CHAPTER 9

Erasing a Borderland

During the second decade of the nineteenth century, the rapid succession of conflicts on Georgia’s borders—the Patriot War, the Creek War, the War of 1812, and the First Seminole War—created unparalleled opportunities for Black Georgians to play a role in the swiftly changing balance of power in the region. It was a riveting climax to decades of continuous flight when twenty-five hundred to three thousand people between 1812 and 1817 took advantage of the political and military crises to cross boundaries into these new worlds.¹ Those final years of instability produced the last and arguably the largest wave of individuals to escape across porous borders and connect with communities that offered a measure of freedom or, at the very least, a form of servitude that promised greater autonomy and a recognition of their humanity. Ironically, those same wars marked a time when the struggle for dominance in the Southeast was decisively settled in favor of an ever-expanding United States and when much of that flight was necessarily scattered and defensive in nature.² War forced the trajectory of that multi-cultural region into a more narrowly linear path.

The first notable movement during this troubled period consisted not of Georgians but rather of Black Seminoles who relocated within the Florida Peninsula in the aftermath of the Patriot War. In their march into Florida in January 1813, American forces, as noted, had decimated the economy of the Seminoles, destroying houses and taking livestock and deerskins. To their great frustration, they found the “Negro villages” deserted except for a few women, children, and one old man and, after much searching, killed several warriors and captured nine men.³ Many African Americans accompanied Bowlegs, the younger brother of King Payne, to a refuge on the Suwanee River, where a new settlement took shape. Many of the Alachua Seminoles followed a younger leader, Micanopy, to Okahumpka in central Florida’s Lake Country.

Other Black Seminoles broke away from the Seminoles and made their way to the rolling savannas of west central Florida, where they founded a settlement along the Manatee River, a place that offered an easily defensible position near fertile farm land and not far from rich hunting grounds.⁴ There they built a significant free Black community that served as a refuge of freedom not only for the victims of the Patriot War but also for many African Americans who were later routed by the string of conflicts that convulsed the Southeast. Known as Angola by Cubans who fished nearby, the coastal settlement testified to the deep African roots that shaped its culture. Reporting on the presence of Black people in the area, Benjamin Hawkins, the federal agent in Creek territory, noted, “The negroes [are] now separated at a distance from the Indians on the Hammocks or the Hammock not far from Tampa Bay.”⁵

Archaeological digs have confirmed that Angola was indeed an all-Black community with ties to Cuban fishermen who regularly visited the Tampa Bay area and Bahamian wreckers who prowled the coast looking for wrecked sea vessels to salvage. The first residents were refugees from the Patriot War, but more, many more, came after the destruction of the British-built fort on the Apalachicola River in 1816 and the First Seminole War in 1818. During the latter conflict, Gen. Andrew Jackson’s invasion of Florida forced the inhabitants of Bowlegs Town as well as the Mikasuki settlements to decamp farther south. Angola was a fiercely proud community that sheltered warriors and soldiers who had proven their mettle against Americans and pro-American Creeks.⁶

As a counterpoint, elite planters, unsettled by the deteriorating security in East Florida, carried their labor force back into Georgia in the aftermath of the patriot invasion. When his desperate gamble to establish an independent republic failed, John Henry McIntosh, member of a prominent Georgia family and president of the ephemeral Territory of East Florida, moved over seventy men, women and children to the Satilla River, reporting, “Negroe soldiers on St. John’s have an entire ascendancy [and] treat the white inhabitants with the utmost insolence.”⁷ More to the point, none who escaped from his control during the upheaval had been returned. Disgusted that white supremacy as he understood it was not to be the order of the day, he retreated to wait for the moment when Florida fell to the United States.

Others saw opportunity in the anarchy that followed the invasion and participated in the stealing of slaves and their sale for quick cash in St. Marys, Savannah, and Augusta.⁸ It was a reverse pipeline. Samuel Alexander, a self-styled “colonel” and adventurer, assembled an odd collection of sixty frontiersmen, bandits, and thieves recruited in Georgia at Trader’s Hill and led them across the St. Marys in a spree through northern Florida. Taking advantage of the vacuum of power, his men plundered, pillaged, and stole slaves and valuables, targeting former loyalists still in that colony. In the most notorious raid, several dozen men crossed over to Amelia Island, occupied the plantation of Richard Cashen, and set about leisurely robbing the estate of its valuables. Twenty-six enslaved people were carried back to Savannah and sold at auction.⁹ A resident of Amelia Island accused Alexander of bringing into Georgia “large bodies of negroes stolen from the Floridean planters,” while a resident of St. Marys told the governor about the widespread prevalence of slave stealing and kidnapping by Georgians and Floridians. According to them, several ploys were being used, including luring free Blacks across the St. Marys River under pretense of high wages, then grabbing and selling them. So brazen were these operations that a free Black man and his family living eight miles from St. Augustine were kidnapped and auctioned in Georgia, as were fighters who deserted from the Black militia.¹⁰ As in earlier periods, the movement of African Americans on the Florida-Georgia coast included forced migration.

Alexander and his confederates were able to cover their tracks by a carefully coordinated campaign in which Georgians on both sides of the river wrote letters describing the threat posed by African Americans. Jacob Summerlin delivered the starkest warning when he intoned that the Black militia welcomed any and all fugitives who joined them. “The Negroes publically say that they will rule the Countrey,” he noted in a deposition.¹¹ The reality was considerably different. Governor Sebastián Kindelán of East Florida kept three companies of “Havanna coloured troops” confined to St. Augustine after word arrived that the leader of the insurgents, Buckner Harris, and his lieutenants were in the office of Georgia governor David Mitchell soliciting the launch of another invasion. When rumors spread of the concentration of “colored troops” on Amelia Island, a local merchant pointed out that, of forty-two supposed soldiers, seventeen were mulatto sailors whose ship heading to St. Augustine had been blown off course by a hurricane, while the remaining twenty-five were militiamen who had been sent to help restore order in the wake of the storming of Richard Cashen’s plantation.¹²

Despite the chaos, or perhaps because of it, the breakdown in authority in East Florida triggered a new surge of flights from Georgia. Six men fled from a plantation near Darien for the river forty-five miles distant. They made it as far as the town of St. Marys, where the frontier-like conditions promised enough space to allow them to act as if they were part of the local scene, but the group was stopped, interrogated, and jailed. During the night, a fugitive named John quietly slipped out of the converted house that served as the jail and found a way to cross into Florida.¹³ As a former sailor, he spoke Spanish, English, and French and, once across the border, adopted the surname Spaniard as a testimony to his embrace of Hispanic culture. He was stepping back into the world from which he came. Other groups followed. Planters John Couper and James Nephew were taken by surprise when seven people from their adjoining plantations on St. Simons banded together to steal a boat to reach Amelia Island.¹⁴ Women were probably participants since the group was large, and older patterns of escape continued to hold true.

