A piece of Dixon history: When the Civil War came to Dixon 

DIXON – When Dixon boys went off to World War I, World War II and all subsequent wars, they left for boot camp.

But in the Civil War, Dixon boys were trained right here in town along with recruits from throughout northern Illinois. This is the story of Dixon’s Civil War camp.

On April 12, 1861, rebel forces of the newly formed Confederate States of America attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina, thus catapulting the country into a long and bloody civil war. Three days later, on April 15, the newly elected President Abraham Lincoln issued a call for 75,000 volunteers “to repossess the forts, places and property which have been seized from the Union.”

When the news of Lincoln’s call finally reached the Dixon newspaper over the telegraph wires, the city’s population of 2,200 quickly responded.

Wild enthusiasm

Dixon’s Civil War veterans vividly remembered the evening of April 16, 1861, when a mass meeting of locals was held at the Lee County Courthouse. “Amid wild enthusiasm,” citizens stood up to give patriotic orations, stirring the masses to action.

Within 24 hours, a hundred of Dixon’s youngest men volunteered to put their lives on the line for the Union cause. They soon organized as the 13th Illinois Infantry Regiment.

A regimental history, published in 1892, recorded many of the details of what happened in Dixon during the ensuing months. Most of this article comes from that book’s chronicle of the recollections of the soldiers of the 13th Illinois.

Dixon and Lincoln

First, it must be remembered that Dixon strongly supported Lincoln. He had visited Dixon several times since his first visit during the Black Hawk War of 1832. More recently, in 1856, Lincoln spoke on the courthouse lawn to support John C. Fremont, the first Republican candidate for president and an ardent opponent of slavery.

Lincoln had several friends in Dixon, and he spent time at Alexander Charters’ home at Hazelwood, Joseph Crawford’s home at Third and Ottawa, Silas Noble’s mansion just south of Hazelwood, the Nachusa House and probably at Judge John Eustace’s home in North Dixon.

So, when Lincoln ran for president in November 1860, 69% of Lee County voted for Lincoln. No other Republican presidential candidate throughout the 19th century would attract as great a percentage of local votes as did Abraham Lincoln.

So, when Lincoln issued a plea for volunteers in 1861, Lee County answered the call.

Why they signed up

Word quickly spread that Dixon was the place where hundreds of young men throughout northern Illinois were gathering to join the war effort. What was the spark that ignited “the boiling of young blood”?

These young men certainly knew of the hotly debated issue of slavery, but according to the regimental history, their primary motivation was “latent love of country, and of good government. This love blazed into the spirit of sacrifice when the government was put in open peril.”

Loaded down with ignorance

Some were as young as 17, even though 18 was the youngest age accepted officially. The average age of all those Lee County boys was 21.6.

They had no idea of the horrors that lay before them. As they recalled after the war, “It is safe to say that the most of our officers were loaded down with about the same amount of ignorance as the rank and file.”

“How little we knew then of the gigantic struggle before us, which was to continue for years, and bring sorrow and mourning to hundreds of thousands of souls.”

Why Dixon?

Of all the cities and towns of northern Illinois, why did Dixon become a major training camp? The railroad is the simplest answer.

Only six years earlier, two railroad lines were completed to Dixon, along with a rail bridge across the Rock River, allowing transport to and from every direction.

So, when the war broke out, over those tracks “thousands of trains loaded with the sturdy men” chugged into Dixon, along with “almost countless trains of supplies that were the very sinews of war.”

The Dixon training grounds

In the days after that April 16 rally at the courthouse, about 1,000 young men rolled into Dixon on the trains, coming from all points between Chicago and Rock Island. To make a complete regiment of 1,000, they formed 10 companies of about 100 men each.

As a general rule, each company contained recruits from the same town. Company A, for example, was filled with boys from Dixon, Company B was mostly from Sterling, Company C was from the Amboy and Sublette area, and so on.

After they climbed off the train at the depot station on Depot Avenue, “a march of a mile brought them to the fair grounds, east of the town, which was to be the place of encampment.”

Old Camp Ground Avenue

“Fair grounds?” In the years before the war, the Lee County Agricultural Society held its annual fair on that property, which is now Oakwood Cemetery. The cemetery already had begun there, but in 1861, it occupied only a small section on the east side of today’s South Dement Avenue between Fourth and Fifth streets.

So, in 1861, the fairgrounds became Union campgrounds. To this day, the cemetery’s “Old Camp Ground Avenue” runs through the same space where the soldiers trained in 1861.

“The grounds were good,” the soldiers remembered, “having on them some timber and a good spring of water, while the fairground fence was something of an advantage in keeping men in and out.” That same spring still runs along the eastern boundary of today’s cemetery.

The camp came under the command of Col. John Dement, 57, a respected Dixonite who had distinguished himself in the Black Hawk War of 1832. In his honor, the camp was named Camp Dement.

In our next installment May 9, this column will describe the regiment’s first blunder in Dixon, its “first Sabbath” in Dixon, its first injury in Dixon, the first soldier killed in Dixon and much more.

• Dixon native Tom Wadsworth is a writer, speaker and occasional historian. He holds a Ph.D. in New Testament.