PrefaceIn 1994, four tattered scrapbook albums, containing some five hundred vivid Civil War watercolor drawings and maps by Union soldier Robert Knox Sneden, were consigned to an art dealer who specializes in Southern works. When the dealer initially approached the Virginia Historical Society by phone, the institution's curators were naturally curious, but skeptical. When they finally examined firsthand what the dealer had described, however, they realized they were looking at a remarkable collection of artwork that had dropped from sight for many decades, languishing in a Connecticut bank vault since the Great Depression. A generous gift from Mr. and Mrs. Floyd D. Gottwald, Jr., of Richmond enabled the Historical Society to acquire the collection.
The Historical Society realized that it had made a significant acquisition. Over the years, previously unknown drawings, paintings, and sketches have turned up here and there. But not major collections. Most were known and accounted for. Never before had so many original watercolors appeared from nowhere like these. The Historical Society staff launched an all-out effort to learn more about the Union soldier who had captured so much of Virginia's lost landscape, but who left faint tracks in the documentary record himself.
Their investigation led to Sneden's service records at the National Archives and the inevitable genealogists, who helped fill in details about the man and his background. Further research led them to a ninety-five-year-old local and family historian, who in turn reported that the great-grandson of Robert Sneden's brother lived in upstate New York. He was the present owner, she alleged, of the Union soldier's illustrated wartime diary/memoir.
Little of this diary/memoir had been known to historians before. The Century Collection of Civil War Art, a book published in 1974, however, gave a tantalizing hint. A brief passage noted that nearly three dozen engravings on the Peninsula Campaign were by a Robert K. Sneden, who kept an extensive wartime diary with illustrations. "Little is known of Sneden's life beyond his wartime experiences," it further noted, and "the fate of his diary is a mystery...It seems to have disappeared."
A call by the Historical Society to the artist's great-great-nephew confirmed that he did indeed own the diary/memoir. Actually, he said that it was in five volumes, but he had shut them away years ago in a mini-rental bin in Arizona. Through a complicated arrangement, the owner retrieved the documents and brought them to the Historical Society for examination, with the right to purchase. The five volumes turned out to contain nearly five thousand handwritten pages and hundreds more watercolors. Unfortunately, Volume 2, covering most of May and June 1862, had been missing for more than a century, according to the owner. Nevertheless, Mr. and Mrs. Gottwald were generous once again, and by the end of 1997, the Historical Society added the other significant body of Sneden's work to its collections.
Although originally described as a "diary," the five volumes are a memoir based on a diary. In the introduction to his first volume, Sneden states: "In these volumes an authentic and generally correct account is given of the movements and Battles fought by 'The Army of the Potomac'...which has been compiled from a diary kept during the time by the author." Indeed, in his narrative Sneden notes that he mailed diary entries and pictures home during the war. He stated that he kept a shorthand diary in secret while incarcerated as a prisoner of war. Apparently using his original diaries and several published sources as the basis of his account, Sneden put pen to paper and wrote his wartime narrative probably over a period of many years beginning in the late 1870s. At the same time, presumably he compiled the separate scrapbook albums of drawings, many of which may have been his original wartime images. Like many Civil War artists, both professional and amateur, he probably made hasty sketches in the field in pencil or pen and ink. He then refined and colored them later, possibly after the war. We know that a few of his drawings were done later, copied from other pictures that he could not have seen until after the war. The vast majority of the eight hundred or so drawings, however, were based on his original sketches made in the field.
Perhaps Sneden tried to publish his memoir. In the 1870s and 1880s, a steady stream of Civil War publications rolled off the presses, many of which were bestsellers. Sneden may have hoped that his magnum opus would bring him much needed 'income to support a struggling career as an architect. Portions of his account discuss the war beyond his own experiences. He analyzes strategy, relates the movement of armies, including the enemy's, reports the strengths of opposing forces, and critiques army leadership. He occasionally interjects information that could have been known to him only well after the event. He may have been trying to publish a history of the Civil War combining his personal story with a more general account. There is no evidence, however, that any such effort by Sneden bore fruit.
