Religion and the Early South in an Age of Atlantic Empire‪.‬

EARLY 1704: QUEEN ANNE'S WAR RAGES ON THE FRONTIERS OF EASTERN North America. Indian and European allies advance southward through the forest on unsuspecting enemy villages. A surprise raid--defenders are quickly overpowered. Homes and churches are torched, captives are burned at the stake while reciting religious verse, hundreds more file northward into slavery, and those who cannot keep up are butchered on the trail. A fellowship of the godly is decimated. This scene might well describe the famous raids by French and Iroquois attackers on Deerfield and other towns in colonial Massachusetts, immortalized in contemporary survivors' accounts and revisited in dramatic detail by modern scholars. But, in fact, it more accurately depicts the attacks eleven hundred miles to the south by Carolina colonists and their Creek allies on the Spanish mission villages of northern Florida. By August 1704 more than one thousand Apalachee and Timucuan Catholics had been killed or enslaved, many to be sold to the West Indies. Thousands more fled to Louisiana or, disgusted by the mission system and by the Spaniards' inability to protect them, left voluntarily to relocate in South Carolina. Slaughter, captivity, and flight hastened their virtual extinction as peoples; the mission system, the linchpin of Spanish colonialism in the American Southeast since the 1560s, was essentially destroyed. By any measure the assault was far more destructive than its New England counterpart, forever changing the face of the Southeast with the eradication of the great majority of the region's Catholics. But because of the enduring grip of the Puritans on the public and scholarly imagination, the Deerfield raid lives on in the working vernacular of historians of early America, while the annihilation of the Florida missions is mostly known to a few specialists, remaining a largely obscure episode in southern geopolitical history and in the growing literature on the Indian slave trade. In fact, it was a turning point in both early American history and in the religious history of the South. (1)