THE NORTH’S LOST POW CAMP
It was February 1862, and on the outskirts of Chicago, a small crowd gathered and watched anxiously as several thousand Confederate prisoners of war climbed out of a long string of boxcars. Under the guard of Union soldiers, augmented by local police officers and volunteer constables, the captives— “traitors,” the Chicago Tribune branded them—marched some 400 yards to the gates of Camp Douglas, a Union army camp that had been hastily repurposed as a military prison to accommodate them.
The arrival of the Confederate POWs, who vastly outnumbered their guards, had been a source of worry for some in Chicago who feared that the camp couldn’t contain them. What if they broke free and attacked? But once Chicagoans got a look at the defeated soldiers, the fears surely dissipated. The prisoners, who had no winter coats or blankets, had endured several days of travel on unheated boats up the Mississippi River to Cairo, Illinois, and then more exposure to frigid temperatures during the 300-mile train trip to Chicago.
“A more motley looking crowd was never seen in Chicago,” Mary A. Livermore, a Union army nurse, would recall years later. “They were mostly un-uniformed, and shivering with cold, wrapped in tattered bed quilts, pieces of old carpets, hearth rugs, horse blankets, ragged shawls—anything that would serve to keep out the cold and hide their tatterdemalion condition.”
For many Confederate prisoners, the camp would be their final destination.
Another onlooker observed that the
