Camp Douglas (Chicago)

Camp Douglas
Chicago, Illinois, US
Union soldier training camp and the largest prisoner of war camp for detaining military personnel of the Confederate States of America
Type	Training Camp and Union Prison Camp
Site information
Owner	U.S. Government
Controlled by	Union Army
Site history
Built	1861
In use	1861–1865
Demolished	1865
Battles/wars	American Civil War
Garrison information
Past commanders	Brigadier General Daniel Tyler Brigadier General Jacob Ammen Brigadier General William W. Orme Colonel Joseph H. Tucker Colonel Arno Voss Colonel James A. Mulligan Colonel Daniel Cameron Colonel Charles V. DeLand Colonel James C. Strong Colonel Benjamin J. Sweet Captain J. S. Putnam
Occupants	Union soldiers, Confederate prisoners of war

Camp Douglas, in Chicago, Illinois, sometimes described as "The North's Andersonville," was one of the largest Union Army prisoner-of-war camps for Confederate soldiers taken prisoner during the American Civil War. Based south of the city on the prairie, it was also used as a training and detention camp for Union soldiers. The Union Army first used the camp in 1861 as an organizational and training camp for volunteer regiments. It became a prisoner-of-war camp in early 1862. Later in 1862 the Union Army again used Camp Douglas as a training camp. In the fall of 1862, the Union Army used the facility as a detention camp for paroled Confederate prisoners (these were Union soldiers who had been captured by the Confederacy and sent North under an agreement that they would be held temporarily while formal prisoner exchanges were worked out).

Camp Douglas became a permanent prisoner-of-war camp from January 1863 to the end of the war in May 1865. In the summer and fall of 1865, the camp served as a mustering out point for Union Army volunteer regiments. The camp was dismantled and the movable property was sold off late in the year. The land was eventually sold-off and developed.

In the aftermath of the war, Camp Douglas eventually came to be noted for its poor conditions and death rate of about seventeen percent. Some 4,275 Confederate prisoners were known to be re-interred from the camp cemetery to a mass grave at Oak Woods Cemetery after the war.