On Hallowed Ground

by Robert M Poole

  56. Leech, 112–13.

  57. Alan T. Nolan, The Iron Brigade: A Military History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 31–32.

  58. Robert E. Lee to Mildred Lee, Nov. 15, 1861, Recollections, 38.

  59. Robert E. Lee to an unidentified daughter, Dec. 1861, in Personal Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Letters of General Robert E. Lee, ed. J. William Jones (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1875), 385.

  60. Robert E. Lee to Mary Custis Lee, Dec. 25, 1861, Wartime Papers, 95–96.

  61. Robert E. Lee to Gen. Samuel Cooper, Jan. 8, 1862, Wartime Papers, 101–2.

  62. Robert E. Lee to Mary Custis Lee, Jan. 28, 1862, Wartime Papers, 107–8.

  63. Robert E. Lee to Mary Custis Lee, Oct. 7, 1861, Wartime Papers, 79.

  64. The author has included family names for the Lee slaves when they appear in the record, but some, such as Daniel the coachmen, are referred to only by their Christian names in official documents. Many of the Lee slaves who lived long enough to be emancipated had their full names recorded in the deed of manumission, signed by Robert E. Lee, Dec. 29, 1862, and recorded in the Office of the Court of Hustings, Richmond, Virginia, Jan. 2, 1863. AHA.

  65. Martha Custis William to Mary Custis Lee, June 13, 1861, July 25, 1862, AHA.

  66. Furgurson, 102.

  67. Nolan, 33.

  68. Ibid.

  69. Leech, 141–42.

  70. Adj. Gen. Lorenzo Thomas to Col. J. P. Taylor, Jan. 2, 1862, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.

  3: “VAST ARMY OF THE WOUNDED”

  1. Letitia Jones to Mary Custis Lee, undated, Mary Custis Lee Papers (1835–1917), Mss 1 L5144a-1334-1336, VHS.

  2. Mary Custis Lee to Mrs. E. A. Stiles, March 8, 1862, AHA.

  3. Edwin M. Stanton to Charles A. Dana, Feb. 2, 1862, in Benjamin P. Thomas and Harold M. Hyman, Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 146.

  4. Robert E. Lee to Mary Custis Lee, April 4, 1862 in The Wartime Papers of R .E. Lee, Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin, eds., (New York: Bramhall House, 1961), 142.

  5. Emory M. Thomas, Robert E. Lee (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), 230.

  6. Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography, (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1936), II: 594.

  7. David W. Miller, Second Only to Grant: Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs (Ship-pensburg, PA: White Mane Books, 2000), 139.

  8. Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative (New York: Random House, 1958), I:418.

  9. Miller,137.

  10. Maj. W. Roy Mason, C.S.A., “Origins of the Lee Tomatoes,” in Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, (1887–88; reprint: Se-caucus, NJ: Castle, 1982), II: 277; Freeman, II: 252–55.

  11. Thomas and Hyman, 217.

  12. Freeman, II: 254.

  13. Foote, I: 516.

  14. Jari A. Villanueva, “24 Notes That Tap Deep Emotions,”www .west-point.org/taps/Taps.html; Richard A. Schneider, Taps: Notes From a Nation’s Heart(New York: William Morrow, 2002), 8–15. Accounts differ regarding the artillery exchange that produced the first military funeral at which Taps was played. Most sources agree that the shots were fired from Battery A of the 2nd Union Artillery; others credit Battery B, 3rd Artillery.

  15. Brig. Gen. Montgomery Meigs to Charles Meigs, July 8, 1862, MCM Papers, LOC.

  16. Richard Wheeler, Sword Over Richmond(New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 344.

  17. Brig. Gen. John W. Ames, U.S.V, “In Front of the Stone Wall at Fredericksburg,” Battles and Leaders, III:123–24.

  18. Thomas, 271.

  19. Robert E. Lee to Mildred Lee, Dec. 25, 1862, Wartime Papers, 381.

  20. Lt. Col. Richard B. Irwin, U.S.V., “The Administration in the Peninsular Campaign,” Battles and Leaders, II:436.

  21. Robert E. Lee to George W. Randolph, July 12, 1862, Wartime Papers, 231.

  22. Ernest B. Furgurson, Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 191.

  23. “Requests Relating to Missing Soldiers, 1863–76,” NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.

