Show Notes

As white southerners increasingly sought more land to expand the system of plantation slavery across the southern frontier, violence between whites and Indigenous populations intensified in the decades following American Independence. In the borderland of Spanish Florida, a growing number of displaced Native Americans and escaped enslaved people found a multiracial world that offered the perfect conditions for the emergence of the so-called "Negro Fort."

Hosts: Sebastian Garcia and John Lancaster.

Featuring: Matthew Clavin, Jane Landers, Nathaniel Millett, and F. Evan Nooe.

Voice Actors: Kevin Garcia, Brooks Nuzum, and Maddy Poston.

Music by Pixabay artists.

Researched, Written, and Edited by Sebastian Garcia and John Lancaster.

Please help us make our show more discoverable for others by leaving a rating and review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

The Memory of Negro Fort Podcast is produced by UCF graduate history students Sebastian Garcia and John Lancaster and hosted by the UCF Center for Humanities and Digital Research, with additional support from a gift that was made as an extension of the American Historical Association's Sinclair Workshops for Historical Podcasting.

Further Reading:

Clavin, Matthew. The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community. New York University Press, 2019.

Landers, Jane. Black Society in Spanish Florida. University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Millett, Nathaniel. The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and Their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World. University Press of Florida, 2013.

Nooe, F. Evan. Aggression and Sufferings: Settler Violence, Native Resistance, and the Coalescence of the Old South. University of Alabama Press, 2024.

Nora, Pierre. "Between Memory and History." In Realms of Memory, The Construction of the French Past, Volume I: Conflicts and Divisions, translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Columbia University Press, 1996.

Primary Sources:

Augusta Chronicle and Gazette of the State, April 29, 1797, https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn82015220/1797-04-29/ed-1/seq-2/.

Columbian Museum & Savannah Advertiser, April 25, 1797, https://gahistoricnewspapers.galileo.usg.edu/lccn/sn82014741/1797-04-25/ed-1/seq-3/.

The Papers of Andrew Jackson, 1804-1813, edited by Harold D. Moser and Sharon Macpherson. University of Tennessee Press, 1984, https://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=utk_jackson.

"Petition of Mary Brown to the Speaker and Representatives in General Assembly [of Georgia]," 1797, Telamon Cuyler, Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, The University of Georgia Libraries, presented in the Digital Library of Georgia, https://dlg.usg.edu/record/dlg_zlna_tcc016?canvas=0&x=400&y=400&w=1845.

Guest Profiles

Matthew Clavin

Historian

Professor Clavin writes and teaches in the areas of American and Atlantic history, with a focus on the history of race, slavery, and abolition. He has published four books and is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. His most recent publication is Symbols of Freedom: Slavery and Resistance Before the Civil War.

Jane Landers

Historian

Jane Landers is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History and Director of the Slave Societies Digital Archive at Vanderbilt University. Since 2015 she has served as the U.S. member on UNESCO's International Scientific Committee for the Routes of Enslaved Peoples. Her award-winning monographs include Black Society in Spanish Florida and Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions, and she is the co-author or editor of five other books, and numerous articles and book chapters on the history of Africans in the Atlantic World. Her research has been supported by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies, among others. Her research for the National Park Service has documented Africans in the early Spanish explorations of North America and Fort Mose, the first free black town in what is today the United States.

Nathaniel Millett

Historian

I am an historian of the early modern and nineteenth century Atlantic World. I am particularly interested in the experience of Indigenous and African people in southeastern North America and the Caribbean. My work is comparative, trans-regional, and interdisciplinary. My first book, The Maroons of Prospect Bluff and their Quest for Freedom in the Atlantic World focused on the maroon community (independent escaped slave community) located at and around Prospect Bluff on the Apalachicola River in Spanish Florida between 1814 and 1816. My current book project is entitled Native Sea: An Indigenous History of the British West Indies during the Age of Slavery and Empire. The project details and analyzes the role that was played by Indigenous people within and between many societies across the Caribbean basin from the early sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century. I have also published on the history and memory of slavery at Saint Louis University.

F. Evan Nooe

Historian

F. Evan Nooe is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, Lancaster, and historian for the campus's Native American Studies Center. His research focuses on settler violence and Native resistance in the antebellum American South.

