Sumter Is Avenged! The Siege and Reduction of Fort Pulaski (review)

l62CIVIL WAR HISTORY Sumter Is Avenged! The Siege and Reduction of Fort Pulaski. By Herbert M. Schiller. Shippenburg, Pa.: White Mane Publishing Co., 1996. Pp. 216. $29.95.) The author—a medical doctor who has written previously about the South in the CivilWar—was intrigued by the first successful use ofrifled artillery against a masonry fortification, and he wanted to recount the full story. The fortification was built, with 25 million bricks, from 1829 to 1847 on Cockspur Island at the mouth of the Savannah River and named after Count Casimir Pulaski, who died defending the town of Savannah during the Revolutionary War. The walls of the massive five-sided fort were seven feet thick. Georgia state troops occupied Fort Pulaski in January 1861. During the fall of that year Union troops seized Port Royal and Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, and threatened the Georgia coast. Confederate authorities immediately concentrated troops around Savannah and increased the garrison at Fort Pulaski to some 360 soldiers. Soon after Federal forces occupied Tybee Island, a short distance by water from the Confederate fort, the expedition's engineering officer, Capt. Quincy A. Gillmore (soon breveted brigadier general), announced that the walls ofthe fort could be knocked down with new heavy-caliber rifled weapons firing grooved James projectiles. Despite opinions by the best officers—North and South—that the fort could not be reduced by artillery, Gillmore ordered heavy weapons brought to Tybee at night. Sailors rowed vessels bearing guns—whose barrels alone weighed 17,000 pounds—close to shore and dumped them at high tide; these were recovered after the tide ran out and were then hauled hundreds of yards on planks laid across mud and sand and placed in batteries supported by sand bags. Two hundred and fifty soldiers were needed to move mortars weighing over eight tons. Parapets of sand and mud were constructed to hide the weapons. By April 10, 1862, there were eleven batteries or thirty-six weapons in place on Tybee Island; five rifled artillery pieces were aimed at Fort Pulaski, about 1,650 yards distant. That same day Gen. David Hunter, commanding officer of the Federal troops, demanded the surrender of Col. Charles H. Olmstead, commander of Fort Pulaski. When Olmstead refused, Hunter gave the order to fire. Over the following two days more than 5,300 shells were hurled at Fort Pulaski, blasting away bricks and dismantling Confederate guns. The rifled guns firing James projectiles were especially effective. When shells passing through the breached walls of the fort threatened to detonate the magazine, Olmstead surrendered . As cheers rang from battery to battery, Lieutenant Horace Porter shouted, "Sumter is avenged!" (1 12) Afterwards, General Hunter summarized the significance of the fall of the Confederate strongpoint, "No works of stone or brick can resist the impact of rifled artillery of heavy caliber" (133). The story of the siege and reduction of Fort Pulaski has never before been told in such detail. The book is particularly important for its descriptions of the remarkable engineering feats directed by General Gillmore to bring his big guns to bear on the fort, all of which was a practice run for him. In just over a year Gillmore would position heavy artillery in the mud and sand ofJames and Morris BOOK REVIEWS1 63 Islands for the bombardment of Charleston. This book is recommend for students of American military history and the Civil War. Walter J. Fraser Jr. Georgia Southern University CiVi/ War in the Indian Territory. By Steve Cottrell. (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing Co., 1995. Pp. in. $8.95 paper.) Steve Cottrell has written a most readable summary of a civil war within the national Civil War—the conflict in Indian Territory, 1861 to 1865, which degenerated into an intertribal conflict as tribe fought tribe and an intra-tribal conflict as members in any one tribe fought each other. Cottrell examines thirty-one major battles or skirmishes in which members of the Five Civilized Tribes participated. Coverage of the various campaigns is to the point, well written, and informative. The narrative flows smoothly from the Battle of Wilson's Creek in Missouri, August 10, 1 861, to the skirmish on Snake Creek, April 24...