Nairne, however, was not a chameleon, simply fitting into his surroundings. He was also committed to encouraging the relationships recommended by the politics of politeness. Some of these ideals, he believed, were already at work in Native villages he had seen on his western trip, a view that only added to his outrage at European traders who took advantage of their power to treat Indians selfishly and arbitrarily.
After Nairne had been imprisoned for ten weeks with little prospect of release, more than sixty residents of his home county of Colleton petitioned the governor to grant bail. Nairne was no traitor, they argued. He had fought for the queen “with great bravery & zeal,” served in the legislature “faithfully,” and labored “with equall Currage and Diligence … among the Indians.” Keeping him from his work “for the Safety of the country,” they predicted, would lead to “many bad consequences.” The commendation (which petitioners assured the governor was shared by “the generallity” of the county) went beyond mere words. They also offered bond in the substantial sum of £10,000, several times the colony’s annual budget.12
As his neighbors noted, Nairne had by 1708 became an important figure in the colony. Formerly an active legislator, he had become North Carolina’s sole representative in Indian country. His expertise in dealing with Native peoples made him a significant figure in defending against attacks from both nearby Indian nations and more distant (but sometimes more troubling) European powers.
Though Nairne failed to mention his imprisonment to Sunderland, he truthfully represented himself as someone who worked “among the Indians.” He had already gained local reputation as a dependable figure in Indian affairs when he first appears in the legislative records (bearing the first of many subsequent misspellings of his name). In 1701 the legislature noted Nairne as the center of a local “allarum” system on the edge of Indian country. In the event of an attack, the watch-house guard on the Savannah River was to go first “to Cap’t Nearnes.” After warning a nearby settlement, the “2 white men & Six Indjans” were then to “return … and follow his ord’rs.”13
Nairne’s life before the creation of this plan remains obscure. Born in Scotland, he had arrived in Carolina by 1695, when he appeared as a witness to the will of a recently deceased Carolinian who had moved from London. Nairne soon afterward married the Scottish-born widow. The marriage suggests that he was an adult by that year—although perhaps not much beyond twenty-one since he was serving in the demanding role of Indian agent on his death two decades later.14
By the turn of the century, Nairne lived in Colleton County, the province’s most southern settlement, working among the Yamasee Indians who lived nearby. He accompanied a number of them to the legislature in 1702 so they could complain about “the abuses done to [them] by the Indjan Traders.” The legislators accepted the charge—and appointed Nairne to oversee restitution. He commanded both Indian and European troops in Carolina’s attack on the Spanish city of St. Augustine the same year. Nairne joined with thirty-three Yamasees in 1703 in an attack on Indians allied with the Spanish in southern Florida, making the first recorded trip into the Everglades by a European.15
Nairne gained his first colony-wide office soon afterward, winning election to an ill-fated legislature that failed to sit in 1705. He finally joined the Commons House in 1707, becoming one of its most active members. Although he worked on a range of significant measures, he was particularly important in establishing regulation of the colony’s Indian trade. He achieved that goal in July 1707 with a bill that created the position of agent. Presumably to foil the governor, the new law specifically named him to the new post.16
The role of agent was important. The legislators (and all thoughtful Carolinians) knew that the colony’s survival depended on good relationships with nearby Indians. Numbering fewer than 6,000 Europeans and Africans in 1700, the southernmost English settlement on the mainland faced dangers on all sides. To the north, where North Carolina (still not fully differentiated from South Carolina) technically bordered on Virginia, Native groups like the Tuscarora divided them from the older colony’s settlements. To the south, what would become the British colony of Georgia would not be settled for decades. Spanish Florida lay farther south. To the west were Indian country and a revived French claim in Louisiana. As Nairne noted to Sunderland from the jail cell, Carolina was “a frontier, both against The French and Spaniards.”17
The threat of these European powers was even greater because of a major European conflict. Queen Anne’s War, as it came to be called in America, had already been going on for a half dozen years when Nairne became agent in 1707. It would last a half dozen more, ending only two years before Nairne’s death. Carolina’s fears about France and Spain were not unrealistic. The two countries had staged a sea-borne invasion of the colony’s capital in 1706 that lasted four days before it was repulsed. Nairne made his westward journey two years later to prepare a counterstrike against the increasingly active French, a work halted soon after his return because of rumors they were planning another direct attack on the province.18
These military and imperial issues could not be separated from relations with the Native Americans that surrounded and far outnumbered Carolina residents. As Nairne pointed out in 1705, the colony dealt with more Indians than any other British colony in America, perhaps “almost as many as all other English Government put together.” Nairne’s 1715 census of “all the Indian Nations that are subject to the Governmt. of South Carolina and solely traded with them” makes these connections clear. Despite years of population decline, he found twenty-one distinct Native groups operated within Carolina’s sphere of influence, some 27,000 Native people.19 Nearly 1,100 of these lived “Mixed with the English Settlements,” almost exactly one Indian for every ten Europeans and Africans in those areas. Except for the Creeks and the Cherokees, both hundreds of miles away, the Indian population around Carolina consisted of smaller nations numbering in the hundreds rather than the thousands, increasing the difficulties of maintaining good relations with all.20
A “breach of friendship between the Indians and us” would be disastrous, the legislature declared in 1707, leading to “the dreadfull Effects of an Indian Warr.” As Nairne warned Sunderland the following year, the French could make things “Intollerably Troublesom” by building alliances with the Indians from Mobile to Carolina. The resulting difficulties would endanger even the British colonies to the north of Carolina. Nairne had sought a similar large-scale coalition to oppose the French. Even smaller partnerships seemed essential. Nairne reassured potential settlers in 1710 that Carolina’s Indian allies could defeat any potential European threat. Nine years earlier the colony had even given the Yamasee a cannon.21
The representatives’ choice of Nairne to represent the colony in this perilous situation testified to their confidence in his leadership abilities. Nairne was an energetic man of action who found parts of the 1708 trip so tame that he spent his days with the hunters seeking game. But he was also thoughtful and deeply inquisitive. His 1710 pamphlet carefully noted both how much more a Carolina blacksmith typically made per day than a bricklayer (one shilling, six pence) and how many female pigs a new farm needed (four). He showed similar care in his work with Native Americans. As he told Sunderland, he sought “to have a very minute account, of all people as well Europeans, as Salvages, from Virginia to the Mouth of the Mississippi,” mastering the fine distinctions separating Saraws from Catapaws, Apalatchees from Apalatchicolas, Congrees from Corsaboys.22
Nairne offered Carolina more than practical expertise. Although he possessed a military man’s desire to push ahead and to make a clear distinction between allies and enemies, he was also deeply idealistic, compelled to oppose injustice, especially