Fort Monroe National Monument | HISTORY OF FORT MONROE

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By Larry Holzwarth


The American experience during the War of 1812 revealed the weakness of United States coastal defenses. Throughout the war the British fleet was able to enter the Chesapeake Bay with relative impunity, conducting raids on the interior via the James and Potomac rivers. Following the war, noting the successful resistance of Fort McHenry to the British attack on Baltimore during that conflict, President James Monroe initiated an up-to-date system of stone and brick fortresses, called the Third System, to be built for the defense of American harbors and inland waterways. More than three dozen such forts were authorized, with construction beginning in 1819 and continuing for more than twenty-five years. The coastal defense system would continue to expand with the nation and remain a vital part of the national defense into the mid-twentieth century.

In urgent need of protection were the the waters located between modern day Norfolk and Hampton, Virginia, known as the Hampton Roads. This is where the James, Elizabeth, and Nansemond Rivers come together just before flowing into the Chesapeake Bay. The region’s strategic importance had been recognized since the earliest days of the English settlement at Jamestown in 1607. A series of stockades had been built on a peninsula that juts into the Hampton Roads. Originally named Point Comfort, the peninsula was first used as a refuge for settlers in the event of Indian attacks, and later as a defense against attack from the sea.

The first fort built at Point Comfort was known as Fort Algernourne, a series of wooden palisades, probably triangular in shape. This was eventually replaced with a structure known as Fort Old Point Comfort in 1632. However, this fell into disrepair and was abandoned by the late 1600s. In 1728, Virginia militia and British troops erected Fort George on the site; the brick and masonry structure was the most substantial fort yet built at Point Comfort. Unfortunately, it was destroyed by a hurricane eleven years later. No replacement was constructed.

When the War of 1812 began, there was still no fort to protect the Hampton Roads, and as a result, the waters were used as an anchorage by British ships, effectively blockading American ships from entering the Atlantic. By the end of the war the need to fortify Old Point Comfort was apparent, and two fortifications were authorized. Fort Calhoun (later renamed Fort Wool) would be built on a man-made island in the Hampton Roads; Fort Monroe was erected on Old Point Comfort.

An expatriate French military engineer, Simon Bernard, was hired as the original designer. (He was to design many of the harbor forts under construction during the Third System; French military engineering was considered the world’s best at the time). Bernard’s design was to build a fort which could command the waterways in all directions, provide for interlocking crossfire over the Hampton Roads anchorage, and be difficult, if not impossible, to directly assault. Fort Monroe was entirely surrounded by a moat, above which rose casemated walls of brick and stone. The outside walls were ten feet thick to resist the heaviest artillery fire of the day. The casemates provided rooms for living, firing embrasures for heavy guns, and storage facilities. The fort contained 63 acres within its walls and outliers and was erected at a cost of two million dollars. Fort Monroe was considered complete by 1834, after fifteen years of construction.

Model of Fort Monroe

Model of Fort Monroe

In 1831, a young Army Corps of Engineers officer named Robert E. Lee supervised construction at the fort, including the dredging of the moat to its proper depth and ensuring a steady supply of water to the moat provided by Mill Creek. Fort Monroe’s size and seeming invulnerability earned it the nickname of “The Gibraltar of the Chesapeake.” It is the largest masonry fort ever built in the United States.

The fort remained manned, with garrisons of varying size, throughout the rising tensions between North and South over the issue of secession. During the antebellum period, the U. S. Navy’s shipyard on the west side of the Elizabeth River grew steadily, with dry docks opening in 1827, further increasing the strategic importance of the region to the nation’s defense.

In April, 1861, in response to the threat of Virginia seceding from the Union, President Lincoln ordered Fort Monroe to be resupplied and its garrison strengthened (it was a similar move to strengthen Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, which precipitated the first shots of the Civil War). When Virginia joined the confederacy in May, Union naval authorities ordered the shipyard burned, but it was instead seized by Virginia troops. The partially burned United States frigate Merrimack was part of the vast store of military materials seized by the Confederacy.

In May of that year, on the same day Virginia seceded, three fugitive slaves arrived at Fort Monroe and asked for shelter. The slaves were the property, under Virginia law, of a Colonel in the new Confederate Army. When an officer of that Army arrived under a flag of truce and demanded the slaves be returned, General Benjamin Butler, commander of Fort Monroe, refused to hand them over. Butler argued that the slaves were not free men, but the property of a state at war with the Union, and were therefore “Contraband of War.”

