While Arlington remained in limbo, the family searched for a new place to live. Seeking relief from the visitors thronging their Richmond house, they escaped to Derwent, a friend’s country estate, where they lived through the blazing summer of 1865 in a weather-beaten farm house. The place was stuffy and uncomfortable, but it gave them some rest, and time to consider where they might resettle. Lee fielded correspondence, and took long rides on Traveller. Toward the end of the summer, he agreed to a position as president of Washington College, a tiny school with forty students and a staggering debt in Lexington, Virginia. The college, set deep in the Shenandoah Valley and far from the prickly entanglements of Richmond or Washington, seemed ideal to Lee, who needed honorable work as well as a home. Washington College provided both.45
As students returned that autumn, the Lees settled at Lexington and unwrapped some of the silver plate and paintings they had salvaged from Arlington. When they unrolled carpets rescued from the plantation, the rugs were too long and had to be folded at one end to fit their new home.46 Lee found the place comfortable and his work absorbing, but his wife continued to miss her old property on the Potomac. “I long for the old scenes & old haunts,” she repined to a cousin. “I cannot take root in a new soil—I am too old for that.”47 She still held out the hope that Arlington’s dead could be disinterred, buried elsewhere, and her family home restored.48
Although this dream was unrealistic, key members of the clan made discreet visits to the old estate in the closing months of 1865 to see for themselves how the war years had changed Arlington and to gauge whether it might be put in livable condition again. The most detailed reconnaissance came from Mary Lee, thirty, the family’s eldest daughter and by all accounts the most adventurous one. While visiting friends in Georgetown she ventured over the river for a bittersweet homecoming. “It seemed like a dream to be looking quietly once more on the old familiar Scenes & under such different auspices,” she reported to her mother that winter.
We proceeded along a perfect road through a Country so changed that had I not known where I was I should have never identified it in the world. Not one single tree, not a bush, is standing on either side of the road. The heights from the river … are lined with fortifications & barracks & freedmans [sic] villages & back in the Country as far as the eye can reach the perfect desolateness extends. Where the Arlington tract commences large placards are stuck over both sides of the road “Government Farms—Do Not Trespass” … On the Height the graveyard commences & extends almost to the little stream … The vegetable garden with its old brick wall & ivy looked just the same, the only thing that did … The flower garden is entirely altered, made smaller in every way … surrounded by a white paling … Round the paling were the row of graves of which you have heard. The front looked very desolate, all grown up with church mint & aspens & ailanthus … Not saying who I was, I was not allowed to enter many of the rooms … I went into the parlour, in which nothing was standing but the old sideboard, with broken doors … One of the mantels was also broken … I was forbidden to enter Papa’s office … Upstairs I was permitted to go into my own dressing room “to see the view.” There was nothing in it, nor the hall. I saw several of the servants in the distance but not wishing to be recognized did not speak to them. Thornton … Cornelius … & Dandridge I think & Robert. The graveyard commences from the road as it descends the hill & stretches out … acre after acre … I returned that way over the long bridge to see as much as I could & had I not been so unwell I would have gone over again. It was a very trying visit, more painful even than I had expected … It was a beautiful bright nice day and the view was lovely but the whole face of the country so utterly changed that turning my back on the house I could have scarcely recognized a feature of it. 49
Her letter offered little hope for returning to Arlington, in marked contrast with a contemporaneous assessment from her uncle Smith Lee, who visited the estate in the late autumn or winter of 1865 on what he thought was a clandestine inspection. After touring the house and grounds, he concluded that the place could be made habitable again and reported this to his brother in Lexington.50 Smith made the mistake of sharing his views with the cemetery’s superintendent, who dutifully sent them to the quartermaster general—along with the mystery visitor’s identity.51
“A brother of Genl. Lee (Smith Lee) in a recent visit to Arlington, remarked to the Superintendent, ‘that the house could still be made a pleasant residence, by fencing off the Cemetery, and removing the officers buried around the garden,’” Capt. James M. Moore wrote his superiors on December 11, 1865. Moore, detailed by Meigs to look after the cemetery, took occasion to suggest more burials around the mansion, in keeping with his commander’s goal “to more firmly secure the grounds known as the National Cemetery, to the Government by rendering it undesirable as a future residence.”52
