Connections: Complex History Along Florida’s “Forgotten Coast”

After a year of near isolation, we ventured to the Gulf Coast of west Florida, celebrating our anniversary and introducing our new Labrador Retriever, Emily, to the joys of the salt surf. But Emily was having nothing of it and the sky was still in turmoil after the latest tropical storm that had just passed. Still, there is nothing we love more than the shores of St. George Island and the charm of old Apalachicola, a place where your stress evaporates.

And then there is the history, natural and otherwise. Here is where the great Apalachicola River reaches the sea, carrying the sand and silt from the Chattahoochee and Flint Rivers of Georgia to be deposited on the bleached-sugar beaches. It also suffuses the bays and estuaries with fresh water, creating an environment that shrimp and oysters must have in order to survive. But behind the coast there is a hard country of swamps, pine thickets and sandy soils, places like Tate’s Hell, rich in wildlife and pine thickets-and alligators. Now a state forest, it has convenient concrete paths that also serve as roadways for golf carts and access from shoreside gated communities into a rich, if somewhat hostile, natural world.

For centuries only the the mouths of river have given reason and possibility for settlement. Throughout Spain’s long claim to West Florida, it’s efforts yielded little of profit except at the Apalachicola River estuary where the protective veil of St. George’s Island sheltered the town and its wharves from powerful storms. From here, trade with the great Indian nations of the interior was practical and the bay offered rich harvests of shell fish.

Eventually the entirety of Florida would become part of the United States through war and diplomacy. Apalachicola was key to the export of Georgia’s, and Alabama’s, cotton to the spinning mills of Great Britain. There was a British consulate here for many years.

Blockaded by Union warships during the Civil War, Apalachicola would boom again as the great longleaf pines of the coastal plains were cut, and the logs were floated down river to supply the Victorian-era building boom. Even brick homes in Boston and New York needed wooden flooring and framing. Steam boats plied the Apalachicola-Flint-Chattahoochee waterway system up to the beginning of the twentieth century, linking Albany and Columbus and many smaller places to Apalachicola – as well as to the greater trade of the Gulf and Atlantic.

In the twentieth century, railroads and trucks would steal this commerce away from the riverboat companies. During a work stint in Albany, I met an elderly man who recalled as a boy seeing paddle-wheel steamer wrecks along the banks of the Flint River. And, tropical fish more than 100 miles up river from the Gulf. Great sturgeons were once caught along the Flint River, before dams blocked their way to spawning waters.

Just above Apalachicola is the old “Negro Fort” that saw the first instance in which free blacks and Native Americans cooperated to try and defend their freedom from America’s ever-expanding system of slavery and its expansion claimed by right of “Manifest Destiny.”

Runaway slaves sought refuge not only though the “Underground Railroad” system to the northern states, but also fled from the cotton plantations to “Indian Country” -the vast lands claimed by the Creeks throughout the coastal plains (and more) of Georgia and Alabama. The Creeks (the Muscogee and their confederates) benefitted from the knowledge of farming, milling, masonry, carpentry and many other skills that the Blacks brought with them. I must research sometime if anyone has written to say that this hemorrhaging of slavery into the borderlands helped inspire the national Fugitive Slave Law. It was common enough that we find many references to the “Black Seminoles” in southern newspapers of the antebellum era.

During the War of 1812, after General Andrew Jackson defeated the Upper Creek “Red Sticks” at Horseshoe Bend, he went on to the Gulf Coast to stamp out any politically inconvenient operators and their supporters who existed in this nether world of sanctuaries beyond white control along the coast, all but ignoring the legal Spanish authorities.

Even after burning the US capitol and defeating an American effort to invade Canada, the British were still concerned about their Caribbean empire, where the American navy and freebooters were having a field day. Britain’s navy was anchored to European concerns and the war with Napoleon’s France. Jackson anticipated that a British landing force might gain control of French Louisiana and open the way to link the entire Mississippi Valley to Canada.

This could create at the very least a great inland commercial empire, blocking American’s westward expansion. It was this invasion of the Gulf Coast that Jackson endeavored to defeat. But where would the British landing occur? Apalachicola, Mobile or New Orleans?

Jackson was able to concentrate his army of US regulars, volunteers and Native American allies at New Orleans in time to deny the British their objective. Ironically, a peace had been agreed upon before the American victory. Ironically, the battle that propelled Jackson to the U>S presidency was fought in peacetime.

After the Red Stick Revolt was defeated, Blacks occupied an abandoned British fort just up the river from Apalachicola, stockpiled powder and shot and reinforced the ramparts. All to no avail. An American gunboat sailed up the river and fired a hot round into the magazine, igniting an explosion, wrecking the fort an killing many of the defenders.

There is-as is so often the case-little to see at the site to inspire our imaginations about Fort Gadsden, the “Negro Fort,” but interpretive signs help and a visit to websites containing maps of the place can help us gain our bearings.

There is an academic “cottage industry” at the moment rewriting the military history of the “Forgotten Coast.” I will touch on some of these works in a coming blog. Meanwhile, pass me another “Going Coastal” beer from the cooler.