View on the Battery

This print comes from a different source than most of the Charleston views, and its provenance is worth stating. It is one of the photographs given to the United States Military Academy by the widow of Captain Orlando M. Poe, Sherman's chief engineer. In the typed list that accompanied the donation it is number 211, described as “View on ‘The Battery,’ Charleston, with wreck of the 12 inch Blakely gun.”

The list is slightly off on the caliber. The English Blakely rifles at Charleston were 12.75-inch, not 12-inch — a small discrepancy, but the kind that propagates through catalogs and secondary accounts once it is written down, and worth correcting where the original document can still be checked.

The photograph is Barnard's. It shows the Battery with the wreckage strewn along it and the Confederates' earthen parapet still in place around the gun position, not yet leveled. Keith F. Davis, who has done the closest work on Barnard's movements, places his arrival in Charleston in March 1865 and has him working there for at least several weeks.

The parapet is what dates this frame relative to the others. Comparing it against the March 14 views, part of the timber in the embrasure has been taken away here, so this exposure is the later of the two. Photographs of a wreck can often be put in sequence this way, by watching what has been carried off between one plate and the next.