Because his original wartime diaries have never been found, it is impossible to know how detailed or accurate they were. Like most diarists, when time did not allow, he probably reconstructed events several days or longer after they occurred. From checking other reliable sources, it is clear that at times he misdated events or confused them with other happenings. In a few instances he freely lifted dialogue and other information from sources that were published after the war. This edited version of his account notes the few places in which his information is inaccurate, questionable, or borrowed. Nevertheless, the amount of detail he provides on things he saw, heard, did, or had done to him strongly suggests that he is the sole source of information for all but a small portion of the account. His descriptions of events and his portrayal of key personalities with whom he associated can be corroborated in numerous other sources. For Sneden, as for many veterans, the Civil War was the most important event of his life, and details of those years were burned in his memory.
Together, his narrative and art constitute one of the most important Civil War documents ever produced. Memoirs of the war are commonplace, but the overwhelming volume of Sneden's account and his incredible detail -- from the terror of being roused from sleep at pistol-point by his captors one cold November night to despondently swatting flies in his Andersonville shanty -- make his story perhaps the most complete description of Civil War battlefield experience and prison life ever written. Hundreds of watercolor sketches and maps provide a visual chronicle of almost every place Sneden went. It is as though he had a video recorder and kept it running throughout the war.
Unlike many Civil War narratives, Sneden's avoids giving the reader postmortem discussions of political or philosophical issues. He shuns diatribes on the evils of the South or the righteousness of the Union cause, though both opinions can be inferred from his matter-of-fact recounting of the ordinary soldier's life. Sneden suffered terribly during his imprisonment, and the perspective of writing after the war ended did not lessen his hatred for his enemies. The desire for retribution, though never far from his mind, is tempered by the analytical detachment of a surveyor and mapmaker. He describes houses, fortifications, and the physics of artillery shells in flight. In the same clinical detail, he delineates the appearance of a mangled corpse lying on the ground and the horrific death in battle of an artilleryman.
It is in Sneden's analytical detachment, devoid of the flowery language and sentimentality typical of nineteenth-century memoirs, that the value of his account lies. His experience rings true to modern ears. As the years carry us farther and farther from the Civil War, we find it harder to understand what it was like for those who lived through it. We can visit the battlefields, but they seem parklike. We can watch the work of filmmakers, but their images are too languid or contrived. We can read the books of thousands of authors and still not catch the spirit and the suffering of the Civil War. The surest way for us to reach back to the events of 1861-1865 is through the record set down by a man who was there. By means of Robert Sneden's words and his art, we learn about the defining experience of his existence: a terrible war in which he was a participant, victim, and chronicler. His remarkable Civil War story, hidden away for decades, can now be told.
Copyright © 2000 by the Virginia Historical Society
Chapter Two: Under Fire
The Federal advance began well enough on April 4. The Confederates put up little resistance, and by nightfall Union troops had marched twelve miles. The following day, however, rain, poor roads, inaccurate maps, overly cautious generals, and an unexpected surprise at Yorktown conspired to bring McClellan to an abrupt halt. Reports from his scouts revealed that the Confederate fortifications were not limited to the immediate Yorktown vicinity; instead they ran completely across the Peninsula. Even more alarming were reports that Magruder was resisting with a much stronger force than anticipated. In reality, the Confederates had only 11,000 men; but Magruder put on a dramatic show of force.
Removed from his comfortable quarters in northern Virginia, Private Sneden now experienced real campaigning for the first time. Cold rain, gluelike mud, wagon-clogged roads, and the sometimes maddening actions of officers became part of his daily routine. Those annoyances, however, could not interfere with the important job he had to do. "The maps of the Peninsula are perfectly unreliable," George McClellan complained. Most were decades old and often failed to show the numerous streams that slowed troop movements. As a result, Union army topographers stayed busy at Yorktown.
