The Tuscarora War: Dispossession at Scale

The Tuscarora were Iroquoian-speaking people who had lived in the coastal plain and Piedmont of present-day North Carolina for centuries before European contact. By the early seventeen hundreds, they were dealing with a colonial government that regularly violated the treaties it signed, with traders who enslaved Tuscarora people and sold them into Caribbean bondage, and with settlers who took land on the understanding that agreements were provisional. In seventeen ten, the Tuscarora applied to the colonial government of Pennsylvania for permission to relocate and were denied.

On September twenty-second, seventeen eleven, approximately five hundred Tuscarora warriors and their allies launched coordinated attacks along the Neuse, Trent, and Pamlico Rivers. At least one hundred forty settlers died in the initial assault. The colonial government of North Carolina, unable to suppress the uprising alone, called for help from South Carolina and allied Indigenous nations including the Yamasee.

The decisive engagement came on March twenty-third, seventeen thirteen, when colonial militia and their allies overran the Tuscarora stronghold of Neoheroka. The numbers recorded in colonial accounts: approximately nine hundred fifty Tuscarora killed or captured in the battle. An additional one thousand Tuscarora were sold into slavery in the aftermath. More than three thousand others were driven from their homes.

In total, the Tuscarora War killed roughly two hundred settlers and approximately one thousand Tuscarora fighters. It left the North Carolina Piedmont largely depopulated of its Indigenous inhabitants. Survivors who could do so traveled north over the following years and were eventually admitted to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy as the Sixth Nation, a recognition of kinship they accepted with the understanding that their homeland in Carolina was gone.

The land opened by this war was planted in the tobacco and grain crops that built the plantation economy. The Piedmont that the Duke family farmed, where Durham grew, where Raleigh was built, was made available in part by what happened at Neoheroka in March seventeen thirteen.