"The releas’d prisoners of war are now coming up from the southern prisons. I have seen a number of them. The sight is worse than any sight of battle-fields, or any collection of wounded, even the bloodiest. There was (as a sample) one large boat load, of several hundreds, brought about the 25th, to Annapolis; and out of the whole number only three individuals were able to walk from the boat. The rest were carried ashore and laid down in one place or another. Can those be men—those little livid brown, ash-streak’d, monkey-looking dwarfs?—are they really not mummied, dwindled corpses? They lay there, most of them, quite still, but with a horrible look in their eyes and skinny lips (often with not enough flesh on the lips to cover their teeth.) Probably no more appalling sight was ever seen on this earth. (There are deeds, crimes, that may be forgiven; but this is not among them. It steeps its perpetrators in blackest, escapeless, endless damnation. Over 50,000 have been compell’d to die the death of starvation—reader, did you ever try to realize what starvation actually is?—in those prisons—and in a land of plenty.) An indescribable meanness, tyranny, aggravating course of insults, almost incredible—was evidently the rule of treatment through all the southern military prisons. The dead there are not to be pitied as much as some of the living that come from there—if they can be call’d living—many of them are mentally imbecile, and will never recuperate."
-Walt Whitman.
"Officially, 12,919 (thirty percent) of the Union prisoners at Andersonville died whereas 4,454 (seventeen per cent) of Confederate prisoners at Camp Douglas died. Wagner, Margaret E., Gallagher, Gary W. And Finkelman, Paul, eds., The Library of Congress Civil War Desk Reference. Simon and Shuster Paperbacks, Inc., New York, NY, pp. 605–6, 609. 2009 edition. ISBN 978-1-4391-4884-6. Levy also noted that prisoners could maintain many of their social customs and behaviors at Camp Douglas, which was impossible at Andersonville, and the garrison enforced discipline at Camp Douglas which deterred crime but the garrison at Andersonville rarely did so. Levy, 1999, pp. 343–344. Andersonville was an open "garbage pit" with no shelters or facilities while Camp Douglas had some buildings and facilities, even if inadequate, and some organization and order. Levy, 1999, p. 344. If about 6,000 deaths actually occurred at Camp Douglas as some sources suggest, the mortality rate for Confederates prisoners at the camp would have been about twenty-three percent. The highest mortality rate at any Union prison was twenty-four percent at Camp Elmira, New York. Wagner, et al., eds., 2009, p. 607. Without understating the conditions or death rate at Camp Douglas, Elmira or Fort Delaware might be more apt comparisons to Andersonville."
-Levy, George, To Die in Chicago: Confederate Prisoners at Camp Douglas 1862–1865.
reply
share
michaelstephenbryant
9 years ago
The prison that first comes to mind for me as being just as terrible is the prison in Elmira, New York. Where Confederate prisoners were kept during New York winters, some who had no shoes. And none were used to a Northern winter.
reply
share