A Confederate monument stands watch over the graves of more than 4,000 men in Oak Woods Cemetery, 1035 E. 67th St. But how did they all get here?
Soon after the cemetery was created in 1853, Illinois created Camp Douglas at 31st Street and Cottage Grove Avenue as it mustered troops for the Union cause. Barracks were built, privies dug and troops trained. After they left, the camp stood empty until the Union suddenly needed to house thousands of prisoners of war.
It was a terrible location for a camp: the ground didn’t drain, sewage – as for all of Chicago – was a problem, and the camp’s water came from the polluted lake. While the food was supposed to be regular Union army fare, vendors cheated on the quality and quantity. The barracks had stoves, but the southern men, who had one blanket, suffered in winter. Prisoners were brutally punished for infractions.Food, warmth and cleanliness in the camp hospital were much better, but medicine was primitive.
Prisoners could get packages at one point, but they were limited after guards found revolvers stuffed inside turkeys and knives inside bread. They could buy food and supplies from licensed vendors if they had greenbacks. For recreation they gambled, played baseball and dug tunnels, pulling up barrack floorboards to dig unseen. Escapes were frequent; one night, 80 men slipped out. Knowing the guards’ muskets were defective, some prisoners escaped by pushing through the rickety fence before it was replaced. Others just bribed a guard.
The Tribune periodically spotted a few uniformed Black men among the prisoners. Most were the enslaved servants of officers. After 1863, they were released, but it may be, as the “Defender” speculated, that there are also Black men buried in the Confederate mound.
The men died of measles, cholera and dysentery. Many of the men arrived in bad shape. Several thousand arrived from Arkansas in rags, suffering from scurvy and smallpox. Prisoner exchanges emptied the camp periodically but, with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, the exchanges stopped. The camp, with a capacity for 6,000, swelled to more than 12,000. A careful analysis in the 1980s concluded that the number of dead was close to the 4,234 whose names are known. Others have cited numbers closer to 6,000. Either way, Camp Douglas was bad, worse than it had to be.
Though Hyde Park Village was a Lincoln stronghold, Chicago was home to a number of pro-South secret societies. In 1864, the Democratic Party, loaded with Southern sympathizers, was holding its presidential convention in Chicago. Conspirators thought that the two groups combined meant there were enough men to spring the 12,000 soldiers in Camp Douglas. They hoped the ensuing chaos would pull Sherman’s army out of Georgia, but, in the end, sympathizing was one thing, taking action was another. The armed uprising didn’t happen, and the collaborators were tried and convicted.
As for the dead of Camp Douglas, they were moved to the city cemetery. When it became Lincoln Park, the U.S. government bought the plot in Oak Woods. In 1867, two years after the war ended, the government buried the coffins in long trenches under an unmarked mound. Perhaps they hoped that Camp Douglas would be forgotten.
In 1868, General John A. Logan of Illinois, president of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), a fraternal organization of Union veterans, declared that every May 30 would be Decoration Day, a solemn day to remember the Union soldiers who had sacrificed themselves for the nation. GAR Abraham Lincoln Post 91 on Chicago’s South Side bought a plot in Oak Woods Cemetery for its members. Another plot, marked with a silent sentinel statue and four cannons, was purchased for indigent veterans. By 1872, thousands rode special Illinois Central trains to Oak Woods on Decoration Day to lay flowers on Union graves while women sang of their sacrifice and speakers recalled that their blood had washed away the stain of slavery.
As a new generation came of age, scars were forgotten. Battle memoirs on both sides became best sellers and Blue-Grey battlefield reunions fascinated the public. On Decoration Day, crowds of 20,000 came to Oak Woods.
In 1885, Union veterans asked ex-Confederates if they would march in the Chicago funeral parade for U.S. Grant. The few dozen that showed up later formed the Ex-Confederate Veterans and joined the Decoration Day ceremonies. References to slavery and rebellion faded as flowers were strewn on the Confederate mound and Union graves alike.
Kentuckian John Cox Underwood had tried to raise Confederate monuments in several Eastern cities before moving to Chicago. The unmarked Confederate mound gave him the perfect opportunity. He told Chicago that a monument on the mound was about honoring chivalric courage in an act of “harmonious forgetfulness.”
