News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: Book Captures Civil War POW Experience

Date: November 21, 2000

"A Yankee's doodle diary He wrote and painted in North and South
By Andrew Curry

As a private in the Civil War, Robert Knox Sneden recorded everything he saw, filling volumes with sketches and diaries. A draftsman and aspiring architect, he signed up early in the war and was soon drawing up maps of fortifications for Union generals, his services in high demand. Captured by Confederate raiders in November 1863, he continued to cover the conflict. Moved on cattle cars from prison camp to prison camp–all the while scribbling shorthand notes and sketches in the margins of his Bible and on tiny scraps of paper–Sneden traveled across most of the embattled South, from a desperately overcrowded tobacco warehouse turned prison in Richmond, Va., to the infamous Andersonville prison camp in Georgia. By the end of the war, Sneden had filled 5,000 handwritten pages, illustrated with almost 1,000 watercolors and maps.

A lifelong bachelor, Sneden died in a veterans home in 1918. His lonely opus remained unknown to scholars until it surfaced several years ago. Free Press won a heated bidding war for publishing rights and last month released an edited version as Eye of the Storm: A Civil War Odyssey. (A traveling exhibit of some of the watercolors will be on display at the New-York Historical Society until the end of the year.)

The book is illustrated with what historians say makes Sneden's work stand out: hundreds of careful watercolors depicting everything from nightmarish prison camp conditions to the early use of hot-air balloons in battle. "This is nearly unique in that it gives us so much illustrative material," says University of Virginia Civil War historian Gary W. Gallagher. "A number of sites he painted were painted by no one else, and we have no photographs of them."

Awkward Abe. "He was an educated person writing from an enlisted man's perspective, rather than an officer's," says Nelson Lankford, one of the editors of Storm. "He has a lot of typical GI complaints." Sneden reserved special scorn for arrogant officers, vandals, and dignitaries. Not even President Abraham Lincoln, "ungainly on horseback . . . [and] covered with dust," was exempt from Sneden's sharp pen.

Little is known of Sneden's life after the war. He never realized his dreams of becoming an architect–which may have been for the best. "If he had been a successful architect," says Lankford, "he wouldn't have had the time to write the memoirs." Though there are no new facts in Sneden's account, for a war as well documented as the Civil War, the emergence of new material still comes as a surprise. "This is just a reminder that when somebody comes up your steps with a battered old suitcase, it pays to be attentive," Lankford says. "Some great stuff is still coming down out of the attic.""