Tonight at 10pm on the History Channel there will FINALLY be a special on a Civil War Prison other than Andersonville. I have a special connection with the show's topic, Camp Douglas in Chicago, because that is where two of my great great uncles and my great great grandfather were taken after being captured at the battle of Nashville. One of my uncles died of disease there and is buried in the cemetery in Chicago.
I apologize for posting this kind of late but I was only just informed about this special a few minutes ago.

I hope that the show will explore the horrors and injustice of the prison. Here is a excerpt taken from a book by Dee Alexander Brown. He wrote a biography on General John Hunt Morgan. These are some statements from some of Morgan's men who were sent to Camp Douglas following Hunt's failed raid in Indiana.

"The first seven of these recaptured men were marched out before the assembled prisinors and tortured with thumbscrews until they fainted with pain. Others were tied up by their thumbs with their toes barley touching the ground. "I saw men punished thus, "said private Thomas D. Henry in a sworn statement," until they would grow so deathly sick that they would vomit all over themselves, their heads fall forward and almost every sign of life become extinct; the ends of their thumbs would burst open; a suergoun standing by would feel their pulse and say he thought they could stand it a little longer. Some times he would say they had better be cut down."
For petty offenses Captain Wells Sponable freely administered both physical and mental cruelties. When he discovered how important reading matter was to the prisoners, Sponable seemed to delight in depriving entire barracks of every form of literature. More than anything else the boys wanted newspapers so that they might know how the war was going, but after Sponable took charge they rarley saw one.
Raw winter weather settled down over the lake front with nights that were bittere cold in the barracks. "The suffereing of the prisoners was great in the extreme,"one of them wrote. "I have seen great, stout hearted men who had faced death in many forms weep from the intense cold."
Sentinel at Camp Douglas reported on Augusta 10, 1864, "Saw a prisoner crawling on his hands and knees outside the fence and under the parapet on which I was stationed. Did not halt him, but fired and hit him."
T.M. Page recorded a "midnight frolic of drunken guards who dragged a score of prisoners from bed and flogged them with cartridge belts." J.S. Rosamond told of how he was ordered to get down on all fours and walk around the bone, growling and barking like a dog for half and hour or so, and then was forced to grovel in the dirt and gnaw at the bone.
"If any one of us was heard to whisper at night," said Private Henry, "or the least ray of light was seen, the guard would fire into the barracks at once." T.B. Clore of the 10th Kentucky "I have know them to be passing along at the dead hour of the night and just for downright meannes fire into the barracks where we were asleep. As a protection many of us nailed a board across the head of our bunks and filled in between that and the outside boards with earth and stones."
All the guards developed loose trigger fingers when prisoners walked anywhere near the deadline, which was eighteen feet inside the fence. "After being cooped up in the cars four or five days, they were nearly dead for water. The poor fellows would lie down close to the deadline and reach their arms through and pull the snow to them. I saw one of the guards standing twenty-five steps from a prisoner thus engaged shoot at him three times."

Kind of makes Andersonville look like Motel 6.