Chapter Eighteen

Field of Honor

Richmond 30 th April 1861

My dear Mary

On going to my room last night I found my trunk & sword there & opening it this morning discovered the package of letters, & was very glad [to] learn you were all well & as yet peaceful. I fear the latter state will not continue long, not that I think Virginia is going to make war but if the Federal Government should be disposed to peace there is now such a mass of——in Washington such a pressure from the north, & such fury manifested against the South that it may not be in the power of the authorities to restrain them—Then again among such a mass of all slanders it might be considered a smart thing to cross into Va & rob, plunder, &c especially when it is known to be the residence of one of the Rebel leaders—I think therefore you had better prepare all things for removal that is the plate pictures &c. & be prepared at any moment—where to go is the difficulty—when the war commences no place will be exempt in my opinion, & indeed all the avenues into the State will be the scene of Military operations—Tell Custis to consider the question He is a discreet person & prudent & advise what had better be done—I wrote to Robert that I could not consent to take boys from their school & young men from their colleges & put them in the ranks at the beginning of the war when they are not wanted & where there were men enough for the purpose—The war may last 10 years where are our ranks to be filled from then? I was willing for his company, to continue at their studies, to keep up its organization & to perfect themselves in their military exercises & to perform duty at the College but not to be called into the field—I therefore wished him to remain—If the exercises at the College are suspended he can then come home. I do not wish any more socks or shirts at this time. I forgot to take from the old uniform coat I left for the servants the eyes or hooks from the shoulders that confined the epaulettes—will you cut them out & also the loops at the collar—you will have to rip the coat & take them out If you will then wrap them up carefully & send them to Mr. John G or Mr Dangerfield directed to the Spottswood House there are persons coming on every day by whom they can be forwarded I was much interested in Mary Childe’s letter—My poor Anne how she must have suffered—I have not time to write to her—There is no prospect or intention of the government to propose a truce—Do not be deceived by it—Custis must exercise his judgement about sending to the Alexa market—It is your only chance—Give much love to all my dear children & Helen Tell them I want to see them very much—May God preserve you all & bring peace to our distracted country Truly yrs

RE Lee¹

A CENTURY AND A HALF have passed since this urgent, distracted letter was written, yet it still has the power to rivet our attention. Like the audience at a Greek drama, we know the outcome of this story, but cannot resist hearing the whole tragic tale once more. The letter also impressed Mary Lee, and when the little note deteriorated to the point that it was unreadable, she made this copy, full of spelling errors and repeated words that would have been uncharacteristic of her husband. Her carefully preserved transcript makes it clear that she understood exactly what this message meant. In its simplest terms it signaled the end of the Lees’ life at Arlington. But in the hasty, broken sentences and casual asides Robert Lee also presages most of the terrible reality of 1861, a reality that few wanted to admit at this early date. The hope for peace was gone; the long season of posturing and threats would now turn to protracted violence. Young men like his son Rob would be snatched in all their promise, many to be marched to merciless death. Order as they understood it would be painfully altered. Of this we need no greater witness than Lee’s stunning admission that he had given his slaves the heavy blue U.S. Army coats he had worn so proudly for thirty-four years.

Now the lines between public and personal life were also becoming blurred, and Lee began to realize that his words were no longer his own, that his privacy would be an early victim of the war. It had been but ten days since his resignation from the U.S. Army, and he had traveled only a hundred miles to Richmond. Yet these figures belie the immensity of the journey he had taken. Lee had been an ordinary citizen, respected and liked, but safe in his obscurity. Now he was becoming a kind of civic property, open to scrutiny, a lightning rod for hope, for emulation—and for censure. During the next few months he took on the appearance generations after would associate with him, growing a beard, his hair becoming prematurely white. (Whether a nod to the fashion he always courted, or to avoid shaving in the field, it was to his family’s horror that the beard appeared.) His very name was recast about this time, with the popular press calling him “Robert E. Lee,” a formulation not used by himself or his family, and with which he never identified. His wife’s home was no longer a private sanctuary; it was now a potential artillery position. The unsettling shift from a life of privileged anonymity to public expectation was part of the general confusion that reigned in those early days of mingled exaltation and apprehension. Nowhere is this more evident than in the last line of his letter, where Lee calls on God to “bring peace to our distracted country.” The problem is, we do not quite know to which country he is referring.²

The spectacular view from Arlington’s front portico had charmed visitors for nearly six decades. It was one of the chief glories of the place, remarked on by everyone from Lafayette to the young Henry Adams. Arlington had a prospect that took in a dozen miles in three directions, including the water approaches to Washington and the old ports of Georgetown and Alexandria. The Capitol was just over three miles away; the White House even closer. The best artillery could now reach targets three or four miles distant. “It is not hard to imagine what would have happened if Confederate cannon had found lodgement on the plateau…,” wrote one observer, “and had started practicing artillery fire with the White House as a target.” Once Virginia had seceded, both sides knew that control of these heights was a tactical necessity.³

