Fifteen Months in Dixie; Or, My Personal Experience in Rebel PrisonsDay, W. W. (William Worthy)
History
Fifteen Months in Dixie; Or, My Personal Experience in Rebel Prisons
Day, W. W. (William Worthy)
United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Prisoners and prisons
Of all the men who had charge of of prisoners and who are responsible
for their barbarous treatment, only one was ever brought to punishment.
“Majah” Ross was burned in a hotel at Lynchburg, Va., in the spring of
1866. General Winder dropped dead while entering his tent at Florence,
S. C., on the 1st of January, 1865.
“Majah” Dick Turner, Lieutenant Colonel Iverson and Lieutenant Barret
have passed into obscurity, while Wirz was hanged for his crimes. That
Wirz richly deserved his fate, no man who knows the full extent of his
barbarities, has any doubt, and yet it seems hard that the vengeance of
our Government should have been visited upon him alone. The quality of
his guilt was not much different from that of many of prison commandants
but the fact that he had a greater number of men under his charge
brought him more into notice. Why should Wirz, the tool, be punished
more severely than Jeff Davis and Howell Cobb? They were responsible,
and yet Wirz hung while they went scot free.
I have frequently noticed that if a man wanted to escape punishment for
murder he must needs be a wholesale murderer, your retail fellows fare
hard when they get into the clutches of the law. If a man steals a sack
of flour to keep his family from starvation, he goes to jail; but if he
robs a bank of thousands of dollars in money and spends it in riotous
living, or in an aggressive war against what is known as the “Tiger,”
whether that Tiger reclines upon the green cloth, or roams at will among
the members of Boards of Trade or Stock Exchange, or is denominated a
“Bull” or a “Bear” in the wheat ring, why he simply goes to Canada.
Surely Justice is appropriately represented as being blindfolded, and I
would suggest that she be represented as carrying an ear trumpet, for if
she is not both blind and deaf she must be extremely partial.
Reader, if I have succeeded in amusing or instructing you, I have partly
accomplished my purpose in writing this story. Partly I say, for I have
still another object in view.
The description I have given of the prisons in which I was confined is
but a poor picture of the actual condition of things. 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. They were left by their Government
to suffer because that Government believed they would best subserve its
interests by remaining there, rather than to agree to such terms as the
enemy insisted upon.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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