When General Meigs finished his monument to the Unknown Civil War Dead, he focused on other embellishments at Arlington, where he raised the Temple of Fame to George Washington and famous Civil War generals; established a wisteria-draped amphitheater large enough to accommodate five thousand people; designed the Sylvan Hall, composed of living maples laid out in the pattern of a cathedral nave; and erected a massive red arch at the cemetery’s entrance. The arch honored one of the war’s least effective—but most popular—generals, George B. McClellan. Like much of what Meigs built, the McClellan Arch was ornate in the Victorian style, with flourishes of gold leaf and effusions of patriotic poetry carved into the gate:
ON FAME’S ETERNAL CAMPING GROUND THEIR SILENT TENTS ARE SPREAD AND GLORY GUARDS WITH SOLEMN ROUND THE BIVOUAC OF THE DEAD
This poem, thought to be one of Meigs’s favorites, was rendered in bold block letters, as was the name McCLELLAN, which strides across the gate’s massive lintel. Meigs had his own surname chiseled into a column by the arch—it is one of the first things one sees upon entering the cemetery.
Meigs’s feelings for Arlington grew more proprietary with the years. He sketched his own design for the amphitheater’s rostrum, chose new plantings for the mansion’s borders ( Caladium esculentum and canna), and even dictated the formula for plastering the cracked columns on Lee’s house (one part Portland cement, two parts “clear, sharp sand”). The columns, he wrote, “should be cemented to resemble those of the Parthenon, which is the accepted canon of Grecian Ionic order.”77 Nothing escaped the quartermaster’s notice. When the grapevines languished around one building, he urged gardeners to enrich the soil with a mixture of soup skimmings and crushed bones. The final ingredient was mentioned without a hint of irony.78
5
A QUESTION OF OWNERSHIP
ROBERT E. LEE NEVER RETURNED to arlington. He may have glimpsed it from Alexandria, probably for the last time, in February 1866. “I did not approach Arlington nearer than the railway which leads to the city,” he reported to a cousin. “I know only too well how things are there.”1 Lee had come back to Washington reluctantly, summoned to give testimony before a joint congressional committee on Reconstruction.
He tried to avoid reopening old wounds, but when members pressed the general for his views on black enfranchisement, Lee’s answer revealed that four years of war had done nothing to change his views about African Americans. “They are an amiable, social race,” he said. “They like their ease and comfort, and, I think, look more to the present-time than to the future . . . My own opinion is that, at this time, they cannot vote intelligently, and that giving them the right of suffrage would open the door to a great deal of demagogism, and lead to embarrassments in various ways.”2
Lee’s testimony, disturbing by today’s standards, attracted little criticism, except in the Chicago Tribune, which excoriated the old general for his slipperiness and recalcitrance. The Tribune concluded that “Gen. Lee is either an uncommonly ignorant man or that he is a very costive witness.” It continued:
Congress and the people of the loyal States should exclude the rebels from positions of power until a political party can be created at the South which shall know the definition of treason. Gen. Lee’s testimony makes it plain that such a party can only be formed of the colored population. The whites, slave-holders and poor trash alike, are indoctrinated with the belief that rebellion is not a crime but is a virtue in the individual, if the State, which is but the aggregate of individuals, gives its sanction to it. How long, in the ordinary course of things, can a Government exist, when half its territory is controlled by men who believe it is their duty to take up arms against it whenever they see a chance of overthrowing it?3
Although Lee tried to steer clear of such controversy on his two-day visit to the capital, he remained mindful of the resentments his presence rekindled. “I am considered now such a monster,” he wrote of the Washington visit, “that I hesitate to darken with my shadow the doors of those I love lest I should bring upon them misfortune.”4 The same reticence likely kept him from visiting his old home.5
Despite this, Lee still clung to the hope that Arlington might be returned to his family—if not to Mrs. Lee, then to their eldest son, George Washington Custis Lee, designated as Arlington’s heir in his grandfather’s will.6 During this and later visits to Washington, Lee quietly huddled with Francis L. Smith, his trusted Alexandria lawyer, to explore the subject of redeeming the estate. Their last known consultation, which produced little hope, came in July 1870. “The prospect does not look promising,” Lee reported to Mary after the meeting.7 The question of Arlington’s ownership was still unresolved, along with Robert E. Lee’s citizenship, when he died, age sixty-three, at Lexington, on October 12, 1870.8
By this time the scars of war were beginning to heal, but not for all of those who had faced Lee in battle. Union authorities barred Confederate mourners from the nation’s first official Decoration Day at Arlington on May 30, 1868. Timed to coincide with the blooming of spring flowers, the celebration was established to honor the nation’s war dead. The event, organized by the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans group, had been the brainchild of former Maj. Gen. John A. Logan, an Illinois congressman and radical Republican known for his combativeness and fiery oratory.9 Decoration Day, he wrote, would be set aside for “cherishing tenderly the memory of our heroic dead, who made their breasts a barricade between our country and its foes … We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance.”10
