Negro Fort was a short-lived fortification built by the British in 1814, during the War of 1812, in a remote part of what was at the time Spanish Florida. It was intended to support British operations against the U.S. via its southwest border, by means of which they could "free all these Southern Countries [states] from the Yoke of the Americans". Part of its troops did march north against Georgia, but returned when news of the Treaty of Ghent became known.
The fort was destroyed on July 27, 1816 when a "hot cannon ball" landed in the magazine, leading to a huge explosion. This action is also sometimes referred to as the Battle of Negro Fort (also called the Battle of Prospect Bluff or the Battle of African Fort). Colonel Duncan L. Clinch, the attacking commander, reported salvaging approximately "2,500 muskets, 50 carbines, [and] 400 pistols" from the ruins; as well as inflicting nearly 300 casualties to the fort's occupants. The salvaged arms were given to Colonel Clinch's allies, the Creeks, as war booty for their help in taking the fort.
This is the only time in its history in which the United States destroyed a community of escaped slaves in another country. However, the area continued to attract escaped Africans until the U.S. construction of Fort Gadsden in 1818.
Construction of the fort
Built on a site overlooking the Apalachicola River, about 15 miles north of present-day Apalachicola, Florida, it was the largest structure between St. Augustine and Pensacola. Trading posts of Panton, Leslie and Company and then John Forbes and Company, loyalists hostile to the United States, had existed since the late eighteenth century there and at the San Marcos fort, serving local Native Americans and fugitive slaves. The latter, runaway or freed black slaves from plantations in the American South, used their experience of farming and animal husbandry to set up farms stretching for miles along the river.
Construction at the site of the fort began in May 1814, when George Woodbine, a captain of Royal Marines was landed by Hugh Pigot from HMS Orpheus, and a powder magazine was built. There was a hiatus from the end of August 1814, as the British were requested to redeploy to Pensacola by Governor Manrique.
By September, there was a square moat enclosing a large field several acres in size. There was a 4 feet (1.2 m) wooden stockade the length of the moat, with bastions at its eastern corners. There was a stone building containing soldiers' barracks and a large warehouse, 48 feet (15 m) by 24 feet (7.3 m). Several hundred feet inland was the magazine, in which stands of arms and 73 kegs of gunpowder were stored.
In November 1814, the British redeployed from Pensacola to Prospect Bluff. Following a council of war held that month with his warrior allies, Nicolls decided to proceed with the construction of two forts, at their urging.
Blacks and Native Americans under Nicolls' direction built two forts on the Apalachicola River. The more important one was to be on the border of Georgia, at the juncture of the Flint and the Chattahoochee Rivers, in modern Chattahoochee, Florida, from which attacks could be launched into Georgia. Time only permitted the construction of a small wooden structure, which Nicolls called Fort Apalachicola, but is today referred to as Nicolls' Outpost.
The larger one, which actually was built and was intended to be a supply depot for Nicolls' Outpost, did not have a name; it was referred to simply as the British Post. It was 15 miles (24 km) above the river mouth and 60 miles (97 km) south of Nicolls' Outpost and the border of Georgia. The construction of the larger fort was described by Brigadier General Edmund P. Gaines in a letter of May 14, 1816 to Andrew Jackson, who had charged him with destroying the Fort:
The ramparts and parapets built of hewn timber filled in with earth, mounting 9 to 12 pieces of Cannon, several of which are very large, with some mortars and Howitzers. It has a deep ditch intended to be filled with water, but was dry when seen by my informants, two or three months ago. The work is nearly square and extends over near two acres [0.81 ha] of ground, has Comfortable barracks, and large stone houses inside. It is rendered inaccessible by land, except a narrow pass up near the margin of the river, by reason of an impenetrable swamp in the rear and extending to the river above.
The fort was very well provided with ordnance:
It included 4 twenty-four-pound cannons, 4 six-pound cannons, beside a field piece and a howitzer. In addition there were found 2,500 stands of muskets with accoutrements, 500 carbines and 500 swords ... 300 quarter-casks of rifle powder and 162 barrels of cannon powder, besides other stores and clothing.
The area enclosed by the fort was 7 acres (34,000 sq yd; 2.8 ha); on the eastern corners (those most vulnerable to attack) were bastions with walls 15 feet (4.6 m) high and 18 feet (5.5 m) thick.
The magazine area of the fort was located about 500 feet from the river bank, and consisted of an octagonal blockhouse holding the principal magazine. The citadel was an octagonal design in the Vauban style. Each exterior wall was 50-feet in length. The rampart was 12-feet high and 18-feet thick. It was topped with planking, thus forming a gun deck for artillery. With the addition of crenellations, the height increased to 15 feet
This was surrounded by an extensive star-shaped enclosure covering about 16 acres with bastions on the eastern corners. The ravelin along the river with cannon was 15 feet high and 18 feet thick. To the south of the citadel, where the face of the bluff projected closer to the river than its other points, a redan or ravelin was built. Cannons could fire both upstream and downstream. The heaviest cannons were sited here, and could control the river for over a mile. It appears on the early map, Fort Gadsen was built over it in 1818, as shown on the later map. Cox notes that "barracks, storehouses and other structures were added to the fort, while the primary magazine and armory were inside the octagonal citadel." A further obstacle for attackers is that swamps almost surround Prospect Bluff.
Prior to deploying to New Orleans the following month, where he was wounded, First Lieutenant James Christie of the Royal Artillery was employed by Nicolls "drawing the lines of the fort." This was completed during an absence of Nicolls. Upon his return, and reviewing the plan, "I found it so defective that I ordered [Robert] Henry to execute it differently."
