‘Drive a bayonet into the — —! Let him drop where he is!’ The orders were barked out by an excited German, a member of a small platoon made up of European settlers eager to fight for their newly adopted homeland. Before the latest Confederate prisoner was shredded by razor-sharp bayonets, two ‘ruddy-faced Ohioans’ intervened, claimed Stanley as their prisoner and frogmarched him from the battlefield. His knapsack containing letters, the photograph of Henry Hope and the lock of his hair were left in the hollow in which he had sought refuge from the madness all around.
Stanley claims that as he was taken from the battlefield he spoke to his Yankee captors about their respective causes. He learned that Yankees were not the robbers politicians had made them out to be, but decent fellows who, like himself, would have preferred to be anywhere else but in a war. Now he was their prisoner he expected to be treated decently as he was directed to other captives taken on the battlefield.
They were bundled onto steamers and dispatched upriver to St Louis from where they were herded into railway trucks and taken to Camp Douglas on the outskirts of Chicago – the northern military’s best-kept secret prison camp, a grim hellhole where more would die in its overcrowded, unsanitary, brutal conditions than on many a field of battle.
The prison pen was a square enclosure, a bleak cattle yard, walled high with planking on top of which were sentry boxes. Over eight thousand prisoners were housed in twenty large wooden barns standing 30ft apart in two rows, each measuring about 250ft by 40ft and accommodating up to 300 tired, wounded, hungry and lice-ridden men. Inside each barn was a wide platform on each side, raised 4ft from the rough floor. These platforms formed continuous bunks for about sixty men, allowing 30in per prisoner. Two more rows were accommodated on the hard floor.
Prisoners were told to form into military-style companies and elect ‘officers’ to draw rations and oversee the running of each barn. Trooper Stanley of the 6th Arkansas Regiment found himself ‘Captain’ of his barn’s right-hand platform and the berth below. Blank books were handed to each ‘Captain’ with instructions to note the names of everyone in their company. Stanley was responsible for 100 captives and on production of his ration book, he was assigned meagre supplies for his men for distribution in the billet.
Disease swept through Camp Douglas’s miserable prison barns so that within a week of arriving, scores of men in Stanley’s billet were suffering from dysentery, cholera and typhoid. Medicine offered by the Confederate government to ease their soldiers’ suffering was seized by prison authorities as ‘spoils of war’. Soon the company’s size began to dwindle as sick and dying men were carried off, never to return.
Filthy latrines were located next to open sewers at the rear of the barns and rain washed raw sewage into drinking water supplies. ‘Each time imperious nature compelled us to resort to them, we lost a little of that respect and consideration we owed our fellow-creatures,’ Stanley recalled. Crowds of sick men, who had fallen to the ground with weakness, wallowed in filth, breathing in the stenchful atmosphere. Those not so far gone prayed for death. Dead wagons arrived daily to collect more bodies, which were piled one upon the other like so many carcases of frozen mutton.
On the same day as the dead wagon carted away two full loads, Stanley was told that if he was tired of being a prisoner he could be released – by the simple expedient of switching sides, exchanging his disease-infested rags for a new blue uniform worn by soldiers of the North. At first he refused but over the following weeks he realised that if he remained at Camp Douglas he would either succumb to illness and die or be locked up in the hellhole for many more months. On 4 June 1862, Stanley together with a handful of other men negotiated their release, enrolled in the US Artillery Services, took an oath of allegiance to the government of the North – ‘and was once more free to inhale the fresh air’.