The Battle for Fort Pulaski, 1862: How Rifled Cannon Ended the Age of Brick Forts

Fort Pulaski, at the mouth of the Savannah River in Georgia, was finished in 1847 but held by just two caretakers until 1860. When South Carolina seceded that year, Georgia's governor Joseph E. Brown ordered the state to take it: a steamer carried 110 men down from Savannah, and the fort was signed over to Georgia. After Georgia seceded in February 1861 and joined the Confederacy, Confederate troops moved in and prepared for attack.

The Union takes Tybee

The Confederates judged Tybee Island too isolated and unready to hold, and by December 1861 had abandoned it — giving United States troops a foothold across the river from the fort, where they began building batteries along the beaches.

General Thomas Sherman wanted to bypass the fort and strike Savannah, but Rear Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont found the waterways too shallow and called the plan dangerous; the dispute eventually cost Sherman his command. Meanwhile he ringed the fort with batteries and gunboats.

• February 13, 1862: the Confederate supply ship Ida ran past a battery the Union had secretly built at Venus Point on the river's north bank. It survived, but never reached the fort again.
• The next week: another battery went up on the south bank, a boom was thrown across Tybee Creek, guarded by two infantry companies and a gunboat, and the telegraph line from Savannah to Cockspur Island was cut. After February 15, the only contact with Savannah was a courier slipping through the marshes by night.

Inside the fort were five companies of Georgia volunteers — 385 officers and men under Colonel Charles H. Olmstead — with 48 guns covering every approach.

Confederates prepare Fort Pulaski for battle.

The new weapon

Starving the garrison out was one option: the fort had been stocked on January 28 with six months' food, perhaps stretchable to August or September, but surrender would eventually have been certain. Sherman, though, wanted Savannah fast, and the Northern press wanted action. On February 14 the Army's commanding general ordered the whole expedition to concentrate on reducing Fort Pulaski — but Sherman had already moved. On February 19 he sent his chief engineer, Captain Quincy A. Gillmore, to command the troops on Tybee and prepare a bombardment.

Gillmore was a brilliant engineer whose greatest strength was a fearless disregard for tradition.

The fort seemed invincible. Its solid brick walls were 7½ feet thick, backed by massive masonry piers; the river and wide marshes surrounded it; warships could not safely get within range; and the nearest firm ground for batteries was Tybee, 1 to 2½ miles away. Experience said smoothbore guns and mortars had little chance of breaching heavy masonry beyond 700 yards, and none beyond 1,000. The Army's Chief of Engineers, General Totten, said "you might as well bombard the Rocky Mountains", and Robert E. Lee, standing on the fort with Olmstead, told him the Union could make it "pretty warm" with shells, but could not breach his walls at that distance.

Gillmore knew better. He had studied the Army's tests of rifled guns, begun in 1859, and on December 1, 1861, risking ridicule, he reported that mortars and rifled guns on Tybee could reduce the fort, with a full plan of attack. Sherman approved it while doubting the rifles, writing that guns could only "shake the walls in a random manner".

Building the batteries. Troops built 11 batteries on Tybee's northwest shore. Seven stood on open marsh in full view of the fort, so work there was done at night, in whispers, and camouflaged before dawn; some guns needed 250 men to haul them across the marsh.

The battle

April 10, 1862. Olmstead refused a call to surrender. The mortars disappointed — their shells burst high, fell outside, or threw up harmless mud — but the fort shook at every solid shot, and one dismounted a casemate gun, wounding its crew. By noon observers counted 47 scars on the southeast corner. To the Union troops the fort still looked almost as solid as that morning.

In fact the fort was a shambles. Nearly all the rampart guns and mortars facing Tybee were dismounted, only two of five casemate guns worked, and at the southeast angle the wall had flaked away 2 to 4 feet deep from top to moat.

The bombardment opened two large holes in the fort's walls.