Shortly after this memorandum made the rounds, word of Smith Lee’s visit leaked out. Then, in an instance of poor timing for the Lee family interests, one of Mrs. Lee’s eruptions appeared in the press. She intended getting Arlington back, the Philadelphia Press reported, even if she “is obliged to live in the black quarters.” Other newspapers noted that she had been lobbying President Johnson for the return of Arlington.53 “But among other obstacles she will probably encounter is the fact that 12,000 Union soldiers have been buried upon its soil,” the Philadelphia paper warned that winter. “Sixty brave officers sleep their last sleep in the grounds which surround the family mansion … It is of course impossible that the nation can surrender the graves of so many of its defenders to the leader of armies they volunteered to oppose.”54 One sentence in this news item—the one referring to brave officers—was underlined in the heavy blue pencil Meigs often used for annotating records, and the clipping placed in the quartermaster’s files.55
Meigs, the consummate bureaucrat, had outmaneuvered Lee, the consummate strategist, for possession of the high ground at Arlington. To ensure that he kept it, Meigs took the offensive as the winter of 1866 began, urging Edwin Stanton to make sure the government had sound title to Arlington. “I respectfully recommend that the title be investigated by the legal advisor of the Government and that then if not perfect, steps be taken to make it entirely secure,” Meigs wrote. “A portion of this estate has been set aside as a National Military Cemetery and in it a large number of interments have taken place. Inquiries have been made lately of members of Congress by their constituents, the bodies of whose kindred repose in this cemetery, suggesting a fear that the United States may yet restore to the original possessors, the land consecrated by these remains.”56 Meigs would return to this refrain again and again in the years ahead.
For the present, he arranged for reinforcements in the cemetery, where the army of the dead would continue to grow, keeping James Parks and other gravediggers busy at their shovels for months to come. Between December 16 and December 27, 1865, for instance, quartermaster’s crews disinterred 297 soldiers from the wartime graveyard at the Augur Hospital in Alexandria and reburied them on the Lee plantation.57 Other crews made similar forays into the capital, where they cleared temporary cemeteries and transferred the remains to Arlington. Simultaneously, Meigs dispatched Capt. James Moore into the Virginia countryside to locate and rebury tens of thousands of Union soldiers from battlefields within a thirty-mile radius of Washington, from Manassas to the Rappahannock River of Virginia.58
Moore’s squads would take years to accomplish this gruesome assignment, given the rushed nature of wartime burials and the chaotic state of the battlefields. Conditions at Spotsylvania and the Wilderness were typical.“Hundreds of graves on these battlefields are without any marks whatever to distinguish them,” Moore reported, “and so covered with foliage that the visitor will be unable to find the last resting place of those who have fallen until the rains and snows of winter wash from the surface the light covering of earth and expose their remains.” To further confuse matters, Union skeletons were mingled in trenches with Confeder
ate bones; skulls and femurs were disembodied and scattered; burial records were often non existent. Little wonder that few of the dead could be identified: of 5,350 Union fatalities Moore’s crews uncovered at Spotsylvania and the Wilderness, only 1,500 could be named. Most of these unknowns would be reburied in new battlefield cemeteries close to where they had fallen, but more than 2,000 would be packed up and returned to Arlington, where Meigs had reserved a place of honor for them.59
There was no way to make sense of the unspeakable losses the Civil War inflicted, but it was possible in the aftermath to impose some semblance of order—and a degree of solace—by accounting for the loyal soldiers and sailors lost in the recent tragedy and by giving each a decent burial. Who were they? Where had they fallen? How could friends and loved ones find their graves? Meigs mobilized the peacetime army to answer these questions, beginning at Arlington. There the first phase of the restoration process took place, beginning a five-year program to honor hundreds of thousands of Union dead by mustering them in new national cemeteries across the nation.60
