Negro Fort
by Jack R. Johnson 03.2021
Graphic by Doug Dobey.
Two hundred years ago, the largest community of freed slaves in North America was not found in the northern cities of Philadelphia or New York, as one might imagine. Rather, the largest population of freed slaves, was found in the deep South of the Florida panhandle, in an abandoned Fort along the Apalachicola River. Dubbed ‘Negro Fort’, this place was initially set up by the British and then handed over to freed American slaves and Native American Indians. It became the starting point of Andrew Jackson’s bloody Seminole war, and one of the largest massacres of freed slaves on the American continent.
Negro Fort had served as a refuge for freed men and women, as well as those fleeing slavery in the South. The British had handed over the Fort intact with all its weapons and ordnance to the Corps of Colonial Marines—Black troops who chose to remain. Surrounding it was a sizeable community of runaway slaves, indigenous people (some of whom were forced out of the Mississippi Territory and Georgia), and the occasional white trader. The existence of a Negro Fort, as the U.S. Army called it, was anathema to Georgia plantation owners. Since it was a known safe destination for runaway slaves from as far away as Virginia and Tennessee, Georgian plantation owners feared Negro Fort as a threat to the institution of slavery. Hundreds of freed men and women migrated to the fort and settled there or close by. Once word began circulating about the autonomous free Black community, Georgian plantation owners sent letters to the U.S. government demanding that action be taken. Colonel Robert Patterson urged the fort’s elimination, stating “The service rendered by the destruction of the fort, and the band of negroes who held it is one of great and manifest importance to the United States and particularly those States bordering on the Creek nation, as it had become the rendezvous for runaway slaves.”
The problem, of course, was that Negro Fort was not a part of the United States. At the time, it was in Spanish controlled Florida. Andrew Jackson decided to build Fort Scott above this territory at the junction of the Flint and Chattahoochee rivers, where they joined to form the Apalachicola. To receive materials and supplies, boats going to Fort Scott needed to traverse the Apalachicola River–then Spanish territory–passing right next to Negro Fort on the way. During one of the deliveries, two gunboats stopped along the river directly beside Negro Fort. Not surprisingly, they were met with an attack by the infantry at the fort. Almost all of the Americans were killed. Whether this was arranged by Jackson to provide a handy excuse to attack Negro Fort can’t be proven, but the circumstance of the attack proved timely.
Under the pretense of “national defense,” Andrew Jackson ordered the destruction of the Fort. It was a short, but dreadful battle. After only a couple minutes of engagement, a heated cannonball (a ‘hot shot’) entered the fort’s magazine, where ammunitions were kept, and caused an explosion that destroyed the entire post. The explosion killed 270 men, women, and children. No casualties for the Americans were noted. The explosion was heard more than 100 miles away in Pensacola. Afterwards, the U.S. troops and the Creeks charged and captured the surviving defenders. Garçon, the black commander of the Fort, and a Choctaw chief, among the few who survived, were handed over to the Creeks, who shot Garçon and scalped the chief under orders from Andrew Jackson.
General Gaines later reported that:
“The explosion was awful and the scene horrible beyond description. You cannot conceive, nor I describe the horrors of the scene. In an instant lifeless bodies were stretched upon the plain, buried in sand or rubbish, or suspended from the tops of the surrounding pines. Here lay an innocent babe, there a helpless mother; on the one side a sturdy warrior, on the other a bleeding squaw. Piles of bodies, large heaps of sand, broken glass, accoutrements, etc., covered the site of the fort... Our first care, on arriving at the scene of the destruction, was to rescue and relieve the unfortunate beings who survived the explosion.”
Many of the survivors at the fort were taken prisoner and placed back into slavery under the claim that the Georgia plantation owners had owned their ancestors.
As Matthew J. Clavin noted in The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community, this was the first and only time in its history in which the United States destroyed a community of escaped slaves in another country. By eliminating this refuge for fugitive slaves, the United States government closed an escape valve that Blacks had utilized for generations, it also destroyed a powerful symbol of Black freedom that “subverted the foundations of an expanding American slave society.”
The destruction of Negro Fort also led to the first Seminole War.
Chief Neamathla, a leader of the Red Stick Creeks at Fowltown, was so angered by the death of some of his people at Negro Fort that he issued a warning to General Gaines that if any of his forces crossed the Flint River into Spanish Florida, they would be attacked and defeated. Unfortunately, the threat provoked the general to send 250 men to arrest the chief and have him flogged. A battle arose in his defense and it became the opening skirmish of the First Seminole War.
Both in human and monetary terms, the Seminole Wars were the longest and most expensive of the Indian Wars in United States history.