The first project of the Confederates on the Canadian frontier was to liberate all Confederate prisoners in the North, and in this purpose their hopes centred in Chicago, for here there was a great prison with thousands of men in confinement. Camp Douglas had been laid out in the summer of 1861 as a camp for military instruction. It was located on land belonging to the Douglas estate, just north of the grounds of the first Chicago University. In this region, where stands to-day the Douglas monument, no streets were then laid out, but the whole was open prairie, save for the little University building erected four years before, and one solitary residence. The camp was first used as a military station, but in February, 1862, after the battle of Fort Donelson, it was hastily prepared for the reception of prisoners and eight or nine thousand Confederates were placed there. Temporary quarters were erected to hold them, but the barracks became so crowded that the United States regiments were obliged to encamp in tents on the prairie. During this year Camp Douglas served as military prison for seventeen thousand Confederate prisoners and furnished barracks as well for eight thousand paroled Confederate troops. In 1863 it was much improved by a thorough rebuilding which followed a season of inclement weather, when the unsanitary and crowded conditions made the men, already weakened by exposure and army life, a prey to all kinds of disease. It was in the fall of this year that many dramatic escapes were made, the prisoners taking up the floor of their barracks and digging gradually at night and during the absences of the guards a long tunnel large enough for one man to crawl through to the open land beyond the camp fence. On a dark night eight or ten men would make their way out, watching from the outer end of the tunnel to escape between the rounds of the sentinel. During November some seventy prisoners made their escape through a tunnel over fifty feet long, of whom fifty were afterwards recaptured. The next year the prisoners’ barracks were raised four feet above the ground to prevent such escapes. It was no wonder that the thoughts of the Canadian Commissioners turned to this prison. During the year 1864, seventy-five hundred men came to join the five thousand already there, and in spite of the large death-rate that summer from smallpox and other contagious diseases, this was a body of men who, if liberated, could do great things in the Northwest.