The few extant photographs of Fort Sanders, including the cropping atop this page, apparently were taken after the Nov. 29, 1863, battle by George Barnard, the official photographer for Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s Military Division of the Mississippi.
Barnard, a Connecticut native who grew up in New York, apparently took the photographs after Dec. 6 when he arrived with Sherman and his troops to relieve the Confederate siege of Knoxville. By then the Confederates under Gen. Longstreet had buried their dead and marched away.
Sherman was disgusted to find defending Union Gen. Ambrose Burnside and his staff officers dining heartily while the soldiers of his army were starving. “They were on short rations of hardtack, water and bread, while their commanders licked meat fat off their fingers at Burnside’s groaning table in the Crozier House mansion.”
Two of Barnard’s photographs of the fort are archived at Notre Dame University. The aforementioned view is there as well as one I had not seen before. Possibly because it is hard to interpret. The caption says it is the view southeast of the fort’s parapet, but which part of the parapet is not specified. It seems, in fact, to be a northeast view, almost behind the fort.
