The Parapet, Looking Toward Morris Island

From the parapet of Fort Sumter, looking toward Morris Island — which is to say, looking straight down the line the shells came in on.

Morris Island is the low, pale strip on the horizon. There is almost nothing to it: a sand bar at the south side of the harbor entrance, without cover or elevation. The Federals took the lower end of it in July 1863, and the fighting to get the rest — the assault on Battery Wagner on July 18 that the 54th Massachusetts led, in which Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and Major David Ramsay of the Charleston Battalion were both killed — was among the costliest of the siege.

Once they held it they built their batteries on it, including the marsh platform that carried the Swamp Angel, and from that sand they bombarded both this fort and the city four miles beyond it.

Everything in this photograph was shaped by what is on that horizon. The broken parapet the camera stands on, the gabions, the sand packed into the ruins — all of it is the answer to guns on a sandbar two and a half miles away.