stan
Ft. Morgan
Tue Jun 5 23:39:04 2001


I worked at Fort Morgan during the summer of '99. The armament at Fort Morgan is, as I recall, pretty similar to that of Fort Gaines.

If you have been to Ft. Morgan, you read the story of the Lt. Col. of the 21st Alabama Infantry. During a firing demonstration on one of the forts 32 pounders (smoothbore) it exploded, decapitating him. Some of the 32 pounders had been rifled, weakening the breech, and this resulted in the accident. I will check in my files to see if I can find any better record of what pieces were in the fort.

The atrocity at Ft. Morgan is that when the citadel caught fire due to Federal artillery fire, in order for the powder magazines not to explode, literally just a few feet away from open flames, the men were ordered to pour the powder down the cisterns (wells), ruining their drinking water and adding to the necessity to surrender. In the process several men were killed when the kegs of powder exploded.

The temperatures reached over 90 degrees, there was the remnants of a burning building inside the fort, and the men had no drinking water save what was in their canteens. When the fort capitulated, the Federals made the Confederates, at that point prisoners, stay in the fort in these conditions. Later, while prisoners of war, a large majority of the prisoners died, going from basically the tropics to the frigid cold of the North. I could start from scratch telling the history of Ft. Morgan, but that is another story.

Stan