The Remains of the Floating Battery

Heavy timber sides lie broken open on a marsh bank, and in among them two great cannon muzzles point out of the wreck at the camera. Beyond, a boat with three men in it rides on flat water. The Library of Congress calls it the remains of the famous Floating Battery.

It was famous because it was there at the start. Through the winter of 1860–61 Charleston built its ring of works — sand and palmetto-log batteries at Cummings Point, on Sullivan's Island and at Fort Johnson — and the floating battery was framed at Marsh's shipyard and moored, iron-clad, off Sullivan's Island by March. It fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861.

This is what four years did to the idea: a hulk in a creek with its guns still in it, photographed by an army that had taken the city the battery was built to defend.