Negro Fort

On July 27, 1816, a single American cannonball ended the largest free Black community in North America. When the British evacuated Florida after the War of 1812, they left their fort on Prospect Bluff — a strong earthwork and octagonal magazine on the Apalachicola River — armed and supplied in the hands of their allies: about 300 Black men and a band of Seminole and Choctaw warriors. Hundreds of fugitives came down to it; the maroon settlement around 'Negro Fort' may have held 800, and fugitives ran from as far as Tennessee to reach it.

To Georgia slaveholders the fort was intolerable — a beacon of armed freedom sixty miles inside Spanish territory. Andrew Jackson ordered it destroyed, and in July 1816 Colonel Duncan Clinch moved up the river with 500 Lower Creek allies while Navy gunboats under Jairus Loomis closed in. The fort's gunners couldn't find the range. An American shot — accounts describe a heated ball — entered the powder magazine.

The explosion killed some 270 men, women, and children in one blast — among the deadliest single cannon shots in American history. The commander Garson was executed; the surviving fifty were returned to slavery. The United States had invaded a foreign territory to destroy a community of people who had freed themselves. The Army built Fort Gadsden on the ruins; Hurricane Michael tore the trees out in 2018 and unburied the maroon community's artifacts from the roots.

Negro Fort is the archive's Prospect Bluff file — the British-built fort on the Apalachicola that sheltered the largest free Black settlement in North America until a magazine explosion killed 270 in July 1816.