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Primary sourceDocument1866

A List of the Union Soldiers Buried at Andersonville

Dorence Atwater; Clara Barton · 1866

A published register of Union soldiers buried at Andersonville prison, copied by Dorence Atwater and accompanied by Clara Barton's report on identifying and marking the graves.

Barton wrote the report included here describing her 1865 expedition to identify and mark Andersonville's graves.

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Front cover of a bound book with dark brown spine and tan paper boards. A white label at top left reads '973.771 At9 cop. 2'. A faint 'Digitized by Google' watermark appears at bottom right.
A List of the Union Soldiers Buried at Andersonville, with report by Clara Barton, 1866. Library of Congress.

About this source

What it is

This 1866 publication combines Dorence Atwater's copy of the official death register from Andersonville prison with a report by Clara Barton describing the 1865 expedition to identify and mark the graves there. The book is held by the Library of Congress, reproduced from an original at the Huntington Library.

Why it matters

Atwater secretly copied the death register while a prisoner at Andersonville, and after the war his list helped identify the graves of thousands of Union soldiers who had died there. Barton led the expedition that used this information to mark nearly 13,000 graves, giving families a record of what happened to missing soldiers. Together the document shows how survivors and reformers worked to give the Civil War dead individual recognition.

Look closer

  • Why might Atwater have risked keeping a secret list of the dead?
  • What does it take to turn a list of names into marked, identifiable graves?
  • What does this document tell us about the scale of death at Andersonville?

This document is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Clara Barton on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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