The Creation of Arlington National Cemetery

By Haylee Cardinal

Arlington National Cemetery is one of America’s most well-known cemeteries. The cemetery can be found in Arlington, Virginia where over 400,000 soldiers have been laid to rest.^[1] This cemetery takes up 639 acres of land and is covered in beautiful monuments and trees. Soldiers are laid to rest there from all major United States wars and conflicts starting with the Civil War. Now that Arlington National Cemetery has reached a top tourist spot in America’s history it is interesting to look back and see the true beginnings of this cemetery. This paper will look at the creation of Arlington National Cemetery and how it is rooted in deceptive decisions and creative lies by the federal government.

The first fact that is unknown to most is that Arlington National Cemetery was originally the home of Robert E. Lee, a commander of the Confederate Army. The property was owned by Robert’s wife, Mary Custis Lee, who inherited the “1,100-acre estate along with 196 slaves” from her father, George Washington Parke Custis the grandson of Martha Washington, who died in 1857.^[2] The couple used the Arlington house as their family home where six out of their seven children were born.^[3] The Arlington house was the Lee family home up until the start of the Civil War but it is not a widely told fact by most history books.

The chaos of the Arlington house began when talk of the Civil War began and Lee was forced to choose a side. On April 18^th, 1861, Lee was summoned to talk with General Winfield Scott who offered him command of the Union Forces. Lee declined the position saying, “But how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?”^[4]  Lee’s resignation from the army was unexpected from people within the Union. Elizabeth Brown Pryor wrote, “Lee was under no pressure to resign … Lee’s commander and colleagues seem to have had confidence in him until the last. Indeed, Lee’s departure was received at the war department with regret.”^[5] Many believed that Lee would stay loyal to the Union, which created a sense of disappointment when Lee resigned. Lee then left Arlington and his family home for the last time, where it would be taken unlawfully by the Union troops.

Robert E. Lee had left Arlington and, “traveled to Richmond, where he accepted a commission as commander-in-chief of the military forces of the Commonwealth of Virginia.”^[6] This left Arlington defenseless and open for the Union defenses to raid where a base camp was set up on May 24^th, 1861. The Arlington house was situated, “overlooking the District of Columbia [making] the sight a natural military objective for either the defense of or an attack on the nation’s capital.”^[7] 14,000 Union troops marched into Arlington and set up base camp under the command of General Sandford where the Arlington plantation was transformed “into a citadel, with new roads carved into the hillsides and breastworks burrowed into the heights.”^[8] The nation had stolen the home that Robert E. Lee once knew, he fought for and would never be the same again. By the end of 1861, Robert E. Lee had accepted the loss of Arlington telling his daughter, “Your old home, if not destroyed by our enemies, has been so desecrated that I cannot bear to think of it.”^[9] Arlington slowly became a place of war rather than a home.

The first deceptive decision made was in May of 1863, which was the first step into the fall of the Lee family home. General Order No. 28 issued by Maj. Gen. Samuel P. Heintzelman allowed Lt. Col. Elias M. Greene to seize all abandoned rebel lands that may benefit the government.^[10] One of the first acts done by the War Department was to experiment “with creating a centralized village using urban and suburban reform ideas for the freedmen … on land that once belonged to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.”^[11] This shows that the United States was using land they had unrightfully taken from Robert E. Lee under the precedent of being a Confederate. The freedmen’s camp was celebrated “by those who believed that slavery was a sin and Lee a traitor.”^[12] After the success of the freedmen’s village the federal government attempted to find ways to legally steal the Lee’s land.

To secure their claim on Lee’s land, the federal government created new loopholes to legally obtain the 1,100-acre property of Arlington. “The law required that [taxes] be paid in person by the lawful owner” even though most Confederate soldiers could not cross the Union lines to pay the taxes for their lands.^[13] When Mrs. Lee could not pay the taxes in person due to her poor health, the Union government turned away her cousin who went to pay the taxes, Arlington was set to be sold for $92.07 in 1863. The federal government then purchased Lee’s land on January 11th, 1864 “for the sum of twenty-six thousand and eight hundred dollars” giving the army apparent legal authority to do as they pleased in Arlington.^[14] 

Arlington was chosen as a spot for burials by General Montgomery C. Meigs. “Meigs apparently survived only one site-Arlington-and made his recommendation to the Secretary, perhaps as a gesture of revenge.”^[15] Meigs had developed a deep hatred for Lee after he joined the Confederate army which can account for a lot of decisions Meigs makes around Arlington. The first soldier buried on the grounds of Arlington was “Pvt. William Christman, twenty-one, of the 67^th Pennsylvania Infantry, buried on May 13, 1864.”^[16] The first graves were made far away from the mansion where soldiers were still living at the time, now referred to as the Lower Cemetery. Officers were buried closer to the Lee mansion with proper burials. The first officer buried at Arlington was Capt. Albert H. Packard on May 17, 1864. Packard was buried “at the edge of Mrs. Lee’s Garden, about a hundred paces from the mansion.”^[17] Meigs was officially destroying Arlington’s legacy as a family home and building it up as a cemetery.