Underwood’s goal was to broker Northern investment in the impoverished South while reframing the past as the Lost Cause, a movement that claimed the war was about states’ rights, agrarian values and natural aristocracy, and that slavery was a benevolent institution. The South, in short, had nothing to acknowledge or atone for. One money raiser for the monument was a lecture by Confederate General John Brown Gordon. He was a politician loudly opposed to Reconstruction and accused of leading the Georgia Ku Klux Klan. Another fundraiser was a gala celebrating plantation life where Black entertainers sang “pleasing plantation melodies.”
Underwood designed the monument himself. An unarmed Confederate soldier, his head bowed, stands atop a granite pillar, apparently gazing down in sorrow at the men beneath his feet. However, it’s based on a painting by John Adams Elder called “Appomattox,” the moment the cause became lost. The base has the great seal of the Confederacy on its front. Three plaques decorate the other sides. One shows men rushing to the courthouse to enlist; one depicts a soldier dying on a battlefield; and the last depicts a veteran’s return home to a ruined landscape. The dead of Camp Douglas never got to return home or witness Appomattox.
The dedication in 1895 was all that Underwood could wish for. It was an enormous affair, covered in excruciating detail by the newspapers: Chicago’s plutocrats, famous Confederate generals and the GAR on one dais! More than 100,000 turned out to gawk at men like General James Longsteet, Robert E. Lee’s right-hand man.
The Southerners graciously said that the Camp Douglas deaths were inevitable, the natural result of hardships and homesickness. They pointed out that it was Southern votes in Congress that gave the 1893 World’s Fair to Chicago. Everyone hoped for the dawn of a new prosperity. Even Booker T. Washington, who was not there, talked about the dedication as a welcome reconciliation if it inspired Chicago to invest in the Southern Black community. Jenkin Lloyd Jones, wounded Union veteran, charismatic preacher, fervent supporter of Lincoln and the uncle of Frank Lloyd Wright, said that, though the men had died in the service of human blundering, God used their sacrifice to bring about reconciliation.
Part of the ceremony involved spiking four cannons, donated by the U.S. government. However, recent accounts that say the dedication included President Grover Cleveland and his cabinet are wrong. Through a wild coincidence, they were in Oak Woods later that same day, but they were bringing the body of Secretary of State Walter Q. Gresham to the cemetery chapel. They arrived late on a special train from Washington, D.C., said prayers, and immediately returned, never laying eyes on a Confederate general.
Other GAR posts were outraged that the monument was dedicated on the day sacred to the Union dead. The Black GAR posts of Chicago were noticeably silent. Thomas D. Lowther thought there was way too much “harmonious forgetfulness” and way too little remembering. He anonymously bought the plot next to the mound. The next Decoration Day, the Confederates were enraged to find a cenotaph in their way, dedicated to Southerners who had opposed slavery and disunion, men like Lowther himself.
In 1905, Abraham Lincoln Post 91 erected the statue “Lincoln the Orator” on their plot. It’s a copy of a statue in Rosamond, Illinois, by Charles J. Mulligan, a student of Lorado Taft. It represents Lincoln at the moment of his fullest articulation of the meaning of the war, at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery. The original statue spells out on its base Lincoln’s ode to a government “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The Oak Woods Lincoln is silent, the base blank.
In 1911, after Congress passed a law to put names on Civil War graves, bronze plates naming the known dead in the mound were added to a new base. The men themselves finally got their due.
In 1914, the cemetery declared that only white people could buy new plots, though Black families, like that of Ida B. Wells, could continue using plots they already owned. Jenkin Lloyd Jones issued a thunderous denunciation but it wasn’t until 1963 and a lawsuit that Oak Woods once more became the resting place for Chicago’s Black leaders.
As for Decoration Day, it evolved into Memorial Day as new wars took a new toll. Once it became a Monday holiday, the era when tens of thousands gathered to decorate graves and listen to speakers ponder the meaning of sacrifice in war had passed.
If you see something around Hyde Park that makes you ask, "What’s that about?", let me know athydeparkquestions@gmail.com. I might be able to find the story.
