The old plantation the Lees had known became less recognizable with each passing year. Carved up for various uses during the war, Arlington remained so after it, with the four hundred–acre Freedman’s Village and government farms sprawling through the bottomlands, a semicircle of forts guarding heights to the north and west, and, of course, the two hundred–acre cemetery dominating the plantation’s heart, where the old forest disappeared and graves took its place.31 Although the number of troops at Arlington declined in the postwar years, a strong contingent of soldiers stayed on at Fort Whipple; one of six Civil War forts at Arlington, Whipple was eventually renamed Fort Myer, which covers 256 acres of the original property today.32
The cemetery continued to grow, with more than sixteen thousand graves in place by 1870. Weeds moved in, the mansion leaked, and burial mounds sagged as coffins decayed. Wooden headboards rotted and fell away. The Grand Army of the Republic, which had become a powerful voice for veterans, complained about Arlington’s slovenly appearance, and the quartermaster’s department responded, refilling slumped grave plots, buying burros to pull new mowing machines, tidying paths among the tombs, and patching up the old house, which would continue to spring leaks for years to come.33
By the mid-1870s, the first white marble headstones began to appear at Arlington, where they replaced the wooden grave markers from the war years. The old wooden headboards had been cheap, costing about $1.25 to $1.50 each, but they had to be painted regularly and lasted no more than five years. With his usual attention to detail, Meigs calculated that it would cost $1 million a decade to replace the wooden headboards at Arlington and other national cemeteries. He suggested a solution: outfitting each tomb with new tablets made from galvanized iron, at a cost of about two dollars each; they would last for decades instead of years, saving replacement and maintenance expenses.34
“One of these will be placed at the foot of every grave and will remain when the wooden headboards decay and perish,” Meigs proposed. Several hundred of the iron markers were produced at the Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois and set up in various national cemeteries, but they proved to be unsightly and difficult to read, and they won little praise from anyone but the frugal Meigs, who blocked the adoption of costly marble or granite replacements for several years.35
“I am still of the opinion that the best monument for this purpose yet contrived is the small rectangular block of cast iron, galvanized to protect it from rust,” Meigs wrote in his annual report of 1868. “It is not costly, it is easily transported, is not an object of plunder. With wages of stone cutters at $5 a day, the cost of 320,000 headstones properly lettered would be a very great charge upon the treasury.”36
Even as the old wooden headboards decayed and fell away, Meigs held out for his metal markers until 1873, when pressure from the Grand Army of the Republic prompted Congress to appropriate $1 million for a nationwide headstone replacement program. The legislation called for “durable stone of such design and weight as shall keep them in place when set.” It was left to Secretary of War William W. Belknap to develop a design, which was soon announced. The new tombstones would be fashioned from granite or white marble, cut four inches thick, ten inches wide, and a yard long; markers in northern latitudes were made taller by six inches to withstand frost; each tombstone, slightly rounded on top, displayed an incised shield with a grave number, the name of the deceased, his rank, and his home state. Since the first of these markers appeared at Arlington, few modifications have been made to their simple, elegant design. Belknap also decreed a design for the individual tombstones of unknown soldiers, sailors, and marines, who received granite or marble blocks six inches square, two feet six inches tall, and planted so that six inches of stone appeared above ground; each would be inscribed with a number keyed to the cemetery’s registry. By late in 1873, the quartermaster had arranged contracts for the first of Arlington’s new headstones, which ground crews began planting with the spring of 1874. The headstone replacement program, like the reburial campaign before it, made a vital point—that Union servicemen had lived and died in a noble cause, which earned them a place of honor in the nation’s cemeteries.37
