| The Fall of Fort Pulaski back - next | |
Savannah was prospering from cotton trade in 1860 - firmly linked to the plantation economy that depended on slavery. Feelings for secession were high in the city. When South Carolina left the Union in December the city celebrated with crowds filling the streets and a rally in Johnson Square. The city's militia units paraded and the men of the city itched for action. On January 3, 1861, in the first hostile act of the war, 134 members of three militia units, the Chatham Artillery, the Oglethorpe Light Infantry and the Savannah Volunteer Guards seized Fort Pulaski. The masonry fort on Cockspur Island guarding the mouth of the Savannah River. Built in the 1830s, the fort's fort's seven-foot-thick walls were considered impregnable. |
 Molyneaux House was home of British counsel |
| Robert E. Lee, who had worked on the fort as his first assignment out of West Point, inspected the fortifications and judged they could not be breached. Colonel Charles Olmstead, who had led the expedition which captured the fort, led the garrison of some 380 men who faced the Northern forces who controlled the seaways and were building batteries at Goat Point on Tybee Island, some 1,700 yards distant. Olmstead refused a demand to surrender and on April 11, 1862 the Union guns opened fire. New rifled cannon on Tybee Island battered down the brickworks. In 30 hours most of Fort Pulaski's guns were knocked out, the walls breached and the powder magazine exposed. Olmstead surrendered. The face of warfare had changed and would continue to change with the introduction of new technologies through the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Olmstead was criticized for his "easy" surrender but the colonel felt capitulation was necessary to save the lives of his men who would have been sacrificed needlessly with the issue already decided by the certain reduction of the fort. With Fort Pulaski out of the way, the Union Navy set about bottling up the Port. back - next | |
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