Journal E:
How did you come across this work?

Charles F. Bryan, Jr. :
Seven years ago, two men appeared in our front lobby carrying a battered old suitcase. And this is a suitcase you'd think you would find in your grandmother's attic. Actually, they had called us a few days before to tell us that they had a Civil War scrapbook they wanted to show us.

In our business scrapbooks send up all kinds of warning signals, because you envision pieces of paper falling apart, and terrible glue, things attached by very - our conservative said, adhesive made from hell. So we were somewhat suspicious. I had an extremely busy day that day and I told Dr. Kelly, Dr. Jim Kelly, who heads our museum, I said, Jim, why don't you meet with him, I really have a very busy schedule.

So they came in, Jim brought them up to our rare book room, and they put the old suitcase on the table, opened it up, brought these scrapbooks out and laid them on the table and started turning the pages. Well, within about five minutes he said, would you excuse me for a minute, I need to go see our director. And so Jim came and stuck his head in my door and said, Charlie, you really need to come see this. And I said, what, Jim? He said, no, you really need to come see this.

So I went across the hall, into the rare book room, and met these two gentlemen. Mr. Chuck Ash of Litchfield, Connecticut and a dealer in Southern artwork. And after introductions they said we'd like for you to see this. And so I went up somewhat skeptical, and these were rather battered looking - there was this battered old suitcase lying on this table, and these rather loose looking scrapbook albums.

We started turning the pages, and as we turned the pages my eyes got bigger and bigger. And even though I'm not really a practicing historian anymore, my training was in Civil War and reconstruction, that was my specialty. And I could tell immediately that this was something very significant, because each page contained these very detailed maps of battlefields, and villages in various parts of Virginia. But in addition to the maps were these remarkable watercolor drawings. I said, well, what are these? They said, well, this man was a map maker in the Union Army, and obviously he made maps everywhere he went. But also everywhere he went he took his sketchbook with him and did these drawings.

So we continued - there were four of these scrapbook albums, and it was a visual chronicle of the Civil War. Mainly here in Virginia because he served in Virginia. Then you moved farther along in the scrapbooks, and you saw that he was obviously captured and ended up in prison here in Richmond, and then eventually in Andersonville.

And we said, well, what are you going to do with these? And they said, well, they're for sale. And we said, how much? And I'm not really at liberty to say that amount, but it was a considerable sum of money, six figures. And Jim and I kind of look at each other - where are we going to get that money? We said - and I was determined, I said, we will try to find that money any way we can, because it was - we quickly recognized that it was something very significant.

So, we asked them if they would leave the scrapbook albums with us, and give us a few days to see if we could find a donor. So, fortunately, a few days later we contacted Mr. Floyd Gottwald, who is a very prominent businessman here in Richmond, a philanthropist. Very interested in the arts, but also very interested in history, particularly the Civil War. And one of our trustees arranged to have Mr. Gottwald come over and take a look at these scrapbook albums.

Floyd Gottwald is a wonderful man, but he's a man of few words, and it's very hard to read him and his reaction. So we brought him in and he'd smile, and we turned the pages, and we weren't really sure how he was reacting. And we turned one page and he said, stop. Yes? He said, that's my great grandmother's and grandfather's farmhouse. We said, you're kidding?

It was at Bottoms Bridge, the Bottoms Farmhouse, his great grandfather and grandmother were Bottoms. And by coincidence, Robert Sneden, this Union solider, had been on that property. And, as I have said before, it's almost - if they had video cameras in those days, he would've had it and would've kept it running. Because he recorded almost everywhere he went. And Mr. Gottwald said, well, how much are these? And we told them, and he said, well, let's get them. [CHUCKLES] And of course we had no idea that there was this connection. I think he would've done it anyway, but that cinched the deal.

And so we acquired these scrapbook albums. Bought them from Mr. Ash. And we immediately began to do research on this Robert Sneden. As a matter of fact, we didn't even know how to pronounce his name. We were calling it Snedan [PRON. WITH SHORT E SOUND] to begin with. And so for two or three years we were calling them Sneden Civil War pictures, and the Sneden albums.

