Officers got better treatment. Less than a week after Private Christman came to rest in the Lower Cemetery, the first Union officers were given prominent burial close by the Lee mansion. The first of these, Capt. Albert H. Packard of the 31st Maine Infantry, was interred on May 17, 1864. He was placed at the edge of Mrs. Lee’s garden, about a hundred paces from the mansion, with its sweeping views of the river and capital. Packard, shot in the brain during the Wilderness fighting, miraculously survived his journey from the battlefield to Washington’s Columbian College Hospital, where he died on May 16. Buried the next day, he occupied a part of the grounds where Mrs. Lee had enjoyed reading in warm weather, surrounded by the scent of honeysuckle and jasmine.7 Before the middle of June, six other officers were sleeping on the hillside with Packard, their graves guarding the garden’s eastern border.8
The placement of these tombs illustrates a bit of strategic maneuvering by Meigs, who planned to make Arlington uninhabitable for the Lees after the war—unless they wished to live among ghosts.9 Meigs also knew that planting Mrs. Lee’s garden with prominent Union officers would make it politically difficult for anyone to disinter these heroes of the Republic.10
The old estate made a logical site for new burials in any event. Since January 1864, the Union believed that it held clear title to the property. There was still plenty of open land there, and it was convenient to Washington’s hospitals, yet at a discreet distance from the capital’s population. And there was precedent for a cemetery on the estate. Members of the Custisclan had been buried there, as had the family’s slaves, and after them the many contrabands and freedmen who found their way north during the war.
It is clear that Meigs had formed a master plan for Arlington before he sought permission to make it the nation’s preeminent graveyard. A week in advance of its official designation as a burial place, he was already referring to the “new cemetery” and describing how it would handle the growing traffic of interments from Washington.11 In one often-repeated account of the cemetery’s origins, Meigs and President Lincoln get joint credit for the idea. According to this story, which seems rooted in Meigs family lore, the moment of inspiration came on May 13, 1864, as Meigs and Lincoln were visiting Arlington on a carriage ride. Their outing was interrupted when the general noticed a crew loading a dozen dead soldiers into wagons from an Arlington hospital for burial at the Soldiers’ Home. He stopped the presidential carriage and ordered the dead to be buried on the spot, and thus began Arlington National Cemetery—so goes the legend.12
Yet files from the Office of the Quartermaster General cast doubt on this time-honored story. The record shows that the first military interments at Arlington came from hospitals in Washington, not from one on Lee’s estate; that the first burials were sent to Arlington not en masse but in small shipments over a number of days—two on May 13, six on May 14, seven on May 15, two on May 17, four on May 27, one on May 29, two on May 30, one on June 8, one on June 9, and one on June 13; and finally, that the only hospital operating at Arlington when Meigs and Lincoln are supposed to have visited was Abbott’s Hospital, a fifty-bed facility that treated the residents of Freedman’s Village—not white soldiers such as Christman, Blatt, and others in Arlington’s first colony of burials.13 The most likely explanation is that Meigs and his fellow officers hit upon the Arlington idea, put it into practice under the exigencies of war, and sought bureaucratic approval after the fact—not the first time a military officer would request authorization for something he had already done.14
Private Christman had been in the ground for barely a month when Meigs moved to make official what was already a matter of practice at Arlington. “I recommend that … the land surrounding the Arlington Mansion, now understood to be the property of the United States, be appropriated as a National Military Cemetery, to be properly enclosed, laid out, and carefully preserved for that purpose,” Meigs wrote to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton on June 15, 1864. Meigs proposed carving a two hundred–acre parcel out of the property—more than a fifth of the plantation—for the new graveyard. He also suggested that Christman and others recently interred in the Lower Cemetery be separated from the contrabands and slaves and reburied closer to Lee’s hilltop home. “The grounds about the Mansion are admirably adapted to such a use,” he wrote.15
Edwin Stanton, whose disdain for Lee matched Meigs’s, endorsed his quartermaster’s recommendation on the day it was put forward. “The Arlington Mansion and the grounds immediately surrounding it are appropriated for a Military Cemetery,” Stanton ordered. “The bodies of all soldiers dying in the Hospitals of the vicinity of Washington and Alexandria will be interred in this Cemetery. The Quartermaster General is charged with the execution of this order. He will cause the grounds, not exceeding two hundred acres, to be immediately surveyed, laid out, and enclosed for this purpose, not interfering with the grounds occupied by the Freedmans [sic] camps.”16
Then Stanton signed the historic order in his bold, back-slanting hand.
