At the Marsh Battery

A closer view along the face of the Marsh Battery, taken from the marsh itself. A wall tent has been pitched at the left against the parapet, and a group stands at the right where the sandbags step down; a man in a broad hat is at the center, in the grass.

The tent is the detail worth pausing on. This was not a place anyone could live comfortably: a log raft in salt marsh, four and a half miles from the city it was shelling and well within reach of the guns on James Island. That someone pitched canvas on it says the position was held and worked, not simply built and fired.

It was. The gun burst on its thirty-sixth round, but the battery did not stop being a battery. Fort Sumter's post returns were still counting shots from the Swamp Angel in September 1864 — fifteen one night, thirteen the next, one of them striking a lighter at the wharf. The name outlived the gun that earned it by more than a year.