Today while at the NARA in DC a "Guard Report" was found in the volumes. The very last entry was dated March 15, 1866. The Union guards made their last report that day and there were a total of four guards guarding 5 prisoners.
The guards were 1 sergeant, 1 corporal and two privates and all of them were with the 4th Veteran Reserve Corps. Their equipment was mentioned. 1 set of handcuffs, 1 ball and chain, 1 key and 1 padlock.
The five prisoners were all Union soldiers held on various charges. Desertion, Sentence by Court-Martial and drunk on duty. So as it turns out the last prisoners at Camp Chase were Yankees.
Six weeks after this last guard report the following was found in a newspaper article.
The article mentions Hartup and Oliver. They were Union deserters with the 43rd Ohio Infantry. They murdered a Provost Marshall who was after them. They were hanged at Camp Chase, Ohio.
The following article came from the newspaper "The Ohio State Journal" on May 3, 1866 on page three column three:
CAMP CHASE IN ITS DECLINE- During the war there flourished as a thing of life, a few miles from Columbus, a great military center, a city within itself, a monstrous struggling thing, bound down by law and force, a something with an organism different from all around it, a power in the land looked to with anxious eye, a living giant preparing always for a great struggle. It is no longer a military center, no more a living thing; the city is deserted, the giant’s form, a skeleton.
Hundreds and thousands of armed men, paraded on the guardians of the living thing; a single man, unarmed, keeps watch and ward over the remains of the thing dead waiting for burial. Two years ago you entered the precincts of Camp Chase armed with passes signed and countersigned; were directed by short spoken orderlies; warned by straight up and down sentinels; received with punctilious standoffishness by officials; and came away duly impressed with the military power of the country. Now you drive up to the gate as you would to that of a cemetery; the guardian presents himself in his shirt sleeves; you tell him your desires; he kicks away a huge stone; opens the gate; cautions you a little, and you enter unchallenged and unheralded to the mighty presence of the great solitude of loneliness.
The rows of barracks remain unchanged; the flowers planted by some careful wife of some careless officer are ready to record that the hand of woman has been here; the flag staff stands without pulley, rope or flag; the chapel with its half change in the latter day to a theatre remains a monument of the one, a tell tale of the other, the prison pens frown still with barred gates, but are silent within. In one, the scaffold upon which Hartup and Oliver were executed stands firm-the grim guardian of the ghostly solitude, and with beam in place, and trap half sprung, seems waiting for another victim.
Everywhere are the marks of the skeleton. The pump stocks have all been withdrawn from the wells; the windows taken from the buildings grass growing on the parade ground. Old shoes tumble into promiscuous grouping, tell which buildings have been last occupied; and the martin-boxes give some signs of life. A little fruit tree, in the midst of all this loneliness, blossoms and puts forth leaves with all the proud defiance of nature, and with a scornful fling with every wave of wind, for the works of man perishing on every side. Camp Chase has but few visitors now, and these few can scarcely tell why they go. Proud and powerful while living, it is not great, but only silent and gloomy in its decline.