But, as I say, we attempted to learn as much about him as we could, because he was a mystery. No one had ever heard of this man. He was a private in the Union Army. We were able to get his service records from the National Archives. And we learned a little bit more about him. That he had been born in Canada. But we weren't sure when he moved to the States.

We learned that he joined the 40th New York in the fall of 1861, then he was captured. And then from these pension records and service records we realized that he filed for claims after the war, and he said that he was an invalid as a result of the war. But, really, not very much. A little here, a little there, a little piece - a scrap of information here, and a shred of evidence over here. But for three or four years we really didn't know that much about him.

Jim Kelly, again, who heads our museum, and is the curator of this traveling exhibit, is a true historian as a detective. And a friend of his said have you thought about there being some connection to Sneden's Landing in New York? Was it Sneden? No, we were thinking it was... Oh, yeah, there's a Sneden's Landing on the Hudson River, near the Palisades, on the west side of the Hudson River, just up from New York City. I said, no, I don't think we made that connection. So Jim contacted - wrote a letter to the Rockland County Historical Society, which is the local county there for - the county for Sneden's Landing. Sent a letter up, received a response from a volunteer, who said, no, we don't see any connection. And so Jim said, well, that was a dead end.

But several weeks later - I've forgotten the exact scenario on this - he received a phone call from a woman named Alice Hogenson, a 92 year old woman. And Jim said it was a very difficult conversation because she was hard of hearing. So the back and forth - and she said, oh, there definitely is a connection. This is the home of the Sneden Family, we've had Snedens here since the 17th Century. It's an old Dutch family, and she went on, and on, and on.

Jim was about to conclude the conversation, and she said, well, of course you know about the diary. And Jim said, well, yes, we have the diary - assuming that she meant the scrapbooks, because there were lots of notes. She said, oh, no, no, there's more. And he said, well, what do you mean? No, there were the scrapbooks, but there was also a diary he kept during the war. And Jim was flabbergasted - he said, well, where is it? She said, well, let me give you the name of the man who owns these diaries, and she gave it to him - we have to keep his name anonymous. But he lived in a little town in Upstate New York, and come to find out he was Sneden's great-great nephew.

So Jim called him up one day not too long after this. And he said, oh yes, I have them. And Jim said, well, can we arrange to come up and see them? He said, well, no, you can't. They're in a mini-storage unit out in the desert in Arizona, near Tucson. And Jim - well, what are they doing there? [CHUCKLES] And he said, well, I used to live in Tucson, and I have a lot of my personal effects out there. And Jim said, well, we would very much like to see these. We have the scrapbooks... And, well, this man, he's a character in a way, and for various and sundry reasons that I can't get into, he doesn't fly - and we talked about sending him an airline ticket, you know, a plane ticket to go out there and retrieve them, and he said, no.

And so finally we agreed - we would send him several hundred dollars to drive out there in his own car, to go pick up these things and bring them to us, and let us take a look at them to see if we wanted them. So we sent him a check. Jim came to me, and I said, that's fine, I think it's worth it. So we sent him a check - enough for about three weeks' worth of travel to go out there and bring them back.

Well, three weeks went by, four weeks, four weeks, five weeks, six weeks - it must've been two or three months. We thought, well, that's money thrown away. We never heard from him, never a phone call, nothing. And we said, well, that was money wasted. One day, a man comes driving up in an old car, and had on the back bumper a "Forget Hell" and a Confederate flag bumper sticker on it. And he said, you know - and it had New York tags on it. He said, you know, up north I anger people by that Confederate flag, and then down here in the South I anger people by these New York tags. I mean the man's a real character.

So he gets out of his car carrying this large cardboard box, almost like a liquor box. And he comes in, we bring him back up to the rare book room. So he reaches in and starts pulling out these thick, I would say five-inch thick volumes. There are five of them, of a thousand pages each. Page after page.

