This Torrent of Indians
War on the Southern Frontier, 1715–1728
Larry E. Ivers
The Southern frontier could be a cruel and unforgiving place during the early eighteenth century. The British colony of South Carolina traded with several Native American groups. The economic and military relationships between the colonialists and
natives were always filled with tension, but the Good Friday 1715 uprising surprised
Carolinians by its swift brutality. Larry E. Ivers examines the ensuing war in This Torrent
of Indians. Named for the Yamasee Indians because they were the first to strike, the war
persisted for thirteen years and powerfully influenced colonial American history.
While Ivers examines the reasons offered by recent scholars for the outbreak of the
war—indebtedness to Anglo-American traders, fear of enslavement, and pernicious
land grabbing—he concentrates on the military history and its impact on all inhabitants of the region: Spanish and British Europeans, African Americans, and the numerous Indian groups and their allies. Eventually defeated, the Yamasee and other Indian
tribes withdrew from South Carolina while others made peace treaties that left the
region ripe for colonial exploitation.
Ivers’s detailed narrative and analyses demonstrate the horror and cruelty of a war
of survival. The organization, equipment, and tactics used by South Carolinians and
Indians were influenced by differing customs and technologies, but both sides acted
with savage determination to extinguish their foes. Ultimately it was the individuals
behind the tactics that determined the outcomes. Ivers shares stories from both sides
of the battlefield—tales of the courageous, faint of heart, inept, and upstanding. He
also includes a detailed account of black and Indian slave soldiers serving alongside
white soldiers in combat. Ivers gives us an original and fresh ground-level account of
that critical period, 1715 to 1728, when the Southern frontier was the spoils of war.
February 2016, 304 pages, 8 b&w illus.
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Larry E. Ivers, a retired attorney,
served in the U.S. Army as a paratrooper
with the 11th Airborne Division, as an
instructor in the Army Ranger School,
and as an adviser to South Vietnamese
troops in the Mekong Delta. His previously published works include Colonial
Forts of South Carolina, 1670–1775 and
British Drums on the Southern Frontier:
The Military Colonization of Georgia,
1733–1749.
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