The Story of Camp Douglas: Chicago's Forgotten Civil War Prison

Download or read book The Story of Camp Douglas: Chicago's Forgotten Civil War Prison written by David L. Keller and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2015-03-23 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you were a Confederate prisoner during the Civil War, you might have ended up in this infamous military prison in Chicago. More Confederate soldiers died in Chicago's Camp Douglas than on any Civil War battlefield. Originally constructed in 1861 to train forty thousand Union soldiers from the northern third of Illinois, it was converted to a prison camp in 1862. Nearly thirty thousand Confederate prisoners were housed there until it was shut down in 1865. Today, the history of the camp ranges from unknown to deeply misunderstood. David Keller offers a modern perspective of Camp Douglas and a key piece of scholarship in reckoning with the legacy of other military prisons.