56. “Memorial of G.W. Custis Lee, of Virginia,” April 6, 1874, Miscellaneous Senate Document No. 96, 43rd Congress, 1st Session.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid.
59. Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs to Secretary of War, Jan. 8, 1875, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
60. Brig. Gen Montgomery C. Meigs to Secretary of War, June 10, 1876, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
61. G. W. C. Lee to Capt. J. J. White May 4, 1876, in Yates, II:120.
62. William W. Belknap to Sen. John J. Patterson, May 25, 1874, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
63. Maj. Oscar A. Mack to Mrs. C. P. Culver, Jan. 18, 1875, reprinted in The New York Times, Jan. 29, 1875.
64. Johnson and Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, 8:446–51.
65. Charles R. Williams, Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes, III:24, in AHA.
66. Enoch A. Chase, “The Arlington Case,” Virginia Law Review, XV, 3 ( January 1929): 207–33. While President Rutherford Hayes sympathized with the Lees, he had the good sense to let the Arlington case proceed through the judicial system without White House interference. Robert Hughes, a native Virginian and originally a Buchanan Democrat favoring states’ rights, detested Confederate president Jefferson Davis and, as a prominent newspaper editor in Richmond, suggested that Virginia consider negotiating a separate peace. After the war, he became editor of the Republic, the first postwar Republican newspaper in Virginia, attended the Democratic National Convention of 1868, and ran as a Republican for Congress and governor—unsuccessfully—before President Grant appointed him as a federal judge in 1874.
67. Chase, 215.
68. Ibid., 217.
69. Ibid, 219–20.
70. United States v. Lee, 106 U.S. 196 (1882).
71. Chase, 218–19.
72. Ibid., 200.
73. Ibid., 219.
74. Prior to the sale of Arlington in 1883, the Secretary of War asked Gen. William T. Sherman, then in charge of the U.S. Army, about the military value of the estate. Sherman replied with characteristic bluntness: “Respectfully submitted to the Hon. Sec. of War with expression of my judgment that the Arlington Estate is not of the least military value to the U.S.” William T. Sherman to Robert Todd Lincoln, Jan.12, 1883, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
75. One begins to suspect a curse on the Lee family. With the ownership question resolved after twenty years, Custis Lee transferred Arlington’s title to the federal government in 1883, paying a required $150 tax to Alexandria County—a sum promptly embezzled by the clerk of the Alexandria County Court and not discovered until three years later. The clerk was sent to jail. Memorandum, George A. Mushbach, attorney for Alexandria Board of Supervisors, to Lt. Col. R. N. Batchelder, April 26, 1883, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
76. Chase, 232–33.
77. The estimates of the population of Freedman’s Village vary considerably, from a high of 1,500 to some 100 in the initial colony. The only official figures come from the quartermaster’s census in 1888, when 173 families were counted in a population of 763.
78. G. A. Wheeler to Gen. C. H. Howard, undated, but likely c. 1867, in Roberta Schildt, “Freedman’s Village: Arlington, Virginia, 1863–1900,” Arlington Historical Magazine VII, 4 (1984): 51.
79. J. S. Roberts to Lt. Col. William Bube, Jr., Jan. 8, 1867, in Schildt, 49.
80. Lt. Col. A. C. Card, deputy quartermaster, report to Quartermaster General, March 27, 1888, AHA.
81. The Washington Post, Dec. 7, 1887.
82. John B. Ellis, Sights and Secrets of the National Capital (New York: United States Publishing Company, 1869), 499–500.
83. Edgar S. Horner, principal clerk, Quartermaster General’s office, to Col. Charles G. Mortimer, superintendent of Arlington National Cemetery, undated but at least 1895, AHA. Mortimer described payments to laborers Cornelius Syphax, who worked at the cemetery from 1870 through 1895, and to his brother Ennis Syphax, who worked from 1872 through 1891. Cornelius received as little as $1 per day and as much as $1.75; Ennis was paid $1 per day.
