away from Fortress Monroe, primarily. This broad band of water,
encircling the high, grey old walls of the place, appeals strongly
to one’s romantic sense. Ho, warder! to the draw-bridge! And all
that sort of thing. There is a draw-bridge, too,--five of them,
in fact, at the five entrances to the fort. So, ho, for the
draw-bridge and a view inside the fort!
[Illustration: GARDEN VIEW OF ONE OF MONROE’S ANTEBELLUM RESIDENCES]
The visitor who crosses the narrow way leading across the moat
and penetrates to the interior of Fortress Monroe will not be
greatly impressed by show of military works. These are all quietly
and modestly ready in the background, somewhere. He will find
himself in a charming sort of park which strongly suggests the
tropics in its luxuriance of foliage of all kinds. Indeed the air
of Old Point, for some reasons, supports tropical plant growth that
will not live in the countryside immediately adjoining. One of the
effective sights that the visitor sees in the fort are the clumps
of fig trees which are to be found, and there are to be found, too,
magnolia and rhododendron and crape myrtle.
There is a large parade ground, flanked on the east and north
by long barracks. The rest of the grounds, not including the
casemates, is given over to residences, to various store-houses and
to a building of the Coast Artillery School which has been located
at Monroe since 1867.
The casemates of the old fort are used as residences for married
private soldiers and for other purposes, not transparently
military. The long rows of heavy cannon once to be seen here are
to be found no more, their place being taken by modern batteries
elsewhere.
There is to be seen the casemate in which Jefferson Davis,
president of the Confederate States, was confined after the working
out of the destiny of the Lost Cause. It is not different from its
neighbors, and is an inconspicuous little compartment in a wall
with an ornamental little two-post doorway and one window. Many
curious visitors stop before it.
Old Point Comfort and all of this section of the lower Chesapeake
have seen many strange visitors and cargoes in the Past. Doughty
old Captain John Smith came to Hampton Roads and wrote about what
he saw with that wealth of picturesque detail which those old
chroniclers loved to pour forth. The name Point Comfort itself
came from the circumstance that Smith was cast into this Hampton
Roads on the wings of a storm at sea and that he hailed the first
strip of solid land that he saw as a comfort, indeed. At an early
period a settlement was made here, as a subsidiary of the Jamestown
colony, and, as early as 1611, a fort was built on the point as
a defence against Indians and freebooting marauders of buccaneer
type. The fort was armed and known as Fort Algernon, in honor of
Lord Algernon Percie, one of the directors of the Virginia Company.
The greatest fort of the country was once called Algernon!
This little fortification was not of long life, however. It was
maintained for a few years by the Jamestown colony but went into
decay after the failure of its parent. The strategic value of the
Point as a place for defence was not lost sight of, however, in any
succeeding generation, though the place was not called into service
for many years.
[Illustration:
By courtesy of the War Department
FIRE!!!
Showing shells just leaving mortars, Fort Monroe, Va. (This
remarkable photograph was taken with modern high speed appatratus
by the Corps of Enlisted Specialists stationed at this post.)]
The foundations of Fortress Monroe were laid in 1819, and the
works were carried forward actively for ten years. The plans were
drawn by the famous Bernard, one-time aide-de-camp of the first
Napoleon, and one of his leading engineers. It was Bernard’s
ambition to construct in the United States (he came to the
United States in 1816 and immediately entered the employ of the
government) one great fortress like the works of Antwerp, in the
fortification of which he had a large share. Fort Monroe, named
in honor of the president who did so much to make sure that the
coast defences of the country should be adequately founded, was the
result of this vision.
It is to be seen that the life of the present fortification begins
after the War of 1812, but the military history of the vicinity of
Fort Monroe prior to that time is full of interest.
During the Revolution the mouth of the Chesapeake was guarded by
British cruisers and a rigorous blockade was maintained. Despite
this, during the war no less than 248 privateers were fitted out in
the waters of the Chesapeake and managed to gain the high seas by
eluding the vigilance of the patrol beyond the capes.
