Some forty miles west of Tallahassee, Florida, the Apalachicola River runs gently through a flat, sandy floodplain. The surrounding land lies nearly level with the water table, and during the rainy months between January and April, the river extends up to five miles across. Today, this swampy stretch of the Gulf Coast is largely unpopulated, but for the periodic invasion of loggers. The region has not always been so quiet, however. Between 1814 and 1816, thousands of Redsticks, Seminoles, and fugitive slaves fled to the area where they built a fort, a final challenge to the new order spreading across the Deep South.

White Americans called the stronghold the Negro Fort, a name that reveals the symbolic as well as real threat that it represented to them. Farther upriver, on the banks of the Flint and Chattahoochee, the United States would soon establish other forts whose appellations testified to the dominance of American authority in that region: Fort Gaines, Fort Mitchell, Fort Scott, Fort Lawrence, and others, named in honor of American military officers and state governors. And in the heart of Upper Creek territory at the junction of the Coosa and Tallapoosa rivers, Andrew Jackson and his troops had already constructed Fort Jackson, where Creek leaders negotiated the treaty officially concluding the Redstick War. The Negro Fort stood in stark opposition to these military outposts and represented a challenge to their authority.