Sneden spent long hours bending over drafting tables, often relying on the most modern of available scientific methods, including reports from Professor Lowe's balloons, to prepare maps. He also was not afraid to go up on the lines to do his job. He, like some other mapmakers, regularly exposed himself to enemy fire to get accurate surveys of the landscape. On one occasion he found himself the object of target practice by a Confederate artillery crew. For a soldier, however, Sneden led a charmed existence, and he knew it. He freely admitted that his comrades in the trenches were not so fortunate.
April 12, 1862
...This morning at 7 a.m. cries of "the balloon is loose" and "look at her"...startled most of us at headquarters while crowds of soldiers came running from all directions out of the woods to the front of the open plain to see it sail gracefully away high in [the] air with two long ropes dangling from the car or basket. It was going swiftly straight for Yorktown.
The balloon had been moved since it had been fired on yesterday...half a mile or so back of the sawmill. The ropes being securely fastened to a tree, [General Fitz-John] Porter had ascended there yesterday to observe the enemy. This morning he unloosed one rope which held the balloon, leaving one to hold it, and tried to ascend again by himself. When the balloon arose the rope broke and set him free. He had been up with Lowe the balloonist many times before, but the idea of being loose and sailing at such a swift rate through the air had confused him, and he did not know how to manage a balloon either. It was dead calm on the earth's surface, but the balloon moved very rapidly nevertheless. As he passed over our heads,...we shouted "pull the valve," but he did not heed or hear us. Lowe soon came up on horseback and went after his balloon...The Rebels would have been delighted to have got the balloon with Fitz-John in it. We at headquarters did not care as long as they did not get the balloon.
...The balloon rose to about 1,600 feet [and] sailed across the plateau in our front and to right over Yorktown. The general crouched down in the car as volleys of rifle balls were fired at the balloon by the enemy as the car descended lower down and directly over their works. Porter now threw over all the sand bag ballast attached to the balloon, when it rose quickly to a great height and striking an upper adverse current came sailing slowly back to us again to the camps of Birney's [brigade] below the sawmill. Porter, fearing that he would be carried beyond to the James River unless he could descend, became desperate, climbed out of the car and gave the valve line a hard jerk, which opened the valve wide. It also made him lose his grip on the ropes and he fell into the basket, one half of his body hanging over the side with the balloon 2,000 feet above the earth! Porter now was aware that he had pulled the valve too wide as the balloon now began to fall very rapidly and with a fearful rush; he could not close the valve again for the rope was far out of his reach away above his head in the netting. Even if he had the strength to reach it, he could not climb up and get it.
The balloon now began to be as limp as a rag and was tossing from side to side, but was descending straight into the camp. Seeing a large tree beneath him he took his chances for life by jumping into it, and in a second was hanging in the branches by one arm and leg, completely enfolded by the shattered balloon with the escaping gas filling his lungs at every breath. Help was at hand, however, and he was rescued by the soldiers of Birney's troops. The balloon was torn away, and he was lowered to the ground in an exhausted condition...
On investigating, it was found that both ropes which held the balloon had become corroded by contact with the acid wagon tops, by which the gas is manufactured, and broke at the jerk when the balloon had got to the end of its tether. New ropes were of course attached to it. General Porter investigated the cause of the balloon ropes so suddenly snapping off when he made the ascent, and found out that the sergeant who had been detailed from the 50th New York engineer regiment had had some hard words with his captain who had charge of the balloon the evening previous. The sergeant, therefore, smeared the ropes with acid from the gas making wagon, which ate the ropes so that they broke like loose tow.
Copyright © 2000 by Virginia Historical Society
Chapter Eight: This Hell on Earth
Conditions at Andersonville worsened with the approach of summer. The Confederates crowded more and more prisoners into the stockade to bake in the heat of the Georgia sun. A decision made far to the north compounded the problem. General Ulysses Grant believed that exchanging prisoners prolonged the war because of the relative disparity of manpower between North and South. As a result, for more than a year there had been no general exchange of prisoners as there had been earlier.
