<p>In 1760, when British victory was all but assured and hostilities in the northeastern colonies of North America came to an end, the future of the southeastern colonies was not nearly so clear. British authorities in the South still faced the possibility of a local French and Indian alliance and clashed with angry Cherokees who had complaints of their own. These tensions and events usually take a back seat to the climactic proceedings further north. I argue that in South Carolina, by destabilizing relations with African and Native Americans, the Cherokee Indians raised the social and political anxieties of coastal elites to a fever pitch during the Anglo-Cherokee War. Threatened by Indians from without and by slaves from within, and failing to find unbridled support in British policy, the planter-merchant class eventually sought to take matters into its own hands. Scholars have long understood the way the economic fallout of the French and Indian War caused Britain to press new financial levies on American colonists. But they have not understood the deeper consequences of the war on the local stage. Using extensive political and military correspondence, ethnography, and eighteenth-century newspapers, I offer a narrative-driven approach that adds geographic and ethnographic breadth and context to previous scholarship on mid-eighteenth century in North America. I expand understandings of Cherokee culture, British and colonial Indian policy, race slavery, and the southeastern frontier. At the same time, I also explain the origins of the American Revolution in the South.</p> / Dissertation

This work reevaluates commonly accepted interpretations of Seminole ethnogenesis in light of recent scholarship and previously ignored sources from the Spanish archives. It argues that Seminole formation was largely a bi-product of a struggle between two opposing Lower Creek factions: the Creek "nationalists" and the ostensive Creek "partisans" of the British. This factional struggle became increasingly bitter during the French and Indian War and ultimately led to a schism whereby the ostensive "partisans" of the British colonized of the Alachua savanna in the early 1760s to become recognized as the first Florida Seminoles. This work also raises questions about the ostensive Anglophile identity of the first Seminoles and suggests that such an "identity" was based largely on deception and theatrics. In closing, this work addresses the institutional basis of the myth of Seminole aboriginality.

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Chief Justice William Allen and Benjamin Franklin met hundreds of times prior to Franklin's departure to London in 1757, and yet very little has been written about Allen. For over twenty years, Franklin and Allen worked closely on a variety of municipal improvements: the library, the hospital, the school, the fire company and many other projects that were the first of their kind in America. And while Allen was Franklin's main benefactor for close to twenty-five years --it was Allen's endorsement of Franklin that got him his job as Postmaster-- Franklin mentions him only twice in his &lt;italic&gt;Autobiography / History

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature and language of Anglo-American opposition to quartering from the start of the French and Indian War in 1756 to the Revolutionary War in 1776. This paper will also attempt to demonstrate the shifting focus of Anglo-American arguments against the quartering of troops over these two decades. Quartering of troops in private homes and defraying the cost of quartering were the prevalent concerns of Anglo-Americans during the French and Indian War. Then, the Quartering Act of 1765 significantly changed the perception of Anglo-Americans toward quartering of troops as a matter of illegal taxation. Lastly, the unfolding events in 1768 and onwards, in Boston, marked a turning point as the fear of a standing army in peace time redefined Anglo-American opposition to the quartering of redcoats. The significance of Anglo-American opposition to the Quartering Acts paled in comparison to other colonial grievances that stemmed from taxation issues, but it was important enough to finds its place in the Declaration of the Independence and in the Third Amendment of the federal constitution. / Master of Arts

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This work is a social and cultural history of the participation of enslaved and free Blacks in the Seven Years’ War in British America. It is, as well, an intellectual history of the impact of Blacks’ wartime actions upon conceptions of race, slavery, and imperial identity in the British Atlantic world. In addition to offering a fresh analysis of the significance of Britain’s arming of Blacks in the eighteenth century, it represents the first sustained inquiry into Blacks’ experience of this global conflict. It contends that, though their rhetoric might indicate otherwise, neither race nor enslaved status in practice prevented Britons from arming Blacks. In fact, Blacks played the most essential role in martial endeavors precisely where slavery was most fundamental to society. The exigencies of worldwide war transformed a local reliance upon black soldiers for the defense of particular colonies into an imperial dependence upon them for the security of Britain’s Atlantic empire. The events of the Seven Years’ War convinced many Britons that black soldiers were effective and even indispensable in the empire’s tropical colonies, but they also confirmed that not all Blacks could be trusted with arms. This work examines “Tacky’s revolt,” during which more than a thousand slaves exploited the wartime diffusion of Jamaica’s defensive forces to rebel, as a battle of the Seven Years’ War. The experience of insecurity and insurrection during the conflict caused some Britons to question the imperial value of the institution of slavery and to propose that Blacks be transformed from a source of vulnerability as slaves to the key to the empire’s strength in the southern Atlantic as free subjects. While martial service offered some Blacks a means to gain income, skills, a sense of satisfaction, autonomy, community, and even (though rarely) freedom, the majority of Blacks did not personally benefit from their contributions to the British war effort. Despite the pragmatic martial antislavery rhetoric that flourished postwar, in the end the British armed Blacks to perpetuate slavery, not to eradicate it, and an ever more regimented reliance upon black soldiers became a lasting legacy of the Seven Years’ War. / text

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