The Garrison at Its Guns

Inside Fort Putnam, 1865, by the Library of Congress's date. Soldiers stand about a heavy rifle on its high-wheeled siege carriage; the door of a bombproof opens at the left with barrels ranged on its roof; boxes and implements are stacked along the parapet, and a second gun stands beyond the first.

This is the fort as a working address rather than a battlefield: the guns kept ready, the ammunition under sod, the men posed where they worked because a photographer had come out to the end of Morris Island. The plate number scratched on the negative — 3520 — places it in a run of interior views made on the same visit; two more stereographs of this interior sit beside it in the catalog and were not part of the material staged here.

What the camera cannot show is what the address had cost. This ground was Battery Gregg, given up by its garrison on the night of 6–7 September 1863 after fifty-eight days of siege on this island; the men in this frame belong to the army that took it.