Loyalist newspapers applauded his action. “This and the contraband establishment there are righteous uses of the estate of the rebel General Lee,” the Washington Morning Chronicle reported.“The grounds are undulating, handsomely adorned, and in every respect admirably fitted for the sacred purpose to which they have been dedicated. The people of the entire nation will one day, not very far distant, heartily thank the initiators of this movement.”17
Meigs visited the new cemetery on the morning of its creation, touring the place with Edward Clark, the engineer and architect he assigned to survey the property. On that tour of Arlington, Meigs was incensed to find that his orders to cluster graves around the Lee mansion had been ignored: most of the new burials were still being placed in the Lower Cemetery. “When the season permits it the bodies lately interred there … will be removed to the National Cemetery at Arlington,” he told Brig. Gen. D. H. Rucker, the officer in charge of the quartermaster’s Washington Department.18 It is clear that he meant for Private Christman and others to be reburied closer to the mansion. Yet it was an order Meigs found devilishly hard to enforce. “My plans for the cemetery had been in some degree thwarted,” he recalled later.
It was my intention to have begun the interments nearer the mansion, but opposition on the part of officers stationed at Arlington, some of whom used the mansion and who did not like to have the dead buried near them caused the interments to be begun in the Northeastern quarter of the grounds near the Alexandria road.
On discovering this by a visit I gave special instructions to make the burials near the mansion. They were then driven off by the same influence to the western portion of the grounds … On discovering this second error I caused the officers to be buried around the garden. 19
Meigs blamed Gen. Rene E. DeRussy, who had his headquarters at Arlington, for subverting his plans. To make sure this did not happen again, Meigs moved to evict DeRussy and his staff from the mansion, replacing them with two full-time chaplains who would oversee day-to-day operations at Arlington.20 The appointment of chaplains also served another purpose—to quell public criticism of the military’s slapdash approach to burials. “The Quartermaster’s Department is, I think, unjustly blamed for interring the soldiers without appropriate ceremonies,” Meigs wrote Edwin Stanton on June 16, 1864. “It has not the appointment or employment of chaplains,” Meigs protested. “Its officers are occupied with their appropriate duties, and cannot be present at the cemetery constantly. The interments are going on all day.”21
Meigs then suggested a solution. If chaplains set up residence at Arlington, they could “take charge of the whole conduct of the interments, and perform appropriate religious services over all persons interred therein.”22 Stanton quickly approved the plan.23 DeRussy was out and Meigs’s chaplains were in, along with Capt. James M. Moore, a loyal lieutenant from the quartermaster’s corps. Moore and his family moved into the mansion to keep an eye on the cemetery. These administrative shifts proved to be critical in the evol
ution of Arlington, which would gradually become less important as a strategic military site and more so as a national symbol of the martial virtues—duty, honor, and sacrifice.