Until Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Meigs had been preoccupied with winning the war—which for him meant supplying troops with food, weapons, boots, mules, and other essentials. Now that it was over, Meigs called in burial reports from quartermasters throughout country, tallied them up, and discovered documentation for only 101,736 burials—about a third of the 341,670 estimated Union war deaths. Faced with this deficit, Meigs renewed his order in October 1865. Special recovery crews from the quartermaster’s department, headed by Capt. James Moore in the east and by Col. Edmund B. Whitman in the west, began to comb through old battlefields in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, in Tennessee and Kentucky, down through the Mississippi valley, across Georgia, and into crowded graveyards of infamous Confederate prison camps at Andersonville, South Carolina, and Salisbury, North Carolina. Traveling with clerks, letterers, painters, and lumber for new headboards, the teams gradually converted temporary graveyards into permanent national cemeteries, scattered from Maryland to Texas. There were seventy-four in existence when the reburial program finally ended in 1870.61
By this point, the campaign to recover the dead had consumed more time than the war itself.62 Costing $4 million, the program proved to be a lavish mission, but the results exceeded expectations, accounting for 315,555 of the total 341,670 Union fatalities. The remaining casualties were thought to be lost in private cemeteries or obscure battlefield plots Meigs’s scouts had been unable to penetrate.63 “Such a consecration of a nation’s power and resources to a sentiment, the world has never witnessed,” said Quartermaster Edmund Whitman, summarizing the unprecedented care which the United States devoted to those who never returned from the war.64
While the recovery program went forward, Meigs kept his officers busy collecting field reports for a comprehensive Roll of Honor, which attempted to list the name, rank, unit, and final burial site for each serviceman killed in the conflict. When the last names were printed in 1872, the Roll of Honor ran to twenty-seven paperback volumes, eagerly snapped up by friends and family who had lost loved ones in the war. This printed series, although peppered with misspelled names, duplication, and gaping omissions, remains one of the most complete records of Union burials, and a tribute to Meigs’s diligence. Publishing such a roster at government expense was the least a grateful nation could do for grieving relatives, Meigs thought. “All care for the dead is for the sake of the living,” he wrote.65 “I do not believe that those who visit the graves of their relatives would have any satisfaction in finding them ticketed or numbered like London policemen or convicts … But if he finds his … ancestor’s name and position in full therein inscribed he will be satisfied that a grateful country had done due honor to the solider.”66
Decades after the war, government clerks were still trying to assess its human cost by collecting hospital records, muster rolls, casualty lists, and other official documents in a Washington office, where information about each Union veteran was distilled on an individual index card. Army scriveners were poring over these cards upstairs at Ford’s Theatre in 1893 when the accumulated weight of people and paper brought two floors crashing down in a cloud of dust, adding another twenty-one casualties to those killed by the Civil War, according to historian Drew Gilpin Faust.67 At least five of the victims, who had survived the shot and shell of battle only to be dispatched by the accident at Ford’s, were buried with honors at Arlington that summer.68
When General Meigs finally received word, on September 21, 1866, that recovery crews had gathered in the last of the unknowns from Manassas and other nearby battlefields, he asked that a large shipment of them be sent to Arlington for reburial. He set laborers to work excavating a huge pit just to the southwest of Mrs. Lee’s garden. Twenty feet deep and twenty around, it was to be a mass grave, which the quartermaster intended as Arlington’s first memorial to unknown soldiers.69
A reporter came to witness the mass burial. “A more terrible spectacle can hardly be conceived than is to be seen within a dozen rods of the Arlington mansion,” the Washington National Intelligencer reported. “Down into this gloomy receptacle are cast the bones of such soldiers as perished on the field and either were not buried at all or were so covered up as to have their bones mingle indiscriminately together. At the time we looked into this gloomy cavern, a literal Golgotha, there were piled together, skulls in one division, legs in another, arms in another, and ribs in another, what were estimated as the bones of two thousand human beings.”70
Meigs put the number at 2,111. When the burials were done that September, workers sealed the vault and Meigs designed a stone sarcophagus to cover it. He included an inscription, which was carved into the face of the monument:
Beneath this stone repose the bones of two thousand one hundred and eleven unknown soldiers, gathered after the war from the fields of Bull Run, and the route to the Rappahannock. Their remains could not be identified, but their names and deaths are recorded in the archives of their country; and its grateful citizens honor them as of their noble army of martyrs. May they rest in peace.
