A year later the Federal garrison on Cockspur Island was reduced to a small holding force. The great battles were being fought elsewhere and the South was gradually losing the war. But in late October 1864 Fort Pulaski again became actively involved in the war when about 550 prisoners of war– all Confederate officers, in rank from lieutenants to lieutenant colonels–were brought to Cockspur Island from a stockade on Morris Island, S.C.

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In mid-December, Colonel Philip P. Brown, Pulaski’s commender, was ordered to limit each prisoner’s daily rations to one-quarter pound of bread, 10 ounces of cornmeal, and one half pint of pickles; for 43 unusually cold winter days, prisoners subsisted on that meager diet–or died. There were no blankets and no warming fires, neither coal nor wood to heat the casemates. The men grew weaker daily, and by midJanuary 1865 scurvy was taking its toll. But late in January, Pulaski’s prisoners were put back on full rations, which saved many lives. About 460 lived to be exchanged. The Confederate prisoners at Fort Pulaski were memorialized in Southern history as “The Immortal Six Hundred.”

On April 29, 1865, 20 days after Robert E. Lee surrendered, 200 guns were fired from Fort Pulaski’s ramparts to mark that surrender, which also ended Lee’s great military career, begun 35 years earlier on Cockspur Island. For Lee, and for the fort he helped design, the guns had grown silent. The war was over.

Indefatigable author Peggy Robbins of Gulfport, Miss., ranges far and wide in her varied historical interests. As further reading, see volume 2 of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War or Ralston B. Lattimore’s Fort Pulaski: National Monument.

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