SEBASTIAN GARCIA: April 8, 1816.

GARCIA: About eight months have passed since the British left their fortifications, including weapons and ammunition, to their Black and Indigenous comrades along the Apalachicola River. In the absence of the British, this growing community of Native Americans and formerly enslaved Blacks thrived. They leveraged skills they developed as maroons and enjoyed locally available natural resources from the Florida wilderness, as well as the military structures and knowledge the British left behind. In other words, the community at the so-called Negro Fort had all the conditions to ensure their survival and freedom indefinitely.

JOHN LANCASTER: Such security horrified white American southerners, including Andrew Jackson, who, upon monitoring this autonomous community for eight months, wrote in a private letter that:

ANDREW JACKSON: If the conduct of these people is such as to encourage the Indian war, if the fort harbors the Negroes of our citizens, of friendly Indians living within our territory, or hold out inducements to the slaves of our citizens to desert from their owners' service, this fort must be destroyed.[1]

GARCIA: Jackson and other white southerners viewed the fort and its inhabitants as an affront to the racial order of the American South, an obstacle to the continuation of Black enslavement and Indian removal. As a result, over the course of the year that these escaped enslaved people and Native Americans enjoyed life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the Americans schemed to destroy them and the fort that afforded them such freedom, fulfilling Jackson's promise that this fort must be destroyed.

GARCIA: I am Sebastian Garcia.

LANCASTER: I am John Lancaster.

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

LANCASTER: Episode Three: A Negro Fort.

GARCIA: The one-year period between July 1815 and July 1816 marks the conclusion of the history of Negro Fort. During this time, the former Black and Indigenous comrades of the British lived freely in the Florida wilderness, enjoying the various geographical, cultural, and physical advantages that enabled them to survive and maintain their freedom. They understood the precarity of their situation, as they did not utilize their advantages to launch a larger recruitment campaign or to incite a revolution against their American enslavers. They simply wanted to keep what they had and defend it at all costs. Despite this deliberate non-aggression, their mere existence as a free Black and Native community upset the racial logic of plantation society that deemed them inferior and incapable of living freely. Consequently, white southerners viewed the Negro Fort as a racial insult, a dangerous example to their Indigenous enemies who yearned to retain their ancestral lands and to the people they enslaved who dreamed of their freedom from bondage. As a result, they launched an illegal, unconstitutional invasion on foreign soil, which came to a head with the Battle of Negro Fort, which occurred from July 15 to July 27, 1816. The consequences of slavery, the language of the Constitution, frontier violence, the Creek War, and the War of 1812 all culminated in this dramatic three-week siege and defense of Negro Fort.[2]

LANCASTER: But before we hear the sounds that raged during this conflict, how exactly did the remaining inhabitants of the fort live during their one-year of freedom? Besides Garcon and Polydor, who exactly called the fort home, and how did they survive and maintain their autonomy? How were they similar and different from other maroon communities in American history? How did white southerners view this community? Why did they call it the negro fort? And how did they ultimately launch their illegal and unconstitutional attack on foreign soil against the maroons at Prospect Bluff?

GARCIA: To answer this final set of questions, we will first spend some time with the autonomous people at the fort to understand how they lived, survived, and thrived; we will then shift our perspective to the white southerners who, during this one-year period, grew more anxious to attack and eliminate the free community at Negro Fort; we will then return to the fort for one final time, when it became a battleground between freedom over bondage.

LANCASTER: Between autonomy over subjugation.

GARCIA: Between life over death.

LANCASTER: Once the British formally withdrew in July 1815, the remaining inhabitants of the fort constituted a maroon community. Maroon communities existed in the Americas as early as the first decade after European contact.

NATHANIEL MILLETT: A maroon community is normally understood to be an autonomous settlement of formerly enslaved people who fled their bondage or were actually abducted by other maroons, liberated in some cases. These communities become common across the Americas beginning as early as the late 1490s with the introduction of slavery and, in this case, Spanish colonialism. 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. The overarching commonality of maroons is that they were efforts by usually people of African descent, sometimes in conjunction with Native people or Europeans, to resist and reject slavery and create autonomous societies. They almost always were created in remote and inhospitable locations outside the plantation complex because they were inherently defensive. They were looked at as a threat to slavery, a spur to slave resistance, so they, from their very inception, be they two people or two thousand people, always really troubled enslavers and colonial officials who usually worked for their destruction. So they sought to be invisible, to disengage as much as was possible, never fully possible.

