At the same time she was promoting the enfranchisement of freedmen, she embarked on a project aimed at diminishing another major post-war problem: the whereabouts of thousands of missing soldiers. She appreciated the difficulty of keeping accurate records in the confusion of battle and understood that it was often nearly impossible to recognize the dead, or identify individual graves among the hastily dug common trenches. Her wartime notebooks and diaries are filled with names of missing and wounded soldiers and lists of those who died in her arms with perhaps no one else to know their fate. With official permission from President Lincoln, she devised a plan to identify missing soldiers by publishing in newspapers monthly rolls of men whose families or friends had inquired. Any person with information could write to her and she would forward it to those concerned. As she went about her work she learned that not everyone was willing to be found. Soldiers who were attached to Southern sweethearts, who had deserted, or who simply wished to start a new life, preferred to remain missing. One young man wanted to know what he had done to have his name “blazoned all over the country” in newspapers. “What you have done ... I certainly _do not_ know,” she replied. “It seems to have been the misfortune of your family to think more of you than you did of them, and probably more than you deserve from the manner in which you treat them.... I shall inform them of your existence lest you should not ‘see fit’ to do so yourself.” In all, Barton’s “Office of Correspondence with Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army” worked for four years to bring information to more than 22,000 families. The most help she received came from a young man named Dorence Atwater, a former Andersonville prisoner. He fortuitously had copied the names of more than 13,000 men who had died during his confinement. With his aid, she identified all but 400 of the Andersonville graves and caused the camp to be made a National Cemetery. Atwater’s help was invaluable, and he became a close personal friend. She was highly indignant when the Federal Government arrested Atwater on charges that his death list was government property. Federal officials claimed that he had “stolen” back the list after turning it over to the War Department. The case appears to have been actually based on confusion and a stubborn refusal of both sides to back down, but Clara Barton was incensed. She fought for Atwater’s release with every influential person she knew; she advised and prompted his statements from prison and carried on a monumental publicity campaign to elicit public sympathy. Largely because of her efforts, he was freed.