Center for Civil War Photography

The following story by Bob Zeller is about George S. Cook's combat action photography
which appeared in the November-December 1997 issue of Military Images.

September 8, 1863

This date, in the annals of the American Civil War, prompts no immediate recognition, certainly not like July 3, 1863 or April 14, 1865. The Confederates won the battle of Sabine Pass that day. Other smaller actions, according to "The Civil War Day by Day" included a naval bombardment in Charleston Harbor-a regular occurrence that historic summer. Unmentioned, and largely overlooked by history, is the photographic work of Charleston photographer George S. Cook. In Charleston Harbor on September 8, 1863, within Fort Sumter's battered walls, Cook, a Southern photographer, became the world's first combat photojournalist. Although Cook himself never laid claim to being the first to take pictures under fire, exciting new discoveries reported by or inspired by Military Images bolster the previously known evidence, already strong in its own right. Combined with the full story of the furious engagement in Charleston Harbor on September 8, 1863, told here for the first time with the perspective of Cook's photographic activities, the evidence becomes overwhelming that Cook was, indeed, the first to successfully make war photographs while under fire.

A native of Connecticut, Cook was 44 years old in the summer of 1863. By then, he had been a photographer for some 20 years, and had operated a gallery in Charleston since 1850. The fact that Cook succeeded in obtaining combat photographs came as no surprise to his contemporaries. He was bright, resourceful, ambitious and well connected. He was one of the few in the South who actually profited from the conflict. When the federal blockade began to strangle the South, Cook invested in blockade-runners. He made a handsome profit and continued to receive photographic supplies and take photographs throughout the war.

Cook had an eye for newsworthy images. In February 1861, two months before the war started, he took his camera to Fort Sumter after arranging a sitting with its Union commander, Major Robert Anderson. When the Confederates bombarded Sumter on April 14 to start the war, and Anderson withdrew, Cook's car photograph of Anderson became an instant best seller in New York. It received the same enthusiastic reception that Brady's Cooper-Union photography of Lincoln had received in 1860. On August 17, 1863, the Union forces blockading Charleston Harbor began what is known as the "first great bombardment" of Fort Sumter. Union guns blazed for more than two weeks, firing almost 7,000 shells that reduced much of the fort to rubble.

The battle Cook photographed on September 8 was no routine skirmish. It was according to Confederate Major John Johnson in "The Defense of Charleston Harbor," "probably the severest naval engagement in American history up to that time." A Union fleet of five monitors and the New Ironsides - the largest battleship in the world at the time - came to the defense of the monitor Weehawken, which had run aground on a sandbar and was exposed to Confederate fire. The Union gunboats "for nearly three hours delivered by far the heaviest cannonade heard from the naval force off Charleston Harbor," Johnson wrote. As many as 46 shells fell into Fort Sumter. Undaunted, Cook went to work with his camera. From the northeast section of the battered parapet, he photographed the New Ironsides and two monitors as they shelled Fort Moultrie. He kept low, using a broken gun carriage as a tripod.

Cook also made a number of images inside the fort. The most interesting of those is the controversial "exploding shell" photograph, which is said to show the smoke from a Union shell that has just exploded on Sumter's debris-littered parade ground. Original prints of this photograph show varying degrees of retouching. For this reason, some historians doubt its authenticity. Nonetheless, Cook's work was one of the few photographic endeavors of the war to make news.

It has long been known that Cook's photographic achievement was reported on September 12, 1863 in the Charleston Daily Courier, a local story of note. But we now know that Cook's photographic work at Fort Sumter was more extensive than previously known, and his accomplishments were even bigger news that previously thought, reaching people in the North as well as the South.

The Discoveries

Mark Dunkelman certainly wasn't thinking about Charleston photographer George S. Cook as he plowed through day after day of the Providence Daily Journal for 1863 while sitting at a microfilm machine in the Providence Public Library. Dunkelman, a contributing editor to Military Images, cannot remember exactly what he was looking for that day in the library about two years ago. He may have been looking for material to publish in the Rhode Island Civil War Round Table newsletter, which he edits, or he may have been searching to see if the Journal had published a story about Sgt. Amos Humiston, who was found dead at Gettysburg with an ambrotype photograph of his three children in his hand. Dunkelman is writing a book about Humiston.

