The Mortars

Two heavy seacoast mortars sit on their beds in a sanded pit inside Fort Moultrie, muzzles up, a plank stockade at their backs and a stair climbing the traverse behind. Plate 3467; an albumen print of this same negative is pasted into the April 1865 album page from which several views in this series survive.

A mortar is the voice a fort uses in the dark. From the deck of the monitor Catskill on picket off Morris Island in December 1863, a Federal officer recorded a still, clear, moonlit night broken at midnight when Fort Moultrie opened — the kind of firing these beds existed for, thrown high to fall on whatever the flash had betrayed.