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‘Pemberton, as I have always understood, had materially departed from General Lee's plan of defensive works for the Department.
Be that so or not, the system which Beauregard found established upon the approaches to Charleston and Savannah he radically changed with all possible energy. * * * And so comprehensive were these changes that, had General Long chanced to visit those two places and the intermediate lines about the first day of July, 1863, he would have been sorely puzzled to point out, in all the results of engineering skill which must have met and pleased his eyes in the Department, any trace of what he had left there something more than one year before.’1
But
General Long clung to his error.
Instead of acknowledging the injustice he had committed, he wrote and forwarded to the ‘Southern Historical Society Papers’ a second article, wherein, after declaring his intention not to recede from his former statement, he ventures upon the following extraordinary assertion:
‘It is well known that after being battered down during a protracted siege, Fort Sumter was remodelled, and rendered vastly stronger than it had previously been, by the skilful hand of General Gilmer, Chief of the Confederate Engineer Corps, and that various points were powerfully strengthened to resist the formidable forces that threatened them.’2
This stress laid upon
Fort Sumter shows
General Long's narrow appreciation of the subject.
But as to
Fort Sumter itself,
General Gilmer had nothing to do with the remodelling of its battered walls, nor with the preparation and strengthening of the defences in and around
Charleston and its harbor; nor has he ever made any such claim.
The fact is, that he only reported for duty in that Department about the middle of August, 1863, shortly before the evacuation of
Morris Island, which occurred on the 7th of September.
At that time the works in
South Carolina and
Georgia were already planned, and in process of construction, almost all of them being entirely completed.
General Gilmer was an educated Engineer, doubtless worthy of the rank he held in the
Confederate service; and no one denies that, had
General Lee been sent to
Charleston, in the fall of 1862, instead of
General Beauregard, he would have been equal to the task laid out