In 1892 , the United Confederate Veterans of Chicago ( UCV ) appealed for funds to build a monument in Oak Woods Cemetery where almost all of the Confederate dead were reinterred from City Cemetery and the cemetery for those who died from smallpox near Camp Douglas . In that document , the UCV estimated that about 1,500 more unidentified Confederate dead were buried at Oak Woods . The document states that these bodies " … can not be traced further , except in numbers , thereby making the probable aggregate as roundly stated above 6,000 . " In the book compiling the speeches and material for the dedication of the monument in 1895 , John Cox Underwood of the UCV stated that he had identified 4,317 of those buried in " Confederate Mound " , the mass grave at Oak Woods Cemetery , that 412 more were identified by the U.S. Government in the roster of those reinterred from the smallpox cemetery and that an estimated 1,500 more were on registers burned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 , for a total of 6,229 . In 1912 , Josiah Seymour Currey wrote that " there are 6,129 bodies of Confederate soldiers lying in Oakwoods Cemetery . " More recently , in 2007 , Kelly Pucci used the 6,000 figure for Camp Douglas deaths . In 2015 , David L. Keller wrote that " the total number of deaths at Camp Douglas is somewhere between the 4,243 names contained on the monument at the Confederate Mound at Oak Woods Cemetery and the 7,000 reported by some historians . " He wrote that the best estimates are between 5,000 and 6,000 . He cited poor record keeping and the actions of those who handled the bodies for the lack of an exact number . Keller states that up to 50 percent of those who died before April 1863 were not found later . Because City Cemetery was close to Lake Michigan , many bodies were swept into the lake
Great Chicago Fire
Great Chicago Fire
Camp Douglas (Chicago)