The Flag on the Parapet

A United States flag hangs from a tall staff over Fort Moultrie's parapet, log cribwork and a brick gun circle below it, a gun on its wooden carriage at the right, and the houses of the island running off behind the palmettos.

The flag is the date. Confederate forces evacuated Charleston and its harbor forts overnight on 17–18 February 1865, and the plates in this series were made in the weeks after — the album page this run survives in is titled April 1865. Moultrie had been in Confederate hands since Anderson's garrison left it at the end of 1860 — by late January 1861 the state's batteries were already going up along Sullivan's Island — and the staff in this photograph is the plainest possible statement that that was over.