AMERICAN SOLDIER: HOLD YOUR FIRE.

AMERICAN SOLDIER: HOLD YOUR FIRE!

SEBASTIAN GARCIA: On July 23, 1816, the Battle of Negro Fort reached a critical turning point. Under a flag of truce, American-allied Creeks, exhausted from almost a week of fighting, plodded through the thick humidity of the Florida woods. They approached an intimidating fort atop a high bluff along the Apalachicola River. As they neared the imposing citadel, a formidable figure came into their view over the walls of the fort.[1]

JOHN LANCASTER: Garçon, a thirty-year-old carpenter and commander of the fort, observed the American gunboats raise the white flag and deploy their Creek allies to negotiate the fort's surrender. Formerly enslaved and with a Francophone name, Garçon likely hailed from a French colony in the Americas.[2] Like other formerly enslaved people, Garçon found freedom at the fort and refused to surrender it at all costs. A week of combat against the Americans demonstrated his successful defense of the fort and its autonomy, as the Americans struggled to advance up the bluff. Unsurprisingly, then, Garçon ridiculed the Americans' demand for the fort's surrender, scolding the Creeks as they returned to the American gunboats.

GARCIA: From the river below, the Americans watched a red flag ascend through the clouds of smoke that lingered over the looming fort. Garçon decided to raise the red flag of no surrender to signal that he and the fort's inhabitants preferred to fight to the death rather than live in bondage.

LANCASTER: This choice came at a cost.

GARCIA: I am Sebastian Garcia.

LANCASTER: I am John Lancaster.

GARCIA: And this is The Memory of Negro Fort Podcast.

LANCASTER: Episode One: "A Multiracial World."

GARCIA: The Memory of Negro Fort Podcast tells the story of how and why Americans have remembered and erased the memory of the largest autonomous community of runaway enslaved people and Native Americans in the history of the United States. To begin uncovering the memory of this free community that American statesmen and soldiers labeled "Negro Fort," we must first understand its history. History refers to the reconstruction of the past through critical analysis of surviving records. It is therefore rooted in the concrete and is determined to represent past events authentically. Memory, on the other hand, is rooted in the present, always evolving, and subject to both remembering and forgetting.[3] After a historical event occurs, its memory begins as various groups and people remember or forget aspects of it to fit their own worldviews.

LANCASTER: In July 1816, Negro Fort stood at the intersection between several larger histories, including the legacies of frontier violence between Native Americans and white settlers in the eighteenth century, the War of 1812 and its goal of American expansion, escalating frictions between the United States and Spanish-controlled Florida, and the growing reliance on enslaved labor in the American South during the early nineteenth century.

GARCIA: The fort's creation was a product of the War of 1812. The conflict occurred at a moment when the US sought to expand its territory into Indigenous lands and the southern planter class increasingly viewed enslaved labor as a cornerstone of their economy and way of life. As a result, the war concretized the historical issues of violence on the southern frontier between white settlers and Indigenous people and the desire of some in the US to expand the institution of slavery into territories like Florida.

LANCASTER: At the same time, the ideological creation of the site as "Negro Fort" revealed the growing racial hierarchy of the Early Republic, as the community of free Black and Indigenous people who lived there undermined the new nation's social order. The persisting memory, and sometimes oblivion, of Negro Fort underlines the importance that issues like race, national identity, power, and violence have had on the history of the United States.

GARCIA: The Battle of Negro Fort, which occurred between July 15th and July 27th, 1816, gave a physical battleground for the American-Creek forces and individuals like Garçon to play out and contend with these real issues of their time and place. To understand why Garçon decided to hoist the red flag of no surrender on July 23rd, we must first situate ourselves in the decades following American Independence, and ask: How did the failure to address slavery in the Constitution encourage white southerners to expand their plantation system across the southern frontier? How did this desire to expand slavery across the southern frontier influence both Black and Native people to flee into Spanish Florida? What made Spanish Florida a compelling destination to avoid further enslavement and displacement for these subjugated peoples of the United States? And how did decades of these interrelated issues of frontier violence, the southern expansion of slavery, and Indigenous dispossession culminate in a full-scale conflict with the War of 1812—a conflict that led to the creation of the so-called "Negro Fort"?

