Talk:Negro Fort

Missing information

At the end of the paragraph on the action, there is mention of "Creeks" charging the position alongside the Americans. This is the first time this nation is mentioned, and their presence and engagement is otherwise unexplained. Laodah 00:56, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Negro Fort

I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Negro Fort's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "Boyd":

• From Edward Nicolls: Boyd, Mark F. (October 1937). "Events at Prospect Bluff on the Apalachicola River, 1808–18". Florida Historical Quarterly.
• From Fort Gadsden Historical Site: Boyd, Mark F. (1937), "Events at Prospect Bluff on the Apalachicola River, 1808-1818", Florida Historical Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 2, Florida Historical Society, pp. 55–96, JSTOR 30138273
• From Corps of Colonial Marines: Boyd, Mark F. (October 1937). "Events at Prospect Bluff on the Apalachicola River, 1808–18". Florida Historical Quarterly. [St. Augustine]: Florida Historical Society.

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT⚡ 00:15, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

The Fort, as was true of other rivers of (north) Florida

What was meant here? Anmccaff (talk) 17:45, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Fixed. Thanksfor spotting this. deisenbe (talk) 18:03, 26 February 2018 (UTC)

Removed “accuracy disputed” tag

It took quite a while to find it, since he put nothing in the edit sumnary box, but this was done by Quirkle on 22:23, 14 August 2018 (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Negro_Fort&oldid=854976437).

As the tag says, “relevant discussion may be found on the talk page”. There is no explanation here or anywhere else of why it was added, so I’ve deleted it. deisenbe (talk) 11:09, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

As the edit summary noted -see the diff for the URL above- this concerns the rather unfortunate number play concerning the value of the men Nicolls left as leaders. the Spanish Dollar I.e, the Peso, was legal tender, at par, in the US up until near the Civil War...19571857. (Hadda look the exact date up.) It remained in use in the Southwest into the twentieth century, and, of course, lives on in the use of “two bits” for a quarter, the Pound had a nearly fixed exchange rate with the dollar - every type of dollar, back in the day before they were debased- it was worth about 5 of them, (The Mark, too, fit in with this; it was roughly two bits, as was the Shilling, but that’s not relevant here.)

$500 dollars back in 1815 or so would be roughly 40 grand now, although, of course, the inflation rate varied with different purchases. Qwirkle (talk) 13:09, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

PS, as the diff shows, the edit summary shows exactly which fact was disputed in that section; you should strike the sentence which claims it did not. Qwirkle (talk) 13:13, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

If you mean that note about currency, all of which text has been removed, justifies a continung “accuracy disputed” tag, the item disputed no longer being there, I don’t see it.

Regarding the value of the peso, I put quite a bit of work on it, using the silver content and the value of silver. Since you say I was wrong, really wrong, I think my request for a source supporting what you say is reasonable. There is nothing on it in Legal tender#United States. deisenbe (talk) 17:40, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

”I did quite a bit of work on it” should be a clue that WP:OR is a factor, the emphasis on input vs. output when making such an outlandish claim frankly also suggests WP:CIR.

Spanish Dollar, Peso, and Dollar, for only a few, would rapidly put you straight on the use of the Spanish Dollar, getting to understand the difference between intrinsic worth of currency and its value in trading might be a little more involved, so let’s do that later, along with inflation. Qwirkle (talk) 18:15, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

PS: checking a few websites for silver value of coins suggests that the intrinsic value of an old peso from the early 1800s runs now from about 14 bucks to 10 (depending on how much silver was rubbed off) just for the metal. Qwirkle (talk) 19:24, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

Thank you. I was unaware the peso was the equivalent of the dollar for many years. deisenbe (talk) 11:25, 17 August 2018 (UTC)

Need for courtesy and civility

It concerns me to have one editor calling another “stupid”, and to find content characterized as “dreck” (shit).

Please read or reread Wikipedia:Etiquette. deisenbe (talk) 11:18, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

POV tag, And dependence on persuasive and polemic sources.

Any article that makes direct, uncritical use of sources like Allman or Nell needs a POV tag, and probably for the article as a whole. Allman’s book isn’t history, it’s a jeremiad. The section quoted from Nell, which ultimately comes from Giddings, is not only a partisan account, it is literally imaginary. It is not based on any account, but on Giddings imagination. Qwirkle (talk) 12:52, 18 August 2018 (UTC)

Extensive comment.

This article is about, or touches on several subjects, some only tangentially related to each other. This article, much like much of the real scholarship, is an example of the Blind men and the elephant.