In 1779 General Leslie sailed from New York with 3000 of His
Majesty’s troopers to land upon the peninsula not far from the site
of Fort Monroe and there to await orders from Lord Cornwallis, who
was in North Carolina. He entered Hampton Roads and took Norfolk
and Portsmouth, fortifying the latter place as a base for future
operations. After some weeks of inactivity, he re-embarked and
sailed to reinforce Cornwallis at Charleston. In the following year
Clinton ordered the traitor Arnold with 50 sail and 1600 soldiers
to replace Leslie.
The Arnold expedition proceeded up the James River in 1781 and set
the torch to the public buildings of Richmond. After pillaging
Petersburg, it returned to Portsmouth and threw up strong
intrenchments. Lafayette attempted to stay this destroying band
but had not force enough of his own and did not receive expected
reinforcement. The fleet which had been sent to augment his numbers
was engaged by the British under Admiral Arbuthnot off the capes
and compelled, after a hot engagement, to withdraw to Newport. The
English thus retained their hold on Hampton Roads and were enabled
to send additional forces to General Arnold under General Phillips.
In April the combined forces under Arnold moved again up the James
River, burning and pillaging.
Cornwallis occupied Portsmouth shortly after this, but soon again
moved to Yorktown, where he threw up huge intrenchments, the
outlines of which are plainly discernible at the present day. In
September, 1781, the French under Comte de Grasse were successful
in entering the Chesapeake to co-operate with Washington, Lafayette
and Rochambeau. The British fleet under Admiral Graves sturdily
contested the capes, but was forced to surrender the hold which it
had maintained so effectively. In the ensuing month occurred the
historic surrender of Cornwallis.
[Illustration: CASEMATES OF FORT MONROE, AS THEY WERE DURING THE
CIVIL WAR]
During the War of 1812, a British order in council declared the
Chesapeake to be in a state of blockade, and in 1813 Rear-Admiral
Cockburn of His Majesty’s navy was sent to Lynnhaven Bay, near
Norfolk. The Americans had a large flotilla in Hampton Roads, and
had constructed Forts Norfolk and Nelson on the Elizabeth River
near Norfolk and had thrown up intrenchments on Craney Island,
these dispositions all being under the direction of Brigadier
General Robert B. Taylor.
At daybreak of June 22, 1813, a determined attack was made by the
British under Cockburn from land and sea, which was repulsed. Three
days later quiet Hampton was captured after a gallant defence by
an inadequate garrison and the town pillaged in barbaric fashion.
Soon after, Cockburn withdrew to the coasts of South Carolina
and Georgia, but resumed his operations in the lower Chesapeake
March 1, 1814. In July, 1814, he was largely reinforced and with
a combined land and naval expedition commenced that march up the
Chesapeake which culminated in the sacking of Washington and the
final repulse of the expedition at Fort McHenry. This was the last
important engagement of the War of 1812.
During the Civil War Fortress Monroe saw stirring scenes, though
it had no very active part in any of them. In October, 1861,
Hampton Roads off the fort was the rendezvous for great land and
naval forces under Admiral Dupont and General Sherman designed to
capture Hilton Head. In the January following another great force
was brought together here for operations on the Carolina coast. In
the spring of 1862 McClellan’s army arrived at Old Point and went
to Yorktown.
In March of 1862 occurred in Hampton Roads the episodes of the
_Merrimac_. A watcher on the walls of Fort Monroe would have seen
this queer, square vessel, covered with railroad iron, sailing down
the blue waters. He might have seen the sinking of the _Cumberland_
with the greater part of her crew despite her desperate, impotent
efforts against this new kind of adversary. He might have witnessed
the destruction of the _Congress_ by fire and the partial disabling
of the _Minnesota_. He might have heard in the old fort that night
the barrack-room gossip of the new giant and whispers of the
expected arrival of a United States champion which was to take
up the gage of combat. The next day he might have seen from the
ramparts the struggle between the _Merrimac_ and the _Monitor_,
which ushered in a new chapter in naval warfare and began the era
of the steel-clad knight of the seas.
Later Old Point Comfort became the base of operation of the Army of
the James.
In 1893, during the celebration of the Columbian Exposition,
Hampton Roads was the rendezvous under the guns of old Monroe for
the vessels of all of the nations of the world. The old fort sees
the most important manœuvres of the United States navy of to-day.