MATTHEW CLAVIN: From the earliest days of the colonial period, we're talking the 1500s, large numbers of Africans would escape in the Americas, typically the Caribbean islands and Central America. Matthew Clavin. I am a professor of history at the University of Houston in Houston, Texas. And so maroon becomes a term applied to small, typically, pockets or communities of escaped slaves during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. And they're all over the Americas, from the West Coast of Africa to the Caribbean to South and Central America and eventually Florida.

LANCASTER: Prospect Bluff fit the definition of a typical maroon community. But because it existed near the southern periphery of the United States, contained a large supply of powerful weapons, and had historical ties to the British Empire, the fort also developed into an exceptional maroon community.

GARCIA: These same attributes began to transform Prospect Bluff into Negro Fort.

CLAVIN: Negro Fort is a community of escaped slaves. So right there, it fits the definition of a maroon colony. But what makes it very different is, and anybody who has studied Negro Fort, this is inescapable, there's never been a community of maroons given so many military supplies, so many uniforms, so many weapons, so many vessels, so many cannon. It's just unprecedented. And so, for them to have hundreds of barrels of gunpowder and shot, hundreds of muskets, and what they called stand of arms, so it wasn't just the gun, it was all the accessories that you needed to fire these things, to have boats, to have cannon, even the uniforms, they had boxes and crates full of red coats. It was incredible. So, they really were given advantages that no other maroon community ever had or would ever have in the history of slavery in the Americas.[3]

JANE LANDERS: It's not totally isolated. I'm Jane Landers. I'm the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. It's formed by some maroons and some Indigenous people but fortified by a major political power and in that way is not so common.

GARCIA: Not just a major political player, Great Britain boasted one of the most powerful militaries in the world.

LANCASTER: As a result, the fort at Prospect Bluff that British soldiers and their allied Black and Native troops built remained an impressive and robust structure even after the British left in July 1815.

CLAVIN: The original site is about five, six, seven acres large. And I've been there multiple times, walked it multiple times, measured it a couple of times. And so, this entire area is surrounded by this moat with this wooden stockade. There's two large bastions with these towers where you'll have soldiers. But what happens toward the end of the War of 1812, around 1815, you're going to get built in the middle of this site what Nicolls is going to call a citadel. And this is just this massive inner fort. So, it's an octagonal-shaped fort made of literally earth and wood. So, it's these huge chopped-down trees, these huge logs with a bunch of mud and dirt. And they're stacked up, and you build this octagonal fort that's about 150 feet in diameter. And inside of it, you have a couple of barracks and storage facilities, and you have this huge place to store, they call it a magazine, to store gunpowder. And we're talking hundreds of barrels of gunpowder. This becomes sort of the center of Negro Fort, and outside of it, you have more barracks, you have more storage facilities, you have huts where some of these people and their families would live.

MILLETT: It was a pretty standard British design, kind of middling-size fort built from locally available timber, obviously. Dug out big trenches around it, fatefully a powder magazine in the middle of it. High wooden walls built on the banks of the Apalachicola River, one of the major thoroughfares of the Southeast, placed at an absolutely critical strategic junction by the British. It's near a place where Creeks and Seminoles meet to do business with the British, so it is in multiple different ways a highly strategic location. It is both remote but then also central through different networks of communication.

LANCASTER: This combination of seclusion and interaction with nearby Indigenous populations continued to benefit the community at the fort after the war. They often traded with networks of Native Americans for food and supplies. They also harnessed the geography and ecology of the area, using their proximity to the Apalachicola River to grow crops, fish, and hunt.

MILLETT: In terms of the physical geography, it is still very, very remote. Water provides the main thoroughfare, so too well-worn trails and paths all throughout the entire region. It is thickly forested. The forest teems with life, as does the river for feeding people. It also is conducive to agriculture once it's cleared and planted. So it ends up being, in terms of a place to form a maroon community, pretty much ideal. It compares very well to other maroons in different locations. It may even be kind of advantageous. Some maroons are in swamps, where it's difficult to grow stuff, and in mountains, where it's difficult to grow stuff, even more remote. So, in terms of geography and ecology, it is pretty ideal.

