There are over 6,000 Confederate soldiers buried in Oak Woods Cemetery in Chicago who died of illness or starvation in Union prisoner-of-war camps. Instead of individual burials, each with a headstone, the soldiers were buried in a mass grave, memorialized by a tall monument with the statue of a Confederate soldier. The names of the dead are engraved on bronze plaques. The burials, plaques and monument do not paint the Confederacy “in false glory and sentimental nostalgia” and was not motivated by such an aim, but rather by the recognition that the Confederate dead were human beings whose lives mattered and deserved remembrance.
Slavery was not only a sin of the South, but of the Union as well until the 13th Amendment was ratified in December, 1865, months after the Civil War had ended. The Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, did not pertain to slaves in the Union states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, or Missouri, nor to slaves in counties of Virginia that were soon to form the Union state of West Virginia, nor to slaves in occupied Tennessee and the occupied southern region of Louisiana. Are we therefore to remove monuments to Union soldiers from the slave states of the Union?
— Jerre Levy, Chicago