FORTS SUMTER AND MOULTRIE
NEAR CHARLESTON--SOUTH CAROLINA
The bombardment of Fort Sumter from Fort Moultrie began at dawn of
April 12, 1861, and continued without remission for about 36 hours,
or until noon of the second day. During that time, though shot and
shell played havoc with the walls of both the besiegers and the
besieged, no human being was hurt,--a strange preliminary, indeed,
to the most murderous civil war since the invention of gunpowder in
the history of the world.
This has been called the first time in history that two forts waged
battle against each other. It was like two strong men, tied by the
feet, almost beyond reach of each other, being allowed to strike at
each other until one or the other should fall.
To understand something of the conditions which governed this very
historic bout between Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie, one must have
some idea of the lay of the land at Charleston. Charleston, itself,
it may be pointed out, is situated on a long narrow spit of land
at the juncture of the Ashley and Cooper Rivers. The arrow-head
formed by these two rivers points almost directly toward the mouth
of Charleston Bay, where the waters of the two rivers joined mingle
with the Atlantic Ocean. Let us go to the point of the arrow-head
upon which Charleston is situated, to the Battery,--that is,
Charleston’s most famous public park,--and gaze seaward: Five miles
away, across a shimmering blue, we see a little geometrical dot
almost midway between the jaws which hold Charleston Bay. This
is Fort Sumter, a little stone work built by the United States
Government in 1828 on a sandy shallow. Fort Moultrie is situated
on Sullivan’s Island, on the northern one of the two jaws of the
bay, a body of land really distinct from the mainland but which
seems from this distance to be a part of that land. Of the two
fortifications, Fort Moultrie is the older and by long odds the
more interesting as to past.
Wise heads of both sections in 1860 saw that war was inevitable
between the North and the South, though patriots did their best to
prevent armed conflict. But the doctrine of State individualism
or State’s Rights was too firmly established to be gotten from
the body corporate without a purging of blood, just as individual
rights in the social structure can never be enforced to the last
limit without conflicting with the community purpose. So when, on
Christmas night, 1860, Major Anderson, commanding at Fort Moultrie,
moved his whole force secretly over to the sub-post, Fort Sumter,
and sent his women and children to Charleston, with the request
that they be sent north, the citizens of Charleston, at least, knew
that the issue had been squarely met, to be settled at the court of
last resort.
[Illustration:
Copyright Detroit Publishing Co.
FORT SUMTER, A PILE OF STONE ON A SANDY SHOAL]
Mrs. St. Julien Ravenel, in her delightful reminiscences of
Charleston, writes:
Doubt and delay were gone. Then came the call to arms....
January, February, and March were so full of crowded life that
they seemed an eternity, yet one dreaded lest eternity should
end. End it did when one night at eleven o’clock seven guns
thundered out over the town and every man sprang up, seized
his rifle and ran to the wharves. It was the signal that the
relieving fleet (from the north) was on its way south, and that
the whole reserve must hurry to the islands.
During all this time Fort Sumter had been supplied with provisions
and necessaries by the citizens of Charleston.
When Major Anderson in command at Fort Sumter accepted Beauregard’s
terms of surrender and saluted the new flag, he was conveyed, with
all the honors of war, in the steamer _Isabel_ to the United States
fleet which had lain idle in the offing.
From this time until the end of the Civil War Charleston was in a
state of siege. There was a short period of preparation on both
sides before the Federal fleet appeared, November, 1861, outside
the quaint old city. The city maintained its integrity complete
against attacks by water, and finally fell to a move in force by
land in the last year of the war, when the defenders of Charleston
were withdrawn and all of the men of the remnants of the armies of
the Confederacy were being concentrated for one last desperate
protest against the inevitable.
After the Civil War Fort Sumter was repaired and strengthened and
is still a seat of military power as a sub-post of Fort Moultrie.
To reach Fort Moultrie one goes from Charleston by ferry to the
northern side of the Cooper River and takes a trolley which leads
seaward along the coast across an inlet to Sullivan’s Island, which
has become a popular summer place with many people of Charleston.