Once Meigs had his new bureaucratic arrangements in place, Mrs. Lee’s garden began to fill with graves. Union captains and lieutenants joined the handful of officers already sleeping on the hilltop, one felled by a shot to the chest, another by a thigh wound, an arm wound, a face wound, a shoulder wound, a knee wound. Others died of diphtheria, typhoid, or dysentery; others from the shock or infection from amputation. One died from drinking bad whiskey.24
The most curious garden burial was marked by a short, square stone with no identifying name, merely the number 5232. Beneath it three amputated legs had been interred, all from Union soldiers treated at Judiciary Square Hospital in May 1864. One of the legs belonged to James G. Carey, a private in the 106th Pennsylvania Infantry, who not only survived his operation but lived until 1913; the fate of the second solider, Arthur McQuinn, 14th U.S. Infantry, is unknown; the third, Sgt. Michael Creighton, a native of Ireland in the 9th Massachusetts Infantry, survived his amputation for two weeks but died on June 9, 1864. He was interred in the Lower Cemetery the next day, separated from his left leg by more than half a mile, which makes him the only person at Arlington with two graves.25
In a capital where surgeons performed amputations throughout the Civil War, it is unknown why the legs of Creighton, McQuinn, and Carey were chosen for this peculiar but honorable burial. Unlike most others in Mrs. Lee’s garden, none of these three was a commissioned officer, which places them in a distinct minority.26 Most amputations were buried in unmarked mass graves or burned. Why was this trio singled out? Perhaps their symbolism mattered more than their individual identities, another rebuke for the Confederate general who had caused so much Union suffering. The gesture could not have been an afterthought—someone had to label the remains, transport them from the hospital across the river, record the particulars in a ledger, ready a marker for the grave, and bury the legs in the garden. Like much else that transpired at Arlington in those days, there is no official explanation for it, just a worn white stone rooted in the grass, one of three thousand graves appearing in Arlington’s inaugural year as a military cemetery.27 By the end of that year, some forty officers’ graves had filled the garden, while most other burials were destined for the Lower Cemetery or to a new section just west of the mansion.28
That last autumn of the war produced thousands of casualties, but few were felt more bitterly at home than the death of Lt. John Rodgers Meigs, a son of the Union quartermaster. Lieutenant Meigs, twenty-two, was shot on October 3, 1864, while on a night scouting mission for Gen. Philip Sheridan in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Accounts varied, with Sheridan saying that Lieutenant Meigs had been killed by Confederate guerillas disguised as civilians; Rebels claimed later that Meigs had fired on them first. What ever the cause, Lieutenant Meigs was dead. He was returned with solemn honors to Washington, where President Lincoln, Edwin Stanton, and other dignitaries joined General Meigs for the funeral. Meigs mourned the loss of his “noble precious son,” saw him buried among relatives in a Georgetown cemetery, and braced for the final clash of the conflict, which now seemed infinitely less benign than the “great & holy war” he had foreseen at its outset.29
The war was almost over. Lee’s army had eroded from 60,000 to some 28,000 men by the time fighting renewed with the springtime. Abandoning their entrenchments around Petersburg and Richmond, the Confederates made a dash to the west, where Grant blocked the retreat. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Virginia, on April 9, 1865. The rest of the Confederacy collapsed soon afterward.
Lee slowly made his way home to Richmond, where his wife and daughters had lived through the last years of war. He arrived on April 15, 1865—the very morning on which President Lincoln died—to join his family at 707 Franklin Street, a borrowed house in a burned-out city now occupied by Union troops. Lee handed his faithful war horse, Traveller, to an attendant, acknowledged cheers from the street, and closed the door behind him.30
His future looked bleak that spring. In the four years—almost to the day—since he had bid farewell to Gen. Winfield Scott and turned south, Lee had lost almost everything. Arlington, which held thousands of graves, was gone. He owned no other home. His investments, moderate at best, had dwindled. He was without a job, a prisoner of war on parole, stripped of the right to vote or to hold public office. And shortly after arriving in Richmond, he received the unsettling news that his old commander in chief, Confederate president Jefferson Davis, had been captured while trying to flee the country. Arrested in Georgia, Davis was brought back to Virginia, thrown into military prison at Fort Monroe, and clapped in irons.31 There were rumors that Davis would be tried and hanged for his part in the rebellion.32 Lee faced the same fate. Less than a month after Appomattox, he received word that he, Davis, and other Confederate leaders had been indicted by a federal grand jury—for treason.33
