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Survey of Historic Sites and Buildings

	FORT MORGAN (Fort Bowyer Site) Alabama
Baldwin County, at the terminus of Ala. 180, on Mobile Point, at the entrance to Mobile Bay. Fort Morgan and the Battle of Mobile Bay Fort Morgan State Historic Site

Ownership and Administration. State of Alabama; Department of Conservation.

Significance. Fort Morgan, guarding the entrance to Mobile Bay, is a Registered National Historic Landmark relating primarily to the Civil War. However, an earlier fort on the same site, Fort Bowyer, was involved in the War of 1812, a phase of history treated in this volume.

Resenting Spanish collaboration with British forces and the latter's use of the Spanish port of Mobile, long coveted by the United States, in 1813 President Madison ordered Gen. James Wilkinson, U.S. commander at New Orleans, to capture the city. After taking Fort Charlotte, the major inland defense, Wilkinson began to construct the "Seraf" (soon thereafter named Fort Bowyer) on Mobile Point, facing the sea approach, at the mouth of Mobile Bay. The new commander, however, questioned the defensive value of the wooden fort and stopped construction. The next year, 1814, Gen. Andrew Jackson, upon visiting Mobile and noticing the strategic location of the uncompleted fort, ordered it completed, refitted, and garrisoned. The sea approach was guarded by a semicircular battery 400 feet long, flanked by two curtains (sidewalls) 60 feet long that joined a bastion facing the land approach. The interior of the fort was 180 feet long from the summit of the bastion to the parapet of the battery; the parapet was 15 feet thick. Artillery pieces numbered 20, but the fort had no casemates and was open to artillery fire from high mounds of sand a few hundred yards to the rear.

The British, seeking to regain Mobile, twice attacked the fort with numerically superior forces. In September 1814 some 130 British soldiers and 600 Indian allies attacked it from the land approach, but Maj. William Lawrence's forces repulsed them. Two days later four British ships attacked; one was damaged and ran aground not far from the fort, and the other withdrew to Pensacola. This victory, involving the loss of only four soldiers, aided the morale of U.S. Army troops and convinced them that they had a chance of winning the war.

The second British attack on Fort Bowyer was made early in February 1815, just before the ratification of the Treaty of Ghent, by 5,000 British troops, who had been defeated 1 month earlier at the Battle of New Orleans. Landing 3 miles from the fort, they captured it but soon abandoned it when they learned that the war was over. It then fell into ruins.

In 1819 the U.S. Army began constructing Fort Morgan, a brick fort, on the site and completed it in 1834. Two years later Federal troops occupied it and remained until the outbreak of the Civil War, at which time Confederate forces seized and garrisoned it. It remained an unthreatened Confederate stronghold until August of 1864, when Union forces captured it.

Present Appearance. No remains of Fort Bowyer are extant. Fort Morgan, repaired by Union forces after its capture in 1864, is in fine condition and is part of Fort Morgan State Park. A huge concrete gun mount and several concrete batteries constructed during the Spanish-American War may also be seen.

NHL Designation: 12/19/60