Fort Moultrie, when once it is reached, is not a pretentious
place,--the old works, that is,--being simply a star-shaped fort
of brownish-red brick on which the hot southern sun pours down in
quantity. It overlooks a rumpled beach and the sea on one side and
flat uninteresting land on the other. To the seaward one can gaze
upon Fort Sumter and find it not more interesting of aspect close
at hand than it is at a distance. Beside the gate of Fort Moultrie
is a small marble shaft which marks the grave of Osceola, the
Seminole chieftain. If one has devoured Indian tales in his youth
he will no doubt be more interested in this simple memorial than
in the immediate aspect of military things around him. It was in
Fort Moultrie that Osceola was jailed after his capture in Florida
and it was here that he died,--from a broken heart, if one is still
interested in Indian stories!
The present Fort Moultrie was started in 1841 on the site of a
famous old palmetto structure of the same name which had stood
since early Revolutionary days. In 1903, with the exquisite tact
which it displays occasionally, army headquarters in Washington
decided to change the name of the fort to Fort Getty in honor of
some deserving soldier whose career is recorded in the files of the
Army Department, but the loud chorus of indignation that greeted
this move carried all the way from Charleston to Washington, and
the name of that delightful old Revolutionary character, William H.
Moultrie, is still preserved at the spot where his first battle was
fought.
The foundations of Fort Moultrie were laid in January, 1776, when a
Mr. Dewees, owner of the island which bears his name, was ordered
to deliver at Sullivan’s Island palmetto logs eighteen to twenty
feet long and not less than ten inches in diameter in the middle;
and Colonel Moultrie was ordered to superintend the erection of
a fort from this material. It was not completed in June when the
British came into view. In design a double square pen it was built
of palmetto logs piled one upon the other and securely bolted
together; the space between the outer and inner pen was about
sixteen feet and this was filled in with sand; there were square
bastions. The walls were intended to be ten feet high above the gun
platforms where were mounted 64 guns.
The British fleet bearing a land force was under the command of
Admiral Sir Peter Parker, and reached Cape Fear early in May, where
it was joined by Sir Henry Clinton from New York with a portion of
the troops which had participated in the Battle of Bunker Hill.
Clinton assumed command of all the land forces. On the 4th of June
the fleet appeared off Charleston bar and a small force of men
was landed on Long Island, the island just north of Sullivan’s
Island, and on the 28th of June advanced under Sir Peter Parker to
give battle to Fort Sullivan, as Moultrie was then known. There
were brought into action in this engagement the following English
vessels: The _Bristol_ and _Experiment_ of 50 guns each; the
frigates _Active_, _Solebay_, _Acteon_, _Siren_, and _Sphinx_ of 28
guns each; the _Thunderbomb_ and _Ranger_, sloops, of 28 guns; and
the _Friendship_ of 22 guns, in all, a very powerful squadron. The
Americans had their unfinished palmetto fort, 64 guns and 1200 men.
Several days before the battle the fussy General Charles Lee, whom
Washington afterwards in his only recorded uncontrolled exhibition
of temper called, at the battle of Monmouth, “a damned poltroon,”
had removed to another defence of the city half of the small
quantity of gunpowder which Moultrie had been given for the defence
of his fort.
The command of the defence of Charleston had been given to General
Lee by the Continental Congress, and General Lee had appeared in
the city on the same day that the British fleet was sighted off
the bar. From the first he seems to have been in conflict with
Moultrie. Moultrie’s fort, he said, was poorly designed, and
doubtless it was; Moultrie should provide a means of retreat for
his men, and Moultrie replied that they would never use it; and
Moultrie this and that. Moultrie himself, his admirers were forced
to admit, was “a man of very easy manners, leaving to others many
things which he had better have attended to himself.”
But the point is that Moultrie carried this same easiness of manner
and mental poise into battle with him and was on this account an
ideal officer to direct a fight. He had, moreover, the unlimited
confidence and affection of his men and he knew the people he was
working with.
The British appeared off Fort Sullivan just when the feeling
between General Lee and Moultrie was at an acute stage. We find
Moultrie now at face with the problem of defending his “slaughter
pen” fort against an overwhelming force with the insufficient
quantity of gunpowder which General Lee had left him.
