The Second Spanish Period
1784-1821
Part Eight
Road to the First Seminole War
Road to the First Seminole War
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| Attack on the "Negro Fort" by artist Jackson Walker |
British Agitators in
Florida and the Prospect Bluff Fort
After
the capture and death of William Augustus Bowles, Americans in Georgia and
other borderlands of the United States still worried about more British agitators in
Spanish Florida attempting to arm and guide Indians against them. Only
thirty-five years after the American Revolution, American hatred of the British
was still strong. The upcoming First Seminole War was a military action to
punish hostile Indians in Spanish Florida, but it was also about the
eradication of the British from the Gulf of Mexico and the borderlands which
made the war a kind of continuation of the War of 1812.[1] Present-day
Wakulla County played an important role in the First Seminole War, as General Andrew Jackson
seized Fort San Marcos from the Spanish, executed two Britons, and two Creek
chiefs there. The banks of the Wakulla River was home to a few warring villages
of Red Sticks, such as Prophet Town, also known as Francis Town. The Spanish
empire was falling apart, and one after the other, their colonies in the
Americas gained their independence. The United States desperately wanted the
Floridas, and was worried that the Spanish might cede them to another foreign
power, such as Great Britain. During the War of 1812, British activities in the
Floridas made Americans even more nervous.
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| The Prophet Josiah Francis - self portrait |
In present-day Alabama, Colonel Andrew Jackson
gained the nickname “Old Hickory”, and national fame, when he defeated the Red
Sticks, Creeks who refused the “American way of life”, at the Battle of
Horseshoe Bend in 1814. The resulting Treaty of Fort Jackson, ceded much of the
Creek territory in central, and southern Alabama, as well as southern Georgia,
to the United States. Creek refugees began to move out of the new United States
territory and into Spanish Florida, joining the Seminoles and Miccosukees.
Following their defeat, the British interceded and revitalized the Red Sticks
that had fled into the Floridas. Red Stick leader Josiah Francis had intended
to surrender to U.S. forces, but after the British arrived with their support,
the Red Sticks took back to the warpath.
In
1814, the War of 1812 was still raging between the United States and Great
Britain. As the Spanish did not have the means to stop them, the English were in
Spanish Florida meddling in the affairs of the Seminole and Creeks, as well as
fugitive slaves who ran away to Florida from their American masters to the
north. In 1804, an associate of John Forbes and Company, William Hambly, opened
a store at Prospect Bluff on the eastern shore of the Apalachicola River, near present-day Sumatra in Franklin County.
During the War of 1812, British Admiral Lord Cochrane ordered Captain George
Woodbine to sail up the Apalachicola River to take over Hambly’s store at
Prospect Bluff and to start handing out arms and supplies to their Creeks,
Seminole, and maroon allies. He was ordered by the British government to
recruit and train Indians and maroons into a military force to be used to
invade the southern United States. The British built a massive fort at Prospect
Bluff, which sat on a cliff overlooking the Apalachicola River. The fort had an
earthen parapet fifteen feet high and eighteen feet thick, with a wooden
stockade for further protection.
Several
renegade Creeks had informed U.S. authorities that they planned on continuing
the war against the Americans, a threat that put fear in the minds of American
frontiersmen, who blamed the British for agitating the Indians. During the War
of 1812, a very large group of Red Stick Creeks gathered at Pensacola. Fearing
that the U.S. may attack the city because of this, the Spanish governor invited
the British in to help protect the West Florida capitol city. From Prospect
Bluff, Woodbine and Nicholls sailed to Pensacola and occupied the city in
September of 1814. After around seven-hundred Creeks and Seminoles came to
their aid, Nicholls decided to send Woodbine with a hundred marines and
three-hundred Indians to attack the American Fort Bowyer at Mobile Point.
Unfortunately for the redcoats, General Andrew Jackson had recently
re-garrisoned Fort Bowyer and was prepared to defend it. The British attack on
Fort Bowyer was repelled, and they fled back to Pensacola suffering thirty dead
and forty wounded. U.S. casualties were four dead, five wounded. Jackson wasted
no time in pursing the limping British to Pensacola with a force numbering around
four-thousand. In early November of 1814, Andrew Jackson seized Pensacola. The
British left Pensacola, and Jackson headed for New Orleans, where he would gain
great fame after the defeat of the British during the Battle of New Orleans in
1815.
After
the British were driven out of Pensacola by Jackson, they returned to Prospect
Bluff on the Apalachicola River. After the War of 1812 ended in February of
1815, the British left the Gulf of Mexico all together, except for Lieutenant
Colonel Edward Nicolls in West Florida. Nicholls ordered for the fort on
Prospect Bluff to be strengthened, and stocked with cannon, muskets, and
ammunition. The fort consumed two acres, built in a square with its ramparts
and parapets strengthened by wood and earth. The British placed nine to twelve
cannons to be mounted on the fort, as well as several mortars and howitzers.
Inside the massive fort were several houses and barracks made of stone. A group
of three-hundred runaway slaves, or maroons, and Creeks, Seminoles, and Miccosukees
were issued red British military coats. The British still aimed to use the
native peoples and maroons as a military force, and intended to give them the
fortification, arms and ammunition, in order to keep harassing Americans across
the border.
