Camp Chase: Where the Confederacy Came to Columbus
Near Columbus, Ohio
West of downtown Columbus, in what is now a residential neighborhood, stands a small Confederate cemetery, one of the last visible traces of a place that became one of the deadliest prisoner-of-war camps of the Civil War.
Camp Chase was established in May of eighteen sixty-one, just weeks after Fort Sumter, as a mustering and training ground for Union recruits. It was named for Salmon P. Chase, then Ohio's governor and soon to become Lincoln's Treasury Secretary. The training function did not last long. As Union armies began capturing Confederate soldiers in large numbers, especially after the fall of Fort Donelson in February eighteen sixty-two, Camp Chase was converted into a prison.
At its peak in eighteen sixty-three, the camp held around eight thousand men. It had been designed for four thousand. Two prisoners shared a single bunk. Food and clothing ran short. The Scioto River bottomland where the camp sat was cold and poorly drained.
In the winter of eighteen sixty-three to sixty-four, smallpox swept through the overcrowded barracks. In February of eighteen sixty-four alone, four hundred ninety-nine men died in a single month. By war's end, more than two thousand Confederate soldiers had perished at Camp Chase, most from disease rather than violence.
The camp was demolished after the war and absorbed into Columbus's westward growth. But one small parcel was set aside: the Camp Chase Confederate Cemetery, where two thousand two hundred sixty men lie buried under simple marble headstones. A bronze statue of a Confederate soldier, erected by former prisoners and their families in nineteen oh two, stands watch at the entrance.
The contrast is quiet but striking. A Southern memorial in an Ohio suburb, maintained by the United States government, marks the place where a war that began over slavery claimed thousands of men far from home.