In any event, while scanning the October 20, 1863 edition of the Daily Journal, Dunkelman noticed this headline:

"PHOTOGRAPHING FORT SUMTER UNDER DIFFICULTIES"
It was followed by a story of about 300 words written by the Charleston correspondent of the Mobile Advertiser on September 11, 1863, three days after Cook took his photos. In Rhode Island some five weeks later, the Daily Journal's editors read the Advertiser's story and decided it was newsworthy and interesting enough to reprint.

Dunkelman was immediately drawn to the story. He was familiar with Cook's action photos, and he noticed that the story contained a number of new details. It seemed to describe the taking of the "exploding shell" photo. And it very specifically described Cook's camera work on the parapet: "Subsequently, and admirable battle scene was taken, representing the Ironsides and two monitors, wreathed in their own smoke, while delivering their fire on Fort Moultrie."

Delighted with his discovery, Dunkelman had a copy made from the microfilm and sent one along to MI, which reprinted the 1863 story in its entirety in the "Light and Shadow" column of the May-June 1996 edition. At that time, I was in the midst of assembling Civil War stereographs for "The Civil War in Depth," the first 3-D photo history of the war. I planned to include a chapter on action photography featuring wartime photos that either purported to show action or came close.

Cook's "exploding shell" photograph had fascinated me since childhood. And his photo from the parapet is one of the most intriguing Civil War photos ever taken. Even though they were not stereo views, I decided to include them in the action chapter. They were too compelling to leave out. On Saturday, June 29, 1996, while laboring to finish the manuscript for "The Civil War in Depth," I became sidetracked, yet again, by Cook's photos. I found myself studying the MI article.

To illustrate the story Dunkelman discovered, MI reproduced Cook's parapet photo as it had appeared 86 years ago in Miller's Photographic History of the Civil War. The image in MI was far sharper and clearer than the one I was most familiar with the rather blurred parapet photo in Volume Four of the Image of War series. I gathered up the book and the issue of MI and set them down in front of my wife to show her how much sharper the MI image was. She glanced at them and asked, "Are they the same photograph?" At the same instant, I realized with stunned amazement that they weren't. For one thing, the three Union gunboats were in slightly different positions in relation to the parapet in the two images. Next, I noticed that the piece of broken gun carriage in the foreground of both images was in a slightly different position in the two images. This could only mean one thing: Cook had moved the camera slightly between exposures. Could it be possible, I wondered, that Cook had taken the two photographs with the intent of creating a 3-D view of historic scene?

Stereo views are normally taken with a camera that has two side-by-side lenses with the lenses and eyes-width apart. You can, however, create a 3-D picture with a single-lens camera if you expose one photograph, move the camera a couple of inches to the left or right and then take another. Obviously, Cook had done this, then the two photos would work together as a single 3-D view. The test was simply a matter of placing them side-by-side and looking at them through a viewer.

I made photocopies of the two images. Coincidentally and most conveniently, MI and Image of War reproduced the photos at exactly the same proportions. I cut them out, placed them side-by-side and sighted them in through the convergent lenses of a stereo viewer. In an instant, my melded the two slightly different photos and the scene from the parapet burst out in 3-D. It was a breathtaking moment, an unforgettable highlight of almost two decades of collecting and studying Civil War photography.

Following the initial excitement of discovery, I took the time to carefully read the story Dunkelman uncovered. I then noticed, to my utter amazement, the written testimony that Cook had intended to create exactly what I had discovered a 3-D view of the enemy fleet in action. "Subsequently an admirable battle scene was taken, representing the Ironsides and two monitors, wreathed in their own smoke, while delivering their fire on Fort Moultrie," wrote the Mobile paper's Charleston correspondent. "I learned that it is intended, after a time, to make these pictures public, and to reduce them to stereoscopic dimensions."

There is no documentation that Cook ever marketed his parapet photographs as a stereo view. Perhaps he was discouraged by the fact that the ships were not in alignment. But there is no question that he took not one but two photographs from the parapet of Fort Sumter on September 8, 1863, and that those two photos works together as a 3-D image.

The Battle

On September 8, 1863, Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren, commander of the Union Navy's South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, was bound and determined, once and for all, to wrest Fort Sumter from the Confederates in order to win back the place where it had all started. Dahlgren was confident he had the bastion in his grasp. He had pounded the fort with shellfire from August 17 to September 2, firing 6,878 shots and silencing its guns. Just two days earlier, on September 6, the Confederates had abandoned the important Battery Wagner on Morris Island to the south of Fort Sumter. It had withstood repeated attacks by land and sea, including the July 18 assault of the 54th Massachusetts made famous by the movie "Glory."

