Poor sanitation and crowded conditions led to an outbreak of typhoid fever in Duff Green’s Row, a squalid street situated near the site of today’s Supreme Court building. Infected refugees were placed in quarantine there, while those who showed no sign of sickness were removed to an army camp at Twelfth and O streets, on the northern edge of the city, which became a new freedmen’s camp. It was described as a mud hole, with one end of the site situated in a former brickyard, the other in an old cemetery. With barracks crowded, some of the refugees had to make do with tents. The camp’s water, drawn from wells that were drying up, triggered a massive outbreak of dysentery.55
The refugee population reached an estimated ten thousand by the spring of 1863. Freedmen improvised as best they could. Some moved into the former slave pens in Alexandria. Others built shanties from scrap lumber and tarpaper on Capitol Hill. A rickety line of huts, which came to be known as Murder Bay, appeared along the fetid Washington Canal. Outsiders were shocked by what they found in such neighborhoods.
“I have just visited the freemen in their cabins,” said one visitor. “Their sufferings are most heart rending. The weather is cold; they have little or no wood. Snow covers the ground; and they have a scanty supply of rags called clothes … Government gives them very, Very small allowance of soup. Many will die.”56
Many did. Most of the black refugees had little resistance to scarlet fever, smallpox, and whooping cough. Infants and children were especially susceptible. Illness claimed at least five lives each day among Washington’s black refugees—probably many more.57 “Exactly how many, no record ever told,” wrote historian Constance McLaughlin Green.58
After medical authorities expressed concern over conditions in refugee camps, Lt. Col. Elias M. Greene, chief of the quartermaster’s Washington Department, was called to investigate. In May 1863, he proposed a fix that would bolster the war effort, improve living conditions for former slaves, and enlarge the Union presence at Arlington, already a bustling Federal encampment.
Without mentioning Robert E. Lee by name, Greene urged the War Department to establish a new freedmen’s camp on those lands south of the Potomac that had “been abandoned by rebel owners and are now lying idle.” He meant Arlington, of course, and its rich bottomlands. The unused outbuildings and slave quarters on the Lee property, Greene wrote, could easily accommodate new residents desperately in need of shelter.59
“The houses are left standing,” Greene argued. “There are enough to provide quarters for from 500 to 750 field hands with a very small outlay for additions and improvements.” Why not move the former slaves to Arlington?
The force of contrabands, males and females, now idle in this city & a dead weight on the Government can be employed to a very great advantage in cultivating the above lands, raising corn & millet, and cutting hay …
The families need not be separated, as they can still be united and may be fully as well provided for as their present quarters in this city and at less expense. Besides this there is the decided advantage afforded to them of the salutary effects of good pure country air and a return to their former healthy avocation as field hands under much happier auspices than heretofore which must prove more beneficial to them and will tend to prevent the increase of diseases now prevalent among them. I also propose establishing a large vegetable garden South of the Potomac to be cultivated by the younger Contrabands and others of them who are unable to do heavy field work. The proceeds of such labor would be considerable …
The arrangements I propose will not only in my opinion conduce to the sanitary & moral improvement of the Contrabands, but it will save the Government an immense amount of money … I respectfully suggest that the matter should be decided within the next forty-eight hours. It will be absolutely necessary to commence any farming operations for the present season otherwise it will be too late to plant. 60
Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton approved Greene’s proposal on the spot, and on May 22, 1863, Maj. Gen. Samuel P. Heintzelman issued General Orders No. 28, directing Greene to take responsibility for all contrabands in Washington, D.C., and Alexandria, to seize Arlington and “all rebel lands, farm houses and tenements thereon, at present abandoned by their owners … situated south of the Potomac and within the lines of his command,” and to put able-bodied freedmen to work cultivating “said lands … in such a manner as may be most beneficial to the Government.”61
Freedmen began moving to Arlington that spring. There they would live under the joint patronage of the quartermaster’s office and the American Missionary Association. The first wave of a hundred former slaves, including some who had belonged to the Lees, filed into the fields and began sowing wheat and planting potatoes. Some lived in surplus army tents while a village of simple frame duplex houses took shape along the Potomac River.62 This new Freedman’s Village, where the streets were named for famous generals and political figures, was formally dedicated on December 4, 1863. A correspondent from Harper’s Weekly wrote approvingly about the settlement. It was“quite lively, having a large number of children in it … The principal street is over a quarter of a mile long, and the place presents a clean and prosperous appearance at all times.”63
It would grow to a community of fifteen hundred, with a hospital, two churches, a home for the aged, and schools for both children and adults. The latter were trained as seamstresses, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and carpenters. The idea was that the village would provide a temporary haven for freedmen until they found jobs and established their own homes elsewhere.64 Some did move on, but many refugees stayed at Freedman’s Village for decades, raising children and even grandchildren on the fringes of the old plantation.
