Camp Chase: Confederate Graves in a Union City
Near Columbus, Ohio
In May eighteen sixty-one, barely a month after the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter, the United States Army established Camp Chase on the western edge of Columbus. It began as a training ground for Union volunteers. Within a year it had become one of the largest Confederate prisoner-of-war camps in the North.
At its peak, in eighteen sixty-three, the prison held around eight thousand Confederate soldiers. Disease moved through the camp with relentless efficiency. Smallpox, pneumonia, typhoid. By the end of the war, the camp's cemetery held over two thousand graves.
The camp was dismantled after eighteen sixty-five. The surrounding land was absorbed into Columbus's Hilltop neighborhood, eventually built over with houses and streets. The cemetery alone remained, and what remained was two thousand two hundred sixty graves, the largest Confederate cemetery in the North.
In eighteen ninety-five, a former Union soldier named William Knauss organized the first memorial service at the site. He believed the dead deserved recognition regardless of which side they had fought for. He published a history of the camp in nineteen oh six. A Confederate Soldier Memorial was dedicated in nineteen oh two.
Today Camp Chase Confederate Cemetery is administered by the Veterans Administration as a national cemetery equivalent. Federal maintenance of Confederate graves has been a source of quiet controversy in national policy debates for decades. The graves are there either way, in rows, in Columbus, in a city that fought the other side.
