The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community by Matthew J. Clavin (review)

Over the last several decades, one of the great shifts in how American history is understood has been the recognition that slavery and slaves should be at the center of that history rather than at its margins. In his new study, The Battle of Negro Fort: The Rise and Fall of a Fugitive Slave Community, Matthew J. Clavin makes a similar historiographical intervention by placing the "Negro Fort" at Prospect Bluff in Spanish Florida at the center of the dynamics that led to the various invasions of Florida undertaken or ordered by Andrew Jackson during and after the War of 1812, crucial episodes in the expansion of American slavery. However, Clavin interprets the fort not only as a direct spur to American expansion but also as emblematic of both "the larger fight over freedom and slavery that raged throughout the Americas at the turn of the nineteenth century" and the fact "that the American government had always sanctioned slavery" (p. 2). Even more ambitiously, he claims these events are "early evidence of what came to be known as the Slave Power" and a sign that "ambivalence over the institution [of slavery] had disappeared since the nation's founding" (pp. 12, 14).

Clavin's book is organized as a chronological narrative of the events that led to the battle of Negro Fort, the battle itself, and its long aftermath (including an epilogue on how abolitionists used the fort's story). The origin of the fort was in the British policy during the War of 1812 to encourage slaves to fight for the British empire. As a result of these British efforts, this fugitive slave community was based in a well-constructed fort, well-armed, and organized on military lines; they even wore British military uniforms, indicating that they conceived of their community "as a 'sovereign enclave of British subjects'" (p. 86). Andrew Jackson was the community's main antagonist, and many of the actions he took that led to his rise to prominence (such as the American invasions of Florida) were driven by his desire (shared by many white southerners) to destroy the fort and capture its residents.

Despite the importance of the British and of Jackson to this story, Clavin places African Americans at its center, carefully excavating the diverse backgrounds of the hundreds of people (including Native Americans) who lived in and around the fort. Clavin concludes that these African Americans were not "slave revolutionaries" but rather individuals who seized the opportunity presented by British intervention for "'self-determination, self-reliance, and self-rule,'" much like other maroon communities throughout the Americas (p. 12). Clavin also shows that, even after the fort was destroyed, many of the African Americans who had congregated there managed to escape and continued their resistance for years afterward, typically in close alliance with Native Americans (particularly Redstick Creeks and Seminoles).

Perhaps Clavin's greatest contribution, besides retelling an important event from American history that has been largely lost to memory, is to show how important the actions of the residents of Negro Fort were to the course of the conflicts on America's southern border in the 1810s and after. The great fear of many white southerners, manifested in the fort, was that slaves and Native Americans would unite with the support of the British to halt and perhaps even reverse American expansion. Clavin shows how these fears justified military expeditions into Spanish Florida as well as the later Seminole Wars. In this excellent study, Clavin concludes that, much like during the Civil War, the willingness of slaves to run to and even join a power fighting against their enslavers drove crucial events in American history.