Page:Historic towns of the southern states (1900).djvu/370

 General Gillmore, who had constructed the fort for the Government at a cost of $500,000, reduced it at a range of from two thousand to three thousand five hundred yards. One remarkable fact about the defence of Fort Pulaski was that the Confederates allowed the Northern fleet to sail back of the fort through Wall's Cut, and interrupt communication with the city. It was through this identical channel that the British reinforced their troops in 1779, the French fleet failing to guard the narrow pass. In July, 1863, the Confederate ironclad ship Atlanta, fitted out in Savannah, sailed for Warsaw Sound to meet the monitors Weehawken and Nahant. The Atlanta ran aground, and was shot to pieces by her antagonists. On December 26, 1864, General Sherman's army captured the city, eighty-six years, almost to the day, after the British captured it from General Howe. Savannah then contained about twenty thousand people. To-day it has over sixty thousand, is the largest and busiest seaport on the South Atlantic, ships more than a million bales of cotton a year, and handles more than a million packages of naval stores. At Tybee Roads, where Oglethorpe first anchored his good ship Ann; where the