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Illustrated Episode · Volume II, chapter 19 · April 1712

Peace was the bait

Inside a log fort's gate, armed men bind the wrists of a group of Indian men and women while a coated officer with a sword stands watching; the captives look back at him, steady and angry, in soft spring light.
Fort Barnwell, on the Neuse River, spring 1712. Colonel John Barnwell's men seize Indians who came in trusting a promise of peace, in order to carry them to South Carolina and sell them into slavery. Baron von Graffenried wrote that Barnwell used the pretense of a good peace. Rothbard says this treachery drove the Tuscarora back into war that summer. Chapter 19 of Conceived in Liberty.

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Adapted from Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Mises Institute, 2011), CC BY 3.0.

What happened

In January 1712 Colonel John Barnwell marched from South Carolina to help North Carolina against the Tuscarora, leading about thirty white officers and some five hundred Indian allies, most of them Yamasee. Rothbard tells what came after the first peace. North Carolina was slow to supply him and quick to criticize his terms, and Barnwell decided to take the pay he had come for. At Fort Barnwell, the log fort he had built on the Neuse at Core Town, he drew in a number of Indians under the pretense of a good peace, the Swiss baron Christoph von Graffenried wrote, and took them prisoner, and his Indian allies hoped to get a sum from each. They were carried to South Carolina to be sold as slaves. Rothbard had already named kidnapping into slavery as the most embittering grievance of the Carolina Indians, so notorious that Pennsylvania in 1705 banned the importation of Indian slaves from Carolina. The Tuscarora, he writes, were understandably bitter at this treachery, and in the summer of 1712 they resumed the war against a white foe they now thought could not be trusted in any respect (CiL, p. 588). Von Graffenried agreed that the seizure properly embittered the rest of the Tuscarora and the Carolina Indians. South Carolina sent a second army under Colonel James Moore, who ended the war in March 1713.

Sources

  1. Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2011 single-volume ed.), vol. II, ch. 19, pp. 587-588. CC BY 3.0. Rothbard
  2. Christoph von Graffenried, account of the Tuscarora war and his captivity (1712), as quoted in 'Primary Source: Christoph von Graffenried's Account of the Tuscarora War', NC Anchor / NCpedia (accessed 2026-09-30): Barnwell 'under the pretense of a good peace ... enticed a goodly number of the friendly Indians ... took them prisoner at Core Town'; 'made his way home with his living plunder'. Primary source
  3. Lawrence Lee, The Indian Wars in North Carolina, 1663-1763 (Raleigh: Carolina Charter Tercentenary Commission, 1963), ch. 4 (the truce of March, Fort Barnwell at Core Town, the peace of 17 April, and the seizure after von Graffenried), at penelope.uchicago.edu. Secondary source
  4. 'Fort Barnwell (C-32)', North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, Highway Historical Marker blog (2023-12-07; accessed 2026-09-30). Secondary source
  5. John Lawson, A New Voyage to Carolina (London, 1709), on the dress of the Carolina Indians (match-coats of deer's skin with the hair on), via search summaries of the docsouth text; not reread. Primary source
  6. Era registry entry southern-colonies-1710-1770 (data/cil/registry/eras/), dress and arms for the Tuscarora and frontier settlers; its own sources are listed in its notes. Secondary source