Eye of the Storm: A Civil War Odyssey.

Written and illustrated by Robert Knox Sneden. Edited by Charles F. Bryan Jr. and Nelson D. Lankford. (New York and other cities: The Free Press, c. 2000. Pp. [xviii], 329. $37.50, ISBN 0-684-86365-0.)

Union private Robert Knox Sneden, 40th New York Volunteers, was an outstanding memorialist, mapmaker, and artist who illustrated his Civil War memoir with watercolor drawings. His diary and some of his field sketches are not extant, but in the 1870s and 1880s he produced a previously unpublished five-volume, handwritten manuscript preserved by his family and now held by the Virginia Historical Society. This book is an edited version of Sneden's manuscript. Before the war he was an architect, engineer, and landscape painter in New York City. He enlisted and served in the Army of the Potomac from September 1861 to October 1862, when he was assigned to headquarters of the Washington, D.C., defenses. Returned to field duty a year later, he was captured by John S. Mosby's irregulars in November 1863 and was a prisoner of war for over twelve months. Nearly half of his memoir describes and illustrates his prison experiences in Richmond and Andersonville.

Sneden's work is outstanding because, as cartographer at the corps headquarters of General Samuel P. Heintzelman, he moved around on the front, viewing earthworks, visiting camps and picket lines, making observations, and drawing maps and sketches. Indeed, his drawings contribute an unusual dimension. "It is as though he had a video recorder and kept it running throughout the war," write the editors (p. ix). During the Peninsula campaign, Sneden lost confidence in General George B. McClellan when the general developed "fortification on the brain" (p. 58) in the needless "military humbug" (p. 48) of the siege at Yorktown. Presaging one of the themes of military historian Russell F. Weigley in A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861-1865 (Bloomington, Ind., 2000), Sneden condemned McClellan for withdrawing to the rear during battles and failing to personally direct the fighting. At Malvern Hill, McClellan was "safe on board the Galena!" (p. 96) and in "ignorance of the situation in the front of battle" (p. 97). Sneden was at the front, and he relates how the massed Union artillery held their fire until the attacking Rebels were within range. Then the artillery opened fire, and the Union infantry cheered and ran forward in a bayonet countercharge. The dramatic accompanying sketch takes the viewer above the field and shows the Confederate infantry advancing through the meadow to the edge of the cornfield. On the hill Union infantry stand in close ranks with skirmishers thrown forward, smoke bursting from the cannon, and in the background Union gunboats on the James River fire on the Confederate right flank.

Captured in the Mine Run campaign, Sneden provides valuable details on the nightmare of awakening with a pistol to his head and hearing one of Mosby's men order him to keep silent or have a hole blown through him. Mosby recognized that Sneden was more than an ordinary private and interrogated him on the location of Union cavalry. As a prisoner of war, Sneden demonstrated uncommon pluck and survivability. In Crew and Pemberton Prison in Richmond he created counterfeit greenbacks and used them to purchase food for himself and others. At Andersonville, for friends planning to escape, he made counterfeit passes and maps of the roads toward Atlanta. He wrote his journal in shorthand intelligible only to himself and used pine gum to glue his sketches inside a New Testament. In describing the hanging of six "raiders" convicted of robbing and killing fellow prisoners, he relates that when the rope around the neck of William Collins broke and Collins fell to the ground, the shaken man queried: "Where am I? Am I in eternity?" (p. 245).

There are several valuable maps and prison camp layouts, and one of the dramatic drawings at Andersonville illustrates the shooting of a prisoner taking a plank from the "dead line" for firewood (p. 221). Sneden reported the brutalizing influence of prison life and described the despondency that settled on the men and their hatred for the guards. However, he described prison commandant Henry Wirz's reception of his group at Andersonville when, as the editors point out, Wirz did not arrive until a few days later (p. 202). This and other mistakes of chronology mentioned by the editors raise the question of reliability--not of the annotations in this book, but of Sneden's memory-and one must keep in mind that this is a memoir written after the war and not a diary. The draft of Sneden's memoir on which this book is based is repetitive and has unusual abbreviations and other eccentricities, but the editors performed exemplary work in deleting, revising, and preparing the text for smooth reading. Chapter introductions set the stage clearly and concisely. This exciting book is one of the most colorful, revealing, and valuable Civil War memoirs in print.

JAMES A. RAMAGE
Northern Kentucky University