The Third System was a 19th-century program of coastal fortification in the United States, and Fort Pulaski, near Savannah, Georgia, is one of its best-preserved forts.
Why a new system
When the British burned the nation's capital in the War of 1812, American coastal defense was a patchwork of scattered batteries and outposts. Learning from that war, the country designed a new system to guard its critical shores.
| Planning | built in a relatively peaceful era, allowing unprecedented standardization; for the first time a professional board oversaw design and construction |
| Ambition | close to 200 forts envisioned for the Atlantic and Pacific coasts |
| Reality | only 42 built, 1816–1867; some were never finished, partly because of what happened at Fort Pulaski in the Civil War |
Elevation and engineering plan for Fort Pulaski. NPS
Building on mud
By the early 1820s, the busy port of Savannah needed a bigger river fort. Work began in 1827 on Cockspur Island, just east of the city.
- Fresh from West Point, Lt. Robert E. Lee — later a Confederate general — designed the canals and earthworks that drained the island to give the fort a foundation. Visiting during the Civil War, he found his dikes had worked; maps from 1862 show the land inside them as the island's only dry ground.
- The soft mud couldn't bear a fort of some 13 million bricks, so builders drove 70-foot pilings into it, topped by two layers of timber as a subfloor for the brickwork.
- The workforce included soldiers, skilled masons, carpenters and enslaved people hired out by their enslavers, all enduring heat and mosquitoes. From 1829 to 1847 work went on intermittently, sometimes halted for months in summer.
Fort Pulaski from the air. NPS
The finished fort
The two-tier fort is a truncated hexagon facing east, with a demilune, a moat, two powder magazines and a parade ground about the size of a football field.
| Brick | Source | Use |
|---|---|---|
| "Savannah Gray" (brownish) | made nearby at the Hermitage Plantation's brick plant — by enslaved men, women and children, whose fingerprints still show in the walls | the lower walls |
| Rose-red | Baltimore, Maryland, and Alexandria, Virginia | harder, so used in arches and embrasures — often mistaken today for modern brick |
In 1848, Savannah's 13,463 residents felt safe from foreign invasion. Fort Pulaski was one of a chain of forts meant to keep powers such as England and Spain at bay — yet, ironically, it saw its only action in the Civil War.
More: NPS on American forts and on Robert E. Lee and Fort Pulaski.
Sources
Based on "Third System of Fortification," National Park Service, Fort Pulaski National Monument; a work of the United States government in the public domain.
In these publicationsFort Pulaski National Monument
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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