With the establishment of the English colonies of Virginia and Carolina came new waves of immigration, albeit some that was unwilling. Virginia and Carolina were slave-plantation colonies. The labor required to work these plantations was initially coerced from indentured ethnic groups, largely northern Europeans, enslaved Indians, and lastly and overwhelmingly from members of enslaved African tribal communities. Coinciding in 1670 with the establishment of Charles Town (later, Charleston), South Carolina (under a charter extended toward eight Lord Proprietors of Carolina colony), the recessed, extensive wetlands that bound present-day Robeson County were in danger of being traversed by "outsiders."
From the north, recently released indentured servants, of both European and African extraction, as well as mixed Native, African, and European individuals (Forbes 1993; Leaming 1995), migrated from Virginia into the Albermarle Sound region of North Carolina. These settlers named this non-plantation settler colony "Roanoke." Roanoke colony and its colonists had received their land grants and titles, not from the English crown or the Lord Proprietors of Carolina, but from the Tuscarora tribe. In fact, in large measure, Roanoke colony fell under the direct suzerainty of the Tuscarora, and not England (Leaming 1995).
By 1710, Indian-English conflict had reached a crisis point. The Lumbee lands of the Cape Fear Valley lay midway between two increasingly formidable English settlements. The tranquility of peaceful isolation far and away from hostile groups was about to end. The English colonies of Virginia and South Carolina, determined to continue their policy of expansion, came into direct conflict with some of the remaining Virginia Powhatans, but mostly they clashed with the Tuscarora, who straddled the border of present-day Virginia and North Carolina.
War between the Tuscaroras and the landed planter class of Virginia and South Carolina interested in "civilizing" the northern portion of the Carolinas, or Roanoke, broke out in 1711. There was a well-founded and general fear that the embittered tribes of Virginia and the Carolinas who had receded into the swamps would join the Tuscarora in a war against the colonists (Leaming 1995). With the aid of tribes like the Catawbas who at this point resided in South Carolina, the colonists were able to defeat the Tuscarora at their stronghold of Fort Nohoroco in 1713 (Dial and Eliades 1996:15). On route back to South Carolina, English, Catawba, and purportedly some Cherokee warriors returned by way of Robeson County. According to Lumbee tradition, a number of the Cherokee warriors chose to settle with the growing community of Indians in Robeson (McLean 1942; Dial and Eliades 1996:16).
The Roanoke colonists had been allied with the Tuscarora, and with their defeat, the independence of European settlers from direct colonial intervention in the politics and society of Roanoke quickly came to an end. Tribal impediments to Virginia's expansion southward were removed.
Government fell under the aegis of Virginian and Carolinian interests, but the nature of North Carolina government remained chaotic throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Newly established colony interests often could not agree on what the interests of the colony were (Leaming 1995; Byrd 1967; Forbes 1993). The colonials' constant border disputes with remaining Indian tribes made frontiers such as present-day Robeson County "untenable" and "ungovernable" by the highly stratified governments of Virginia and South Carolina. Conveniently, this chaos also allowed the ancestors of the Lumbee to become familiar with the colonial government system, how the colony defined and organized its legal and political boundaries, and the means by which to negotiate with an increasingly encroaching colonial presence.