LANCASTER: To begin answering these questions, we will briefly travel to Independence Hall and the drafting of the Constitution; we will then head south to places like South Carolina and Georgia, where white settlers continue to violently displace Indigenous people from their lands; such displacement pushes them—and us–into Spanish Florida, a multiracial and multiethnic world on the southern border of the United States that provokes anxieties for the slave-owning class who do not yet control it. We will then traverse this southward path again through the lens of one such slave-owner and crucial figure in the history of Negro Fort–Andrew Jackson. These diverse perspectives offer a comprehensive view as to why the decades following American Independence help explain the immense stakes carried by Garçon, the fort's inhabitants, and the American-Creek belligerents during the Battle of Negro Fort.

MATTHEW CLAVIN: The Constitution is rightly considered a pro-slavery document, but even in that document, the word slave is not used intentionally. Matthew Clavin. I'm a professor of history at the University of Houston in Houston, Texas. There was a concerted effort not to make slavery permanent, or to concertize it in that document. And so, it kind of just reflects that a lot of the founders, early Americans in general, even slave owners were very conflicted over the idea of human bondage. It was very much a part of many areas in the United States, but even the most prominent slave owners were uncomfortable with it. Over half the people who signed the Constitution were slave owners, yet I'd say almost all of them have been documented with their anti-slave views. But before you get excited and think that a lot of them were really opposed to slavery, it's one thing to express anti-slavery opinions, but it's another thing to do anything against it. And people like Thomas Jefferson owned hundreds of people, talked repeatedly about the evils of slavery. When he's president, he signs into law the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. But his idea of abolition was tied in with the idea of colonization, this racist idea that even if we are to free these African-American slaves, they need to be exiled from the country. It's very complicated and it's all over the place. It's very inconsistent. And I know it's hard for people to fathom today, but to have a slave owner who's anti-slavery seems paradoxical to us, but it was quite common back then. But also paradoxical is the idea that you feel that these people should be free, but because of their Blackness, they can't live here in the United States. So, certainly in the Revolutionary era and shortly thereafter, almost every slave owner is conflicted over the idea of owning people.

LANCASTER: This moral ambivalence to slavery quickly eroded as southern planters increasingly sought to expand their plantations, and by extension, the profits afforded by enslaved labor. The expansion of slavery required more land to cultivate cash crops like cotton, tobacco, sugar, and rice. This appetite for land to grow the institution of slavery clashed with indigenous populations who already inhabited the frontier regions of the early Republic.

F. EVAN NOOE: Southerners are fighting against indigenous peoples fairly regularly between the American Revolution and the American Civil War in this antebellum period. I'm Evan Nooe. I'm an Assistant Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, Lancaster. And I'm also the historian for our campuses' Native American Studies Center. Some family histories that will be passed down through generations that will say we moved here from the east, out into the rugged wilderness, set up a homestead, and then we were attacked by Indians. Where it goes from there is usually retaliatory violence from their perspective against indigenous people. Native Americans are defending their homes. And then settlers are using that as justification to further displace indigenous people.

LANCASTER: One of the most well-known and persisting stories that many white southerners continued to point to during the early nineteenth century as further justification for Indian removal and settler expansion was the Hampton Family Massacre. In 1773, Anthony Hampton and his wife, Anne Elizabeth, settled in the recently organized Ninety-Six District in modern-day upstate South Carolina. Seven years before, Cherokee and South Carolina colonial officials delineated the land between Indian and settler territory.

NOOE: They set up what's referred to as the Indian border, basically, this buffer zone in which the Cherokee are supposed to stay west of this line, and settlers are supposed to stay east of this line. The Hampton's and several others, move basically right into this buffer zone that's supposed to be unoccupied. His adult children are engaged in the deerskin trade, often trading with indigenous people in this market exchange economy. But we see that there are further attempts by colonists to acquire large tracts of Cherokee land, so much so that it's going to push basically a faction of the Cherokee to defend themselves. They had several times already had settlers basically kicked out of their property. They have worked with colonial officials to do this. They've done it by themselves to do this. But they basically feel they've been pushed too far when there's this effort by colonists to make a massive land purchase, actually, west of the Appalachian Mountains. So, we see conflict break out basically simultaneously with the American Revolution, where the Cherokee are going to defend their borders against colonial encroachment. And the Hampton's, being in an area where they're not supposed to be in the first place, are going to be early casualties of the Cherokee War of 1776.

