Two Officers of the Catskill, at Battery Bee

Two United States Navy officers — Lieutenant Commander Edward Barrett and Lieutenant Cornelius N. Schoonmaker of the monitor Catskill, so the Library of Congress titles the plate — seated on a field gun inside Battery Bee on Sullivan's Island, a rammer lying on the planking at their feet and a long wharf running out over the water behind them.

The Catskill had been at this work a long time. She assembled with the other monitors in Port Royal Sound in March 1863 for the attack on Charleston, and she was still standing picket off Morris Island at the end of that year — one report from her deck records a still, clear moonlit night broken at midnight by Fort Moultrie's guns.

Battery Bee, where they sit, was one of the works their ship had faced. It carried one of the two heaviest guns in the harbor — an 11-inch Dahlgren the Confederates raised from the wreck of the monitor Keokuk, sunk in the April 1863 attack. The gun fought the action of 8 September 1863 from this battery and stayed to the end. Two naval officers resting on its platforms after the city fell were sitting, in the most literal way, on the other side's guns.