Hundreds of politicians, spectators, and old warriors answered Logan’s summons, crossing the river to Arlington, where the gnarled oaks sprouted new leaves and the hills were thick with new grass for the occasion. The mansion’s columns were draped in mourning and bristling with flags. Military bands played hymns, cannons boomed their salutes to the dead, poetry was declaimed especially for the occasion, and patriotic prayers echoed among the graves. (“We come to mourn over a great national calamity,” the Rev. C. B. Boynton intoned, “which partially and temporarily rent our Republic asunder, drenched the land with blood, dug it over for graves, and brought the death and shadow upon thousands of homes.”11 ) A one-legged general solemnly read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to the crowd. Another general, James A. Garfield—soon to be elected President Garfield—made a long speech from the portico of Lee’s mansion, where the Virginian had paced alone just seven years before; for all that had transpired since, a century might have passed.12
“What other spot so fitting for their last resting-place as this, under the shadow of the Capitol saved by their valor?” Garfield asked, invoking the memory of the soldiers and sailors buried around him. “Here, where the grim edge of battle joined; here, where all the hope and fear and agony of their country centered; here let them rest, asleep on the nation’s heart, entombed in the nation’s love!” Without mentioning Lee by name, Garfield reminded his listeners of the Confederate’s leading role in the rebellion: “Seven years ago, this was the home of one who lifted his sword against the life of his country, and who became the great Imperator of the rebellion. The soil beneath our feet was watered by the tears of slaves, in whose hearts the sight of yonder proud Capitol awakened no pride, and inspired no hope … But, thanks be to God, this arena of rebellion and slavery is a scene of violence and crime no longer!”13
As Garfield spoke, a contingent of children, brought across from the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Orphan Asylum in Washington, squirmed in their best Sunday clothes by the mansion’s steps. “And here are the children,” said Garfield, gesturing toward them, “little children, to whom the war left no father but the Father above. By the most sacred right, theirs is the chief place today. They come with garlands to crown their victor fathers. I will delay the coronation no longer.”14
At this the war orphans formed lines, marched around Mrs. Lee’s garden, and spread blossoms over the graves of officers Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs had given a place of honor there; then the crowds trailed the
children to the Tomb of the Unknown Civil War Dead, which was hung with garlands and flags; then out through the cemetery to decorate all of the graves—except those belonging to several hundred Confederates at Arlington. This ceremony of remembrance, known as Memorial Day since it was declared a national holiday in 1888, has been repeated in all the years since.15
Friends and families of the Confederate war dead chafed at the restrictions placed on them at Arlington. They also envied the care and expense their former enemies lavished on the Union dead, while the graves of their own sons and husbands remained neglected in many northern cemeteries. With no government resources for reburial and memorial operations, southerners organized ladies’ memorial associations, local volunteer groups that took responsibility for maintaining Confederate graves at home and for recovering thousands from battlefields in the North. In 1871, the Ladies’ Hollywood Memorial Association of Richmond won permission to bring Virginia’s dead home from Gettysburg, which added almost three thousand new Confederate graves to the Richmond cemetery; in May 1872 the ladies collected the remains of eighty-nine Confederates from Arlington for reburial in Richmond; more than a hundred Rebels from North Carolina were removed from Arlington in October 1883, placed in black caskets, and conveyed through Alexandria, heralded by church bells throughout the city. Returned to Raleigh, they were led through the streets by a military band, honored in state at the rotunda of the capital, and accorded final honors in the Confederate section of the city’s Oakwood Cemetery.16
With the urgency of the war years receding, there was finally time for making such adjustments at Arlington, which was gradually being transformed from a cemetery of convenience into a shrine for national heroes. Veterans campaigned to have federal regulations relaxed so that all of those who had served in the Civil War, along with their dependents, would be eligible for burial at Arlington and other national cemeteries. Ever conscious of budget constraints, General Meigs opposed the liberalized standards, arguing that legislation of 1862 and 1866 explicitly limited burial privileges to those who had died in battle or in military hospitals. It would be impractical, he reported in 1869, to provide “suitable burial places throughout the country for the many hundreds of thousands of veterans that might avail themselves of such right were it found to exist.”17
Although this view won support from the War Department, it was stoutly disputed by Gen. William T. Sherman, then general in chief of the Army, who argued that all national cemeteries should be open to all Civil War soldiers, active or retired. “Surely, when practicable these cemeteries should be devoted to the burial of soldiers for all time to come,” Sherman wrote. This expansive view eventually won out over Meigs’s more restrictive one. Under pressure from the Grand Army of the Republic, Congress voted in March 1873 to extend burial privileges at Arlington and other national cemeteries to all honorably discharged Civil War veterans. They would be buried at no cost, provided with a headstone, “and their graves shall receive the same care and attention as the graves of those already buried,” the legislation decreed.18 In later years, these standards would be broadened to embrace the veterans of all wars, not just those who had served in the Civil War.
