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The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community
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Overview
In the aftermath of the War of 1812, Major General Andrew Jackson ordered a joint United States army-navy expedition into Spanish Florida to destroy a free and independent community of fugitive slaves. The result was the Battle of Negro Fort, a brutal conflict among hundreds of American troops, Indian warriors, and black rebels that culminated in the death or re-enslavement of nearly all of the fort’s inhabitants. By eliminating this refuge for fugitive slaves, the United States government closed an escape valve that African Americans had utilized for generations. At the same time, it intensified the subjugation of southern Native Americans, including the Creeks, Choctaws, and Seminoles. Still, the battle was significant for another reason as well.
During its existence, Negro Fort was a powerful symbol of black freedom that subverted the racist foundations of an expanding American slave society. Its destruction reinforced the nation’s growing commitment to slavery, while illuminating the extent to which ambivalence over the institution had disappeared since the nation’s founding. Indeed, four decades after declaring that all men were created equal, the United States destroyed a fugitive slave community in a foreign territory for the first and only time in its history, which accelerated America’s transformation into a white republic. The Battle of Negro Fort places the violent expansion of slavery where it belongs, at the center of the history of the early American republic.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781479837335 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New York University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/10/2019 |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Sales rank: | 621,080 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.10(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
WAR AND RESISTANCE
In January 1815, Andrew Jackson's motley collection of army regulars, militiamen, Indians, pirates, and free people of color were engaged in defending New Orleans from an invading British force more than twice its size. At the same time, Niles' Weekly Register, a popular national periodical published in Baltimore, Maryland, warned of a simultaneous attack against the southern United States originating in Spanish Florida. Though nominally neutral during the War of 1812, the colonial governments of East and West Florida seemed to have chosen sides when they allowed a British naval fleet to gather at the mouth of the Apalachicola River with fourteen thousand troops, "a considerable part of them blacks." The vessels brought arms, ammunition, and other "presents," which the British intended for the Indians and slaves they expected to recruit nearby. With the American army focused on New Orleans, the redcoats planned to arouse "the savages and negroes" along Florida's Gulf Coast "for the purpose of murdering women and children on the inland frontiers of Georgia." Or so claimed Niles' Weekly Register.
For American settlers, the fear of Indians and slaves was part and parcel of life on the southern frontier. But British actions during the War of 1812 made the possibility of a combined Indian-slave assault across the United States' southern border a distinct reality. When the American government declared war on Great Britain in June 1812, the British responded indifferently. The Napoleonic Wars in Europe had diverted the empire's attention from its former American colonies for more than a decade, and now the government was reluctant to join another costly military campaign. Only an American invasion of Canada in June 1812 succeeded in arousing Great Britain, initiating a prolonged fight between the two rivals. With resources stretched thin, Great Britain early decided on a policy of arming and recruiting Native Americans, African Americans, and anyone else willing to volunteer for His Majesty's Service. By filling their ranks with America's subject people, the British hoped to produce a form of "psychological warfare to force the American government to terms."
From the opening of the war, Indians across North America rallied to the British cause because of their common enemy. Westward expansion meant that by the opening of the nineteenth century, some four hundred thousand American citizens — roughly 10 percent of the US population — lived west of the Appalachian Mountains. In the Northwest Territory, white encroachment on Indian land increasingly brought native people into contact with British merchants and officials, who manned a series of forts along the Canadian border and who also abhorred the new arrivals. In an effort to slow the Americans' advance, the British provided food, weapons, and other essential goods to the territory's indigenous people, who then harassed and intimidated settlers. "We have had but one opinion as the cause of the depredations of the Indians," read an article circulated on the eve of the War of 1812. "They are instigated and supported by the British."
Among the beneficiaries of Great Britain's generosity were the Shawnee, an Algonquian-speaking people who in the eighteenth century migrated from various points to the Ohio River Valley. At the opening of the nineteenth century, the Shawnee were inspired by their leader Tecumseh, a charismatic war chief, and his religiously inspired brother, Tenskwatawa, or the Prophet. Under their leadership, the group launched a historic movement to unite Indian people across tribal lines and to join the British in vanquishing the United States. Tecumseh thought violence was the best way to fight for the Shawnees' interests whereas his younger brother sought a religiously inspired cultural revolution, but both dreamed of an expansive pan-Indian alliance extending from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.
In 1811, Tecumseh traveled hundreds of miles to convince Indians below the Ohio River to join the anti-American confederation. In a fiery speech before hundreds of Creek chiefs and warriors in the old Indian town of Tuckabatchee, Alabama, the Shawnee leader challenged his listeners to reclaim the land and culture of their ancestors. The Muscogee were once a powerful people, Tecumseh began, but they had buried their bows and arrows in the graves of their fathers. Because the "white race" had seized their land, corrupted their women, and trampled on the bones of the dead, Tecumseh demanded, "War now! War always! War on the living! War on the dead!" Referring to Great Britain and Spain, Tecumseh informed his rapt audience, "Two mighty warriors across the seas will send us arms — at Detroit for us, at Pensacola for you." When this happened, he declared, "I will stamp my foot and the very earth shall shake." The impact of the emotional address was palpable. According to one eyewitness, "Not a word was uttered when he closed; no one applauded; no one replied; but a thousand warriors, the 'stoics of the woods,' shook with emotion, and many a tomahawk was brandished in the air."
