Friday, June 26, 2009

Quote of the Day (Robert Knox Sneden, on a Hellish Prison From a Prior American War—Andersonville)


“More than half of the sailors and marines are dead as also the Massachusetts battery who came in with the Plymouth prisoners. All the officers who belonged to Negro regiments and who were put in here sometime ago are dead with the exception of Major Bogle of [the] 17th Massachusetts Regiment. Corpses are now piled up near the dead line at the south gate inside to be taken out at sundown. The sight is sickening and horrible beyond conception. All are nearly naked, black as crows, festering in the hot sun all day, covered with lice and maggots— while thousands of big flies swarm on the bodies filling their mouth, nose and ears. The stench is sickening too— worse than any battlefield. Some are so decomposed as to have to be shovelled into the dead wagon!... Sometimes the dead lie there a day or more. I have counted twenty-six dead in one day who lay in the sun festering until an hour before sundown, which is the only time the Revel officer at the gate permits them to be carried out to the bough shanty outside known as the dead house.”—Private Robert Knox Sneden, diary entry for June 26 to 30, 1864, from the Civil War prison of Andersonville, Ga., in Eye of the Storm: A Civil War Odyssey (2000)

Decades after the stench had disappeared and the war dead properly honored at Andersonville and other military prisons of the massive conflict between North and South, citizens of Monsey in upstate Rockland County, N.Y., became accustomed to seeing a cranky, aging man who, unable to make serious headway as a commercial artist or architect, continually fired off letters to the War Department's pensions unit, urging them to give him more money. Maybe some in the community knew he’d been a war victim, but could they have known how deeply the wounds still stung in Robert Knox Sneden?

Americans have come to know a great deal about Guantanomo and Abu Ghraib, but how many know about Andersonville or Richmond’s Libby Prison—or Point Lookout in Maryland or Elmira Prison in the North?

The abuses at Andersonville were punished swiftly at the war’s end with the trial and execution of its commandment, Henry Wirz. But one of the most indomitable witnesses to the horrors there was Sneden.

In a burst of patriotism, Sneden signed up with the Union Army right after Fort Sumter, becoming a mapmaker. He saw action in half a dozen battles in the eastern theater of operations, but he bore his most significant testimony to the war’s horrors when he was sent to different Confederate prison camps, most infamously Andersonville.

In the 1990s, John Frankenheimer directed Andersonville, a TNT movie about life in that camp. As good as that drama was, I can’t help think that its images could have been improved had Sneden’s drawings come to light and been published sooner.

Andersonville excited controversy as soon as the war ended, and continues to do so as far as questions concerning Wirz’ intent and ability to improve conditions are concerned. There was no question at all for Sneden, however, that the camp was an outrage.

What made Sneden’s work—the largest collection of Civil War soldier-art ever published—so unique was not simply its quantity but the harrowing conditions under which it was created. To keep his pencil sketches from being confiscated by guards, Sneden hid them in his shoes and even sewed them in his coat.

The dire conditions he endured during 13 months in prison—starvation, fever and despair—left Sneden physically damaged and psychically maimed. Unable to establish himself as an artist, he never married. In the mid-1880s, he found only a meager measure of satisfaction when the Century Publishing Co. used a few of his images for its epic series, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War.

Sneden chafed at Monsey or, as he put it, “this miserable snow town.” He lived the last couple of decades in the Soldier’s and Sailors’ home.

“I leave no posterity, but a good WAR RECORD,” Sneden later said of his time in the war. Nearly three-quarters of a century after his death, it was discovered that he had left a great deal indeed to posterity—nearly 1,000 images, along with a 5,000-page diary-memoir that turned out to be one of the most startling contributions to the literature of the conflict.

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