“Not Negroes nor Slaves but Free People”: Free People of Color in the Colonial Southeast Indian Trade

This thesis examines the role of free people of color in the colonial Indian trade in England’s southern American colonies, primarily Virginia and the Carolinas, from the 1640s to that trade’s decline in the colonial southeast by the early 1770s. Free people of color participated in the Indian trade throughout the colonial period in substantial numbers, and sometimes became that trade’s principal actors. At a time when race-based laws and prohibitive social conditions emerged alongside the development of southern slave society, the Indian trade—operated largely by a colorful cast of adventurers who often worked outside the reach of colonial government—offered free people of color unparalleled opportunities for economic and social ascendancy in a world increasingly shut off to them due to the inhibiting matters that attended their race. This thesis additionally examines how the geography of the Indian trade provides a key for understanding the movement of free people of color across the southern colonial frontier, as well as the isolated multi-racial communities they developed along their journey.