Camp Butler: Training Ground and Prison

On August second, eighteen sixty-one, three months after Fort Sumter, the state of Illinois established a military training camp on the prairie east of Springfield. They named it Camp Butler, after Illinois's state treasurer William Butler, a friend of Abraham Lincoln. In the months that followed, more than two hundred thousand Union soldiers passed through Camp Butler for training before deploying south and east.

It was the second-largest military training installation in Illinois during the Civil War. In February of eighteen sixty-two, everything changed at a place called Fort Donelson, a Confederate garrison on the Cumberland River in Tennessee. Ulysses S.

Grant's forces captured the fort and took roughly twelve thousand prisoners, a number the Union Army was entirely unprepared to house. Approximately two thousand of those prisoners were sent north to Camp Butler. The men arrived in winter with inadequate clothing and shelter.

Smallpox swept through the prison compound. As many as seven hundred Confederate prisoners died at Camp Butler in eighteen sixty-two alone. Their graves are still here, identifiable by their distinctive pointed headstones.

Eight hundred and sixty-six Confederate soldiers are buried at Camp Butler. Alongside them rest seven hundred and seventy-six Union soldiers, and veterans from every conflict through the Vietnam War. The cemetery now holds more than nineteen thousand interments on fifty-three acres.

The grounds became a National Cemetery after the war. The rolling quiet of the place gives little indication of the illness and suffering that defined eighteen sixty-two here. What remains is the grass, the headstones in their rows, and the flat central Illinois sky above.