Camp Douglas occupied about eighty acres of prairie south of 31st Street between Cottage Grove Avenue and what is now Martin Luther King Drive, on land associated with the late Senator Stephen A. Douglas. It opened in 1861 as a place to muster and train Illinois volunteers, outside the city limits and beside the Illinois Central tracks. In February 1862 Ulysses S. Grant took Fort Donelson in Tennessee and some 5,000 Confederate prisoners with it, and Chicago, as the nearest rail hub with a fenced camp, became their prison for the rest of the war.
What happened
The camp was never built for the purpose. It was meant to hold at most 6,000 men in flimsy wooden barracks served by a crude sewer, and after prisoner exchanges stopped in 1863 the population reached about 12,000. More than 40,000 Confederates passed through in under four years. A U.S. Sanitary Commission inspector in 1862 described foul smells and unventilated, crowded barracks, and the diseases that follow such conditions, dysentery, smallpox, typhoid and tuberculosis, did most of the killing. Chicagoans at first visited freely; a local businessman later charged ten cents for a place on a viewing platform. Security was loose enough that about 500 prisoners escaped through tunnels or past bribed guards.
How many died is argued. The names on the monument at Oak Woods number 4,243, and a careful analysis in the 1980s put the true figure close to that; the historian Theodore Karamanski estimates about 4,500, or seventeen percent of those held. Popular accounts prefer 6,000 or more and the nickname eighty acres of hell, and claim it was the deadliest prison of the war, which Karamanski rejects: Andersonville in Georgia killed some 13,000, or twenty-eight percent of its prisoners. The dead were buried on the camp grounds and in the City Cemetery on the North Side, the lakefront graveyard that is now Lincoln Park.
The reinterments
When the City Cemetery was condemned for the park, the federal government bought a plot at Oak Woods Cemetery at 67th Street and Cottage Grove. Remains were moved from the camp in 1866 and from the City Cemetery in 1867, when military records count 3,384 bodies, and laid in long trenches under an unmarked mound. In 1887 the War Department allowed a group of former Confederates led by John C. Underwood to raise a monument there, and on May 30, 1895 a forty-foot granite column topped by a bronze soldier with bowed head, modeled on John A. Elder’s painting Appomattox, was dedicated before a crowd reported at 100,000. The Veterans Affairs record of the site says President Cleveland and his cabinet attended; the Hyde Park Herald’s historian Patricia Morse argues that Cleveland was at Oak Woods that day only to accompany the body of his secretary of state, Walter Gresham, to the cemetery chapel. After an act of Congress in 1903 funded improvements, the mound was raised and in 1911 bronze plaques bearing the known names were fixed around the base. Twelve unidentified Union guards who died at the camp lie there as well, each under a headstone marked unknown.
The camp itself was pulled down soon after the war and its parade ground given over to baseball. The neighborhood filled with housing and became Bronzeville, the center of Black Chicago. In 1992 the undertaker Ernie Griffin, whose funeral home stood on the camp site and whose grandfather had enlisted there in the 29th U.S. Colored Infantry, put up a memorial to the Confederate dead with a battle flag at half mast; neighbors tore the flag down repeatedly, and the memorial went when the business closed in 2007. The first official marker, a small plaque at 32nd Street and King Drive, was placed in 2014 after lobbying by the Camp Douglas Restoration Foundation, which has run two archaeological digs with a local school and hopes to build a museum.
The ghosts
The Chicago Architecture Center, listing the city’s haunted sites, records that the souls of the prisoners are said to wander the blocks where the camp stood, appearing as shadowy men in period dress who sometimes take hold of a passer-by’s arm or hand. That is the whole of the documented tradition. No named witness, date or location within the former camp attaches to it, and it does not appear in the extensive nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing about Camp Douglas, which is concerned with the death toll, the conditions and the politics of the monument.
Where it stands
Camp Douglas is a case where the history is grimmer than the folklore. More than four thousand men died of neglect and disease on a site that today shows nothing of them, and their bodies were moved twice before coming to rest under a monument that is itself contested as a Lost Cause memorial in a cemetery that also holds Ida B. Wells and Harold Washington. The shadowy figures in period dress are a recent addition that borrows the camp’s horror without adding any evidence to it.