—September, A.D. 1866.71
The solemn gray memorial, a boxy structure surmounted by a quartet of Rodman guns and a crown of round shot, launched Arlington’s long tradition of honoring unknown soldiers, a military ritual that would be refined with each new war.72 By his placement of this monument, Meigs was erecting another barrier to the Lees’ return. Other motives—including a sense of duty and a particular passion for design—also may have inspired his gesture, typical of much that the quartermaster initiated on the Lee estate.
The abstract concept of honor found physical expression in these busy postwar years, in which Meigs gave vent to his aesthetic urges at Arlington. This was nothing new for the quartermaster, who was fascinated by design and architecture. Like Lee, he had joined the elite engineer corps after West Point, but unlike Lee, Meigs continued to design and build things, putting his stamp—and quite often his name—on prominent public structures all over the capital. He supervised designs for the National Museum on the mall, the multiturreted red brick edifice now known as the Arts and Industries Building of the Smithsonian Institution; for the Cabin John Bridge, the world’s largest masonry span when completed in the 1860s; and for the Washington Aqueduct, which conveyed fresh water to the capital before and after the war. Meigs also supervised the expansion of the Capitol building in 1853, with its new dome and statue of Freedom, a project jointly commissioned by Meigs and a Mississippi senator named Jefferson Davis. Perhaps his best-known design was the Old Pension Building, now the National Building Museum, with its grand atrium, its frieze of Union soldiers marching off to war, and its fifteen million bricks; this made it the world’s largest brick building when completed in 1887, earning it the derisive nickname “Meigs’s Old Red Barn.” After Gen. Philip Sheridan toured the sprawling building with its proud designer, Sheridan could find only one fault: “It is fireproof,” he joked to his old friend.
73
If such criticism discouraged Meigs, he did not show it. After the war, he turned a creative eye upon Arlington, where the rolling hills and grand views offered an irresistible canvas for his artistic impulses. Before many others, Meigs viewed Arlington as an important element of Washington’s future landscape design.74 In 1870 he even consulted Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., the country’s preeminent landscape architect, about the look of Arlington. Olmsted counseled restraint. Arlington, he said, should be “studiously simple … to establish permanent dignity and tranquility” and to guard against “ambitious efforts of landscape gardeners.”75
Meigs largely ignored this advice. His own sense of design was rooted in Victorian tradition and enhanced by the flourishes of the Gilded Age, which caused Arlington’s austere hills to sprout with new ornamented monuments, layer-cake mausoleums, hefty stone markers, granite urns, and any number of obelisks. Not all of these were placed there by Meigs, but they were the reflection of an exuberant time when bigger meant better—before official standards constrained the size or taste of markers in the cemetery. If his family could afford it, a lowly lieutenant’s tombstone could overshadow and outweigh a colonel’s marker in the next row. Several stone angels materialized around the Lee mansion, one brandishing a trumpet; another, an anchor; another, a spray of roses. Officers had their military exploits chiseled into the lids of their crypts; one soldier had accomplished so much and was so cramped for space that he was forced to end his own epitaph with an anticlimactic“etc.” Most idiosyncratic was the marker chosen by Lt. Wallace F. Randolph, an artillery officer who had a twelve-hundred-pound Napoleon cannon hauled to Arlington to indicate his resting place. Such eccentricities were tolerated at Arlington until the twentieth century, when new regulations were finally imposed—to preserve space as well as aesthetic standards.76
On Hallowed Ground Page 9