First, we have what would now be known as a failed state problem. Spanish Florida was unable to control much of its territory next to an expanding United States with a border which was easily crossable both by escaping slaves and by raiding parties driven by politics, by revenge, and by simple criminality. J Q Adams did not support Jackson’s decisions lightly, he disliked slavery...and Jackson as well, come to think of it. It took JQA about a year of plowing through documents before he decided that Jackson took the best course available to him. The article does not reflect this.

The article also glosses over the degree to which the use of the Appalachicola as a supply route was a subterfuge. Some edits take it as a given (which it should not be), but Jackson and Gaines clearly were looking for a chance to do something about it, and Millett makes a strong case that they were going to start something one way or the other, as does Heidler.

Next we have the consequences of British imperial policy. Britain was determined to keep control of its Caribbean assets and saw the expansion of American power as a threat. Nicolls’ actions were not just abolitionism, but plausibly deniable covert action against the US. The article does not reflect this. (Which I’m getting tired of writing.)

Next we have the entire entirely understandable ambitions of slaves seeking freedom, and former slaves wishing to remain free. Some had not “caught the egalitarian spirit of the age,” but had gone AWOL as slaves and serfs always have, given a chance. We don’t, and can’t, know what portion on the inhabitants near Prospect Bluff were committed to a cause, and which merely wished to sit under their own vine. TADNRT.

We have a collision of several models and modes of slavery. Spanish culture had never quite shook the idea that it was wrong to hold a fellow Christian in bondage, and there was no real plantation culture in Spanish Florida, which was seen as not fit for large scale agriculture, but best reserved for growing trees for pine tar and other naval stores. (Southern Georgia was seen in much the same way with federal plans for a largely unpopulated area dedicated to tar and turpentine derailed by squatters who were mostly seen as the dregs of White American society.) Most Floridian Spanish slaves - from which Prospect Bluff’s top leadership was drawn- were city folk, servants or tradesmen, who often worked directly with and for their masters and mistresses, and had to be generally knowledgeable, and generally stood nearer to equality in day-to-day matters, as opposed to gang-labor field hands, who were often seen -and not just by slaveholders -as volatile simpletons who could just manage to handle simple tools...like weapons. This wasn’t racism, per se, but fear of the mob writ large; free whites in similar circumstances were seen the same way, although it obviously took a great deal of doublethink by the slavocracy to blame people for a condition they themselves had imposed on them. TADNRT.

Abolition was gaining traction in Britain, and the drawn-out diplomacy that resulted from Nicolls’ actions reflected this. By the time the last claim was settled, his decisions had the ring of moral authority to his government, while the US simultaneously entered the Gag Rule era, where ideas on slavery, driven out of national discourse, became openly sectional. You see something similar with old Jayhawkers in the US, sadistic violence was seen as “fighting the good fight” in retrospect. TADNRT.

The economics involved are completely ignored. To a mainstream Southron of the day, an escaped slave was the monetary equivalent of a car theft...and not a cheap car, either...without any insurance. The three leaders focused on were valued at about a 25,000 dollars in today’s terms, roughly, although that needs to be taken with two separate grains of salt, since claims on the government are often deliberately inflated, and inflation numbers are always a rough guide, except when reduced to specific purchases, which thankfully are no longer openly available here. TADNRT.

In addition to all of this, in the article itself we have blatant slacktivist coatracking for, roughly, the Confederate Monument removal cause.

Yeah, the thing needs warning tags, and possibly more than a few.

Once the POV and other problems are cleaned up, there is still more to address. The explosion followed closely on a threat to blow up the fort rather than surrender it, which opens several obvious possibilities un-noted here.

The Army-Navy rivalry, and the effect of prize money on Loomis’s actions are untouched. I’d bet there is an entire (yet unwritten) book there, but it is alluded to in plenty of existing sources.

The majority of slaves returned to the US were captured not by the Beastly Buckra, but by the (formerly) Noble (former) Savage. The overwhelming bulk were taken by the Creek. Of the twenty or so which the Army did return, many, maybe over half, were returned to Spanish slaveholders.

The story, far from fading from popular and scholarly sight in the twenties, dropped out around WWII, IMS, just as did other stories from the Revolution and the War of 1812. Twisting the Lion’s tail had passed out of vogue, I suppose, and the major proponent of the subject being a redacted Stalinist did not help either. Aptheker was already rightly a Jonah by the 1950s.

What I see as the best source for -some- aspects of this story, Millett, appears to be being used from GooGoo snippets, not from being read in the round.

Finally, some scholarship is starting to acknowledge that Jackson saw some of his own actions as a regrettable cost of democracy and diplomacy, not as good in themselves; that he saw it impossible for the Civilized Tribes as such to maintain nationhood within the Southern states, especially with an external threat nearby.

21:51, 1 February 2019 (UTC)~

I find this is an important article and don't think that it violates significantly the NPOV standard, though it is true that being "neutral" with respect to the specific historic incident related -- and accurately related -- here would be no mean accomplishment.

