When Jusserand finished, soldiers bore L’Enfant from the Rotunda, down the long Capitol steps, and out into the April sunlight. They eased him onto a caisson pulled by six bay horses, and the cortege moved down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the White House, through Georgetown, and across the river to Arlington, accompanied by cavalry, two military bands, a battalion of army engineers, and a long procession of mourners who converged on Lee’s mansion.26
After a brief Catholic service and the sounding of Taps, soldiers prepared to lower L’Enfant into the ground, but before they could do so, a man stepped from the crowd, unpinned a gold medal with a blue ribbon from his coat, and reverently laid it on L’Enfant’s casket. The man was Sen. Augustus Octavius Bacon, Democrat of Georgia, and the medal, in the form of an eagle crowned by laurels, was from the Society of the Cincinnati, a fraternal order for French and American officers of the Revolutionary War and their male descendants.27 L’Enfant had not only been a member of the society; he had designed its original badge, won George Washington’s imprimatur for the prototype, and sailed to Paris in 1783 to oversee the first badges cast.28 Somewhere along the way, L’Enfant had lost or sold his own Cincinnati medal. Senator Bacon had noticed and made amends, and this time the decoration stayed with the Frenchman.29
It took another two years for L’Enfant’s monument to be finished.30 Thirty-five architects entered a competition for the design, which was won by William Welles Bosworth of New York. He produced drawings for a chunky Beaux Arts marble shaft decorated with oval panels and draped with swags.31 Reviewing the design for the American Institute of Architects, president Cass Gilbert and secretary Glenn Brown recoiled at Bosworth’s proposal. “I could not approve the design selected by the jury either as a suitable design for the purpose or as the best design of those submitted,” Gilbert wrote. Leaving nothing to chance, he and Brown came up with a simpler plan, presented it to Bosworth, and urged him to adopt it. “If a monument had been erected to L’Enfant at the time of his death, by his friends in Washington, it would have been a cemetery monument of that period,” Gilbert wrote, suggesting an understated memorial “colonial in type—a table tomb, with the Plan of Washington on top, and the remains in the ground below.” Bosworth swallowed his pride and embraced the revision. He produced blueprints for a table top tomb precisely like the one Brown and Gilbert prescribed.32
That problem was resolved, but one last controversy remained. When plans for the tomb were presented to the quartermaster in November 1910, an alert officer noticed a problem: the architects had erroneously listed L’Enfant’s rank as “Major, U.S. Engineer Corps,” when in fact the Frenchman had been a captain of U.S. Engineers and brevet major of the Continental Army. Distinctions of rank mattered little to ordinary civilians but carried great weight with military professionals. They knew the difference between temporary titles, such as L’Enfant’s majority, and permanent rank; their daily status, not to mention their paychecks, depended upon precision in such things. To make matters worse, L’Enfant’s graveyard promotion had already been committed to stone. The monument was scheduled to arrive at Arlington in less than a month, followed by President Taft and a retinue of high-powered officials expected for the springtime dedication.33
“Inasmuch as the inscription has already been cut,” assistant quartermaster George Ruhlen reported to the secretary of war, “these discrepancies cannot be remedied without disfiguring the monument. For this reason, and owing to the further fact that the circumstances under which the monument is to be placed in Arlington National Cemetery are entirely different from those affecting monuments of other officers interred there, this office recommends approval of the design and inscription in accordance with the copy herewith submitted, this case not be taken as a precedent.”34 The War Department took this face-saving advice, the monument arrived, and the cream of Washington society turned out for a formal unveiling on May 22, 1911. From the portico of the Lee mansion, where chairs had been set up for distinguished visitors, President Taft led the speakers that afternoon:
All Americans who take pride in the Capital and its development … must feel deep gratitude to L’Enfant for what he did … and must rejoice that now, 86 years after his death, the time has come when we are paying him just tribute in sight of the city that he designed, in a place full of tender memories for the nation, a beautiful estate dedicated to the patriotic dead, furnishing a terminal—and a proper terminal—for the design of the future of the city of Washington. L’Enfant will now lie here appropriately in state and in rest, with the gratitude of the nation he served so well.35
On this day of celebration, Taft avoided mention of the confusion over Captain L’Enfant’s rank, just as he did not call attention to the error permanently chiseled into line nine of the engineer’s tombstone, which lists the year of his birth as 1755, when in fact he was born in 1754.36
Even with these distractions, L’Enfant’s arrival at Arlington helped balance the years of neglect he had suffered, while bringing attention to the new breed of architects such as Glenn Brown, who saw it as their mission to civilize the nation’s cities. “This is the first tribute to a City Planner and is worth the attention of the country,” Brown wrote to the editor of Harper’s Weekly to generate interest before L’Enfant’s tomb was dedicated in 1911.37 In addition to advancing the ambitions of fellow designers, the Frenchman’s ascension also marked Arlington’s emerging status as the nation’s most esteemed war memorial. Begun as a graveyard for destitute soldiers, it had expanded to receive all Civil War veterans a few years later. Then it grew to accommodate those who fell in the fight with Spain. And with the reburial of L’Enfant and those who had served in earlier wars, it became the place to honor all of America’s conflicts—past, present, and future.
