One Civil War prison has tended to receive most of the attention from historians, and with some justification. Andersonville in Georgia was a POW camp that housed up to 45,000 Union soldiers, and nearly 13,000 died from disease, overcrowding, or exposure. After the war, its commandant, Austrian-born Captain Henry Wirz, was arrested, charged, tried by a military tribunal, and hanged.
I’d heard of the POW camp in Elmira, New York, which imprisoned Confederates referred to as “Hellmira.” In 2020 Civil War historian Derek Maxfield published Hellmira: The Union’s Most Infamous Civil War Prison Camp—Elmira, NY. Almost 3,000 prisoners died at Elmira. And I’d heard of the prison at Alton, Illinois, which housed up to 1,900 Confederate prisoners at any given time and at which some 1,500 died. If you add the totals for all prisons, more Confederates died in Union prisons than Union soldiers in Confederate prisons. But the numbers can be deceiving; the totals on both sides were likely higher.)
But a prison camp in Chicago, which started life as an army base near the present campus of the University of Chicago, holds the dubious honor of being the Union prison where more Confederates died than any other. Officially, about 4,400 Confederate prisoners died at Camp Douglas, the highest number of deaths of any Union POW camp. And the number is likely higher because of poor recordkeeping and the destruction of records in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.
Some Wednesday Readings
Can a Donor Revolt Save American Universities? – Joseph Savage at The Free Press.
A Fall Break for the Army – Bert Dunkerly at Emerging Civil War.
Who or what are ‘the Palestinians?’ – Roger Kimball at The Spectator.
Why Was My Talk at a Medical Conference Canceled? – Vinay Prasad at The Free Press.
On the Railroad Tracks to the Western Theater – Sarah Kay Bierle at Emerging Civil War.
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