Mounting Guard at Fort Wagner

A guard detail forms up on the sand before the earthwork, an officer out front, a line of men along the crest above and a sutler's shed at the right with its awning out. Cooley's plate, April 1865: mounting guard at Fort Wagner.

Wagner had been the hardest ground in the harbor — the assault of 18 July 1863, the fifty-eight days, the sap, the mine — and by the spring of 1865 it was a post where the guard turned out on schedule and a man could buy tobacco behind the parade. The photograph is what the end of a siege looks like two years later.