CLAVIN: Surrounding the fort, north of the fort, and south of the fort alongside the river, you have hundreds of escaped slaves and some of their family members and they have farms, what one American soldier calls plantations. And he said that they go 50 miles up the river. And I certainly believe there were a lot of acres of land alongside the river where these maroons, these escaped slaves, had this property to themselves for a year, and I'm sure they had crops planted for at least many miles alongside the river.

MILLETT: It is quite a thing to imagine living in the forest of West Florida 200 years ago, big insects and alligators, and it would be a challenging physical environment to live in.

LANCASTER: But the inhabitants of the fort at Prospect Bluff inherited valuable knowledge and materials from the British that helped them thrive as an autonomous community.

GARCIA: Very few, if any, maroon communities in the Americas enjoyed the same resources and evolved in the same way.

MILLETT: Its material advantages are, if not unique, extremely unusual in comparative perspective. The British left a massive amount of, most importantly, weapons and ammunition and powder, but also pots, kettles, axes, things that you need to survive in the wilderness. This is an immense benefit to the community. Most maroons are survivalist entities where people just escape with the shirts on their backs, and then they have to steal, raid, and trade for goods that the Prospect Bluff community has in spades. When other maroon communities have to try to acquire goods, it oftentimes leads to conflicts and their destruction. So this is a huge advantage that the community enjoys. It allows them to really disengage from white society. They don't need guns. They don't need this and that. And they can pick and choose who to interact with.

LANCASTER: As a result, the community at the fort developed a rich autonomous society informed by enslaved people's own ethnic diversity and lived experiences. The movement of Black people around the Atlantic World meant that the inhabitants of the fort carried with them a great variety of social and cultural identities. The material and geographic advantages of Prospect Bluff allowed these diverse backgrounds to prosper and coalesce.

MILLETT: The formation and cultivation of families, social bonds, the practicing of religion, networks of community, storytelling, and my way of imagining Prospect Bluff is that it would be a really vibrant place also because of the ethnic diversity of it. It is both Afro-diasporic, but again, in the broadest possible sense. French stories, Caribbean stories, African stories, Georgia, different languages, dialects, Indigenous people coming and going. It would be an acutely diverse place of multiple cultural sensibilities, experiences, ages, but with this guiding principle of freedom and protecting freedom at all costs. And we've earned this, and this is our community, and it's an autonomous, free, earned community in the Atlantic borderlands at the tail end of the Age of Revolution.

GARCIA: The diversity of enslaved experiences in the early nineteenth century also meant that when the inhabitants found freedom at Prospect Bluff, they brought with them a variety of skills and expertise that facilitated the survival of the community. Sources created by Spanish officials at the time offer important insight into the varied people who lived at the fort.

LANDERS: Some of them were very, very skilled craftsmen, such as shipbuilders and carpenters. Some of them were literate. And so this is something that people don't think about when they think about rebellion and forts and so on, that some of these were very, very adept figures. One of the fellows that I find that was taken from a Florida plantation ends up in the Suwannee is a fellow called Nero. Polydor, Abraham, Sebastian, they all had particularly interesting backgrounds. The commander, Garcon, as you can tell by the French name, is coming out of Saint-Domingue, which makes him actually very scary.

LANCASTER: In 1791, the beginning of a violent insurrection by enslaved people against white colonial administrators in Haiti, then known as the French colony of Saint-Domingue, led to the Haitian Revolution, one of the only successful slave rebellions in history. Garcon's connection to Haiti provoked memories of the violence of the Haitian Revolution in the minds of some white people. He also contributed to the fort's sustainability alongside the other inhabitants.

LANDERS: Garcon was a 30-year-old carpenter from Saint-Domingue. There was another 30-year-old carpenter, Tom, who was valued at 700 pesos. Twenty-three-year-old Augustine, valued at 500 pesos. Harry was a caulker and a navigator, knew how to read and write, and he was valued at 2,000 pesos, which is really a lot. And Abraham, master carpenter, valued at 1,000 pesos. There were even some African-born people, Congo, Carlos Congo, Carlos Mayumbe. So, these are not necessarily people who could be bamboozled into serving. They made choices. They knew how to read the political winds. These are people who had skills, had languages, had value.

GARCIA: Not everyone in the region viewed the inhabitants of the fort in this way.

LANCASTER: Threatened by their skills and the autonomy they afforded, American slave-owners felt compelled to attack the inhabitants of the fort and control this value for themselves.

