Camp Butler cemetery home to Confederates

SPRINGFIELD — David Simpson speaks of his great-grandfather, Confederate Capt. Ellis Harper, in reverential tones.

He calls Harper “a man of staunch beliefs” — despite detractors, including Simpson’s father, who called him “a cutthroat” and “a horse thief.”

“He was a horse thief a thousand times over,” admits Simpson, from his cellphone in Lebanon, Tenn. “But he was a good horse thief.”

Not to be argued is that Harper did things his own way, operating guerilla-style in Civil War Tennessee and Kentucky, where he and his detachment attacked Union trains and secured the booty for the rebels.

His military career didn’t have a promising start. Part of the 30th Tennessee Infantry, Harper was captured at Fort Donelson, Tenn., in February 1862 and shipped to Camp Butler outside of Springfield as a prisoner of war.

Foreshadowing his later calling, Harper didn’t stick around long. He escaped the less-than-secure encampment and may have walked home to Tennessee.

“He was a mean motor scooter and a bad dude,” Simpson contends.

For Brenda Shelton Olds of Austin, Texas, Camp Butler provided a more somber setting during a 2006 visit she made to the grave of Pvt. Thomas B. Shelton, the brother of her great-great-grandfather, Pvt. James Harvey Shelton, both Confederate soldiers.

“To think of him dying so far away from home, it’s such a sad thing,” Shelton Olds says of Thomas Shelton, a member of the 6th Texas Infantry, who probably died of wounds suffered at the Battle of Arkansas Post in early 1863. “All those tombstones represent men who died long before they should have.”

There are 866 Confederate graves making up a separate section at Camp Butler, which was created in 1862 as one of the first national cemeteries. More than 5,000 rebel soldiers passed through the camp, originally set up to provide military training for Union troops, in several waves in 1862-63.

With the sesquicentennial of the beginning of the Civil War and a continuing interest in genealogy, current and past directors of Camp Butler say there is still a fascination with that part of the camp’s history. A new book due out this fall contains a section on Camp Butler, as well as other Union prisons and Civil War-related sites in the state.

Gale Red considers Camp Butler hallowed ground.

The chief genealogist for the Sons of Confederate Veterans and a retired Air Force officer from O’Fallon, he is unsparing in his contempt for other Civil War prisons in Alton, Rock Island and Chicago, which he labeled “true hellholes,” and says that Camp Butler was “somewhat less harsh” in its treatment of Confederate prisoners.

Red’s group, along with the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Military Order of the Stars and Bars, raised money to build a monument at Camp Butler in 2005, which drew the ire of several groups in Springfield.

“The Confederates are buried (at Camp Butler) because of the treatment they were given there,” Red says. “Every cemetery is a sacred place to me. National cemeteries are doubly sacred. “Camp Butler is an especially solemn place to me.”

During the first half of the Civil War, Illinois Gov. Richard Yates wasn’t enamored with having Confederate soldiers imprisoned so close to the state’s capital with its “many secessionists.”

But when Gen. Ulysses S. Grant captured Fort Donelson and 12,000 rebels with it, a mad scramble ensued about where to house them.

Then, prisoners of war were, at best, an afterthought, says Bill Rhoades, Camp Butler’s director from 2005 to 2006 and a Civil War enthusiast. “Plus, nobody expected the war to last that long,” Rhoades says.

Camp Butler’s size and proximity to a railway line probably made it attractive.

However, author Dr. Jeffrey Shay points out the complex lacked a wall around its perimeter at first, which made escapes easy.

That’s not to say guarding “secesh” prisoners was taken lightly. The Illinois State Journal reported two rebel prisoners attempting to escape were shot to death en route to Camp Butler. Some escapees who had made it out of the area later gave up voluntarily because they didn’t want to be pressed into service again.

While the mortality rate of prisoners at Camp Butler exceeded the national average during the Civil War, Red says it eludes some of the scrutiny other Illinois prisons received, such as Camp Douglas in Chicago and Alton.

“Camp Butler is kind of an enigma,” Red says. “Each prison was its own beast.”

“A lot of POWs came into (Camp Butler) in poor medical condition,” says Shay, author of “A Past That Matters,” due this fall. The biggest killer in POW camps, he says, “was apathy. Some units were pretty good (at looking after prisoners), and some were pretty bad.

“Camp Butler comes across in the middle. But Camp Douglas was every bit as bad as Andersonville,” the notorious Union POW camp in Georgia.

Ed Conway’s great-grandfather, Edward L. Middleton, and his brother, Levi E. Middleton, both served in the 7th Mississippi Infantry and both fought at the Battle of Murfreesboro in Tennessee. Edward Middleton escaped, but Levi was captured and sent to Camp Butler, where he died — from his battle wounds, Conway presumes — on April 1, 1863.

Conway, who lives in Covington, La., says neither North nor South escapes blame when it comes to rough prison conditions.

“It occurred on both sides,” he says. “But (Levi Middleton’s death) does give you pause for some reflection.”

The Southerners, Simpson says, weren’t used to Northern climates and were bereft of blankets, stoves and even shoes. Exposure to various strains of disease and primitive medical technology may have also contributed to POW mortality rates nationally, says Rhoades, who is now the director at Fort Gibson National Cemetery in Oklahoma.

“Prison life was bad during the War between the States on both sides,” Simpson says.

Joseph Difani takes part in Civil War battle re-enactments in and around the St. Louis area, but you can’t blame him for not choosing sides. Three great-great-grandfathers served on the Union side; a great-great-great-grandfather, Pvt. James Calvin Hulsey, served on the Confederate side.

Hulsey had left behind an infant daughter with typhoid fever to serve in the war, according to newspaper accounts. He was captured at Fort Donelson, within earshot of his home in Robertson County, Tenn., and sent to Camp Butler.

Through Hulsey’s wife’s pension request, Difani learned that Hulsey had taken an Oath of Allegiance, probably in August 1862, that secured his release from Camp Butler. A witness to the pension request, Pvt. J.F. Glover, served with Hulsey and confirmed that both men took oaths. People who took the Oath of Allegiance pledged loyalty and allegiance to the Union.

Glover stated in 1910 that he was sick while at Camp Butler, and that Hulsey accompanied Glover back home. Some time later, both men started back to their command “but the Yankees was so thick we came back home until (Hulsey’s) death (in 1893),” Glover answered.

While “taking the oath” had a certain stigma attached to it — soldiers often couldn’t return to their homes until after the war, Red says — Difani cut Hulsey some slack.

“He was a farmer (in Tennessee) and may have joined looking for a paycheck,” Difani says. “It would have had an effect on him, being held against his will, so far from home.”

Even miles from home, Confederate soldiers in their final resting place are remembered. An obelisk monument, dedicated at Camp Butler in 2005, is a testament to that.

There was controversy at the time. It centered around the possible flying of the Confederate flag at the dedication and less about the monument itself, says Red, who is looking to start Sons of Confederate Veterans chapters elsewhere in Illinois, including Springfield.

“People don’t know or don’t want to know history and are swayed by emotional arguments made by those with an ax to grind,” says Red, referring to the controversy.

“It’s an appropriate monument,” Rhoades says, “to people who fought and died for whatever they believed in.”

Having a place that acknowledges the men who fought can provide some comfort for descendants.

Shelton Olds and her family from Texas took in the Lincoln sites during a 2006 Springfield visit, but it was a trip to Camp Butler to the grave of her great-great-grandfather’s brother that cast an emotional pall over the trip.

“It was a beautiful, dignified place,” remembers Shelton Olds. “It was a piece of family history I was able to put into place.”