Damaged walls of Fort Pulaski, Fort Pulaski National Monument
Cockspur Island has been important militarily since James Oglethorpe founded Savannah in 1733. It sits at the mouth of the Savannah River, and before modern warfare, the only way for an enemy to reach Savannah would be to sail a fleet of warships up the river. There was no way to invade by land because the coastal area was nothing but marsh, making it impossible to move men and equipment from the coast to the city. A properly placed fort on Cockspur Island could control all ship traffic on the Savannah River.
The first fort on the island, an earth and log structure called Fort George, was built by the English in 1761. After the American Revolution it was torn down because it could not stand up to the current naval technology. A second fort, Fort Greene, was its replacement. Built in 1794, it only lasted ten years until being destroyed by a hurricane in 1804.
Construction on Fort Pulaski began in 1829 as part of the United States’ effort to strengthen coastal defenses as a result of how easily the British were able to blockade and even invade American cities during the War of 1812. This included successfully burning Washington, D.C., to the ground. Today you might wonder what’s so bad about that, but back in the early 1800s it started a national panic. This age of fort construction was termed the “Third System,” and from 1816 through 1867 forty-two forts were built, all to protect the waterways leading to major cities. Many of the forts are still standing today.
Fort Pulaski was designed by French military engineer General Simon Bernard, but construction commenced under the command of Major Samuel Babcock. A survey of the area was done in December 1828 and construction began in early 1829, though work was suspended during the summer due to the heat. In November, Robert E. Lee, a recent West Point engineering graduate, arrived to assist Babcock. Lee would go on to have a hand in the construction of other forts, but Fort Pulaski was his first assignment.
When Babcock returned from the north in December, work on the project began again. However, he was old and not in good health, so the brunt of the work fell on the shoulders of Lee. In early 1830, construction on the barracks and the wharf began, as well as on the draining of the marsh and the building of the dike system. Work continued through June, at which time construction was halted again when physicians recommended that Babcock retire to cooler weather; he never returned to Cockspur Island.
When work resumed in the winter of 1830, drainage ditches and dikes were nearly complete. However, building forts on marshy ground was a relatively new undertaking, and when Lee and Lieutenant Joseph Mansfield, who had arrived to replace Babcock in January 1831, conducted a new survey of the land, they discovered that the ground would not support the weight of the fort as thought earlier. They presented the report to the military’s engineering department in March, and it was decided to suspend the project until revisions to the design could be made. In the meantime, Lee was sent to Hampton Roads, Virginia, to work on the construction of Fort Monroe (also part of the National Park system, the Fort Monroe National Monument).
Now under the command of Mansfield and an engineer with experience building in wet conditions, Captain Richard Delafield (who would become superintendent of West Point a few years later and eventually a General), the plans for Pulaski were modified to make it only a one-story fort of considerably less weight. Work on the fort commenced once again and continued until funds ran out in 1833, not to resume until 1835. Mansfield remained in charge of construction until being transferred in 1845. It would still be another two years before the fort was completed. Total cost was approximately $1 million. When done, the walls of the fort were nearly eight feet thick, having been constructed from 25 million bricks. The fort was thought to be impenetrable. U. S. Chief of Military Engineers Joseph Totten is quoted as saying, “One might as well bombard the Rocky Mountains as Fort Pulaski.”
At the time of its construction, Pulaski was indeed impenetrable for all practical purposes. Only the largest guns had a chance of damaging it, and their range was only a half mile. The closest place to launch an artillery bombardment was Tybee Island and it was over a mile away (McQueens Island was mainly marsh). Guns with a mile or longer range would be shooting smaller projectiles, none of which could do much damage to the fort.
Fourteen years after the completion of Fort Pulaski, the United States changed forever when on December 20, 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union after the election of Abraham Lincoln. At that time, Federal troops stationed at Fort Moultrie in South Carolina withdrew to the island-based Fort Sumter in order to better defend themselves if a civil war erupted. Two weeks later on January 3, 1861, wishing to avoid a similar Federal occupation of Fort Pulaski, Georgia Governor Joseph Brown ordered the Georgia militia to seize the fort—it was occupied by only two Federal soldiers. When Georgia seceded from the Union on the 19th, the fort was turned over to the Confederacy. Confederate troops also occupied Tybee Island.
One of President Abraham Lincoln’s first orders of business once the war had started was to form a naval blockade of the South’s major port cities. On November 7, 1861, Union troops took over Hilton Head Island, which by water is just seven miles north of Cockspur Island. On Hilton Head the Union regained control of forts Walker and Beauregard and now sat in a good position to launch an offensive on Fort Pulaski. Three days later, Confederate troops stationed on Tybee Island were removed to the safety of the fort. At one mile away, and with the range of heavy artillery only being a half mile, the Confederates saw no reason to maintain a presence on Tybee Island.