The new settlement at Arlington was applauded by those who believed that slavery was a sin and Lee a traitor. “One sees more than poetic justice in the fact that its rich lands, so long the domain of the great general of the rebellion, now afford labor and support to the hundreds of enfranchised slaves,” wrote a visiting journalist, who also found hope and enthusiasm among the “dusky faces” she encountered in Freedman’s Village.65
Within a few weeks of establishing the new community at Arlington, Lt. Col. Elias Greene declared it a success. “The Arlington Estate is one of the largest and most fertile of the abandoned farms, has a full supply of good water, [and] is remarkably healthy,” he wrote. “And being well within the lines of defenses, it secures the safety of the contrabands … The crops are in fine condition and the farms promise to be very remunerative.”66
Despite Greene’s glowing report, not all of those living at Freedman’s Village enjoyed the experience. Toiling in the fields and workrooms under military discipline seemed, for some, scarcely preferable to slavery. The fresh vegetables freedmen grew were requisitioned for sale in Washington, while many of the farm workers were expected to live on army rations.“Don’t feel as if I was free,” said one woman after a few years in Freedman’s Village. “’Pears like there’s nobody free here.”67 Established residents were suspicious of new arrivals, distrusted as disease-ridden, dirty, and discontented.68 And in the patronizing fashion of the day, missionaries and well-intentioned Union officers took moral responsibility for villagers, hectoring their charges on the importance of cleanliness, godliness, and other virtues. “You must be industrious,” admonished the Rev. Dr. J. George Butler, preaching to a gathering of Arlington freedmen. “I do not wonder that so many of you do not love to work,” said the Lutheran minister. “But when you look over all this grand land—the cities and factories and farms—at all its great wealth—and ask where it came from, there is but one answer. It is the reward not of indolence, but of industry … Your race can never become manly except they work industriously.”69
Many took Butler’s advice, prospered, and established successful lives in Freedman’s Village. Others left Arlington as soon as they could, creating new communities in Alexandria that thrive to this day. But the majority of black refugees who made it to the Washington region preferred to stay
in the capital. Life could be precarious there, to be sure, but it was less regimented than Arlington—and perhaps more secure for the long term.70
What if the Confederates won the war and Robert E. Lee returned to reclaim his plantation? Where would that leave the blacks who lived there? To avoid this eventuality, the federal government, having firmly established its physical presence on the Lee estate, moved to make its legal title secure.