A worried Governor Mitchell warned President Madison, “Most of our male negroes on the seaboard are restless and make many attempts to get off to Augustine, and many have succeeded.”¹⁵ In his letter, the governor stressed the need for constant guards and patrols along the Georgia coast because of the disproportionate number of Black people to whites and the ease with which the enslaved could slip away by water. A merchant on Amelia Island, Jose Hibberson, pointedly told the district attorney in Savannah, “[If Spain were to reinstitute the policy of sanctuary,] in all probability one half of the negroes of your sea coast would be over the St. Marys River in less than a month.”¹⁶ Georgians too felt aggrieved. An American witnessed two runaways arriving in a boat at Cowford, the crossing that is the center of today’s Jacksonville, and reported how the captain of the Black militia stationed there, himself a former fugitive, purchased the boat and gave them a pass to St. Augustine to petition for their freedom.¹⁷

Matters took a dramatic turn when the British, looking for opportunities during the War of 1812, began to spill into southern waterways. In the years leading up to the war, maritime commerce and attendant rights on the high seas had brought Great Britain and the United States to the point of conflict over the impressment of American sailors by the Royal Navy and the restrictive Orders in Council intended to cut off trade with Napoleonic Europe. Adding fuel to the fire was the resistance of Native peoples in the Northwest Territory under the magnetic leadership of Tecumseh and their reaching out to the British of Canada across national boundaries. For white southerners, Tecumseh’s initiative reinforced their article of faith that the British were positioning themselves to seize East Florida and use it as a jumping off place for an invasion of the United States. Southerners in turn used that potent thought to cloak their dreams of territorial expansion into the Floridas.¹⁸

In fact, Great Britain was pursuing a strategy far different than the one imagined. Enmeshed in the final phases of the Napoleonic Wars and financially hard-pressed, the government under the Earl of Liverpool was more interested in harassing than in conquering America. During 1813 and 1814, British forces conducted a massive amphibious assault on the southern coasts of the United States that included an attempt to siphon off a sufficient number of slaves to undermine the American will to fight. The remarkably bold campaign stretched from the Chesapeake Bay to the Sea Islands of Georgia to Spanish West Florida and climaxed in Louisiana with the assault on New Orleans.¹⁹

Initially stationed off Chesapeake Bay, the Royal Navy under Admiral George Cockburn had limited aims that required no great commitment of ground troops. He sought to destroy American seaborne commerce, raid the many exposed towns and villages on the coast of Virginia and Maryland, and, most importantly, destabilize the plantation economy by welcoming the enslaved as soldiers and sailors.

The aim of recruiting a few Black soldiers, always an explosive issue, gradually expanded into something much larger. With a hard-won approval from London, Rear Admiral Alexander Cochrane, commander-in-chief of the North American naval station and Cockburn’s superior, issued a proclamation on April 2, 1814, that announced freedom to all enslaved people who made it to vessels of the Royal Navy or to units of the British army operating along the coast. The proclamation was carefully nuanced in its promise that all fugitive slaves along the coasts of the United States could choose between entering “His Majesty’s Sea or Land Forces” or “being sent as FREE Settlers to the British Possessions in North America or the West Indies, where they will meet with all due encouragement.”²⁰ The two admirals claimed that any enslaved person who made it to a British ship, British territory, or British-occupied land would be granted freedom.²¹ Walking a tightrope in their coastal offensive, the British looked to weaken the American will to fight without inciting a slave insurrection.

Despite the racism endemic to the British officer corps, several hundred fugitives were enrolled in the newly created Black Colonial Marines, a military unit with white officers. They had fled plantations along the Chesapeake Bay and were concentrated on Tyger Island in the bay, where they received training. In their first engagements, they acquitted themselves well, especially in the sacking of Washington, D.C., while those not used as soldiers or sailors found roles as guides, laborers, and spies.²² For the first time since Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation in Virginia in 1775, the large-scale recruitment and organization of fugitives into formal military units was being attempted on American soil, raising fundamental issues of race, freedom, rights, and military service. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, the use of Black troops, a commonplace in the British and Spanish empires, posed a terrifying prospect to Americans.²³

In May 1814, a British expeditionary force landed at the Apalachicola River in West Florida to create a diversion for the American military and promptly dispatched Indians with Cochrane’s proclamation of April 2. The response was immediate. The proclamation popped up on trees and buildings around Fernandina in East Florida, presumably posted by British merchant sailors eager to spread the news across St. Marys Sound into Georgia.²⁴ The citizens of Greene County registered their dismay at the invitation to the Black population to abandon their owners, while the Georgia General Assembly voiced its fears that the British might take St. Augustine and give protection “to all the outcasts of society . . . ruffian bands [and] merciless savages, red and Black.”²⁵ Their fears took on a concrete shape as news reached the state that the British were building a fort on the Apalachicola River and using it as a base to recruit a regiment of Black soldiers.

The expeditionary force on the Apalachicola River expanded into a supply base and stockade that officials in Spanish West Florida were in no position to resist. In May, British Admiral Alexander Cochrane had begun shifting his naval forces from the Chesapeake Bay to the Gulf Coast in preparation for an assault on New Orleans, key to the Mississippi. The fort began as a modest effort intended to slow the concentration of the American military on New Orleans and played on the rapidly developing racial tensions in the Southeast.

