ABSTRACT
Early in the eighteenth century, Carolina became the only society on mainland North America with a slave majority. It discusses Indian trade, slavery, and the relationship between the two. Hoping to imitate the success of Caribbean plantation economies, in the 1660s a group of wealthy investors proposed a new colony on the mainland between Virginia and Spanish-controlled Florida. Called Carolina in honor of King Charles II, the colony developed an economy divided between Indian trade and plantation agriculture. In Nairne's Muskhogean Journals: The 1708 Expedition to the Mississippi River, Thomas Nairne describes an Indian agent, trader, political leader, and planter, explains the importance of Carolina to English interests in North America. Nairne wrote during the War of the Spanish Succession, which pitted England against France and Spain. Francis Le Jau, an Anglican missionary, came to Carolina from England in the early eighteenth century to preach Protestant Christianity to the young colony's inhabitants.
