first refused to seat Nairne and then took him into custody. After posting bail, Nairne fled to England. When he appeared before the Lords Proprietors, Carolina’s governing body, the members promoted rather than prosecuted him and encouraged him to write a tract extolling the colony. With his accuser Governor Johnson no longer in office and charges never formally filed, Nairne returned home in 1711 to resume his place as a legislator and (soon afterward) as the colony’s Indian agent.2
Nairne blamed the baseless treason accusation on the governor’s “hatred.” “This Countrey,” the Indian agent explained to a British official, has been “divided into two parties” since Johnson’s “reign” began three years before. Nairne himself belonged to the group opposed to the governor. As a legislator, Nairne had played a lead role in passing an Indian trading act over Johnson’s objections—before taking up the demanding post of agent it had created. Carolina’s ministers usually took Johnson’s side. But they shared Nairne’s frustration with the “unhappy divisions” of the colony’s public life. Carolinians, one clergyman wrote, were “miserably divided among themselves.”3
Carolina’s difficulties went beyond the disruptions caused by Governor Johnson. Six years after his removal in 1709, the Yamasee War threatened the colony’s very survival. Nairne, not surprisingly, participated in the conflict. Having gone to a village to hear Indian grievances in April 1715, he was taken in a surprise attack the next morning in the war’s first battle. He died after three days of excruciating torture.
Although Nairne never achieved, and perhaps never aspired to, the high positions held by Francis Nicholson, the Indian agent’s career may have been as extraordinary as the Virginia governor’s. Nairne worked with Native peoples almost his entire adult life, living (as contemporaries noted) “among the Indians” of southern Carolina, and traveling with them not only westward but south into the Everglades. As agent, he stood up to Carolinians who sought to exploit Natives. Nairne also participated in provincial politics, angering the governor because he both worked with Johnson’s enemies and broke with his fellow Anglicans to support their religious opponents. Nairne’s world, however, went even beyond Carolina and the southeastern part of the continent. He also saw himself as an active leader within the empire, seeking to extend British control over Florida and Louisiana, the centers of Spanish and French power in that part of the world. Undertaken in the middle of a major European war, his 1708 inland trip sought to build a Native coalition that could remove the French from their new settlement at Mobile.4
Each of these settings was deeply problematic. Connecting them—and an accused traitor—to the politics of politeness appears almost as challenging as navigating them in the first place. A man lying in a prison like “a dog in a hot hole,” or tied to a tree with lighted wooden splinters inserted in his body hardly seems a model of refinement.5 But Nairne himself applied a common set of concerns to each of these three seemingly distinct settings, an approach shaped by the emerging politics of politeness. His letters from Indian country in 1708 noted limited government and shocking levels of equality in each nation he visited. Two years later he celebrated the same characteristics in a pamphlet about Carolina itself. But Nairne did more than pay tribute to theories. He also worked to put them into practice by opposing not only the arbitrary French, but oppressive Carolinians as well. His fight against traders in Indian villages and the governor in Charles Town over their exploitation of Indians and religious minorities led directly to his time in prison.
Figure 5. The sections of this 1711 map of Carolina published in London portray the elements of Thomas Nairne’s world. The main map moves from Johnson’s plantation in the upper right down to Charles Town and then south to St. Helena’s Island, where Nairne lived. The upper left places Carolina within the southeastern part of the continent. A small map beneath shows St. Augustine, where Nairne had fought with Carolinians and Indians against the Spanish. A Compleat Description of the Province of Carolina in 3 Parts (London: Edward Crisp, 1711). Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
Nairne’s Carolina was dangerous—more hostile to politeness than Virginia under Nicholson only a few years before (Johnson’s tenure began two years before Nicholson’s removal). In both colonies, adherents of the Church of England claimed an important role in governing, opponents of the governor called for moderation, and rulers were accused (as Nairne not surprisingly said of Johnson) of acting “arbitrarily.” But Nicholson’s opponents successfully challenged his authoritarianism by using the ideals of politeness, values that also helped them lead an increasingly settled society. Carolina was more troubled, more diverse religiously, and more immersed in the ferocious divisions of contemporary English political culture. It was also more dependent on Native Americans both for military protection from hostile Spanish and French settlements and for the English colony’s brutal and destabilizing trade in Indian slaves.6
Not surprisingly, Nairne’s concerns were not precisely the same as those of Virginia gentry or London theorists. Caught in a world dominated by the powerful, Nairne not surprisingly spoke less often about building up elite authority. His work in Indian villages or his time in a Carolina jail cell furthermore did not allow fussy attention to elegant equipage. A life living among Native peoples, he wrote in 1705, was not well suited for “the nice delicate sort.”7
Rather than avoiding difficult situations, Nairne characteristically sought them out—and attempted to improve them. There is no occupation “more great and noble than that of a Soldier,” Nairne wrote two years after his imprisonment. He hastened to add, however, that this commendation applied only to the soldier who imitates “the Ancient Heroes,” who “makes it his Business to destroy Monsters, … and root out Oppression from the Face of the Earth.” It was an idealistic vision, one that he himself sought to fulfill. Even more extraordinarily, the values he attempted to defend were shaped less by ancient mythology or medieval chivalry than by the politics of politeness, by a vision of restrained power that sought social harmony not just among Carolinians but the Indian peoples that lived among and around them.8
Having come of age in the late seventeenth century, Nairne’s connection with polite ideas was perhaps not especially surprising. But his commitment to these values was extraordinary, an allegiance that spanned three distinctive settings—Indian country, Carolina politics, and the British empire—that each posed significant challenges to his ideals. Nairne’s willingness to pursue these goals within such hostile environments suggests that politeness was as important to him as it was to men and women who lived among what he called English “Delicacy.”9
Figure 6. Noted as the work of “Capt Tho. Nairn,” the upper part of the 1711 map of Carolina is almost certainly based on his 1708 map. It shows Carolina on the edge of an expanse of land controlled in part by the French and the Spanish, but primarily by the region’s numerous Indians. Nairne notes the number of warriors in each nation, as well as the more important paths among them, including the route he took on his 1708 trip. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
Indian Country
In 1708, Nairne wrote a letter to the British secretary of state, the earl of Sunderland, offering advice about empire and Indian affairs. Nairne did not know Sunderland, who had probably never even heard of the agent, but Nairne still wanted to ensure that the southeastern part of the continent would not be neglected in the coming peace negotiations with the French (negotiations that, despite rumors at the time, would not begin for several years). The lengthy letter emphasized the importance of the region and its Indians to British interests. An enclosed map detailed the numbers and locations of the peoples of the southeast part of the American mainland. Covering an area stretching from Carolina south to Spanish Florida and west to the new French settlement at Mobile, Nairne’s chart gave special attention to the many Indians who controlled the areas between these European settlements. Together the material offered the fullest account of the region’s human geography then available.10