GARCIA: Their deaths were witnessed by their daughter and son-in-law, Elizabeth Hampton and James Harrison, who watched the violence unfold behind a bush.

GARCIA: From their perspective, the engagement supposedly started friendly. Elizabeth's dad, Anthony, shook hands with one of the Cherokee warriors. Her brother, Preston, recognized the other Cherokee warrior, probably from his work in the deerskin trade. In a matter of seconds, however, Elizabeth saw

ELIZABETH HAMPTON: the very hand which, Mr. Hampton [my father], had, but for a moment before grasped in friendship, now sent a tomahawk into his skull.[4]

GARCIA: Her mother suffered a similar fate, as a Cherokee struck her in the head with a tomahawk. Her brother, Preston, fell after the sound of a gunshot. Perhaps worst of all was the death of Elizabeth and James' unnamed infant son. Cherokee warriors, according to Hampton's retelling, rammed the small child against the wall of the house,

HAMPTON: which spattered with its blood and brains.[5]

GARCIA: Shocked from the scene unfolding before them, unable to look away, Elizabeth and James watched the Cherokee set fire to the house before leaving the settlement. The aftermath left, as remembered by the Hampton family,

JAMES HARRISON: mangled bodies lay scattered to and fro in the yard with fiendish malignity.[6]

NOOE: And while this initial wave of Cherokee resistance is successful, there is going to be a brutal backlash by the colonists, and they're going to work together from Virginia to Georgia to basically take the fight into the Cherokee's nation, and are going to bring not just war and devastation, but dispossession as well. When the South Carolinians, for instance, when the North Carolinians, for instance, invade Cherokee country they're not just trying to win battles on a battlefield, they are going to destroy Cherokee towns. They're going to destroy food supplies. They are going to destroy fields. All of this is not just an act to defeat an enemy in battle, but it is an effort to try and eliminate a people's ability to live in their towns. And we're going to see that by the end of the Cherokee War of 1776, that South Carolina in particular is going to take almost all of the territory that the Cherokee claimed within the South Carolina, at that point, state.

LANCASTER: Tensions between Native people and white settlers worsened in the decades following American Independence, especially on the southern frontier. White southerners grew sour with the federal government, as they increasingly looked for help settling on indigenous lands.

NOOE: State governors will often be very critical of federal agents or the federal government at large, or in some instances, even the president specifically. That they essentially aren't doing enough to either remove indigenous peoples or provide protection for settlers moving into what is often disputed territories. So, we have all these examples of which, the Georgia Muskogee border in the 1790s is particularly tense. There's often sort of raids going back and forth, much of it precipitated by Georgia settlers trying to seize indigenous land under illegitimate treaties. And then when they move into indigenous space and the Muskogee attempt to defend their territory, there's going to often be a cry from Georgia at large that the federal government isn't doing enough to provide protection for settlers or to keep indigenous people in check, from their perspective. So, this becomes an issue that will again have immediate consequences when these acts of violence play out.

LANCASTER: The attack of Isaac Brown's Georgia homestead by Muskogee Creeks in 1797 fueled this growing outcry from Georgia settlers and white southerners at large to enact vengeance and reprisals against indigenous communities.

NOOE: Isaac Brown and his family are living in this disputed territory, not far from the Oconee River. And they're going to be attacked by a group of Yuichi Indians who are living among sort of the broader Creek Confederacy. And it is going to be a pretty brutal assault, not unlike the assault against the Hampton homestead. And it is going to become one that's very well documented as well. Yuichi Indians raid the Brown homestead. They end up killing Isaac Brown. There is going to be a Colonel Lawson, this individual sort of coming in and helping the surviving family members escape. Where things become probably even a bit more salacious than just the death of Isaac Brown, is that when a larger company of militia return to the homestead to recover and bury the body, they find the body has been mutilated. The head has been decapitated and is missing, presumably taken as a war trophy. So, this is going to again be another one of these instances in which Georgians will become irritable, will become agitated, will call for reprisals. What ends up happening is that local Creek leaders are going to be able to track down an individual Yuichi who's thought to be responsible and put them to death and try and keep basically this punishment of Indigenous people by Indigenous people to try and de-escalate conflict.

