The Memory of Negro Fort Podcast

By the summer of 1815, the last British troops stationed at Prospect Bluff departed Spanish Florida. When they exited, they left stockpiles of weapons, ammunition, gunpowder, and tools to their Black and Native allies who remained at the fort. Over the next year, this group developed into an exceptional maroon colony. Populated by men, women, and children from all corners of the Atlantic World, th...

In the spring of 1814, the British established a military fort in Spanish Florida as a base of operations for their planned invasion of the US South. Lieutenant Colonel Edward Nicolls of the British Royal Marines, a man who held uniquely staunch anti-slavery views for a military officer of the time, actively recruited Native Americans and formerly enslaved Black people to fight against the America...

As white southerners increasingly sought more land to expand the system of plantation slavery across the southern frontier, violence between whites and Indigenous populations intensified in the decades following American Independence. In the borderland of Spanish Florida, a growing number of displaced Native Americans and escaped enslaved people found a multiracial world that offered the perfect c...