Sweet rewarded guards for shooting prisoners, restricted prisoner movement, and enforced nightly quiet hours. The reduced rations increased instances of diseases such as scurvy and helped to increase mortality rates. Sweet's command of Camp Douglas, he used reduced food rations - removing vegetables and decreasing the 3oz daily meat portions - to control the prison population and reduce escape attempt numbers. Nothing but fire can cleanse them." (in the documentary 80 Acres of Hell).Īccording to the History Channel documentary, the commander before Sweet imposed the following harsh conditions: 3oz daily meat portions, sitting naked in the winter, crippling sittings on a sawhorse device, and beating or shooting of those trying to circumvent food rations - even, for example, to punish the eating of snow.ĭuring Colonel B.J. The absolute abandonment of the spot seems to be the only judicious course, I do not believe that any amount of drainage would purge that soil loaded with accumulated filth or those barracks fetid with two stories of vermin and animal exhalations. I hope that no thought will be entertained of mending matters. Sanitary Commission, wrote to Colonel Hoffman his superior after visiting the camp: "Sir, the amount of standing water, unpoliced grounds, of foul sinks, of unventilated and crowded barracks, of general disorder, of soil reeking miasmatic accretions, of rotten bones and emptying of camp kettles, is enough to drive a sanitarian to despair. Henry Whitney Bellows, president of the U.S. This is also to this date the largest mass grave in the western hemisphere, as documented by the book To Die in Chicago. Nobody was ever held accountable for the conditions and actions at Camp Douglas, in fact the only Union general to gain the rank without seeing combat was an overseer of Camp Douglas. Many, however, were initially buried in unmarked pauper's graves in Chicago's City Cemetery (located on the site of today's Lincoln Park), but in 1867 were reinterred at what is now known as Confederate Mound in Oak Woods Cemetery (5 miles south of the former Camp Douglas). Some were even dumped in Lake Michigan only to wash up on its shores. The documentary also alleges that, for a period of time, the camp contracted with an unscrupulous undertaker who sold some of the bodies of Confederate prisoners to medical schools and had the rest buried in shallow graves without coffins. According to 80 Acres of Hell, a television documentary produced by the A&E Network and the The History Channel, the reason for the uncertainty is that many records were intentionally destroyed after the war. The largest number of prisoners held at any one time was 12,000 in December, 1864. It is estimated that from 1862–1865, more than 6,000 Confederate prisoners died from disease, starvation, and the bitter cold winters (although as many as 1,500 were reported as "unaccounted" for). Eventually, over 26,000 Confederate soldiers passed through the prison camp, which eventually came to be known as the North's "Andersonville" for its inhumane conditions. The first Confederate prisoners of war, more than 7,000 from the capture of Fort Donelson in Tennessee, arrived in February 1862 by the Illinois Central railroad which ran along the shore of Lake Michigan just to the east of the camp. Douglas for a Union Army training post on the original site of the first University of Chicago. In 1861, a tract of land at 31st Street and Cottage Grove Avenue in Chicago was provided by the estate of Stephen A. Thomas Archibald Bagwell died on 23 September 1864 in Camp Douglas, Illinois, at age 17 Camp Douglas was a Union training camp and later prisoner-of-war camp in Chicago, Illinois, USA, during the American Civil War. Served as an unassigned conscript from North Carolina for the Confederate Army. 1 He was the son of Lorenzo Dow Bagwell and Agnes Elizabeth Morrison. Thomas Archibald Bagwell was born on 9 November 1846 in Rocky Springs, Alexander County, North Carolina.
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