From his new grave overlooking the capital, L’Enfant held the heights for comrades who had fought and bled in the Revolutionary War, as he had done. Just over the hills behind him, another fourteen long-dead warriors, disinterred from Washington and transferred to Arlington in 1905, claimed space for all who perished in the War of 1812.38 Other graves belonged to soldiers from the Mexican-American War (1846–48). All were mingled in Section 1 of the cemetery—also known as the officers’ section—where Montgomery Meigs, Abner Doubleday, John Wesley Powell, and distinguished Civil War veterans already slept. Their close-set tombstones, situated on six rolling acres near the Fort Myer gate, told of the nation’s troubled birth, its violent coming of age, and its precarious survival in a hostile world.39
One such grave marker, worn and discolored by time, belonged to Gen. James McCubbin Lingan, a Marylander who had fought alongside L’Enfant and Washington in the War of Independence, in which he was wounded and jailed on a British prison ship. He finished the Revolution as one of the war’s most respected officers. Years later, he attracted attention for his opposition to the nation’s next great conflict, the War of 1812. He never fought in the later war, but he sacrificed everything for it, becoming perhaps the first American to die for the First Amendment.40
A few weeks after the United States declared war on Britain in June of 1812, Lingan turned up in Baltimore to defend Alexander Contee Hanson, publisher of the Federal Republican and Commercial Gazette. A Federalist like Lingan, Hanson ardently opposed the new war and forcefully said so in his paper—even after a mob of pro-war Baltimoreans stormed Hanson’s office, wrecked the presses, and tore down the building. Hanson defiantly kept printing from another site, informing readers that he would continue to criticize President James Madison’s ill-advised war. Goaded into action by the paper’s inflammatory stance, Hanson’s neighbors took to the streets on July 27 and 28, promising violence. When bricks started flying toward the publisher and his friends, Hanson shot into the mob, killing at least one man and wounding others. The enraged crowd chased him, Lingan, and a handful of supporters into the city jail, where the men sought protection. The crowd broke in, dragged Hanson and others down the stairs, beat them mercilessly, and left them for dea
d.41
When rioters turned on Lingan, he ripped open his shirt. “Does this look like I am a traitor?” he cried, revealing an ugly bayonet scar from his Revolutionary service. This gesture inflamed his attackers, who beat him to death. They tried to do the same to Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, a Revolutionary hero, father of Robert E. Lee, and a defender of Hanson. Beaten to a pulp and left for dead, Lee survived, but he was “as black as a negro, his head cut to pieces without any hat or any shirt but a flannel one which was covered with blood,” according to an eyewitness. Crippled and partially blinded, Lee never really recovered. For his part, Hanson played dead until friends managed to cart him away. He survived the war and won election to the U.S. Senate.42
Within days of the Baltimore riots, Lingan’s broken body was quietly returned to a private cemetery in Georgetown. The chief orator at his funeral was none other than George Washington Parke Custis, an ardent Federalist and master of the newly built Arlington estate. It was said that Custis spoke so movingly that it prompted crying from “old warriors who had almost forgotten how to weep.” In the same spirit of delayed homage that led to L’Enfant’s enshrinement at Arlington, Lingan’s body was recovered from Georgetown in 1908, ushered over the river, and recommitted to earth to the sounds of brass hymns, rifle salutes, and stirring oratory.43
