author
Sumner U. (Sumner Upham) Shearman
1839–1914
A Civil War veteran turned memoirist, he wrote from hard experience about the Battle of the Crater and the long months he spent as a prisoner of war. His work brings together battlefield detail, personal endurance, and the perspective of a man who later moved into public life and the ministry.
1 Audiobook
Battle of the Crater; and Experiences of Prison Life
by Sumner U. (Sumner Upham) Shearman
About the author
Born in Rhode Island in 1839, Sumner Upham Shearman served in the Union Army during the American Civil War, rising to the rank of captain in the Fourth Rhode Island Volunteers. He was captured after the Battle of the Crater, and that experience became the heart of his best-known book, Battle of the Crater; and Experiences of Prison Life.
That memoir, published in 1898, is valued for its direct, first-person account of combat and imprisonment. After the war, he was active in politics in Rhode Island, studied law, and later became a clergyman, spending his later years in Massachusetts.
Shearman died in 1914. Today he is remembered less as a literary stylist than as a vivid eyewitness whose writing preserves one soldier's view of war, captivity, and survival.