Message #230191

[Ashley Washington]

Matthew Brady at Fort Sumter?

Image Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

The new Union occupants could not even begin to restore the original heavy gun positions at Fort Sumter, shown in the background in March 1865. Instead, they built a makeshift fortification on the side of the fort using palmetto logs (visible on the fort’s exterior).

This view was taken at low tide, from an exposed sandbar that runs across a part of the Charleston Harbor entrance. The figure on the far right is probably Mathew Brady, who later in the war had taken to posing in some of his own company’s photographs.

Updated April 12, 2011