From the first arrivals at Andersonville in February 1864, the number of inmates swelled to its maximum of almost 33,000 in July. Sneden's periodic count peaks at 35,000 and thus overstates the numbers only slightly. Indeed, for a time Andersonville became the fifth largest city in the Confederacy. The original stockade of sixteen acres, a third of them occupied by the swamp and deadline, was enlarged in July. Nevertheless, as historian William Marvel has calculated, this enclosure gave each prisoner about the square footage of a grave. With overcrowding and lack of sanitation, the death rate skyrocketed. Smallpox, dysentery, scurvy, malnutrition, and infections that turned gangrenous all took their toll. The Confederate prison doctors protested the conditions and their lack of medicine, but to no avail. They began ascribing some deaths to "nostalgia," their word for the abject despair that caused some men to give up hope and wither away. By the end of the war, nearly 13,000 Union soldiers would lay their bones in the common graveyard just outside the stockade. Some sources set the death toll even higher.
March 15, 1864
...There have been five or six tunnels started by the prisoners here so as to escape at night. They are started in some fellow's shanty and carried under the stockade forty or more feet outside. As the soil is sandy, the cutting is not so hard as the want of pure air during the operation.
Iron skillets, half canteens, wooden scoops and shovels are used. It was a slow but sure way of getting out, but when out, nobody knew the country at all and must be eventually recaptured while begging food from some house...The shaft was only large enough for one to dig at a time, and that upon his hands and knees.
The miner would first cut the clay out with a case knife. Then scoop the earth between his legs behind him, where another man put it into an old haversack, or bag made out of an old blanket, and crawled with it backward out to the shaft from the surface where others would haul it up and scatter the earth along the sinks on the swamp. The bag of earth was sometimes hauled out by a rag rope from the first operator's feet, and pushed in by poles lengthened as the work progressed. An empty bag was pushed in as the full one came out.
Several haversacks of dirt might be carried from the mouth of the shaft without attracting attention from the guard on the stockade, but to carry them at regular intervals all night required the utmost caution and strategy. The dirt carriers started for the swamp in no hurry and in different directions, hiding the bag of earth under a ragged blanket or overcoat.
The one who operated in the hole had to be relieved every twenty minutes or so on account of the foul air, when another one took his place. Many times the head operator was dragged out by the feet the whole way in an insensible condition, but the cold fresh air soon revived him. Gangs of twelve, fourteen, or sixteen generally composed the workmen. Great secrecy was enforced, and it took several weeks of night work to construct a tunnel sixty to eighty feet long, which was the required length, though some were much longer on account of having to dig the entire distance around huge roots of the trees which were underground. Then when the tunnel had progressed to a sufficient distance, the entrance was carefully concealed from those who had huts near by. Very frequently the first hole sunk would be from some comrade's shanty, who had a pole floor to it and slept over the shaft in the daytime. There was always a risk of its being told of by another man not concerned in the construction to the Rebel sergeant at the gate, when he would receive double rations and some tobacco for his information, when a guard all armed would march in and by sounding the earth with crowbars soon discover its course and destroy it before our eyes. Two Negroes generally came in and did this work with shovels. Work on a tunnel would not occur for over two nights when many knew of its location and progress of construction. No one of the prisoners would "give it away," but the meanest and most miserable prisoner. If found out he would be beaten with sticks until he could not stand...
June 26-31, 1864
For the past six weeks many tunnels have been built and over forty have got away through them. None of them have been heard from so far. Wirz, with [Benjamin] Harris [a local hunter] and the dogs, goes around the stockade every morning to find the burrows, sometimes with success. There are over thirty tunnels on the east side of the stockade. Six Negroes with crowbars came in the stockade with three Rebel officers who held pistols in each hand. They sounded the ground with the crowbars all around the stockade inside the death line or death space, and found fifteen tunnels, some large and some small. Nine of these went clean under the stockade, which is sunk five feet in the ground. Seventeen prisoners went through one hole last night. Wirz was furious, and the rations were stopped for forty-eight hours in the detachments to which the men belonged. The hunters are now out with the dogs. They are generally recaptured and brought back within two days from their leaving. The red peppers which the sutler sells are now ground fine and put in the tracks of those who escape to destroy the dog's scent. One sniff of this makes the dog useless for a week, so the recaptured ones say who have tried it.
