The lessons of Custis Lee’s recent Supreme Court victory had not been lost on John Syphax or his constituents. If they could not prevent the evictions at Arlington, at least they might expect compensation for their property. The War Department took the point. Two days before Christmas 1887, General Holabird ordered his men to survey the village, record any improvements, and assess the value of each holding. He authorized the purchase of land held by “unauthorized citizens or others as squatters or for residence, under the color of any permission or otherwise.” Then he ordered that the freedmen’s occupation of the village be “made to cease and desist.”97
The first wave of black residents pulled up stakes in the spring of 1888—most of them with trifling payments for their Arlington property. Lucy Harris received $35 for her house; Martha Smith, a former Custis slave, got $40.34 for hers, along with $3 for the trees and vines she had planted. Her neighbor James Parks, who occupied half of a duplex built in the first days of Freedman’s Village, received $13.20 for his home, while his brothers Lawrence and William were paid $63.09 and $78.09, respectively. The unfortunate William Winston, lot 83, got nothing at all. Members of the Mt. Olive Baptist Church were paid $1,040 for their brick building, which provided seed money for the replacement they would soon raise down the road in Alexandria. The War Department’s total assessment for the village amounted to $10,936—or $103 per household, far less than the $350 figure John Syphax had proposed. Congress provided $15,000 to cover payments and some moving expenses for displaced villagers. Many years later, in 1900, lawmakers authorized another $75,000 to reimburse freedmen and their heirs for the “contraband” taxes they had been required to pay during and after the war for the support of their impoverished neighbors.98
Most freedmen had disappeared from Arlington by the 1890s, with the last holdout departing just as the old century gave way to the new. All that remains of their presence are the timeworn headstones of their friends and relatives in the contraband cemetery: Mary Mack, Citizen; Tuda Simms, Civilian; Anna Ross, Citizen; Elija Hawkins, Civilian; Moses Jackson, Citizen; Child of T. B. Fladroy, Civilian; and hundreds of others who sleep in tidy rows at the far margins of Arlington.
With the freedmen out of the way, the national graveyard had room to grow. It added 142 acres in 1889 and another 56 acres in 1897, bringing the total to just over 400 acres—double the size that General Meigs had envisioned when he first sketched out the boundaries in 1864.
Meigs watched with pride as Arlington made the transition from pauper’s ground to field of honor. He instituted decorative improvements, lavished attention on the graveyard’s gates and roads, and made sure that old comrades were buried in grand military style. When he was not fussing over designs for Arlington, Meigs put his itchy pencil to work sketching plans for bowling alleys and billiard tables for army posts, where peacetime troops had time on their hands. It was cheaper, Meigs thought, “to amuse soldiers than punish them for faults resulting from ennui and want of interesting employment for leisure hours.”99
Looking to his own future, Meigs incorporated Arlington into family plans, commandeering a prime corner of the cemetery for himself and his relatives. His wife, Louisa Meigs, was the first to be buried there, in 1879, occupying a hilltop plot alongside Meigs Drive. Here, just to the west of Lee’s mansion, where gnarled oaks spread their branches wide to the breezes, Mrs. Meigs was joined by the general’s father, numerous in-laws, and four of their children, including Lt. John Rodgers Meigs, their beloved son killed in the Civil War. As quartermaster, Meigs had expressed reluctance to disturb anyone’s grave, but he did not hesitate to break this rule where his own relatives were concerned, digging them up from Washington churchyards and transferring them to his corner of Arlington. By the 1880s, the Meigs clan far outnumbered any Lees remaining on the estate.100
Even in this moment of triumph, however, the old quartermaster’s influence was waning. When an assassin’s bullet claimed the life of President James A. Garfield in 1881, Meigs lost a sympathetic executive in the White House and, by extension, his protection in the higher reaches of the War Department. Power passed to Vice President Chester A. Arthur, who lacked his predecessor’s war-time experience and showed no particular sympathy for Meigs. The new president ordered the quartermaster’s retirement, in part to make room for others long overdue for promotion. Still vigorous at age sixty-five and protesting that he was “not too old to have lost all desire to be useful,” Meigs surrendered his army post in 1882—the same year of the Supreme Court’s ruling for Custis Lee. These developments must have proven keenly disappointing for Meigs, a diligent officer who had served with distinction for forty-six years and who had so ardently resisted the Lees’ claims to Arlington.101
Set adrift for almost six months, Meigs eventually found new work, boosted by highly placed friends on Capitol Hill. In August 1882, Congress named him to design and oversee construction of the new Pension Building in Washington, a sprawling nine hundred thousand dollar project that would absorb the general’s creative attention for another five years. As was his practice, Meigs left his mark on the new building by incorporating busts of himself, his wife, and his father in the interior cornice work, among the likenesses of American Indians who glared down on visitors far beneath them. When Meigs was not immortalizing himself, he plunged into the capital’s thriving scientific community, serving as a regent of the Smithsonian Institution and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He gathered for regular roundtable discussions with the astronomer Simon Newcomb, the artist-naturalist Titian Ramsay Peale, the aviation pioneer Samuel P. Langley, and the Smithsonian secretary Joseph Henry, who used his scientific expertise to concoct a powerful alcoholic punch Meigs particularly enjoyed.102
As he grew older, Meigs made frequent visits to Arlington, where his family’s graves anchored Section 1, Row 1 of the cemetery. He designed his last monument with typical thoroughness. Resting over his wife’s grave, it would be a massive gray boxlike sarcophagus, elevated on a pedestal of brown fieldstone and built on the same imposing scale as his earlier shrine to the unknown soldiers of the Civil War. In words carved into the face of the stone, it would celebrate the highlights of Meigs’s public career: QUARTERMASTER GENERAL, SOLDIER, ENGINEER, SCIENTIST, PATRIOT.
