Fort Gadsden is located in Franklin County, Florida, on the Apalachicola River. The site contains the ruins of two forts, and has been known by several other names at various times, includingProspect Bluff Fort, Nichol’s Fort, British Post, Negro Fort, African Fort, and Fort Apalachicola.

Listed in the National Register of Historic Places, the Fort Gadsden Historic Site is located in Apalachicola National Forest and is managed by the U.S. Forest Service. It was named a National Historic Landmark in 1972.

During the War of 1812, the British hoped to recruit the Seminole Indians as allies in their war against the United States. In August 1814, a force of over 100 officers and men led by a lieutenant colonel of Royal Marines, Edward Nicolls, was sent into the Apalachicola River region in Spanish Florida, where they began to aid and train local Indians. Although Nicolls claimed he rallied large numbers of Indians, his efforts bore little fruit in terms of actual fighting, and the completion of the war ended his mission a few months after his arrival.

Before Nicolls left, however, he built a fort at Prospect Bluff, 15 miles above the mouth of the Apalachicola and sixty miles below U.S. territory, which he equipped with cannon, guns, and ammunition. The fort, originally known as the British Post, served as a base for British troops and for recruitment of ex-slaves into the new Corps of Colonial Marines, and as a rallying point to encourage the localSeminole Indian tribes to attack the United States. When the British evacuated Florida in the spring of 1815, they left the well-constructed and fully-armed fort on the Apalachicola River in the hands of their allies, about 300 fugitive slaves, including members of the disbanded Corps of Colonial Marines, and 30 Seminole and Choctaw Indians. News of the “Negro Fort” (as it came to be called) attracted as many as 800 black fugitives who settled in the surrounding area.

Under the command of a black man named Garson and a Choctaw chief (whose name is unknown), the inhabitants of Negro Fort launched raids across the Georgia border. The fort, located as it was near the U.S. border, was seen as a threat to Southern slavery. The U.S. considered it “a center of hostility and above all a threat to the security of their slaves.” The Savannah Journal wrote of it:

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. 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?

As the American expedition drew near the fort on July 27, 1816, black militiamen had already been deployed and began skirmishing with the column before regrouping back at their base. At the same time the gunboats under Master Loomis moved upriver to position for a siege bombardment. Negro Fort was occupied by about 330 people during the time of battle. At least 200 were freedmen, armed with ten cannons and dozens of muskets. They were accompanied by thirty or so Seminole and Choctaw warriors under a chief. The remaining were women and children, the families of the black militia.

 

An American map of the later Fort Gadsden next to the older Negro Fort.

Before beginning an engagement General Gaines first requested a surrender, the leader of the fort was an African named Garson and he refused. Garson told Gaines that he had orders from the British military to hold the post and at the same time raised the Union Jack and a red flag to symbolize that no quarter would be given. Negro Fort was considered heavily defended by the Americans so after forming positions around one side of the post, the navy gunboats were ordered to start the bombardment. After this the defenders opened fire with their cannons but they were not experienced artillerymen and thus were not effective.

It was daytime when Master Jairus ordered his gunners to open fire, after only five to nine rounds of hot shot, a cannon ball entered the fort’s powder magazine. The ensuing explosion was massive and destroyed the entire post. Almost all of the occupants were killed or wounded and just after the American column and the Creeks charged and captured the surviving defenders. General Gaines later said that the “explosion was awful and the scene horrible beyond description.” There apparently were no American casualties.

Aftermath

 

A plaque at the site of Negro Fort marking the location of the powder magazine.

Garson was executed by firing squad because of his responsibility for the Watering Hole Massacre and the Choctaw Chief was handed over to the Creeks who killed and scalped him. The survivors were taken prisoner and put back into slavery. Neamathla, a leader of the Seminole at Fowlton, was angered by the death of some of his people at Negro Fort so he issued a warning to General Gaines that if any of his forces crossed the Flint River, they would be attacked and defeated. The threat provoked the general to send 250 men to arrest the chief in November 1817 but a battle arose and it became the official opening engagement of the First Seminole War.

In early 1816 the U.S. built Fort Scott on the west bank of the Flint River in Georgia for the purpose of guarding the Spanish-American border. Supplying the fort, however, was a problem; to take materials overland required traveling through unsettled wilderness. Major General Andrew Jackson, the military commander of the southern district, preferred supplying Fort Scott by boat over the Apalachicola River in Spanish territory, which had the advantages of being both easier and of providing a likely casus belli for destroying the Negro Fort. As expected, when a naval force attempted the passage on July 17, 1816, it was fired on by the Negro Fort, and four U. S. soldiers were killed.

Ten days later, Andrew Jackson ordered Brigadier General Edmund P. Gaines at Fort Scott to destroy the Negro Fort. The American expedition included Creek Indians from Coweta, who were induced to join by the promise that they would get what they could salvage from the fort if they helped in its capture. On July 27, 1816, following a series of skirmishes, the American forces and their Creek allies launched an all-out attack under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Duncan Clinch, with support from a naval convoy commanded by Sailing Master Jarius Loomis.