With little fanfare, Congress had laid the groundwork for seizing the title to Arlington early in the war. Just as the Peninsula Campaign heated up, lawmakers enacted legislation allowing for direct taxes in the “insurrectionary districts” in June 1862. Amended in February 1863, the statute was meant not only to raise much-needed revenue for the war effort but also to punish those supporting the rebellion. It enabled federal commissioners to assess and collect taxes on real estate in Confederate territory; if those taxes were not paid in person, the commissioners were empowered to sell the land. Acting under that law, the authorities levied a tax of $92.07 on the 1,100-acre Arlington estate in 1863. Mrs. Lee, stranded in Richmond by the fighting and by deteriorating health, dispatched a cousin to pay her tax bill. But when Philip R. Fendall presented himself to the commissioners in Alexandria, they informed him that they would accept the money only from Mrs. Lee. They sent him packing and set the date for selling Arlington: January 11, 1864.71
The Potomac River was covered with ice that day, with no boats running and carriages scarce. Although the auction was well attended, arctic conditions seemed to chill the bidding. The sole offer for Arlington came from the federal government, which tendered $26,800 for the estate, something less than its assessed value of $34,100.72 The new owners intended to reserve the property “for Government use, for war, military, charitable, and educational purposes,” according to the certificate of sale.73
Because the auction was prominently reported in local papers, it is certain that the Lees knew about it, but nowhere in their voluminous correspondence does this milestone appear to be mentioned directly. General Lee may have cryptically referred to the sale a few weeks after the event, when he wrote to Mary on February 6, 1864. “I am glad you have not been discouraged by the notice of the papers,” he wrote then, perhaps a reference to Arlington, perhaps to reassure his wife about the condition of his army.74 It had been an especially harsh winter, with hundreds of his men barefoot and more than a thousand without blankets. Rations were scarce, desertions mounting.75 Faced with these realities, Lee had little time to mourn the loss of Arlington.
For her part, Mary Lee, who after several months of separation had been briefly reunited with her husband a few weeks before, was shocked to see how the war had aged him; now she refrained from burdening him with unpleasant intelligence from home. She sent him socks, family news, and encouragement on the front, where Lee’s heart condition sent new spasms of pain down his left arm. He kept busy, badgering the Confederate quartermaster for beef, shoes, and other supplies, while pleading with President Jefferson Davis for reinforcements. Lee expected the new Union commander, Ulysses S. Grant, to concentrate his forces for an all-out assault as soon as the weather allowed.76
This was precisely what Grant had in mind. On May 4, 1864, his army crossed Virginia’s Rapidan River and pressed to the south with 119,000 men. His objective was not Richmond but Lee’s army, now reduced to a force of 62,000.77 As soon as Grant was across the river and into the tangle of scrub oak and briars known as the Wilderness, Lee launched a furious attack, driving into the Union line and setting off a series of battles that would be among the bloodiest of the war. For more than a month the generals fought their way south, with Grant trying to force his army between Lee and Richmond, and Lee maneuvering to interrupt the blue tide. The Battle of the Second Wilderness raged down to Spotsylvania Courthouse, then spread to North Anna River, Cold Harbor, Riddell’s Shop, and Petersburg. There the Forty Days’ Campaign finally sputtered to a halt on June 14, leaving a seventy-mile trail of dead horses and charred fields behind. By then, Grant had crossed the James River, just to the south of Richmond. The campaign had cost him 50,000 killed, wounded, or captured. Lee’s casualties were less—some 32,000—but that amounted to half his army. Lee could not afford the depletion. Grant could.78
After the first clash that May, the inevitable backwash of wounded and dying soldiers piled into Union-controlled Fredericksburg, a transshipment point where the injured—both Federals and Confederate prisoners—were borne into churches, stores, and shell-pocked homes to await treatment. Others were dropped in the street, shoulder to shoulder and head to toe, lying so thick on the ground that one cavalry patrol was forced to find another route through town. Many of the men died before they could be treated; others starved in place before provisions could reach them. When the lines of transportation reopened to the north, the thousands of injured men who had been languishing in Fredericksburg were collected on hospital transports and trains for the return trip to Washington. There, as in past seasons of fighting, the wharves and depots overflowed once more with the wounded. By May 21, 1864, the Washington Chronicle reported the arrival of eighteen thousand new patients, a piece of news confirmed by the ambulance wagons jostling through the capital’s streets day and night.79
Even as Washington blossomed with the promise of another spring, new battalions of injured soldiers lay dying in the city’s hospitals. They quickly filled the national graveyards. The Alexandria National Cemetery was approaching its limit of one thousand burials, as was the Soldiers’ Home, with its eight thousand graves. With the Union focused on winning the war, little attention was paid to caring for the dead. Burial mounds eroded and caved in at the Soldiers’ Home; pools of standing water spread over the graves; headboards rotted and disappeared in the mud. “The few remaining up [had] become so obliterated by exposure to the weather that it was with difficulty many names could be read,” an assistant quartermaster reported. “In some places hardly a trace was left, but for an unsightly stake, to indicate the graves of the departed.”80
Meanwhile, the corpses piled up in Washington faster than the quartermaster’s harried laborers could dispose of them. A stench of death hung over the city, pervasive as wood smoke, prompting a new wave of complaints from war-weary citizens. In desperation, federal officials began scouting for new burial grounds. They settled on Arlington.