The arrival of thousands of untrained Yankee troops in the nation’s capital did nothing to dispel this conviction. The area was strongly divided about the conflict. In Washington, and across the river in Alexandria and Fairfax County, powerful Union sympathies coexisted with Confederate zeal.⁴ The streets were as full of rumor as they were of laughing, loafing, and drilling soldiers. The poet Charles Russell Lowell wrote to his mother on May 13 that the northern troops “parade here and the crowds stare at them—in Alexandria…the Virginia troops parade and crowds gape at them—as to fancying any hostile relation between them, it is almost impossible, and yet I firmly believe there will be a collision within three weeks.”⁵ The newspapers joined in the intrigue by speculating on everything from imminent southern invasion to the price of wheat. Fretfully awaiting credible news at Arlington, Mary Lee thought the papers of both sides “below contempt” and fumed that their “falsehoods & surmises would be amusing if they were not on such a serious subject.” No one knew whom to trust, nor did the troops make them feel particularly safe. In the Senate chamber, at the White House and War Department, nervous officials began to make plans to reinforce the capital’s defenses.⁶

Robert Lee was under no illusions about what this meant at Arlington. He had admired the estate’s vista since boyhood, but in 1861 he gazed out from Arlington Heights as a professional engineer who had spent his career building defensive fortifications. He was only too aware of the strategic value of this site, and assumed that the property would be appropriated for military use.⁷ His son Custis, who opposed secession but nonetheless resigned from the U.S. Army shortly after his father, put it quite clearly. He told a cousin that “were he able to dictate proceedings he would call [secession] revolution and order at once the seizing and fortifying of Arlington Heights.”⁸ Military advantage aside, Lee also sensed that personal animosity was to come. “In reference to the action of the U.S. Govt, you had better make up your mind to expect all the injury they can do us,” he told Mary. “They look upon us as their most bitter enemies & will treat us as such to the extent of their power.”⁹

Lee’s foreboding made him anxious for the family to leave Arlington as soon as possible. He wrote on the subject every few days that spring, with increasing concern. He wanted to be assured that his wife and daughters were in a place beyond the reach of danger, but, as he told Mary on April 30, he did not really know where that might be.¹⁰ Mrs. Lee did at length send Agnes and Annie to the old Fitzhugh property, Ravensworth, along with the Mount Vernon silver and family portraits, but as her husband grew more nervous, she continued to linger on at Arlington. She clung to every report of possible peace, and proposed that the whole question might be resolved by stationing a guard on the grounds.¹¹ The thought of leaving was made more wrenching by one of the loveliest spring seasons in memory, the hillside covered with roses, the air heavily perfumed with yellow jasmine.¹² Mary Lee found a dozen reasons to tarry and at times became defiant. “I would not stir from this house even if the whole Northern Army were to surround it,” she declared to Mildred.¹³

In the tense weeks that followed, Mary Lee would chide her daughters and Custis for ignoring their family’s danger, but seemed unable to grasp the situation herself. She was aroused to fury when Mildred complained about a bonnet “at a time when her Father’s life is in peril, her home in danger of being trampled over by a lawless foe, if not leveled to the ground,” yet she too seems to have been caught in profound denial. Her days were spent directing the servants, working in the burgeoning garden, copying a portrait of Rob.¹⁴ The pain of abandoning her home was simply too much to accept: “altho’ warned to prepare for the worst,” she later admitted, “I could not realize the actual state of affairs.”¹⁵ Arlington, as she sorrowfully noted, “was a place dearer to me than my life, the home of every memory of that life whether for joy or sorrow, the birth place of my children, where I was wedded, & where I hoped to die & be laid under those noble oaks by the side of my parents to whom as an only child I had been an object of absorbing & tender love—The idea of leaving this home could scarcely be endured….” She bowed to the inevitable only when cousin Orton Williams, who still worked in the office of General Winfield Scott, appeared anxiously one early morning to announce that plans were going forward for the immediate takeover of Arlington Heights.¹⁶

Then she worked with speed to fold away Martha Washington’s silk curtains and fine carpets, to take pictures from the walls and remove wine and other valuables from the premises. She packed up the lovely china that had been presented to the Washingtons, and the famous punch bowl, and placed them in the cellar. She was so distraught at leaving that she hastily stored many valuables, putting General Washington’s war tent in open sight in the garret, and fine clocks and engravings in unlocked rooms. Plans were finalized for the servants to be supported by selling produce from the estate in local markets. Mrs. Lee thought she had “a reprieve from execution” when Orton returned to say he thought the occupation had been postponed, but it soon became clear that only a few days might be gained, and that she must depart. On May 19, with the ratification vote on Virginia secession only four days away, she joined her daughters at Ravensworth. She told General Lee that her only consolation was that the war would be soon over and she would be back in a few weeks. In fact, Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee had left Arlington forever.¹⁷

