Storm Over Fort Pulaski

By Peggy Robbins

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As a young U.S. Army lieutenant, Robert E. Lee helped to construct Fort Pulaski. As a Confederate general 30 years later, he confidently assured fort defenders it could not be breached. Union gunners were not so sure.

In late 1860, as North and South stood face to face on the brink of war, Georgia, thanks to the provident leadership of Governor Joseph E. Brown, became one of the first Southern states to begin taking steps to defend itself. First came the reorganization and strengthening of state volunteer forces and the formation of new volunteer companies. The legislature, on Brown’s recommendation, appropriated a million dollars for self-defense and authorized the raising of 10,000 troops. The legislature provided for a convention on January 16, 1861, to decide the future action of Georgia, and the fore’ sighted governor got busy acquiring all the military information and material he could before that time.

Brown figured, correctly, that after then it would be too late. He got U.S. War Department samples of army equipment, with the idea of manufacturing it in Georgia; he got detailed descriptions of the type of rifled cannons and projectiles considered by experts to be superior; and he even placed orders for arms in Northern states. Brown also arranged for a $10,000 bonus to be offered by the state to any person establishing in Georgia a cannon factory capable of making three guns a week and of casting a 10-inch columbiad.

There was great excitement in Georgia when word came that South Carolina had seceded from the Union on December 20, 1860. People in Savannah gathered in the streets and cheered; some carried signs favoring secession. After dark on December 26, citizens and companies of militia marched through the streets carrying torchlights and transparencies, and homes and businesses were brilliantly lighted “in honor of South Carolina.”

Immediately after news of the Federal occupation of Fort Sumter reached Savannah by telegraph on the morning of December 27, angry citizens and military leaders recognized that the same danger threatened the Georgia seaport. The people of Savannah, in a public meeting, determined to seize Fort Pulaski before the Federal government could garrison and defend it. “There is but one sentiment on the question,’ reported the Savannah Republican, “and that is of indignation and resistance….We might have been quieted by a milder course, but there are none of us so degraded as to submit to being whipped into submission.”

Fort Pulaski had been built in the late 1820s and early 1830s on Cockspur Island, which had held a fort of one sort or another since colonial days. Robert E. Lee’s first military assignment after graduating from the U.S. Military Academy was as acting assistant commissary of subsistence at the general site. After many surveys he selected the fort’s permanent site and, because of his superior officer’s illness, actually ran the construction operation for more than a year until being replaced by Lieutenant Joseph K.F. Mansfield, who labored long and hard overcoming such problems as illness–malaria, typhoid, dysentery–a destructive hurricane, and periodic failure of the US. Congress to appropriate necessary funds.

In 1833 the new fort, still not completed, was named Pulaski in honor of Count Casimir Pulaski, the Polish hero mortally wounded at the Battle of Savannah in the American Revolu tion. In 1845 the state of Georgia ceded Cockspur Island to the Federal government. Completed in 1847, huge, handsome Fort Pulaski had in it some 25 million bricks; the majority of those, the rose-brown bricks used to build most of the walls, were manufactured at Hermitage Plantation, two miles from Savannah. The rose-red, much harder bricks used for the openings through which cannon were fired, the arches, and the walls facing the parade grounds were hauled in from Alexandria, Va., and Baltimore, Md.

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