Gillmore, His Horse, His Tent

An officer stands at the head of a saddled horse before a wall tent with its fly rigged against the sun — the Library of Congress titles the plate General Quincy A. Gillmore in front of his tent, and dates it to the July–August siege that made his name.

Gillmore's biography is published on this site among the people of the harbor: the engineer who breached Pulaski with rifled guns, took the Department of the South in June 1863, and ran the operations this photograph sits inside — the crossing to Morris Island, the siege of Wagner, the breaching of Sumter from four thousand yards. Here he is at the domestic end of all that, holding a horse in the sand.