As Orton Williams had known, the Union’s initial intention was to take control of Arlington as soon as Virginia made its declaration of secession. On May 3 General Scott, determined “not to lose a moment in anticipating the enemy,” had directed the Department of Washington to occupy the heights and construct enough fortifications to hold them. Part of the pressure came from persistent speculation about Virginia troops on or near the property.¹⁸ Mrs. Lee had hoped, of course, that this is exactly what might take place. However, despite the bravado of some young Confederate officers, who claimed that forces protecting Manassas Gap Junction could arrive in time to prevent a seizure, Arlington remained in Federal hands throughout the war.¹⁹ Many could not understand why southern officials had not moved swiftly to control the position. Ironically, Lee himself fed the reticence by ordering Virginia operations to be defensive as long as possible. Indeed, the first official message in his hand after accepting Virginia’s command directs a subordinate to proceed quietly, and to take care so “that conflict be not provoked before we are ready.”²⁰ But in Washington the worst was believed, and preparations for a ring of defensive forts went forward. Long before plans were finalized, northern papers began speaking confidently of “the cool airy rooms & cool commanding position for summer quartering on ‘Arlington heights.’”²¹

In the end, Virginian Winfield Scott waited for the formal ratification of secession before he directed troops to cross the worn old Long Bridge. But once he heard the jubilant cheers from the southern bank of the Potomac, he wasted no time in making his move. On May 23, just hours after the decision, the orders were given. Soldiers who had been sleeping on their arms in preparation for the advance began to snake across the river. It was a memorable moonlit night, and one volunteer, at the head of the column of eight thousand men, wrote that “the moonbeams glittered brightly on the flashing muskets as the regiment silently advanced across the bridge.” A slave watching from Arlington saw a different image: to him it “look lak bees acomin’.”²² A smaller column crossed the Aqueduct Bridge above the capital city, while a regiment of Zoaves was dispatched downstream to Alexandria. The action was completed with just a few isolated exchanges of fire. The gravity of the unfolding conflict was soon apparent, however, as an irate citizen shot dead the Zoaves’ commander, a popular Chicagoan named Elmer Ellsworth, for removing a Confederate flag from the roof of his Alexandria hotel.²³

At Arlington the Union men immediately began to throw up fortifications that could protect the bridgeheads and establish points of support for troops in the field. Charles Russell Lowell, who talked his way into the camps the day after the crossing, saw that earthworks were already well begun. Construction continued the next day, despite the fact that it was Sunday, and even the chaplains pitched in to help. Within forty-eight hours tents started to arrive, many of them relics of the Mexican War, and stores were sent over to supply surgeons and a hospital.²⁴

General Irwin McDowell, an acquaintance of the Lees, was put in charge of the encampment. He chose to make his headquarters outside the mansion rather than occupy the family’s property. For a brief time it looked as if all might be as cordial as possible under the circumstances. Mary Lee had written a farewell letter to General Scott, “in sadness and sorrow,” declaring that it was only for her husband’s sake that she had left Arlington: “Were it not that I would not add one feather to his load of care, nothing would induce me to abandon my home.”²⁵ Scott had given orders that everything possible was to be done to protect Arlington and its unique historical possessions. A number of former colleagues in the U.S. Army visited the Heights and expressed general unhappiness over the predicament of the country, and relief that the house and its contents had not been disturbed. In these early days, hope for a miraculous resolution to the worsening crisis was still alive.²⁶

It appears that a genuine attempt was made by Union leaders in the first months to treat the occupation as temporary, and to respect the property. With the establishment of a defensive stronghold and the encampment of thousands of soldiers, however, came an inevitable deterioration of the estate. Wood was needed for buildings and fuel, and the great forests began to be cut down. The day after the assault, one New York outfit “proceeded to level to the ground a fine peach orchard of three hundred trees.” “Cherish these forest trees around your mansion,” Lafayette had once told Molly Custis.²⁷ Now, despite a few efforts to place cautionary placards on some particularly fine oaks, by summer’s end the landscape was scarred with huge stumps.²⁸ Three days after his march across the Long Bridge to Arlington, Edward A. Pierson, a surgeon’s mate in the 1st Regiment, New Jersey Brigade, wrote to his aunt that “Frank Price says he will show me where to steal chicke[n]s & other Poultry—also where to steal secession Strawberries.”²⁹ Bored, hungry, or vengeful soldiers shot the overseer’s chickens and rabbits, and then threatened his life. When they tired of shooting animals, the soldiers aimed bullets at buildings, trees, and each other, with such regularity that Confederate troops in the vicinity complained of the noise.³⁰ The riverbank pavilion that had once welcomed merry picnic parties became a location for smuggling goods to the regiments in Virginia. A captain in the 15th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry described coffins filled with lager and bolognas in boxes labeled quinine, and called the operations at Arlington an “eyeopener to the wiles of human nature.”³¹

