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

by William W. Day

Descend, ye chilly, smothering snows!

Not all your rage, as now united shows

More hard unkindness, unrelenting,

Vengeful malice unrepenting,

Than heaven illumined man on brother man bestows!”

Burns.

After I left the prison, I was marched around to three other prisons and waited outside while the Surgeon went through them to visit the sick. It was a damp, chilly day, and I was so sick and tired and my bones ached so badly that I was compelled to lie down upon the cold, wet, stone sidewalk, while the Surgeon went through the prisons. But all things earthly have an end, so did that Surgeon’s visits, and I was at last marched to the Hospital.

Here allow me to describe the Hospital buildings. There were four of them; three stood on the hill at the south part of the city, the fourth was on the banks of the river, near the Richmond Railroad bridge. They were about 40×120 feet and two stories high, with a hall running the whole length, dividing them into wards, each building contained four wards. They were erected in 1862 for the use of the wounded in the celebrated Peninsular Campaign.

To the rear of the north hospital building was the pest-house, a defunct shoe shop, in which convalescent shoemakers, who were soldiers in the rebel army, worked for the benefit of the C. S. A. To the rear of the center building was the cook-house and eating room, where convalescents took their meals, and to the rear of the cook-house stood the dead house, where the dead were placed prior to burial. To the rear of the south building was the bakery, where all the bread of the hospital and prisons was baked. This arrangement brought the three hospital buildings in a line, while the bakery, dead house and pest-house were in a line to the rear. A line of guards paced their beats around the whole.

I supposed when I was sent to the hospital that I had fever of some kind, but in two days the soreness of my throat and the pustules on my face and hands told the story too plainly, that the inoculation of a few days before was doing its work. I was down with a mild form of small-pox, varioloid, the doctors called it, but a Tennessee soldier pronounced it a case of the “Very O Lord.” I was taken from the hospital to the pest-house and laid on a straw pallet. My clothes were taken from me and sent to the wash-house and I was given a thin cotton shirt and a thin quilt for a covering.