Fort Pulaski was a Civil War engagement fought in Georgia, 1862. It was a Union victory.
Fort Pulaski, built by the U.S. Army before the war, is located near the mouth of the Savannah River, blocking upriver access to Savannah. Fortifications such as Pulaski, called third system forts, were considered invincible, but the new technology of rifled artillery changed that. On February 19, 1862, Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Sherman ordered Captain Quincy A. Gillmore, an engineer officer, to take charge of the investment force and begin the bombardment and capture of the fort. Gillmore emplaced artillery on the mainland southeast of the fort and began the bombardment on April 10 after Colonel Charles H. Olmstead refused to surrender the fort. Within hours, Gillmore's rifled artillery had breached the southeast scarp of the fort, and he continued to exploit it. Some of his shells began to damage the traverse shielding the magazine in the northwest bastion. Realizing that if the magazine exploded the fort would be seriously damaged and the garrison would suffer severe casualties, Olmstead surrendered after 2:00 pm on April 11.
Fighting at Fort Pulaski on April 10 and 11, 1862, brought an end to a lengthy siege during the American Civil War, sometimes called the siege and reduction of the fort. Federal troops stationed on Tybee Island, working alongside naval forces, kept up pressure for 112 days before finally taking the Confederate stronghold following a bombardment lasting 30 hours. What made this engagement historically significant was the pioneering deployment of rifled artillery, weaponry that rendered older coastal fortifications obsolete overnight. This campaign also marked the first time Union forces launched amphibious assaults on a large scale while under enemy fire.
Once the fort fell, Savannah's usefulness as a port came to an effective end. Federal forces pushed their blockade and navigational support further along the Atlantic seaboard, afterward pulling most of the roughly 10,000 soldiers stationed there away to other assignments. Despite this loss, the combined army and navy defense mounted by the Confederates had already held off any Federal push for more than three months, kept the city itself safe, and ensured no further Union assault from the sea would succeed there for the rest of the conflict. In response, rail lines along the coast were pushed further to reach Charleston, South Carolina, which remained under blockade.
Geographically, Fort Pulaski sits on Cockspur Island in Georgia, positioned where the Savannah River meets the sea. From this vantage point, the fort guarded all seaward routes into Savannah, a city whose importance rested on its cotton exports, its role as a railway hub, and its standing as the state's foremost manufacturing center, complete with a state arsenal and privately owned shipyards. Behind the fort, a pair of estuaries running south connected to the Savannah River. Just to the east, close enough to see Hilton Head Island in South Carolina, stood Tybee Island, home to a lighthouse.
Union forces spent time expanding their base on Hilton Head Island before turning their attention to the siege of Fort Pulaski. That effort against the fort got underway on November 24, 1861. Scouts had confirmed that Confederate troops no longer held Tybee Island, so Du Pont sent three gunboats forward in an amphibious strike near the Tybee Island Lighthouse. A naval bombardment lasting two hours prompted the Confederate pickets to torch the lighthouse themselves and pull back. Commander Christopher Rodgers of the USS Flag then guided sailors and Marines ashore in thirteen surf-boats, seizing both the lighthouse and the nearby Martello tower and raising the national flag over them. That night a small detachment lit decoy campfires to confuse any Confederates still in the area. Two days afterward, Du Pont and Sherman went out to survey the ground themselves, and on November 29 Major General Quincy Adams Gillmore, serving as the command's chief engineer, brought three companies of the Fourth New Hampshire to claim the whole island formally, meeting no resistance. With the navy moving supplies into place, the army had gathered enough material by December 20 to establish what was called "a permanent possession."
The British steamer Fingal turned out to be the final vessel to slip past the blockade into Savannah. Carrying weapons and munitions, she reached the mouth of the Savannah River near Wassaw Sound on a clear night in mid November, then used a thick early morning fog to conceal her passage over the bar and upstream. She would later attempt to
On the Union side, Savannah's port was shut off from Confederate use early in the conflict, which widened the reach of the naval blockade. Repairs to the fort's damage took only six weeks, and Confederate forces never attempted to seize it back. Savannah itself stayed under Confederate control until Sherman's forces reached the city in December 1864 during his march to the sea. In the years after the fighting, it became clear that heavy rifled cannon had made masonry fortifications obsolete, transforming coastal defense in much the same way the clash between the Monitor and the Virginia had transformed naval warfare. The speed with which Fort Pulaski fell was cited as grounds for abandoning further masonry fort construction, prompting a brief turn toward earthwork forts during the 1870s. Yet the lessons the Union drew from this engagement went unapplied until after the war had ended. When Fort Fisher came under assault in December 1864, the shelling proved scattered and imprecise, leaving the fort largely
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