sources: Yamasee War (Wikipedia); Cusabo (Wikipedia); Ittiwan people (Wikipedia).