This position was rapidly supported by the Lincoln administration, and by June over 500 slaves had arrived at Fort Monroe. In August, Congress gave the policy the sanction of law. With the number of slaves soon growing too large to be contained within the walls of the fort, Butler authorized the construction of a “Grand Contraband Camp” outside of the walls on the ruins of the town of Hampton. Most of the construction was accomplished by the slaves themselves. After the Emancipation Proclamation and the decision to develop African-American army units, many enlisted.

In March 1862, Union General George McClellan landed his army at Fort Monroe to begin the Peninsula Campaign, his attempt to capture the Confederate Capital at Richmond. Fort Monroe served as a primary logistics base for this campaign, which ended in a Union defeat after a series of battles around Richmond known as the Seven Days. Abraham Lincoln visited the fort in May 1862 to observe the Union army during this campaign.

Also in March 1862, the CSS Virginia, rebuilt as an ironclad by the Confederates on the hull of the USS Merrimack, lumbered out of its anchorage to attack the Union ships in Hampton Roads. In the span of an afternoon, the Virginia sank the USS Cumberland, set the USS Congress afire, and forced the USS Minnesota aground under the guns of Fort Monroe. Virginia withdrew when darkness fell, determined to return the next day to destroy the Minnesota. In the evening, the USS Monitor, the U. S. Navy’s first ironclad, arrived ready to do battle with the Virginia in the morning. The historic confrontation, the first between ironclad warships and known as the Battle of Hampton Roads, was witnessed from the casemates of Fort Monroe.

Fort Monroe remained in Union hands throughout the Civil War. The fort provided a base of operations which allowed the Union to quickly retake the Naval Yard and force the Confederates to withdraw up the James River nearer to Richmond. Fort Monroe’s presence also made the attempts of blockade runners to reach the Confederacy to be largely futile. Unable to run under the fort’s guns, blockade runners were forced to elude the Union ships in Chesapeake Bay and land their cargoes in remote streams, from which movement of the supplies over land was difficult.

As the Civil War came to an end and the Confederate armies surrendered in the field, their officers and men were protected from prosecution for treason by the paroles granted by the officers to whom they surrendered. The same was not the case for civilian members of the Confederate government. Confederate States President Jefferson Davis was captured by Union troops in 1865 and sent to Fort Monroe for imprisonment pending trial for treason. He remained a prisoner there, at first in a bare cell in the casemate, in irons. Gradually his treatment and his living facilities improved, in part as a response to his failing health and in part due to growing support for his release. After two years he was released on bail, although he remained under threat of trial until the general amnesty was granted by President Andrew Johnson in 1868.

After the Civil War, Fort Monroe’s importance as a coastal defense facility began to wane and the fort took an active role in training, becoming the military’s main school for the study of artillery. By the 1890’s the fort hosted the Coast Artillery School, the U. S. Army Coast Artillery Corps, and published the Coast Artillery Journal. With Naval ships deploying ever larger guns, with ranges measured in the tens of miles, Coastal Defense guns grew accordingly, and many of the newest calibers were tested at Fort Monroe.

World War I brought a renewed emphasis on protecting American inland waterways from a new threat—the U-boat. The first submarine net in American waters was deployed across the entry to Hampton Roads between Fort Wool and Fort Monroe. Artillery training increased with the growth of the U. S. Army, and the coastal guns were manned against a potential naval attack.

World War II brought a similar increase in the training of Army artillerists. Coastal guns were again deployed against the very real threat of U-boat attack, with German submarines sinking Allied ships in sight of the U. S. coastline. Although the coastal artillery at Fort Monroe did not fire upon any German ships, the fort’s artillery training school provided trained gunners to sites around the world, from the Philippines to the Mediterranean.

After World War II, many of the functions of Fort Monroe were obsolete. Advancements in aviation, long range missiles, and other armaments rendered its defensive guns useless, as the possibility of a seaborne attack became unlikely. The United States Army’s Training and Doctrine Command made its headquarters at the fort in 1973, tasked with developing, evaluating, and monitoring Army training.

By the end of the 20th Century and the close of the cold war, numerous U. S. military commands and bases were determined to be redundant. After several rounds of Base Realignment Commission hearings in which Fort Monroe survived as an active military command, in 2005 BRAC determined that its mission could be merged with other nearby bases such as Fort Eustis. Fort Monroe ceased to be a commissioned military post in 2011. President Obama designated the fort as a National Monument on November 1, 2011.

Gun emplacement at Fort Monroe National Monument

Gun emplacement at Fort Monroe National Monument

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Last updated on November 3, 2024
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