The Battle of Fort Hughes in Bainbridge, Georgia

A Seminole War fight for survival!

by Dale Cox

The site of Fort Hughes is marked by a federal monument
placed at today's J.D. Chason Memorial Park in the 1880s.

A cloud of smoke enveloped the blufftop at Bainbridge, Georgia, 205 years ago today. Hundreds of Red Stick Creek, Seminole, and Maroon (Black Seminole) warriors exchanged fire with a detachment of soldiers in Fort Hughes, a small log stockade at today's J.D. Chason Memorial Park.

The battle started on the previous day, simultaneous with an attack by a much larger Native American army on the supply ships Little Sally and Phoebe Ann at Ocheesee Bluff, Florida, (please see The Battle of Ocheesee).

The fight at Ocheesee was part of an effort to stop supplies and communications from reaching Fort Scott, the U.S. Army headquarters on the lower Flint River. The attack on Fort Hughes, however, was an aggressive attempt to take the stockade and wipe out the soldiers defending it.

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The little fort measured only 90-feet per side and was built by Lt. Col. Matthew Arbuckle to defend the Flint River crossing at Burges's Bluff (today's Bainbridge). His 300-man force was falling back from the Battle of Fowltown on November 23, 1817, with Lower Creek warriors in hot pursuit. To protect the column's rear during its slow crossing of the Flint, Arbuckle ordered his men to throw up a fort on the crest of the bluff.  He named it Fort Hughes after Aaron Hughes, a regimental musician, who was killed at Fowltown.

Fort Hughes is one of the stops on the Creek Heritage Trail.
A series of interpretive panels at J.D. Chason Memorial Park
tell the story of the fort and the Creek and Seminole Wars.

The outpost was square in design with blockhouses - two-story structures that housed soldiers and strengthened the defenses - on two diagonal corners. A section of the stockade line was discovered by archaeologist Brian Mabelitini in 2018. The excavation showed that the walls were built by digging a trench, standing posts upright in it, and then filling in around them. The posts or pickets of the stockade were surprisingly small, just thick enough to stop the lead balls fired from Native American rifles and muskets.

When Arbuckle finished the fort and completed his crossing of the Flint on November 25, he left behind Capt. John N. McIntosh of the 4th Regiment of U.S. Infantry with 40 men as a garrison. The assignment went quietly enough until December 15-18, when hundreds of warriors emerged from the nearby woods and tried to storm the post.

The soldiers repelled the initial attack, fighting desperately from behind their walls of thin posts as the warriors attacked from all sides. Lt. Col. Arbuckle later reported that McIntosh and his men were "surrounded by a large force, and his [McIntosh's] arrangements were such as to do him much credit." [1]

Neamathla (Eneah Emathla) was the powerful and charismatic
chief of Fowltown, a village near today's Bainbridge, Georgia.
He likely took part in the Battle of Fort Hughes.

Many of the warriors likely came from nearby Fowltown and were undoubtedly led by their prominent chief, Neamathla. Another group came from as far away as the Suwannee River and included fighters from as far away as the Suwannee River.

The latter group included not only Maroon (Black Seminole) fighters but also one of several white Bahamian residents who took part in the Seminole War of 1817-1818. Peter Cook came to Florida as a merchant and employee of the trader Alexander Arbuthnot. Displeased with his employer, he left him and joined Robert Ambrister on the Suwannee River. Ambrister was a former lieutenant in the British Marines and had served at Prospect Bluff (the "Negro Fort") on the Apalachicola during the War of 1812.

Ambrister sent him with a party of warriors to help take Fort Hughes, an experience that Cook described in a letter to his fiance in the Bahamas:

…The balls flew like hail-stones; there was a ball that had like to have done my job; it just cleared by breast. For six days and six nights we had to encamp in the wild woods, and it was constantly raining night and day; and as for the cold, I suffered very much by it; in the morning the water would be frozen about an inch thick. [2]

A luminary and memorial service held in 2017 to mark the
200ths anniversary of the fights at Fowltown and Fort Hughes.

The weather was severely cold in the late fall of 1817. Ash blasted into the atmosphere by the explosion of the Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora still impacted the climate of the Northern Hemisphere. Temperatures remained so unusually cold more than one year after the eruption that the years 1816-1818 became known as the "Year without a Summer." Others called it "Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death."

The attacking force was unable to take Fort Hughes. The blockhouses of the outpost projected slightly from the walls, allowing Capt. McIntosh and his men to fire at any warriors who approached the stockade. The soldiers, meanwhile, were protected by the log walls of the blockhouses, and the attack force couldn't harm them.

Fort Hughes included two blockhouses similar to this
reconstructed one at Fort Mitchell Historic Site in Alabama.

Despite this advantage, the fight was a close thing for McIntosh's command. Fort Hughes did not have a well, and one officer who was present later described how the soldiers suffered greatly for water during the battle. A providential rain finally brought relief and saved the garrison from a need to break out through the Native American lines to find water.

The battle continued for three days before the chiefs and Cook finally decided that it was useless to continue and called off the fight. He and his force withdrew to the Suwannee, but their object was achieved. Lt. Col. Arbuckle at Fort Scott realized the vulnerability of Fort Hughes and sent troops to withdraw Capt. McIntosh's detachment.

Archaeological evidence suggests that the log walls of the fort later burned. Whether this fire took place during or after the war is not known.

The site of Fort Hughes can be visited today at J.D. Chason Memorial Park. Visitors can see a monument, interpretive panels, beautiful old trees, and a great view of the Flint River. The site is temporarily closed due to a major park enhancement project being carried out by the City of Bainbridge.

Click play here to learn more about the archaeological discovery of Fort Hughes:

Editor's Note: You can learn more about Fort Hughes, Fowltown, Fort Scott, and the Seminole War in 1817-1818 in these books from historian Dale Cox: