The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community - Hardcover

Clavin, Matthew J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1479837334 ISBN 13: 9781479837335

Verlag: New York University Press, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

The dramatic story of the United States’ destruction of a free and independent community of fugitive slaves in Spanish Florida

In the aftermath of the War of 1812, Major General Andrew Jackson ordered a joint United States army-navy expedition into Spanish Florida to destroy a free and independent community of fugitive slaves. The result was the Battle of Negro Fort, a brutal conflict among hundreds of American troops, Indian warriors, and black rebels that culminated in the death or re-enslavement of nearly all of the fort’s inhabitants. By eliminating this refuge for fugitive slaves, the United States government closed an escape valve that African Americans had utilized for generations. At the same time, it intensified the subjugation of southern Native Americans, including the Creeks, Choctaws, and Seminoles. Still, the battle was significant for another reason as well.

During its existence, Negro Fort was a powerful symbol of black freedom that subverted the racist foundations of an expanding American slave society. Its destruction reinforced the nation’s growing commitment to slavery, while illuminating the extent to which ambivalence over the institution had disappeared since the nation’s founding. Indeed, four decades after declaring that all men were created equal, the United States destroyed a fugitive slave community in a foreign territory for the first and only time in its history, which accelerated America’s transformation into a white republic. The Battle of Negro Fort places the violent expansion of slavery where it belongs, at the center of the history of the early American republic.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Matthew J. Clavin is Professor of History at the University of Houston and the author of The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community, Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers, and Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution.

Matthew J. Clavin, Professor of History at the University of Houston, is the author of Aiming for Pensacola and Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War.

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The Battle of Negro Fort

The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community

By Matthew J. Clavin

New York University Press

Copyright © 2019 New York University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4798-3733-5

Contents

List of Figures, ix, 
Introduction, 1, 
1 War and Resistance, 15, 
2 The British Post on Prospect Bluff, 45, 
3 A Free Black Community, 71, 
4 Fighting to the Death, 103, 
5 The Battle Continues, 129, 
6 Slavery or Freedom, 157, 
Epilogue, 181, 
Acknowledgments, 191, 
List of Abbreviations, 193, 
Notes, 195, 
Index, 245, 
About the Author, 

CHAPTER 1

WAR AND RESISTANCE

In January 1815, Andrew Jackson's motley collection of army regulars, militiamen, Indians, pirates, and free people of color were engaged in defending New Orleans from an invading British force more than twice its size. At the same time, Niles' Weekly Register, a popular national periodical published in Baltimore, Maryland, warned of a simultaneous attack against the southern United States originating in Spanish Florida. Though nominally neutral during the War of 1812, the colonial governments of East and West Florida seemed to have chosen sides when they allowed a British naval fleet to gather at the mouth of the Apalachicola River with fourteen thousand troops, "a considerable part of them blacks." The vessels brought arms, ammunition, and other "presents," which the British intended for the Indians and slaves they expected to recruit nearby. With the American army focused on New Orleans, the redcoats planned to arouse "the savages and negroes" along Florida's Gulf Coast "for the purpose of murdering women and children on the inland frontiers of Georgia." Or so claimed Niles' Weekly Register.

For American settlers, the fear of Indians and slaves was part and parcel of life on the southern frontier. But British actions during the War of 1812 made the possibility of a combined Indian-slave assault across the United States' southern border a distinct reality. When the American government declared war on Great Britain in June 1812, the British responded indifferently. The Napoleonic Wars in Europe had diverted the empire's attention from its former American colonies for more than a decade, and now the government was reluctant to join another costly military campaign. Only an American invasion of Canada in June 1812 succeeded in arousing Great Britain, initiating a prolonged fight between the two rivals. With resources stretched thin, Great Britain early decided on a policy of arming and recruiting Native Americans, African Americans, and anyone else willing to volunteer for His Majesty's Service. By filling their ranks with America's subject people, the British hoped to produce a form of "psychological warfare to force the American government to terms."

