Only six years after the end of the Civil War, the Great Chicago Fire destroyed all the Chicago Historical Society’s records. So when Ted Karamanski was researching his 1993 book, Rally ‘Round the Flag: Chicago and the Civil War, he had to piece together the missing history from newspaper accounts.
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Unfortunately, “the coverage was partisan and unreliable,” he says. Among the most prominent daily papers were Joseph Medill’s abolitionist, pro-Lincoln, prowar Chicago Tribune and the Democratic, segregationist “copperhead” Chicago Times, whose flamboyant editor, Wilbur F. Storey, “heaped mountains of purple prose on Abe Lincoln, essentially advocating that the Union give up the effort to reunite the country–that the Confederacy should be allowed to go its own way.”
Camp Douglas was the Union army installation located in what later became known as Bronzeville. At the beginning of the war many Chicagoans had visited the camp on weekends, mingling with the troops and chatting with the prisoners. But the custom came to an end as bitterness toward the south increased. Thousands of Confederate POWs at the camp died of dysentery, smallpox, and exposure; many were buried at Oak Woods Cemetery on 67th Street. Prisoners who misbehaved or tried to escape were exiled to an airless, windowless building or forced to straddle “Morgan’s mule”–a piece of lumber suspended 15 feet above the ground–with a brick tied to each leg.
