Originally aired on September 08, 1995 - In part 54 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson tells us how Arlington National Cemetery, once the grounds of a beautiful estate, became a burial ground for the nation’s war dead.
#54 – Arlington National Cemetery
It is the nation’s largest shrine to fallen heroes, yet it started as a memorial to George Washington. The land was first a beautiful estate; it ended as a burying ground. What initially was intended as an exciting home for the living has become a somber haven for the dead.
Few places in America had a more commendable start, and more shameful conversion, than what we know today as Arlington National Cemetery.
George Washington Parke Custis, the stepson and namesake of our first president, inherited the property in 1802. Custis immediately set out to build a combination mansion and shrine to the father he adored. The stepson wanted to call the place “Mount Washington”, but he eventually named it “Arlington” after the family’s first home on Virginia’s eastern shore.
Custis and his wife had one child, a daughter Mary. In 1831 she married young Robert E. Lee. Arlington became the only real home army officer Lee was to have for thirty years. It was there that six of his seven children were born. It was also there, as civil war descended over the land in April, 1861, that Lee made the decision to offer his sword to his native Virginia.
The Lee family moved south, and Federal officials took possession of the Arlington estate. By 1863 it had become the site of fortifications along the Potomac River as well as a squalid village for some 2,000 free blacks. The worst was yet to come, thanks to a former friend and colleague of Lee’s.
Montgomery Meigs was Quartermaster General of the Union army. He was a hard worker and brilliant engineer, but Meigs was also uncontrollably vindictive. He considered all Confederates (including his own brother) to be nothing less than traitors.
To punish Lee for siding with Virginia in the Civil War, Meigs determined to turn Arlington into a vast cemetery. The Quartermaster General began unauthorized burials there in May, 1864. When the Secretary of War endorsed the idea, Meigs in sweeping fashion gathered unwanted Federal soldiers who had died in Washington hospitals or on nearby battlefields and had them transported to the high ground overlooking Washington.
These soldiers were not merely interred on the Arlington estate. Meigs demanded that the bodies be placed as close to the mansion as possible to insure that the Lee-Custis home would forever be uninhabitable. One hot August afternoon in 1864, Meigs set the tone himself by superintending the burial of 2,111 unknown Union dead in a single grave in the middle of Arlington’s rose garden.
At first, it was no honor to be buried at Arlington. Only those who had died unknown, or those whose families could not afford the cost of private funeral services, were put there. With time, a positive transformation began.
In 1900 President William McKinley gave permission for a section of the cemetery to be set aside for Confederate dead. Fourteen years later, that new section was officially accepted by Virginian-born President Woodrow Wilson. A final designation came in 1955, when the Arlington mansion was dedicated as a memorial to General Lee.
Today 230,000 dead lie in the 600-acre tract at Arlington. With an average of eighteen funerals daily, all space in the cemetery is expected to be gone by the year 2025.
A couple of events need to be told to round out the story. In 1882 Montgomery Meigs died. By his order, he was buried a stone’s throw from the Lee-Custis mansion. Later that same year, the U. S. Supreme Court found the federal government guilty of illegal seizure of the Arlington estate. The court awarded the family both the property and $150,000 in damages.
The Lees took the money. It was too late to do anything else with the property. So the cemetery remains a monument to both the bitter feelings engendered by a civil war and the human cost of a united states born in that war.
