BACKCHARLIE BARNESNEWS NOTESCOMPRESSONIN MEMORIAMFAVORITE PROFARCHIVESUNDERWRITING

 ORIGINAL SEMINOLES

By Dana Peck

About 30 miles upstream from the mouth of the Apalachicola River on the Gulf of Mexico sits Fort Gadsden, built over the ashes of Negro Fort, a British stronghold in 1814 and later a refuge for Seminoles, a group of Indians and Negroes, who had been living in the area for generations.

Lt. Col. Nichols of the British Army built Negro Fort, after he was dispatched to the Panhandle as part of a widespread British plan to recruit Indians and Negroes to serve in the military.

Nichols also constructed the fort to protect the group from marauding slave-catchers, who crossed the Georgia borders to seize men, women and children and make money by selling them to plantation owners.

It appeared to be insignificant to the kidnappers that some of the Indians and Negroes settled along the rich banks of the Apalachicola had been there since the 17th century, indeed, longer, one historian says, than the Israelites had been in exile. In the late 1600s, these "Exiles," as they were called, had escaped slave lands in Carolina and Spanish slave traders along the eastern coast to find freedom.

It also seemed to make no difference in 1816 to Georgia plantation owners and their bounty hunters that the Indians and Negroes had been living for generations in the Spanish Territory and had been accorded the rights of citizens of Spain.

Although the events of the day were ironic - the British building a fort in Florida to protect the Seminoles, free citizens of Spain's territory, from slave-catchers in Georgia - the events that followed the construction of Negro Fort were deadly.

Provoked by the fact that about 800 of those prospering in and around Negro Fort were escaped slaves from Southern plantations, Gen. Andrew Jackson ordered Maj. Gen. Edmund Gaines and Lt. Col. Duncan Clinch to destroy Negro Fort and return the Negroes to Georgia plantation owners.

Clinch, to some, seemed to back off his assignment, but Sailing Master Jairus Loomis took command of the attack, with the following results, according to Joshua Giddings' "The Exiles of Florida": "Mothers and children now shrieked with terror as the roar of cannon, the whistling of balls, the explosion of shells, the war-whoops of the savages, the groans of the wounded and dying, foretold the sad fate that awaited them. The stout-hearted old men cheered and encouraged their friends, declaring that death was to be preferred to slavery."

Loomis reported that of the 334 in the fort, 270 died instantly from the assault; three of the remaining 60 escaped without injury.

Of those killed, 34 were Seminole Indian men, a toll with even more costly results: Seminoles believed that no souls could rest until their deaths had been avenged. As a consequence, the Negro Fort massacre prompted the First Seminole War, which two bloody years later ended with the withdrawal of the U.S. military from Florida.

 Send a letter to the Editor: fstimes@unicomm.fsu.edu

Copyright ©2002 Florida State Times