From the opening of the war, Indians across North America rallied to the British cause because of their common enemy. Westward expansion meant that by the opening of the nineteenth century, some four hundred thousand American citizens — roughly 10 percent of the US population — lived west of the Appalachian Mountains. In the Northwest Territory, white encroachment on Indian land increasingly brought native people into contact with British merchants and officials, who manned a series of forts along the Canadian border and who also abhorred the new arrivals. In an effort to slow the Americans' advance, the British provided food, weapons, and other essential goods to the territory's indigenous people, who then harassed and intimidated settlers. "We have had but one opinion as the cause of the depredations of the Indians," read an article circulated on the eve of the War of 1812. "They are instigated and supported by the British."

Among the beneficiaries of Great Britain's generosity were the Shawnee, an Algonquian-speaking people who in the eighteenth century migrated from various points to the Ohio River Valley. At the opening of the nineteenth century, the Shawnee were inspired by their leader Tecumseh, a charismatic war chief, and his religiously inspired brother, Tenskwatawa, or the Prophet. Under their leadership, the group launched a historic movement to unite Indian people across tribal lines and to join the British in vanquishing the United States. Tecumseh thought violence was the best way to fight for the Shawnees' interests whereas his younger brother sought a religiously inspired cultural revolution, but both dreamed of an expansive pan-Indian alliance extending from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

In 1811, Tecumseh traveled hundreds of miles to convince Indians below the Ohio River to join the anti-American confederation. In a fiery speech before hundreds of Creek chiefs and warriors in the old Indian town of Tuckabatchee, Alabama, the Shawnee leader challenged his listeners to reclaim the land and culture of their ancestors. The Muscogee were once a powerful people, Tecumseh began, but they had buried their bows and arrows in the graves of their fathers. Because the "white race" had seized their land, corrupted their women, and trampled on the bones of the dead, Tecumseh demanded, "War now! War always! War on the living! War on the dead!" Referring to Great Britain and Spain, Tecumseh informed his rapt audience, "Two mighty warriors across the seas will send us arms — at Detroit for us, at Pensacola for you." When this happened, he declared, "I will stamp my foot and the very earth shall shake." The impact of the emotional address was palpable. According to one eyewitness, "Not a word was uttered when he closed; no one applauded; no one replied; but a thousand warriors, the 'stoics of the woods,' shook with emotion, and many a tomahawk was brandished in the air."

Despite his plea, Tecumseh failed to unite diverse Indian groups against the United States. After the Shawnee helped the British lay siege to Fort Detroit in eastern Michigan in one of the first major engagements of the war, American victories along the Canadian border forced the British and Indians to retreat into Canada. There, important disagreements emerged between the two allies over strategy and tactics. While Tecumseh's dream of halting American expansion died with him at the Battle of the Thames in October 1813, the Anglo-Indian alliance he spent the last years of his life cultivating continued.

In the spring of 1814, Napoléon Bonaparte abdicated the French throne, temporarily bringing peace to Europe and enabling Great Britain to focus its attention on the American war. Momentum soon turned in favor of the British. In August, after capturing Washington, D.C., redcoats burned and destroyed the city's most prominent public buildings, including the recently completed US Capitol. Among the incendiaries in the nation's capital were fugitive slaves from the Chesapeake Bay area, referred to as the "internal enemy" by Alan Taylor in his study of the War of 1812 in Virginia. Numbering in the hundreds, they served the British in a variety of capacities, including as scouts, spies, soldiers, and sailors.

The courage and determination of these fugitives along the eastern shores of Maryland and Virginia initially surprised the British, who immediately arranged for the conveyance of these refugees aboard one of His Majesty's ships. "The slaves continue to come off by every opportunity," wrote Royal Navy captain Robert Barrie before revealing his plan to send the women and children to the British colony of Bermuda for safety. The men he intended to use militarily, noting, "Amongst the Slaves...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: New York University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1479837334
• ISBN 13: 9781479837335
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchbär; info@buchbaer.de; ; Weberstr. 67; Osnabrück; 49084; Deutschland