Now it was time to move on Fort Sumter. At 6:20 a.m. on September 7, he sent the following message to the Confederates: "I have sent a flag of truce to demand the surrender of Fort Sumter. If not complied with, I will move up all the ironclads and engage it." The reply came from Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, commander of the Confederate forces: "Refuse to surrender Fort Sumter. Admiral Dahlgren must take it and hold it if he can."

On the morning of September 7, as a preliminary action, Dahlgren directed the monitor Weehawken to cut off communications to and from Sumter and points south. As the Weehawken tried to negotiate the narrow channel between Fort Sumter and Cumming's Point to the South, it ran aground in 11 feet of water. The monitor remained stuck through high tide that afternoon and night. The Confederates, however, did not notice the problem until the next morning. At 6 p.m. on September 7, the Union fleet sailed in the engaged Fort Moultrie for about three hours, until it was too dark to see.

Later, under the cover of that same dark night, Cook was rowed across the harbor to Fort Sumter, according to Miller's Photographic History of the War. The two newspaper accounts do not say when or how Cook got to the fort, but both say he made the trip under fire. If Cook made the trip under the cover of darkness, as would be expected, he indeed could have been under fire. The daily log of one monitor's commander, Lt. Cmdr. John Lee Davis, of the U. S. S. Montauk, states, "enemy firing slowly" between midnight and 2:30 a.m. on the 8th Davis said he fired seven shots of his own before retiring from action at 1:30 a.m.

At 7 a.m. on September 8, the commander of Fort Sumter, Major Stephen Elliott, Jr., belated realized that the Weehawken was stuck. He sent a message to Fort Moultrie: "The monitor near Cumming's Point is evidently aground. Fire should be opened on her, as the thin part of her hull is probably exposed." As soon as Fort Moultrie opened on the Weehawken, Dahlgren sent in the fleet to divert the fort's fire. The frigate New Ironsides, whose 20 guns made it the most powerful battleship in the world, was joined by the monitors Patapsco, Lehigh, Nahant, Montauk and Passaic. The fleet began bombarding Fort Moultrie at 8:45 a.m. (Johnson's book says it began at 11 a.m.)

Although aground some 2,000 yards from Fort Moultrie, the Weehawken was hardly defenseless. At 9:07 a.m., the second shot from the Weehawken's 15-inch gun glanced off the muzzle of an 8-inch Columbiad in Fort Moultrie and ricocheted into some shell boxes, which blew up in quick succession. A hail of shrapnel tore through the batter and chewed up the men of Company E, First South Carolina Infantry. For the Confederate defenders of Charleston Harbor, it was one of the most devastating moments of the entire war.

When the explosions stopped, sailors on the Union vessels were cheering. But the carnage around the Rebel gun was devastating. Sixteen men were dead. Twelve more were wounded. The company commander, Capt. R. Press Smith, barely managed to save himself, diving into a ditch as the shells exploded. The fort's guns fell silent for a time as the commander, Col. William Butler, scrambled to replace the shattered company with another company from nearby Battery Beauregard. More than four miles to the South, at Legare's Point on James Island, Confederate Major Edward Manigault heard a "heavy" explosion from Fort Moultrie and could only guess what happened. "Many shells were heard to explode one after another," he wrote in the diary.

The engagement continued for more than four hours as big guns blazed away on both sides. At 10:15 a.m., the New Ironsides opened up on Fort Moultrie from 1,000 yards. It began firing slowly at first to get the range. The Rebel gunners responded "with accuracy and precision, firing with great rapidity" Capt. S.C. Rowan of the New Ironsides reported. He ordered "a very spirited and concentrated fire" on Fort Moultrie, causing the Rebel fire to slacken. "The fire of all the forts slackened down to an occasional gun, when I directed a slow fire to be kept up to economize shell," Rowan reported. "The moment the enemy discovered this, he jumped from behind his sand bags and opened rapidly. I renewed our rapid fire and silenced him again." Rowan reported the engagement as "one of the severest artillery duels ever sustained by a ship through a space of two hours and fifty-five minutes."

The New Ironsides alone fired 483 shots. It was hit at least 70 times. All of the monitors took hits as they fired on the forts. Some shots from Union guns fell into the village of Moultrieville behind Fort Moultrie, igniting fires in dwellings. When the fleet managed to place itself between Fort Moultrie and the Weehawken, it also managed to draw off Moultrie's fire, much to the frustration of Elliott, who was watching from Fort Sumter.

