Fort Pulaski National Monument, GeorgiaLattimore, Ralston B.
History
Fort Pulaski National Monument, Georgia
Lattimore, Ralston B.
Fort Pulaski (Ga.) -- Siege, 1862; Fort Pulaski National Monument (Ga.)
Had Gillmore been able to inspect the fort at the end of the first day,
he would have had reason to rejoice. The place was in shambles. Nearly
all of the barbette guns and mortars bearing upon Tybee had been
dismounted and only two of the five casemate guns were in order. At the
southeast angle, the whole wall from the crest of the parapet to the
moat was flaked away to a depth of from 2 to 4 feet.
_Surrender_
On Friday morning, at daylight, the bombardment reopened with fresh
vigor on both sides. Pulaski had repaired some of her guns during the
night and now directed her barbette fire with considerable precision
and rapidity. From Tybee, Gillmore’s gunners resumed the work of
breaching with determination, and the effect was almost immediately
apparent in the enlargement of the two embrasures on the left of the
southeast face of the fort. Pulaski’s fire was far less accurate than
that of the Federals. The batteries on Tybee were nearly all masked
behind a low sand ridge and were also protected by heavy sandbag
revetments. Most of the Confederate shot and shell buried themselves in
the beach or traveled completely over the Federal batteries and
trenches. About 9 o’clock the besiegers received their only casualty. A
solid shot from Pulaski entered a gun embrasure in Battery McClellan
striking a private soldier and wounded him so severely that he died
soon after.
During the morning, the naval gunboat, _Norwich_, began to fire against
the northeast face of the fort, but the range was too great and her
shots struck only glancing blows on the brick walls. A battery on Long
Island opened up at long range from the west, and shots were landing on
the south wall from guns located on a barge in Tybee Creek.
[Illustration: _Mortar Battery Stanton in action, April 10, 1862._
Sketch by W. T. Crane in Supplement to _Frank Leslie’s Illustrated
Weekly_, May 3, 1862.]
At noon, a considerable part of the Federal fire was directed against
the guns on the ramparts of the fort and within half an hour these guns
were silenced. By now, two great holes had been opened through the
walls and the inside of the fort was visible from Tybee. The interior
arches had been laid bare, and a barbette gun on the parapet was
tottering, ready to fall. It was plain that the whole east angle would
soon be in ruins. General Benham gave orders to prepare to take Fort
Pulaski by direct assault.
At the fort, when all men were ordered from the ramparts to allow the
guns to cool, Pvt. L. W. Landershine thought that “things looked blue.”
One man had been mortally wounded, another had had his foot taken off
by the recoil of a gun, and a dozen others had been struck by fragments
of shell. Projectiles from the rifle batteries were passing completely
through the breach, sweeping across the parade, and striking against
the walls of the north magazine in which 40,000 pounds of black powder
was stored.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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