84. In July 1872, Secretary of War William W. Belknap declared all of Arlington, including the cemetery, Freedman’s Village, and Fort Whipple (later Fort Myer) a national military reserve. This might have been an attempt to forestall Mrs. Lee’s recovery of Arlington—then controversial and much in the news. Although Belknap’s action failed to discourage the Lee family, it provided a pretext for evicting freedmen from the military reservation fifteen years later.
85. William Syphax to Sen. Algernon S. Paddock, Aug. 15, 1888, AHA.
86. Anonymous letter to the Hon. John A. Rollam, May 10, 1869, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
87. Ibid.
88. Brig. Gen. J. C. McFerran, report to Quartermaster General, May 11, 1869, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
89. J. A. Commerford to Lt. Col. George B. Dandy, deputy quartermaster, Nov. 12, 1887, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
90. Brig. Gen. Samuel B. Holabird to William C. Endicott, Nov. 17, 1887, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
91. Ibid.; see also Alexandria Gazette, Dec. 6, 1887; The New York Herald, Dec. 8, 1887; The Washington Post, Dec. 7, 1887.
92. The Washington Post,“The Eviction of the Squatters From Freedman’s Village,” Dec. 7, 1887.
93. The New York Herald, Dec. 8, 1887.
94. Alexandria Gazette, Dec. 6, 1887.
95. John B. Syphax, born a free man, was the son of Maria and Charles Syphax of Arlington. According to family tradition, Maria was the daughter of George Washington Parke Custis.
96. John B. Syphax to William C. Endicott, Jan. 18, 1888, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
97. Brig. Gen. Samuel B. Holabird to Lt. Col. A. C. Card, Dec. 23, 1887, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
98. Lt. Col. A. C. Card to Brig Gen. Samuel B. Holabird, March 27, 1888, with “Valuation of Property in Freedman’s Village, 1888,” NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General. The “contraband tax” was long an annoyance for freedmen at Arlington, where each was assigned a job, paid $10 per month, and assessed $5 per month to help former slaves unable to work. The tax was suspended in 1868 when the Freedmen’s Bureau was dissolved.
99. Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs to F. T. Hodgdon, Feb. 18, 1881, in Risch, 490.
100. Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs to William W. Belknap, Aug. 5, 1871, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
101. David W. Miller, Second Only to Grant: Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs (Shippensburg, PA: White Mane Books, 2000), 272.
102. Ibid., 272–90.
103. The Boston Daily Globe, Jan. 3, 1892.
104. “Former Custis Slave to Sleep in Death in Arlington Estate,” The Evening Star(Washington, D.C.) Aug. 22, 1929.
105. The New York Times, Jan. 3, 1892; The Washington Post, Jan. 4 and 5, 1892; Miller, 261–90; Pryor, 314–15.
106. Stanley P. Hirshson, The White Tecumseh: A Biography of William T. Sherman (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1997), 388.
107. “It took a war to heal the scars of war; attack upon a foreign power to bring unity at home,” wrote Edmund Morris in The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 654.
6: “A SPLENDID LITTLE WAR”
1. Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Pportrait of the World Before the War, 1890–1914(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966), 55–56.
2. Margaret Leech, In the Days of McKinley (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), 168.
3. Ibid.,168. Roosevelt, disgusted by McKinley’s dithering, famously declared that the president had “no more backbone than a chocolate éclair.” Leech, 169.
4. Morris, 631–33; Leech, 168–69; A. C. M. Azoy, Charge! The Story of The Battle of San Juan Hill (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1961), 24–25.
5. Allen Johnson and Dumas M
alone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930) 20: 50–52. Sherman, an admirer of Wheeler’s fighting abilities, is reported to have said after the Civil War that Wheeler should be given a command in any future conflict. The New York Times, April 27, 1898.
6. Tennant S. McWilliams, “New Southerner Abroad: General Joe Wheeler Views the Pacific and Beyond,” Pacific Historical Review47, 1 (Feb.1978): 123–27.
