The Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument of Indiana

The Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument of Indiana

The Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument

As a sign of celebration and remembrance, many Confederate monuments offer a message of a time in US history marred by slavery and the breakup of the Union. The objectives of these monuments are to perpetuate the Lost Cause narrative and continue the fallacies that the Civil War was not fought over slavery. In many cases those monuments are a representation of a belief system yet offer no historical context. The Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Indiana was erected as a memorial to Confederate prisoners of war who died at Camp Morton. The memorial gives a glimpse into the horrors of war if looking deeper into the grounds where the monument once stood. It also inspires the inquiry of why the monument erected to memorialize the Confederate dead and why it was important to do so. Camp Morton served as a military camp for Union troops from April 1861 until February 1862. Situated on the Indiana State Fairgrounds, it was used as a mustering ground and military camp. One of eight Union prison camps for Confederate noncommissioned officers and privates, it is estimated that approximately 1,700 prisoners died at Camp Morton between 1862 and 1865. Some of the buried soldiers were exhumed and returned to their families. However, it is known that the remains of 1,616 prisoners were left behind. In 1866 a fire ravaged the cemetery office, destroying the records that gave the precise locations of the burials. In 1909 former Confederate General William C. Oates, a former congressman from Alabama, was commissioned to identify the soldiers who died in federal prison camps. Unsuccessful in finding the remains of the missing soldiers, former General Oates recommended a single shaft be erected bearing the names of the soldiers. The monument reads, “Erected by the United States to mark the burial place of 1,616 Confederate Soldiers and Sailors who died here while prisoners of war and whose graves cannot now be identified.” The monument represents the lives lost as prisoners of war but unlike other conflicts before and after, the men memorialized died at home. These men had been made prisoners by their own countrymen, fighting for ideological differences that enslaved the lives of men and women who also shared the same nationality. Ultimately, the monument, like many others like it, met its demise and was removed on June 8, 2020, following Black Lives Matter protests after the murder of George Floyd. The Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument of Indiana served not just as a memorial of the prisoners that died there. It also served as a historical landmark that provided an insight into the Civil War that many other monuments simply do not offer. It does not celebrate the Confederacy, or does it perpetuate the Lost Cause narrative. It provides a symbol of a nation broken by the institution of slavery, a nation that was forced to turn on itself in the name of individual freedom in the belief that all men are created equal.

Confederate General William C. Oates (creator)

Winslow, Hattie Lou, and Joseph R. H. Moore. Camp Morton, 1861–1865: Indianapolis Prison Camp. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society: 1995.

Bodenhamer, David, and Robert G. Barrows, eds. The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis. Indiana University Press: 1994.

"Memorial for Confederates". Plymouth Tribune. November 5, 1908

Mack, Vic Ryckaert and Justin L. "Garfield Park Confederate Memorial being dismantled". The Indianapolis Star. Retrieved 2020-06-08.

1911

Max Bezanilla

English

Memorial

Hist. 402A Fall 2021

Indianapolis, Indiana