CONFEDERATE MEMORIAL DAY
Confederate Mound, Oak Woods Cemetery, Chicago
Confederate Mound, Oak Woods Cemetery, Chicago
April 23, 2017
Sunday, 23 April, marked Confederate Memorial Day, and the annual service to honor the 6,229 Southern soldiers who died at infamous Camp Douglas, in Chicago, was held by the SCV’s Camp Douglas 516. Moreover, for the first time in years, Michigan supplied participants in the person of three SCV Camp 2257 members, and making the trip on a sun-shiny, 70 degree day were 7th Arkansas Captain Robert Fragala, Adjutant Duane Peachey, and Jim Perkins.
Approximately thirty people attended the ceremony at Confederate Mound, Oak Woods Cemetery on Chicago’s south side which was well organized and officiated by Chicago, Illinois SCV Camp 516. Included in a most impressive service were the opening prayer, the main address given by Camp 516’s Steve Quick, who was dressed as a Confederate naval officer, a three volley salute, and a moving ritual where handfuls of soil from all eleven Confederate States, along with three border states, were ceremoniously scattered along the burial grounds where these Confederate heroes now rest.
Below is the address delivered by Camp 516 Compatriot Steve Quick:
“Once a year we return to this place, this peaceful forgotten corner which conceals the horror of what happened to these men. We come to remember the 27,000 herded through the walls of Camp Douglas and the 6,000 who never left. They rest, literally under our feet in the largest mass grave in the Western Hemisphere. In a nation which cyclically has a great fascination for our ‘Civil War,’ this place is forgotten. Over three days in 1863 between 5-7K fell in a village named Gettysburg which today draws 1.2 M visitors a year. Look around you, and this is the largest gathering that will be in this place.
"It is precisely because of the intentional amnesia obscuring this “death camp” - that’s what author George Levy called it - that what we do here, what we say here, what we take from here matters so much. These were simple farm boys, literate enough to read their bibles and write letters in their own inventive script. They were enlisted men, many from rustic homes who hunted and fished, plowed behind mules, planted and harvested their own fields. They married young, buried too many of their children and wives in family plots on their own farms. These farms and these families were why they fought, these simple faithful uncommonly courageous men.
"They answered duty’s call as their grandfathers did during the revolution, to preserve the union as it was handed to them, uncorrupted by the unholy alliance of big business and big government. They chose to die here, wasting away rather than take an oath that could have saved their lives. Their deaths were not due to lack of resources, but to intentional deliberate neglect and human cruelty. The silence surrounding their death is wrapped in the same complicity, hoping to preserve a catechism which is neither truthful nor historical.
"The challenge for us today is to remember truthfully, without bitterness. To have the courage to speak of something too many prefer not to hear, to risk the epithets that will certainly be hurled if we dare break the silence and ignorance. Because until the truth of this place is known and their stories have been faithfully told, the work of beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks remains undone."
[For more on the historian, you can find him at his website: SteveQuick.org]
Confederately,
- James D. Perkins
Commander
Major General Patrick R. Cleburne Camp #2257 (Grand Rapids, MI)
Army of Tennessee, Sons of Confederate Veterans
