William W. Day

“ Soon the rebels came up the ascent at the charge step. We wait until they are in short range then we rise from behind our slight entrenchments and pour such a well directed volley into their ranks that they stagger for a moment, but for a moment only, and on they come again returning our fire, then the batteries open on them and from their steel throats belch forth iron hail and bursting shells, while we pour in our deadly fire of musketry. They halt! They break! THEY RUN! Those heroes of Longstreet’s, they have met their match in the hardy veterans of the west. ”

“ If we were to be exchanged, which we doubted, then good bye to all these terrible scenes of want and suffering. If another prison pen was our destination, then we hoped it would not be so foul and disease laden as the one we left, and in any case we had left Winder and Wirz and we knew that though we were to rake the infernal regions with a fine comb, we could not find worse jailors. With thoughts like these running through our minds we dragged our weak and spiritless bodies to the station, where we got into a train of freight cars as best we could. ”

“ I am convinced that cheerfulness depends and must depend on outward circumstances as well as on an inward state of mind. Why not? We were men not angels, material beings, not spirits; we were subject to the same appetites and passions to which we, and others are subject, under better circumstances. Starvation, privation, misery and torture had not purged from us the longings, the hungerings and thirstings after the necessaries, the conveniences, yes, the luxuries of life, but on the contrary, had increased them ten fold. ”

“ All other classes of men who went to the war and many men and women who did not go, are recognized and I believe that justice demands the recognition of the ex-prisoners. I make no special plea in my own behalf. I suffered no more than any other of the thousands who were with me, and not as much as some, but I make the plea in behalf of my comrades who I know suffered untold miseries for the cause of the Union, and yet who amidst all this suffering and privation, spurned with contempt the offers made by the enemy of food, clothing and life itself almost, at the cost of loyalty. ”

“ Around the clump of brush I sped, thinking, “now for Chattanooga.” “Hello, Bill! Where you going?” “Oh, I had got started for Chattanooga, but I guess I will go with you,” and I ran plump into a squad of men of my company and regiment under guard.
Men, styling themselves statesmen, have stood up in their places in the halls of Congress and called prisoners of war “Coffee Coolers” and “Blackberry Pickers.” ”

“ They knew that the success of the Union arms meant the freedom of the slaves, and they always worshipped a Federal soldier. Any prisoner who escaped from rebel prisons, and succeeded in reaching the Union lines, owes his success to the negroes for without their friendly aid in the way of furnishing food, and pointing out the way, and in most instances acting as guide, they could never have succeeded. ”

“ It is impossible for any person endowed with the common feelings and instincts of humanity to understand, much less to explain, the character of Winder and Wirz. How any person in this enlightened age could be guilty of the cruelties and barbarities practiced by those two ghouls surpass all attempts at explanation. I am of the opinion that the majority of the people of the South were ignorant of the full extent of the horrors of the Southern Military Prisons. ”

“ It is never too late to tell the truth, although the truth may be sharper than a two-edged sword. It is never too late to inspire our young men to love, and venerate, and defend, the Flag of their Country; to tell them how their fathers suffered in support of a PRINCIPLE. No, it is not too late to tell this story, and I have no apologies to offer any man, living or dead, for telling it. ”

“ For the purpose of tracking escaped prisoners, an aggregate of seventy blood-hounds were kept at Andersonville. They were run in packs of five or six, unless a number of prisoners had escaped, in which case a larger number were used. They were in charge of a genuine “nigger driver” whose delight it was to follow their loud baying, as they tracked fugitive negroes, or escaped Yanks through the forests and swamps of southern Georgia.
These blood-hounds were trained to track human beings, and with their keen scent they held to the track as steadily, relentlessly as death itself ”

“ Sunken gray eyes too dull and cold to light up, marked a hard, stony face, the salient features of which was a thin lipped, compressed mouth, with corners drawn down deeply—the mouth which seems the world over to be the index of selfish, cruel, sulky malignance. It is such a mouth as has the school boy—the coward of the play ground, who delights in pulling off the wings of flies. ”

“ How our hearts sank within us as we came to the low sheds and buildings, which form the Station of the Petersburg and Weldon R. R. Heretofore during the day, “God’s Country,” and home had seemed very near to us, but now all these hopes were suddenly dashed to the ground, and dark despair, like a black pall, enshrouded us. I believe that most of us wished that dark, rainy night, that it had been our fate to have fallen upon the field of battle, and received a soldier’s burial. ”

“ I heard some of the prisoners go so far as to exonerate the Confederate Government from any charge of intentionally subjecting them to a protracted confinement, with its necessary and unavoidable sufferings in a country cut off from all intercourse with foreign nations, and sorely pressed on all sides, whilst on the other hand they charged their prolonged captivity upon their own Government, which was attempting to make the negro equal to the white man. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Many of our artisans went out thinking they would get a chance to work for food and clothing by simply giving their parole of honor they would not attempt to escape. But the rebs insisted that they must take the oath of allegiance. A few took the required oath, but most of the boys returned to prison, and most heartily anathematized the men who had the impudence and presumption to suppose that they would be guilty of taking the oath of allegiance to such a rotten, hell-born thing as the Southern Confederacy. ”

“ Inside of the stockade there were no nurses for the sick, except such voluntary care as one comrade bestowed upon another. In cases where men of the same company or regiment were associated together the sick man so far as I observed, was cared for as well as the circumstances would admit of. But what could these men do for each other? There was no medicine to be had for love or money. The surgeons prescribed sumac berries for scurvy, and black-berry root for diarrhea and dysentery. ”

