Castle Pinckney and Its Prisoners

The wider view: Castle Pinckney's curved brick casemates with prisoners and guards distributed over two levels — a row of men sitting and standing along the rampart above, more at the casemate doors below, a shed roof leaning against the wall.

South Carolina troops took the little harbor fort on 27 December 1860, the day after Anderson moved his garrison to Sumter, and it found its first real use as a prison camp the following summer, when the captives of Bull Run came south. As a photograph it is close to unique ground: the Confederacy keeping, and picturing, Union prisoners in the first months of a war whose prisons would later admit no cameras at all.