Confederate Mound

Camp Douglas began as a Union training camp on the south side of Chicago, but after the surrender of Fort Donelson in February 1862 the federal government hastily converted it into a military prison. More than 26,000 Confederate prisoners passed through Camp Douglas, and more than 4,000 died there. Men who died at the camp were buried at City Cemetery, now Lincoln Park, and at a smallpox cemetery. In late 1865, local ordinances forced the U.S. Army to move the remains of an estimated 5,000 Confederate prisoners buried in the city, and the federal government purchased a 5-acre lot in Oak Woods Cemetery. The remains of 655 Confederates and at least twelve Union guards from the smallpox cemetery were reinterred there, and two years later the army moved an additional 3,384 bodies from the City Cemetery. This lot became known as Confederate Mound. In 1887, the War Department approved an Ex-Confederate Association of Chicago proposal to place a memorial there, and John C. Underwood, a former Confederate officer, designed it and raised funds to erect it. The army supplied four artillery pieces and enough projectiles to create six pyramidal stacks around the monument, whose May 30, 1895, dedication drew an estimated 100,000 people. In 1911, the Commission for Marking Graves of Confederate Dead hired Van Amringe Granite Company of Boston, Massachusetts, to raise the nearly 40 foot monument and place it on a new base surrounded by a low mound. The mound features sixteen bronze plaques containing the names of 4.275 Confederate soldiers that the Commission was able to document as having perished at Camp Douglas. Broader national efforts toward reconciliation also shaped Confederate burial commemoration: on May 30, 1868, the Grand Army of the Republic decorated Union and Confederate graves at Arlington National Cemetery; thirty years later President William McKinley declared that every soldier's grave from the Civil War was a tribute to American valor and urged shared care for Confederate graves. The War Department created the Confederate section at Arlington in 1901 and marked the graves with distinctive pointed-top marble headstones. In 1906, Congress created the Commission for Marking Graves of Confederate Dead to identify and mark the graves of Confederates who died in Northern prisons, later expanding its mission to all national cemeteries containing Confederate burials. Four former Confederate officers led the Commission over its lifetime, and by 1916 it had marked more than 25,500 graves and erected monuments where individual graves could not be identified. In 1930, the War Department authorized the addition of the Southern Cross of Honor to the Confederate headstone.

Chicago, Illinois · United States