Henry Whitney Bellows, president of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, visited in the summer of 1862 and declared that nothing but fire could cleanse the place. He wrote of standing water, unventilated barracks swarming with vermin, and soil reeking with accumulated filth. This was Camp Douglas, one of the largest Union prisoner-of-war camps of the Civil War, built on low-lying prairie on Chicago's south side between what is now East 31st Street and East 33rd Place. From 1861 to 1865, the camp served shifting purposes -- training ground, detention center, permanent prison -- but the constant through all its incarnations was misery. Sometimes described as 'the North's Andersonville,' Camp Douglas held as many as 8,962 Confederate prisoners at once, and its official death toll stands at 4,454, with some historians estimating the true number between 5,000 and 6,000.
When President Lincoln called for volunteers after Fort Sumter fell in April 1861, Illinois men flooded into Chicago. Judge Allen C. Fuller chose the camp site because it was close to downtown, surrounded by prairie, near Lake Michigan for water, and bordered by the Illinois Central Railroad. What Fuller did not realize -- he was a judge, not an engineer -- was that the low-lying ground was a terrible choice. The camp lacked sewers for more than a year. It flooded with every rainfall and became a sea of mud in winter. Latrines were desperately insufficient. The Illinois Central Railroad transported 4,459 of the first Confederate prisoners from Fort Donelson, captured by Ulysses S. Grant's forces in February 1862. They arrived to find a camp, but no real prison. Within a month, over 700 prisoners had died.
February 1863 was the deadliest month at any prison camp during the entire war. That month, 387 prisoners died at Camp Douglas, many from smallpox and other diseases spreading through barracks where men slept on damp floors. About 1,500 poorly clothed and physically unfit prisoners had arrived in January, and neither the Army nor the War Department made immediate improvements. Colonel Hoffman, the commissary general of prisoners, proposed two-story insulated barracks, but the Army approved only thin single-story structures originally built for short-term use. Cooking pots doubled as heating devices, destroying the quality of food. At one point only two water hydrants served the entire prisoner population, forcing men to wait hours in the cold. Some prisoners who escaped during a January 1864 blizzard were found frozen to death nearby.
In the fall of 1864, Colonel Benjamin Sweet, the camp's commandant, claimed to have uncovered a Confederate plot to storm Camp Douglas and free its prisoners on November 8 -- Election Day. Confederate Captain Thomas Hines had indeed been sent from Canada to organize such an effort, hoping to raise 5,000 sympathizers in Chicago. He found just 25 untrained volunteers and apparently abandoned the scheme. Historians still disagree about whether the plot was real or a hoax exploited by Sweet for personal advancement. Sweet arrested Confederate agents and several prominent citizens, confining them first in a church before moving them to Camp Douglas. President Lincoln awarded Sweet a brevet promotion to brigadier general that December. The episode gave English its earliest recorded use of the phrase 'to hell in a handbasket,' found in an 1865 account of the conspiracy.
The camp's undertaker, C. H. Jordan, sold some prisoners' bodies to medical schools and buried the rest in shallow graves without coffins. Some reportedly washed into Lake Michigan from graves eroded along its shores. Many were initially buried in unmarked pauper's graves in Chicago's City Cemetery, on the site of today's Lincoln Park. In 1867, the remains were reinterred at what is now known as Confederate Mound in Oak Woods Cemetery, about four miles south of where the camp stood. The official count of 4,454 dead is disputed. Records were lost in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and estimates range as high as 6,000 or more. The death rate was roughly seventeen percent -- comparable to other Northern prison camps, though lower than at Andersonville.
Today, condominiums fill the site where Camp Douglas once stood. For decades, a local funeral home on the property maintained prisoner records and flew a Confederate flag at half-staff; the business closed on December 31, 2007. Since 2012, archaeological work has been conducted at the site, led by Dr. Michael Gregory of DePaul University with help from local volunteers and neighborhood children. The Camp Douglas Restoration Foundation, formed in 2010, works toward establishing a permanent museum. Through September 1862 alone, 980 Confederate prisoners and 240 Union guards and trainees had died at the camp, almost all from disease. The ground they suffered on is unremarkable now -- flat Chicago streets, brick buildings, the hum of city life -- but the history beneath the pavement is anything but.
Located at 41.84°N, 87.62°W on Chicago's south side, between East 31st Street and East 33rd Place. From the air, the camp site is indistinguishable from the surrounding residential neighborhood of the Bronzeville area. Lake Michigan lies about a mile to the east. Oak Woods Cemetery, where Confederate Mound holds the reinterred remains, is visible about four miles south. The nearest airports are Chicago Midway (KMDW, 8 miles southwest) and Chicago O'Hare (KORD, 16 miles northwest). Best viewed at 2,000-3,000 feet AGL.