Union
Camp Name
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An institutional timeline of 22 major prison and parole camps operated by the Union and Confederacy during the American Civil War. The width of each bar represents the camp's operational period; color encodes mortality rate from cool blue (low) through deep red (catastrophic). The story turns on a single mechanism: the Dix-Hill prisoner exchange cartel of July 1862 kept camps nearly empty for a year — until it collapsed in mid-1863 when the Confederacy refused to treat Black Union soldiers as legitimate prisoners of war.
Click any camp bar to open a detail panel and zoom the map to that location. Key historical events — Fort Donelson, the Dix-Hill Cartel, the cartel's collapse, Grant's deliberate suspension of exchanges, Andersonville's peak, Appomattox, and the Sultana disaster — are marked as vertical annotations crossing all rows.
Maryland camps highlighted: Point Lookout (St. Mary's County) was the largest Union POW camp by peak population. Camp Parole (now the suburb of Annapolis called Parole) held Union soldiers released by the Confederacy and awaiting formal exchange — it was also Clara Barton's headquarters. Both are within 90 minutes of Bowie.
Sources: Official Records of the War of the Rebellion · Wikipedia / Civil War prison camps · American Battlefield Trust · NPS Andersonville NHS · Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion · Maryland DNR (Point Lookout) · HMDB
Developed and researched by Claude AI (Anthropic) · March 2026 · Corrections, suggestions, or additional sources are welcome via GitHub Issues