We know little about Private Robert Knox Sneden beyond the pages of his memoir. He returned home to New York after his release from Andersonville and died alone in an old soldiers' home in 1918 Charles F. Bryan, Jr., is director and CEO of the Virginia Historical Society (VHS) in Richmond, Virginia, and has written on the Civil War in Tennessee and the Peninsula campaign Nelson D. Lankford is assistant director for publications and scholarship at the VHS and edits its quarterly journal, the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography

Preface In 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. Li

Michael LarkinThe Boston GlobePuts the modern reader in the heart of the war. It is astonishing that such valuable experience could have remained hidden for so long.

Contents PrefacePrologue
CHAPTER ONE To the Front!
CHAPTER TWO Under Fire
CHAPTER THREE Confusion and Darkness: The Seven Days
CHAPTER FOUR Enough of Terrible Fighting
CHAPTER FIVE Captured
CHAPTER SIX "On to Richmond!"
CHAPTER SEVEN Prison Train to Andersonville
CHAPTER EIGHT This Hell on Earth
CHAPTER NINE Freedom
Epilogue
Note on Sources
Editorial Method
Acknowledgments
Index

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