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Eye of the Storm: A Civil War Odyssey
A vividly illustrated chronicle of the Civil War, written by a Union mapmaker who witnessed the worst of the war firsthand, includes his experiences during a two-year stint at the notorious Andersonville prison. 100,000 first printing. First serial, Military History Quarterly.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published October 6, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
April 21, 2016
Imagine you’re a Virginia Historical Society curator in 1994 hanging out with your curator buddies. The phone rings. An art dealer has a bunch of original Civil War drawings and maps. “Sure, bring ’em by,” you say, not expecting much. The art dealer places four tattered volumes of intricate, beautiful drawings and paintings on your desk. Your heart skips. You don’t let on to the dealer. You make some calls, beg some people and buy the volumes.
But there’s more! A little (a lot) of digging at the National Archives and a conversation with a 99-year-old local and family historian leads you to a storage facility in Arizona belonging to the great-grandson of Private Robert Knox Sneden the artist of the maps and drawings. Inside the storage unit lies 5000 handwritten pages and hundreds more drawings documenting Private Sneden’s incredible, harrowing and ultimately inspiring journey through the Civil War!
I bought this book years ago because I liked the drawings. I didn’t read the preface or the book blurb when I finally read it this week. For the first 50 pages I read it mainly because I still liked the pictures. Sneden got lucky. General Samuel Heintzelman noticed his maps and drawings and scooped him up. As a lowly private Sneden was given enormous freedom in his new position. As the army sat idle under McClellan he wrote about the everyday life of an army at rest.
Eventually he wrote about an army at war. Just when I got lulled into the boring life of a waiting soldier Sneden’s luck changed. The private didn’t write like a prissy 19th century guy. Horrifying, funny and grim events are detailed in a matter-of-fact way that’s a little unsettling. At first it’s just soldiers robbing graves in churchyards, a few injuries and deaths, but then all hell breaks loose on the pages: mules and horses left for dead after giving out in thick Virginia mud, others slaughtered wholesale so the enemy won’t get them during a retreat; locomotives filled with millions of dollars worth of supplies and ammo set fire to as they screech driver-less over a bridge and into the water; blood streaming out the bottom of ambulance wagons and walking wounded dragging themselves with terrified eyes away from the Rebel army nipping at their heels.
One dark evening Sneden and a few other engineer types are stay behinds at a temporary headquarters. Sneden spots shadowy figures on horseback in the woods. He fears them–I feared them as I read. He warns his roommates but they laugh. The following morning they’re captured. I kept waiting for Sneden to escape even though by now I’d looked ahead and knew the poor private I’d grown to love would end up at the notorious Andersonville Prison Camp.
Throughout his harrowing year in prison Sneden keeps his wits as 30,000 men are crammed into a tiny prison yard on swampy, treeless land in Georgia. Millions of maggots rise from the swamp, thousands of men lie sick and dying. “Sick and dying” is a clinical way of putting the immensity of the suffering that Sneden writes about in such detail. He’s a good man and that’s what really gets me as I read this. He shares, never descends into the depravity of the desperate others who gather around a sick man waiting to steal his tin cup when he dies.
All the while he sews his shorthand notes into his shirt, trousers and hat, sending home his sketches when he can. He lives but never forgets the enormity of the evil he witnessed. His hatred for the enemy is expressed at a cool distance, but it’s there and who can blame him? War is hell.
After the war he’s left with ailments that keep him from steady work. Government doctors dismiss many of his claims as they do so often now with veterans who give everything even their health to a cause. He doesn’t marry. He writes to the pension office. He writes his memoir. He crosses out his name in the book of the dead or missing and lives out his final years in an old soldiers’ home because he can’t afford to live anywhere else.
I hope he had people who appreciated him as he sat on the old home porch in summer. In the winter I hope someone knitted him socks. He deserved at least that.
But there’s more! A little (a lot) of digging at the National Archives and a conversation with a 99-year-old local and family historian leads you to a storage facility in Arizona belonging to the great-grandson of Private Robert Knox Sneden the artist of the maps and drawings. Inside the storage unit lies 5000 handwritten pages and hundreds more drawings documenting Private Sneden’s incredible, harrowing and ultimately inspiring journey through the Civil War!
I bought this book years ago because I liked the drawings. I didn’t read the preface or the book blurb when I finally read it this week. For the first 50 pages I read it mainly because I still liked the pictures. Sneden got lucky. General Samuel Heintzelman noticed his maps and drawings and scooped him up. As a lowly private Sneden was given enormous freedom in his new position. As the army sat idle under McClellan he wrote about the everyday life of an army at rest.