All was in readiness in January 1892 when Meigs, seventy-five, died in his Washington home after a brief bout with the flu. After funeral services at St. John’s Church on Lafayette Square, he made the final journey to Arlington in high style, accompanied by an Army band and an honor guard of 150 foot soldiers decked out in their best uniforms. He rode away on clouds of praise. “The Army has rarely possessed an officer who contained within himself so many valuable attainments, and who was entrusted by the Government with a greater variety of weighty responsibilities or who has proved himself more worthy of confidence,” read the General Orders from the War Department.103 A caisson bearing his flag-draped casket rattled across the river, up the long slope to Arlington, and across the meadow of tombstones he had so assiduously cultivated. With muffled drums marking time and guidons snapping in the winter wind, the procession passed Mrs. Lee’s garden and came to a halt on Meigs Drive. There, in a plot that James Parks had just cleared for the general, the rifles barked their last salute, Taps sounded over the tawny hills again, and soldiers in blue eased Montgomery Meigs into the ground.104 His burial instructions were precise: workers were directed to seal his tomb with hydraulic cement and leave him to await the Resurrection.105
With Meigs’s death, the old order shifted. Lee and Grant were long gone. So was Jefferson Davis. So was Gen. John A. Logan, father of Memorial Day. Gone too were the generals whose names recalled the bloody work of Manassas, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and other battles: Hood, Thomas, Hooker, Jackson, McClellan, Stuart, Sheridan, Burnside, Meade. Even the durable William T. Sherman had joined the silent ranks by February 1891, barely a year ahead of Meigs. One of Sherman’s pallbearers that winter was Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, eight
y-four, who had stood bareheaded in the cold at Sherman’s funeral in St. Louis out of respect for his old adversary. “If I were in his place and he standing here in mine,” Johnston said, “he would not put on his hat.” Johnston caught cold and died in short order.106 Such displays of magnanimity helped soften hard feelings between North and South. But as the historian Edmund Morris has observed, it took a new war to heal scars from the old one.107
PART II
REUNION
6
"A SPLENDID LITTLE WAR"
THE NEW WAR WAS SPARKED by the fiery explosion of the U.S.S. maine in Havana harbor on the night of February 15, 1898. More than 260 American sailors, marines, and landsmen were lost in the blast and its aftermath, which came at a delicate moment in Spanish-American relations. The second-class battleship had been summoned to Havana to evacuate Americans if the unrest between Cuban colonists and Spanish authorities roared out of control. The in-surrectos had been seeking autonomy from Spain for decades, through peaceful protest, armed resistance, and occasional rioting. As strife continued to roil the island in the 1890s, newspapers such as the New York Journal of William Randolph Hearst and the New York World of Joseph Pulitzer agitated to expel Spain, free the Cubans, and enlarge U.S. interests in the region, just as other imperial powers—among them Britain, Germany, Belgium, France, and Italy—were extending their reach into other parts of the world. The cause of the Maine’s explosion was unknown but that did not matter to those clamoring for war.1
While Navy divers began the grim business of recovering the burned and mutilated bodies from Havana Harbor, President William McKinley remained reluctant to mount an invasion of Cuba. The former Union major, who had lived through the carnage of Antietam and other Civil War actions, counseled restraint until a board of inquiry could establish the cause of the Maine’s sinking. Meanwhile, as Hearst and Pulitzer agitated for war and the first Maine victims were given temporary burial in Havana’s Colon Cemetery, McKinley tried to soothe jingoists in Congress, explored diplomatic initiatives with Spain, and sought to dampen militants within his own administration, where his assistant secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, was spoiling to punish Spain for “an act of dirty treachery.”2
McKinley demurred. “I don’t propose to be swept off my feet by the catastrophe,” the president told a Senate confidant. “The country can afford to withhold its judgment and not strike an avenging blow until the truth is known.”3
Just in case, though, the nation prudently cranked up its rusty war machinery, with McKinley hoping it would not be needed. The regular Army, shrunken to a force of less than 30,000 by peacetime, made hasty plans for boosting troop strength and appointing officers, while the navy scoured European ports for surplus ships. Congress approved $50 million for war preparations on March 8, 1898. When the bill was reported to the House of Representatives that day, a Rebel yell pierced the decorum of the chamber and all eyes turned to its source, a wiry little man with a pointed white beard who stood all of five feet two inches in his boots—Rep. Joseph Wheeler, sixty-one, a Democrat representing the Eighth Congressional District of Alabama.4
The diminutive congressman, first elected in 1891, was known as “Fighting Joe” Wheeler from his days as a hard-hitting Confederate lieutenant general of cavalry. Ranging from the Mississippi across Georgia and up through the Carolinas, Wheeler joined in more than two hundred engagements, had sixteen horses shot from under him, was wounded three times, and earned the respect of both William T. Sherman, whom he had plagued incessantly, and Robert E. Lee, who placed Wheeler on a par with J. E. B. Stuart as a cavalry officer.5