At 10:35 a.m., he sent a message reporting that the monitors closest to Moultrie "have drawn her fire from the one aground, which is to be regretted." In another report, he said the shelling of the Weehawken should have been "more general and continuous." From the Union side, Colhoun, the Weehawken's commander, noted as well: "When the Ironsides and monitors engaged the batteries they ceased firing at us." Colhoun was nonchalant enough about the situation to send his men to breakfast.

In Sumter, Elliott sent messages to Fort Moultrie throughout the morning; more than one an hour, providing almost a blow-by-blow account. "Ironsides was heavily hit just now, throwing great deal of sand off her deck," he reported at 11:15 a.m. "Enemy very busy at their old works on Morris Island. One Parrott gun from there opened on the fort just now. At noon: "Fragments of Ironsides torn away by shot from Sullivant's Island just now."

Although the New Ironsides and the monitors were protected by thick iron and further protected by sandbags on their decks, they were not damage-proof. All of the vessels received some damage and most had a wounded sailor or two. "Seventy hits can be counted, but the woodwork on the spar deck is so much cut up that we were probably struck near a hundred times," reported the New Ironsides' carpenter. "The spar deck represents a complete mass of ruin."

At 1:20 p.m., the New Ironsides withdrew from the engagement, followed by most of the other monitors. The monitor Patapsco was disabled. It had shot a hold through its own smokestack and choked its engines. It had to be towed away. That evening, although still under fire, the Weehawken managed to get itself unstuck. It sailed off to safety, its crew exultant. It had fired 82 shells, including that devastating second shot into Fort Moultrie. It had been hit 24 times. One hit sprung a small leak, which was quickly patched. Another shell struck the top of the turret and broke off several pieces of railroad iron, one of which broke Seaman John O'Grady's left thigh. Two other sailors were slightly wounded. Other than that, there was no serious damage. (Three months later, the Weehawken foundered and sunk at anchorage in the harbor, taking a third of its men with her).

Alvah F. Hunter, a 17-year-old ship's boy on the monitor Nahant, well remembered the end of the battle on September 8. "Just as we reached the vicinity of the other monitors, the Weehawken was floated off the shoal and all the ironclads withdrew," he wrote in his memoir. "We fired both our guns at Fort Moultrie as a parting salute. When we boys came on deck and took a look at Sullivan's Island, there were great clouds of dense, black smoke rolling up from a large summer hotel and a village of cottages which stood in the rear of Fort Moultrie and the batteries on each flank of the fort. It was a most comforting sight and satisfied our boyish desire to see the result of our hard work."

But the action was far from finished. At 1 a.m. September 9, on an uncommonly dark night, several hundred Union marines in two columns of small boats approached the fort. But Elliott, Sumter's commander, had become "quite possessed" with a Union night assault, according to Johnson, and was well prepared for it. The Federals were raked by musketry from the fort and bombarded by shot and shell from the Rebel batteries on James and Sullivan's Islands. It was over in 20 minutes. The Union loss, according to Johnson, was six killed, 19 wounded, 25 missing and 102 captured. In Sumter, not a defender was hurt. Dahlgren failed to take Fort Sumter and no Union force ever conquered the Rebel bastion until the Confederates abandoned it and all of Charleston on February 17, 1865.

The Photography

When George S. Cook crept up to the parapet of Fort Sumter on September 8, 1863, and aimed his camera lens at Union gunboats as their guns blazed, he was achieving a milestone that his fellow photographers, North and South, could keenly appreciate. With his immensely popular card photograph of Major Robert Anderson, Cook had scored one photographic coup inside Fort Sumter before the war even started. When it did get started, Cook and his fellow Charleston operators became the first photographers of the Civil War. With their cameras, they documented the damage to Sumter and the other harbor forts and batteries.

The most memorable were about 35 stereo views taken by J. M. Osborn and F. E. Durbec, who operated the Southern Stereoscopic and Photographic Depot at "the sign of the big camera" on King Street. From the very start of the Civil War, photographers both North and South were eager to document it with their cameras. In July 1861, Mathew Brady took his cameras to the front for the first major land battle at Bull Run.

Fellow photographer Timothy O'Sullivan recalled the effort, perhaps inaccurately, in an 1869 article: "The battle of Bull Run would have been photographed 'close-up' but for the fact that a shell from one of the Rebel fieldpieces took away the photographer's camera." Brady himself told the story 30 years later in an interview with George Alfred Townsend: "I went to the first battle of Bull Run with two wagons from Washington.We stayed all night at Centreville, we got as far as Blackburne's Ford, we made pictures and expected to be in Richmond the next day, but it was not so, and our apparatus was a good deal damaged on the way back to Washington."