I do want to point out one other angle of the history that is not mentioned but probably remains to verify. Having worked a good deal in Haiti, I find myself just about convinced that the leader of Negro Fort named as "Garçon" and usually described as a "mulatto" must have been one of those Haitians who spread out across the Caribbean and the southern United States after Haiti beat the French in its War of Independence to try to free slaves elsewhere in the hemisphere. It may have to remain no more than a strong likelihood, but one worth keeping very much in mind. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pabetaber (talk • contribs) 21:51, 1 February 2019 (UTC)

burned alive prisoner

I am looking at the Boyd, Mark F. (October 1937). "Events at Prospect Bluff on the Appalachicola River, 1808-1818". Florida Historical Quarterly. 16 (2): 79–80. source and I do not see where it says that a prisoner was burned alive. What it says, and this is not reported as a fact but rather as the report of John Lopez, one of the seaman, is Three of the party, including Luffborough, were killed on the spot; and one, Edward Daniels, was made a prisoner. Where it does it say that anybody was burned alive? nableezy - 18:14, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

Whether this is a mere error, or deliberate misrepresentation, I will leave to the reader to determine, but the cite says explicitly, on page 80, Upon examination of the prisoners it was learned that Daniels, rhe seaman captured from the Luffborough party, had been tarred and burnt alive. Whatever the reason this was missed or ommitted, it is a reminder that Google-dredging a source, as opposed to actually reading it, is a A Bad Thing. Qwirkle (talk) 21:39, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

I actually did read it, though I admit I missed that part. However you removed that the source attributes the ambush to one of the seaman. nableezy - 21:46, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

Ive corrected the source misrepresentation and request that editors actually follow WP:V and ensure that the material that they add is cited to a reliable source. nableezy - 21:20, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

The cited source says as follows:

In the afternoon a solitary figure was discovered on a sandbar near the river mouth. A boat was sent to secure him, when it was found to be John Lopez, a seaman, who turned out to be the only survivor of Luffborough’s party. According to his report, they were ambushed from the shore by forty negroes and Indians, while approaching to speak to a negro who had been observed. Three of the party, including Luffborough, were killed on the spot; and one, Edward Daniels, was made a prisoner.

Note the according to his report. nableezy - 22:15, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

There is no source misrepresentation, merely a removal of POV-pushing innuendo, unless there is some other reason to emphasize Lopez. Is there? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Qwirkle (talk • contribs)

The reason to attribute it is because the source does. You wrote in your edit summary that supported as fact by -every- source presented so far. If that is true then cite those sources. Removing what the one source does say however is not one of the options. And you are also up to 3 reverts. nableezy - 22:23, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

This may be my mistake. I was working at the same time on the Battle of Fort Pillow, for which there is good evidence that at least two were burned alive. If I dud it, it was a mistake, and I thank Nableezy for catching it. deisenbe (talk) 22:40, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

No, that was my mistake, I missed further on it talks about one of the bodies being found tarred and burned alive. I thought it would have been included with the original paragraph about Three of the party, including Luffborough, were killed on the spot; and one, Edward Daniels, was made a prisoner. The missing attribution however remains a problem. nableezy - 22:42, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

No, the cite doesn’t say that exactly, either, does it? Qwirkle (talk) 23:00, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

Uh what? nableezy - 23:04, 1 June 2019 (UTC)

url to the Florida Historical Quarterly's stash

Here, with some other goodies.

Thanks, @Carlstak:. That saves some Jstor availability. Qwirkle (talk) 01:01, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

My pleasure. Carlstak (talk) 01:11, 2 June 2019 (UTC)

This is the page with the links to all the The Florida Historical Quarterly issues. As I said in article edit summary, I don't know why they hide this information. Carlstak (talk) 21:44, 24 July 2019 (UTC)

Beligerents

Can someone explain how if the British withdrew from the fort in 1815 they were a beligerent in July 1816. Yes I know that there were ex-British Colonial Marines, but their employment terminated in 1815.

More correctly Spain should be listed as a beligerent as US forces encroached illegally on Spanish territory. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.233.33.115 (talk) 11:20, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

Presumably because it's noted that the Fort's Defenders had hoisted the Union Flag and therefore asserted British nationality? 82.1.7.158 (talk) 15:48, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

New article

Just wanted to get a quick read on y'all's opinion on this, should a new article be made exclusively for the fortification and settlement, seperate from the article on the battle? - Navarre0107 (talk) 05:51, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

Navarre0107 What is the title of this article suppose to be - Negro Fort or Battle of Negro Fort? It's confusing. Mitchumch (talk) 19:00, 28 August 2020 (UTC)