The same was not true for the freedmen, slaves, and Confederates who remained segregated at Arlington. There was no provision for replacing their grave markers in the legislation of 1873, which was construed to apply only to the Union dead. Meanwhile, the Lower Cemetery suffered from neglect: the grass ran rampant, graves collapsed, and so many headboards rotted that the cemetery superintendent suggested in 1877 that they be tossed out entirely, without replacement. Relatives could find loved ones from records in the cemetery office, said James Gall Jr. “The grounds would be much improved in appearance and the cost of maintaining them materially reduced,” he told superiors. His idea was overruled by the War Department, but it would take several years before Arlington’s freedmen, slaves, and Confederates received their own permanent headstones, which were thinner and less substantial than those in the main cemetery.38
Just downriver on the plantation, a thousand former slaves were still living in Freedman’s Village after the war, making their temporary refuge into a permanent community. Many had no other place to go. Although barred from owning houses at Arlington during the war years, many managed to buy them afterward; many rented plots of five and ten acres for a nominal fee. A platoon of thirty soldiers from the 107th Regiment of the U.S. Colored Troops kept order in the village, while preventing outsiders from harassing residents.39 Former slaves such as James Parks continued to live and work at the cemetery, where he would prepare the ground for the famous and the obscure for decades to come.40 Other freedmen worked as cemetery gardeners, laborers, and teamsters. Many grew their own produce for markets in the capital, as they had done in plantation days.41
One prominent black family even managed to peel off a 17 ½-acre parcel from the Lee estate as soon as Union victory was ensured. In a case that got a good deal of attention in its day, William Syphax, an Arlington native and a messenger for the Department of the Interior, petitioned President Andrew Johnson for title to the land. In his appeal, dated May 11, 1865, Syphax argued that Arlington’s first master, George Washington Parke Custis, had given the land to his mother, a former slave named Maria Syphax, at the same time that he freed her.
“In the year 1826, the late Mr. G. W. P. Custis manumitted my Mother and her children,” William Syphax wrote, “and at his death my father became free by the terms of Mr. C’s will. At the time my mother was freed Mr. Custis gave to her, for the use of herself and heirs, a small parcel of land … lying on the outer boundary of the Arlington tract, where my parents continue to reside … My parents have no written evidence of this gift of land made to them by Mr. Custis, but can establish, by parol evidence, the facts herein alleged.”42
This narrative evidence proved convincing: Maria Syphax was, in the terms of those times, a mulatto with strong Caucasian features; unlike most other slaves, she had been raised in the Custis mansion, playing with Mary Custis (later Mrs. Robert E. Lee); she had been singled out for preferential treatment by George Washington Custis, who freed her and her children three decades before arranging to free his other slaves. He had given property to no other slaves, and for years had allowed the Syphax family to use their corner of Arlington as if they owned it. Within the Syphax clan, it was understood that Maria had been not only a slave of George Washington Custis—she was also his daughter, from a union with a household servant of Martha Washington’s named Airrianna Carter.43
It took a year for the Syphax case to work its way through the federal bureaucracy, but the petition was finally granted on June 12, 1866, when President Johnson signed legislation awarding the small Arlington tract to Mrs. Syphax. Newspapers, happy to poke fun at Custis family history, had a field day with the story. “It happens that this colored man (Charles Syphax) is a half-brother to Mrs. General Robert E. Lee, and grandson of George Washington Parke Custis, who was a stepson of George Washington!” reported
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. “That is quite a parentage, is it not? … It is also asserted that Mrs. General Lee has, in all, some forty half-brothers of the same sort in and around Washington.”44 Forty was probably an exaggeration, but there were, in fact, more than a few children of mixed race on the Arlington plantation, with many claiming ancestry in the Custis line. “We’re all colors, from white to dark brown,” said one such descendent. “Nobody’s black.”45
If Mrs. Lee worried about this aspect of family history, she kept her own counsel. Her views on race, like her late husband’s, were far from simple. She held a strong prejudice against African Americans, whom she derided at one time or another as lazy, idle, and untrustworthy. They were the “pets” of northern do-gooders, she said.46 Yet alongside these beliefs, she maintained tender feelings about many of those blacks she knew, exchanging news with former servants who had emigrated to Liberia and inquiring after the fortunes of those remaining at Arlington. Her correspondence with Selina Gray, the former housekeeper who had watched over the mansion since 1861, is particularly affectionate.