And at first we thought this was just going to be a written text accompanying the scrapbooks. But interspersed throughout the pages, every three or four pages, were more beautiful little watercolor drawings. Some of them duplications of what were in the scrapbook, but most of them were not. They were in addition to the scrapbook. And we said, my gosh, there are more.

And so combining the pictures in the scrapbooks, and the maps, and the pictures and the maps in the five volumes, it was close to a thousand images, and we were bowled over. And said, well, are you willing to sell these? And he said, well, if you'll get a certified appraisal I would be willing to sell these to you.

So we brought a certified Civil War appraiser in, he appraised them - pretty good figure on them, and we went back to Mr. Gottwald, brought him over. Mr. Gottwald comes and we turn the pages, and he says, well, how much? And we told him. He said, well, let's get them. So we acquired the diaries. And, of course, we were excited because there were more images.

But very soon after getting them, we started reading excerpts. And his handwriting is very distinctive, it's very legible. And if you've read from the diary - he's a good writer. And I just by chance picked up Volume 3 and turned to the end of November. And, again, there's so many coincidences here, and it happened to be the section in there describing his capture in November of 1863. And I started reading it. And I kept turning page after page. And I said this is absolutely remarkable. I had never read anything like this. And I'm a Civil War historian, and I've read hundreds of memoirs, most of which are extremely dry and quite uninspiring. Others are very flowery, that very typical Victorian language that you have to read through. This was very simple, straightforward description. And there was a descriptive power to his writing that really struck me. And I showed it to Jim and some of my colleagues and they even said this is really great stuff.

And we read other - his descriptions of being in battle, and describing the horrific death of an artillery man near him, and seeing wave after wave of Confederate troops attacking Melbourne Hill. And he's standing there watching it. It was great stuff. And we said, in addition to the pictures we ought to see an edited version of the diary and getting it published. So that's - you want me to keep going?

Journal E:
In reading the book, Sneden comes across as a man who's in the experience, but there's also a part of him outside of it watching. What's your sense of him as a man?

Charles F. Bryan, Jr. :
Here's what's remarkable about that diary. We can't forget that the man started the war as a private and ended the war as a private, which is the lowest rank in the army. So he has in many ways the perspective of the enlisted man. And as you read the diary, there's a distrust of officers, there's why the hell are we doing this? There's that viewpoint of the private soldier, the enlisted man, which is very different from that of the officer.

Yet because he was a map maker, and the special job that he was in, he was around officers all the time. He was at headquarters. So he had this outlook of an enlisted man, which was in a sense down to earth, but he was in a position in which he could overhear officers talking, could influence - in some ways influence their decision. So he's looking at the war from two different positions.

Had he been an infantryman, a private in an infantry regiment, his war would've been a very narrowly focused war. It would've been the comrade next to him in the ranks, and they would've known very little about what was going on around them. And you talk to anybody who's served in war and combat, they will tell you that their war was the immediate situation in front of them. They fought the war with blinders. He had no blinders. He's in a position in which he can see the big picture, but through the eyes of an enlisted soldier.

And as a result, I have never seen a memoir with that kind of perspective on it. And by being an enlisted man and a private solider, he concentrates so much on the little things. Describing what a camp looked like. Describing the retreat... I've never read a description of a retreat coming - they were retreating from Savages Station, and describing the lightning and the flashes of the lightning, and the teamsters beating their horses, and the wagons breaking down, and people cursing.

He sees the world in such detail that I think an officer wouldn't have been able to describe it. The officer would've been thinking, I have to get my troops up here, and we have to get to this next objective. Sneden didn't have to worry about that, so he's describing it as anyone would have seen it. I mean he's providing eyes for the war that other Civil War memoirs don't.

Journal E:
How did he affect you personally?

