1740 slave code in South Carolina
from http://are.as.wvu.edu/minges.htmhttp://are.as.wvu.edu/minges.htm
all my Slaves, whether Negroes, Indians, Mustees, Or Molattoes.'1
Towards a Thick Description of `Slave Religion'
by Patrick Neal Minges © 1999
In areas such as Southeastern Virginia, the "Low Country" of the Carolinas, and around Galphintown34 near Savannah, Georgia, communities of Afro-Indians began to arise. The term "mustee" came to distinguish between those who shared African and Native American ancestry from those who were a mixture of European and African. Even after 1720, black and red Carolinians continued to share slave quarters and intimate lives; many wills continued to refer to "all my Slaves, whether Negroes, Indians, Mustees, Or Molattoes."35 The depth and complexity of this intermixture are revealed in a 1740 slave code in South Carolina that ruled:
...all negroes and Indians, (free Indians in amity with this government, and negroes, mulattoes, and mustezoes, who are now free, excepted) mulattoes or mustezoes who are now, or shall hereafter be in this province, and all their issue and offspring...shall be and they are hereby declared to be, and remain hereafter absolute slaves.36
As early as the latter years of the nineteenth century, ethnologists cited the deep relationship between African Americans and Native Americans. James Mooney in 1897 noted: "It is not commonly known that in all southern colonies Indian slaves were bought and sold and kept in servitude and worked in the fields side by side with negroes up to the time of the revolution... Furthermore, as the coast tribes dwindled they were compelled to associate and intermarry with the negroes until they finally lost their identity and were classified with that race, so that a considerable proportion of the blood of the southern negroes is unquestionably Indian."37 In his 1937 doctoral dissertation, James Hugo Johnston asserted, "The end of Indian slavery came with the final absorption of the blood of the Indian by the more numerous Negro slave. But the blood of the Indian did not become extinct in the slave states, for it continued to flow in the veins of the Negro."38
Increasingly toward the end of the century, Africans began to flee slavery in larger numbers to settle among the Indians in their immediate vicinity and in so doing became mediums of exchange for non-indigenous culture.39 Therefore, by the time that John Marrant arrived among the Cherokee in the middle of the eighteenth century, there is little doubt that the Cherokee had some prior exposure to both Africans and Christianity. When Marrant was brought before the "King of the Cherokee" that his fate might be determined, he witnessed to the Cherokee in their native tongue:
I cried again, and He was entreated. He said, "Be it as thou wilt;" the Lord appeared most lovely and glorious; the king himself was awakened, and the others set at liberty. A great change took place among the people; the King's house became God's house; the soldiers were ordered away; and the poor condemned prisoner had perfect liberty and was treated like a prince. Now the Lord made all my enemies become my great friends.40