The necessity of Arlington’s fortifications became clear with the first battle of Manassas, on July 21, 1861. In an unexpected rout, overconfident Union forces were left scrambling back to Washington—to the derision of many, including Mrs. Lee.³² Yankee arrogance was replaced by real fear and a realization of the seriousness of the crisis. As the remnants of McDowell’s troops scattered in retreat, the Army of Northern Virginia might have had a chance to retake its leader’s home. By pushing the rear Union guard back against the Potomac and occupying Arlington Heights—just as Federal officials feared they might—the Virginia forces could arguably have made a strong political as well as military stand. However, Jefferson Davis and General P. G. T. Beauregard thought the Confederate boys too weary, and, paradoxically, too demoralized by the victory, to make the pursuit. “To that disorganization and that demoralization the safety of Washington was due,” one Union officer later stated.³³ When the rebel forces did not seize the initiative, the northern army hardened its position overlooking the capital. It also hardened its spirit of animosity toward the South.

Union soldiers at Arlington, 1864.
ARLINGTON HOUSE, THE ROBERT E. LEE MEMORIAL, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

One result of the battle was the dismissal of General McDowell, and with the appointment of a new Union commander, George B. McClellan, Arlington became a larger, more animated encampment. Thousands of drilling soldiers trampled the gardens, and officers now took over the rooms of the house. It was a messy place, with tents of many varieties stretching across the horizon, no latrines, and a stale odor of tobacco, damp fires, and crudely cooked rations.³⁴ About this time the property also began to be labeled as the home of a traitor, and the Lees’ possessions started to disappear into the pockets of souvenir hunters and angry veterans of the battlefield. They picked up trinkets at first, but soon the soldiers found a way to transport items as large as sofas and grandfather clocks. They walked off with the children’s portraits, Mary Custis’s girlhood school notebook, custard cups, and the venerable Custis Bible. The family dog was stolen and sold to a sailor from Canada. By January 1862 the Mount Vernon treasures were also in jeopardy. Martha Washington’s damask curtains were lost, Washington’s tents carted off, and the grand punch bowl disappeared. “It is better to make up our minds to a general loss,” Lee wrote philosophically at Christmas 1861. He was to be proven right. By the end of the war, when they had stripped the house of everything else, the boys in blue even took the iron door latch.³⁵

Pillaging and vandalism have been persistent problems since armies first took the field. Union authorities anticipated this and had given some thought to curbing the activity. In his initial call for troops Abraham Lincoln set the tone by asserting that the “utmost care” would be taken to avoid any destruction or disturbance of civilian life. General Scott was also convinced that “hard war” policies were counterproductive, and had pioneered conciliatory practices during the Mexican War. In the spring of 1861 he bullied his general staff to uphold the president’s decision.³⁶ Several historians have analyzed official northern attitudes toward civilian property, postulating that in the early stages of the Civil War a “rosewater” policy emerged, which sought to enlist the loyalty of border-state Southerners by protecting their rights and using courteous behavior in their presence. Policies of calculated harshness, meant to place doubt on the Confederacy’s ability to safeguard its citizens, appeared only later.³⁷

Arlington and the neighboring Virginia counties seem to have been exempt from any such grace period. Serious plunder, insulting behavior, wanton destruction, and what one Union cavalryman termed “almost daily acts of high-handed robbery” began immediately after the arrival of Federal troops.³⁸ One inhabitant called the conduct “vile, abusive, scurrilous, blasphemy” and accused the Yankees of plunging the citizenry into “the greatest state of anxiety and excitement.”³⁹ The foraging campaigns were not necessarily planned, but it is clear that officers knew about the raids and even participated in them. Men in the ranks came to rationalize foraging as an act of righteous vengeance, or confused random destruction with military need. According to Henry W. Halleck, who in 1861 essentially wrote the rules regulating interstate relations in wartime, private property was fair game if seized as a penalty for military offenses or taken directly from the field of battle. It could also be confiscated if it was needed to support the army or used to defray the expense of maintaining order. The latitude implied was obvious.⁴⁰

Though Robert E. Lee probably would not have overtly expressed these views, he doubtless understood the concept. Northern Virginia’s citizens were not at all exempt from the degradations of their own forces. A Fairfax County citizen recalled that her family’s property had held enough timber to last “for hundreds of years” until Virginia troops “cut down every last bit of it.”⁴¹ Confederate general Carl Van Dorn expressed regret that he had to call attention to previous directives “to those in & around Fairfax Co to uphold civilian rights.” Lee also had to remind his officers of “the necessity of preventing troops from all interference with the rights and property of the citizens of the State.”⁴² Union generals delivered the same commands, with similar dismay at having to repeat their orders.⁴³ When a journalist mentioned to General Scott in July 1861 that he had seen farmhouses near the Washington aqueduct completely sacked, “the General merely said, ‘It is deplorable!’” and literally threw up his hands in defeat.⁴⁴