Cochrane put ashore George Woodbine, a sometime merchant who was brevetted as a captain in the Royal Marines, with instructions to recruit and establish a “Regiment of Colonial Marines from the American Blacks,” five hundred strong, as well as Creeks fleeing the carnage of a civil war in which the Americans had intervened.²⁶ The fort opened a wide range of opportunities for people of African descent while threatening the racial balance in the region by offering the possibility of an alliance between African Americans and Natives.²⁷

Woodbine recruited a cadre of Creeks and Seminoles to distribute Cochrane’s proclamation throughout the Southeast, and, although the effectiveness of this initiative cannot be measured, the news of the fort spread rapidly. A few days after arriving on the Apalachicola River, Woodbine was already reporting, “Negroes are flocking in from the states.” Reports surfaced of “a party of negroes, upwards of 200 men,” who had “run away from the States” and were on the march.²⁸ To a planter in Camden County, the ever-vigilant Benjamin Hawkins identified a Mikasuki chief as giving “encouragement to negroes to run to them.”²⁹

Command of the outpost on the Apalachicola soon passed to a regular officer of the Royal Marines, Lt. Col. Edward Nicolls, who brought a deeply felt antislavery ideology forged by witnessing desperate scenes of fleeing slaves in West Africa and warfare in the Caribbean. He appeared with one hundred seasoned Royal Marines and a personal commitment to the abolitionist cause that made a deep imprint on the emerging community at Prospect Bluff. Stationed off the Gulf Coast in preparation for the New Orleans campaign, Admiral Cochrane urged Nicolls to “encourage . . . by every means the Emigration of Negroes from Georgia and the Carolinas.”³⁰ Recruiting enslaved people throughout the entire South became the overriding goal, even more so than appealing to the dissident Creek population. To a Creek chief, Benjamin Hawkins denounced the English officer as a second Bowles whose “negro stealing” had to be stopped and urged that Native Americans “take or destroy all white and Black people” found armed.³¹

By the end of 1814, enslaved people on the Georgia coast were well aware of the fort on the Apalachicola. In successive trips to St. Augustine, Wood-bine brought back several dozen African Americans. One observer noted that, after his stay in St. Augustine that included a visit to the governor, “many negroes deserted from their masters and many complaints were made about him and soon after his departure, no less than eighty followed him . . . and . . . in passing thro’ Indian towns within the Jurisdiction of Florida he picked up a few more.”³² The appeal went beyond his physical presence. Individual families set out on foot. Boatswain, Rose, and their two children escaped from the Perpall plantation on the St. Johns River and made their way to the Bluff “in consequence of having understood, that all negro slaves joining the British troops in the Floridas or America would be made free.” Nor were they all field hands. Robin, a carpenter and skilled craftsman who worked in an urban setting hiring himself out, preferred freedom in an unknown setting to his relatively autonomous status.³³

The Creek War of 1813 and 1814 complicated the opportunities and dilemmas that African Americans faced in the Southeast. Ever since the American Revolution, the Creek Nation had been undergoing an acute identity crisis as it grappled with the challenges of how best to adapt to multiple pressures forcing change. The issues revolved around the erosion of Creek power relative to expanding American settlements, the crumbling of a fragile hunting economy as deer became scarce, and the mounting pressures for assimilation generated by the “plan of civilization” drawn up by the Indian agent, Benjamin Hawkins. In 1813, a fateful year for the nation, a majority of warriors in the Upper Towns rose up against both American encroachment and an emerging elite of Natives who embodied the acquisitive instincts so at variance with an older world.³⁴ Called “Red Sticks” because of their brightly painted war clubs and animated by Tecumseh and other prophets of pan-Nativism, they repudiated white culture by killing thousands of cattle, burning houses and outbuildings around Native plantations, destroying spinning wheels and forges, and harassing the “old chiefs” whom they deemed betrayers of their nation’s heritage.³⁵

The war split towns and social groupings apart.³⁶ What began as a civil war soon morphed into a regional conflict that led to the involvement of Americans only too anxious to intervene. Three separate columns of American troops from Georgia, Tennessee, and Mississippi advanced into Creek country to protect American interests in principle but more easily to take advantage of the circumstances and expand territory. Skirmishes and raids by the Red Sticks ensued almost nonstop, not with the aim of defeating the Americans militarily but rather to force advancing settlers back behind the actual boundaries. In March 1814, a final, climactic battle took place at Tohopeka (Horseshoe Bend). Gen. Andrew Jackson inflicted a crushing defeat that cost the Creeks as many as eight hundred casualties and extracted twenty-two million acres of land in the devastating Treaty of Fort Jackson that took land even from pro-American Creeks who had fought for Jackson.³⁷

Many of the defeated Red Sticks and their Black allies headed south into Spanish Florida, where they rallied around the small British force in the fort on the Apalachicola River. Numbers of enslaved people in the Upper Towns slipped away as well to join their peers at the Prospect Bluff fort. A slave of Chief J. Stedham disappeared, then returned with “negro March” to recruit and lead fourteen of his peers to the British.³⁸ Hawkins reported to Jackson that five of his slaves had either run off or were stolen, while his neighbor Timothy Barnard lost five as well.³⁹ More disturbing, Hawkins relayed news that a war party of twenty-eight people, half red and half Black, had been sighted on their way to attack a white settlement.⁴⁰ Hawkins was told by his Indian “spies” of a nefarious plan to “free and prepare for war all our Blacks in this quarter” and relayed this twisted information to a receptive Jackson.⁴¹

Excitement built up on the Georgia coast when rumors raced through the Lowcountry that Capt. George Woodbine was advancing toward St. Marys at the head of several hundred Indians, rumors that made real the emergence of an Indian-Black alliance around Prospect Bluff.⁴² The threat, however, came not from Native Americans and their allies but from the Royal Navy. On November 24, 1814, a British frigate appeared off Jekyll Island escorted by a brig and a schooner. Royal marines went ashore, seized livestock and crops, and liberated twenty-eight slaves, including Big Peter, the driver for the DuBignon plantation.⁴³ Soon thereafter, at the beginning of 1815, Admiral Cockburn’s entire fleet appeared off the Sea Islands of Georgia. His aim was quite modest: to support Admiral Cochrane’s attempt on New Orleans by creating a diversion. He was to occupy the Sea Islands, encourage enslaved people to desert their masters, and threaten an attack on Savannah in the hopes of drawing away American forces from Louisiana.⁴⁴