CLAVIN: What the real threat is, by the end of this War of 1812, as this Negro Fort emerges, the growing threat is Black people. It's Black slaves thinking they have a right to freedom, Black people having access to firearms. It's utterly terrifying to Southern planters.

GARCIA: The term Negro Fort is an American construct.

LANCASTER: Applied to the community at Prospect Bluff, it illuminates a deep ideology of racial fear felt by many southern planters of the period.

GARCIA: In 1815, American slave-owner and statesman Benjamin Hawkins first used the term to describe the fort.[4]

CLAVIN: Benjamin Hawkins. He's this powerful bureaucrat. But as he reaches middle age, he's a planter. That is his identity. He is a Deep South planter in Southern Georgia. And so when he says this fort is now a Negro Fort, he is speaking to like-minded people. He's sending a message. Today we call it a dog whistle, right? It's this idea that this is a fort controlled by Black people, which almost implies we, the United States, have to act on this. We can't stand for this.

GARCIA: Hawkins's use of the term Negro Fort resonated with other slave-owners across the South because it highlighted the rigidly defined but ultimately imaginary racial hierarchy that characterized southern society in the early nineteenth century.

MILLETT: That term was a label created by American enslavers and American officials for very particular loaded reasons. It is both designed to underscore the racialized menace to slavery that was embodied by a free Black community, Fort as the militaristic piece of the puzzle, and Negro unambiguously about race. This is Andrew Jackson, and people like this, trying to name and other and create a menace using all the semantic tools they would have had.

CLAVIN: Blackness is so anathema to what they are endeavoring to accomplish economically and regarding geography and expansion and all that stuff. It's code word, right? That this is a Negro Fort, it's got to go.

F. EVAN NOOE: This fortification occupied by formerly enslaved Black southerners flies in the face of the status quo of what is an expanding plantation South.

CLAVIN: And it's just the whole idea of Black people having a fort, having weapons, it is so contrary to everything a Deep South planter stands for, that it's a whistle being blown that we need to come together and we need to eliminate this thing as quickly as possible. We won't stand for it.

NOOE: The labeling of this fortification as the negro fort versus something more neutral, in a lot of ways is a politicization of this maroon colony, that it is used to highlight the fact that there are Black southerners in their own fortification with guns and ammunition, not far from basically the United States border. 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 campus's Native American Studies Center. And it is going to be a term that will sort of inflame passions of white southerners, not just in this border region, but across the South, who are very much invested in this racial hierarchy of the region.

LANCASTER: Andrew Jackson was one of these people. As a southern slave-owner, he sympathized with the planter class who felt threatened by the organized and armed Black presence at the fort.

ANDREW JACKSON: I have very little doubt of the fact that this fort has been established by some villains for the purpose of murder, rapine, and plunder, and that it ought to be blown up regardless of the ground it stands on.[5]

NOOE: The southern presses will put out there that this is a refuge for basically enslaved Black southerners to seek out across much of this area. So there will be continued raids by Red Sticks across the Florida-Georgia border, across the Florida-Alabama border. And there are going to be calls from white Georgians in the South for basically federal intervention.

GARCIA: Jackson's national reputation following his victories against the Creeks in 1814 and at the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 increasingly encouraged white southerners living near the Florida border to look to Jackson to confront what they viewed as the material and ideological threat of Negro Fort.

CLAVIN: As soon as the Battle of New Orleans is over, frontier settlers and politicians, there's a congressman, there's a judge, and they're writing letters to Washington, D.C. saying, send in Andrew Jackson. We got problems down here, send us Andrew Jackson. He's got this reputation after the Creek War of being a frontier warrior. And certainly, after the Battle of New Orleans, he's got this ragtag group of troops that he puts together at the last minute and crushes the British. So I think for a lot of people across the United States and the Deep South, these planters, he's one of them. Yet he's also this emerging American warrior who can defeat people down here. Just send Andrew Jackson. And Jackson will volunteer himself as well.

LANCASTER: Jackson's near-genocidal views about Native Americans also influenced his anxiety over the community at Negro Fort. His persistent pursuit to invade Spanish Florida and push the Indigenous populations out of the peninsula remained a constant ambition. Many southern slave-owners shared this desire, as they eyed Spanish Florida as a region suitable for the expansion of American slavery. And the manufactured threat Negro Fort posed offered a fortuitous opportunity for southern sympathizers like Jackson.