Mary Custis Lee knew of the devastation and disdainfully pronounced the Yankees “those cow thieves who will plunder & destroy everything.”⁴⁵ She was well aware of the situation in Fairfax County, but the knowledge that she was not alone in her losses did nothing to mitigate her outrage. She was incensed when she found she was required to have a pass to visit her old home after its occupation, and refused to request it.⁴⁶ That she was the heiress of Mount Vernon’s traditions heightened her indignation. When, in 1862, Union forces driving forward on the Peninsula campaign forced her to flee the White House estate, now the property of Rooney, she pinned an angry note to the door of the house: “Northern soldiers who profess to reverence Washington, forbear to desecrate the house of his first married life, the property of his wife, now owned by her descendants,” signed, “A granddaughter of Mrs. Washington.” She was further stunned about this time to learn from the newspapers that the Washington memorabilia, including the blanket under which the first president had died, had been removed from Arlington and put on public display.⁴⁷ Her husband, more resigned to the destruction that accompanied armies in the field, counseled acceptance, advising that “even if the enemy had wished to preserve it, it would have been almost impossible.” Yet he too could be roused to bitterness at the thought of Arlington’s desecration. “I should have preferred it to have been wiped from the earth,” Lee told a daughter, “its beautiful hill sunk, and its sacred trees buried, rather than to have been degraded by the presence of those who revel in the ill they do for their own selfish purposes.”⁴⁸

It is hard to overstate the effect the seizure of Arlington had on the Lees. Every member of the family expressed sorrow, anger, and despair, with an eloquence that rings through the centuries. Lee thought the blow so devastating that it must be a sign of divine displeasure, a punishment for his inadequate appreciation of the home they had shared together.⁴⁹ As the Lees began to understand that they might never return, the loss radicalized them with a power far beyond political rhetoric. They had been reluctant, borderline secessionists—anguished over the conflict at its commencement and still heartsick about the turn of events well after hostilities had begun.⁵⁰ Prior to the war the family was associated with the United States to an unusual degree. Their ancestors had conceived the very idea of the Union, had forged its structures and fostered its growth, and they were surrounded by the mementos of that glorious history. The capital city, and all the promise it held, was in daily view from their doorstep. Robert Lee had defended the nation for thirty-four years in the U.S. Army, seeing the country from northern New England to the Rio Grande, far more aware of America’s vast splendor than most of his contemporaries. But the seizure of Arlington had exiled the Lees, and impressed upon them an awful truth: that former friends and colleagues, even those long received as family, were now enemies. They cared little whether the destruction was ordered or accidental, whether it was termed requisition or robbery. It was an act of personal violation and as such invoked a personal vengeance. In Mary Custis Lee this response was particularly strong, and for the rest of her life she would reserve her most heated words for the men who “without honour or pity” had carried “tyranny & despotism…to a height I could not imagine possible, it only wants the guillotine to complete it.”⁵¹ Their house sacked and their most cherished political principles questioned, Mrs. Lee stoutly declared that “our duty is plain, to resist unto death….”⁵² With the occupation of Arlington, the Lees finally became rebels. From this time forward their identification with the fate of the South never wavered.

While the Lees were agonizing over the destruction of their past, events were taking place that presaged the future. It was not all mud and plunder at Arlington. William Tecumseh Sherman was among a group of officers who gathered in the large parlor—now the office of the adjutant-general—“trembling” to hear their fate in the wake of the disaster at Manassas. “Every mother’s son of you will be cashiered!” predicted Lee’s former colleague Samuel Heintzelman. To their surprise, an aide entered the room waving a list of promotions, and there at Arlington Sherman was given his general’s command.⁵³ The promotions were a key part of Lincoln’s plan to rally his army at this critical moment. The president also drove over to Arlington to address the foot soldiers. Standing awkwardly in an open carriage, speaking in his simple, homey way, he talked of “our late disaster at Bull Run, the high duties that still devolved on us, and the brighter days to come.” Sherman, who accompanied Lincoln, called it “one of the neatest, best and most feeling addresses I ever listened to.”⁵⁴

Other visitors to Arlington found inspiration in the great mass of men and their dedication to the precepts of the Union. One day a middle-aged woman traveled through the tent cities, her carriage surrounded by boys of the 6th Wisconsin, all singing the irreverent marching song “John Brown’s Body.” Her mind filled with the soldiers’ endless tramping, Arlington’s “hundred circling camps” and “burnished rows of steel,” she went into her rooms at Willard’s Hotel, and late that night wrote out a new lyric. “I returned to bed and fell asleep, saying to myself, ‘I like this better than most things that I have written,’” remembered Julia Ward Howe. She had just composed “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”⁵⁵