Charles F. Bryan, Jr.:
He - I must say, I don't think I would've liked the man. He seems like a crotchety, persnickety, grumpy kind of fellow in one respect. One thing that did affect me, that struck me - as I say, I've studied the Civil War a lot, and you hear about problems of alcohol abuse and the use of alcohol. It wasn't until I read this memoir as to how grinched the armies were with whiskey. That really struck me - that sitting around the campfire at night, drinking their toddies, and getting a real buzz on before they get ready to start the next day.

I was in the Army, and that was unheard of. By the 20th Century, alcohol is simply not available to soldiers. But he talks about running into a group of Confederate prisoners who had been fighting at the Battle of Savages Station, and what do they tell him? They got into the Union liquor, and they got drunk, and then they did the attack - and made the attack.

That doesn't really answer your question, but... And even when they were in prison, they talk about the guards having this so-called pine top whiskey or liquor available to them. It is so very pervasive, that really struck me.

Journal E:
Can you tell us a little bit about the process of editing your work? I mean, as you said, there were thousands of pages...

Charles F. Bryan, Jr.:
There were 5 thousand manuscript pages. And we transcribed approximately - and this is a guess - 4 thousand of those pages. And there's a reason for that. If you look at the diary in its entirety there are lots of sections and they're lengthy sections, about the war in the so-called west. The war in Tennessee, the war in Georgia. We knew he never served there.

He - for example, he was in Washington during the Battle of Gettysburg, and he has 100-page description of the Battle of Gettysburg. He was not there. And so what we think he was doing - this is our sense - is that in the 1880's and 90's, he was putting together his history of the war - his own history of the war, but the war at large. And we speculate - there's no proof of this, but we speculate that he was trying to get this thing published. He had a struggling career as an architect, and in the 1880's and 90's there were a whole series of books coming off the presses on the Civil War and they were hot sellers. And I think he had hope that he would tell his story and would get it published. He never did.

So he felt in putting this history together that he had to tell a bigger story. Well, his bigger story is really not anything new or interesting. It's his story that's interesting. So in transcribing, I would estimate that there are about a thousand pages that we did not transcribe, that were not really in his words.

So it was about 4 thousand manuscript pages, which condensed down to about 15 hundred pages of typewritten. Of that typewritten transcription we came up with about 500 pages. So, about a third of his diary shows up in Eye of the Storm, the book. However, I must say that Nelson Langford, my co-editor, and I were very careful in making sure that there was a complete story here, that there were no big holes left out.

And he had a tendency, even in those 15 hundred pages, to repeat himself. And so we would try to leave as much of the repetition out as possible. So you're getting about a third of his own story. But you're really getting, I would say, a good 90 percent of what he experienced.

In terms of the actual editing, fortunately, the man was a good writer, he was a good speller, but like many people in the 19th Century, he was indifferent to punctuation, to paragraphing. Long sentences, run-on sentences that would go on, and on, and on. And we felt that we needed to adapt this manuscript for not only the modern reader, but for even a reader during his time.

And we took on the view that had he submitted this to one of the big publishing houses in the 1880's and 90's, say Scribners, it would've been edited. There would've been an editor who would've gone through and cleaned up his punctuation, standardized his capitalizations. He capitalized all over the place, and that was very typical of the 19th Century.

So what we did is we just set a very simple standard of standardizing capitalizations, artificially breaking some of his sentences down, artificially breaking it into certain paragraphs. And then we artificially divided it into the nine chapters. The nine chapters that you see in Eye of the Storm were actually imposed by us. And we took natural breaks in his narrative, and then, as you can see from the published volume, each of those chapters has an introductory essay that we prepared to set the story up - provide transitions as to what is happening.

We tried to keep footnotes to a minimum. That was in agreement with our editor, Bruce Nichols at the Free Press, which is a division of Simon & Schuster. And we agreed that what we didn't want was a volume that every time you turned the page you had to wade through half a page of footnotes. And I think we struck a happy compromise in footnoting just enough to provide information for the reader.

Journal E:
Yes, you don't get lost...

