A Runner That Did Not Get In

Off the beach at Sullivan's Island, the frames of a sidewheel steamer stand up out of the water — both paddle wheels stripped to their spokes, a length of hull awash beyond, and in the foreground a rough stone groin half-buried in the sand, with a rigged spar standing over it.

This is what the blockade left on Charleston's beaches. The runners were fast, low, gray-painted steamers, many of them Clyde-built, coming over the bar on a moonless flood tide with the Sullivan's Island range lights lit for a few minutes to bring them in; the trade peaked in 1863 and ran, at growing cost, to the last winter of the war. The ones that misjudged it ended like this — driven ashore, burned or battered by the blockaders, and left to the surf. Their iron was worth salvage: on Morris Island the Federals stripped boiler plate from the runner Ruby's wreck to line their battery embrasures.

The Library of Congress does not name this vessel, and she is not named here. The paddle frames say sidewheel steamer; the rest is the sea's work.