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

by William W. Day

(End of witnesses’ testimony.)

This was the testimony of a scientific medical officer, who was so thoroughly a rebel that he served as a private for six months in the Confederate army, and yet so humane as to condemn the barbarous treatment imposed on helpless men by such fiends as Winder and Wirz.

Let me call the readers particular attention to a few points in the testimony of Dr. Jones.

First. As to his charge of filthiness. He states the truth, as any ex-Andersonville prisoner too well knows, but he does not inform his Government as to the cause. He does not say that these men were turned, like so many swine, into the stockade, after being robbed of everything of value. That no cooking utensils were furnished, that not an ounce of soap was issued to the prisoners after May 1st, 1864. But he does tell us that water was scarce, and filthy beyond the power of description, he does tell how these men became dispirited by long confinement, by bad diet and worse drink, and by their filthy surroundings, and by the constant presence of death. What wonder that men under all these discouraging circumstances soon fell to the level of brutes? And yet all were not so filthy; all did not lose their instincts of manhood, but through all these discouraging surroundings, observed, as well as possible under the circumstances, the laws of health. Were it not so this story would never have been written.

Second. He speaks of hearing some of the prisoners exonerate the Confederate Government, and lay all the blame of their continued imprisonment on the Federal Government. There is too much truth in this statement to be pleasant to us as patriots, but let us see if these men were wholly to blame in this matter.

We had heard all sorts of discouraging rumors for the last ten months. The rebels had told us that Lincoln would not exchange prisoners unless the negroes were put upon the same basis as whites. That was just and honorable in the Government, but it was death to us. The fact is that of all the forty-five thousand prisoners that I saw in Andersonville there were not to exceed a half dozen negroes, and they were officers’ waiters. The rebels did not take negroes prisoners who were captured in arms, they killed them on the spot, and we knew it, but perhaps our Government did not.

For my own part I never exonerated Confederates for the part they took in cases where they might have done better. It is true that they could not furnish us such a quality of food as our Government furnished Confederate prisoners, but the excuse that they had not enough for their own soldiers is too flimsy as shown by the supplies that Sherman’s men found in Georgia on that famous “March to the Sea” after we had been removed from Andersonville. And even if they were short of food, they had enough pure air and water, and enough land so that we need not have been compelled to drink our own filth, nor breathe the foul effluvia arising from the putrefaction of our excrements, nor be crowded at the rate of thirty-three thousand men on twelve acres of ground, as we were at Andersonville. There was wood enough so that men need not have been compelled to eat corn meal raw. There was no valid excuse for robbing men of their little all and then turning them into those prisons, to live or die, as best they could.

When we come to the part our Government took in this matter it is simply this; General Grant was of the opinion that we could perform our duty as soldiers better in those prisons than we could if exchanged. Exchange meant giving a fat rebel soldier, ready to take the field, for a yankee skeleton ready for the hospital or the grave. Considered as a military measure I admit it was right; but considered from a humanitarian point, it was simply hellish.

Do you wonder that we thought our Government had forgotton, or did not care for us? And yet when the crucial test came, when life and liberty, food and clothing, were offered us at the price of our loyalty to our Government, our reply was “no, we will let the lice carry us out through the cracks, before we will take the oath of allegiance to the Confederacy, we will accept death but not dishonor.”

Don’t blame us if we were discouraged and disheartened, if we did growl at, and find fault with, a government which we imagined had deserted us in the hour of our greatest need; we were true and loyal after all, and if you had been placed in the same condition you would have done just the same.