Gun Number Seven, Fort Putnam

A heavy rifle sits behind a traverse of gabions and sod inside Fort Putnam, muzzle raised, a soldier standing at the breech with his hand on the iron. A small plate marked 7 is fixed to the gabion revetment — the Federal garrison numbered its guns the way a well-run battery should.

Putnam was Battery Gregg until the night of 6–7 September 1863, when the Confederates gave up Morris Island; within weeks its guns, renamed and re-aimed, were breaching Fort Sumter across the channel. What had been the outwork of Charleston's harbor defense became the muzzle pressed against its cheek.

Sumter returned the attention the only way it could by then — by watching. Through 1864 the fort's nightly post returns counted every Parrott shell thrown from these works, logged the misses, and noted each new stockade and covered way as the shovels raised it. The man standing at this breech was part of the view the other side studied every morning.