Excerpt from Notes on Seacoast Fortification Construction In the fall of 1906 the author of these notes was relieved from duty in charge of the Norfolk engineering district, and was sent to the Engineer School at Washington Barracks as director of military engineering. The Norfolk district, from which he came, had, during his tenure of the district, been an exceedingly active one as far as fortification construction was concerned, and had been the principal site of the joint Army and Navy maneuvers in 1905. Furthermore, during the years 1903 to 1906 a large amount of experimental Coast Artillery work had been in progress at Fort Monroe. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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In 1794, faced with possible war with Great Britain, the federal government assumed the responsibility for the construction and manning of seacoast fortifications from Maine to Georgia. Construction was entrusted to French-born engineers, who followed traditional European bastioned designs. In 1806, Britain1s abuse of neutral maritime rights again threatened war, and Congress appropriated funds for additional seacoast defenses. Almost all of the design and construction of these works was supervised by officers of the Corps of Engineers, most of whom were graduates of the new U.S. Military Academy. On the eve of the outbreak of the War of 1812, the defenses of the Atlantic coast and the Mississippi River below New Orleans were substantially complete, manned by regular troops, and performed well. Due to the effectiveness of these fortifications, the United States embarked on construction of a series of permanent seacoast defense systems in 1816 that lasted through World War II.