Like others who had lived at Arlington, Mrs. Gray knew of Mrs. Lee’s attachment to her home and kept her apprised of changes there. “It is a most lovely place now,” Selina Gray wrote in 1872, but “so changed you wold hardly know it … The whole of it is rented to the freemen. They have little huts all over that beautiful place … Your things at the time of the war was taken away by every body.” One artifact of old Arlington remained, however: a rosebush Mrs. Lee had planted by her mother’s grave in the hills behind the house. Mrs. Gray clipped a bud from the plant and folded it into her letter that autumn, along with this wish: “I trust I may see the day yet when you all will have Arlington.”47
Mrs. Gray betrayed no hint of bitterness toward her former owner, although she admitted that she “under went a great deal to stay at Arlington as long as I did having so many inferior persons to contend with … But I am very happy that I have got a comfortable home of my own now … a bout half way to Alexandria. We have 10 acres of land.”48
Whether the two women met again is unknown, but Mrs. Lee did manage a farewell visit to Arlington, early in June 1873.49 Accompanied by a friend, she rode up the long hill in an open carriage at eleven a.m. and toured the estate until two P.M., stopping from time to time to take in the scene. She never emerged from her coach, but asked for a drink of water at the Arlington spring; someone brought it to her, along with a handful of flowers. Then she was driven away.50 “My visit produced one good effect,” Mrs. Lee wrote a friend later that week. “The change is so entire I have not the yearning to go back there & shall be more content to resign all my right in it.”51 She died in Lexington five months later. She was sixty-five.
With her death, Mrs. Lee’s hopes for Arlington lived on in her eldest son, George Washington Custis Lee, now thrust into the role of family leader. For Custis, who was nothing if not dutiful, regaining the estate was a matter of filial obligation, as well as enlightened self-interest: He had no inheritance beyond the Arlington property, now encumbered by thousands of graves, a crumbling manor house, a military outpost, a refugee village, and what seemed to be an unshakable federal claim of ownership.
Diligent, handsome, coolheaded, and exceedingly reserved, Custis was the image of his father, whom he had been content to follow from his earliest days.52 Trailing Robert E. Lee to West Point, Custis graduated first in the class of 1854 (while his father was superintendent); entered the engineer corps (as his father had done); resigned his commission at the outbreak of the Civil War (after his father’s example); and followed his father to Richmond in 1861, when both joined Confederate service. Assigned as a military aide to Jefferson Davis, Custis yearned for a battlefield appointment but endured the war years without one, doing what was expected of him and rising to the rank of major general. In addition to his staff duties, Custis served as the family’s acting patriarch in his father’s absence, shipping blankets, clothing, bridles, and camping equipment to the general; keeping track of Mrs. Lee and his four sisters when fighting threatened to maroon them; dispensing funds to relatives; writing checks for his father’s rent on the Richmond house; consulting lawyers and business associates when the general was unable to do so; and helping to settle the confused estate of George Washington Custis as the war crashed around the Confederate capital.53
When the fighting was over, Custis followed his father in peace, moving to Lexington, Virginia, with his parents in 1865. There, age thirty-three, he was appointed professor of civil and military engineering at the Virginia Military Institute. When the elder Lee died in 1870, Custis moved across town to replace him as president of Washington and Lee College, where he remained for twenty-seven years.54
Through it all Custis suppressed his own ambition, maintained a terse correspondence with family, veterans, and college associates, and disappeared for weeks at a time, when it was said that he was suffering from arthritis, boils, dysentery, typhoid fever, and other ailments; it was rumored that these absences might have been caused by drinking. More likely Custis was suffering from depression, which began to haunt him at West Point and dogged him for years afterward.55 The intensely private Custis remained a lifelong bachelor. Often housebound in his later years, he left few clues about the man behind the stiff, soldierly form glimpsed in family photographs and official correspondence.