7. Sam Hanna Acheson, Joe Bailey, The Last Democrat (Manchester, NH: Ayer Publishing, 1970), 91.
8. Leech, 228–29; Johnson and Malone, eds., Dictionary of American Biography20: 51.
9. More than a century after the Maine’s sinking the cause of the ship’s explosion remains uncertain. An official investigation by the late Adm. Hyman Rickover reported in 1976 that spontaneous combustion in the vessel’s coal bunker probably set off an adjoining magazine; a later study, commissioned by National Geographic magazine, relied upon before and after computer models in its study of the Maine, but the journal’s report, in February 1998, did little to solve the mystery, concluding that it was possible—but not provable—that the explosion was sparked by an external source. Not enough evidence has appeared since to draw a definitive answer in either direction.
10. Leech, 228–40; Morris, 626–44; Joseph Wheeler, The Santiago Campaign, 1898 ( Boston: Lamson, Wolffe and Company, 1898), 3–4.
11. Like other distinguished cavalry officers—among them J. E. B. Stuart, Philip Sheridan, and Fitzhugh Lee—Joe Wheeler was a West Point cadet when Robert E. Lee was superintendent there. Graduating in 1859, Wheeler was brevetted as a second lieutenant, served the Army for two years, and resigned his commission in 1861 when the Civil War began.
12. Wheeler, 4.
13. Leech, 162–93.
14. The Indianapolis News, June 28, 1898.
15. The New York Tribune, “Old Glory’s Leaders,” quoted in The Atlanta Constitution, May 7, 1898, with similar stories praising the appointment of Wheeler and Fitz Lee from The Philadelphia Times, The Brooklyn Citizen, The Newark Advertiser, and The Philadelphia Inquirer; see also The New York Times, April 27, 1898.
16. Wheeler, 13–38; Morris, 665–75; Azoy, 82–95.
17. Azoy, 95. Wheeler’s war cry has been rendered several ways. The Washington Post, quoting him seven years after the event, has Wheeler saying: “Give the Yanks hell, boys! There they go!” The New York Times: “Give it to ’em boys! The Yankees are on the run!” Either way, the sentiment is the same.
18. Morris, 668.
19. Azoy, 139.
20. Despite the gallantry of African American troops in the Civil War, the Indian Wars, and the Spanish-American War, the armed forces remained determinedly segregated through World War II, reflecting the status of race relations in many parts of the United States.
21. John Hay to Theodore Roosevelt, July 27, 1898, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 16th ed. ( Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1992), 536.
22. Ernest R. May, Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a Great Power (Chicago: Imprint Publications, 1991), 242–43.
23. Erna Risch, Quartermaster Support of the Army: 1775–1939 (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 1989), 465–67.
24. Monro MacCloskey, Hallowed Ground: Our National Cemeteries (New York: Richards Rosen Press, Inc., 1968), 46.
25. Under the congressional statute of July 8, 1898, the secretary of war was given discretionary authority to repatriate the war dead from overseas; relatives could leave loved ones abroad, have them returned for private burial, or have them buried in a national cemetery. About half of those repatriated from the Caribbean went to national cemeteries. Most received in San Francisco were taken by friends and relatives for private interment.
26. Edward Steere, “Shrines of the Honored Dead: A Study of the National Cemetery System,” Quartermaster Review, 1954, 22–23.
27. Annual Reports of the War Department for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1899 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1899), 187. While Ludington was correct in suggesting that repatriation of overseas war dead was unprece dented in U.S. history, the practice had antecedents in ancient Greece.
28. Ibid.,184–85. It is likely that burial details provided the bottles with names inside, a means of identifying the dead adapted from Civil War days. “Bringing Home The Heroic Dead,” Boston Daily Globe, May 28, 1899, 31.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Steere, 24.
32. Brig. Gen. M. I. Ludington, Annual Report of the Quartermaster General to the Secretary of War, 1900 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1900), 40.
33. Michael Sledge, Soldier Dead: How We Recover, Identify, Bury & Honor Our Military Fallen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 220.
34. MacCloskey, 46; Steere, 24; Sledge, 36.
35. The New York Times, Dec. 15, 1898.
36. Ibid.; Leech, 349–50.
37. Ibid.
38. The Atlanta Constitution, Dec. 15, 1898.
39. The New York Times, Dec. 15, 1898. Margaret Leech, 646, quoting correspondence between Clark Howell and H. Kohlsaat, credits Howell for McKinley’s conciliatory gesture regarding Confederate graves. Howell was editor of The Atlanta Constitution at the time of McKinley’s visit.