For the first time since the Revolution, enslaved Georgians saw Black soldiers in a position of relative power.⁴⁵ Cockburn led a contingent of Black marines onto Cumberland Island and set soldiers and sailors to digging entrenchments and building forts on the estate of the venerated revolutionary war general Nathanael Greene. The enslaved population watched in awe as a mixed force of Black marines, resplendent in red uniforms, secured the site alongside members of the Royal Marines. A naval surgeon recalled years later how the 149 slaves on the plantation stepped forward as one body to take advantage of the chance to “emigrate” and gain their freedom. It was a quiet, orderly process. “The overseer, a Black man, carried the keys of the outhouses to his mistress yesterday,” the surgeon recalled, “and told her he intended to join the British.”⁴⁶ It was a decorous proceeding, so opposite to the scenes during the chaotic days during the Revolution when the British invaded Savannah.⁴⁷

Among those stepping forward was fifty-year-old Ned Simmons, who enrolled without hesitation in the putative “Black Company” and four weeks later formally enlisted in the Third Battalion of Colonial Marines. He received a red uniform designed for the Colonial Marines and a weapon and then began his training as a soldier.⁴⁸ The Colonial Marines were the brainchild of the fertile mind of Cockburn, who was seeking a way to acquire the manpower so desperately needed. They “are really very fine fellows,” he later wrote. “They have induced me to alter the bad opinion I had of the whole of their race and now I really believe these we are training, will neither shew want of zeal or courage when employed by us in attacking their old masters.”⁴⁹

The ranks soon filled out, with African Americans from all the Sea Islands stepping forward and assuming the responsibility of men called on to fight for their freedom and for their liberators. When a Florida planter, Zephaniah Kingsley, arrived on Cumberland Island to claim the several dozen people that had fled his plantation, he remarked on “the magical transformation of his own negroes, whom he left in the field only a few hours before, into regular soldiers, of good discipline and good appearance.” He speculated what a few hundred more Royal Marines might have accomplished, “notwithstanding all the care and vigilance that was used to prevent desertion.”⁵⁰ His intuitive grasp of the issues found little echo among his fellow planters.

General Greene had acquired Ned Simmons shortly after the Revolution, either as part of the original group he had purchased in St. Augustine or from the brief time that Greene spent in South Carolina.⁵¹ He worked at Mulberry Grove, the rice plantation that the loyalist John Graham had turned into a showcase and a grateful state had given to Greene. In 1791, Simmons was selected as one of the handful of men to carry President George Washington from Mulberry Grove to Savannah and through the streets of the town, a celebratory journey filled with cheering crowds, fireworks, and artillery salutes.⁵² It was a moment Simmons would remember throughout his life with great pride. After Greene died of a heatstroke, his widow, Caty, remarried and eventually moved with her new husband, Phineas Miller, and her three children to Cumberland to recoup the family’s fortunes.⁵³

Simmons’s roots were deep in the slave community. A Baptist, apparently he was influenced by the missionary work of the Savannah River Association of Black Baptist Churches, a dynamic religious movement that was re-shaping the cultural life of Black people along the coast and had reached all the way to the St. Marys River. Those from Cumberland Island who eventually migrated to Trinidad and Nova Scotia under British auspices created Baptist churches as part of re-creating their lives in a new setting.⁵⁴ Until the War of 1812, Simmons had lived within the bounds of a plantation system where monotony, routine, and harsh treatment were the norm and made himself a valuable member of the enslaved population of Louise Greene Shaw, an early advocate of a paternal system of management meant to incorporate slaves into the larger “family.” Ned Simmons had no hesitation about turning his back on a system that was oppressive by definition and denied his humanity. The precious clues of his life point to a man animated by a fierce drive to assert his identity, nothing more so than his attempt to learn to read at age one hundred.⁵⁵

Black Georgians on St. Simons Island shared Simmons’s joyful reaction when, in 1815, three British naval vessels landed at the main dock to offer a long-hoped-for chance at freedom. No groups had more cause to break the chains of oppression than the enslaved of Pierce Butler, former senator from South Carolina, by this time resident of Philadelphia, who had assembled the largest slave force to be found on the Georgia coast. He held in bondage five hundred people by 1806 and several hundred more by the time of the war. Immensely talented but with an arrogance to match his talents, Butler aimed at creating nothing less than agricultural factories on St. Simons, Little St. Simons, and Tide islands, an empire of mud and water that rivaled in size and output the biggest of the plantation complexes in South Carolina. A man of giant ambitions and emotions, he personified the growing desire to produce commodities of high quality for the English market, generate a handsome profit, and exercise direct control over the lives of his enslaved people.⁵⁶

Under the tutelage of Roswell King, a businessman turned plantation manager, the Butler slaves may have been some of the best clothed and fed on any plantation but they were under constant surveillance, their movement limited, and their every action controlled. The profit-conscious King became an extreme example of a new kind of discipline on plantations along the Georgia coast. The most distinctive feature was an absolute prohibition against visitation of neighboring plantations, keeping his labor force self-contained and isolated. Although the Cannon’s Point plantation of John Couper was separated from Hampton by tiny Jones Creek and a narrow belt of marshland, to most of Butler slaves it was unknown territory.⁵⁷ The wife of a planter in Darien commented decades later, “The Butler negroes were a race apart. They never, until years after the [civil] war, mingled with other negroes.”⁵⁸ King broke the power of Butler’s long-time drivers by trading away their leader and grinding down the others, with Hampton and the plantations on Little St. Simons and Butler Island evolving into forced labor camps with no exit. He could boast to his watchful employer that no enslaved person had run away for over several years, a clear exaggeration but close enough to the truth to underscore the type of community that the settlements had become. An old habit had seemingly been eradicated.⁵⁹

