In response to President Abraham Lincoln's 1861 call for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the southern rebellion, Governor Oliver Morton quickly mobilized Indiana, and thousands of Hoosiers assembled in Indianapolis at Camp Morton, established at the old fairgrounds. Indiana troops served in every theater of action, and as the war progressed Camp Morton became a prisoner-of-war camp housing thousands of Confederates, while City Hospital treated both Confederate prisoners and Union soldiers. Indianapolis citizens celebrated the fall of Richmond, Virginia, on April 3, 1865, and Robert E. Lee's surrender on April 9, but their joy turned to despair after Lincoln's assassination six days later; his body lay in state for eighteen hours at the Indianapolis capitol building on April 30. More than 700 Union soldiers who died in city hospitals were first buried in Greenlawn Cemetery, and in November 1866 undertaker William Weaver supervised the removal of 712 soldiers' remains to Crown Hill, where all but thirty-six were identified. The new national cemetery occupied 1.4 acres within Crown Hill Cemetery, in what is now Section 10, and the government paid $5,000 for the lot. On May 30, 1868, the first Decoration Day observance there drew about 1,000 participants for speeches, music, and grave decorating. In the early 1870s the U.S. Army installed two gun monuments and a flagstaff, and in the 1880s plaques bearing stanzas from the poem “Bivouac of the Dead.” In 2011, adjacent land containing many Civil War dead, Section 9, was donated to the federal government; together these 2.5 acres hold the graves of 2,043 veterans and their dependents. The Woman's Relief Corps, auxiliary of the Maj. Robert Anderson Post No. 369, Grand Army of the Republic, received permission in November 1888 to erect a monument there, and local stonecutter James F. Needler created the eagle-topped limestone pedestal, which was dedicated on Memorial Day 1889.
