Camp Douglas: Chicago’s Civil War Prison Camp

Camp Douglas: Chicago’s Civil War Prison Camp

During the American Civil War (1861–1865), the city of Chicago, far from the battlefields of Virginia and Georgia, became home to one of the war’s most notorious Confederate prisoner-of-war camps: Camp Douglas. Originally built in 1861 as a training ground for Union volunteers, it was hastily converted in early 1862 into a prison after the Union captures at Forts Henry and Donelson produced thousands of Confederate prisoners.

Over the next three years, approximately 26,000 to 30,000 Confederate soldiers (and some civilian political prisoners) passed through its gates. By the time it closed in 1865, at least 4,500–6,000 of them had died, giving Camp Douglas one of the highest mortality rates of any Civil War prison—worse than the infamous Andersonville in Georgia when measured as a percentage of prisoners held.

Camp Douglas operated under military authority from the moment it opened. Illinois was never under formal martial law for the entire state, but President Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus (March 1863 nationwide, with earlier regional suspensions) and the broad grant of military jurisdiction over prisoners of war effectively placed the camp outside normal civilian legal oversight. The fact that Camp Douglas turned into a death trap was only possible because military commanders had near-absolute power.

Prisoners could not petition federal courts for release or to challenge conditions because habeas corpus was suspended for anyone the military labeled a Confederate prisoner or “disloyal person.” Guards and commanders faced virtually no risk of being sued or prosecuted in Illinois courts for neglect or cruelty.

The camp commander, Colonel Charles V. DeLand, and later commanders allowed (and sometimes participated in) rampant embezzlement of food, clothing, and medical supplies that were supposed to go to prisoners. Contractors sold blankets, coal, and rations on the open market while prisoners froze and starved. Civilian fraud prosecutions were almost impossible because the camp was under exclusive military jurisdiction.

Designed for 4,000–6,000 men, the camp routinely held 8,000–12,000 prisoners in 1864–65. Barracks were never completed; many men lived in open “sinkholes” of mud and sewage. Scurvy, smallpox, and pneumonia killed dozens per day. Commandants repeatedly ignored orders from Washington to improve conditions because they faced no immediate legal consequences.

Units such as the “Camp Douglas Guard” and later regiments of paroled Union soldiers (many of whom were bitter former Andersonville prisoners themselves) inflicted beatings, torture with the “mule” (a saw-horse that crushed genitals), and summary executions. Military commissions, not civilian juries, handled any trials, and they almost never convicted Union personnel.

Contemporary newspapers exposed the horrors, but because the camp was under martial authority, federal military officials could censor or suppress reporting and threaten editors with arrest.

By conservative estimates:

• Total prisoners held: ~26,000–30,000

• Documented deaths: 4,459 (Union records)

• Probable total deaths: 6,000+ (modern historians adjusting for lost records) with many of the bodies dumped in a swamp that washed out into Lake Michigan.

• Peak winter 1864–65: 100–200 deaths per month from cold and disease alone

When the war ended and surviving prisoners were released, their emaciated condition and firsthand accounts shocked the nation. Northern newspapers that had remained silent under wartime censorship now published graphic exposés. Politicians in the 1866 and 1868 elections used Camp Douglas as proof that Lincoln’s broad use of martial law and suspension of habeas corpus had enabled government brutality against both Confederate prisoners and Northern civilians.

The abuses at Camp Douglas (along with similar scandals at Elmira, New York; Fort Delaware; and the treatment of civilian detainees under Lincoln’s military commissions) became Exhibit A in the postwar legal and political backlash against unchecked military power. Key reforms and precedents that still bind the U.S. government today trace directly to this experience:

• Ex parte Milligan (1866)

  The Supreme Court ruled that military commissions could not try civilians where civil courts were open, explicitly citing the danger of the kind of arbitrary military rule that had governed camps like Douglas. The Court declared Lincoln’s broad suspension of habeas corpus unconstitutional in areas not in active rebellion.

• Posse Comitatus Act (1878)

  Passed largely by Southern Democrats and Midwestern opponents of Reconstruction, this law forbids the U.S. military from performing domestic law-enforcement functions except in strictly defined emergencies. Camp Douglas was repeatedly cited in floor debates as proof of what happens when the army is given police powers on American soil.

• Modern habeas corpus protections and the Non-Detention Act (1971)

  These statutes, strengthened after Vietnam-era fears, explicitly prohibit indefinite military detention of U.S. citizens without charge—again with Civil War prison camps (Northern and Southern) used as the cautionary example.

• Geneva Conventions and Uniform Code of Military Justice reforms

  The U.S. military’s modern prisoner-of-war regulations were written in direct reaction to both Andersonville and the Northern camps. The 1929 and 1949 Geneva Conventions, which the United States helped draft, contain provisions on minimum shelter, food, and medical care that read like a direct rebuttal to what happened at Camp Douglas under martial authority.

Camp Douglas is largely forgotten today outside Chicago historical circles (the site is now a residential neighborhood near the lakefront), but its grim record helped convince the American legal system that martial law and the suspension of habeas corpus are powers so dangerous that they must be hedged with ironclad restrictions. The camp’s 6,000 graves are one of the reasons the United States Constitution and federal law still treat military rule over civilians as an absolute last resort, to be used briefly, narrowly, and under intense scrutiny.