In June 1862, James Gibson captured what can be considered by today's standards as the first news photograph from the front with his photography of wounded soldiers at Savage Station, all of whom were captured the next day in a counterattack. Alexander Gardner's historic series of the dead as they fell at Antietam in September of 1862, advanced the standard one step further. The camera was edging closer to the action.

On May 3, 1863, photographer A. J. Russell, although not under fire himself, captured a remarkable series of photographs showing the rising smoke of combat as the second battle of Fredericksburg raged in the distance.

Near Gettysburg in July 1863, Confederate cavalry briefly detained Gardner before proceeding on to the battlefield make another historic series of photographs. It seemed only a matter of time before someone would successfully make a photograph of battle while under fire.

By 1863, in Charleston, the business of photography had changed. Cook had a new assistant, one J. M. (or J. O.) Osborne-apparently the same Osborne who ran the Southern Stereoscopic and Photographic Depot, now apparently out of business. Whether Osborn and Durbec failed because of the war, the blockade or their own business shortcomings may never be known. But we do know that Cook managed to stay in business.

Cook's biographer, great grandson Jack C. Ramsay, Jr., says Cook recorded in his private accounts the profits he made from stock he held in at least three different blockade runners. Miller's Photographic History of the Civil War also notes Cook's involvement in blockade running. It says he smuggled photographic chemicals from the E. and H. T. Anthony Co. in New York labeled as quinine.

It is clear why Cook went to the fort on September 8. Both newspaper articles say that the Confederate chief of staff, Gen. Thomas Jordan, wanted a photographic record of the ruins of Fort Sumter and, according to the Charleston paper, "to show to future generations what Southern troops can endure in battle." Cook "promptly volunteered," according to both newspapers, and came to the fort with an assistant, one J. M. Osborne. (The Mobile paper identified him as "J. O. Osborne.").

Cook, according to both newspapers, took photographs of the interior of Fort Sumter before making the images of the Union fleet in action. Several of Cook's images of Sumter's interior are sharp and clear, and do not have the candid, chaotic feel of the action photos. Miller says they were taken "under more favorable conditions" than the exploding shell photo. Still, while Cook made pictures, the Union ships were "throwing their eleven-and fifteen-inch shells against and into Sumter, rendering personal exposure hazardous in the extreme," according to the Charleston paper. The Mobile paper reported: "Shot and shell were flying in profusion." The Mobile paper seems to refer to the exploding shell photograph in reporting this anecdote: "Some of the garrison, anxious to be a 'feature' in the picture, seated themselves in a favorable position for the purpose, but in a moment more the peculiar sound of an approaching shell caused them to leave a comet-like impression on the plate as the darted away for safety.

The exploding shell photograph indeed does include Confederate soldiers in the lower left of the image, some of them blurred. The exploding shell photograph draws its strongest endorsement from Johnson in "The Defense of Charleston Harbor." He reproduced it as a woodcut engraving on a prominent two-page spread and used an entire page of text to describe in detail the features in the image. "During the heavy cannonade of Sullivan's Island by the ironclad squadron on the 8th of September, an artist from Charleston, Mr. G. S. Cook, was engaged in taking photographs of the interior of Fort Sumter," Johnson wrote. "Centrally in the parade (ground), a shell has just fallen and burst, after having passed over the gorge-wall, discharged by the monitor Weehawken, aground most of this day off Cumming's Point, but firing as many as forty-six times at Fort Sumter."

From the perspective of the photograph, the Weehawken was stranded behind and to the right of the photographer, and the shell arched into the fort from over his right shoulder. In 1911, the exploding shell photograph was featured prominently in Miller's Photographic History of the Civil War, which took credit for publishing it for the first time. The Miller image is heavily retouched, even more so than a copy print in the Cook Collection at the Valentine Museum in Richmond. Both, however, show a Confederate flag flying from the parapet and several big guns on the parapet that do not exist in other views of the same area that Cook took that day. And both show what appear to be bits of debris silhouetted by the smoke from the exploded shell.