40. Leech, 353-360.
41. “Soldier Dead At Rest,” The New York Times, April 7, 1899.
42. William McKinley, Executive Order, April 3, 1899, from John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara,http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid&equals$69321; “Soldier Dead At Rest,” The New York Times, April 7, 1899.
43. Ludington, Annual Reports of the War Department, 1899, 31; Annual Report of the Quartermaster General, 1900, 40; “ Maine Dead Receive The Nation’s Homage,” The New York Times, March 24, 1912.
44. “ Maine’s Dead At Rest,” The Washington Post, Dec. 29, 1899.
45. Ibid. While most victims from the Maine eventually came to rest at Arlington, not all did. The two ship’s officers killed in the blast were sent to their hometowns and buried in private cemeteries. Twenty-five injured men were shipped to Key West, where they died and were buried. The rest were never found.
46. After the Confederate section was established at Arlington, Sen. John B. Foraker, a Union veteran from Ohio, delivered on President McKinley’s pledge to assume the care of other Confederate graves. Foraker introduced legislation in 1903 to locate all Confederate graves in the North and mark them with new headstones like those authorized for Arlington. The bill was finally enacted in 1906. Six years later, a federally appointed commissioner had placed new headstones at 30,000 Confederate graves around the country. Michelle A. Krowl, “In the Spirit of Fraternity: The United States Government and the Burial of the Confederate Dead at Arlington National Cemetery, 1864–1914,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 111, 2, (2003): 171–73.
47. Confederate Memorial Associations from Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina had previously won permission to disinter and rebury several hundred soldiers from Arlington National Cemetery; nonetheless, some were overlooked at Arlington and elsewhere. AHA.
48. Krowl,161–63.
49. Ibid.
50. Although Marcus Wright was well known for spearheading the drive to rebury Confederates at Arlington National Cemetery, his contribution as a Civil War historian earned him wide respect in his lifetime. Appointed by the War Department to gather official Confederate records from the Civil War, Wright spent decades on the project, which provided thousands of pages of authentic documentary material for Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, the 128-volume history published by the federal government from 1880 through 1901.
51. Krowl, 163–65.
52. “Letter from the Acting Secretary of War Transmitting A Report of the Commissioner for Marking Confederate Graves, Together with Recommendation for Further Continuance of Said Act, and Reasons Therefor,” 64th Congress, 1st Se
ssion, House of Representatives Document No. 795,” 2–3; Krowl, 164–66.
53. Krowl,170–71.
54. “Tribute Paid in New York,” The Washington Post, Jan. 29, 1906; “Gen. Wheeler’s Coffin Passes ‘Mid Thousands,” The New York Times, Jan. 29, 1906; “President to Attend Gen. Wheeler’s Funeral,” The New York Times, Jan. 27, 1906.
55. Ibid.
56. “Dead Lying in State,” The Washington Post, Jan. 29, 1906; “Home to South They Brought Joe Wheeler,” The Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 30, 1906; “Gen. Joseph Wheeler Buried in Arlington,” The New York Times, Jan. 30, 1906; “Atlanta Vets Go To Funeral,” The Atlanta Constitution, Jan. 28, 1906.
57. “Sleeps in Arlington,” The Washington Post, Jan. 30, 1906.
58. “Ex-Confederates Angry,” The New York Times, Jan. 29, 1906. Wheeler’s obelisk, a copy of the Washington Monument, is forty five-feet tall.
7: L’ENFANT’S GRAND VIEW
1. James Dudley Morgan, “Major Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the Unhonored and Unrewarded Engineer,” Records of the Columbia Historical Society of Washington , D.C., 2 (1899): 118–157; see also Wilhelme B. Bryan, Records of the Columbia Historical Society, 2(1899): 111–117; and Arthur H. Codington, “Major Charles Pierre L’Enfant at Last Honored by Republic,” The Atlanta Constitution, April 26, 1909.
On Hallowed Ground Page 38