After the war and Reconstruction, Congressman Wheeler worked as hard to reconcile North and South as General Wheeler had labored to thrash his Union enemies.6 At the mere suggestion of a new conflict, Fighting Joe was one of the first to volunteer for army service. Within a day of the Maine explosion, the Alabaman dashed off a letter to President McKinley. “In case of any trouble with Spain,” Wheeler wrote, “remember that my tender of services is on file at the War Department.” Wheeler also made sure that the Associated Press and other news organizations knew that he was ready to saddle up again.7
McKinley, who embraced sectional reconciliation as a goal of his administration, knew that the reformed Confederate’s loyalty was genuine.8 He filed away the congressman’s letter until the Maine investigation could run its course, which it soon did. On March 25, 1898, messengers arrived at the White House with a report from the board of inquiry. The board’s findings proved to be tantalizingly inconclusive: The doomed battleship had touched a mine. This had set off two shipboard magazines, which caused the Maine to explode and sink. But the report found no evidence that Spain or its agents had planted the mine or was responsible for the tragedy.9 Despite this, the nation’s fever for war—stoked by sensationalist newspapers, by expansionists on Capitol Hill, and by growing public desire to avenge the Maine disaster—could not be chilled. Congress declared war on April 19; McKinley ordered a Cuban blockade on April 22; Spain declared war on April 23; and McKinley summoned Fighting Joe Wheeler to the White House on April 26.10
The president offered the veteran cavalryman a commission as major general of volunteers—one of only fifteen positions of that rank. It was an appointment calculated to make other southerners feel welcome in the new war. “General,” McKinley told Wheeler,“I have sent for you to ask if you want to go, and if you feel able to go.” Wheeler was not only willing but eager to wear the Union blue again.11 “I replied that, while I was sixty-one years old,” he recalled, “I felt as strong and capable as when I was forty, or even much younger, and that I desired very much to have another opportunity to serve my country.”12
Wheeler went home to pack for the Spanish-American War, while McKinley doled out other key military appointments—including a new set of major general’s stars for Fitzhugh Lee, another former Rebel officer and the nephew of the late Robert E. Lee. Fitz Lee was particularly well acquainted with conditions in Cuba, where he had served as U.S. consul general since Grover Cleveland’s administration, monitoring the unsettled conditions that had led to war. Indeed, it could be said that Lee was inadvertently responsible for the new conflict—or at least the excuse for it—for it was he who summoned the Maine to Cuba to show the colors and to evacuate stranded Americans if need be.13
The news that these two prominent Confederates would be fighting under the old flag won almost universal praise. “There is no longer a North or a South in the old sense,” the Indianapolis News reported. “It is but a memory.”14 The New York Tribune commended McKinley’s conciliatory gesture: “Even a year ago such appointments … would have been almost impossible. A common enemy has removed the last vestige of proscription. The southerner is as anxious to defend the country as the northerner, and some anxiety is expressed in the south lest the war end before the old Confederates have the chance to march under the Stars and Stripes.”15
No soldier yearned more to do so than Fighting Joe Wheeler. After some quick drilling in Georgia, he disembarked with his troops in Cuba and led almost a thousand men into the first major land action of the Spanish-American War. On June 24, 1898, Wheeler urged his troops through the sweltering jungle from Siboney and into the hills at Las Guasimas, where they were soon engaged in a brisk exchange with well-entrenched Spaniards.16 The defenders finally gave way to a dogged American assault, prompting the old Confederate to forget where he was: “We’ve got the damn Yankees on the run!” Wheeler whooped.17
Such outbursts of enthusiasm were as music to those serving under Wheeler. Among them was Lt. Col. Theodore Roosevelt of the Rough Riders, who had given up his post in the McKinley administration to organize his famous volunteer regiment; he pronounced his pugnacious little general “a regular game cock.”18 Another officer, watching disparate companies fighting as one in Cuba, noticed how the experience erased regional and racial distinctions: “White regiments, black regiments, Regulars and Rough Riders, representing the young man
hood of the North and the South, fought shoulder to shoulder, unmindful of race or color, unmindful of whether commanded by an ex-Confederate or not, and mindful only of their common duty as Americans.” The officer who said this was Lt. John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, who had earned his derisive nickname while commanding African Americans of the 10th Cavalry in the Indian Wars. Rejoining the unit in Cuba, Pershing led them into fierce fighting on San Juan Hill and around Santiago. Not only did his Buffalo Soldiers hold their own there—five of them earned the Medal of Honor.19 Even so, it would take half a century and two more wars to desegregate the armed forces of the United States.20
On Hallowed Ground Page 13