It was different in character from places like Andersonville in Georgia, the Confederate prison camp for enlisted Union soldiers that became the most notorious prisoner facility of the war. Castle Thunder held a different population — primarily civilians and alleged spies — under conditions that reflected the Confederacy’s particular concern about internal security and the trustworthiness of people who had been moving between the lines.
Walker was held there for approximately four months. The partial muscular atrophy that the Army subsequently compensated through her disability pension was a physical consequence of those months. Beyond the documented physical damage, the experience of four months in a facility designed for people the Confederacy considered security threats — held as a suspected spy, in a city at war, in a building that was not designed as a prison and was overcrowded far beyond any design capacity — was an experience that the pension record does not fully convey.
She came back from Castle Thunder and continued working. The supervisor of the women’s prison in Louisville, the orphanage director in Clarksville, the lecturer and writer who would spend the next five decades arguing for women’s rights — all of that was the person who returned from Richmond in August 1864, depleted but not stopped.
## The 1865 Award in Its Specific Legal Context
The specific legal situation that produced the Medal of Honor award in 1865 is worth examining carefully, because understanding it requires understanding what the award was replacing.
After the war ended, Walker sought a retroactive military commission. This was the recognition she actually wanted — formal officer rank that acknowledged the nature of her service. The request was denied. The applicable statutes did not provide a mechanism for granting a commission retroactively to a civilian contract surgeon, regardless of the quality of that person’s service.