April 11. Union fire quickly widened two embrasures on the southeast face, while Confederate shots mostly buried themselves in the beach or flew over the hidden Tybee batteries; the besiegers' only casualty was a private mortally wounded in Battery McClellan. By noon the rampart guns were silenced, two great holes opened into the fort, and General Benham ordered preparations for an assault.

Inside, Private L.W. Landershine thought "things looked blue". One man was mortally wounded, another had lost a foot to a gun's recoil, a dozen more were hit by fragments — and rifle shot was passing clean through the breach, across the parade, and striking the walls of the north magazine, which held 40,000 pounds of black powder.

The 25-year-old Olmstead could fight on against overwhelming odds or admit defeat. Judging the situation hopeless and the garrison's lives his next duty, he surrendered. About 2:30 p.m., Landershine saw the colonel and a captain go by with a rammer and a sheet, and knew it was over. The Confederate flag was lowered halfway, a last gun fired, and the white sheet raised. An old era of coastal fortification had ended.

On Tybee, soldiers danced on the beach. Gillmore crossed to Cockspur under a flag of truce and settled the terms with Olmstead — unconditional. By candlelight the fort's officers gave up their swords to Major Charles G. Halpine, General Hunter's representative, Olmstead saying he trusted he had not disgraced his. The Stars and Stripes rose over the ramparts.

Colonel Olmstead and his officers surrender their swords to Major Halpine.

Why it mattered

• The blockade. Holding the fort sealed the entrance to Georgia's main port and tightened the blockade that strangled the South's economy. Within six weeks the fort was repaired and all shipping in and out of Savannah had stopped.
• Fortification. General Hunter told the Secretary of War that the bombardment would change fortification as radically as the Monitor and Merrimac had changed naval architecture: "No works of stone or brick can resist the impact of rifled artillery of heavy calibre." Events proved him right, and Fort Pulaski became a relic of another age.

The numbers. Over two days, 5,275 shot and shell were fired at the fort, but the breach was made mainly by three James rifles — two 84-pounders and a 64-pounder — whose solid shot, from 1,640 yards, drove 20 to 25 inches into the brick with shattering side effects; explosive rifle shells helped too. Other rifles flew erratically, some tumbling end over end. Apart from 100 sailors from the frigate Wabash who manned four Parrott rifles on the second day, none of the gunners — Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York and Maine volunteers — had fired in action before.

Olmstead's choice. The quick fall surprised the world, and some suspected the surrender. But once the Confederates gave up Tybee, they had handed the Union the only sites from which the fort could be taken; when the white flag went up, an assault was being readied, and within 24 hours more than 10,000 troops could have been thrown at the fort.

Afterwards

• The prisoners were sent north, to New York Harbor and later Johnson's Island, Ohio, and Fort Delaware; many died of pneumonia or typhoid, and a good number of privates swore allegiance to the United States. Most were exchanged in August and September.
• The garrison, which reached 600 before falling to about 250, repaired the fort; the 48th New York, there until May 31, 1863, formed a baseball team, a band and a dramatic society.
• Freedom. With the fort secure, General David Hunter declared all enslaved people in Florida, Georgia and South Carolina free. Lincoln quickly rescinded the order, but issued his own Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Fort Pulaski became a final stop on the Underground Railroad: freedom seekers from the area were freed on reaching Cockspur Island.
• A prison. Late in the war the fort held a group of captured Confederate officers known as the Immortal Six Hundred; thirteen died there. After the war it briefly held military and political prisoners, among them a Confederate secretary of state, secretary of the treasury, secretary of war and assistant secretary of war, three state governors and a senator.

Sources

• National Park Service, Fort Pulaski National Monument, "Battle for Fort Pulaski," based on Ralston B. Lattimore, Fort Pulaski National Monument, NPS Historical Handbook No. 18. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/battle-for-fort-pulaski.htm
• The original names Hunter's emancipation order "Gen. Order Number Seven"; the order covering Florida, Georgia and South Carolina is usually cited as General Orders No. 11, so no number is given here.
• Rewritten in hubnx's own words.