Charles F. Bryan, Jr.:
One thing that struck us about him is he was obviously an educated man. We have no evidence that he ever went to college, and he apparently was - he did not move to the United States until he was 18 years old. So he was educated in Canadian schools. And we did a little bit of research on Canadian schools. And it would very much model after the British system. He would've been grounded in the classics, and certainly reading and writing.

He would've - living in the maritime province of Nova Scotia, he would've had to have taken navigation. That was required of all young men. And he would've taken surveying before he moved to the United States. So, obviously, these influenced him.

But we were struck by his solid knowledge of history. Because he will frequently refer to, oh, Napoleon, or ancient Greek history. He sprinkles his narrative with French phrases. So here was a man who may not have been a university or college educated person, but he was educated in another way - that certainly led to a compelling narrative on his part. An ability to tell his story.

Journal E:
And the other thing - maybe you can expand on this a little bit, is that as a map maker, his services were very much in demand. Can you tell us more about that?

Charles F. Bryan, Jr:
You would assume that the armies would not have needed much in the way of maps at the beginning of the war, but they did. There had been no systematic surveying of the United States by anyone prior to the Civil War. Even in very subtle areas. Maps were indifferent, they were inaccurate, in most cases they were very old and outdated.

So the war starts, and both sides, North and South, the generals found themselves with an extreme shortage of accurate maps, and they needed them. If we're going to move a troop down a certain road, well, we want to take you down that road, we need to know where it turns left or right, or we need to know where the mountains and the streams are.

And General McClellan, when he brought his army down to the tip of the peninsula, was plagued by a lack of good maps. So, as a result, both sides - if they could find anyone with any map making skills, cartographic skills, topographical training or whatever, they were assigned as map makers. In the Union Army there was a whole - there were large numbers of these cartographers, whose full-time job was to record - to map the world around them.

And they did after action maps, but they were also sent out on surveys. We want a very detailed map of this particular county for future reference. So they were kept busy full-time.

And Sneden was one of the lucky few. He had those skills. And those cartographers were treated in many ways royally. They were enlisted men, but they were valuable. Almost like people with computer skills today - they're in great demand. And even though he may have been a private solider, he stayed around headquarters and was allowed to drink whiskey with the officers, and tented with officers, and - he certainly didn't lead the life of an infantryman in a regiment in the field. And he knew that. He was very much aware of that.

And you read the diary - he's frequently going and touching base and visiting his old comrades in the 40th New York, or other regiments. And the whole time that he's - that wonderful year he had in Washington, where he's going to the circus and plays, and he's getting fat, and he's living the life of Reilly, he's always - and that's not in the book, in the diary it's not as detailed during that year - but every few entries he's referring to what's going on at the 40th New York. His heart and mind was never really removed from those comrades of his in his original regiment.

Journal E:
Yeah, there's that wonderful part where he's just finished spending that year in Washington. And then he goes back out in the field - he realizes he's gotten a little soft in Washington. I'd better get some boots that really...

Charles F. Bryan, Jr.:
That's right. [CHUCKLES] He's gotten fat and soft. The poor man, the poor man - he had this incredible experience in the field, and then in the fall of 1862 he gets this job in Washington [MUMBLING UNINTEL] headquarters. Great life. It couldn't be better for a soldier.

And then he decides he wants to go back into the field, and be with the boys, and be where the action is. And, by golly, [CHUCKLES] within a matter of weeks he gets captured. And he goes, within a matter of months, from the best of lives to one of the worst of lives as a prisoner of war. From feast to famine within a matter of months.

Of course, one of my favorite parts of the book is when he's here in Richmond and they're having a tough time and not getting enough to eat, and he describes the food they eat. And they practically eat corncobs, and the cornbread is full of bits and pieces of corncob.

And then one day a group of Confederate officers come through, and they're selecting individuals to go help them distribute care packages. They didn't call them care packages. So Sneden and several of his comrades are taken over to this warehouse, and said, all right, gentlemen, you stay here, and your job is to unpack all of these care packages and food packages that have come for the prisoners.