In 1815, virtually the entire enslaved population of Hampton Plantation, the centerpiece of Butler’s empire and the people whose loyalty and contentment King had long boasted, walked off, never to return.⁶⁰ It was a peaceful moment when families were faced with the necessity of making hard choices about uncertain futures. With the British defeat at New Orleans on January 8, the whole effort of Cockburn on the Georgia coast had lost its military purpose. The British admiral remained determined to inflict as much pain as possible on the Americans. Naval forces continued to liberate enslaved people. Locked up for several days by a naval officer for his outspoken opposition, Roswell King was troubled by reports that his slaves appeared to have “a wish to try their New Master.”⁶¹

After his release, King hurried to intercept one last group trudging down the road from Hampton Plantation to the small community of Frederica, where naval vessels were docked ready to take them to Cumberland, then Bermuda. In characteristic fashion, he planted himself in front of their path and argued why they should return. He reported to Butler: “I tried to reason with some of the most sensible of the Negroes not to be so foolish and deluded . . . I found none of the negroes insolent to me, they appeared sorry, solemn, and often crying, they appeared to be infatuated to a degree of madness. . . . Many went off and left their children, others carried off children from their parents and all relations, some left their wives and others their husbands.”⁶² His report to Butler captures a key feature of the departure, the consciousness of what was at stake and the lack of anger on the part of the enslaved. Theirs was a thoughtful, considered decision. The last part of his statement suggests that families did not necessarily leave together, but the fact that virtually everyone on the Hampton plantation quit that space shows that King missed the point. Those departing included 34 children, 36 adolescents and teenagers, 57 men and women, and an additional 11 over forty-five years of age, for a total of 138 people.⁶³

Among them were older people who had served Butler long and well at his home in Philadelphia as well as on St. Simons, like Molly, “a very deserving, good woman,” and Old Betty (“who is free already [and] does as she pleases”), while being provided a home and food. King was crushed that only eight field hands had elected to remain. Virtually all of the skilled craftsmen, from shoemakers and tanners to blacksmiths and bricklayers, had decamped. He could only find consolation in describing how Sancho, an artisan, stubbornly refused to go, even when his mother took all his clothes and blankets from him, leaving him “naked” and alone.⁶⁴

The only success in halting the flight of the Black population came not from white managers or planters pleading their case in the fashion of Roswell King but rather from the lead driver at Cannon’s Point belonging to the Scotsman John Couper. Tom was a practicing Muslim thought to be from a village on the Niger River in the “Foolah nation.” He planted himself in the path of those departing and described his experiences as a slave in the British Caribbean, where the brutal discipline of the sugar plantation made for a strong counter-narrative. He raised the paralyzing prospect that some might find themselves back in slavery through trickery by an untrustworthy people and persuaded many of the fugitives to turn back.⁶⁵ He had touched on a sensitive point. When Admiral Cockburn recruited escaping slaves to fight for the British in the Chesapeake, he found that few if any would volunteer for the West Indian Regiments for fear of being dragooned into slavery in the British Caribbean, where conditions were exceptionally harsh and life expectancy short.⁶⁶ About a third of the Couper slaves turned back.

The one company of the Colonial Marines who engaged in combat with Georgians were from the units originating in the Chesapeake Bay, already trained, veterans of several engagements, and eager to go into battle. That moment came when Cockburn sent them to assist in the taking of the town of St. Marys on January 13, 1815. Their mission was to secure it for the arrival of Maj. Edward Nicolls and his mixed force of British soldiers, Native American allies, and freed Blacks thought to be advancing eastward from the stockade on the Apalachicola River. As the marines moved into the woods ringing the town, a rear guard of American forces delivered the first fusillade on men made conspicuous by their bright red uniforms. “The Yankee riflemen fired at our men in ambush,” a white officer wrote to a relative. “Blackey, on the impulse of the moment, left the ranks and pursued them into the woods, fighting like heroes.” One incident caught the mood. “A poor Yankee, disarmed, begged for mercy. Blackey replied, ‘He no come in the bush for mercy,’ and immediately shot him dead.” The Black soldiers had no idea of giving quarter to captured Americans, the writer noted, and it was with great difficulty that the officers prevented them from putting prisoners to death.⁶⁷ The encounter was the first such inside the state of Georgia since the Revolution, made all the more remarkable by the fact that Black troops had outnumbered the Whites.

In his time on Cumberland Island, Admiral Cockburn had become so committed to the idea of punishing the Americans for their seemingly reckless war that he continued raiding well after learning the news of the British defeat at New Orleans. By the third week of January, the news reached Cockburn as did the announcement of the peace terms at Ghent, yet he did not stop his raids until mid-February and continued to accept runaways on his vessels until March 18, the day on which he sailed away.⁶⁸

The numbers of freedom seekers were staggering. On Cumberland, virtually all the slaves, 236, placed themselves under British protection. On St. Simons, the three principal plantations lost 436 people, 138 from Butler’s Hampton, 238 from the Hamilton Plantation of James Hamilton; and 60 from the Cannon’s Point Plantation of John Couper.⁶⁹ According to military records, 1,455 people left with the fleet and another 250 died before the departure for a total of 1,705 Black people from the Sea Islands and adjacent areas on the mainland; this was in addition to 200 from Spanish Florida.⁷⁰ The admiral allowed slaveholders to board the vessels that held their “property” and make an appeal to return, but virtually none did so. A truce between the admiral and representatives of the United States specified that only those persons present on a vessel of the Royal Navy at 11:00 p.m., February 17, the moment the treaty was signed in Washington, were recognized as free.⁷¹ All others would be returned to their masters. Eighty-one people were put ashore on Cumberland. Tragically, Ned Simmons, still serving on the island in the Colonial Marines after February 17, was forced to surrender his red uniform and weapon and resume his status as a slave belonging to the Greene estate because of this maddening technicality. He did not gain his freedom until the Civil War, when, at age one hundred, he crossed St. Marys Sound to federally occupied territory in Florida.⁷²

Cockburn’s departure from the Georgia coast left the planters on the Sea Islands ever more convinced of the ingratitude and fickleness of Black people. Roswell King summed up the widespread feeling of betrayal when he wrote his employer, “To treat Negroes with humanity is like giving Pearls to Swine, it is throwing away Value and giving insult and ingratitude in return.”⁷³ Elite planters interpreted the bolting of their labor force as proof of their fickleness, laziness, and ingratitude. They were incapable of seeing any other motive. By way of contrast, white Georgians in the interior of the state never felt threatened and never saw the episode as anything more than a naval incursion. News of the negotiations coming from Ghent had a tremendously calming effect.

