Savannah in History by Rodney Carlisle & Loretta Carlisle

Author:Rodney Carlisle & Loretta Carlisle [Carlisle, Rodney & Carlisle, Loretta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Globe Pequot Press
Published: 2019-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

Fort Pulaski interior. The embrasures on the south side of Fort Pulaski, like this one, look out toward Tybee Island, where gunfire from superior and very accurate Union artillery won the battle.

Union forces occupied nearby Tybee Island and prepared to take Fort Pulaski in early 1862. When Union general Thomas Sherman (not a close relation to General William Tecumseh Sherman) demanded surrender, Fort Pulaski’s Confederate commander, Colonel Charles H. Olmsted, refused. Olmsted had six months’ supply of provisions, and, under the guns of the fort, a trickle of blockade-runner commerce had briefly flowed in and out of Confederate-held Savannah in the early months of the war in 1861.

The chief engineering officer on the Union side preparing the attack on Fort Pulaski in 1862 was Quincy Adams Gillmore, who had closely followed the development of rifled artillery, which the U.S. Army had been testing since 1859. Gillmore believed that such cannons, with spiraled rifling inside the bore, increasing accuracy and range, would be effective, even at the two-mile range from Tybee Island. Repeated and accurate firing at the same spot on the thick walls, he reasoned, could breach the walls and allow targeting firing into the fort’s interior.

Gillmore’s commander, General Thomas Sherman, like Confederate colonel Olmsted, was skeptical about whether artillery would be effective against the “impregnable” Third System Fort Pulaski. Even so, General Sherman agreed to allow a bombardment, preparatory to an assault by troops. Sherman had ten thousand Union troops ready for the attack.

Union forces fired on the fort, using both James Rifled cannons and “Parrott rifles,” over a thirty-hour bombardment on April 10–11, 1862. The accurate shelling opened huge holes in the fort’s walls, allowing a view through the center courtyard of the fort directly to the magazine, packed with explosives. Recognizing that disaster loomed, Olmsted surrendered the fort, avoiding useless bloodshed on both sides. There were very few casualties on either side, but the fort, with its few hundred defenders, was no match for the huge assault force ready to attack, once the walls had been breached and the magazine was unprotected from Union artillery. Despite the lack of bloodshed, with only one death in the fort and several Union gunners mortally wounded from artillery accidents, the battle was a resounding Union victory, with 363 Confederate officers and men taken prisoner.

Today, park docents and information panels show exactly where and how the wall on the south side of the fort was broken through.

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