The Black Fort represented a grave threat to the slave system, and news of its existence spread through the fugitive networks enslaved people developed to survive, evade, and plan futures free of slavery’s horrors. Rather than treating the fort as the rival political force it represented, however, slaveholding presidents and policy makers joined prominent newspapers in condemning the Black Fort as a “hornets’ nest” of bandits, outlaws, and pirates. Their sensationalized stories attempted to turn fugitives from slavery into “dangerous criminals,” raising the specter that armed Black militants were on the loose, ready to rampage at a moment’s notice. This form of condemnation revolved around the unspoken assumption that since the fugitives had been brutalized under slavery, it was only a matter of time before they would take revenge. Reports that the Black Fort would syphon enslaved people across the border stoked slaveholders’ fear that they were finding ways to interrupt the expansion of slavery, then carried on by the interregional slave trade, since the transatlantic slave trade had been outlawed, at least officially, in 1808. News that the maroons were “multiplying” further enraged white slaveholders, who were obsessed with racial theories of biological reproduction, with the idea that the fugitive slave community’s free reproduction might outpace their own. To them, it symbolized their loss of control over Black life. Paranoia over Black criminality and race war revealed the moral precariousness of white settler slave society itself.
Federal officials knew firsthand how violence was required to police and maintain the racial inequality of slave society. Among the Black Fort maroons were eight enslaved people who had escaped from U.S. Indian agent Timothy Bernard, five fugitives claimed by U.S. military colonel Benjamin Hawkins, and an African-descended Spanish-speaking corporal who had fled St. Augustine with thirty or forty others. Federal agents like Bernard and Hawkins complained that their slaves had run away because of the existence of “Negro Fort,” and State Department officials received word that slavery on the southern frontier was not secure. Secretary of state James Monroe blamed the British for creating a hub for the “massive force” of Indians and Black fugitive slaves. Military generals vowed to destroy it. “The destruction of the Fort, and the band of negroes who hold it, is of great and manifest importance to the United States,” Colonel Robert Patterson exclaimed. General Andrew Jackson was obsessed with the settlement, believing he could have forced the Creeks to agree to the terms of the Treaty of Fort Jackson had it not been for Britain’s Black and Indian allies. If they could not pressure the Spanish to destroy it, Jackson planned to take matters into his own hands. Ultimately, slave-owning policy makers’ and the U.S. military’s response was predicated on a doctrine of preemption grounded in a geospatial imaginary that extended from the Deep South to places like revolutionary Haiti, to revolts aboard slave ships in the Caribbean, and across the Atlantic to Africa’s west coast.