The Third System

After the British entered the Chesapeake Bay, went up the Potomac River, and set fire to Washington, D.C., in 1814, the United States recognized the need for stronger coastal fortifications despite having won the War of 1812. In 1815, President James Madison urged Congress to fund improved harbor defenses, arguing that preparation for war best secured peace, and Secretary of War James Monroe likewise pressed for vulnerable ports to be put into proper defense. Congress agreed, beginning for the first time a peacetime national program to fortify the coastline. Madison and Monroe thus laid the foundation for the Third System of coastal fortification, a comprehensive network of seacoast forts designed and built over several decades starting in 1816 under an appointed board of engineers, with the expectation that these forts would serve as permanent defenses. Fort Trumbull, built as part of this system between 1839 and 1852 under Captain George Cullum of the Army Corps of Engineers, was planned to work with the water battery at Fort Griswold across the Thames River in defense of New London Harbor.

New London, Connecticut · United States