Ohio Confederate statues remain part of state Civil War landmark

Cleveland Plain Dealer

MARBLEHEAD

Rain slices down the bayonet of the bronze Confederate soldier guarding the entrance to a Civil War cemetery on Sandusky Bay where some 267 Rebel officers and soldiers are buried.

The 19-foot-tall statue, which has been dubbed The Lookout for his gaze out over the water, was erected in 1910 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy as a memorial to the fallen soldiers.

But that gaze may be tinged with concern in light of recent actions in New Orleans to remove four statues relating to the Confederacy and the aftermath of the Civil War.

The New Orleans City Council had Confederate statues declared public nuisances, and Mayor Mitch Landrieu said they “celebrated a fictional, sanitized Confederacy, ignoring the death, ignoring the enslaved, ignoring the terror that it actually stood for.

Ohio, which contributed more than 300,000 soldiers for the Union during the Civil War, has about 300 monuments dedicated to that war. Fewer than a half- dozen represent the Confederacy.

Two of the largest monuments are located at cemeteries for former prison camps that held Confederate POWs – at Johnson’s Island, near Sandusky, and Camp Chase in Columbus.

Both cemeteries are owned by the federal government and are currently maintained by the Department of Veterans Affairs, National Cemetery Administration.

The Camp Chase prison held about 8,000 prisoners at its peak in 1864. Diseases including smallpox, typhus and pneumonia killed nearly eight percent of the prison population.

After the war, the prison cemetery fell into disrepair until a former Union soldier who moved to Columbus began restoration efforts in 1893.

The Johnson’s Island prison opened in 1861 as the first facility to be constructed by the Union solely for imprisoning Confederates – mostly officers and a small number of enlisted men.

At its peak, the 16-acre prison held 3,200 Confederates. But as with Camp Chase, disease and illness steadily thinned the ranks, and the dead were buried on the pastoral island in what became known as the Confederate Stockade Cemetery.

In 1904, the prison site was purchased by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The group donated it to the U.S. government in 1932, and the Johnson’s Island Civil War Prison site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1990.