The threat that focused everyone’s attention was the fort at Prospect Bluff on the Apalachicola where hundreds of African Americans from many directions were assembling, many from Georgia. The white population had good reason to be concerned. Even if Admiral Cockburn’s hostility toward slavery was implacable, its impact was necessarily limited. Col. Edward Nicolls’s antislavery crusade threatened to plant a bomb whose impact had the potential to touch all of the South. In the twelve brief months that he commanded the residents of the fort, Nicolls succeeded in creating a community with a disciplined military force, an organized polity, and the ability to sustain itself through agriculture and trade.⁷⁴

As orders came to withdraw his troops in the late spring of 1815, the abolitionist reminded the residents of Prospect Bluff that they had earned their freedom in service to the British military and could look forward to perpetual freedom and lands in Canada and Trinidad. He left an arsenal of weapons in a powder magazine and, just as importantly, the assurance that these men and women were subjects of the British Empire. Prospect Bluff became the largest and most successful maroon community to exist in the United States, resembling those in the Caribbean yet one of a kind in its commitment to a formal antislavery ideology.⁷⁵ Unlike any other, it reflected the revolutionary currents sweeping the Caribbean and Atlantic worlds.

When Nicolls and his soldiers withdrew in April, the fort sheltered approximately five hundred former slaves. Estimates vary, but historian Nathaniel Millett believes that three hundred to four hundred men were organized into a fighting force, and the presence of women, children, and men incapable of military service carried the total number to six hundred to seven hundred people at its height.⁷⁶ The presence of Red Stick Creeks seeking refuge from the disaster of their civil war may have brought that number to nearly one thousand residents. When the British departed, the Creeks disappeared into the Florida landscape.

The remaining community embraced a remarkable cross-section of the Black population in the Southeast: many who had escaped directly from Georgia, others from East Florida, Africans from West Florida who spoke Spanish and were often of Caribbean origin, those coming from Indian country, slaves stolen from Louisiana, and a number from Mississippi and Tennessee. In December 1815, a leading deerskin merchant, John Innerarity, grumbled, “A considerable number of negroes have escaped from Georgia to that occursed hornet’s nest at Prospect Bluff.”⁷⁷ The following April, Gen. John Floyd reported to the governor of Georgia that the number of “refugee” slaves from the state was rapidly growing and that the seeds of emancipation were being planted insidiously. “Since the restoration of peace,” he warned, “many of the most active and intelligent male slaves have fled from their owners, and joined these outlaws . . . as to render its frequency alarming.” During the previous week, three “fellows” had gone over from plantations along the Satilla River, while rumors circulated that a Mrs. Gibbons had “not a fellow left on her plantation.”⁷⁸ In the extraordinary mix of people, every element of the African diaspora was represented, a potent mixture of cultures, languages, and backgrounds. Their hopes reflected a blending of all the events surrounding the War of 1812, Nicoll’s fierce antislavery rhetoric, and the ideas astir in the revolutionary Atlantic.⁷⁹

For the Spanish, the “Negro fort” revealed the near collapse of their authority in all of Florida in a way that could no longer be hidden from view. For Black people and Indians, it represented a chance to establish an independent community based on a seeming British promise to return and assist their allies. For Americans, its very existence was a provocation, an invitation to enslaved people to throw off the chains of servitude, spreading the dangerous rhetoric of antislavery and acting as an unwelcomed brake on their expansionist aims.⁸⁰ To General Floyd, the danger was pressing: “The seeds of Emancipation are already sown, and are taking a strong hold in a Situation so well Calculated to encourage its growth.”⁸¹

The existence of the mixed-race fort at Prospect Bluff was brief. In the spring of 1816, the U.S. Army established Fort Scott at the confluence of the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers as a first step in containing the real or imagined threat from Prospect Bluff. The following summer, a flotilla of U.S. naval gunboats made their way up the Apalachicola River to reduce the fort while a small party of soldiers approached from the eastward side. When a flag of no-surrender and a British flag were raised over the bluff, followed by a warning shot, the lead gunboat returned fire. Of the first five shots, one ball that had been heated in its galley apparently rolled into the powder magazine and caused a massive explosion that was heard as far away as Pensacola, sixty miles distant. In one stroke, the fort was virtually erased. In line with other histories, Gene Allen Smith and Frank Owsley suggest that 270 of the 334 defenders died, while Nathaniel Millett, who has exhaustively studied the maroons at the fort, speculates that most of the defenders had already melted away into Seminole lands.⁸² Twenty-six Blacks were captured and returned to slavery. The leader of the maroon community, Garçon, survived but was taken by the pro-American Creeks and tortured to death in unspeakably cruel fashion. By the end of the summer of 1816, the borders of freedom around Georgia had been reduced to a shadow.⁸³

In the following months, the final phase in a forty-year period of movements across the Southeast was more nearly a retreat from the Black communities that had dotted the borders of Georgia. Survivors of the disaster at the fort fled to various points deeper into Florida. One group headed to the maroon community of Angola near Tampa Bay in southwestern Florida, providing a valuable addition to those who had already come from Paynes Town and other villages in the Alachua Prairie.⁸⁴ Others headed to a new community called Fowltown, part of the Mikasuki network of villages but located near the Flint River on territory by this time claimed by the United States by virtue of the Treaty of Fort Jackson. Most, however, came to the villages under the direct authority of Bowlegs, the much younger brother of King Payne killed in the Patriot War.⁸⁵ A planter in Chatham County claimed to have upward of forty slaves at the Suwannee towns and a few around Mikasuki and speculated that at least two hundred slaves were there from his “neighborhood.”⁸⁶

