The Gun at Battery Chatfield

Four soldiers on the parapet of Battery Chatfield — two standing against the sky, one pointing out over the water, and a great banded rifle filling the emplacement below them. The Library of Congress dates the record December 1864: not the siege, not the occupation, but the long middle of the bombardment.

Chatfield carried the name of Colonel John L. Chatfield of the 6th Connecticut, mortally wounded in the assault on Battery Wagner on 18 July 1863; the work that took his name stood on the captured island and fired on the harbor he never entered. This photograph survives twice in the staged material — as this negative scan and as a rephotographed album print — and the negative is published here.