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prison camps

“John Ransom’s Andersonville Diary”

November 29, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Much like the Civil War itself, accounts of prison camps can seem at opposite ends of the spectrum. Some, like Camp Douglas in Chicago, are as obscure as the physical sites themselves, buried under city development. Andersonville, the camp for Union POWs in Sumter County, Georgia, has had the most notorious reputation of any camp during the conflict. And yet some Union prisoners, like James Madison Page, reported a very different experience. 

The facts are stark. Over the 13 months of its existence, some 45,000 Union soldiers were imprisoned there, and 13,000 died. 

John Ransom, an acting quartermaster sergeant for the 9th Michigan Cavalry, was captured on Nov. 6, 1863, in east Tennessee. He was first sent to Belle Island, an island in the James River adjacent to Richmond, then to a tobacco warehouse building in Richmond itself, and finally by train to Andersonville. He survived the experience, but only barely. In 1881, he published Andersonville Diary, a memoir of his experiences, using the almost daily journal he kept as the basis.

What he described is, by any measure, horrible. The Confederates, like the Union, had no experience managing prison camps. By 1864, the Confederates were already being stretched thin with food and medical supplies for their own armies, and Union prisoners were not high on the priority list. Both the food supply and the medical resources at Andersonville were bad, and it wasn’t long before prisoners began to die.

Ransom as a young soldier

Exacerbating the already dire situation were the prisoners who formed gangs, robbing and terrorizing other prisoners for food, clothing, and any objects of value. As Ransom continually mentions, it was no surprise that escape and hope for prisoner exchanges were always on prisoners’ minds.

He describes how a prison economy developed, with various prisoners provided services like letter writing to others. But it was an economy in constant upheaval as the death count rose. He noted that some prisoners became mad.

No matter how sick prisoners became, they all wanted to avoid the prison hospital, because no one survived it. Ransom himself became so sick that, he said, he wanted to die. He was kept alive by a fellow prisoner, who happened to be a full-blooded Comanche Indian. Eventually, he and other prisoners were transferred to a hospital in Savannah, where he did receive decent medical care. 

Ransom in later years

Contrary to his fellow prisoner James Madison Page, he had nothing but condemnation for Captain Henry Wirz, the camp commandant who would be hanged after the war ended. He also understood that prisoner exchanges had stopped, because Union Secretary of War Edwin Stanton opposed exchanging Southern prisoners which would likely replenish Confederate armies.

By any definition, Andersonville deserves its reputation. The scenes Ransom describes in his Andersonville Diary are not unlike the scenes of the Holocaust camps in Europe during World Wat II. Some prisoners may have fared better than others, but the death rate and prison conditions speak directly to what can only be called a horror.

Related:

The Story of Camp Douglas by David Keller.

The True Story of Andersonville Prison by James Madison Page.

Top photograph: A view of Andersonville.

“The Story of Camp Douglas” by David Keller

October 18, 2023 By Glynn Young 6 Comments

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.

With its dismantling after the war and development that came later, the prison almost disappeared from popular history. But David Keller (1940-2022), who spent his working career as a banker, had a passion for Camp Douglas. He founded the Camp Douglas Restoration Foundation in 2010, served as a docent at the Chicago History Museum, and was a popular speaker on the prison camp and the Civil War. The foundation has conducted four archaeological excavations of the Camp Douglas site.

Confederate prisoners at Camp Douglas; Library of Congress

In 2015, Keller published The Story of Camp Douglas: Chicago’s Forgotten Civil War Prison. The book includes Keller’s extensive studies and investigations, and it sheds considerable light on a long-forgotten story in Civil War and Chicago history.

Camp Douglas, named after Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas (the Douglas family owned land nearby and may have donated some for the army base), opened first as an army base. But by late 1862, prison space was needed for captured Confederate POWs, and the army base soon was accepting prisoners. Overcrowding happened almost immediately, and the site was in a swampy area near Lake Michigan – a disaster waiting to happen for poorly-clothed POWs.

David Keller

Keller provides both details and context. He explains Chicago’s role in the Civil War and how Camp Douglas was created as a reception and training center for Union troops. He then gives a short but fact-filled overview of how prisoners of war had been treated in America up until the time of the Civil War, pointing out that no one had much experience in housing and dealing with thousands of POWs. He details how the camp was selected as a prison and how the problems of prison life were exacerbated by the eventual ending of prisoner paroles and exchanges.

The author draws upon both what official records exist as well as the memoirs of several prisoners. He looks at prisoner health and medical care, deaths, the reasons for the conditions and deaths at the camp, and how Camp Douglas compared to other prison camps on both sides of the war. Keller also includes a chapter on the Conspiracy of 1864, a plot devised by Southern sympathizers to free the POWs.

The Story of Camp Douglas is an important contribution to a little-known chapter of Civil War and American history, as well as to the history of POW camps in the 19th century. It was Keller’s passion to shine a light on a chapter of Chicago and Civil War history that had long been forgotten. 

Related:

The True Story of the Andersonville Prison by James Madison Page.

Top illustration: A drawing of the general layout of Camp Douglas.

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Meet the Man

An award-winning speechwriter and communications professional, Glynn Young is the author of three novels and the non-fiction book Poetry at Work.

 

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