Eventually he wrote about an army at war. Just when I got lulled into the boring life of a waiting soldier Sneden’s luck changed. The private didn’t write like a prissy 19th century guy. Horrifying, funny and grim events are detailed in a matter-of-fact way that’s a little unsettling. At first it’s just soldiers robbing graves in churchyards, a few injuries and deaths, but then all hell breaks loose on the pages: mules and horses left for dead after giving out in thick Virginia mud, others slaughtered wholesale so the enemy won’t get them during a retreat; locomotives filled with millions of dollars worth of supplies and ammo set fire to as they screech driver-less over a bridge and into the water; blood streaming out the bottom of ambulance wagons and walking wounded dragging themselves with terrified eyes away from the Rebel army nipping at their heels.
One dark evening Sneden and a few other engineer types are stay behinds at a temporary headquarters. Sneden spots shadowy figures on horseback in the woods. He fears them–I feared them as I read. He warns his roommates but they laugh. The following morning they’re captured. I kept waiting for Sneden to escape even though by now I’d looked ahead and knew the poor private I’d grown to love would end up at the notorious Andersonville Prison Camp.
Throughout his harrowing year in prison Sneden keeps his wits as 30,000 men are crammed into a tiny prison yard on swampy, treeless land in Georgia. Millions of maggots rise from the swamp, thousands of men lie sick and dying. “Sick and dying” is a clinical way of putting the immensity of the suffering that Sneden writes about in such detail. He’s a good man and that’s what really gets me as I read this. He shares, never descends into the depravity of the desperate others who gather around a sick man waiting to steal his tin cup when he dies.
All the while he sews his shorthand notes into his shirt, trousers and hat, sending home his sketches when he can. He lives but never forgets the enormity of the evil he witnessed. His hatred for the enemy is expressed at a cool distance, but it’s there and who can blame him? War is hell.
After the war he’s left with ailments that keep him from steady work. Government doctors dismiss many of his claims as they do so often now with veterans who give everything even their health to a cause. He doesn’t marry. He writes to the pension office. He writes his memoir. He crosses out his name in the book of the dead or missing and lives out his final years in an old soldiers’ home because he can’t afford to live anywhere else.
I hope he had people who appreciated him as he sat on the old home porch in summer. In the winter I hope someone knitted him socks. He deserved at least that.
January 6, 2014
Excellent, excellent, excellent!
Sneden was a private in the Union forces and kept extensive diaries and made sketches of so much of what he saw. A treasure trove of his writings during and after the Civil War was discovered and the result is this book. Sneden had a rough time in many Confederate prison during the War, and his descriptions are visceral. Having just read "Junius and Albert's Adventures in the Confederacy," I was amazed at how many of the prisons they were in also had Sneden as an inmate. Illustrated by watercolors done by Sneden and based on his sketches, the text is presented in a chronological log of entries. Great read for Civil War buffs.
Sneden was a private in the Union forces and kept extensive diaries and made sketches of so much of what he saw. A treasure trove of his writings during and after the Civil War was discovered and the result is this book. Sneden had a rough time in many Confederate prison during the War, and his descriptions are visceral. Having just read "Junius and Albert's Adventures in the Confederacy," I was amazed at how many of the prisons they were in also had Sneden as an inmate. Illustrated by watercolors done by Sneden and based on his sketches, the text is presented in a chronological log of entries. Great read for Civil War buffs.
July 29, 2020
Interesting book for Civil War fans
June 5, 2010
An eyewitness account of life inside the infamous Andersonville prison camp with drawings made by the author, who was bagged one unfortunate night by Mosby. Well produced book. It was given to me as a gift from remaindered stock. Apparently, it is lost among the vast and ever growing surplus of Civil War publishing.
From this and other sources I am convinced that it was an error to hang Henry Wirz or at least to only hang him alone for this horror. This, possibly the world premiere for the Nuremberg Defense, was an instance when it should have sufficed. I have seen little evidence that Wirz did more than deal as best he could with a horrible and barely manageable situation created by decisions and forces outside of his scope. It is instructive to compare the Andersonville conditions to the condition of southern troops in general. It is too much to expect an enemy to treat prisoners better than it can provide for its own forces. The responsibility lies with the Confederate military command and the government that created the conditions that led to the end of prisoner exchange. Attempts are made (Foote for one implies this in a rare specimen of possible outright bias on his part) to shift the responsibility to the Union. As I understand it, the key issue was black Union soldiers. The Confederates refused to exchange them on an equal basis with white soldiers. The Union then stopped exchange also noting that very often the Union got back broken men in exchange for men still fit for combat, an additional motivation for the suspension. Whatever the dirty work beneath the end effect was to burden the Confederacy with an unexpected flood of prisoners that immediately overwhelmed their facilities and resources with the horrendous results, and not just at Andersonville. There is something here in the way of genuine war crimes, perhaps worthy of a few hangings, but the wrong man was hanged, and the proceeding was arranged to virtually insure the result.