GARCIA: The justice brought by local Creek leaders was not enough for Isaac's surviving wife, Mary Brown. She successfully petitioned the State of Georgia for financial compensation and state assistance, as memories of her rushing to secure the door after Isaac fell to the second gunshot, of the Creek Indians attempting to break through the door with brute force, and of her ultimately seizing "her deceased husband's gun" and firing upon the Creeks, left Mary in a "distress[ed]" and "helpless" condition. As her Georgia representative claimed, the traumatic memories rendered her

GEORGIA REPRESENTATIVE: incapable of affording necessary assistance to her children and therefore cries to your Honorable Body to alleviate her and [her] weeping Orphans' Sufferings by affording her and them some small assistance.[7]

GARCIA: When one of her children, Isaac Brown Jr., came of age in the 1810s, Mary passed on these memories to obtain further retribution for her deceased husband, telling Brown Jr.,

MARY BROWN: Issac, my son, the Indians killed your father, and may kill you, but I had rather hear of your being killed than to hear that my son had acted the coward.[8]

LANCASTER: That Mary preferred her son dying in pursuit of blood revenge more than anything else highlighted the deep lacerations between white and indigenous communities in the southern frontier at the turn of the nineteenth-century. Individuals like Isaac Brown Jr and the Hampton descendants carried these one-sided, fashioned recollections about their family's past when they fought in the War of 1812.

GARCIA: Like the Browns and Hamptons, many Americans viewed this large-scale conflict as an opportunity to simultaneously displace indigenous communities from the South and expand the institution of slavery deeper into the area, precisely in places like Florida. Yet, one glaring obstacle stood in the way of white southerners attempting to accomplish both objectives—Florida was controlled by the Spanish.

GARCIA: Negro Fort's contemporary obscurity partly comes from the fact that it existed within the context of the War of 1812, a conflict equally overshadowed and misunderstood. The war meant more than Francis Scott Key's "Defence of Fort M'Henry" poem, which later became the Star-Spangled Banner, and the spectacle of the British incineration of Washington, D.C. It was a war that carried considerable ramifications for all combatants involved, including the westward and southward-looking Americans, the British, the Spanish, and the Indigenous and Black people who fought for their freedom. It was a war that led to the creation of the largest autonomous community of escaped enslaved people and Native Americans in the history of the United States.

NATHANIEL MILLETT: The War of 1812 is still one of those things which is habitually understudied, always overshadowed by the American Revolution. The War of 1812 is intensely significant for multiple different reasons. My name is Nathaniel Millett. I'm an Associate Professor of History at St. Louis University. I'm also the editor of a journal called Atlantic Studies. American settlers and enslavers are kind of moving into Alabama and Mississippi, and in places like this that are in the proximity of Spanish Florida, but they're doing so while being kind of uneasy. They're moving in because they're greedy and they want to expand and they want land, but they're scared of Seminoles, they're scared of Creeks, they're scared of Red Sticks, they're scared of the kind of lingering British presence out of the Caribbean. And the War of 1812 to Southerners is a pristine opportunity to knock out the Spanish in Florida and to end this threat to the expansion of slavery.

CLAVIN: Florida is just very much beauty in the eye of these Southern slave-owning, land-owning beholders. And they have these incredible visions and dreams of acquiring Florida, not only to extend their plantation culture, but to control the waterways. And they can ship their cotton through a lot of these bodies of water that stream from across the South into the Gulf of Mexico. And so, there's just an economic component to this.

GARCIA: This dream came with a deep fear, however, of what Spanish Florida held, especially for the subjugated peoples of the United States, namely, a non-Anglo, non-Protestant, multiracial, and multiethnic society that undermined the growing racial rigidity of the United States.

CLAVIN: There's also this idea that Spanish Florida, it's non-Anglo, it's non-Protestant. There's such a great number of native people, increasingly runaway slaves. And so, this totally runs counter to again, the dreams and visions of these Southern slave owners. And so, this border is a place of fear and concern for Southern slave owners. And they want to not only secure the border but ultimately eliminate it by making Florida part of the United States.

MILLETT: To American slaveholders across the colonial and early national period their single greatest fear is slave rebellion. And accordingly, white southerners believe in the essential imperative nature of creating these acutely rigidly hierarchical racialized societies, which are also acutely patriarchal. A lot of power and control in the hands of prominent white men, enslavers, officials, militia leaders, are oftentimes of the same person in all three cases. And their job is to keep everyone in check, to keep enslaved people from undermining this, Native people as well, who are considered kind of transgressive and not quite fitting neatly in this hierarchy, their freedom, their mobility, their autonomy, in Native people, their willingness sometimes to work with, to shelter, to live with formerly enslaved Africans, but also to enslave and track down and hunt is troubling to white Southerners. And then, in turn, Spanish Florida kind of ties all of this up. It is a large place which is largely uncontrolled by Imperial white authorities. It is a bastion for fugitive slaves, the society there, Indigenous people, and free and enslaved African people have more autonomy than they do in an American, North American, Anglo-American plantation society. All of this seems like a dangerously bad example to people to the North. And white southerners look at anything that might encourage disobedience, challenging this racialized hierarchy as being dangerous. The young United States agrees by and large and looks at the challenge of Spanish Florida as almost a national security threat.

JANE LANDERS: Everybody wanted to take Florida. From the beginning, they didn't like the idea that the Spaniards were there. I'm Jane Landers. I'm the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. They used all sorts of derogatory language about them and so on. The Anglos to the north I'm speaking of. That expansionist mode that the Americans were committed to, get those Spanish papists, they would call them, out of there. So, everybody's trying to get the Spanish out. And Spain is weakened by this time. It's not the great imperial wealthy power it once was. It's spread thin, and it's experiencing revolutions against its monarchy, too, that will weaken it, which means it can't supply its colonies the way it used to. It can't enforce the law the way it used to. It can't defend. It can't do a lot of things. And that makes it more unstable, too. It's in that turmoil that 1812 happens. Then you could say the Creek Wars happened. And then you could say Negro Fort happens. And that some of the same people are involved in all of those episodes too.

LANCASTER: An enslaved person named Polydor was one of several individuals whose life intersected with the events of the War of 1812, and by extension, Negro Fort. Initially enslaved at Andrew Jackson's Hermitage plantation, Polydor escaped his bondage as a child by heading south to Spanish Florida. Like many enslaved Africans before him, Polydor saw a path within the Spanish system to secure his freedom that did not exist in the United States.

LANDERS: He [Polydor] was a young boy when his parents used that religious sanctuary policy to cross the Georgia line into Florida. And by the old, old, old principles that Spain held, if someone comes seeking the true faith of Catholicism, you are required to receive them and shelter them and free them if they are coming under that guise or under that reason. And so, he comes in as a young boy. He gets educated because he's placed with a very important Spanish official. So, he's literate, and he is someone who, when the British come rolling into town in redcoats, recruiting runaways, he runs with them to Negro Fort.

LANCASTER: The opportunity to receive education, freedom of the mind, and freedom of movement, that existed in Spanish Florida terrified white American southerners and their ambitions to expand slavery and dehumanize Black people.

LANDERS: And this is why the expansionist drive happens. They want to get free people out of there, especially if they're Black, because they don't want that example if they're trying to install a chattel slavery plantation system, expand it from South Carolina into Georgia, into Florida, this kind of a person is very, very dangerous to them or threatening to them. And they would try to eliminate those people.

GARCIA: The person from whom Polydor escaped, Andrew Jackson, led the Americans' effort during the War of 1812 to capture Spanish Florida to not only eliminate people like Polydor, but to ensure that a place where people like him could seek freedom ceased to exist.

