Background
Thomas Nairne was born in Scotland, though it is possible that he was born of Scottish descent in one of the plantations.
(Excerpt from A Letter From South Carolina: Giving an Acco...)
Excerpt from A Letter From South Carolina: Giving an Account of the Soil, Air, Product, Trade, Government, Laws, Religion, People, Military Strength, &C. Of That Province; Together With the Manner and Necessary Charges of Settling a Plantation There, and the Annual Profit It Will Produce We have likewife Hogs in abundance, which go daily to feed in the Woods, and come home at Night; alfoofome Sheep, and Goats. There are tame Fowls of all and great~variety of wild Fowl, 'asmu I Turkeys, Geefe, Ducks, wild Pidgeons, Partridges, Brants, Sheldrakes, Teal; and near-the Sea, Curlews, Cranes, He rons, Snipes, Pellicanes, Gannets, Sea Larks, and many others. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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( Nairne's Muskhogean Journals: The 1708 Expedition to th...)
Nairne's Muskhogean Journals: The 1708 Expedition to the Mississippi River, printed from a previously unpublished manuscript in the British Library, is the earliest known account in English of Muskhogean society. It chronicles a remarkable diplomatic episode in Colonial Indian-white relations. In the winter and spring of 1708, Captain Thomas Nairne and Thomas Welch, a Carolina trader among the Chickasaws, accompanied by a group of Indians, left Charles Town and traveled west to the Mississippi River and south nearly to the Gulf of Mexico. This expedition was a key to English strategy during Queen Anne's War. Nairne visited the Chickasaws to confirm that tribe's allegiance to the English and then went south among the Choctaws in a futile attempt to draw that powerful tribe away from their loyalty to the French. Although he shared the racial and cultural biases of contemporaneous Englishmen, he knew the importance of the Indians as allies and enemies and so conducted his diplomatic negotiations as among equals when he visited the southern tribes. This knowledge of the Indians' importance seems to have tempered his biases, and the diplomatic mission became a study of Indian life and culture. Nairne recorded in great detail--and with the eye of a critic of the Muskhogean society and his own. His accounts include discussions of marriage and mourning ceremonies, rituals and techniques of hunting and warfare, and, most important, the political culture of the Chickasaws and Creeks. Nairne's scientific analysis--he collected data and then drew conclusions--of the matrilineal and consensual bases of Muskhogean society has not been surpassed by any other early observer. Thus, Nairne's Muskhogean Journals: The 1708 Expedition to the Mississippi River is a rich source of information important to anthropologists, archaeologists, and colonial historians.
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Thomas Nairne was born in Scotland, though it is possible that he was born of Scottish descent in one of the plantations.
He was first mentioned in the Carolina records in 1698 as a landowner on St. Helena Island.
As a large planter on the extreme southern border of the English settlements he acquired an influence over the Indians that made him the most remarkable frontier figure of the South in the period of Queen Anne's War. He was captain of a company in Gov. James Moore's unsuccessful attack upon St. Augustine in 1702, and a partisan leader in the later destructive raids into Florida.
In 1702 he was employed by the Assembly to regulate the traders among his neighbors, the Yamasee.
He was also active in efforts to procure missionaries to the Indians through the agency of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. As a representative of the Colleton County dissenters he first clashed with the governor, Sir Nathaniel Johnson, over the conformity and church acts; and in the assembly of 1707 he became the aggressive leader of the country party in the successful struggle to wrest administrative powers from the governor. The issues were the appointment of the public receiver and the regulation of Indian affairs under control of the Commons.
His Indian act of 1707 laid the basis of the southern regulative system. Under it he served as the first provincial Indian agent with a jurisdiction as "itinerary justice" and diplomatic agent as far westward as the Mississippi.
In this office he launched an ambitious scheme for extending British influence among the western tribes and driving the French from Louisiana. He himself at great risk made peace with the Choctaw, the bulwark of the French colony. His memorial of July 10, 1708, to the secretary of state, elaborating his project, was a remarkable statement of the expansionist aims of the Carolinians. Yet his activities in regulating the traders had brought him again into conflict with the governor, and in June 1708 he had been thrown into prison on an obviously manufactured charge of high treason. He was later denied his seat in the Assembly and discharged as agent. Apparently he was never tried; and by a journey to England in 1710 he won the favor of the Lords Proprietors, on whose nomination to the Admiralty he was appointed judge advocate of South Carolina. In England he was energetic in stimulating the settlement of the Port Royal region, and was probably the author of the promotion tract, A Letter from South Carolina (1710). Restored to his Indian agency in 1712, he was engaged in parleys with the discontented Yamasee at Pocotaligo Town, when, on April 15, 1715, the great southern Indian war broke out, a revolt against the abuses of a trade to whose reform he had directed his efforts.
He died at the stake after tortures prolonged, a contemporary reported, for several days.
( Nairne's Muskhogean Journals: The 1708 Expedition to th...)
(Excerpt from A Letter From South Carolina: Giving an Acco...)
He married Elizabeth Quintine, by whom he had one son.