At Bowlegs Town, the refugees replicated the world that they had known at Prospect Bluff.⁸⁷ Rebuilding as best they could their maroon community, they founded loosely associated villages along the Suwannee River and Lake Miccosukee, planted crops, and re-created the political and military structure of the fort. For their leader, they chose a fellow refugee, Nero, who eventually became a chief adviser to Bowlegs while his colleague Abraham became a remarkable Seminole leader who achieved national prominence during the Second Seminole War.⁸⁸ Soon after their arrival, a Seminole told a mestizo friendly to the Americans, George Perryman, that the maroons were mustering arms, parading with regular discipline, and “very strict in punishing violators to the military rules.”⁸⁹ Woodbine returned from the Bahamas in the fall of 1816 and again in the spring of 1817 to encourage their efforts, leading one resident of nearby Camden County to worry, “He will no doubt use his influence to do the worst he can.”⁹⁰

In retaliation for the destruction of Prospect Bluff, the refugees joined with Seminoles and Red Stick Creeks in making raids along the Georgia frontier. Reports regularly came to the Americans at Fort Scott of the many horses, cattle, and hogs taken from settlers in Camden County by “negroes and Indians” who spoke “in the most contemptuous way of Americans.”⁹¹ The most notorious incident took place in Camden when a party of Creeks killed and scalped a Mrs. Garrett and her two children in retaliation for the murder of Big Tom, a Creek in Seminole country, by whites who had crossed the border for plunder.⁹² Throughout the year, the raids continued without pause.

Situated on the eastern side of the Flint River across from Fort Scott and now inside Georgia on land seized through the Treaty of Fort Jackson, Fowltown became the flash point.⁹³ When the commander of the fort received intelligence that the Seminoles were being strengthened by “the addition of every runaway from Georgia able to get to them,” he made humiliating demands on its chief, Neamathla. When the chief refused to comply, he sent 250 men across the river to clear the settlement. In the ensuing fire-fight, four warriors were killed, while the rest executed a swift retreat to the safety of their towns in East Florida.⁹⁴

The pressing question became whether the American forces at Fort Scott would advance into Florida and, if so, under what rules of war, since this act meant crossing an international boundary with hostile intent. The ambush of a U.S. naval vessel making its way up the Apalachicola River made the question easier to resolve, at least in the minds of Americans. In a brutal assault motivated by a desire for revenge, the warriors from Fowltown boarded the boat, slaughtered over thirty soldiers, and captured and tortured to death women and children in Spanish waters.⁹⁵ That event changed the equation.

Receiving instructions, Andrew Jackson departed from Nashville and arrived at Fort Scott on March 9, 1818, with approximately twenty-five hundred men, consisting of federal troops, militiamen from Georgia and Tennessee, and pro-American Creeks.⁹⁶ Interpreting President James Monroe’s orders in the broadest possible sense, the general crossed into Spanish Florida, destroyed the network of Mikasuki towns, occupied the Spanish fort of St. Marks, and, after a short pause, launched out against the towns under the authority of Bowlegs and the Black settlements around them. The Battle of the Suwannee proved to be the decisive engagement. Black and Native warriors held their position on the Suwannee River’s west bank long enough to permit their families and themselves to escape into the peninsula. Millett suggests that more than three hundred Black soldiers fought skillfully and bravely before executing the well-planned escape. In the aftermath, the town was destroyed, as were the surrounding villages. The Scottish merchant Alexander Arbuthnot, who supplied Native Americans with provisions and arms originating in the Bahamas, had written to a young Englishman, “The main drift of the Americans is to destroy the Black people of Swany.” Arbuthnot instructed the Englishman to tell Bowlegs to beware, but the man failed to follow through.⁹⁷

The last grand movement of free Blacks in the Southeast was a purely defensive effort. While the Seminoles retreated farther down the Florida Peninsula to avoid a major loss of life, many Black Seminoles found shelter in the maroon community of Angola, east of Tampa Bay. In August 1818, only a few weeks after Jackson’s incursion, an aide to Jackson reported, “The negroes and Indians driven from Micosukey and Suwaney towns have directed their march to that quarter.” The aide warned, “The bay of Tampa is the last rallying spot of the disaffected negroes and Indians and the only favorable point where a communication can be had with Spanish and English emissaries.”⁹⁸ If the primary purpose of the expedition was to eliminate the “Negro villages” of the Seminoles, it failed. Angola remained in contact with Edward Nicolls in the Bahamas and with Spanish officials who on at least one occasion funneled ammunition to them. Constant flight had not dented the steely resolve to resist. A literate shipwright named Harry, originally owned by Forbes & Company in West Florida, followed a circuitous path. He escaped from slavery to the Prospect Bluff fort, lived there a year, fled to Seminole villages along the Suwannee before they were blown up, and then, after Jackson’s invasion, decamped for the Tampa Bay area, where he was last reported to be drilling one hundred warriors.⁹⁹

Making Jackson a hero to the American public if not his own government, the spectacular incursion into Florida in 1818 accelerated the ongoing talks between John Quincy Adams, secretary of state, and Luis de Onís, the Spanish minister in Washington.¹⁰⁰ Within months, Onís and Secretary Adams reached an agreement whereby Spain ceded East Florida to the United States and renounced all claim to West Florida. The Treaty of Adams-Onís in February 1819 transferred all of Florida to the United States, but Spain delayed the actual conveyance to maintain a degree of leverage in its dealings with the Americans. Named the first territorial governor in 1821, Andrew Jackson immediately asked for permission to send federal troops to disband Angola, and, when permission was refused, he arranged for a party of Lower Creek warriors to wipe out that community. Raiding Natives from Coweta took 120 prisoners and carried many back to be restored to their masters or resold into slavery. Survivors made their way to the Florida Keys, where fishermen picked them up and took them to the Bahamas. Many ended on Andros Island, the largest of the Bahamian islands, where they succeeded in creating a permanent community at Red Bays that sustained itself through cutting timber, gathering sponges, and picking up wrecked property.¹⁰¹

At the same time, prosperous Amelia Island and the port of Fernandina proved a tempting target for an assortment of adventurers, filibusters, and privateers attracted by the collapse of Spanish authority. They mirrored a whole class of people who had appeared throughout the Americas at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and trumpeted revolution while pursuing private ends. The decaying Spanish empire attracted ambitious revolutionaries from other countries in the Americas searching for power and plunder, and Amelia Island was no exception.¹⁰² As part of this breakdown, Black sailors, soldiers, and adventurers made one last appearance a few miles from the Georgia coast.

