The Guns that Shelled the City

Once the Federals held Charleston they began bringing in the artillery they had been shelling it with. These are eight 30-pounder Parrott rifles, taken off Morris Island after a bombardment of 545 days.

There is a particular strangeness to the photograph. The guns that had made the lower city uninhabitable are parked in the Arsenal yard, in the city, under United States flags, being counted.

Brevet Major Francis H. Parker had charge of the arsenal, and stayed on after the war ended. “I have been very busy since I came here,” he wrote to his father in October 1865. “All the Ordnance Depots, forts, batteries, regiments in the Dept. [were] sending their contents into this arsenal.”

His life there was comfortable, and his account of it is worth quoting because it is the ordinary texture of occupation rather than its drama:

We live very comfortably in the office building, it being large with six rooms. Sea food of all kinds is remarkably cheap and plentiful. Very good fish, oysters, shrimps, &c. are sold in the streets by hundreds of negroes from morning till night. I hardly [need] ever go outside the arsenal grounds except occasionally to take a ride.

Six months after the guns stopped, the officer in charge of them was buying shrimp in the street from the people the war had freed.