An estimated 700,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died in the Civil War from 1861 to 1865, and as the death toll rose, the U.S. government struggled to bury fallen Union troops, helping drive the creation of a national cemetery system. On September 11, 1861, the War Department ordered officers to keep accurate and permanent records of deceased soldiers, and federal authority to create military burial grounds came in an Omnibus Act of July 17, 1962. By 1872, 74 national cemeteries and several soldiers’ lots contained 305,492 remains, about 45 percent of them unknown. Soldiers’ lots were established at private cemeteries in northern states, while national cemeteries were built throughout the South where most Civil War fighting occurred. In Vermont, after Confederate forces assaulted Fort Sumpter in South Carolina, Governor Erastus Fairbanks asked legislators on April 23, 1861, to support the federal response, and the state appropriated $1 million to the war effort. Montpelier raised one regiment and became home to Sloan General Hospital, one of Vermont’s three U.S. General Hospitals. Opened in June 1864 on a hill near a spring and the railroad, Sloan General Hospital had 496 beds in twelve buildings and, after the Battle of Cold Harbor, was among the first hospitals to treat more patients with battle wounds than disease. During the Civil War, Vermont’s three general hospitals cared for 8,574 patients; Sloan closed in December 1865 after treating 1,670 patients in just over eighteen months, and of the 174 who died there, some were buried in town. Green Mount Cemetery, established in 1854 on 35 acres in Montpelier, included a soldiers’ lot deeded by the city to the federal government on March 28, 1866. Located along the cemetery front and marked by granite corner stones inscribed “U.S.,” the reservation held two Union graves in 1868 and four in 1874. With eight recorded interments today, it is one of the National Cemetery Administration’s smallest soldiers’ lots, and its graves are marked by the standard round-topped marble headstones approved in 1873 for known Union soldiers.