And so they spend - I've forgotten exactly - about two weeks in this place with pickled peach - I mean with brandied peaches and hams. [CHUCKLES] And It's just a remarkable transition - it's almost like a dream. And they're finding cash, and they're stuffing it into their clothing. And then they have to go back to reality. But that's one of my favorite parts of the book.

Journal E:
Yes, there are some incredible reversals of fortune.

Charles F. Bryan, Jr.: Oh, yeah, yeah. And of course the section where the conditions are miserable in Richmond. The Confederates come in - all right, gentlemen, we're going to take you to this wonderful camp in the country in South Georgia, where it'll be cleaner, and sanitation will be much better. It'll be a much healthier environment for you. It's called Andersonville.

And, of course, that was the original intention of the Confederates. I mean they had not intended to set this up as a death camp, but the conditions had become so crowded here in Richmond, that they began to set up satellite camps in the Deep South.

And then, of course, that spring of 1864, the Union Army did away with exchanges, and so the Confederate prison system simply couldn't handle the volume of soldiers - of captured soldiers that were coming into the system. And then Andersonville became one of the worse, and Sneden happened to end up there.

Journal E:
And he gives a first person account of life in Andersonville. It's a significant portion of the book. Please elaborate.

Charles F. Bryan, Jr.:
There are other accounts. But William Marble, who has written the most recent, and regarded as the most comprehensive history of the Andersonville experience, has described this as the best account of life in Andersonville that he's ever seen. And Mr. Marble has gone through literally hundreds of those accounts, and he says this is the best one.

One thing we warn the reader in this, that a lot of the information - not a lot, but some of the information in his Andersonville account is inaccurate. There are mistakes in the dates, and there are misjudgments here and there. But you can understand why. I mean the man nearly died at one time. The conditions were miserable.

And I'm sure there were days on end that he just simply didn't have the energy when he was sick to sit down and record. And, as he points out, when he was in prison, just having scraps of paper to keep notes were difficult. And he kept shorthand notes. And, again, another piece of evidence that he was an educated man - he knew shorthand. So he kept shorthand notes when he was in prison, but he used a Bible, he used any piece of paper he could get his hands on to record what was happening.

So we have reason to believe that his notes during the period of imprisonment were somewhat sketchy, and that he came back later and filled in some information here - filled in those holes here and there. And as a result there are mistakes that you don't see in the period prior to captivity. Nevertheless, it is a very detailed and remarkable description of what it was like to be a POW during the Civil War.

Journal E:
Can you talk a little bit about the watercolors? His background as an artist?.

Charles F. Bryan, Jr.:
We have no idea how he trained as an artist. It is our speculation that he - in the 1850's, that he was apprenticed as an architectural draftsman/engineer, which were terms used interchangeably. And that anyone who goes into architecture has to learn perspective drawing. I mean that's just a requirement. So, apparently he was either self-trained, or trained by somebody how to do perspective drawings.

We are aware of two pre-war paintings, both of which are owned by the New York Historical Society. One of which is on display in the current Sneden exhibit. One is of Sneden's Landing, of all things, and another is a little village further up the Hudson River. So he had some training. Who, where, how he did it we don't know.

But within days of his reporting to his regiment in September of 1861, he's making sketches. And you read that in the diary - as a matter of fact, we left out a lot of the little entries - I made a sketch of this, I made a sketch of that. I mean it's just sprinkled - he was doing this all the time. Again, it's almost as if he had a video camera he was shooting.

We think that he probably made hasty sketches in the field. I mean how would someone have the time to sit down in the midst of a battle and draw a color picture of troops in combat? Like the field artists for the big newspapers - the big weeklies at that time - Harper's and Frank Leslie's illustrated magazine - you had these field artists who would go in and do hasty sketches. And then when the battle was over, or the action was over, they would come back in and refine those and fill them in. And we think Sneden did the same thing. A hasty sketch here, pot it in his pack, and then later when he had time he would go back and fill them in. Or actually even redo them.