The two sides exchanged cannon fire, but the shots of the inexperienced black gunners failed to hit their targets. A “hot shot” (a cannonball heated to a red glow) from the American forces entered the opening to the fort’s powder magazine, igniting an explosion that was heard more than 100 miles (160 km) away in Pensacola, and destroyed the fort, killing all but 30 of 300 occupants. Garson and the Choctaw chief, among the few who survived the carnage, were handed over to the Creeks, who “Scalped the Choctaw alive and then fatally stabbed him; Garson was shot in execution style.” Other survivors were returned to slavery.

The Creeks salvaged 2,500 muskets, 50 carbines, 400 pistols, and 500 swords from the ruins of the fort, increasing their power in the region. The Seminoles, who had fought with the blacks, were conversely weakened by the loss of their allies, and Creek involvement in the attack increased tension between the two tribes. Seminole anger at the Americans for the fort’s destruction would contribute to the breakout of the First Seminole War a year later.

Spain protested the violation of its soil, but according to historian John K. Mahon, it “lacked the power to do more.”

In 1818 General Jackson directed Lieutenant James Gadsden to rebuild the fort, which he did on a nearby site. Jackson was so pleased with the result that he named the location Fort Gadsden.During the American Civil War, Confederate troops occupied the fort until July 1863, when an outbreak of malaria forced its abandonment.

By William Loren Katz

This Christmas Eve marks the 172nd anniversary of a battle for liberty in 1837 on the banks of Lake Okeechobee, Florida, that helped shape the United States of America. An estimated 380 to 480 freedom-fighting African and Indian members of the Seminole nation threw back an advance of more than a thousand US Army and other troops led by Colonel Zachary Taylor, a future President of the United States. The Seminoles so badly mauled the invaders that Taylor ordered his soldiers to fall back, bury their dead, tend to their wounded . . . and ponder the largest single US defeat in decades of Indian warfare. The battle of Lake Okeechobee is not a story you will find in school or college textbooks so it has slipped from the public consciousness. But in a country that cherishes its freedom-fighting heritage, Black and Red Seminoles of Florida sent everyone a message that deserves to be remembered and honored.

Around 1776 the Seminole nation had reconstituted itself as a multicultural nation by aligning itself with escaped Africans who had long lived in the penninsula. Beginning in the early 18th century hundreds of African Americans had fled bondage in Georgia and the Carolinas to find refuge and a productive life in Florida. Though Spain claimed Florida, it was an ungoverned land in which Native Americans roamed freely as did slave runaways, pirates and whites who rejected the limitation established by European invaders.

Generations of slave runaways established plantations in Florida, raised cattle and horses, brought up their children and took care of their elderly. For fifty miles along the Appalachacola river, African people ran plantations, and pursued a healthy, happy family life. When the Seminoles, a break-away segment of the Creek Nation, arrived in the penninsula around the time of the American Revolution, Africans were on hand to instruct them in methods of rice cultivation they had learned in Senegambia and Sierra Leone. Based on this cooperation, two peoples of color hammered out an agricultural and military alliance against US slaveholder posses that periodically raided their communities.

In 1816 General Andrew Jackson, hero of New Orleans and commander of US Armies in Florida, determined to terminate this resistance on the southern flank of the US border. To Jackson and slaveholders who dominated the federal government, Florida’s free Seminole people of color constituted a clear and present danger to the US slave system. They saw these free communities as holding a beacon light that could entice thousands of runaways to bolt Georgia, the Carolinas and Louisiana. Even more, the Seminoles offered escapees a safe haven. Perhaps most important, since Africans played a leadership role in the newly-integrated Seminole Nation, their villages stood as a successful, alternative societies, and refuted white claims that Africans were meant to be slaves.

Prodded by slaveholders, Washington officials connived at destroyng the Semnole alliance, and re-enslavement of the African members. Beginning in 1811 President James Madison, Virginia slaveholder and father of the U.S. Constitution, provided covert US support to this military effort. Finally, in 1819, the United States purchased Florida from Spain, and prepared to settle scores with the Seminoles. The Seminole nation, however, refused to capitulate, and rejected any surrender its African brothers and sisters members.

The result was three Seminoles wars that lasted from 1816 to 1858, at times tied up half of the US Army, cost the Congress $40,000,000 and took 1500 US military deaths. This also represented the single largest and longest explosion of slave resistance in the United States.

Throughout Africans played key roles. In 1837, when US troops were engaged in the second Seminole wars U.S. General Sidney Thomas Jesup, the best informed US officer in the field, wrote “This, you may be assured, is a negro and not an Indian war.” He continued:

Throughout my operations I have found the negroes the most active and determined warriors; and during the conferences with the Indian chiefs I ascertained they exercised an almost controlling influence over them.