Among Lee’s adversaries, none seemed keener to make an example of him than Meigs, still indignant over the death of his son six months before. “The rebels are all murderers of my son and the sons of hundreds of thousands,” Meigs fumed as word of Lee’s surrender reached him. “Justice seems not satisfied [if ] they escape judicial trial & execution … by the government which they have betrayed attacked & whose people loyal & disloyal they have slaughtered.” If Lee and other Confederate leaders escaped punishment because of clemency, then Meigs hoped that Congress would banish them from American soil.34 He was not alone in these views, which were strongly held by radical Republicans on Capitol Hill and by some newspapers. At least one of the latter resurrected the old charge about Lee’s whipping Wesley Norris and an unnamed cousin, both slaves, who had escaped from Arlington before the war.35
But with the prospect of national reunion in sight, other leaders were happy to follow the late President Lincoln’s model of malice toward none and charity for all. General Grant was one of these. Relentless in battle but magnanimous in victory, he believed that Confederates would become useful citizens if treated generously. And from the time of Appomattox, Lee set an example for his former comrades in arms, urging them to put the war behind them, go home, and rebuild their broken country. “All should unite in honest efforts to obliterate the effects of the war and to restore the blessing of peace,” he wrote.36 This attitude reassured Grant, calmed some of the raw anti-Union feeling in the South, and probably saved Lee from prosecution. The treason charges against him quietly disappeared, almost certainly because Grant interceded on his behalf with President Andrew Johnson.37
While the Confederate general avoided the spectacle of a trial, he found it difficult to regain his citizenship. His application for a presidential pardon, heartily endorsed by Grant, was postponed for weeks, then months, then years. Lee continued to wait for the presidential reprieve, which never came. The delay might have been intentional, as penalty for his role in the insurgency, or it might have been an honest mistake caused by bureaucratic error. Lee’s oath of allegiance, signed on October 2, 1865, disappeared into the State Department files for more than a century, finally resurfacing in 1970, when a researcher discovered the document, duly notarized and fixed with Lee’s faded signature, in a dusty box of documents at the National Archives. With this legal requirement finally met, Congress restored the general’s citizenship in 1975. President Gerald R. Ford signed the legislation in ceremonies at Arlington, attended by Robert E. Lee IV and other family members.38
The Lees would spend the postwar years trying—or at least hoping—to regain possession of Arlington, a struggle that continued their long-distance battle of wits with Meigs. Mrs. Lee, less fatalistic and more outspoken than her husband, felt a growing sense of outrage about changes at Arlington. The ink was barely dry on the Appomattox surrender when a cousin wrote to Mrs. Lee on May 15, 1865, urging her return to the plantation. “It is thought well for persons who have property in that part of the state t
o be near at hand, that they may take possession as soon as it is vacated … I trust dear Cousin you will be back ere long at Arlington too. I can not believe that you will be defrauded out of it.”39
Neither could Mrs. Lee, who often gave voice to her feelings, in contrast to her self-possessed husband. “I cannot write with composure on my own cherished Arlington,” she admitted to one friend.40 She seethed over the placement of Union graves: “They are even planted up to the very door without any regard to common decency41 … My heart will never know rest or peace while my dear home is so used & I am almost maddened daily by the accounts I read in the paper of the number of interments continually placed there … If justice & law are not utterly extinct in the U.S., I will have it back.”42 Such outbursts probably did the Lees more harm than good, fueling adverse comment in the press and hard feelings among radical Republicans who had no sympathy for leaders of the rebellion.
For his part, Lee understood this political reality and kept his ambitions for Arlington hidden from all but a few advisors and family. He conferred quietly with lawyers about reclaiming the property, a matter he was willing to investigate but not to press openly. “I have not taken any steps in the matter,” he cautioned a Washington attorney who offered to take on the Arlington case for free, “under the belief that at present I could accomplish no good.” However, he encouraged the sympathetic lawyer to research the case.43 To his elder brother Smith Lee, the general admitted that he wanted to “regain the possession of A.” and particularly “to terminate the burial of the dead which can only be done by its restoration to the family. I have made no application on the subject waiting for the action of President Johnson upon my application to him to be embraced in his proclamation of Amnesty.”44
On Hallowed Ground Page 8