Fifteen Months in Dixie; Or, My Personal Experience in Rebel Prisons

by William W. Day

I found, when I arrived in No. 1, not only members of my own company but a number of men from Company B of my regiment. We were quartered in the south-east corner on the second floor. Nearly opposite where I was located comrade Dexter Lane, then a member of an Ohio regiment, now a citizen of Merton, Steele county, Minnesota, had his quarters. We were strangers at that time but since then have talked over that prison life until we have located each other’s position, and feel that we are old acquaintances.

I think I did not feel so lonesome after I joined my comrades of the 10th Wis. There is something peculiar about the feelings of old soldiers towards each other. Two years before these men were nothing to me. I had never seen them until I joined the regiment at Milwaukee. But what a change those two years had wrought. We had camped together on the tented field and lain side by side in the bivouac. We had touched elbows on those long, weary marches through Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia, had stood shoulder to shoulder in many hard fought battles, and now we are companions in Southern prisons. They were not as kind-hearted, nor as intelligent as Billings but there was the feeling of comradeship which no persons on earth understand as do old soldiers.

The “majah” in charge of Prison No. 1 was a man by the name of Charley Brady, a southern gentleman from Dublin or some other seaport of the “Green Isle,” and to his credit, I will say, he was a warm hearted Irish gentlemen. I do not call to mind any instance where he was unnecessarily harsh or cruel, but on the other hand, he was kind and pleasant in his manner and in his personal intercourse with us treated us as though we were human beings in marked contrast with the treatment of the prison officials who were genuine Southerners brought up under the influences of that barbarous institution, slavery.

Perhaps some of my readers who were confined in Prison No. 1 will not agree with me in my estimate of Charley Brady, but if they will stop a moment and consider, they will remember that our harsh treatment came from the guards who were a separate and distinct institution in prison economy, or was the result of infringement of prison rules.

About a week after my arrival in No. 1 some of the prisoners on the lower floor were detected in the attempt to tunnel out. They had gone into the basement and started a tunnel with the intention of making their escape. They were driven up and distributed on the other three floors. This gave us about two hundred and thirty men to a floor and left us about eight square feet to the person.

About this time the cook-house was completed and we had a radical change of diet. There were twelve large kettles, set in arches, in which our meat and soup were cooked. Before proceeding farther let me say, that the cooking was done here for 3,500 men.

Our soup was made by boiling the meat, then putting in cabbages, or “cow peas” or “nigger peas,” or stock peas, (just suit yourself as to the name, they were all one and the same) and filling up AD LIBITUM with water. The prisons first served were usually best served for if the supply was likely to fall short a few pails full of Dan River water supplied the deficiency.

Our allowance was a bucket of soup to sixteen men, enough of it, such as it was, for the devil himself never invented a more detestable compound than that same “bug soup.” The peas from which this soup was made were filled with small, hard shelled, black bugs, known to us as pea bugs. Their smell was not unlike that of chinch bugs but not nearly as strong. Boil them as long as we might, they were still hard shelled bugs. The first pails full from a kettle contained more bugs, the last ones contained more Dan River water, so that it was Hobson’s choice which end of the supply we got.

(I notice there is considerable inquiry in agricultural papers as to these same cow peas whether they are good feed for stock. My experience justifies me in expressing the opinion that you “don’t have” to feed them to stock, let them alone and the bugs will consume them.)

Our supply of shorts bread was discontinued and corn bread substituted. This was baked in large pans, the loaves being about two and a half inches in thickness. This bread was made by mixing meal with water, without shortening or lightening of any kind. It was baked in a very hot oven and the result was a very hard crust on top and bottom of loaf, and raw meal in the center.