How about the coloring? How could he do the watercolors? We speculated that he may have done some of the coloring during the war, but he very well may have - when he had all of this free time on his hands after the war, he may have gone back and colored them after the war. We just don't know.

But there are enough references in the diary that he did, literally, hundreds of sketches in the field. How complete they were, for the moment we don't know. But, again, we think he did, like artists of that time, quick, hasty sketches, and then refined them and colored them later.

Journal E:
What do you think of his paintings?

Charles F. Bryan, Jr. :
They're good. He's not a trained artist. You can't accuse him of being a Hudson River artist. But what is special about them is he had an eye for the built environment and the natural environment. He's not good on people, the human figure, or horses, for example. But we have compared many of his drawings to photographs, and he was good at - he had such an eye for detail. We think he's fairly accurate in those paintings.

And they vary in quality. It seems the ones - my feeling is the ones that were in the scrapbook, which I think are the ones he did in the field, are actually better than the ones that he may have done later. 'Cause they flow freer, there's - I don't know, they seem to be less stilted than some of the others.

Sometimes there will be two images of the same scene, and one will have this greater free-flowing style to it than the one that is more rigid. And, frankly, the one with the free-flowing style I think is better art. But, again, I don't think Robert Sneden will be regarded as a great artist. And you compare his work to other Civil War artists, like Henry Wode, or Winslow Homer - he's not a Homer, he's not a Wode.

But compared to a lot of other Civil War solider art, which is a whole genre in itself - I'm not sure if you're familiar with that - but both sides, there were lots of soldiers who did sketches and drawings during the war. In our own connection here at the Virginia Historical Society, both North and South, we have Civil War diaries, where they - soldiers would've sketched in something. Some of them are pretty good. But none produced the volume of work that Sneden did, and none provide the detail that Sneden did. I don't know if that answers your question, but...

The great Civil War artists were the Homers, the Wodes, who were actual trained artists.

Journal E:
How big were the watercolors?

Charles F. Bryan, Jr.:
They vary in size. They can be - some of them are very small, may be 2 inches by 3 inches; some are elongated, 7 or 8 inches wide, 3 or 4 inches tall; then some of them are quite large, 8 by 10. So that they vary. There's absolutely no uniformity. They're all kinds of shapes. He does some in ovals, he does some in squares, some are rectangular. He's an interesting man.

Just to go through his scrapbooks, and to see how he arranged them and organized them, and colored them. This is a man who had a lot of time on his hands after the war. Which is to our advantage. As we've said, his being a professional failure worked for the benefit of those of us who want to learn something about the Civil War.


Journal E:
Can you put this volume of work in some sort of larger historical perspective?

Charles F. Bryan, Jr.:
One of the things I do want to comment about this collection is we talk about the Civil War being the first modern war, and indeed it was the first modern war. Railroading, advances in all kinds of technology, use of the telegraph, modern weaponry, any number of examples of that. But it's also the first visual war in human history. Wars had been portrayed visually for centuries, but the Civil War has an incredible volume of illustrative material.

First of all, you have photography. There are a few photographs from the Mexican War, there are a few photographs from Crimean War, but the Civil War is the first war to be photographed extensively. Also during the Civil War you had large numbers of newspaper artists who were sending images back to newspapers. And the technology was such that newspapers were illustrated. And so the big newspapers at that time were full of illustrations of what was going on in the front. And so the first time anywhere in the world a civilian population could visualize what was happening in the field.

And so you had photography, you had field photographers, you had people like Winslow Homer and field artists sending works back. But you also had these soldiers doing work on their own, just because they dabbled in art themselves, they saw themselves as artists. And so you have, literally, thousands of examples of what's called Civil War soldier art.

We have good collections of Civil War soldier art in our own collections, but none of us - and I had this confirmed by a number of my colleagues - had seen Civil War soldier art quite like Sneden's. In the quality and the volume of it. There is nothing comparable to this in terms of what he recorded and the amount of drawing he did. And that in many ways makes it, as one Civil War scholar has said, the largest collection and best collection of Civil War solider art anywhere.