Because Seminoles fought in a jungle area they knew better than the white invaders, their armies ran circles around their numerically and technologically superior foe. Though they had the added burden of moving their families out of harm’s way, Seminoles soldiers were able to baffle, surprise and humiliate the US army, navy and marines. In its desperation to quell resistance, the US officers ordered the taking of women and children as hostages and the violation other codes of warfare. These tactics did not achieve victory or split the red-black alliance but they indicate that the Seminole war can be viewed as early versions of US intervention and disaster in Vietnam.

In 1837 Chief Osceola and other Seminole leaders were seized coming with a white flag to a conference called by U.S. authorities. Osceola’s personal bodyguard of 55 at the time included 52 men of African descent. US forces imprisoned the Seminoles in a cell in Castillo de San Marcos, later renamed Fort Marion, in St. Augustine. Osceola, ill and depressed, sat slumped on the floor, his life ebbing away. Army officials also captured another Seminole peace delegation that included two fire-brands of the resistance, Wild Cat or Coacoochee, 25, and his Black sub-chief, John Horse, also 25.

Bilingual, tall, powerfully built and a commanding presence, Horse draped himself in silver amulets, rich sashes and elaborate, bright plumed head shawls. Widely respected for his knowledge of the foe, and a crack shot, Horse occupied a strategic position among the Seminoles. Revered for his often-tested diplomatic talent, calm self-assurance and courage in battle, he also was brother-in-law of Holatoochee, a leading Seminole who had the ear of Miconopy, the nation’s ruler. Chiefs such as Jumper and Holatoochee repeatedly asked Horse to negotiate with US authorities.

From their 18 foot by 33 foot cell at Fort Marion where they were held with two dozen Seminole prisoners, Coacoochee and Horse devised a plan. “We resolved to make our escape or die in the attempt,” Wild Cat later wrote. They took weeks to loosen the iron bar in the jail’s 18 foot roof and create a hole eight inches wide. The heavier prisoners agreed to diet in order to slip through, and some 20 prisoners, including two women, escaped through the opening. For over five days the band made its way southward gathering allies and guns and living “on roots and berries”

U.S. Colonel Zachary Taylor raced after them accompanied by 70 Delaware Indian mercenaries, l80 Missouri riflemen and 800 U.S. regular army soldiers from the Sixth Infantry, the Fourth Infantry and Taylor’s First Infantry Regiment. The day before Christmas US forces located the Seminoles, who had carefully positioned themselves at the northeast corner of Lake Okeechobee. Seminole marksmen were perched in the tall grass or in trees, the sprawling Lake a few hundred yards behind them.

Taylor’s forces advanced through a swampy area and its five foot high razor-edged sawgrass. Movement was impassable for horses, and extremely difficult for humans as soldiers sank up to their thighs in the mud and water beneath them.

At 12:30 in the afternoon of Christmas eve Seminole snipers prepared for battle. The first shot had yet to be fired when the Delawares, sensing disaster, deserted and left. The Missouri riflemen charged toward the Seminoles but a withering fire brought down their commander, many commissioned officers and some of non-commissioned officers. The Tennesseans fled.

Colonel Taylor then ordered his regular army troops forward but they encountered deadly rifle fire. He later reported their earliest barrages brought down “every officer, with one exception, as well as most of the non-commissioned officers” and left “but four . . . untouched.” After a two and a half hour battle in which they had been outnumbered, Semnole forces fell back their canoes and made their escape.

As Christmas Day dawned Colonel Taylor forces counted 26 U.S. dead and 112 wounded, seven dead for each dead Seminole fighter, and the US had taken no prisoners. US troops rounded up 100 Seminole ponies and 600 cattle.

Lake Okeechobee was the US military’s most decisive defeat in more than four decades of warfare in Florida. Four days after his army limped back to Fort Gardner, however, Colonel Taylor claimed victory. He said: “the Indians were driven in every direction.” The US Army accepted his report, and promoted him.

From that point, however, US officers had to recognize the unity and strength of the African-Seminole alliance. Said General Thomas Sidney Jesup, “The negroes rule the Indians, and it is important that they should feel themselves secure; if they should become alarmed and hold out, the war will be resumed.”

Based on his reputation as an “Indian fighter,” Zachary Taylor was elected the 12th President of the United States. Historians continue to distort the battle of Lake Okeechobee. In The Almanac of American History (1983), Arthur Schlesinger Jr. summarized the battle in one inaccurate sentence, “Fighting in the Second Seminole War, General Zachary Taylor defeats a group of Seminoles at Okeechobee Swamp, Florida.”

This is the nation of Patrick Henry and “Give me Liberty or give me death!” The United States was born in struggle against British colonial rule. It proudly declared people had natural rights and dedicated itself to self-determination. The heroic, freedom fighting struggle of the Seminole nation stands as a milestone in the American battle for liberty.