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Sneden the memoirist does not change our interpretation of Civil War battles or leaders, but Sneden the storyteller will mesmerize us with the power of his narrative. It is the story of a soldier who saw first-hand some of the most dramatic events of the war in the East. The chaos of battle is nowhere better portrayed than in his accounts of the Peninsula and Seven Days’ campaigns of 1862 when General George McClellan threw away a golden chance to end the war at an early stage. Even more compelling are Sneden’s vivid passages that describe with the passion of the eyewitness the horrific conditions of prison life in the South during the harrowing year he spent as a prisoner of war, most of that time at the infamous Andersonville camp in Georgia.
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Sneden could create this dramatic account because of his narrative talent and because of the sources he had at hand when he wrote. He did not write from memory alone, but with the aid of extensive diaries that he kept as a mapmaker before his capture and short-hand diaries he surreptitiously wrote as a prisoner of war and smuggled out of the Confederacy on his release. Using these resources and casting his memoir in diary form, he gives his story an immediacy that other memoirs lack. Sneden’s descriptive power is especially apparent in the prison sequences, with a dramatic evocation of the helplessness of living under the constant threat of violence, deprivation, disease, and despair. From his capture by John Singleton Mosby to the tedium of prison life, to the dramatic execution of the “raiders” at Andersonville by fellow prisoners, to his secret sketching of Confederate forts while on parole, Sneden the master storyteller grips the reader with the fervor of one who had endured much and burned with the desire to tell the world of his ordeal. |
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he discovery of the Robert K. Sneden collection brings to light a rich,
new, and entirely unexplored Civil War resource of the first rank. The
graphic materials – perhaps a 1,000 watercolors, sketches, diagrams,
maps, and landscapes – constitute perhaps the largest collection
of soldier art to survive the war. It is not just the art, however, that
gives the collection its distinction. The pictures that Sneden painted
in words carry at least equal weight for enriching our understanding of
America’s great national trial. 