The Tuscarora War, 1711: Attack on the Neuse and Tar-Pamlico Settlements

Early on the morning of September 22, 1711, small groups of Native men approached farmhouses scattered along the Neuse and Trent rivers and the Pamlico River in eastern North Carolina. Settlers' accounts say that many households were taken by surprise. Within a day or two, roughly 130 colonists were dead, and the survivors were fleeing to fortified houses.

The attack was planned, coordinated and aimed at the colony's newest and most exposed settlements. It began the Tuscarora War, which lasted until 1713 and permanently changed both North Carolina and the Tuscarora people.

A grievance built over years

The Tuscarora were an Iroquoian-speaking people with towns across the coastal plain and the Piedmont rivers of eastern Carolina. By the early 1700s their lands were under pressure from English settlers moving south from Virginia and inland from the sounds. Traders cheated them, and colonists seized land. Tuscarora also reported that their people, children included, were being kidnapped and sold into slavery.

The Tuscarora were not a single, unified polity. The towns in the north, led by Tom Blunt, mostly kept ties with Virginia and later sided with the English. Towns farther south, whose best-known leader was Hancock, took the lead in the war.

One immediate spark was the founding of New Bern in 1710. The Swiss baron Christoph von Graffenried brought Swiss and German Palatine colonists to the point between the Neuse and Trent rivers, near the Native town of Chattoka. The colonists had purchased the land from the colony's proprietors, not from the Tuscarora or their neighbors.

A colony divided

North Carolina was poorly prepared. The colony was small, thinly settled and barely governed. In 1711 it had just come through Cary's Rebellion, a political fight over the governorship between supporters of Thomas Cary and those of Edward Hyde, which had at times turned into armed conflict.

The Tuscarora and their allies, including the Coree and Pamlico, may have judged this to be a good moment to strike. Historians generally agree that the colony's internal divisions made it harder to respond.

September 22 and the fall of John Lawson

Just before the main attack, Tuscarora captured two men traveling up the Neuse: Graffenried and John Lawson, the colony's surveyor general and author of A New Voyage to Carolina (1709). Lawson was put to death. Graffenried, who in his own account described a hearing before Native leaders, was eventually released after he agreed to keep New Bern neutral.

On September 22, attacks fell on the Neuse and Trent settlements and on homes along the Pamlico and Bath County frontier. Estimates of the dead start at about 130 and run higher, and the figures are uncertain because records were poor and survivors were scattered. The dead included many of the Palatine and Swiss colonists at New Bern. Settlers abandoned farms and crowded into garrison houses, and the colony's economy in the area stopped.

Help from South Carolina

North Carolina's militia could not manage the war alone, and the colony asked for aid. Virginia declined to commit much force, so the colony turned to South Carolina. In 1712 Colonel John Barnwell led a force that was mostly Native, including Yamasee and others, into Tuscarora country. He attacked towns and besieged Hancock's fortified town of Catechna. Barnwell then agreed to a truce, but he and his men seized Tuscarora captives, which helped end the peace and renewed the fighting.

A second South Carolina expedition under Colonel James Moore Jr. arrived in early 1713 with a handful of white officers and a much larger Native army. In March it besieged Fort Neoheroka, in what is now Greene County, and took it after several days. Accounts differ on the numbers, but several hundred Tuscarora were killed and many more were captured, and most of the captives were sold into slavery. The fall of Neoheroka broke Tuscarora resistance in the south.

North to the Iroquois

Tom Blunt's northern Tuscarora made peace with North Carolina and were later granted a reservation on the Roanoke River. Many of the other Tuscarora left. Over the following years, groups moved north into Pennsylvania and New York. By about 1722 they were accepted by the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy, as the sixth nation, joining the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca. Their language was related to Iroquoian languages, and tradition holds that their ancestors had come from the north.

The war opened eastern North Carolina to English settlement, but it left the colony heavily in debt. It also showed how colonial powers could use Native allies against other Native peoples. Some historians connect resentments from the Carolina campaigns to the Yamasee War of 1715, which nearly destroyed South Carolina.