To Die in Chicago: Confederate Prisoners at Camp Douglas, 1862-65

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“Did Wirtz, the commandant of Andersonville prison, ever do anything as inhumanly brutal as used to be inflicted on Confederate prisoners in Camp Douglas?”
—Sgt. T. B. Clore, Camp Douglas survivor

The Chicago doctors who inspected the prison in 1863 referred to as Camp Douglas an “extermination camp.” It quickly became the largest Confederate burial ground out of doors of the South.

What George Levy’s meticulous research, including newly found out hospital records, has uncovered isn’t a pretty picture. The story of Camp Douglas is one of brutal guards, deliberate starvation of prisoners, neglect of the sick, sadistic torture, murder, corruption at all levels, and a beef scandal reaching into the White House.

As as a result the overcrowding and substandard provisions, disease ran rampant and the mortality rate soared. By the thousands, prisoners needlessly died of pneumonia, smallpox, and other maladies. Most were buried in unmarked mass graves. The exact number of those who died is inconceivable to discern on account of the Union’s haphazard recordkeeping and general put out of your mind for the deceased.

Among the most shocking revelations are such forms of torture as hanging prisoners by their thumbs, hanging them by their heels and then whipping them, and forcing prisoners to take a seat with their exposed buttocks in the ice and snow.

The Confederate Camp Andersonville never saw such gratuitous barbarity.

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