The fort also had "dozens of axes, carts, harnesses, hoes, shovels, and saws," along with many uniforms, belts, and shoes. The British left all these behind. There were over a dozen schooners, barques, and canoes, one 45 feet (14 m) long, along with sails, anchors, and other equipment, and "a number of experienced sailors and shipwrights".
A refuge for fugitive slaves
Fugitive slaves had been seeking refuge in Florida for generations, and they were well received by the Seminoles and treated as free by the Spaniards if they converted to Catholicism; the origins of the future Underground Railroad are here. The Spaniards wanted their own Pensacola slaves back, but as far as American slaves they did not much care. In any event, they lacked the resources to find and "recover" them, at one point inviting the American slaveowners to catch the fugitives themselves. The settlement at the Negro Fort "was the largest concentration of refugees from chattel slavery in the South between the end of the Revolution and the Civil War".
Fugitive slaves continued to arrive, seeking in Florida their freedom; they set up a network of farms along the river to keep them supplied. The Southern plantation owners became increasingly alarmed as news of the fort spread.
To attract recruits, the British visited the Creek, Seminole, and "negro settlements" along the river and its tributaries, distributing guns, uniforms, and other goods. The Creeks were enthusiastic about this opportunity to attack the United States, whose settlers had taken their land. At the request of the British, they started inviting Blacks to join them. Slaves of the Spanish in Pensacola were also invited, and came by the hundreds. As a result, the British Post was a "beehive of activity" in 1814. Colonel Nicolls had under his command, at Prospect Bluff, or living up the river, some 3,500 men eager to attack the Americans. Most of the Africans/Blacks did not want to return to be slaves of the Spanish in Pensacola, some of them adopting English names and claiming to be fugitives from the United States so that they would not be returned.
British Post
After their expulsion from Fort Barrancas at Pensacola, the British returned to Prospect Bluff, on the southern frontier, and intended to establish a post from which to base their operations, by means of which they could "free all these Southern Countries [states] from the Yoke of the Americans".
They were preparing to attack Georgia when news arrived of the end of the war. With the offensive cancelled, a meeting was held on March 10 resulting in the Treaty of Nicolls' Outpost. Nicolls and his men then returned from Nicolls' Outpost to Prospect Bluff. The British paid off the Colonial Marines in April, in the presence of a Spanish army officer, Vicente Sebastián Pintado, seeking to reclaim the fugitives from Spanish Florida. On April 22, the British withdrew most of their force to Bermuda, with Pintado departing with HMS Cydnus, in transit to Pensacola. On May 16, 1815, the British evacuated the last of the garrison there. At the time of his departure in May 1815, Nicolls promised his allies to return in six months, according to Hawkins.
Gaines estimated that 900 Native American warriors and 450 armed blacks inhabited the fort.
Negro Fort
Later American histories would accuse Nicolls of ensuring that "the fort was left intact for the use of the Indians. Instead, it came into the possession of a band of free renegade Negroes." It is the largest and best-known instance before the American Civil War in which armed African escapees from North American slavery resisted European Americans who sought to return them to slavery. (A much smaller example was Fort Mose, near St. Augustine.)
The Negro Fort (African Fort) flew the British Union flag (Union Jack), as the former Colonial Marines considered themselves British subjects. The Spaniards continued their policy of leaving the fugitive slaves alone. What was different now was that a corps had had some military training, and was well armed, and had been encouraged by departing abolitionist Nicolls to get others to run away from their owners and join them. The number and ethnicity of men, and in some cases their families, at the Negro Fort was not fixed; they came and went as the unstable political situation evolved. Yet the existence of a fortified, armed sanctuary for fugitive slaves became widely known in the southern United States.
Negro Fort was ruled under Martial law, and according to the historian Matthew J. Clavin the residents had little in common and struggled with unity.
The pro-slavery press in the United States expressed outrage at the existence of Negro Fort. This concern was published in the Savannah Journal:
It was not to be expected that an establishment so pernicious to the Southern states, holding out to a part of their population temptations to insubordination, would have been suffered to exist after the close of the war [of 1812]. In the course of last winter, several slaves from this neighborhood fled to that fort; others have lately gone from Tennessee and the Mississippi Territory. How long shall this evil, requiring immediate remedy, be permitted to exist?
Escaped slaves at Prospect Bluff came from as far as Virginia (a single individual recaptured by US forces after the battle, Charles, had escaped from Virginia to HMS Seahorse when it was raiding the Chesapeake Bay, and subsequently debarked at Prospect Bluff). The Apalachicola, as was true of other rivers of north Florida, was a base for raiders who attacked Georgia plantations, stealing livestock and helping the enslaved workers escape. Other slaves escaped from the militia units near the border, in which they had been serving. To correct this situation, seen by Southerners as intolerable, in April 1816 the U.S. Army decided to build Fort Scott on the Flint River, a tributary of the Apalachicola. Supplying the fort was challenging because transporting materials overland would have required traveling through unsettled wilderness. The obvious route to supply the Fort was the river. Although technically this was Spanish territory, Spain had neither the resources nor the inclination to defend this remote area. Supplies going to or from the newly-built Fort Scott would have to pass directly in front of the Negro Fort. The boats carrying supplies for the new fort, the Semelante and the General Pike, were escorted by gunboats sent from Pass Christian. The defenders of the fort ambushed sailors gathering fresh water, killing three and capturing one (who was subsequently burned alive); only one escaped.