July 1, 1864
We were very much crowded, the narrow streets which were only six to eight feet wide made it impossible for anyone to go through them without jostling each other. Main Street now is thronged from early morning until dark by thousands of prisoners, who all have rations of some kind to sell or exchange for money or other rations not cooked. One half of us yet get raw ration. The barbers and others buy up all the goober beans which they cook and sell for 5¢ a cup, or half pint. Wood has been so scarce that enough could not be had to cook one's own ration.
The sailors have lots of money, and seem to live well on sutler's supplies. They get whiskey once in a while from the sutler, paying 50¢ greenbacks for a tablespoonful. They have managed to buy a fiddle from the Rebel guard and all take turns at scraping on it. Only one of them can play a tune anyhow. Many are splitting up the stockade timbers with pine wedges which are first hardened in the fire. Pails are being made of the wood to hold water or beer in. The corn beer peddlers are doing a good business. Several barrels of the stuff [are] constantly being fermented in the sun and made for sale. Hundreds are yelling all day, "Here's your fine cold beer; coldest in the stockade for only 5¢ cup," etc., or "Who'll swap beans for soup?" or "Who'll give a chew of tobacco for half a raw ration?" Some carry their wares of a few potatoes, onions, tobacco, etc., on little boards slung around their necks. Others have little stands on four sticks with their half dozen potatoes, or a few onions, some salt and pieces of plug tobacco cut in inch squares which sell for 25¢ each. All yelling and making a great noise all day. The noises and yells in the Gold Room at New York is nothing in comparison. Many who win a stake at cards speculate in tobacco, salt, potatoes, onions, etc., which can be had from the sutler at wholesale prices and in a week or two have hundreds of dollars made from a start of a dollar or two. There is a perfect mania for trading and swapping.
All the vacant sites of shanties left by those who moved into the new stockade have been seized and held by some who lived near by and held for real estate, which they expect to sell to the next lot of new prisoners who arrive here. Thread is carefully picked out of the old dirty clothes thrown away, or from some dead man, and with needles got from the sutler at $1 each numbers of tailors have started business, mending and patching the clothes of others who pay from 10¢ to 50¢. Trousers made from stolen meal bags are cut out by the sailors for 50¢ each and made up by the tailors, and sell readily for $2.50 per pair. All the sailors and marines wear them now. Gamblers are playing cards all day or throwing dice into a tin cup for a box, and games of Honest John, euchre, or poker are going on all day, while crowds of others stand by to watch the piles of money change hands: among the gaping crowd stand the half starved, ragged skeleton like forms of some of the prisoners, who have no money, and don't ever expect to have any, who beg 10¢ or so from the lucky ones when the game breaks up. Stakes are from $1 or $5 per game to $100 greenbacks.
The Raiders are also in the crowd, watching the lucky winner pocket his gains then follow him to his shanty which is marked by the gang for a midnight raid that night. These raiders have been making desperate attacks lately on all those who are known to possess any money, watches, rings, or other valuables. They have grown so bold as to attack and rob prisoners in broad daylight, regular highway robbers. They select their victim and two or three of them club the unfortunate man either in his tent or in the streets, rob him so quickly that before he can cry out the thieves generally have escaped by dodging in behind the tents in the narrow crooked streets, or in a tent of a confederate thief and robber near by. Out of sixteen robberies reported to Big Pete who is chief of the police or Regulators, not one of the scoundrels have been arrested. Seven or eight prisoners have been known to have been murdered by the gang within the past month! As they have suddenly disappeared and must have been killed and buried for plunder. The Regulators seem to be in with the gang and a new force of police has recently been organized which come in the place of the old ones although "Big Pete" is still chief.
While excavating for a tunnel last week the workmen exhumed two dead prisoners who had been buried seven feet deep together, entirely naked and in a decomposed state. The owner of the tent or shanty which was over the dead men hastily tore it down and moved away to some other locality before he could be identified.
Copyright © 2000 by Virginia Historical Society