The Union, however, knew something that the Confederates did not, and in early December 1861, troops occupied Tybee. Under the command of Captain Quincy Adams Gillmore, construction began on eleven artillery batteries that were to hold 36 guns and mortars, ten of which sported a new technology called rifling.
The batteries were ready in early April. On the 10th, Gillmore demanded the surrender of Fort Pulaski, a demand at which the Confederates, under Colonel Charles Olmstead, laughed. After all, what could cannon on Tybee Island possibly do? As a result, Gillmore began what would be a thirty-hour bombardment of the fort, an effort that sent more than 5,000 artillery shells in the direction of Fort Pulaski.
Bombardment of Fort Pulaski
Fort Pulaski, like all forts of its time, was a masonry fort built of stone, or in this case, brick. Brick had no problem stopping a typical cannonball, for these didn’t travel with much velocity, nor were they very accurate, so the chance of blasting a hole in a fort wall by hitting the same spot over and over again was slim. However, rifled artillery had an inner barrel that had a spiral grove cut into it. When fired, they sent bullet-shaped shells spinning like footballs, increasing not only their accuracy, but also their range and velocity.
While the effects of the rifled artillery on the walls of Fort Pulaski remained to be seen, for the Confederates, it turned out to be like showing up for a fight with a musket and finding out that your enemy had an M-16 machine gun. The walls of the “indestructible fort” were breached in less than thirty hours, and the holes put into the walls were not just random holes. Engineers who had built the forts during the time of peace all ended up on opposite sides during the Civil War, which meant that no matter what fort you occupied, your enemy probably had an engineer who knew its weaknesses. Such was the case with Fort Pulaski.
The Union attack was aimed at the southeastern corner of the fort. On the opposite, northwestern corner was the fort’s main gunpowder room. Subsequent artillery shells were now capable of entering the fort through one of the existing holes, bouncing across the parade ground towards the gunpowder magazine, and blowing the entire fort sky high. When Olmstead realized what was going to eventually happen, he immediately surrendered.
Union troops occupied Fort Pulaski and made repairs within six weeks. Olmstead and his men were sent to a prison camp on Governors Island in New York harbor. Oddly enough, the Union never attempted to occupy Savannah, and it wasn’t until Sherman marched into town that it came into Union hands. However, with the Union in control of ship traffic on the Savannah River, the city was essentially rendered useless for the duration of the war.
Directly after the war, Fort Pulaski was used to house political prisoners, then was abandoned by the military altogether in 1873. After this time, the only occupants were the Cockspur Island Lighthouse keeper and his family, and even they were gone once the lighthouse was decommissioned in 1909. The fort remained in a rapidly deteriorating state, and even after it was made into a National Monument in 1924 under the control of the War Department, no attempt to restore or stabilize it was made. It wasn’t until the fort was transferred to the National Park Service in 1933 that renovations began in earnest by the Civilian Conservation Corp, an organization created by the U. S. Government to put men back to work during the Great Depession. The fort reverted back to military use during World War II, but afterwards it was returned to the National Park Service and opened to the public in 1947.
With the fall of Fort Pulaski to rifled artillery, all coastal forts effectively became obsolete. As a result, after the Civil War construction on forts that had not yet been completed was ceased. Those still in use no longer served any defensive purposes. In some cases the interiors of the masonry forts were fitted with concrete bunkers and batteries (Fort Sumter, for example) that could withstand rifled shells, while some were converted into command centers, offices, and training grounds. Others, like Pulaski, were used for a few years and then simply abandoned. Many of the Third System forts are now part of the National Park system: Fort Sumter, Fort Monroe, Fort Hancock, Fort Wadsworth, Fort Washington, Fort Jefferson, Fort Pickens, Fort Barrancas, Advanced Redoubt, Fort Massachusetts, Fort Alcatraz, Fort Point, Fort Warren.
Fort Pulaski was named after Casimir Pulaski, a Polish soldier who rose to fame fighting a Polish civil war against the Russians and the puppet government that it had installed in Poland. Fighting went on from 1768 until 1772 when the rebels were finally defeated. During this time he had middling success, losing as many battles as he had won, but he did gain valuable experience as a soldier. Upon defeat, Pulaski fled to France and tried to join the French army, but he had made many enemies and could not find an army to fight for. He was even sentenced to death back in Poland for trying to kidnap the Polish king, Stanislaw II.
In 1777 he met Benjamin Franklin and Marquis de Lafayette and was recruited to join the American Revolution. After saving the Continental Army at the Battle of Brandywine, George Washington appointed him Brigadier General in the cavalry at a time when the cavalry was mainly used for scouting purposes. Pulaski organized the cavalry into a fighting unit and is known today as the “Father of the United States Cavalry.” Tragically, he was killed in the Battle for Savannah in 1779.
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Last updated on November 11, 2024
