Fort Magruder

Fort Magruder was an earthen redoubt built in 1861 at the center of the Confederate defensive Williamsburg Line, which stretched between the James and York rivers and consisted of fourteen forts. It was the third Confederate defensive line encountered by Federal troops under Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan during the Peninsula Campaign in the spring of 1862, and it became the heart of the Confederate position during the Battle of Williamsburg. Formed as an elongated pentagon 600 yards in circumference, with walls rising 15 feet from a flooded moat and mounting eight guns, the fort guarded the intersection of the Yorktown–Hampton and Warwick roads, the primary land access to Williamsburg. At dawn on May 5, 1862, Brig. Gen. Richard H. Anderson’s South Carolina Palmetto Sharpshooters occupied the fort while Union Brig. Gen. Joseph Fighting Joe Hooker’s troops from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and New York deployed on either side of the Warwick Road and advanced toward the Confederate redoubts under concentrated artillery and infantry fire. An abatis of felled trees in front of the fort and the flanking redoubts, together with a quagmire created by weeks of rain, turned the ground into a muddy, tangled obstacle. Union artillery commander Maj. Gen. Charles S. Wainwright called it “a very ugly place to have to attack,” and one of Hooker’s troops recalled that heavy shot crashed among the fallen timber, plowed up the dirt in front, rebounded through the woods in the rear, and that the continuous snap and crack was murderous. The battle ebbed and flowed all day, with both sides claiming victory, and nearly 20,000 troops were engaged. Union casualties were 2,283 and Confederate losses were 1,560. During the night after the battle, Southern troops abandoned Fort Magruder and the other redoubts of the Williamsburg Line as the Confederate army withdrew toward Richmond, and the fighting there foreshadowed the brutality of the Peninsula Campaign still to come.

Virginia · United States