Fort Moultrie, Looking East

A heavy gun on a wooden barbette carriage holds the foreground, mounted over a brick-walled emplacement with its traverse circle laid in the masonry. Beyond it the interior of Fort Moultrie runs away to the east — sand thrown up over traverses and bombproofs, palmettos, and the low wooden quarters of the garrison.

The sand is the thing to notice. Moultrie began the war as a masonry fort, and this view shows what the war made of it: earth piled over everything that could be piled over, because by 1863 every gunner in the harbor had learned that sand absorbs what brick shatters under. The neat brick emplacement in the foreground belongs to the old fort; the dunes behind it belong to the new one.

Moultrie's guns fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861 — the 1893 sketch of Colonel Rhett in this site's primary sources says his battery here put forty rounds of red-hot shot into Sumter's officers' quarters and set them burning — and the fort stayed in Confederate hands until the harbor was evacuated in February 1865. This photograph belongs to the occupation that followed.