Wagner and Gregg Together

A long palisade of sharpened stakes runs across the middle of the plate, sand sloping away before and behind, with the works low on the horizon: Forts Wagner and Gregg in one frame, as Cooley titled it in 1865.

By the Federal renaming they were Fort Strong and Fort Putnam, and by the date of the photograph both had been in Federal hands for eighteen months. The palisade is the detail worth keeping: obstacles like this, plus abatis and wire entanglement, are what the siege's approach works were actually made of.