That same year, a middle-aged naval commander named Robert E. Peary struggled toward the North Pole, the Arctic grail that had eluded him for more than two decades. Although his previous forays into the ice had claimed seven of Peary’s toes and much of his fortune, this time he hoped finally to plant the Stars and Stripes at the top of the world, not only to win fame for himself but also, as he put it, “for the honor and credit of this country.”44 Such patriotic talk was not unusual in those self-assured times, when John Philip Sousa took the Marine Band to play packed houses, the Navy’s Great White Fleet toured the world on a prestige-building cruise, and Teddy Roosevelt unashamedly foresaw “a new century big with the fate of mighty nations.”45
Mighty nations such as the United States established territories in the Philippines and the Caribbean, linked the oceans by means of a new Panama Canal, and embraced figures such as Peary, who returned to a hero’s welcome in 1909, claiming to have reached the North Pole.46 While these patriotic initiatives unfolded, the country reached into its past to restore the memory of figures such as L’Enfant and ventured abroad to reclaim the patriarchs of key national institutions.
In this nationalistic spirit, Gen. Horace Porter, a famous Union officer appointed U.S. ambassador to France in 1897, devoted part of his European assignment to searching for the lost grave of John Paul Jones, patron saint of the Continental Navy. It took Porter six years to find what he believed to be Jones’s grave just outside Paris. The remains were removed, examined closely, and shipped home in July 1905 under naval escort, accompanied by Rear Adm. Charles D. Sigsbee—he of the U.S.S. Maine catastrophe. Sailing up Chesapeake Bay in fine July weather, Sigsbee brought his squadron safely through to Annapolis, where Jones was encrypted at the heart of the U.S. Naval Academy, in a chapel tomb described as “one of the most ornamental and elaborate … in America.”47 A similar patriotic impulse inspired the retrieval of James Smithson, benefactor of the national museum, in 1904. The Smithsonian Institution assigned its most famous regent, Alexander Graham Bell, to escort Smithson’s bones from Italy; President Roosevelt ordered the warship Dolphin to accompany the funeral convoy from New York; and the museum’s English-born benefactor was seen into a specially commissioned sepulcher, which still guards the entrance to Smithsonian headquarters today.48 By exalting such figures from the past, the country emphasized virtues considered essential to its future.
Ceremonies for L’Enfant, Lingan, Jones, and Smithson attracted considerable attention in their day, but virtually no controversy. So many graves were being emptied and shifted that the burst of funerary activity came to appear almost normal. The Civil War had hardened the quartermaster’s office to moving dead armies from one place to another, while the Spanish-American War had taught that it was possible to recover compatriots from overseas, often under appalling conditions, with efficiency and dignity. Hardly anyone noticed when Congress first considered L’Enfant’s disinterment in 1905; the bill sailed through with only perfunctory debate and no hearings.49 If the cause was patriotic and handled with tact, such moves produced little fuss.