NOOE: In a lot of ways, we see that the sustainability of what becomes referred to not just by U.S. officials, but in the press as well as the negro fort, is a challenge to the racial hierarchy of the American South. If there is going to be an effective maroon colony that is well-armed and potentially well-defended, there is concern that it then will basically encourage Indigenous people to continue resisting U.S. expansion as well.

LANCASTER: Eager to invade the Florida peninsula once more and eliminate a community that undermined his vision of a racialized order, Jackson often spoke about the inhabitants of the fort in militant terms as a justification to do so.

ANDREW JACKSON: Under whose authority has this fort been established? Whose subjects do they profess to be? If they profess to be subjects of a power with whom we are at peace, then their acts are acts of war and ought to be made the subject of demand for redress by our government. If they are a banditti assembled in the Territory of Spain or claim to be the subjects of any other power and are stealing and enticing away our negroes, they ought to be viewed as a band of outlaws, land pirates, and ought to be destroyed.[6]

GARCIA: Jackson also used this belligerent and racialized language about the fort and its people in his correspondence with Mauricio de Zuniga, the Spanish governor of West Florida. Jackson's attempts to contact the Spanish governor during the spring of 1816 reflected his growing desire to invade the foreign territory.

ANDREW JACKSON: Sir, I am charged by my government to make known to you that a negro fort, erected during our late war with Britain has been strengthened since that period and is now occupied by upwards of two hundred and fifty negroes, many of whom have been enticed away from their service or their masters, citizens of the United States. All of whom are well clothed and disciplined.

ANDREW JACKSON: This banditti and the hostile Creeks are sending recruiting parties into Georgia and threatening the safety of the southern frontier. This is a state of things which cannot fail to produce much injury to the neighboring settlements and excite irritations which may eventually endanger the peace of the nation. The conduct of the banditti is such as will not be tolerated by our government, and if not put down by Spanish authority will compel us in defense to destroy them.[7]

CLAVIN: He says it's self-defense. They basically accused, you know, there's a couple of settlers who were killed along the Florida border in this time period. And every time their lives were taken, Jackson and people like him will blame it on Negro Fort. There's no evidence to suggest anybody from Negro Fort had anything to do with this handful of murders. It's just frontier violence, quite frankly. But if a Native American was involved, Jackson and people like him say, well, it must be the Indians aligned with Negro Fort. So they make an argument that these people are killing Americans. They're crossing the border, coming to kill more Americans. So as an act of self-defense and self-preservation, we must invade Spanish Florida.

GARCIA: The invasion of Negro Fort by Jackson-led forces began on July 15, 1816.

LANCASTER: The Americans devised a three-pronged approach to open their assault. First, the American troops and their allied Creek warriors established a fortification near the junction of the Apalachicola River and the U.S.-Florida border, called Camp Crawford. This allowed the U.S. forces to monitor Negro Fort and eventually launch their attack.

GARCIA: Second, a U.S. Navy convoy shipped supply vessels and gunboats from the Louisiana coast to the mouth of the Apalachicola River and finally upstream to Camp Crawford.

LANCASTER: Third and lastly, one of the U.S. army boats planned to escort the naval convoy as they ascended to the camp.

GARCIA: With this illicit traffic along the Apalachicola River in Spanish Florida, the American forces hoped to bait the inhabitants of the fort to fire upon them, intending to instigate a confrontation with the maroons at Negro Fort.

LANCASTER: If the maroons fired first, then the American convoy could retaliate in self-defense and shield Jackson from possible controversy invading a foreign territory.

NOOE: There's going to be a camp set up. The establishment of this fortification to both keep an eye on the Negro Fort and to try and deter continued raids by Native Americans on white southern settlers means that to access it, the U.S. Navy has to go by sea.

CLAVIN: One group is going to come south from Georgia down the Apalachicola River. There are two hundred and fifty Creek warriors and maybe a hundred American soldiers from the U.S. Army, and the soldiers get in boats and they start floating down the river. And at the same time, you're going to have several gunboats who had come over from Louisiana and several schooners, U.S. Navy forces, maybe a hundred men, and they're going to sail up the river. And the goal is to meet, coming from the north of the river and coming up from the south from the Gulf of Mexico.

