Camp Douglas: The Union Prison Where More Than 4,000 Men Died

The Union Had Its Own Andersonville - It Was in Chicago SUBSCRIBE - for more videos covering history's prison camps! --- ---- --- ---- --- --- --- --- --- ----- --- ----- --- ---- ----- ---- ---- ---- --- --- -- -- -- - In December 1864, twelve thousand and eighty-two Confederate prisoners were held on twenty acres of frozen prairie four miles from downtown Chicago. The barracks were twenty-four feet by ninety, built for about ninety-five men, and holding closer to one hundred and ninety. They had no windows and no door shutters, two stoves for every two hundred men, and they had been lifted five feet off the ground on timber posts to stop tunneling, which put a Chicago winter directly under the floor. Rations came through a sliding hatch cut in the kitchen partition, and the men called it the crumb hole. One prisoner weighed his cooked beef ration on the sutler's scales and got four ounces. In November the water was shut off for repairs, to the barracks and to the hospital, and men crossed the dead line to gather snow under orders that allowed the sentries to fire on them. More Confederate prisoners died at Camp Douglas than at any other Union prison camp. The official count is four thousand four hundred and fifty-four. The camp also produced the arrests and the military commissions that led the Supreme Court, in 1866, to rule that civilians cannot be tried by military courts while the civil courts are open. Built from prisoner memoirs, inspection reports and the camp's own registers. SOURCES: John M. Copley, A Sketch of the Battle of Franklin, Tenn.; with Reminiscences of Camp Douglas, 1893, https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/copley/c... George Levy, To Die in Chicago: Confederate Prisoners at Camp Douglas 1862-65, 1999 Dennis Kelly, A History of Camp Douglas, Illinois, Union Prison, 1861-1865, National Park Service, 1989, https://npshistory.com/publications/a... Lonnie R. Speer, Portals to Hell: Military Prisons of the Civil War, 1997 Joseph E. Eisendrath Jr., Chicago's Camp Douglas, 1861-1865, Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 1960, https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/... David L. Keller, The Story of Camp Douglas: Chicago's Forgotten Civil War Prison, 2015 Camp Douglas Restoration Foundation, History of Camp Douglas, https://campdouglas.org/history-of-ca... Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. 2, 1866, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ex_par... Opinion of the Court United States Senate, report on Confederate Mound, Oak Woods Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/S... Stephen E. Towne, Quelling the Camp Douglas Conspiracies, Chicago History, Winter 2015 Theodore J. Karamanski, Camp Douglas, Encyclopedia of Chicago, http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistor... National Park Service, Experiencing the Struggle for Survival at Camp Douglas, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/illi....