Customer Reviews

To Die in Chicago: Confederate Prisoners at Camp Douglas 1862-65

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Lets start with the author. His research is exacting, methodical, and painstaking. He brought zero bias to the enterprise and the result is a stunning achievement that is both scholarly and readable. Douglas, the "accidental" prison camp began as a training camp for IL. volunteers. Donalson and Island #10 changed that. The long war no one expected combined with artic cold, primitive medical care and the barbarity of the captors created in the authors own words "a death camp." Stanton's and Grant's policy of halting the prisoner exchange behind the pretense of Fort Pillow accelerated the suffering. In the latest edition Levy found the long lost hospital records at the National Archives which prove conclusively that casualties were deliberately under reported. Prisoners were tortured, brutality was tolerated and corruption was widespread. The handling of the dead rivals stories of Nazi Germany. The largest mass grave in the Western Hemisphere is filled with....the bodies of Camp Douglas dead, 4200 known and 1800 unknown. No one should be allowed to speak of Andersonville until they have absorbed the horror of Douglas.

George Levy does an excellent job in presenting the life and times of a Civil War prisoner of war camp -- from its origin to its closing after the completion of the War. The most positive aspect of the book, however, is that it lacks bias; Levy is objective throughout his presentation. The only detractions of the book are what I perceived to be poor editting. For instance, several statements and facts were often repeated in later chapters. Also, tables of data were poorly presented in their format. This is not the author's fault, but rather the editor's. With regard to content, I would have preferred to read more descriptions of Camp Douglas from the Union soldiers' point of view (especially those within the Camp's garrison or the VRC). Nearly all of the views of the Camp from the Union perspective were based on administrator's reports and communications. How different were the views between the common Union soldier and the Confederate POWs? We really don't get a clear picture of this dichotomy from Levy's book. Overall, the book is better than any Andersonville book that I've read.

To Die in Chicago is a wonderfully researched and well-written book that provides a vivid and heartbreaking account of the Confederate prisoners who lived and died in a Union prison camp. It gives much information for anyone seeking information about ancestors held there and it offers a real sense of the prisoners' daily lives and ordeals. I checked it out six times from the library and decided it is time to buy it. You should too!

My interest in this book was sparked because one of my 3G Grandfather's brother's died there. I read it to get a sense of what happened to him. I could not put it down. This book shocked and insensed me about what history never told me. Well worth reading you are looking for read that tells history as it is rather than how it was not. I highly recommend this book also for people who have a fascination for the Civil War time period like me.

As a descendent of a soldier from a Mississippi regiment who was a prisoner at Camp Douglas I found this book to be very informative and easy to read. The author has thoroughly researched this subject and appears to have left no stone unturned. What I found especially interesting is his work not only provides information on the suffering of Union soldiers and Confederate prisoners at Camp Douglas but provides a window into the federal bureaucracy characterized by corruption, penny pinching and incompetence that caused so much needless suffering. Perhaps this was true in the south but Confederate prison camps are not the subject matter of this work.

I would recommend this work to anyone interested in the Union prison camp system and Camp Douglas.

This book was a great addition to to the information that I had on Andersonville Georgia USA by Peggy Sheppard when we visited it on an Elderhostel trip in 1999 and she was our instructor.

I love the synopsis at the beginning of each chapter. I gave the book 5 stars because of the wonderful overview it gave.

This book is more on the administration of the camp, that is it tells about the camp commanders and Hoffman who ran the camps and the Secretary of War Stanton who was motivated by revenge. The idea that the north should take the high road and make reunification an easier proposition never occurred to Stanton even when it was clear the Confederacy was dead.

Levy did an excellent job and used information on Burke and and his Pa who were both in the camp to give a view of prison life. Pa, a Mason, 'deserted' the camp and went to live in the Mason barracks who was tended by a guard who was a Mason. Condition were so good there that Pa no longer wanted to be exchanged and after his release Pa went to live in Medina, Ohio where his mother lived.

Burke on the other hand lived in the south after the war. When Burke left he did not give his blanket or other items to Pa, showing the rift that developed. This provided a good example of life and after life of the camp and its people. How the dead were buried in wetlands and their recovery was bungled at least four times is interesting as well.

I have tried to take a different approach than the other reviews. The book is somewhat like a college professor's lecture so it is a bit dry at times, but Levy is what he is. His classes must be informative and interesting as well and there was no way to present the information he did without it being somewhat dry at times. This is the cost of a wonderfully well presented overview of Camp Douglas from the top to the bottom. A book from the life of prisoners would have been more interesting, but you would not have learned about those who ran the camp and why.

The one thing Levy left out was when Ada C. Sweet died. Perhaps he could not find the information. On September 17, 1928, Ada died at the home of her sister, Mrs. Winifred Black Bonfils, (Annie Laurie) in San Francisco, California. Ada was 72 years old and had run a good race.

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Have just received "To Die in Chicago". Book was in excellent condition and is living up to my expectations. I have just begun to read and reseach but this book is a wealth of information.

Bought the book because of a class on the Civil War I took that made me want more details and the book provided that.

This is a strange book and I would be interested to know how well it was received by the academic community. On the one hand, Levy quotes and footnotes a large number of original sources. (Most of these seem reliable, but he uses several Chicago newspapers somewhat uncritically, which worries me a little.) On the other hand, his analytical statements sometimes seem questionable or even simply wrong. As one example, his claim that Morgan's raid "pointed the way for" Sherman's march through Georgia is not, I think, supportable. The book overall lacks a thesis or analytical framework. The edition I read was also very badly edited, with several paragraphs actually cut off and the text missing. Having made these criticisms, the original sources, particularly prisoners' diaries, quoted by Levy do reveal a vision of a horrific place to be. At Camp Douglas, unusually for the period, prisoners were actually beaten by guards and forced to sit unclothed in the snow, among other "punishments". Levy does not analyze the fact that this brutality worsened significantly as the war went on, with the camp being reasonably tolerable in 1862 and a hellhole in 1864. Overall, this book collects interesting information but I would treat all unsupported statements made by the author with extreme caution.