Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

upon the Westo Indians in 1680, thereby going against the proprietary policy
of peaceful trade and friendship with the Westos. The proprietors, however,
maintained a monopoly of the Westo trade, so that this furnished an incentive
for the disgruntled colonists to make war upon the Westos rather than
remain in peace. A bloody struggle ensued. After three years, South Carolina,
with the help of the Savannah tribe, annihilated the Westo Indians. The
Savannahs settled near the Savannah River, replacing the slaughtered Westos.
There they and South Carolina made a mutually profitable deal: the whites
supplied the Savannahs with arms and the Savannahs, in turn, made war upon
and enslaved neighboring Indians, after which they sold the slaves to South
Carolina.
The Spaniards had made one fatal mistake in occupying Gualé: they sent
missionaries to their Indian allies instead of arms. Beginning in 1680, South
Carolina incited a series of Indian attacks against the unarmed Spanish Indians
and mission posts. By the end of the Westo War, the aggressive policy of
South Carolina had driven the Spanish mission stations out of Gualé. The
Spanish Indians also fled, and the powerful Yamassee Indians, attracted by a
winner, moved from Florida to South Carolina.
With the crushing of the Yamassees and other Indians in the Yamassee
war, the old Gualé region was now open for settlement and penetration. The
Carolina proprietors agreed in 1717 to a fantastic scheme to establish a feudal
Margravate of Azilia in the Gualé region. The proprietors were to grant the
region to the promoters, in exchange for a quitrent of a penny per acre occupied.
The main Azilia promoters were Sir Robert Montgomery, a Scottish baronet,
and the poet Aaron Hill. Montgomery and Hill wrote promotional
monographs, glowingly puffing the land as "our future Eden." A myriad of
elaborate townships were projected, to be spaced in concentric zones with the
Margrave's palace in the exact center. But, like many other wild schemes, the
plan collapsed with the ending in 1720 of the inflationary and speculative
South Sea Bubble on the London Stock Market.
One of the first acts of the new royal government in South Carolina was to
build Fort King George at the mouth of the Altamaha River, the first English
establishment in the Georgia region. The fort was to serve as a standing outpost
against the French in the west and the Spanish in the south. The South
Carolina Assembly resented paying for a new garrison, but the new governor,
Francis Nicholson, was able to drive through the sizable appropriations.
Not only was the erection of the fort on former Spanish territory an insult
and a threat to Spain, but soon the fort was being used to incite the Indians
to raid Spanish settlements in Florida. The Spanish ambassador to London
charged that the Floridians "could not stir out of their houses to cultivate
their lands, or turn out their cattle without apparent danger from the said
Indians." The Crown sent two letters to Nicholson, ordering the end of the
aggressive violence against the Spanish settlements. The great hope of Nichol-
108