After Fort Donelson surrendered on February 16, 1862, the U.S. Army converted Camp Butler into a military prison and sent Confederate captives there, with 2,000 arriving first and another 1,000 coming in April 1862 after the capture of Island No. 10 near New Madrid, Missouri. Beginning in September, prisoners were sent south for exchange and the camp was empty by October, but in early 1863 an estimated 1,665 Confederate soldiers captured in Arkansas and Tennessee arrived. Barracks were often full, forcing prisoners to live in tents, and illness reached epidemic proportions, with pneumonia a constant problem. When the last Confederate prisoners departed on May 19, 1863, more than 800 had been buried in the prison cemetery, victims of inadequate facilities, poor sanitation, and disease. Those who died at Camp Butler were buried in individual coffins in an old cornfield northeast of the camp near Union graves, marked with headboards or stakes, and all Confederate prisoners buried there remain in their original graves. The burial ground became a national cemetery in 1862, and an 1868 U.S. Army inspection reported that graves had been dug as deaths occurred without regular plan or order. In 1908, the Commission for Marking Graves of Confederate Dead erected the pointed-top marble headstones that still mark the graves. Broader reconciliation followed the Civil War: in 1868 the Grand Army of the Republic decorated both Union and Confederate graves at Arlington National Cemetery; in 1901 the War Department created the Confederate section at Arlington; five years later Congress created the Commission for Marking Graves of Confederate Dead to identify and mark Confederates who died in Northern prisons, later expanding its mission to all national cemeteries with Confederate burials; by 1916 it had marked more than 25,500 graves and erected monuments where individual graves could not be identified; and in 1930 the War Department authorized the Southern Cross of Honor on Confederate headstones.