CLAVIN: He's from Tennessee. He's from South Carolina. He's from that bifurcated South where there's white supremacy and there's Black slavery. And Florida is just completely different. Enslaved people had rights that they didn't in the English-speaking world. In Florida, there are Native Americans with land and guns and power. There are a lot of escaped slaves. There's the Spaniards who seem to get along with these Black people—there's large free Black populations in St. Augustine and Pensacola. So, for Jackson, he always sees Spanish Florida as just an obstacle to the dreams of white southerners. We, the United States, need Florida to make more money, for slave owners to grow more cotton and ship more cotton. But then there's also this idea that this multiracial world of Spanish Florida is undermining what white southerners are establishing north of the Spanish border. Like I said, the white supremacy, the Black slavery. Going back to Thomas Jefferson, a lot of the Founding Fathers had their eyes on Spanish Florida, but none of them were talking about a military invasion or anything like that. Jackson is one of the first that he really helps get the ball rolling that we're going to get Spanish Florida. And if we have to do it violently, well, then we'll do that.

LANCASTER: Jackson first needed to defeat the Creek Nation, which, in his view, stood as a dangerous threat and obstacle in reaching the southern border of Spanish Florida and securing the land of present-day Alabama and Georgia. A Major General in the Tennessee Militia, Jackson leveraged the frontier violence that erupted between Tennesseans and Creek Indians in May 1812 to call for a full-scale invasion into Creek lands.

NOOE: The Duck River Raid basically occurs at about the same time that the War of 1812 is escalating with the British. There had been several violent interactions between Tennesseans and Muskogee Creek as Tennessee settlers are pushing into Indigenous spaces. So, we see the Duck River Raid being one of these more salacious events, in which multiple people are killed as a result of a Creek raid against this settlement. Again, a settlement that is an ambiguous territory, whether they're supposed to be there or not. Probably not. But what we see happening is this becomes fodder for people like Andrew Jackson to advocate for a wholesale invasion of the Creek Confederacy, basically, drive down south to what is modern-day Alabama and he uses sort of a fire and brimstone approach to describing what he thinks that the Tennesseans should do to the Muskogee. He talks about exterminating towns.

ANDREW JACKSON: I shall penetrate the Creek Towns.[9]

NOOE: He talks about enslaving women and children as captives as a result.

ANDREW JACKSON: I shall lead into Captivity their wives and Children.[10]

NOOE: Makes it very clear that he doesn't want to just avenge these deaths—he wants to put an end to a people.

ANDREW JACKSON: I shall lay waste to their villages...I shall burn their houses...I shall kill their warriors.[11]

LANCASTER: Throughout 1813 and 1814, Jackson committed these acts of violence against a militant faction of Creeks called the Red Sticks, who broke away from other Creeks that viewed American assimilation, rather than fighting to the death, as the most effective way to retain their land.

CLAVIN: The Creek are divided by the time of the War of 1812. Roughly half the Creeks are kind of loyal to the United States out of desperation. But then there's half of the Creeks who are completely militant and militarized, and they do not want to give away another acre of land to the United States. And they're labeled the Red Sticks. They used to carry these war clubs they painted red before battle. And these people will fight to the death, and they will align with slaves if they have to. So, Jackson, going back to the American Revolution, he's known Native Americans his entire life. He's a frontier kid. He doesn't like Native Americans. And so by the time of the War of 1812, he comes to despise Native people, especially those who show any form of resistance. And so, he's ready to escalate the United States' war on Native people as long as it benefits not only him, but people like him, the southern United States, and even the country nationally by expanding its borders.

GARCIA: On August 30, 1813, the Red Sticks launched their greatest military victory during the war. The attack targeted Fort Mims in the Tensaw district in present-day southern Alabama. Defeat for the Americans came in a matter of a few hours. The Red Sticks spared none in this brutal assault.

NOOE: It is such a wholesale victory for the Red Stick Creeks, in which they're attacking an American outpost on Creek territory, resulting in the death of almost 600 settlers who are trying to find protection against this unfolding Indian war that they're now concerned with. But while this is a victory for the Red Sticks, it's going to spark retaliation.

GARCIA: By none other than Andrew Jackson.

NOOE: Andrew Jackson is going to be able to drum up support for an invasion of Creek country, one that he's basically been asking for quite some time. We will see that the federal government will authorize the territorial militia in the Mississippi Territory, and then Georgia and even South Carolina, will send militia to fight against the Creek Confederacy. The Tennesseans will eventually be the most successful.