Still a work in progress, Arlington was hardly a place of rest in the decades following the war: Confederates were carted away, their remains jumbled and confused with other bones during the transfer; Federal dead and former slaves were imported from nearby battlefields and cemeteries; Union families came from far away to disinter relatives; agents scoured Arlington’s markers for the names of long-missing soldiers—not only to ease the suffering of their survivors, but also to secure a percentage of pensions due to war widows.19
Veterans lobbied the War Department to have comrades disinterred and moved to more prominent graves at Arlington. One such request came in 1871, when a committee of African American soldiers petitioned the War Department to relocate hundreds of U.S. Colored Troops to the high ground around Lee’s mansion—up from the Lower Cemetery, where black soldiers had been buried unceremoniously among the poor white warriors and former slaves.20
General Meigs, who still kept a firm grip on developments at the national cemetery, fielded the request and advised against the transfer. “I regret always to move a body once interred in the National Cemetery, believing that the dead, once decently buried, should have rest,” Meigs told William W. Belknap, then secretary of war. “As for the disinterment and removal now proposed, I think that there are objections to it in sentiment as well as in the expenses.” He continued:
If the colored people generally prefer to have their comrades, who fought for them, taken up again and scattered among the whites, it can be done … I believe that hereafter it will be more grateful to their descendants to be able to visit and point to the collected graves of these persons, than to find them scattered through a large cemetery and intermingled with another race. The records show that there are in Arlington Cemetery 3,757 contrabands or refugees and 343 colored soldiers. 21
The War Department agreed, and the U.S. Colored Troops stayed in the Lower Cemetery, a short distance from the slaves and freedmen who had unwittingly pioneered the way to Arlington.22
For her part, Mrs. Lee continued to obsess over the loss of her home in the years following General Lee’s death. “Her thoughts were ever in the past at Arlington, always Arlington,” recalled her youngest daughter, Mildred.23 Instead of brooding over the situation, Mrs. Lee took action. Within weeks of her husband’s death in 1870, she petitioned Congress to form a joint committee, which was asked to examine the federal claim to Arlington, disclose the number of graves there, and “report … on what terms a suitable spot for a cemetery can be purchased in the neighborhood, and the probable cost of removing the bodies to the new place of sepulture … The committee shall take the statements of Mrs. Lee in order to identify her property with greater certainty, to discover the extent of her losses, and they shall report all facts necessary to a settlement upon the principles of substantial justice.”24
This resolution, introduced by the gallant but politically tone-deaf Sen. Thomas Clay McCreery, a Kentucky Democrat, provoked a torrent of protest in the Republican-dominated Senate. “That resolution is … repugnant to my notions of justice,” boomed Sen. George Franklin Edmunds, a Vermont Republican. Despite this warning shot, McCreery not only plunged ahead with Mrs. Lee’s petition but also took occasion to eulogize the Confederate general, comparing him to the military giants of the Old World—the Warwicks, the Marlboroughs, and the Wellingtons. “But who among them all had more genius and less ostentation than General Lee?” McCreery asked his stunned colleagues, several of whom had worn the Union blue. “Was he not a hero? Was he not a Christian? Was he not a gentleman? The widowed partner of his bosom still lives and in her behalf I implore your justice. I do not ask for anything else.”25
But the Kentuckian asked for a great deal more—far more, indeed, than the Senate was prepared to consider. “Now what is the character of this proposition?” asked Sen. Waitman Thomas Willey, a Republican from West Virginia. “It is that the Congress of the United States shall deliberately inquire whether the remains of the sacred dead should not be disturbed in their repose and scattered we know not where. Is there anything more insulting to the sense of the country and to the sense of the Senate?”26
For more than an hour, colleagues answered Willey’s question in the negative. Sen. Charles Sumner, Republican of Massachusetts, recalled that he had been present at the birth of Arlington National Cemetery in 1864, when the late Edwin M. Stanton had signed orders establishing the burial ground.27 It had been Stanton’s express intention, Sumner declared, to put the property beyond the Lee family’s reach. “He said he meant to bury those dead there in perpetual guard over that ground,” Sumner said,“so that no person of the family of Lee should ever dare to come upon it unless to encounter the ghosts of those patriots. It was in that spirit that that ground was set apart. Now, as I understand, it is proposed to take up those remains and to
give over the ground to the family of the traitor.”28
Sen. James Warren Nye, a Nevada Republican who had been particularly close to President Lincoln, described Mrs. Lee’s petition as “an insult to all the dead who fell in the mighty struggle for the Union … Disturb these dead, and for what? To make room for a traitor’s widow.”29
A battered McCreery tried to withdraw his resolution—to no avail. His opponents insisted on a vote, and the Senate rejected the petition, fifty-four to four. In the process, the debate helped to elevate Arlington’s status: from a potter’s field created in the heat and desperation of wartime, the cemetery was becoming something grand, a ground hallowed in the national imagination, symbol of sacrifice and honor. Senators wanted the place preserved for “the sacred dead,” “the patriot dead,” “the heroic dead,” home of “martyrs” and “patriotic graves.”30 Nobody was going to yield that piece of ground without a fight. Meigs’s preemptive occupation of Arlington was working.
On Hallowed Ground Page 10