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

In September 1863, twenty-year-old William W. Day fought in the bloodiest two days of the Civil War. At Chickamauga, he went from Union soldier to Confederate prisoner in an instant, beginning an ordeal that would consume fifteen months of his life. This memoir, written with the hard-won clarity of distance and the raw edge of memory, delivers an unvarnished account of what Union soldiers endured in rebel prisons: overcrowding, starvation, disease, and the slow erosion of hope. Day pulls no punches. He describes the filth of prison pens, the brutal logistics of captivity, and the particular cruelties inflicted on Union prisoners by their Confederate captors. But he also captures the solidarity among prisoners, the black humor that kept men sane, and the small dignities preserved even in degradation. This isn't history from the generals' tents - it's the war told from the ground, from inside the stockades where ordinary men tried to survive an extraordinary nightmare.