  24. Furgurson, 190–92; Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington: 1860–65 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941), 204–16.

  25. Walt Whitman, Prose and Poetry (New York: Library of America, 1982), 720–21.

  26. Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington: Village and Capital, 1800–1878 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 261; Whitman, 737. “Every family has directly or indirectly some representative among this vast army of the wounded and sick,” Whitman wrote in The New York Times, “Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers,” Dec. 11, 1864.

  27. Eastern Branch is known today as the Anacostia River. The Washington Canal, filled in long ago, now forms the northern edge of the national mall.

  28. Walt Whitman to his mother, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, June 7, 1864, in John Burroughs, Whitman: A Study ( Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1904), X:43.

  29. Leech, 207–8.

  30. As the war progressed, military hospitals improved.

  31. General Orders No. 75, War Department, Sept. 11, 1861, cited in “History and Development of the National Cemetery Administration,” Department of Veterans Affairs, National Cemetery Administration, Feb. 4, 2006, 1.

  32. Capt. James M. Moore to Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, “Extract from annual report of Capt. J. M. Moore, assistant quartermaster, U.S. Army, for the year ending June 30, 1865,” in The War of the Rebellion: a compilation of the official sources of the Union and Confederate Archives (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880), Series III, Vol. 4, 317–22.

  33. Dog tags, more formally known as identification tags, did not come into widespread use until 1913, when the Army published its first regulations requiring them. All U.S. combat soldiers were wearing aluminum identity disks by 1917; the tags took on the familiar oblong shape—and the canine associations—by World War II.

  34. Untitled notes in NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.

  35. Capt. Richard W. Wooley, “A Short History of Identification Tags,” Quartermaster Professional Bulletin, Dec. 1988.

  36. Furgurson, 192–93.

  37. Whitman, 714. “The wounded men often come up broke,” wrote Whitman, who gave patients gifts they could not otherwise afford—apples, writing paper, candy, tobacco, and sometimes small sums of money, “bright new ten-cent and five-cent bills … about the best thing I could do to raise their spirits, and show them that somebody cared for them.” Whitman, 749–50.

  38. Leech, 207.

  39. Furgurson, 192–93.

  40. R. B. Bonteene to Capt. J. M. Moore, Jan. 10, 1865, “Requests for Information Relating to Missing Soldiers,” NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.

  41. Leech, 207; Montgomery C. Meigs to Edwin M. Stanton, June 16, 1864, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.

  42. The first permanent cemeteries on foreign soil were established in 1850, for burial of U.S. soldiers from the Mexican War. Brig. Gen. Monro MacCloskey, Hallowed Ground: Our National Cemeteries (New York: Richards Rosen Press, 1968), 19–20.

  43. Ibid.

  44. “History and Development of the National Cemetery Administration,” Department of Veterans Affairs, National Cemetery Administration, Feb. 4, 2006, 1–3.

  45. “Cemeteries—Cypress Hills National Cemetery,” U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, June 30, 2006.

  46. Furgurson, 189.

  47. Furgurson, 189–90; Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 454–55; Leech, 302–3.

  48. Green, 277.

  49. Felix James, “The Establishment of Freedman’s Village in Arlington, Virginia,” Negro History Bulletin, 33, 4 (April 1970). Lincoln’s 1863 order did not apply to slaves living in Maryland or other border states for politi cal reasons; it was feared that such action might drive border state
s to join the rebellion. In addition, Lincoln’s authority for the order arose from his claim of extraordinary wartime powers, which applied only to those states at war with the Union.

  50. “Jubilee Among the Contrabands,” The Evening Star, Washington, D.C., Jan. 1, 1863, Virginia Room, ACL.

  51. Robert E. Lee to Mary Custis Lee, Dec. 21, 1862, Wartime Papers, 378–79.

  52. Robert E. Lee, Deed of Manumission, Dec. 29, 1862, Robert E. Lee Papers, Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia.

