The ditches of Cockspur Island

In 1829, the U.S. Army began work on a "Third System" fort on Cockspur Island, near the mouth of the Savannah River. One of the engineers sent to work there was a recent West Point graduate, Second Lieutenant Robert E. Lee of Virginia. One of Lt. Lee's duties was to create a drainage system that would allow the soft ground of Cockspur—so low-lying that it often disappeared at high tide—to support the fort's massive masonry walls. The canal below, and the brick structures in the succeeding photos, represent part of that system.

Lee was transferred back to Virginia in 1831, and two years later the stronghold was named Fort Pulaski in honour of Casimir Pulaski, the Polish cavalry commander who had perished at Savannah in the American Revolution. The fort was completed in 1847 but did not see service until 1861, when Georgia seceded from the Union and Governor Joseph Brown sent troops to occupy the fort; upon Georgia's joining the Confederate States, Fort Pulaski became a Confederate military installation under the command of Colonel Charles H. Olmstead. 

In the intervening years, Robert E. Lee had had an illustrious career with the U.S. Army, and having reluctantly resigned his commission after Virginia's secession, he became first the commander of the Provisional Army of Virginia and the Virginia State Navy, and then a full general in the newly-formed Confederate States Army. Although he would later come to his greatest fame as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, and eventually General in Chief of the Armies of the Confederate States, in late 1861 and early 1862 Lee was in command of the Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, and as such responsible for coastal defenses in those states—including, of course, Fort Pulaski. 

Lee's professional opinion, shared by most of his peers at the time, was that Pulaski's walls—eleven feet thick—were invulnerable against even sustained artillery fire. In the words of U.S. Chief of Engineers Joseph Totten, "You might as well bombard the Rocky Mountains." In consequence, nearby Tybee Island, deemed too isolated to be defensible, was abandoned by Confederate forces and subsequently occupied by the Union Army. Lee's own assessment of the situation, offered to Col. Olmstead, was that "they will make it pretty warm for you here with shells, but they cannot breach your walls at that distance."

For nearly four months, Union and Confederate naval forces contended for control of the Savannah River as the Federals sought to establish and then tighten their blockade of Savannah. Meanwhile, Brigadier General Quincy A. Gillmore, himself an engineer who had taken a keen interest in naval rifled guns, was establishing artillery positions on Tybee Island. Like the engineers who had built Pulaski, Gillmore's men had to contend with marsh that could easily swallow cannons, but they had the additional disadvantage of working in combat conditions. They worked mainly at night to avoid artillery fire from the fort, braving alligators and mosquitoes to build corduroy road and gun platforms, then hauling the heavy guns to their makeshift emplacements. 

On the 10th of April, 1862, Gillmore's batteries commenced the bombardment of Fort Pulaski from Tybee Island. Thirty hours later, with the fort's walls breached and one of the powder magazines exposed, Olmstead recognised his situation as hopeless and surrendered the fort. (His sword now lies in a display case at Fort Pulaski National Monument.)

In much the same way that the battle between the ironclads USS Monitor and CSS Virginia just two months earlier had signaled the end of the age of wooden warships, the Battle of Fort Pulaski demonstrated that Lee and Totten had been wrong, and that existing coastal forts were obsolete in the face of rifled artillery.

But while Lee had overestimated the strength of Fort Pulaski's walls, the drainage system he built here remains a testimony to his engineering acumen, and that of the Army engineers generally. Fort Pulaski consists of an estimated 25 million bricks, built on a wooden platform with poles sunk up to 70 feet into the mud of Cockspur Island. And while the masonry walls ultimately were no match for rifled Parrott and James cannons, we were told that even now—195 years after construction began, and 177 years after its completion—there are still no cracks in its foundation.