Could Cook's camera have actually capture flying debris? Most likely not. At the same time, it is a fact that as early as 1859 and 1860, the E. and H. T. Anthony Co. was selling "instantaneous" photographs of New York street scenes, with exposure times of less than a second, that all but froze the movement of people and carriages in the streets. Miller, in describing the exploding shell photo, confirms this is how it was made: "It is quite as successful a picture as could have been made by the instantaneous photographic apparatus of the present day." It is my theory that Cook indeed captured some evidence of the exploded shell of his glass plate. Beyond the borders of the heavy white smoke, mainly above it and to the upper left, is a much less distinct pattern of smoke. Perhaps this hazy, less compelling image of dispersing smoke is what Cook actually captured, and he enhanced the effect with retouching.

In any event, even if the exploding shell photo is fakes, the two photographs of enemy gunboats in action clearly are not. The most distinct image of the gunboats is the one reproduced in Miller with this headline:

"FIRST PHOTOGRAPH OF IRONCLADS IN ACTION. A DARING CAMERA TRIUMPH OF 1863."
This image shows the distinctive outline of two monitors, probably the Montauk and Passaic, with their single turrets and their smokestacks clearly visible. In the lead is the New Ironsides, its great bulwarks presenting a different, larger form than the monitors.

Is this image in Miller retouched? Miller does not say it is, but it is obviously clearer and sharper than the same photograph as reproduced from the Library of Congress in Ramsay's book. This image is hazy and blurred. But a close examination of the two blurred photographs reveals the same type of smoke patter emerging from the Ironsides as is clearly evident on the Miller version.

Even in the hazy photos, part of the ship is obscured by a white form that clearly looks like smoke, and extends away from the left side of the ship in a conical shape. However blurred or faint, the photographs stand as their own mute testimony to Cook's accomplishment and the newspaper articles back them up. Cook, the Charleston paper reported, "had the good fortune to secure, amid the smoke of battle in which they were wreathed a faithful likeness of the Ironsides and two monitors." The Mobile paper, as mentioned earlier, also explicitly referred to the photos of the gunboats. Both newspapers as well as Miller note Cook's bravery while under fire in Fort Sumter. "He got his picture and was ordered off the parapet since he was drawing upon the fort the fire of all the Union batteries on Morris Island," Miller reported. The Charleston paper said: "Mr. Cook requested permission to go outside the fort and take a picture of the exterior from the water, but it was thought that this would draw additional fire from the fleet, and the project was abandoned."

The only suggestion that Cook's activities were actually noticed by the Union fleet came in this cryptic entry from Dahlgren's own report of the engagement of September 8: "Some movement in Sumter seemed to draw attention from the Weehawken, which, with a few well-directed shells, settled that business." Of course, one must be prudent with the facts in the Cook story, particularly as reported by Miller. For one thing, miller erroneously identifies the Weehawken as one of the three ships in the parapet photo, while reporting correctly elsewhere that the Weehawken shelled Fort Sumter when it was aground near Cumming's Point. Miller also offers this apparent exaggeration: "Cook, with his head under the dark cloth, saw on the ground glass as shell passing within a few feet of him. Another shell knocked one of his plate-holders off the parapet into the rainwater cistern. He gave a soldier five dollars to fish it out for him.

Nevertheless, the significance of Cook's photographs was recognized almost immediately. "The Ironsides and two Monitors Taken-A Bold Feat" read the tiny headline of the September 12 Charleston Courier. The newspaper called it "one of the most remarkable acts.ever recorded in the history of war." And his contemporaries recognized the accomplishment. Four years after the war, Timothy O'Sullivan wrote an article on the adventures of a photographer's life, and undoubtedly was referring to Cook in this passage: "In 1863, while photographing Fort Sumter and the Confederate batteries in the vicinity of Charleston, a courageous operator saw his camera twice knocked over by fragments of shell, his camera-cloth torn and the loose, white sand of Morris Island scattered over plates and chemicals. The veteran artillerists who manned the battery from which the views were made wisely sought refuge in the bomb-proofs to secure themselves from the heavy shell fire which was opened upon their fortification; but the photographer stuck to his work, and the pictures made on the memorable occasion are among the most interesting of the war."

Miller was perhaps the most strident about the uniqueness of Cook's photos. And over the years, they generally have been considered the first action photos. The Image of War series, edited by William C. Davis, said the parapet photo "may be the only genuine combat action photo to be made during the Civil War." But with an understanding of the evolution of war photography from 1861 to 1863, a full knowledge of what was happening around Cook as he made his photographs and the benefit of new discoveries, we can see more clearly the significance of his work as America's first combat photographer.