Here is the map from the Florida DOT site that Ken Steinhoff recommended. If you click on the above map fragment, it should take you to the PDF file at the DOT site from which it was taken.

I’ve circled the site of the Negro Fort in red. It’s about 27 miles by road from East Point, which is across the bay from Apalachicola. If you go by crow, it’s about 15 miles straight north of Apalachicola.

Fort Gadsen used to be right here, along the near shore of the Apalachicola River. The Negro Fort, so called, was an earlier fort that had been located a strong stone’s throw back from the river.

The link in the above paragraph is to a Wikipedia from which I got most of the information for this post. It looks like I’ve returned all the books I had on this subject to the library, so I don’t have handy all the details I’d like.

However, one detail that’s not in Wikipedia is one that I remembered while taking my photos. I was hunched down close to the edge of the river, concentrating on a search for better camera angles, when Myra mentioned alligators.

Alligators? Were there alligators this far north? Then I remembered having read that the defenders in the Negro fort had had very little in the way of provisions, and had been reduced to eating alligators. So after that, I didn’t focus so single-mindedly on camera angles.

And how is this place connected with Black Hawk? There are a couple of connections.

The first is because of its connection with the Creek War, a civil war which later morphed into a part of the War of 1812. Tecumseh’s and Tenskwatawa’s message of religious revival and united resistance to the Americans did much to touch off the Creek War here in the south, and also influenced Black Hawk and some of the Sauk and Fox people on the upper Mississippi. The Black Hawk war of 1832, 20 years later, can be thought of as a late-developing outcome of the message of revival and resistance.

Here in Florida, which was Spanish territory at the time of the War of 1812, the British tried to organize and support the Indian resistance to the United States. A number of black slaves also escaped to the surrounding area — perhaps 300 of them at the time the British abandoned the place in 1815. Perhaps 800 more slaves heard of the fort and fled to this area.

In 1815 the war with England was over, but a place of refuge for black slaves was seen as a threat to the southern states. In early 1816 an American force was sent up the river onto Spanish territory to destroy it. There was an exchange of cannon fire, and then a red-hot shot fired from the boats on the river hit the powder magazine, blowing up the fort with a noise that was heard a hundred miles away, and killing 90 percent of the defenders. The survivors who were not executed were returned to slavery.

The other connection to Black Hawk is Brigadier General Edmund P. Gaines. He was the person ordered by Andrew Jackson to destroy the fort, though I don’t think he was here for the cannon fight. Gaines was later in charge of the Western Military District when the Black Hawk conflict arose. In 1831, a year before the Black Hawk war, there was a lesser conflict during which Gaines met with Black Hawk several times to get him to move from his home in present-day Rock Island to the west side of the Mississippi, and then marched against him with sufficient strength to force the issue without having to resort to violence.

The end was a famous scene in which Black Hawk signed an agreement to stay on the west side of the river. Lieutenant George McCall, who read the agreement of capitulation to Black Hawk, later wrote to his father that when Black Hawk came forward to make his X on the treaty, he “made a large, bold cross with a force which rendered that pen forever unfit for further use.”

Black Hawk broke the agreement the following spring — in small part because he thought the Americans hadn’t kept their part of the agrement, either.