ABSTRACT
The northern and southern regions of the Carolinas were very different from one another. South Carolina, many of whose first planters migrated from Barbados, survived in its earliest years by providing food, livestock, and Indian slaves to the West Indies. Historians have recently come to appreciate the economic significance to the fledgling South Carolina economy of the Indian slave trade—accomplished by making alliances with a series of native peoples who captured and traded their enemies to the English as slaves. South Carolina quickly evolved, however, into a society that depended upon African, not Indian, slaves, once colonists identified rice (and later indigo) as marketable crops, and after the Yamasee War revealed the dangers of the Indian slave trade. In contrast, the Albemarle area to the north that eventually became North Carolina was described often by critics as a refuge for former servants and ne’er-do-wells. Here there was a greater degree of egalitarianism that persisted into the eighteenth century and informed the Regulator movement of the 1760s.
