Mar 24, 2022 - Sale 2598

Sale 2598 - Lot 312

Price Realized: $ 5,000
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 4,000
(MILITARY--WAR OF 1812) A spy's report from the Florida frontier, including a description of what became the famed Negro Fort. Manuscript report in an unidentified hand, 10 x 8 inches, docketing on verso; toned, partial separations at folds with slight loss at intersections, apparently lacking an integral blank. Fort Mitchell, AL, 8 January 1815
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Additional Details

In the late 18th century, a British trading company established a trading post in a remote location in Spanish-held western Florida, which attracted a small community of refugees from slavery, as well as Seminoles and Choctaws. During the War of 1812, the British army took control of the post from trader John Forbes in 1814, hoping to use it as a base for an attack on the American South. They formed many of the refugees into a Corps of Colonial Marines. A British fort offering a destination for escaped slaves, and arming them--this made Southern planters rather nervous.

Offered here is a written summary of a verbal report by a member of the Apalachicola tribe named Micco, who was sent by Americans as a "confidential man" to spy on British activities along the Apalachicola River in Florida. He began his journey by land along the west bank of the Chattahoochee River in what is now Alabama. Moving into ostensibly neutral Spanish-held Florida, about two miles below the confluence with the Flint River where it becomes the Apalachicola River, he discovered a small outpost: "20 white and 40 black soldiers . . . at the little old field where the commissioners of limits encamped. One officer commanded in British uniform. The Blacks were in blue. They had no fort or ditch. The Oheteyoconulges built them one house, and were to build another."

Mecco continued down the west bank, crossing about 25 miles below the fork at the property of Jack Mealey's and then another 50 miles along the east bank to the former Forbes & Company flour mill or trading post, which the British were developing into Fort Gadsden. There he saw "about 30 white soldiers at Forbes's stores and 60 black soldiers . . . they have four cannon and mortars about 7 inch, two feet long, fixed on carriage with two low wheels, the store surrounded with a ditch. About 200 hostile Indians. He saw a number of black women and children at the stores, the men were all soldiers." At the store he learned that "the Miccosookee people brought 3 skalps the day before he got to the store. Tuckwikee commanded the party and got the scalps near St. Illos. They were men's scalps and killed on horse back. He saw a large supply of goods, arms and ammunition of good quality for the Indians."

At the end of the War of 1812, soon after this report, the British abandoned the fort. However, as a sort of parting gift to the Americans, they left behind a large store of arms and ammunition, and encouraged the all-Black Corps of Colonial Marines to remain and defend the site. It then became more widely known as Negro Fort, and its existence helped spark the Seminole War to subdue Florida. In the 1816 Battle of Negro Fort, General Andrew Jackson managed to destroy the fort by lobbing a heated cannon ball into the powder magazine, killing hundreds.