Camp Douglas

Written by Robert Weiglein

Today if you stand at the corner of 31st and Cottage Grove Ave on the south side of Chicago you may not be aware during the Civil War it was the location of largest military installation in Illinois. The site was named after Stephen A. Douglas on whose property the camp was established. The Union Army created the camp in 1861 as a staging and training camp for volunteer regiments with as many as 30,000 union soldiers stationed there.

In early 1862 it became a confederate prisoner-of-war camp. In the fall of 1862, the Union Army facility was also used as a detention camp for paroled Confederate prisoners, Union soldiers who had been captured by the Confederacy and sent North under an agreement that they would be held while awaiting prisoner swaps. Official records showed that 26,781 confederate prisoners passed through camp Douglas from 1863 through 1865. Documents also describe the gross mistreatment of rebel prisoner soldiers. Gen B.J. Sweet, commander of the camp in 1864, was a strict disciplinarian who justified this treatment as retribution for cruelty by the Confederacy of Union prisoner soldiers. Sweet enforced punitive rationing even when it was clear the food was not sufficient to feed the prisoners. Disease was rampant and listed as follows: Typhoid fever, diphtheria, small pox, cholera, consumption dysentery, measles and pneumonia resulting in a high mortality rate.

One in seven prisoners died in the camp. Administrative incompetence and corruption created intolerable conditions. Prisoners were housed in overcrowded poorly constructed buildings and subject to disease, mistreatment and malnutrition. Approximately 4,275 Confederate prisoners who died in the camp were buried in the City Cemetery north of the city and then re-interred to a mass grave at Oak Woods Cemetery after the war. The site of the mass burial, one of the largest in the country, is marked by the Confederate Mound originally built in 1895 and was later revised.  Camp Douglas has all but disappeared save a bronze plaque located at 3232 South Martin Luther King Drive, Chicago IL.

Five unidentified prisoners of war in Confederate uniforms in front of their barracks at Camp Douglas Prison, Chicago, Illinois. United States Camp Douglas Illinois Chicago, None. [Between 1862 and 1865] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2012646159/.

William Bross, "History of Camp Douglas," Paper Read before the Chicago Historical Society, June 18, 1878, in Mabel McIlvaine, ed., Reminiscences of Chicago during the Civil War, New York: The Citadel Press, 1967 (originally published in 1914), p. 160.

Camp Douglas, Chicago, Ill. , . [No Date Recorded on Shelflist Card] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2003677752/.

References

Bross, William, 1813-1890. 1914 Reminiscences of Chicago during the civil war. Chicago, R.R. Donnelley, 1914. p.

Plan of Camp Douglas. Blomgren Bros. & Co. 1885

View of Camp Douglas [ca. 1865?]. Blomgren Bros. & Co. 1885

The history of Camp Douglas: including official report of Gen. B.J. Sweet: with anecdotes of the

rebel prisoners. Tuttle, Edmund B. (Edmund Bostwick), 1815-1881.

Pucci, Kelly. c2007 Camp Douglas: Chicago’s Civil War prison

Levy, George. c1994 To die in Chicago: Confederate prisoners at Camp Douglas, 1862-1865

Camp Douglas, Chicago, Ill. , . [No Date Recorded on Shelflist Card] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2003677752/.

Five unidentified prisoners of war in Confederate uniforms in front of their barracks at Camp Douglas Prison, Chicago, Illinois. United States Camp Douglas Illinois Chicago, None. [Between 1862 and 1865] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2012646159/.