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Photographer: Mike Stroud
Taken: October 5, 2008
Caption:
Fort McAllister : A Proving Ground | Additional Description:
Although it was a small fort with comparatively
few men and guns, Fort McAllister played a key
role in both Confederate and Union strategies for
naval warfare.
Knowing that block-running ships carrying
Confederate goods hid in the Ogeechee River,
the Union Navy first sent the
Potomsak, a
3 masted wooden gunboat, to cruise upriver.
Arriving at Fort McAllister on July 1, 1862 the
Potomsak fired twice and retreated. It was
the first of many Union ships to test the earthen fort.
On July 29, the Union ships,
Paul Jones, Unadilla,
Huron, and Madgie shelled Fort McAllister with their
11- inch smoothbore, Parrott rifles, and smaller-caliber
guns. The shells sank into the fort's dirt walls, while
the Confederates fired back relentlessly until the
gunboats retreated.
But the Union Navy had other opponents for Fort
McAllister: ironclads. A few months earlier, a legendary
battle between the
C.S.S. Virginia( formerly the
Merrimack ) and the
U.S.S. Monitor -
gunboats covered by iron plates - had changed naval
warfare forever. Against iron-hulled ships,
conventional weapons no longer worked.
However, ironclads were hard to maneuver, and
handling weaponry was difficult inside their tight
spaces. Union officers wanted to test the vessels
again before attacking the Confederate stronghold
at Charleston.
Fort McAllister, an isolated outpost on deep water,
was the ideal proving ground. In two separate battles
in early 1863, the Union attacked with the ironclad
Montauk and then with a combined force of the
Montauk plus three additional ironclads - the
Passaic, the
Patapsco, and the
Nahunt.
After nearly seven hours of fighting, both sides sustained
heavy damages, but neither was defeated. In the battle
of competing technologies, both sides won.
Submitted: October 20, 2008, by Mike Stroud of Bluffton, South Carolina.
Database Locator Identification Number: p40126
File Size: 0.136 Megabytes
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