Some programs were established at Arlington that also pointed to the future dynamism of the nation. Among the most famous was McDowell’s decision to test the military value of gas-filled balloons for reconnaissance. Almost daily excursions were made above the hills of northern Virginia, proving that they could be guided accurately and that telegraph equipment could be attached to them to relay information. Though not widely adopted, the balloons signaled the importance of air operations in warfare and the beginning of experimental flight.⁵⁶ The property also became the site of a far-reaching project for educating the newly freed slaves. “Freedman’s Village” was the outgrowth of the Union Army’s attempts to care for Arlington’s black people and a response to the needs of thousands of runaways who arrived in Washington. In 1863 the Department of Washington directed that inhabitants of the “contraband” camps be consolidated at Arlington, and at one point up to two thousand people lived and worked in the rows of whitewashed buildings on the southern corner of the estate. Schooling was arranged, a hospital was erected, and a farm was developed. To complete the village, a cemetery was created in one corner of the grounds. The experiment was not without its challenges for officials as well as inhabitants. One of the Yankee soldiers who was living at Arlington in 1862 wrote in his diary that the residents “sing dance play cards and get drunk and are a nuisance…. they get plenty to eat from the government and don’t care to work for now they are ‘free niggers.’”⁵⁷ Nonetheless Freedman’s Village did educate and protect many former slaves, providing an important stepping stone in the transition from bondage to freedom. The message implied by the establishment of a community of freed blacks on land belonging to a leading family of the proslavery Confederacy was not lost on most observers, and indeed may have been one motivation for its location.⁵⁸

It was well that the Lees did not know all that was happening at Arlington, for it would have been harsh intelligence during a difficult time. Lee’s early days with the Virginia forces were not easy, filled as they were with the work of creating a viable military structure and the need to juggle a bevy of difficult egos. By June 1861, in the turmoil resulting from the transfer of Virginia forces to the Confederate army and his own temporarily uncertain status, he even talked of resignation. When Bishop Meade gingerly inquired what his position in the Confederate army actually was, Lee replied that he did not know. Lee wrote that he was “mortified” when he was kept from participation in the first battle of Manassas. He again used the word “mortification” to describe his failed campaign at Cheat Mountain in September 1861, a bungled opportunity that was made more dreadful by the death of a young cousin whose skill he had admired and whose company he had enjoyed.⁵⁹ He had trouble, as well, in closing his accounts with the U.S. Army, was short of cash, and may have feared that his long career had been capped by a dishonorable discharge.⁶⁰ Though Lee wanted Rob and young men like him to remain in college, he had had to relent when he found that his son was of age to make his own decision about joining the army.⁶¹ Worst of all, by Christmas Mary Custis Lee was nearly totally crippled by rheumatism. “I cannot walk a single step without crutches & very few with them,” she told a daughter, explaining that she was trying a new cure, this one based on molasses and whiskey. Her life was now that of “a Southern refugee,” as one friend put it. In the first year of the war she changed location a dozen times and was twice caught behind enemy lines. Her infirmity made the constant moving from place to place as painful as the cruel exile from her home.⁶²

To compound matters, the Lees continued to have trouble collecting their assets and paying taxes in the United States. The situation became critical when a direct tax on property in the “insurrectionary districts” was levied in 1862, which the owners were required to pay in person. In the case of default, a group of commissioners was to determine the disposition of the property. The amount held against Arlington was not exorbitant—$92.07 plus a late penalty—but it had to be tendered by Mrs. Lee herself, in Alexandria, which was under Union occupation. In the summer of 1863 the property was confiscated, though the final deadline for the payment was January 1, 1864.⁶³ Physically unable to travel, and fearful that she might be captured, Mary Lee tried to send a cousin with the payment, but the money was refused.⁶⁴ A land sale was held less than a week later. “The first property sold was—No. 1—Arlington estate, lately occupied and owned by Gen. R. E. Lee,” stated the National Republican on January 12, 1864, adding, “at times the bidding was quite spirited and the prices were considered good.” The price for the 1,100-acre Arlington estate, however, was anything but good and was possibly fixed. The sole bidder was the Federal government, which paidonly $26,800 for the property, though it had been valued at $34,100. The Custismills, with 500 acres of land, went for $4,100, also considerably below value. They did not yet know it, but the heirs of George Washington Parke Custis no longer owned Arlington.⁶⁵

Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs of the Union army.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Certainly the appropriation of Arlington had been a dubious procedure, even in wartime, as the Supreme Court would determine twenty years later. But in 1864 the Federal government assumed it held title to the property and moved to expand its military use. The house was now a barracks, and a huge remount stable was erected on the grounds. The great battles of spring 1864, however, ultimately determined the future of the property. As the campaign of General Ulysses S. Grant unfolded, from the Wilderness and Spotsylvania through Cold Harbor to the trenches of Petersburg, a shocking number of dead and wounded began to arrive in Washington. Over the course of this military season some 65,000 casualties were registered on the Union side alone. The nation had no context for understanding such a number of fatalities. It also had no facilities for their burial.⁶⁶

The Union officer in charge of such necessities was the quartermaster general, Montgomery C. Meigs. Fascinating and irascible, from childhood Meigs had been “a regular warrior in the nursery” and an inveterate master builder. It was the same Meigs who had shared adventures with Lee on the Mississippi River in 1837, and the two had retained their friendly contacts in after years. When Meigs was assigned to Washington to supervise the expansion of the Capitol and the construction of its great dome, he and his wife sometimes visited the Lees at Arlington. Meigs’s enthusiasms were intense: they ranged from his love of milk toast with cucumbers and French dressing for breakfast to his obsession with designing an early home sauna. With the outbreak of the war, one of his passions became the Union army and the assurance of its success. As quartermaster general he took a personal interest in facilitating the supply, comfort, and movement of these troops, often at the scene of battle. By all accounts he did it brilliantly.⁶⁷

Meigs was hardly a moderate. From the start he assigned blame to the proslavery factions and censored anyone who chose to serve the Confederacy. As he watched from a window on the May night when columns of blue-clad soldiers crossed the Long Bridge, he thought bitterly that “they were going to suffer for the ambition and villainy of these…politicians of the South.”⁶⁸ He became more radical as the war went on, especially once he saw the terrors of Libby Prison and witnessed the slaughter in the “Titanic Struggle” of the Wilderness. He blamed his old friend Lee both for abandoning the United States and for “almost alone” prolonging the conflict in 1864.⁶⁹ By the end of the war, his cherished son killed and his army diminished, Meigs was advocating executions for Confederate leaders and punitive measures that included reapportionment of property to the freedmen and denial of civil rights to southern whites. Noted a granddaughter: “He had great contempt for the South.”⁷⁰

If Meigs had hatred in his heart in May 1864, he also had a burden of necessity upon his shoulders. Hundreds of ill and wounded soldiers were dying in the Washington hospitals, and the numbers were increasing as the weeks of dreadful fighting wore on. He saw that the city’s burial grounds were filled, and he also saw caustic newspaper accounts claiming callous treatment of the honored dead by Federal authorities.⁷¹ It is clear that he was under considerable pressure, but less clear is what aroused his interest in Arlington.⁷² The Meigs family story stated that President Lincoln, who admired his quartermaster general, asked him what should be done with the property. It concerned Lincoln that Lee was still alive, and that no just outcome seemed clear. “Mr. President, why not make it a field of honor?” Meigs was said to reply. “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.” Lincoln reportedly adopted the idea immediately.⁷³ In fact, interments had already begun, mostly near the cemetery at Freedman’s Village. On June 15, 1864, Meigs wrote a memorandum to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton—himself a believer in “hard war” policies—suggesting that “the land surrounding the Arlington Mansion, now understood to be the property of the United States, be appropriated as a National Military Cemetery.” The grounds around the stately home, added Meigs, were “admirably adapted to such a use.” Stanton approved the plan the same day, and the first official burials, both Union and Confederate, followed quickly. By the end of June, some 2,600 soldiers lay at Arlington.⁷⁴

Only two days after Stanton’s decision, the northern press commented on the action, applauding the creation of a “Great National Cemetery” and calling the juxtaposition of Union dead on property associated with one of the rebel leaders “a happy thought.” Stanton was given full credit for the farsighted move; later Mrs. Lee would also ferociously lay the responsibility at his door.⁷⁵ Yet Meigs remained the driving force. He was dedicated to the idea that the cemetery would be in the immediate vicinity of Arlington House—“encircling” was the word he used—and personally selected the site just behind Mrs. Custis’s gardens for a mass grave of unknown soldiers from the first battle of Manassas. When Meigs found that some subordinates were circumventing his plans to place Union dead around the house, he reiterated the orders, and when on a second visit he found that still no burials had taken place, he personally paced off the graves, had several coffins disinterred, and “caused the officers to be buried around the garden….” Mary Custis Lee ascribed the act to pure malice. “They are planted up to the very door,” she seethed when she knew of the burials, “without any regard to common decency.”⁷⁶

In 1892, a few months after Meigs’s death, a pamphlet was published that accused him of plotting to prevent the Lees from returning to Arlington. Though no source was cited, the story that Meigs orchestrated the estate sale and declared that “the arch-rebel shall never again enjoy the possession of these estates” came to be so often repeated that it took on the quality of fact. Given the circumstantial evidence, it is tempting to believe this interpretation. The document that would authenticate the assertion has yet to be found, however, and Meigs’s alleged statement that if Lee returned to Arlington he would be sleeping “among ghosts” stops short of proving a deliberately vindictive action.⁷⁷ There is a risk here, as well, of concluding that Meigs’s plan was made for one reason alone, or that it could not simultaneously embrace rational and emotional elements.⁷⁸ We know that Meigs regarded the South with hostility, but we also know he was under strong political pressure to find an appropriate place for the dead. Despite some rough early moments in the burial procedures, sober commentary generally lauded the decision to find a respectable resting place for those sacrificed on both sides.⁷⁹ In addition, a persuasive argument could be made for a third and powerful impetus for Arlington’s designation as a national landmark.