  53. Robert E. Lee to Mary Custis Lee, Dec. 21, 1862, Wartime Papers, 378–79.

  54. Casualty estimates from the Battle of Gettysburg have been closely examined and debated since Civil War days. It would appear that Lee underestimated his losses, gauging them at about 20,000; in the years since, historians have adjusted the figure upward, suggesting that Confederates lost as many as 28,000, with Union casualties at 22,000.

  55. James, 5.

  56. The National Freedman, March 1, 1865, 60; Green, 276–78.

  57. James, 5.

  58. Green, 278.

  59. Lt. Col Elias M. Greene to Maj. Gen. S. P. Heintzelman, May 5, 1863, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.

  60. Ibid.; Jennifer Hanna, Arlington House: The Robert E. Lee Memorial (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2001), 80.

  61. Maj. Leavitt Hunt, General Orders No. 28, May 22, 1863, NARA RG 92, RG 92, Quartermaster General’s Office.

  62. “General Plans No. 9 and No. 10 VA” for Freedman’s Village, Department of War, Office of the Quartermaster General, AHA.

  63. “Freedman’s Village, Arlington, Virginia,” Harper’s Weekly, May 7, 1864.

  64. Lt. Col. Elias M. Greene to Charles Thomas, Dec. 17, 1863, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.

  65. Mary C. Ames, The Independent (Washington, D.C.), January 6, 1867.

  66. Lt. Col. Elias M. Greene to Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, July 22, 1862, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.

  67. “Report to the Executive Committee of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends upon the Condition and Needs of the Freed People of Color in Washington and Virginia,” Nov. 10, 1864; see also Roberta Schildt, “Freedman’s Village: Arlington, Virginia, 1863–1900,” Northern Virginia Heritage, Feb. 1985, 11–23, Virginia Room, ACL.

  68. James, 6.

  69. “Addresses and Ceremonies at the New Year’s Festival to the Freedmen of Arlington Heights and Statistics and Statements of Educational Condition of the Colored People in the Southern States, and Other Facts,” 1867, 16, Virginia Room, ACL.

  70. Furgurson, 257.

  71. Enoch A. Chase,“The Arlington Case,” Virginia Law Review XV, 3 ( Jan. 1929): 207–33.

  72. The National Republican, Jan. 12, 1864.

  73. Chase, 207–33.

  74. Robert E. Lee to Mary Custis Lee, Feb. 6, 1864, Wartime Papers.

  75. Robert E. Lee to Mary Custis Lee, Jan. 24, 1864, Wartime Papers.

  76. Robert E. Lee to Jefferson Davis, March 30, 1864, Wartime Papers.

  77. Maj. Gen. Alexander S. Webb, “Through the Wilderness,” Battles and Leaders, IV:152–69.

  78. Foote, III: 268, 316. As the Forty Days’ Campaign was starting, Gen. George Meade is supposed to have expressed apprehension about the coming fight. According to John Hay, President Lincoln’s secretary, Meade worried that the Confederates would “make a Kilkenny cat fight of the affair.” In Hay’s account, General Grant told Meade: “Our cat has the longer tail.” John Hay, The Complete Civil War Diaries (Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 143.

  79. Leech, 322–23.

  80. Capt. James M. Moore, “List of papers Accompanying the Report of the Quartermaster General, 1864,”O.R., Series III, Vol. 4, 874–904.

  4: FIRST BURIALS

  1. H. J. Conner to Frederick L. Fishback, June 23, 1923, for Robert R. Dye, Superintendent, Arlington National Cemetery, with selected reports from Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, Part III, Vol. I, AHA.

  2. Enoch A. Chase, The Sunday Star, (Washington, D.C.), Nov. 4, 1928, 5.

  3. Capt. James M. Moore, Extract No. 3, in annual report of the operations of the Quartermaster General’s Department, Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs to Edwin M. Stanton, Nov. 3, 1864, The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Sources of Union and Confederate Armies (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900), Series III, Vol. 4, 874–905.

  4. Conner.

  5. Conner.

  6. Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs to Edwin M. Stanton, April 11, 1873, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.