Despite his plea, Tecumseh failed to unite diverse Indian groups against the United States. After the Shawnee helped the British lay siege to Fort Detroit in eastern Michigan in one of the first major engagements of the war, American victories along the Canadian border forced the British and Indians to retreat into Canada. There, important disagreements emerged between the two allies over strategy and tactics. While Tecumseh's dream of halting American expansion died with him at the Battle of the Thames in October 1813, the Anglo-Indian alliance he spent the last years of his life cultivating continued.
In the spring of 1814, Napoléon Bonaparte abdicated the French throne, temporarily bringing peace to Europe and enabling Great Britain to focus its attention on the American war. Momentum soon turned in favor of the British. In August, after capturing Washington, D.C., redcoats burned and destroyed the city's most prominent public buildings, including the recently completed US Capitol. Among the incendiaries in the nation's capital were fugitive slaves from the Chesapeake Bay area, referred to as the "internal enemy" by Alan Taylor in his study of the War of 1812 in Virginia. Numbering in the hundreds, they served the British in a variety of capacities, including as scouts, spies, soldiers, and sailors.
The courage and determination of these fugitives along the eastern shores of Maryland and Virginia initially surprised the British, who immediately arranged for the conveyance of these refugees aboard one of His Majesty's ships. "The slaves continue to come off by every opportunity," wrote Royal Navy captain Robert Barrie before revealing his plan to send the women and children to the British colony of Bermuda for safety. The men he intended to use militarily, noting, "Amongst the Slaves are several very intelligent fellows who are willing to act as local guides should their Services be required in that way, and if their assertions be true, there is no doubt but the Blacks of Virginia & Maryland would cheerfully take up Arms & join us against the Americans." Barrie allowed slaveowners to approach their slaves under flags of truce and try to convince them to abandon the British, but, he noted with a bit of pride, "Not a single black would return to his former owner."
Though sparse, some evidence of the fate of the fugitive slaves who climbed aboard the British ships survives. In 1837, Charles Ball penned one of the important fugitive slave narratives of the antebellum era, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man, but decades earlier he was serving as a free man in the US Navy when he witnessed "several thousand black people" disappear beyond British lines. Ball recalled in his memoir, "None of these people were ever regained by their owners, as the British naval officers treated them as free people." After a local slaveowner lost almost all of her one hundred slaves, Ball joined a "deputation of gentlemen" that approached the British fleet "for the purpose of inducing her slaves to return to her service." Once on board one of the vessels, Ball encountered hundreds of escaped slaves on the main deck and encouraged them to return to their owners. Because "their heads were full of notions of liberty," however, they refused and instead tried to convince him to accompany them to one of Britain's Caribbean colonies. For reasons never explained, Ball declined these entreaties, choosing instead to continue his service in the American rather than the British armed forces.
Ball incorrectly asserted that all of the slaves who embarked on British vessels headed for the West Indies. To the contrary, many men of fighting age volunteered in the Corps of Colonial Marines, a unit of black enlisted men and white officers organized by Vice Admiral Alexander Cochrane. To attract recruits, the commander-in-chief of the Royal Navy's North American Station issued a proclamation in April 1814, which British agents distributed to black people along the southern Atlantic and Gulf coasts. "WHEREAS it has been represented to me, that many Persons now resident in the United States, have expressed a desire to withdraw therefrom," the official decree began, "all those who may be disposed to emigrate from the UNITED STATES will, with their Families, be received on board of His Majesty's Ships or Vessels of War, or at the Military may be established, upon or near the Coast of the UNITED STATES." Once under the protection of the British, the former slaves "would have their choice of either entering into His Majesty's Sea or Land Forces, or of being sent as FREE Settlers to the British Possessions in North America or the West Indies, where they will meet with all due encouragement."
The reasons behind Cochrane's abolitionist plan were several, though two in particular stand out. First was military necessity. While the Americans hesitated to employ large numbers of black troops for fear they would inspire further slave resistance, the British quickly seized the opportunity just as they had done four decades before. At the outset of the American Revolution, the royal governor of Virginia, Lord John Murray Dunmore, issued a proclamation similar to Cochrane's that promised freedom to all "Servants, Negroes, or others" who aided in the suppression of the colonial rebellion. Several years later, the commander-in-chief of the British Army, General Sir Henry Clinton, offered freedom to all slaves who escaped to the British, regardless of whether they volunteered for military service. As a result of these and other actions, thousands of enslaved colonists undermined the American independence movement by joining the British and depriving their owners of a valuable source of labor and military manpower. History seemed to repeat itself during the War of 1812, when Cochrane's proclamation inspired as many as five thousand fugitive slaves to emigrate from the United States and become free British subjects.