NOOE: Everybody who seems to be involved in this is very well aware that if they sail up the Apalachicola River, they're basically going to be under fire by the maroon colony at Prospect Bluff. And it is very clear that they are baiting the inhabitants to basically fire upon them, so that they can have cause to engage with this outpost that, by the way, is in a foreign country. It is a U.S. Navy sailing up a river in Spanish territory to basically try and spark a conflict with the occupants of this fort.

LANDERS: The Americans had been going illicitly up these rivers already with their navies, again, under kind of covert approval of the American government. But they really had no declaration of war. They shouldn't have been there. That was still Spanish territory. There had been no government negotiations to turn over any of that territory to Americans. So, they're there illicitly.

NOOE: So, when the U.S. Navy began sailing up the Apalachicola River, they did so not just with supply ships, but with gunships as well. When they approached, they were fired upon and they returned fire.

MILLETT: There is a battle for a handful of days. It appears that a large number of would-be potential defenders were both away hunting, and there had already been kind of an evacuation of a large number of the community members. So the fort was undermanned when this large American and Creek invasion came.

CLAVIN: It's about a three-week-long affair. At first, three sailors are killed on the southern stretch of the river. A fourth guy will be killed after he's tortured. And those are the first casualties of this battle. Also, on the northern stretch of the river, we're going to have some lives taken. We're going to have some slaves who are captured by the American soldiers and basically taken into custody. And then eventually, when these two forces arrive at Negro Fort, a siege takes place. And for several weeks, what happens from sunup to sundown is American sailors are bombarding the fort from the river. You have Creek warriors just firing guns, sort of attacking the fort. On a couple of occasions, there's some hand-to-hand combat between some of the maroons and some of the Creek warriors.

LANCASTER: During the sunup-to-sundown bombardment of the fort, the American forces miscalculated the difficulty they faced capturing the area.

NOOE: And what's often overlooked in this whole engagement is a regiment that will try to negotiate a surrender of the fort.

GARCIA: The same racialized views that caused the American forces to fear the Black autonomy embodied by the fort also led them to believe that eliminating its inhabitants would be easy. But Garcon's leadership and defense of the fort proved otherwise.

LANDERS: Garcon informed a Creek delegation that the Americans sent that he had been left in command of the fort by the British government and that he would sink any American vessels that should attempt to pass it. The Indigenous leaders, as well as the Black leaders, knew that if they didn't fight to the end, they were going to be executed in one way or another.

NOOE: The occupants of the fort realized that they couldn't just surrender. If they did, they'd be re-enslaved. Or if they were free from the beginning, they would likely be enslaved. So, it isn't exactly an option for the occupants of this fortification.

LANCASTER: In his resolve to defend the freedom of the fort and its inhabitants, Garcon hoisted the red flag of no surrender.

GARCIA: For people like Polydor, Abraham, and others who lived freely at the fort over the past year, the red flag of no surrender that emerged through the smoke of the battle symbolized their commitment to life and liberty over bondage.

LANDERS: They had put, he had put up, a red flag under the British flag, which was indicative of we will not give any quarter, nor will we surrender. And so, he basically knew that was going to be his result.

CLAVIN: And then ultimately, a cannonball that was heated in a little furnace was fired from one of the American gunboats. And so, they dropped this heated hot shot, they called it, right in the middle of the citadel, where you have hundreds of barrels of gunpowder.

NOOE: According to naval officers who were involved in this assault, they basically fired on the fort. There is a hot shot that sort of infamously hits the powder kegs.

CLAVIN: And as you can imagine...

NOOE: ...blows the whole thing sky high.

MILLETT: The fort itself is almost completely incinerated. A handful of survivors are captured. Some are executed.

NOOE: The United States military will report upwards of 300 inhabitants were killed in the explosion. Southern newspapers are going to report some pretty gruesome and horrific retellings of body parts and limbs supposedly hanging in trees with the death of men, women, and children as a result of this engagement.[8]

CLAVIN: It was an unprecedented explosion that some people claimed you could hear in Pensacola, a hundred-something miles away. So it was a massive, ground-shaking event that killed almost all of the fort's inhabitants in a matter of minutes.

LANDERS: What happened is after all this defiance with the flags and failure for them to surrender, this explosion happened and it just pretty much totally destroyed everything. It had to have been terribly horrible. And even the Americans were kind of horrified by what they saw afterwards in the aftermath. There's not much that survives.

LANCASTER: But at this same moment,

GARCIA: the memory of Negro Fort begins.

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, Richard Weber, 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.