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

by William W. Day

Sir:—There are six members of the 10th Wis. Infantry here together, who were captured at the battle of Chickamauga. We are destitute of clothing, and as defenders of our country, we apply to you for aid, hoping you will be prompt in relieving, in a measure, our necessities. Please send us a box containing blankets, underclothing, shirts and socks in particular, and we stand very much in need of shoes; but I don’t know as they are in your line of business.

“We would also like stationery, combs, knives, forks, spoons, tin cups, plates and a small sized camp kettle, as our rations are issued to us raw; also thread and needles. We all have the scurvy more or less and I think dried fruit would help us very much by the acid it contains,—you cannot send us medicine as that is contraband. We would like some tobacco and reading matter. If there is anything more that you can send, it will be very acceptable.

“We should not apply to you were we not compelled, and did we not know that you are the destitute soldiers’ friend. You will please receive this in the same spirit in which it is sent, and answer accordingly, and you will have the satisfaction of feeling that you have done something to relieve the wants of those who went out at the commencement of the war, to vindicate the rights of our country.

Direct to Wm. W. Day and Joseph Eaton, prisoners of war, Florence, S. C., via. Flag of Truce, Hilton Head.

Yours, &c.,

Wm. W. Day.

P. S. I forgot to mention soap—a very essential article.”

At the same time I wrote to my wife in Wisconsin and to my brother in New York, for a box but instructed them that if there was any prospect of an immediate exchange, they were not to send them. I believe some of the other boys sent home for boxes also. We knew that the chances were very much against our ever seeing the boxes if sent, as we knew that many boxes sent to Andersonville were kept and their contents used by the rebel guards, yet I hoped that out of the three I might possibly get one. When the letters sent to my wife and brother reached their destination, they commenced the preparation of boxes, but before they were complete news of exchange reached them and the boxes were not sent. But during the spring of 1865, after I had settled in Minnesota, and after the capture of Richmond, I received a letter from the General in command of our forces, at that place, informing me that there was a box there directed to me and asking for instructions as to its disposal. I replied to him that it was a box sent to me by the Wisconsin Sanitary Commission, and was intended for me as a soldier, that I was now a civilian, and had no claim on it, and directed him to turn it over to the hospital.

Right here I wish to express my appreciation of the Sanitary Commission. In all the loyal States they did a grand work of mercy and charity, ably seconding the efforts of the Government in caring for sick and destitute soldiers. In fact they performed a work which the Government could not perform. They furnished lint and bandages, canned and dried fruits, vegetables and luxuries of all descriptions for the wounded and sick soldiers, thus giving them to feel that in all their hardships and sufferings they were not forgotton by the kind loyal women of the North, God bless them. It was the ladies of the Sanitary Commission of Milwaukee who established the first Soldiers’ Home, on West Water street, and which has grown into the National Soldiers’ Home near that city. They were ably seconded by the Christian Commission, which sent not only supplies but men and women to the field of war, to distribute supplies and act in the capacity of nurses in the hospitals. The wife of the Hon. John F. Potter, of the 1st Congressional District, of Wisconsin, worked in the hospitals at Washington until she contracted a fever and died, as much a martyr for her country as any soldier upon the field of battle. Governor Harvey, of Wisconsin, lost his life at Pittsburg Landing, where he had gone to aid the wounded soldiers. His wife took up the work, thus rudely broken by her husband’s death, and carried it on until peace came like a benison upon the land.

All over the North, loyal men and women gave of their time and money for the relief of their Nation’s defenders, and to-day deserve, and receive, the thanks of the “boys who wore the blue.”