A 4-foot-tall stone marker lists the names of the men buried in the plot near a residential area of the city.
The marker — erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy — is part of what is referred to as the northernmost Confederate cemetery.
As debates rage across the country about Confederate memorials, finding such a marker in a Union stronghold like Wisconsin may seem odd, but can be easily explained — the soldiers were held as prisoners.
And just a short distance away, another 240 headstones and memorials are dedicated to Union troops who died at Camp Randall, a major training center during the war.
More than 150 years after the Civil War, Confederate memorials continue to be a point of national dialogue.
Topics like slavery, secession and reconstruction are wrapped up in the monuments and statues.
Robert Zeidel, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, said despite the divisive issues and history embodied by the memorials, some are part of an American experience that needs to be remembered and discussed.
“I’m troubled when we start to eviscerate or remove history,” Zeidel said.
“I would much rather see the memorials stay in place and be contextualized than removed. … History is messy, and while American history shows the greatness of the nation, it also shows some of the problematic sides,” he added.
The memorial and grave markers for both sides are among dozens of Civil War monuments in Wisconsin — although the vast majority of those honor 92,000 Union troops that hailed from the state. Wisconsin prospered during the war, with an increased demand for food, strong wheat prices and accelerated production of farm equipment manufactured in the state.
But more than 12,000 soldiers from the state died in the war: 3,802 of combat wounds and another 8,499 from disease and other causes.
Monuments to those soldiers can be found in all corners of Wisconsin.
Some are grandiose, like the arch at Camp Randall, where 70,000 troops trained during the war and which served as a prison camp.
Other markers are more poignant — including rows of weathered white headstones that sit in silence at Forest Hill Cemetery in Madison.
The memorial at Confederate Rest is dedicated to members of the Alabama 1st Infantry Regiment, about 1,400 of whom were captured on an island in the Mississippi River in 1862 and taken to Camp Randall as prisoners. About 10 percent of the troops died from illness, injury and other maladies.
Zeidel said the nature of the Madison monument — a grave site — and its proximity to Union dead, provides a context to the war and what was at stake.
“If you go to this cemetery you can see the grave sites of those who died on both sides of the conflict and have a perspective that it truly was a civil war and those on both sides died and that they reflected two different positions,” he said. “The cemetery almost adds the kind of context I wish was there on all the monuments so they could remain and be seen in a larger sense and their overall place in history.”
Inscribed on
a plaque affixed to the arch is the reason it was built 105 years ago: “Lest we forget.”
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