Inside the Naval Battery

Inside the Naval Battery on Morris Island: gun crews at their pieces between sandbagged traverses and magazines, an officer watching from the parapet with a glass, debris of construction still underfoot. One of the first plates in Haas & Peale's siege series.

The battery was what its name says — guns landed from the fleet and worked by sailors, set into the island's first parallel to add naval metal to the army's breaching effort. Its commander's report is in the appendices of Gillmore's published volume, alongside the engineers' journals that measured this ground trench by trench.