Custis resumed the campaign for Arlington within months of his mother’s funeral, returning to Congress with a new petition. This time the appeal went forward without Mrs. Lee’s inflammatory suggestion that Arlington be cleared of graves. Instead, he asked for an admission that the property had been taken unlawfully, and requested just compensation for it. No sum was specified in his request of April 6, 1874, but he offered to convey Arlington’s title to the United States in exchange for a settlement.56
His closely argued petition, which bristled with judicial precedents and ran to six thousand words, strongly suggests that he was still getting advice from Francis L. Smith, the family lawyer who had previously counseled Robert E. Lee on the subject of Arlington. The document asserted that the federal government had designed its 1864 tax auction to grab the Lee estate for the bargain price of $26,800. At the time the wartime tax was levied on Arlington, Custis asserted, his mother had been “absent from her home and with a line of flagrant war separating her from it.” Although she had dispatched an agent to pay the tax, federal commissioners had refused her money. This rejection, Custis now claimed, citing recent Supreme Court rulings, invalidated any government title to Arlington: Mrs. Lee’s good-faith attempt to pay the tax was the same as if she had paid it.57
“Your petitioner has been deprived of his property without due process of law, and not only without just compensation, but without any compensation whatsoever,” Lee argued in his Senate appeal. Lee acknowledged the realities at Arlington: “As Congress has devoted it to the purpose of a national cemetery, and naturally desires to preserve in their graves, under the guard of the Federal authority, the remains of those who lost their lives in the service of their country, your petitioner is willing to avoid litigation, by the release of his title to the estate upon the payment of a just compensation.”58
Referred to the Judiciary Committee, Lee’s proposal languished there for months. Congress remained sharply divided along regional lines, and Montgomery Meigs was still very much in charge as quartermaster. Spurred by Lee’s Senate initiative, Meigs urged the secretary of war to make sure that the government’s title stood up to scrutiny. “The Adjutant General can probably report more fully as I have understood that under instructions of the late E. M. Stanton, then secretary of war, he took some measures to obtain perfect record of the title,” Meigs wrote in January 1875. “The Cemetery should not pass out of possession of the country.”59 Meigs still fretted about Senate Bill 661 months later, worried that it might eke through Congress and “interfere with the United States’ tenure of this National Cemetery—a result to be avoided by all
just means.”60 He need not have worried. Lee’s petition died quietly in committee, attended by no debate and scant notice. He retreated to Lexington to fume about the occult ways of Capitol Hill—“not a pleasant place for me to go,” he confided to a friend.61
Custis Lee might have given up then and there if not for signs that the hard feelings between North and South were beginning to thaw. The War Department, yielding to an appeal from Confederate veterans, eased its restrictions on their participation in Decoration Day at Arlington.62 The department also gave permission to southern memorial associations to provide new headstones for several hundred Rebels remaining at the national cemetery.63
By the mid-1870s, it was also clear that a decade of Reconstruction—a serious impediment to North-South reconciliation—was on the verge of collapsing from a combination of southern obstinacy and northern indifference. Throughout the old Confederacy, the hard-won gains of African Americans were in tatters. Although national troops had been dispatched to enforce voting rights and to protect black citizens from violence, the deployments were scarcely sufficient for the mission. More than three thousand blacks and their white supporters were killed by the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorists between 1866 and 1876. In one such incident, on April 13, 1873, a heavily armed white gang, led by former Confederate officers, stormed the court house in Colfax, Louisiana, and killed more than sixty black men deputized to protect local officials. Although three of the vigilantes were eventually brought to trial and found guilty in federal court, their conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1875. They were never punished. By this time federal troops had been withdrawn from most southern states, where black citizens would continue to be intimidated, prevented from voting, and routed from office into the early twentieth century. This happened because the impetus for reconciliation of North and South proved greater than the commitment to full citizenship for black Americans.
On Hallowed Ground Page 11