“ The army reached Savannah on the 9th of December, and on the 10th the siege of that place commenced. On the night of the 21st the rebels evacuated the city and it fell into Sherman’s hands.
The whole march had been a pleasure excursion, when compared with the Atlanta campaign. The rebels could never muster a sufficient force of a quality to retard the march of the army. All their boasting of annihilation was simply wind. ”

“ The haggard, distressed countenances of these miserable, complaining dejected, living skeletons, crying for medical aid and food, and cursing their Government for its refusal to exchange prisoners, and the ghastly corpses with their glazed eyeballs staring up into vacant space, with the flies swarming down their open grinning mouths, and over their ragged clothes infested with numerous lice, as they lay amongst the sick and dying formed a picture of helpless, hopeless misery which it would be impossible 53to portray by words or by the brush. ”

“ The dead-house is merely a frame covered with old tent cloth and a few brushes, situated in the south-western corner of the hospital grounds. When a patient dies, he is simply laid in the narrow street in front of his tent, until he is removed by Federal negroes detailed to carry off the dead; if a patient dies during the night he lies there until morning, and during the day, even the dead were frequently allowed to remain for hours in these walks. In the dead-house the corpses lie upon the bare ground, and were in most cases covered with filth and vermin. ”

“ In the matter of wood Iverson was more humane than was Winder, but in the matter of rations it was the same old story, just enough to keep soul and body together, provided a pint of corn meal, two spoonfuls of sorghum syrup and a half teaspoonful of salt daily would furnish sufficient adhesive power to accomplish that result.
There was rather better hospital accommodations here for the sick, than at Andersonville, but at the best it was miserably poor and insufficient. The worst cases had been left behind, but the stockade was soon full of men so sick as to be unable to care for themselves. ”

“ If men had stopped to think, these promises carried with them abundant proof of their own falsity. Where was the evidence of good treatment, judging of the future by the past? What did good pay and large bounties amount to when it took two hundred dollars of that good pay and large bounty to buy a pair of boots? And the good clothing, yes they could clothe them with the uniforms stripped from their dead comrades upon the battlefield or stolen from the supplies sent to the prisoners. ”

“ We remained at the Chickamauga hospital for three weeks. Then all who could ride in wagons were carried to Ringgold, where we took the cars for Atlanta. Many of the wounded had died and we had buried them there on the banks of the “River of Death.” I presume they have found sepulture at last in the National Cemetery, at Chattanooga, along with the heroes of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge. Peace to their ashes. They gave all that men can give, their lives, for their country, and we gave them the best gifts of comrades, honor and a soldier’s grave. ”

“ The monotony of prison life was sometimes relieved by finding among the prisoners an old acquaintance of boyhood days. Many of the western men were born and educated in the East, and it was no uncommon thing for them to find an old chum among the eastern soldiers.
One day as I was cooking my rations some one slapped me on the shoulder and exclaimed, “Hello Bill!” Looking up I saw standing before me, an old schoolmate from Jamestown, New York, by the name of Joe Hall. It was a sad re-union; we had both been in prison more than nine months, he on Belle Isle, and I in Danville. ”

“ In this collection of men from all parts of the world, every phase of human character was represented; the stronger preyed upon 50the weaker, and even the sick who were unable to defend themselves were robbed of their scanty supplies of food and clothing. Dark stories were afloat, of men, both sick and well, who were murdered at night, strangled to death by comrades for scant supplies of clothing or money. ”

“ It is impossible for the most talented writer to give an adequate description. But I have told the truth as best I could. I defy any man to disprove one material statement, and I fall back upon the testimony of the rebels themselves, to prove that I have not exaggerated. These men suffered in those prisons through no fault of their own. The fortunes of war threw them into the hands of their enemies, and they were treated as no civilized nation ever treated prisoners before. ”

“ I heard a sick and wounded Federal prisoner accuse his nurse, a fellow prisoner of the United States army, of having stealthily, during his sleep, inoculated his wounded arm with gangrene, that he might destroy his life and fall heir to his clothing.
The large number of men confined in the stockade soon, under a defective system of police, and with imperfect arrangements, covered the surface of the low grounds with excrements. ”

“ Scurvy, diarrhea, dysentery, and hospital gangrene were the prevailing diseases. I was surprised to find but few cases of malarial fever, and no well marked cases either of typhus or typhoid fever. The absence of the different forms of malarial fever may be accounted for on the supposition that the artificial atmosphere of the stockade, crowded densely with human beings and loaded with animal exhalations, was unfavorable to the existence and action of malarial poison. ”

“ He was the head and front, the great representative of the doctrine of States Rights, which, interpreted by Southern Statesmen, meant the right of a state to separate itself from the General Government, peaceably if possible, by force of arms if need be. And yet when Governor Brown, of Georgia, carried this doctrine to its logical conclusion by withdrawing the Georgia troops from the Confederate armies, to repel the invasion of Sherman and harvest a crop for the use of his army, Davis, in public speeches, intimated that Governor Brown was a traitor. ”

“ When I first reached the battlefield my attention was attracted to a number of horsemen dressed in Federal uniforms. These were evidently rebel cavalrymen who had dressed themselves in the uniforms of our dead soldiers. In every part of the field was evidence of the terrible havoc of war. Bursted cannons, broken gun carriages, muskets, bayonets, accoutrements, sabres, swords, canteens, knapsacks, haversacks, sponges, rammers, buckets, broken wagons, dead horses and dead men were mixed and intermingled in a heterogeneous mass. ”