GARCIA: By August of 1814, the Jackson-led American forces and their allied-Creeks forced the Red Sticks to surrender with the Treaty of Fort Jackson. The treaty reconstructed the geopolitical status of the American South by granting white southerners almost twenty-three million acres of land spanning modern-day Georgia and Alabama.

NOOE: White southerners will celebrate not only their own participation, but each other's participation in this conflict. And most significantly, for the geopolitical recreation of the South, it is going to seize twenty-three million acres of Muscogee land. It is going to basically take large swaths of Georgia and central Alabama, and hand them over to these newly expanding states. So, we see that in the aftermath of this war, settlers are going to move into these territories rapidly.

LANCASTER: And as a result, a massive exodus of Creek Indians fled to Spanish Florida, a place that Native Americans and escaped enslaved people continued to transform into their own sanctuary against the encroaching American racial order.

NOOE: While the Creek War ends in 1814 with the Treaty of Fort Jackson, with the American seizure of millions of acres of Indigenous land, that does not mean the conflict is over for everyone. They're going to be refugee Muscogee Creeks who flee into Spanish Florida, who will flee down the Florida Panhandle.

MILLET: Florida is vast. It is a challenging physical environment in the nineteenth century, swamps, forest, things like that. It's thinly populated by Spanish imperialists who are limited almost entirely to St. Augustine and then Pensacola. So again, Spanish control is nominal. There is a very, very long-term multi-century tradition now of people, of enslaved Africans fleeing from the North into the Florida wilderness, sometimes joining Seminoles, sometimes joining Red Sticks. So, it's simply a geography that allows for these types of communities to form because of the light imprint of Spanish imperialism. But it is also clearly a borderlands region in that it is nominally a Spanish territory on the edge of the expanding United States, but real power is Indigenous, Seminole, Creek, in this region, escaped slaves, people of African ancestry, all of whom have elevated agency—elevated status for people who usually didn't have as much power elsewhere.

LANCASTER: Jackson's war on the Creeks forced more Native Americans to find refuge in Spanish Florida, which in turn, fueled his desire to invade the foreign territory once and for all. Perhaps more important than fulfilling his promise that...

ANDREW JACKSON: The whole creek nation shall be covered with blood. Fire shall consume their Towns and villages, and their land will be divided among the whites....[12]

GARCIA: ...the aftermath of the Creek War positioned Jackson directly on the border of Spanish Florida, a literal step away from realizing his larger ambition of securing the peninsula and eliminating an important escape valve for people that did not fit his vision of the United States.

GARCIA: His victory against the Creeks, however, also squared him against a man equally emotional, equally intense, equally interested in Spanish Florida, but with a completely different worldview. This man was Edward Nicolls.

GARCIA: Thanks for listening to The Memory of Negro Fort Podcast. We're your hosts, Sebastian Garcia

LANCASTER: and John Lancaster.

GARCIA: The Memory of Negro Fort Podcast is hosted by the UCF Center for Humanities and Digital Research, with additional support from a gift that was made as an extension of the American Historical Association's Sinclair Workshops for Historical Podcasting.

LANCASTER: This episode of The Memory of Negro Fort Podcast is researched, written, and edited by your hosts, Sebastian Garcia and John Lancaster.

GARCIA: Special thanks to Barbara Gannon and her graduate colloquium and seminar classes, Scot French, Jim Ambuske, Jeanette Patrick, Crystal M. Moten, Jacque Willever, Kristin Weatherbee, Brian Martin, Heather Gibson, Jamie Akenberger, Amelia Lyons, Amy Giroux, Brook Miller, Jacob Ivey, Jennifer Ivey, Lisa Mills, and David Morton.

LANCASTER: Our thanks to F. Evan Nooe, Matthew Clavin, Nathaniel Millett, and Jane Landers for their expertise throughout this episode.

LANCASTER: We also thank our voice actors Kevin Garcia, Brooks Nuzum, and Maddy Poston.

GARCIA: Subscribe to The Memory of Negro Fort Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you again for listening, and until next time.