If you were a Confederate prisoner during the Civil War, you might
have ended up in this infamous military prison in Chicago.
More Confederate soldiers died in Chicago's Camp Douglas than on any
Civil War battlefield. Originally constructed in 1861 to train forty
thousand Union soldiers from the northern third of Illinois, it was
converted to a prison camp in 1862. Nearly thirty thousand Confederate
prisoners were housed there until it was shut down in 1865. Today, the
history of the camp ranges from unknown to deeply misunderstood. David
Keller offers a modern perspective of Camp Douglas and a key piece of
scholarship in reckoning with the legacy of other military prisons.