CRITICAL PLACES: PROSPECT BLUFF, FLORIDA

(2024)

The 1816 Massacre at Negro Fort

During the War of 1812 the British built a fort at Prospect Bluff, overlooking the Apalachicola River in Spanish Florida, as a base from which to recruit the local indigenous, maroon, and enslaved population. The offer was for freedom in exchange for joining their forces against the United States. Then in 1815, having lost the war, the British withdrew. They handed the fort over to those of their African American soldiers who chose to stay, fully stocked with provisions, weapons and ammunition. Thus came into being one of the largest early Black freemen communities in North America. For a little over a year those soldiers lived there with their families, manning what now became know as Negro Fort, and peacefully farming along the riverbanks.

The respite was brief as Andrew Jackson, having defeated the British, next moved to annex the Spanish territory. In July 1816 Jackson sent an expedition up the Apalachicola River to capture the fort. Shelling it from the river, one heated cannonball scored a direct hit on the power magazine, setting off a massive explosion that totally destroyed the fort, killing over 300 men, women, and children. Bodies and body parts were scattered over a large area, with some found lodged in the tops of the tall pine trees surrounding the garrison.

The explosion was deemed "accidental," and some, such as John Quincy Adams, even tried to defend what happened by saying that the "fort served as a base for a series of depredations, outages, and murders against American citizens." Yet this official military action, which was perhaps the first mass killing of civilians in modern warfare, can also be seen a turning point in the campaign to abolish slavery. In The Battle of Negro Fort, Matthew Clavin writes of how the growing outrage in the aftermath of this massacre eventually led to the introduction of the term "slavocracy" into the American lexicon, referring to the federal government's dominance by the small but powerful class of southern slaveowners and their northern allies.

Slavocracy is not a word I had been familiar with. To me, speaking in this way of a racially based structural predisposition that shapes policy makes the term seem very much a precursor of Critical Race Theory.

Andrew Jackson had a new fort built to replace Negro Fort, Fort Gadsden, which remained in use until Florida became a U.S. Territory on 1821. The place was then gradually abandoned. Today Prospect Bluff is a National Historic Landmark within the Apalachicola Nation Forest. The site has been closed to the public in the aftermath of a hurricane that struck the area in July 2023. It is also kept closed in an attempt to keep out looters who have been scouring the site for artifacts.

The burial site of the over 300 people killed on July 27, 1816, has not been found.