Primary sources
The Photographic History of the Civil War
Every piece of Charleston writing in Miller’s ten volumes of 1911, in the order the set printed it.
The Photographic History of the Civil War in Ten Volumes: Thousands of Scenes Photographed 1861–65, with Text by Many Special Authorities was published at New York by the Review of Reviews Company in 1911, under the editorship of Francis Trevelyan Miller. It was the first attempt to tell the war in photographs, and it remains the largest: several thousand plates, each with a description written for it, set among chapters by officers and historians of both sides.
It matters to Charleston more than its length suggests. The set’s editors went looking for Confederate photographs at a time when almost none were thought to survive, and what they found in Charleston was the work of George S. Cook, who photographed the Federal fleet while it was bombarding Sumter and went on working inside the besieged city to the end — smuggling his chemicals past the blockade, the set says, labelled as quinine. Several of the plates published here had never been printed anywhere before 1911.
All ten volumes were searched in full. 24 pieces are published, describing 89 photographs, about 11,201 words in all, each with its printed pages settled against the page images and a link to the page in the scanned volume. How this collection was made sets out what was searched, what counts as a Charleston piece, and what is likely to have been missed.
The ten volumes
Every volume was read for Charleston matter. The last column is how many pieces each yielded.
| Volume | Title | At the Internet Archive | Pieces here |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vol. I | The Opening Battles | the scanned volume | 3 |
| Vol. II | Two Years of Grim War | the scanned volume | — |
| Vol. III | The Decisive Battles | the scanned volume | 1 |
| Vol. IV | The Cavalry | the scanned volume | — |
| Vol. V | Forts and Artillery | the scanned volume | 1 |
| Vol. VI | The Navies | the scanned volume | 5 |
| Vol. VII | Prisons and Hospitals | the scanned volume | 5 |
| Vol. VIII | Soldier Life and Secret Service | the scanned volume | 6 |
| Vol. IX | Poetry and Eloquence of Blue and Gray | the scanned volume | 3 |
| Vol. X | Armies and Leaders | the scanned volume | — |
The Charleston pieces
Volume I — The Opening Battles
| Piece | Kind | Author | Pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| A Charleston Volunteer Company at Drill under the Walls of Castle Pinckney | photograph description | James Barnes | 89 |
| Sumter Becomes a Federal Target | photograph description | James Barnes | 99 |
| Inside Castle Pinckney, Charleston Harbor, August, 1861 | photograph description | James Barnes | 165 |
Volume III — The Decisive Battles
| Piece | Kind | Author | Pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Charleston, the Uncaptured Port | chapter | James Barnes | 169–74 |
Volume V — Forts and Artillery
| Piece | Kind | Author | Pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Attack and Defense at Charleston | chapter | Roy Mason and Colonel W. R. Hamilton, U.S.A. (Retired) | 109–22 |
Volume VI — The Navies
| Piece | Kind | Author | Pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| A Fighting Inventor: Rear-Admiral John A. Dahlgren on Board the U.S.S. “Pawnee” in Charleston Harbor | photograph description | James Barnes and Robert Sloss | 23 |
| The Chicora and the Palmetto State Break the Blockadein “The Blockade” | from a chapter | James Barnes | 124–28 |
| The Attempts on Charlestonin “The Actions with the Forts” | from a chapter | James Barnes | 238–39 |
| The “David” at Charleston | photograph description | James Barnes and Robert Sloss | 267 |
| Torpedoes and the Hunley in Charleston Harborin “Naval Actions Along the Shore” | from a chapter | James Barnes | 274–76 |
Volume VII — Prisons and Hospitals
| Piece | Kind | Author | Pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Castle Pinckney: The Charleston Zouave Cadets | photograph description | Roy Mason | 4 |
| Men of New York’s “Fighting Sixty-Ninth,” Prisoners in Charleston | photograph description | Roy Mason | 25 |
| Union Prisoners, Castle Pinckney | photograph description | Roy Mason | 27 |
| The Bright Side of Prison Life — 1861 | photograph description | Roy Mason | 157 |
| Charleston as a Prison City: Roper Hospital, the O’Connor House, and the Stockade on Morris Islandin “Treatment of Prisoners” | from a chapter | Holland Thompson | 161–65 |
Volume VIII — Soldier Life and Secret Service
| Piece | Kind | Author | Pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Officers of the Washington Light Infantry on Sullivan’s Island | photograph description | Roy Mason and Louis R. Stegman | 115 |
| Confederate Pickets on Stono Inlet | photograph description | Roy Mason and Louis R. Stegman | 131 |
| The Charleston Zouave Cadets | photograph description | Roy Mason and Louis R. Stegman | 147 |
| A Mess of the Washington Light Infantry in Garrison at Charleston | photograph description | Roy Mason and Louis R. Stegman | 167 |
| Zouaves on Folly Island before Charleston, July 1863 | photograph description | Roy Mason and Louis R. Stegman | 229 |
| The Confederate Signal Tower at Charleston | photograph description | Roy Mason and Louis R. Stegman | 313 |
Volume IX — Poetry and Eloquence of Blue and Gray
| Piece | Kind | Author | Pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Bombardment of Fort Sumter | photograph description | Roy Mason | 40–47 |
| Charleston | poem | Henry Timrod | 48–52 |
| Ode at Magnolia Cemetery | poem | Henry Timrod | 274–76 |
Examined and rejected
These came up in the search, were read, and are not published. They are listed so that the search can be checked.
- South Carolina Men in Blue, Spring 1861 — Volume 1, page 103. A Charleston plate, and it cannot be published. The page sets two unrelated descriptions in facing columns — the Flying Artillery entering Confederate service on Sullivan's Island, and Confederate prisoners at Gettysburg — and the scanner read straight across both, so the words of one run into the middle of the other. Nothing here could be given as the book prints it.
- Charleston Harbor panorama caption — Volume 1, page 166. Set sideways on the page. The scanner read it a letter at a time down the column and returned no words at all.
- Engagements of the Civil War, December 1860 – August 1862 — Volume 1, page 346. A chronological table of engagements compiled by George L. Kilmer, not an article. Its Charleston entries — the firing on the Star of the West, Secessionville — are single lines in a list that covers the whole war.
- Engagements of the Civil War, August 1862 – April 1864 — Volume 2, page 329. The same table continued. Its longest Charleston passage is a description of the Third New Hampshire at Secessionville, which is a Port Royal plate, not a Charleston one.
- The Blockade — Volume 6, page 105. The chapter is about the blockade of the whole Confederate coast, and Charleston is one port in it among Wilmington, Mobile, Savannah and New Orleans. The one passage whose subject is Charleston — the sortie of the Chicora and the Palmetto State — is published here as a section.
- Index to the ten volumes — Volume 10, page 324. The general index. It carries more Charleston lines than any chapter in the set and not a sentence of Charleston writing.
- James Maurice Thompson, “To the South” — Volume 9, page 52. It follows Timrod's “Charleston” on the same page and shares its photographs of the Low Country, but the poem is addressed to the whole South and names Charleston nowhere.
- Confederate Armies and Generals — Volume 10, page 239. A roster. Its Charleston matter is the service records of officers who served there — Beauregard, Ripley, Hagood, Manigault — in entries of two or three lines each.