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I don't make this stuff up.

In the book Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz he recounts his visit to the National Cemetery at Salisbury, NC-

The log for Union soldiers wasn't long. "Most of the corpses were stripped of their clothes, tossed on dead-wagons and dumped in those trenches," Stice said, "so we don't know a whole lot of the names." Salisbury's tiny graveyard held more unknown dead than any other National Cemetery in America.

From a Website which tells the history of the 128 NYS Volunteers.

William, his fellow townsmen Potter Burton, James Norton and George Tipple, and nearly four thousand other Union soldiers were buried en masse in Salisbury's 18 long trenches- the largest group of unknown soldiers in American history.

My great-grandfather, named Jack Riley, was a schoolboy in Indianapolis during the Civil War. His father, who still spelled his name "O'Reilly", owned the St. Charles Hotel there and frequently had the poet James Whitcomb Riley at his bar (the two older boys would sometimes take the poet home in a wheelbarrow, if he needed a ride). Young Jack was fascinated by trains, like many boys of his day (he eventually became a conductor on the Central Pacific, later renamed the Southern Pacific), and one day he caught some easy daywork. There had been a hard frost during the night, and over 600 Confederate prisoners had frozen to death at the local federal prison. He either helped load, or rode the cars, out to the countryside where these dead prisoners were buried, many of them stiff as boards and frozen in awkward positions as they slept on the ground without blankets. This story was passed down in the family.

He also saw Lincoln on the famous train procession to Illinois, when the dead president passed through town. Some of the boys -- they all got the day off school -- put pennies on the rails and saved them as souvenirs. Lincoln was on public display in a glazed coffin, in a glassed-in rail car, and according to Jack, "he was as black as your hat" from the long journey -- some of the boys, having gotten more than they'd bargained for, threw up at the sight.

i didn't think you made it up;Horowitz evidently didn't check his facts. "Confederates in the Attic" is FILLED to the brim with ERRORS. much of his book is demonstrably FICTION, especially the section concerning the murder/hate crime of Michael David Westerbrook.

the historian's office at ANC says there are at least 50,000 unknowns in just one location of the cemetery, many of which are buried under a huge granite boulder, near Lee's home. those remains are those of the long un-interred, which were collected more than a year after the 1st Battle of Manassas & other places in Fairfax, Loudoun & Prince William counties.

frankly, we have NO IDEA whether the unknowns are CSA and/or USA soldiers, thus both the SUVCW & the SCV hold annual memorial ceremonies there each year on the two memorial days. (FYI, Confederate Decoration Day in VA is the FIRST Sunday in June. Rememberence Weekend at Point Lookout POW (DEATH!) Camp is the following weekend.)

for dixie,sw