Cherokee attacks killed nearly two hundred Carolinians in 1760 and freed some enslaved people

Evidence

Native people were critical to the American economy as the procurers of skins for the profitable fur trade, and they also posed a threat to American settler communities. In the years before the American Revolution, Cherokees and English colonists in South Carolina had carried out attacks against one another amid trade disputes and cultural misunderstandings, and in retribution for prior killings. These altercations led to the deaths of nearly two hundred Carolinians at Cherokee hands in the year 1760 alone and disrupted the racial power structure by giving some enslaved Black people the opportunity to flee their English captors. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 448

Categorization

• XREF: The detail that violence disrupted the racial order by letting enslaved people flee connects to the book’s reframing thesis about how the racial hierarchy is maintained and destabilized.