Nicolls
drafted a treaty for the Creeks and Seminoles in Florida that stated Great
Britain would recognize the Florida Indians as an independent nation, allies of
King George, and they would continue to supply them with arms and goods. In
return, the Indians were told to cut all ties to the United States and Spain,
and to consider them their enemies. Nicholls then began to write threating
letters to U.S. Indian Agent Benjamin Hawkins, stating that any American effort
to survey the lands acquired by the United States, via the Treaty of Fort
Jackson, would be met with Indian violence. Hawkins considered Nicholls’s
activities in Florida a violation of the Treaty of Ghent, the treaty that ended
the War of 1812, and he informed Nicholls that British aggressors along U.S.
border, such as himself, would not be allowed.[2]
The Destruction of the
Prospect Bluff Fort
In
the summer of 1815, the British government ordered Nicholls to withdraw from
Florida. But, even after his departure, Americans living near the Florida border
still complained about Indian raids killing their cattle and stealing their
horses. Spanish citizens in Florida also launched several complaints about
British officers in Florida. Before Nicholls departed from Fort Prospect, he
turned the fort over to the Indians and maroons. By 1816, the maroons had farms
surrounding the fort, which extended for miles along the Apalachicola River.[3]
Under the leadership of a maroon named Garcon, around three-hundred and fifty
people occupied, what white Americans referred to as the “negro fort.”
The
prospect of an armed slave rebellion frightened slave owners in the United
States, and once they heard that a garrison from the “negro fort” had attacked
and killed a group of American sailors, General Andrew Jackson decided the
fortification must be destroyed. Jackson felt it was Spain’s duty to eradicate
this fort, and on April 23, 1816, Jackson wrote to the Spanish Governor of West
Florida, Mauricio de Zuniga, notifying him that “the principles of good faith
which always insure good neighborhood between Nations require the immediate and
prompt interference of the Spanish Authority; to destroy or remove from our
frontier this Banditti, put an end to an evil of so serious a nature, and
return to our citizens and the friendly Indians inhabiting our Territory those
Negros now in the said fort and which have been stolen and enticed from them….I
reflect that this Banditti’s conduct will not be tolerated by our government
and if not put down by the Spanish Authority will compel us in self Defense to
destroy them.”[4] Zuniga replied to Jackson
on May 26, that West Florida did not have the means to take on the expedition;
that “I cannot act unless I receive the orders of my Captain General and the
necessary Supplies, in order to undertake the Expedition with the probable
prospect of ending it successfully.” Jackson did not like Zuniga’s reply, and in
a letter pinned to Brigadier General Edmund P. Gaines on April 8, he authorized
the destruction of Fort Prospect.
Gaines
then ordered Colonel Duncan Lamont Clinch, with the help of the friendly Creeks
under the command of William McIntosh, to build an encampment, just north of
the Florida-Georgia line, on the banks of the Flint River. Gaines named it Camp
Crawford and planned on supplying it via New Orleans, which meant a supply ship
would need to enter the Apalachicola River from the Gulf of Mexico, and would
have to pass Fort Prospect in order to reach Camp Crawford. This would allow
the U.S. Army to keep their eyes on the Fort Prospect, and if the fort happened
to fire on them, they had an excuse to destroy it. That scenario is exactly
what happened in late July of 1816.
Colonel
Clinch, with a force of about two-hundred and fifty men, including one-hundred
and fifty Lower Creeks, who were friendly to the US, marched down the banks of
the Apalachicola River to meet a supply ship and protect its passage through
the area. By July 10, the supply ships had arrived and were waiting for Clinch
at the mouth of the Apalachicola River. Once Colonel Clinch neared Prospect
Bluff, his troops were fired on, which prevented his march to continue. Clinch
decided to request gunboat support for the march. The U.S. met the gun boats at
Fort Prospect, and had two warships position themselves across the river from
the fortification. The Americans asked Garcon for a parley, but the fort’s
leader stated that he would destroy any vessel flying the American flag. The
two sides then began exchanging fire. The fort’s cannon kept missing the
American vessels due to the fact that the men were not very well trained in
artillery practices. The American warships began to fire hotshots, cannon balls
that were heated to a glowing red.
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| The destruction of the fort on Prospect Bluff (Negro Fort) |
The ninth hotshot managed to land directly in
the fort’s powder magazine, and the resulting explosion leveled the fort,
killing two-hundred and seventy men, women, and children instantly, and
wounding sixty-one. Red Stick Creeks and their Seminole allies would later
blame the John Forbes and Company employee William Hambly for pointing out to the
Americans the location of the powder magazine. It is said that the explosion
could be heard in Pensacola, over a hundred miles away. The Americans then
stormed the ruins, taking everybody who was not dead prisoner, and into
slavery, claiming that the people of Georgia owned their ancestors. A number of
black leaders were handed over to the U.S. friendly Creeks to be tortured and
killed.[5]
Garcon himself was executed by firing squad.
Sources used:
Belko, W. S. (2011). Epilogue to the War of 1812. In
W. S. Belko, America's Hundred Years' War: U.S. Expansion to the Gulf Coast
and the Fate of the Seminole, 1763-1858 (pp. 54-102). Gainesville:
University Press of Florida.
Moser, H. D., Hoth, D. R., & Hoemann, G. H.
(1994). The Papers of Andrew Jackson, Volume IV, 1816-1820. Knoxville:
The University of Tennessee Press.
Remini, R. V. (2008). Andrew Jackson: A Biography.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dailey, R. C., Morrell,
L. R., & Cockrell, W. (n.d.). The St. Marks Cemetery.
[1]
Belko, p.55
[2] Ibid p.64
[3]
Ibid. p.71
[4]
Jackson to Zuniga, April 23, 1816, The Andrew Jackson Papers V.4, p.22-23
[5]
Remini, p.137
[6]
Dailey, Morrell, and Cockrell, The St.
Marks Cemetery, p.9
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