The pause between wars allowed time for such refinements at Arlington, where workers relocated graves, paved new roadways, reseeded grass, and built new stone walls to replace wire fences as the twentieth century began. Down by the river on land once worked by freedmen, the Agriculture Department took over some four hundred acres, plowed test plots, developed new crops, and experimented with plants introduced from abroad. Rows of fresh tombstones appeared in the section of Arlington dedicated to nurses from the Spanish-American War, a part of the cemetery where the women still occupy most of the real estate. Meanwhile, the cemetery’s durable gardener, D. H. Rhodes, fine-tuned the landscape around the mansion, digging up Mrs. Lee’s garden, grading the ground smooth, and planting new roses as a backdrop for the graves of Union officers. Around the edges, Rhodes created a flower border spelling out the names of famous soldiers in blossoms, a medium he also employed to display a running total of Unknowns at Arlington.50
By 1902, the army issued new regulations for its standard headstones, making them more durable, taller, and wider than before. It also adopted more prominent markers for the graves of unknown sailors, soldiers, and marines—in place of the small square stone blocks issued before 1903, the unidentified dead of the future would have standard marble slabs like others at Arlington, with “Unknown” curving across the stone face.51
Even in times of peace, however, Arlington was never far from the memory of war or the prospect of a new conflict. The summer of 1908 brought the sound of sputtering airplane engines drifting over the cemetery, which combined with cheers from more than two thousand voices late on the afternoon of September 17. A rickety biplane slid down the tracks at Fort Myer, hovered uncertainly over the grass a few moments, and lurched into the sky at precisely five fourteen p.m.52
As the shadows lengthened, John B. McCarthy, a Washingtonian who had been attending a funeral at Arlington, heard the commotion and wandered over to the Fort Myer parade grounds for a look. He gazed up to see Orville Wright, sitting stiffly and wearing a tartan cap, at the controls of a plane swooping over the field in lazy circles. The plane’s only passenger, Lt. Thomas E. Selfridge of the Army Signal Corps, sat beside Wright, waved to friends on the ground, and chattered over the propeller’s drone.53
“The emotions aroused as one watched the craft sailing about so lightly and easily cannot be described,” McCarthy recalled. He watched the skies eagerly, as did a crowd of military brass keen on the reconnaissance potential of the new flying machines. The army had pledged twenty-five thousand dollars to anyone who could meet its specifications for the first warplane: It had to fly at a speed of forty miles an hour, cover a distance of one hundred twenty-five miles, carry a pilot and observer safely, and be portable enough to fit on a mule-drawn wagon. Lured by the hope of a government contract, the Wright brothers delivered the first prototype in September 1908. Orville brought the flying machine to Fort Myer for a series of demonstration flights, while his brother Wilbur performed related experiments for prospective customers in France.54
The Fort Myer trials were going well. By the time Orville took Selfridge aloft, the inventor had already made a dozen runs over the base, breaking all previous records for sustained flight by staying airborne for more than an hour. This impressed a curious public, as well as military observers such as Lieutenant Selfridge. At age twenty-six, Selfridge was already a pioneering aviator who had flown dirigibles and experimental planes in the months before the Fort Myer trials. Assigned by his service to join Orville for the September 17 flight, Selfridge enthusiastically clambered aboard, throwing off his coat and hat
and settling in for the adventure. “He looked as eager as a schoolboy for the test to begin,” the New York Times reported.55
It was Orville’s thirteenth flight in the Fort Myer series, a number that proved to be unlucky as well as historic. On the plane’s fourth pass over the parade grounds, a propeller blade cracked, the aircraft faltered, and it plunged headlong into the ground. The crowd watched in horror, first gasping, then going dead quiet. With their clothes in tatters and covered with blood, Wright and Selfridge lay in the wreckage, pinned down by twisted wires and shattered framework. Women shrieked, men rushed to help, and cavalry troops galloped across the field to hold back a whirling, panicked crowd. A burly Army officer—the one who assigned Selfridge to the flight that day—fainted with a thump.56
In the wreckage of his plane, Wright retained consciousness. Beside him, Selfridge lay perfectly still, crushed under the aircraft engine. Picked from the ruins of the flying machine, they were borne to the post hospital on stretchers. Wright, who sustained a broken thigh, broken ribs, and numerous lacerations, remained hospitalized for months. Selfridge, his skull fractured, died three hours after the crash.57
“It came down like a bird shot dead in full flight, describing almost a complete somersault and throwing up a dense cloud of dust,” said Maj. H. C. Magoon, then superintendent of Arlington. He had been standing near the cemetery wall and was closest to the plane when disaster struck. “The aeroplane started over the cemetery … and I stood aghast, fearing it would alight on the trees. From where I stood I could not see the men when it struck the ground. The machine went to smash in the twinkling of an eye,” he told the Washington Post. “All that I have told you happened in a few seconds, probably two or three, but it seemed a much longer time.”58
On Hallowed Ground Page 16