Meigs was, above all, a designer. He sketched arches and cupolas on napkins, and was proud of being one of the foremost contributors to the grandeur of the federal city. He was recruited to oversee the Capitol improvements when Washington was a sad, unrealized dream: “an overgrown watering place,” as one observer described it, “and the pigs you see grubbing in the main thoroughfares seem in keeping with the place.”⁸⁰ Meigs had a strong sense of the theatrical and was one of those who could foresee what the capital would become. He wrote in triumphal terms of the “Great Review” of Union troops down Pennsylvania Avenue in 1865 and translated this elation into his plan for the Pension Building by placing a line of eternally marching soldiers on its terra-cotta frieze. For the remainder of his days he “was constantly interested in the expansion and security of the city and the beauty of it.”⁸¹ This artist’s eye had not failed to see the grand sweep from the Capitol dome to the hills of Virginia. It was, ironically, altogether in keeping with the prescient way George Washington Parke Custis had situated his house and chosen a design that so flawlessly reflected the mood and monumentality of the new Republic. The desire to create a sanctuary on the promontory, in full sight of the nation’s most sacred structures, rather than on an obscure and swampy corner of the property, fits with many of Meigs’s assertions that Arlington was a fitting monument to the nation’s heroes.⁸²

Fresh graves at Arlington, including a tomb for unknown dead from the first battle of Manassas, placed in the center of the family flower garden.
HARPER SWEEKLY, COURTESY OF VIRGINIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Pragmatism, aesthetics, or malevolence? Meigs does not tell us, and we may never be able to draw a certain conclusion. We do know that his conscience did not trouble him, and that he chose to associate himself forever with this deed. Meigs had his name affixed to one of the cemetery’s avenues, inscribed it on a memorial arch, and chose Arlington for the resting place of his son, his wife, and himself. They were buried within sight of the mansion, surrounded by other veterans of the Union Army. In perfect engineer’s language he instructed those building his tomb to make it of hydraulic cement, tempered with water to avoid any fissures caused by swelling. “Replace the lid…,” he concluded, “and leave me to await the Resurrection.”⁸³

The emotion that Arlington National Cemetery evokes today—of sorrow and sacrifice, of misty, faded grandeur, of mingled anger and pride—were evident from the first. The day after Federal troops crossed the Long Bridge, a visitor remarked, “I suppose today it is occupied, and in spite of its importance and of its owner’s treason, I cannot think of it with much pleasure.”⁸⁴ Just at the end of the war Benson Lossing, a family confidant and coeditor with Mary Custis Lee of her father’s Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington, visited the estate. Prodded by Mrs. Lee to condemn the injustice done to her and her family, he wrote a passionate response, which he wisely never sent. In it he mourned the loss of the noble trees, and paid homage to the grave of his longtime friend George Washington Parke Custis. But, he noted with scarcely disguised ire, all of that was erased when he thought of the prisons at Belle Isle and Richmond and “the fresh graves of seven thousand of our countrymen—many of them the flower of our youth—who had nobly fallen in the defence of the Government established by Washington.”⁸⁵ Perhaps most evocative of all are the words of a young Englishman who had written a smug account of his travels in the United States, full of sophomoric humor. When he reached Arlington, a few months after it was made into a cemetery, his witticisms seemed to leave him. Walking among solemn regiments of gravestones, he saw markers with the sole word REBEL interspersed with graves carrying Yankee names, and was shocked by the magnitude of the nation’s loss.

None of the crippled forms I had seen in the streets, none of the bleeding wounds that I had met with in the cars, not even the ghastly look of a poor fellow whose leg had just been summarily amputated at a railway station, turned me so sick and sorrowful as the sight of that soldier’s burial ground. And then to see the home of Robert Lee sacked and made into a cemetery, and to fancy the thoughts that would fill that great heart to behold the work of devastation going on, and to feel oneself actually in the presence of war with all its attendant horrors, and in the midst of people blinded to them by the blunting experience of four years’ bloodshed. All these thoughts, and others like them, were so strange to me, and in their strangeness so painful, that I doubt whether I ever had a sadder walk than that visit to the heights of Arlington.⁸⁶