  7. George W. Dodge, “The Rose Garden at Arlington House,” The Arlington Historical Magazine, Arlington Historical Society, Oct. 1990, 20–21.

  8. Dodge, 20–29.

  9. Capt. James M. Moore to Brig. Gen. D.H. Rucker, Dec. 11, 1865, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General; MCM Papers, LOC.

  10. Dodge, 20–29.

  11. Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, Diary, June 9, June 10, 1864, MCM Papers, LOC.

  12. J. Howard Avil, “United States National Military Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia,” 1903. Other versions of Avil’s account were repeated in subsequent publications, including the Sunday Star, May 27, 1923, and the book Washington, City and Capital, from the WPA American Guide Series, 1937. These accounts, and others based on them, erroneously record Confederate Pvt. Levi Reinhardt as Arlington’s first military burial.

  13. Roberta Schildt, “Freedman’s Village: Arlington, Virginia, 1863–1900,” Northern Virginia Heritage, Feb. 1985, 17; “First Interment in Arlington National Cemetery,” copy of memorandum, Quartermaster General’s File CMGME-C 687, June 16, 1959, AHA

  14. Meigs makes no note of visiting Arlington with President Lincoln, nor does the quartermaster credit him as coauthor of the idea for a national cemetery—both of which Meigs would have been likely to mention in his wartime journal or his voluminous correspondence. Lincoln first enters the Arlington story after Meigs’s death, when the general’s granddaughter recalls a conversation between the two men. Lincoln supposedly asked Meigs about Arlington’s fate, and Meigs is said to have replied: “The ancients filled their enemies fields with salt and made them useless forever but we are a Christian nation, why not make it a field of honor?” (MCM Papers, LOC).

  15. Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs to Edwin M. Stanton, June 15, 1864, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.

  16. Edwin M. Stanton, June 15, 1864, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.

  17. “A Great National Cemetery,” The Washington Morning Chronicle, June 17, 1864.

  18. Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs to Brig Gen. D. H. Rucker, June 15, 1864, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.

  19. Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs to Edwin M. Stanton, April 12, 1874, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General. Meigs, a naturally industrious man, kept a furious pace throughout the war, providing his army not only with burial services but also with horses, shoes, food, overcoats, ammunition, and warships. He accomplished this with admirable efficiency and little evidence of waste or corruption. A man in a hurry, Meigs dashed off his orders with few pauses for punctuation, a style I have retained when quoting his correspondence.

  20. Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs to Edwin M. Stanton, June 16, 1864; Brig. Gen. D. H. Rucker to Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, July 8, 1864, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.

  21. Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs to Edwin M. Stanton, June 16, 1864, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Brig. Gen. D. H. Rucker to Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, July 8, 1864, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.

  24. Dodge, “The Rose Garden at Arlington House,” Arlington Historical Magazine, Arlington Historical Society, Oct. 1991, 57–59.

  25. Ibid.

  26. At least two other enlisted men found their way into Mrs. Lee’s garden, but their presence can b
e explained. Pvt. Monroe Bradley of the 187th New York Infantry, buried in the garden on Dec. 5, 1864, was put there by accident—someone had mistaken him for a lieutenant; when the error was discovered, he was allowed to stay. Pvt. Adolph Ahrens, killed in the Battle of Second Manassas on Aug. 29, 1862, was buried near the battlefield and later exhumed to rest by his brother, Lt. Louis Ahrens, 4th New York Cavalry, buried in the garden in April 1866, after the war. Dodge, Oct. 1990, 44; Oct. 1991, 54.

  27. Dodge, Oct. 1990, 20–50.

  28. Capt. James M. Moore, in O.R., Nov. 3, 1864, 902–5.

  29. MCM Papers, Oct. 3, 7, 11, 1865, LOC; David W. Miller, Second Only to Grant: Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Books, 2000), 95, 241–42.

  30. Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee, A Biography, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), IV:155–64; Emory M. Thomas, Robert E. Lee: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995) 368–69.

  31. Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930) 5:130.

  32. Jefferson Davis was never brought to trial. After two years in jail, he was released in May 1867 on bond. He lived another twenty two-years, dying at age eighty-two. He never asked for a pardon. Johnson and Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 5:130.