FIFTEEN MONTHS IN DIXIE,
OR
MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
IN REBEL PRISONS.
BY W. W. DAY.
INTRODUCTION.
On the 12th day of April, 1861, in Charleston Harbor, a shot was fired whose echo rang round the world. The detonation of that cannon, fired at Fort Sumter, reverberated from the pine-clad hills and rock-bound coast of Maine across the continent to the placid waters of the Pacific, thrilling the hearts of the freemen of the north and causing the blood, inherited from Revolutionary sires, to course through their veins with maddening speed. That cannon was fired by armed rebellion at freedom of person, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the Union of States. That echo roused those freemen to a resolution to do and to die, if need be, for the maintenance of the Union, and the supremacy of law.
The outbreak of the rebellion found the writer, then a little past majority, on a farm near a little village in Wisconsin. I was just married, had put in my spring crop and when the first call was made for troops, was not situated so that I could leave home, but on the 10th of October following I enlisted in Co. D. 10th Wis. Inf. Vols.