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

by William W. Day

Like quills upon the fretful porcupine.”

—Hamlet.

The cook-house, which I have already spoken of, had a capacity for cooking rations for 10,000 men. Our rations consisted, during the latter part of April and through May, of about a pound of corn bread, of about the same quality as that at Danville, a piece of meat about the size of two fingers, and a little salt per day. This was varied by issuing rice or cow peas in the place of meat, but meat and rice, or peas, were never issued together. We had no more bug soup, nor soup of any kind from the cook-house. We got our bugs in the peas, so that we were not entirely destitute of meat when we had peas. The rice was filled with weevil, so that that too, was stronger, if not more nutritious. But when our numbers were increased by the prisoners who had been captured at Dalton, Resaca, Alatoona, New Hope Church and Kenesaw, from Sherman’s army, and from the Wilderness, from Meade’s army, our numbers had far outgrown the capacity of the cook-house and our rations were issued to us raw.

Then commenced real, downright misery and suffering. These men were turned into the prison after being robbed of everything of value, without shelter, without cooking utensils, without wood, except in the most meager quantities, and in most cases without blankets.

Raw meal, raw rice and peas, and no dish to cook them in, and no wood to cook them with, and yet there were thousands of acres of timber in sight of the prison, and these men would have been too glad to cut their own wood and bring it into the prison on their shoulders. But this would have been a luxury, and Winder did not furnish prisoners with luxuries. There was an abortive attempt made at cooking more rations, by cooking them less, and the result was, meal simply scalded and called “mush,” and rice not half cooked, and burned black wherever it touched the kettle it was boiled in.

The effects of this unwholesome, half cooked, and in thousands of cases raw diet, was an increase of diarrhea, and dysentery, and scurvy.

In thousands of cases of scurvy where scorbutic ulcers had broken out, gangrene supervened and the poor prisoner soon found surcease of pain, and misery, and starvation, in the grave. Amputation of a limb was not a cure for these cases; new scorbutic ulcers appeared, again gangrene supervened, and death was the almost inevitable result.

The prison was filled with sick and dying men, indeed well men were the exception, and sick men the rule. The hospital was filled to overflowing; the prison itself, was a vast hospital, with no physicians, and no nurses.

Thousands of men had become too sick and weak to go to the sinks to stool, and they voided their excrement in little holes dug near their tents. The result of this was, a prison covered with maggots, and the air so polluted with the foul stench, that it created an artificial atmosphere, which excluded malaria, and in a country peculiarly adapted to malarial diseases, there were no cases of Malarial, Typhus or Typhoid fevers.

Your true Yankee is an ingenious fellow, and is always trying to better his situation. Many cooking dishes were manufactured by the prisoners out of tin cans, pieces of sheet iron, or car roofing, which had been picked up on the road to prison.