“It means the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy, that our youth will be trained by Northern schoolteachers, will learn from Northern school books their version of the war, will be impressed by the influences of history and education to regard our gallant dead as traitors, and our maimed veterans as fit objects for derision.”

General Pat Cleburne, CSA

TO THE MEMORY OF THE SIX THOUSAND SOUTHERN SOLDIERS HERE BURIED … WHO DIED IN CAMP DOUGLAS PRISON … 1862 – 1865

So reads a lone monument to Confederate prisoners housed in one of the most infamous prisoner-of-war camps in the War Between the States. It sits over a mass grave on one acre of land, the final resting place of at least 6,000 Confederate soldiers.

The South had Andersonville, which became internationally known as a reminder of prison camp hardships and deaths, immortalized in song, literature, and film and by many Union monuments. Andersonville is the National Prisoner of War Historical Site and has white headstones marking each of the 12, 912 Union prisoners who died there along with a 475 acre park and monuments erected by every Union State and the National Government. All of the main highways of South Georgia have informational signs pointing directions for the tens of thousand who visit there each year.

However, the North had Camp Douglas, a little known prisoner-of-war camp just outside Chicago that set records for prison mortality hidden in lost and incomplete records and covered up by a victorious side of the war. To the victor goes the writing of history and the spinning of the story, as General Cleburne so eloquently pointed out.

Andersonville is infamous yet, one hears hardly a peep about Camp Douglas. Southerners and their friends did not erect a monument to the dead at Camp Douglas until 30 years after the war.

If you go to Chicago today and ask around, few people even know of its existence. Chicago has never publicized its one-time camp. You’ll find no highway direction signs, and rarely if ever see a film about Camp Douglas or any other notorious Union prison. The winners write the history books and they have been silent for over 140 years about those camps and the horrors suffered there.

Camp Douglas was located on the south side of Chicago close to Lake Michigan. It was named in honor of Stephen A. Douglas, a famed Illinois legislator and Lincoln rival, who died in Chicago in June 1861. During the last years of his life Douglas lived at Okenwald, his south side estate. It was located just east of the present-day intersection of Cottage Grove Avenue and 35^th Street. After his death, the government took control of his property and constructed a Union training camp named in his honor. This training camp later became a prisoner-of-war camp and a place of misery and death for Confederate prisoners.

The camp received its first prisoners in February 1862, and soon overcrowding, starvation, scurvy and a complete lack of medical attention made the place a living hell. The death toll during the last three years of the war has been estimated at as many as 6,129 men, slightly less than one-third of the population of the camp. Ultimately, one in five prisoners died, establishing the camp’s reputation for extermination. Andersonville’s highest death rate was less than one in ten.

Three things distinguished Camp Douglas from other Northern prison camps: high mortality rates, extreme acts of cruelty, and a low official count of prisoners who died compared to documentation from other historical sources. Its high mortality rate can be attributed to several factors: overcrowding, unhealthy living conditions, ineffective medical treatment, inadequate food supply, and sheer brutality.

By late 1862 Camp Douglas contained 8,962 prisoners with over 200 prisoners crowded into barracks averaging 105 feet by 24 feet. As the number of prisoners increased, tents were erected to house them. With temperatures below zero, there was little protection from the elements for those prisoners.

Huge latrines were left open so rain washed raw sewage into the drinking water supply.

After a large-scale escape, the floors of the barracks were raised to discourage tunneling resulting in an unexpected bounty: rats and mice which were commonplace could now be more easily caught, and the men resorted to eating them, often raw, because there were no fires on which to cook. A smallpox and cholera epidemic erupted and free medicine sent by the South was withheld as contraband of war.

Camp Douglas was located on a wet, marshy area near Lake Michigan. The Post Surgeon warned Commandant Colonel Tucker the surface of the ground was becoming saturated with the filth and slop from the privies, kitchens, quarters and horses and would become a major threat to health as soon as hot weather set in. It has been estimated the men generated about 3,000 gallons of urine a day and another 28,000 gallons daily from the horses. The horses generated an estimated 15 tons of manure a day. The ground just couldn’t handle it. Some recommended abandoning the camp altogether, and civilian doctors who inspected Camp Douglas on April 5, 1863, referred to it as an “extermination camp.”

During the winter of 1864 there were 1,091 deaths and that was in only four months.

Camp Douglas had what was called a “dead line.” Prisoners who crossed the dead line were shot just as at other Federal prisons. Victims were more often than not simply answering the call of nature and many were shot or even bayoneted in the very act of relieving themselves.

Another punishment was to make the men pull down their pants and sit on the snow or frozen ground. Prisoners were forced to stand for hours in the snow without moving and guards would check footprints to see who had moved. The guilty were given lashes. Some prisoners lost ears, fingers and toes in the bitterly cold weather. One prisoner is reported to have improvised two wooden pegs to substitute for feet and hobbled around.

In June of 1864, the Yankees fixed a frame with a piece of lumber across it near the gate. The top had a sharpened point and was referred to as “the mule.” It was like riding a sharp top rail on a fence or a large-scale version of a sawhorse with the top rail sharpened. Prisoners were forced to sit on it until they passed out and the experience could be made more excruciating by adding weights to prisoner’s ankles. These weights were things such as buckets of sand. By 1865, the mule had gone from its original four feet in height to over 15 feet tall requiring a ladder to mount. Men were often left permanently crippled after a session of “riding the mule.”

From February 1862, when Confederate prisoners first began arriving at Camp Douglas, all the medical colleges in Chicago had an abundance of bodies on which to study. Nearly all were stolen from the dead buried at the city cemetery. Most of these were prisoners who died at Camp Douglas. Shoddy record keeping and plain indifference made accurate determination of actual death counts impossible. On June 9, 1862, the Chicago Tribune reported a difference with official records. It seems 1,490 men were unaccounted for and it was obvious many of the deaths were unreported by those in command of Camp Douglas. The Tribune seems to have counted the dead carefully and indicated the true toll was upwards of 700, not the fewer than 200 that was reported. Later estimates place the number at 800. And that was just in March 1863.

According to the history of Camp Douglas, close to 12,000 prisoners suffered through the winter of 1862 to 1863 when temperatures fell to 20 degrees below zero. From 1,400 to 1,700 lay dead but only 615 would be counted. Between 700 and 1,000 had simply disappeared. Many bodies of dead Confederates inexplicably wound up in Lake Michigan. So, Camp Douglas was exterminating the dead as well as the living.

Today, condominiums sit on the site of Camp Douglas. A monument to Stephen Douglas is located a short distance away. That is all that remains of the site of what is undisputedly the most horrible prisoner-of-war camp of the War Between the States. In Chicago’s Oak Wood Cemetery is the monument erected TO THE MEMORY OF THE SIX THOUSAND SOUTHERN SOLDIERS HERE BURIED … WHO DIED IN CAMP DOUGLAS PRISON … 1862 – 65. So, it has earned the dubious distinction of being in first place among Northern prisons and their testimony not only to brutality but also to the ability to cover it up.

The History Channel recently aired a episode called “80 Acres of Hell” telling the story of Camp Douglas. Seeing the tape is a chilling experience.

George Levy has written To Die in Chicago and it is probably the most complete treatment of the horrors experienced there by Southern men unfortunate enough to be captured and made prisoner. Yet it is Andersonville that lives on in infamy, while Camp Douglas exists in anonymous shame.

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