The Blakelys · Book p. 87
Looking Out from White Point Garden (second view)
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The companion view, turned the other way. Where the first photograph looks up the street into the city, this one looks out past the parapet across the harbor mouth, and it answers the question the other view raises: what was this gun for.
On the horizon, small and dark against the water, are ships. That is the direction the 12.75-inch Blakely at Battery Ramsay was laid to cover — the approaches to Charleston Harbor, where the Federal blockading squadron had been lying since 1861. The gun was mounted here to reach vessels standing in toward the city, and the whole point of buying an English rifle of that size was range and penetration against ships.
In the middle distance, inside the earthwork, is the wreck: the iron chassis and carriage, the tumbled remains of the tube, and the unfilled gabions along the crest. From this angle the shape of the emplacement is legible in a way it is not from the street — the parapet's thickness, the platform the gun traversed on, and how little of it survived the charge the Confederates set off in the bore.
Barnard was standing very close to where he made the inland view. Photographers working with wet plates did not move far between exposures; the plate had to be coated, exposed and developed before it dried, so the darkroom wagon or tent governed how far the camera could stray. Two views from one position, facing opposite ways, is the ordinary economy of the process.
The caption as printed in the book
George N. Barnard, the New York photographer, had been hired by the Union army in 1863 to take pictures of fortifications and related scenes. He was in Atlanta during the Federal occupation of September-November 1864, making many views of the area. In March 1865 he came to Charleston and took some more photographs. One of them shows the wreckage of the 12.75-inch Blakely rifled gun positioned at Battery Ramsay, the White Point Battery. This image, taken in mid-March 1865, shows the carriage of the “Whopper” after it was blown up on February 17 (several powder charges rammed down the tube, then a plugged muzzle). The blast was so powerful that the heavy breech was blown sixteen yards to the rear. A 500-pound iron chunk was thrown into an attic three house-lots away in the William Roper house located at 5 East Battery, owned by William Ravenel and occupied by his nephew, Alfred F. Ravenel during the war (current address is 9 East Battery). It’s still there. Alfred Ravenel was president of the Northeastern Railroad Company from 1858 until his death in 1893. Barnard took this picture from the second-floor piazza of Louis D. DeSaussure’s mansion at South Battery and East Battery. Across the harbor is James Island. Inside the Southerners’ earthen parapet, topped with unused gabions (wicker baskets to be filled with dirt), are all that remains of the gun.
Also at White Point Garden