4
FIRST BURIALS
A MONTH BEFORE ARLINGTON officially became a national cemetery, the burials began there. It was an act of improvisation born of necessity to process the war’s carnage before it became a public health or a public relations nuisance. More than a touch of vengeance was involved too, courtesy of Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs.
While some details of Arlington’s transition from plantation to cemetery remain obscured by the confusion of war and the passage of time, there is no doubt about the first soldier laid to rest on the Lee estate: That honor belongs to Pvt. William Christman, twenty-one, of the 67th Pennsylvania Infantry, buried on May 13, 1864, just as Lee and Grant plunged into their blistering Forty Days’ Campaign. The private’s grave was situated in a poorly drained sector of Arlington, down among the low hills skirting what was then the Alexandria-Georgetown Pike. This far corner of the estate was out of sight of the mansion, where Union officers lived and worked. Not wishing to have the view marred by new graves, they directed the first burials well away from the house.1
James Parks, the family slave who had witnessed Lee’s departure in 1861, was still living at Arlington when the initial wave of war casualties appeared there. He went to work digging the cemetery’s first graves, struggling to keep pace with the long rows of coffins that appeared each morning, stacked in the hills “like cordwood,” as he recalled it.2 These burials took place in the Lower Cemetery, which describes a location as well as the social status of those destined for the potter’s field, the place meant for poor enlisted men such as Private Christman.
Like others who would join him in the Lower Cemet
ery, Private Christman was felled by disease instead of a bullet. He developed measles and died of peritonitis in Washington’s Lincoln General Hospital on May 11, 1864. A farmer newly recruited into the army, Christman never knew a day of combat. He was committed to the earth on May 13 with no flags flying, no bugles playing, and no family or chaplain to see him off. A simple pine headboard, painted white with black lettering, identified his grave, just like the marker erected for Pvt. William H. McKinney, a Pennsylvania cavalryman buried on that same Friday the thirteenth.3 They were joined the next day by Arlington’s first battle casualty, Pvt. William B. Blatt, 49th Pennsylvania Infantry. Wounded in the Wilderness fighting and transported to Washington, Blatt died on his way from the wharf to Armory Square Hospital on May 13.4 All three were from modest backgrounds, as were the other soldiers who soon filled the Lower Cemetery: Alvah Kirk from New York, Artemus Sweetland from Vermont, Lyman E. Besse from Maine, Peter Rawson from New Jersey, Moses Hatch from Massachusetts, and Levi Reinhardt from North Carolina.5
Reinhardt, a wounded Rebel prisoner who died in Washington’s Carver General Hospital, was buried alongside his enemies at Arlington, just as hundreds of other Confederates would be in the last years of war. Several hundred freedmen, who lived and died nearby, would join them in the Lower Cemetery, as would the U.S. Colored Troops who had been fighting for their freedom as well as their lives; the blacks would lie a few rows away from Christman, Reinhardt, and the others, but in the manner of the times, they were scrupulously separated by race.6
On Hallowed Ground Page 7