From this and other sources I am convinced that it was an error to hang Henry Wirz or at least to only hang him alone for this horror. This, possibly the world premiere for the Nuremberg Defense, was an instance when it should have sufficed. I have seen little evidence that Wirz did more than deal as best he could with a horrible and barely manageable situation created by decisions and forces outside of his scope. It is instructive to compare the Andersonville conditions to the condition of southern troops in general. It is too much to expect an enemy to treat prisoners better than it can provide for its own forces. The responsibility lies with the Confederate military command and the government that created the conditions that led to the end of prisoner exchange. Attempts are made (Foote for one implies this in a rare specimen of possible outright bias on his part) to shift the responsibility to the Union. As I understand it, the key issue was black Union soldiers. The Confederates refused to exchange them on an equal basis with white soldiers. The Union then stopped exchange also noting that very often the Union got back broken men in exchange for men still fit for combat, an additional motivation for the suspension. Whatever the dirty work beneath the end effect was to burden the Confederacy with an unexpected flood of prisoners that immediately overwhelmed their facilities and resources with the horrendous results, and not just at Andersonville. There is something here in the way of genuine war crimes, perhaps worthy of a few hangings, but the wrong man was hanged, and the proceeding was arranged to virtually insure the result.
June 17, 2019
I second most of the favorable comments Eye of the Storm has received. Sneden’s prose is more than adequate, and his illustrations are often fascinating. The editors have also done their job well, and they play fair with the reader by pointing out errors and lapses of memory where evidence survives.
Nevertheless, this nicely produced volume left me cold, largely because of the personality of the author. What is one to make of a fellow who criticizes grave robbers and then uses an infant’s skull as a soap dish or denounces those who collaborate with the enemy and then does so himself? The English language has a number of unpleasant words for this sort of behavior.
I don’t trust Sneden. In this memoir posing as a diary, the author exhibits remarkable foresight about the outcome of events. Given the proven errors of the manuscript as well as author’s plagiarism from published sources, readers should retain a good deal of skepticism about the author’s prophetic powers.
Finally, Sneden’s prose is emotionally flat. He can describe battlefield carnage with the appropriate words, but he seems strangely detached from the event. At the conclusion of battles, his first thought seems to be rousting up a meal, and he’s not embarrassed to tell the reader so. If Sneden ever mourned a friend, I missed it. In fact, one wonders whether he had any friends. Sneden’s invective against the enemy also seems conventional and hackneyed. What Sneden seems to have believed in his heart of hearts was that he was superior to the ordinary run of mortals, soldier or officer, Union or Confederate. That would partly explain why, despite gifts as both a writer and an illustrator, Sneden’s post-war existence is traced largely through querulous letters about his pension and why this manuscript lay so long forgotten until its spiritual deadness became more fashionable.
Nevertheless, this nicely produced volume left me cold, largely because of the personality of the author. What is one to make of a fellow who criticizes grave robbers and then uses an infant’s skull as a soap dish or denounces those who collaborate with the enemy and then does so himself? The English language has a number of unpleasant words for this sort of behavior.
I don’t trust Sneden. In this memoir posing as a diary, the author exhibits remarkable foresight about the outcome of events. Given the proven errors of the manuscript as well as author’s plagiarism from published sources, readers should retain a good deal of skepticism about the author’s prophetic powers.
Finally, Sneden’s prose is emotionally flat. He can describe battlefield carnage with the appropriate words, but he seems strangely detached from the event. At the conclusion of battles, his first thought seems to be rousting up a meal, and he’s not embarrassed to tell the reader so. If Sneden ever mourned a friend, I missed it. In fact, one wonders whether he had any friends. Sneden’s invective against the enemy also seems conventional and hackneyed. What Sneden seems to have believed in his heart of hearts was that he was superior to the ordinary run of mortals, soldier or officer, Union or Confederate. That would partly explain why, despite gifts as both a writer and an illustrator, Sneden’s post-war existence is traced largely through querulous letters about his pension and why this manuscript lay so long forgotten until its spiritual deadness became more fashionable.
February 15, 2017
This book was the biography of Pvt. Robert K. Sneden, an artist during the American Civil War, who was captured and sent to a prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia, and endures the harsh living conditions.
March 31, 2012
Robert Sneden was a Private for the Union during the Civil War. This is a collection of diary entries he made during the war including during the time he was captured. The conditions that the soldiers were kept in were truly horrifying and it's amazing any of them survived.
September 1, 2013
What makes this book for me are the long-lost stetches drawn by Pvt. Robert Sneden. One gets from them almost more insight into Sneden than do the words in his diary/memoir. Indeed, the latter are almost devoid of emotion despite the horrific circumstances indurred by Sneden.
August 2, 2016
A wonderful condensation of a huge memoir of the Civil War. Certainly equals the memoirs of General Ulysses S. Grant, but from a very different perspective. The author never held a rank higher than Private.
April 10, 2008
An actual journal from a Civil War Union soldier
December 31, 2010
Another view from the front lines- in drawings, pictures and commentary from those who fought the war and lived in the infamous prisons.
October 30, 2012
From a WW2 book by combat artists bought in my teens, the brutal senses of humans in battle are best captured by
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May 31, 2016very interesting first hand account of the Peninsular Campaign and prison life in Richmond and at Andersonville
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews