------------------------------------------------------------------------ FIFTEEN MONTHS IN DIXIE, OR MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE IN REBEL PRISONS. BY W. W. DAY. INTRODUCTION. On the 12th day of April, 1861, in Charleston Harbor, a shot was fired whose echo rang round the world. The detonation of that cannon, fired at Fort Sumter, reverberated from the pine-clad hills and rock-bound coast of Maine across the continent to the placid waters of the Pacific, thrilling the hearts of the freemen of the north and causing the blood, inherited from Revolutionary sires, to course through their veins with maddening speed. That cannon was fired by armed rebellion at freedom of person, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the Union of States. That echo roused those freemen to a resolution to do and to die, if need be, for the maintenance of the Union, and the supremacy of law. The outbreak of the rebellion found the writer, then a little past majority, on a farm near a little village in Wisconsin. I was just married, had put in my spring crop and when the first call was made for troops, was not situated so that I could leave home, but on the 10th of October following I enlisted in Co. D. 10th Wis. Inf. Vols. As this is to be a history of prison life, it is not my purpose to write a history of my regiment but a short sketch is proper in order to give the reader a fair understanding of my capture. The 10th left Camp Holton, near Milwaukee, about the middle of Nov. 1861. We went by railway via Chicago, Indianapolis and Evansville to Louisville, Ky., thence to Shepherdsville, thence to Elizabethtown, where we were assigned to Sill’s Brigade of Mitchell’s Division. Wintered at Bacon Creek and on the 11th of Feb. 1862, marched with Buell’s army to the capture of Bowling Green. Buell’s army and part of Grant’s army arrived almost simultaneously at Nashville, Tenn. Grant with his forces proceeded to Pittsburg Landing, Buell to Murfreesboro. After Buell with the greater part of his army had marched to Grant’s support, Mitchell’s Division marched on Huntsville, Ala., capturing that place together with about 500 prisoners, 12 engines and a large amount of rolling stock, the property of the Memphis & Charleston R. R. The 10th guarded the M. & C. R. R. from Huntsville to Stevenson, the junction of the M. & C. and the Nashville & Chattanooga R. R. during the summer of ’62.