In June 1817, Gen. Gregor MacGregor, acting in the name of Latin American insurgent forces, landed on Amelia with one hundred sailors and adventurers, established a shadowy government, and created a base for privateering attacks on Spanish shipping.¹⁰³ A flamboyant Scotsman, he had served with the Duke Wellington in the Peninsular War and Simón Bolívar in Venezuela and left when he quarreled with Bolívar over advancement. Desperate for money from the moment of his arrival, he arranged for the sale of thirty-one slaves of Spanish planters who fled the island when he arrived, and he authorized small parties of volunteers who degenerated into roving bands that plundered the mainland on their own account. When one such party approached a plantation on the Matanzas River to seize field hands as prize booty, the careless insurgents mistook soldiers from the Black militia for laborers only to be quickly captured.¹⁰⁴ When the United States disrupted supplies from reaching the island, MacGregor turned over command to his lieutenants and sailed away for adventures elsewhere.

The vacuum was quickly filled. On September 17, another revolutionary and privateer, Luis-Michel Aury, landed on Amelia with a force of “about one-hundred and thirty brigand negroes” (“a set of desperate and bloody dogs”) to pick up the pieces of MacGregor’s enterprise.¹⁰⁵ With the coming of a multiracial, international band of sailors and pirates, Aury represented a more serious challenge to Spanish authority. An adventurer of the first order, he was a well-established privateer who had served with revolutionary governments in Latin America, participated in an attempt to overthrow Spanish rule in Mexico, and had a tenuous claim to represent the Republic of Mexico. Backed by a loosely associated group of Americans in New Orleans who were interested in ending Spanish rule in all the Floridas, Aury occupied Amelia and Galveston Islands simultaneously.¹⁰⁶

Of the approximately four hundred sailors and soldiers who accompanied Aury, Blacks made up probably less than a quarter, but that number still represented around eighty to one hundred armed free Black men on the border of the United States. Further alarming Americans was the news that many came from Haiti and were assumed to be animated by the same ideologies that had inspired the Africans who participated in the German Coast uprising in Louisiana in 1810, the largest slave rebellion in American history. Newspapers referred to the men on Amelia Island as “St. Domingo Rovers” and the “brigands who participated in the horrors of St. Domingo.”¹⁰⁷

Aury’s downfall came from his not-too-subtle attempt to convert Fernandina into a major slaving depot and funnel Africans into the new Alabama Territory and Georgia. In an attempt to evade U.S. naval forces, his men used rowboats to convey two or three Africans at a time, headed small craft up tidal creeks, and managed to take larger craft up the St. Marys to offload them in a remote corner of Camden County. Of the ten vessels known to be carrying slaves into Fernandina, the USS Saranac intercepted six but missed four, with five hundred to six hundred men, women, and children on board.¹⁰⁸ Georgia intercepted another eighty “African negroes” on the border of Creek territory. They had been purchased on Amelia Island, taken up the St. Marys River, carried along the Chehaw trail, and seized near the Creek Agency of federal agent Benjamin Hawkins, where they were to be funneled into the newly declared Alabama Territory.¹⁰⁹

President Monroe initially followed a wait-and-see attitude toward Mac-Gregor and Aury, but, as pressure built up, he ordered a combination of U.S. naval and army units to invade and occupy the island. The unopposed landing took place on December 22, 1817. Overpowered, Aury’s mixed force of Haitians and adventurers were allowed to sail away peacefully. Debate over the wisdom of the U.S. invasion dominated public discussions throughout the United States in the first months of 1818, fueling a battle between Congress and the White House that laid the groundwork for the eventual takeover of Florida through the Adams-Onís Treaty. Although the agreement was signed in February 1819, Spain delayed surrendering Florida to the United States to gain better conditions and finally turned over the colony in 1821.

As the old order gave way, a significant part of the free Black community in St. Augustine sought refuge in Havana. A notable contingent of free Black (Moreno) and mixed-blood (Pardo) militiamen in St. Augustine understood all too clearly that the racial policies of the United States would limit their freedoms and reduce many to slavery. They and their families elected to accompany the Spanish back to Cuba. It was a sad voyage that paralleled the experience of an earlier generation of former fugitive slaves who chose to accompany the Spanish to Havana after the British had occupied Florida at the end of the Seven Years’ War.

However, the parallel was only partial. In 1763, several dozen Pardo and Moreno families had accompanied families of Spanish descent in Florida to make new lives in Havana. They found themselves assigned to marginal land outside the capital eking out an impoverished existence. That mistake was not repeated. Most of the families settled in the Barrio Colón in Havana, where many of the men worked as stevedores on the docks or as artisans. Families clung to families. The center of gravity consisted of the sons and daughters of the dead Isaac Bacas, who had escaped slavery in Georgia at the end of the Revolution: Andres and his wife Eva Fish (and their four children); Justo with his four children; Catalina (Kitty), married to Juan Morel from Ossabaw, and her family; and Teresa, wife of Pedro Ysnardy, the illegitimate mixed-blood son of Florida’s royal treasurer, Miguel Ysnardy. John or Juan Morel, an Ossabaw fugitive who had arrived by 1797, may well have been inspired by the example of Titus.¹¹⁰ All these men had been part of the Black militia serving under the dominant figure of Prince Whitten. It was a cohesive community that had embraced Hispanic culture, although many still spoke English as their first language.¹¹¹

The acquisition of East Florida by the United States signaled the shutting down of the “borders of freedom” that had surrounded Georgia for forty years, the rapid amalgamation of the Southeast into American culture with its devastating racial classification of people, and a dramatic reduction of ties with the Atlantic world that limited the spatial reach of the region. Atlantic history narrowed into the channels set by the rise of a cotton-dominated economy and an expanding slave system controlled by a powerful planter class and a slave population growing through natural increase.¹¹²