The second motive behind the decision to liberate and enlist American slaves was British exceptionalism. Britons prided themselves on Great Britain's status as a world power and its advancements in the area of political freedom. Yet the revolt of the thirteen North American colonies challenged the idea that Great Britain was in the vanguard of liberty. After American independence, therefore, the British relished opportunities to assist those who were denied freedom in the United States — the new and self-proclaimed land of the free. Writing about Great Britain's early efforts to secure black volunteers, historian Gerald Horne concludes that London gained important advantages over its former colonies "by staking out a more progressive position on abolition."
Whatever the reason, the results of the British policy were profound. During the War of 1812, a knowledgeable American sailor summarized the frustration many American troops felt when confronting an enemy that better epitomized the ideals they claimed as their own. The British, he confessed, were the true republicans. "It is all liberty and equality with them; they fight the battles of the world all for freedom." Unlike the Americans, who resisted fighting alongside darker-skinned people they believed to be inferior, the British took "all sorts in their camp — the Indians, the mulattoes, negroes, and whomsoever they can get."
The practice of arming slaves led to some unexpected results, such as convincing British combatants to reconsider their negative views of black people. While stationed along the Chesapeake shore, Rear Admiral George Cockburn begged Cochrane to reconsider his plan to free slaves regardless of whether they chose to enlist in His Majesty's Service. Cockburn believed that slaves lacked courage and would never risk "joining us in Arms." Within a matter of days, however, his attitude changed. Upon the first sight of British vessels, slaves in Maryland and Virginia abandoned their owners and overseers by the thousands, despite the risk of being captured or killed. Those enslaved men who reached the British and enlisted as soldiers were "getting on astonishingly, and are really very fine Fellows," Cockburn noted. "They have induced me to alter the bad opinion I had of the whole of their Race." The admiral's change of mind was so extreme that after several engagements with the American army, he claimed to prefer the newly minted black Colonial Marines to the more seasoned white Royal Marines, admitting, "They are stronger Men and War and Resistance 22 more trust worthy for we are sure they will not desert whereas I am sorry to say we have Many Instances of our Marines walking over to the Enemy."
While the British took great pride in His Majesty's black volunteers, the sight of fugitive slaves in redcoats horrified American citizens and officials, prompting charges that Great Britain had crossed the bounds of civilized warfare. In an essay on the causes of the War of 1812, US secretary of the treasury James Alexander Dallas accused the British of inciting a slave insurrection. To make his point he invoked the Haitian Revolution — a revolt of nearly half a million slaves at the turn of the nineteenth century, which birthed the independent nation of Haiti. Dallas argued that basic humanitarian impulses should have discouraged the British from trying to subject the South to a similar cataclysm, one that would result in the extermination of the white race, as it had done in Haiti. Referring to Cochrane's decree, he remonstrated, "Yet, in a formal proclamation issued by the commander in chief of his Britannic majesty's squadrons, upon the American station, the slaves of the American planters were invited to join the British standard, in a covert phraseology, that afforded but a slight veil for the real design."
Despite Dallas's claim, the British had no intention of inciting a slave revolt and actually discouraged such an event from taking place. They wanted black volunteers, however, and during the war's second year intensified their recruiting efforts by opening an additional front against the United States along Florida's Gulf Coast. From there they intended to recruit, arm, and train fugitive slaves from Georgia and South Carolina and then send them back across the American border alongside regular British troops and allied Indian warriors to destroy the South. To put this plan into motion, British officials ordered the establishment of a headquarters on the eastern bank of the Apalachicola River. Located fifteen miles from the Gulf of Mexico atop a ten-to fifteen-foot-high cliff, the site was called Achackwheithle by local Indians, but the Spanish referred to it as "the hill of beautiful view or Prospect Bluff."
Construction of the British Post began after British forces arrived at Prospect Bluff in May 1814, seized a trading post belonging to John Forbes & Company, and welcomed several of its enslaved employees into their ranks. Over the next several months, British soldiers, Indian warriors, and fugitive slaves carved an opening out of a vast swampland lying beneath a canopy of hundred-foot-tall pine trees. By the end of the summer, the compound consisted of a square-shaped moat enclosing a large field several acres in size. A four-foot-tall wooden stockade ran along the entire length of the moat and included two bastions on its northeastern and southeastern corners. Scattered near the shore were several stone structures, including soldiers' barracks and a "large store building" measuring forty-eight by twenty-four feet. Several hundred feet inland stood a substantial circular armory — known as a magazine — designed to protect the 73 kegs of gunpowder and 180 stands of arms recently delivered to the site.
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Table of Contents
List of Figures ix
Introduction 1
1 War and Resistance 15
2 The British Post on Prospect Bluff 47
3 A Free Black Community 75
4 Fighting to the Death 103
5 The Battle Continues 129
6 Slavery or Freedom 157
Epilogue 181
Acknowledgments 191
List of Abbreviations 193
Notes 195
Index 245
About the Author 253
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