Qualla: Camp Douglas

Camp Douglas: Introduction

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Camp Douglas: A Camp Born on Bad Ground

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Cent...

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Camp Douglas: An Epidemic of Neglect

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 prisone...

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Camp Douglas: The Conspiracy That May Not Have Been

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 effor...

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Camp Douglas: What the Dead Left Behind

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Chic...

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Camp Douglas: Condominiums Over Graves

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 a...

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