The ships formed in double column and poured a terrific fire
upon the fort. Moultrie feared that the concussion of the shells
would rock his guns off their platforms. “Concentrate upon the
Admiral, upon the fifty-gun ships!” This was Moultrie’s direction
to his men. The Americans, expert marksmen that they were, obeyed
his commands and the _Bristol_ and the _Experiment_ suffered
fearfully, the captains of these two great ships being mortally
wounded.
The Americans now began to run short of powder. Colonel Moultrie
sent a despatch for more. He was in pressing need, but no one would
have guessed it from his message which read as follows:
I think we shall want more powder; at the rate we go on I think
we shall. But you can see for yourself; pray send more if you
think proper.
Rutledge sent 500 pounds, and Lee, who was at Haddrell’s with 5000
pounds he had taken from Fort Sullivan, sent no powder but the
message:
If you should unfortunately expend your ammunition without
driving off the enemy spike your guns and retreat with all the
order you can. I know you will be careful not to expend your
ammunition.
General Lee had an idea that battles were fought with bows and
arrows and gunpowder kept to celebrate the victory afterwards with!
And he was determined that that retreat should take place, because
he had prophesied a retreat by all the laws of war some weeks
before.
The cannonade went on, the fire from the fort being at a much
slower tempo than that from the ships. And now a new fact was
discovered in the art of war: The soft palmetto logs with sand
in between were a better bulwark than solid stone. Cannon balls
entered them easily and stopped just as easily without sending
splinters all around. Shells threw the sand up in the air and the
sand fell back again to the spot whence it had risen.
The _Bristol_, the flag-ship, suffered more than any other of the
British vessels. At one time Sir Peter was the only man unwounded
on the quarter-deck, and he, too, presently was hurt.
The _Acteon_ went hard aground on the shoal where Fort Sumter was
afterwards to be raised and had to be abandoned, being set on fire
before she was deserted.
The rattle-snake flag flying over the American fort was shot down,
and Sergeant Jasper, leaping over the parapet, braved the fire of
the British to recover the emblem. Sergeant Jasper lost his life at
Savannah in an effort to duplicate this same feat.
At length the British drew off beaten. They had lost heavily, on
the flag-ship alone 104 men being killed. The American loss was
12 killed and 25 wounded. When the news of this defeat reached
England, though the intelligence was given out by the Admiralty
in the most politic fashion possible, it was a terrible blow to
English pride. “That an English admiral with a well-appointed fleet
of 270 guns should be beaten off by a miserable little half-built
fort on an uninhabited sand bank was incomprehensible,” wrote a
correspondent from London. Had Moultrie had powder enough the
British loss must have been much heavier than it was.
On the 9th of April, 1780, Fort Moultrie was again in action, when
it opened upon Admiral Arbuthnot’s fleet which was sailing into
the harbor in the course of the operations against Charleston that
year. It was unable to prevent the passage of the fleet but it
inflicted some damage to the vessels and killed 27 of the enemy.
Shortly after Fort Moultrie fell to an overwhelming force of
British who attacked by land, and was not again in action during
the Revolution.
FORT PULASKI
AT MOUTH, SAVANNAH RIVER--GEORGIA
The trip from beautiful Savannah to the battered ruins of the once
famous brick fortress, Pulaski, takes one through that gold and
green country which one comes to associate with the name of this
charming southern city. Fort Pulaski is that great hexagon of
brick which one sees from incoming steamers on Cockspur Island at
the mouth of the muddy Savannah River, and all the country round
about is marshy, reedy land, cut up by big and little streams with
no hills to be seen and only scraggy pine trees breaking the flat
monotony of the horizon.
If one would go to Fort Pulaski from Savannah, he seeks out the
little railroad which runs to Tybee, and whose passenger traffic is
confined almost exclusively to summer. There he will be received
by the hospitable southern trainmen and put off the train near
the light-house which graces the northern end of Cockspur Island.
Here, if he has been wise and has made his arrangements properly,
the will be met by a boat from the light-house and will be carried
across to the island.
Arrived at the landing which gives access to the fort, one is
struck by the graceful desolation of the scene. The boards and
timbers of the wharf have rotted, and ends of planks hang down
toward the water like withered arms. Yet the brilliant Georgia
sunshine gives a charm to it all. One does not feel in the presence
of decay; one feels only in the presence of something that is
passing painlessly away.