The placement of the dead around the Arlington Mansion was intentionally done by Meigs. Meigs “planned to make Arlington uninhabitable for the Lees after the war – unless they wished to live among ghosts.”^[18] Meigs is the official mastermind behind the creation of Arlington National Cemetery and the true creator of all the deception and lies told to destroy Robert E. Lee’s home. Meigs wrote the proposal for turning Arlington into a National Cemetery on June 15, 1864, to solidify the federal government's hold on the land in Arlington knowing the nation would never turn over the burial place of so many soldiers back to the Lees. After its official title as a National Cemetery, Meigs removed the soldier’s camp and placed two chaplains that would oversee burials, so there was no excuse to not put graves by the Lee mansion. By the end of Arlington’s first year as a National Cemetery, there were 3,000 graves.^[19] 

The postwar years were filled with disappointment for the Lees who had hoped to regain possession of Arlington. Lee had been meeting with lawyers about getting Arlington back or at least stopping the burials from destroying the grounds further. The decisions Meigs made were “to more firmly secure the grounds known as the National Cemetery, to the Government by rendering it undesirable as a future residence.”^[20] Meigs continued to put his stamp on the Arlington property with the building of monuments throughout the property and the start of Decoration Day on May 30, 1868, where they honored the Union dead. The first of several ways to include the public is to keep Lee away. The prospect of getting Arlington back was looking very unlikely for the Lees with the number of soldiers being buried continuing to go up and Meigs's plans for more monuments.

Arlington National Cemetery continued to grow and flourish, not only as a cemetery but as a memorial for national heroes. More monuments were built, including one honoring the unknown dead Union soldiers. Along with the founding of Decoration Day, Meigs continued to look over the property and have upgrades made and plants placed to make the grounds a beautiful resting place for the honored soldiers. No one acknowledged how the land belonged to Robert E. Lee but continued to make the grounds a sacred place.

Robert E. Lee died in Lexington on October 12, 1870. Upon his death, nothing about Arlington had been resolved. The Lees held onto the hope that the land would be returned to their oldest son, but it was a bleak prospect at this point. Mrs. Lee on the other hand had not given up hope of restoring Arlington and petitioned Congress to examine the federal claim to Arlington in 1870 following Robert Lee’s death. “The senate rejected the petition, fifty-four to four … [the] Senators wanted the place preserved for the ‘sacred dead’,” not given back to the family of a traitor.^[21] This showed that Meigs’s plans for Arlington had worked and no one would want to give back such a hallowed place to a family of traitors.

Mary Custis Lee died on November 5, 1873, in Lexington, five months after she had visited Arlington for the last time. The fight to regain Arlington was passed on to the eldest son, George Washington Custis Lee. The younger Lee took a different approach in petitioning Congress in April of 1874 by asking for compensation only since the land had been taken unlawfully. The federal government could keep the National Cemetery in place, Lee just wanted the money his family had been essentially robbed of. “The petition came to naught, and the burying of Union soldiers in Arlington National Cemetery went on.”^[22] The federal government saw no reason to pay Lee for the land they may or may not have actually paid for and instead continued on. Custis Lee remained quiet about fighting for Arlington until March of 1877 when he went to the circuit courts of Alexandria Virginia to fight for ownership instead of compensation. Lee spent the next three years after his Congressional appearance strengthening his claim for Arlington. Lee was demanding that all trespassers should be removed from his land and bodies be dug up. From there the case was moved to the U.S. Circuit Court of the Eastern District of Virginia in July of 1877. The federal government did everything in its power to stop the case from moving forward but Judge Robert W. Hughes pushed the case forward in March of 1878 saying every citizen has a right to ”judicial determination of a controversy affecting his liberty or property.”^[23] The justice system of the United States refused to allow the government special privileges outside the law and made sure Lee got his chance in court to expose the federal government for stealing his land illegally.

On January 30, 1879, the jury voted for Lee to regain possession of Arlington because “the solemn words of the constitution-‘nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation’-appear to have lost none of their force and effect.”^[24] The government appealed the decision to the Supreme Court but lost to Lee again, ruling that the 1864 sale had been invalid since Mrs. Lee had tried to pay the tax but had been refused. George Washington Custis Lee had finally achieved his family’s dream of regaining the Arlington property and exposing all of the wrongdoings by the federal government to his family and their lands.

After receiving the title and deed to the land at Arlington, Lee sold it back to the government for an agreed “price of one hundred fifty thousand dollars.”^[25] Lee signed the title back to the federal government on April 24, 1883, so there would be no more disputes. The title was formally accepted by Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln. This gave Arlington National Cemetery the symbolism of being an “axis that links the North and South, Lincoln and Lee, the land of the living and the land of the dead, present and past.”^[26] Ironic that people find such beautiful symbolism at the end of such a tragic story.

The creation of Arlington National Cemetery is a story full of lies and deception that show the darker sides of the United States’ past. This is a story that has been buried under the pride the U.S. feels in Arlington National Cemetery to cover up the horrors that were done to the Lee family home in the name of the Union. Despite all of the beauty and honor that goes on daily in Arlington, there will always be an underlying truth of unforgotten wrongdoings lingering until everyone knows the truth and it can be acknowledged fully.

[1] U.S. Army, “History of Arlington National Cemetery,” Arlington National Cemetery, accessed November 27, 2022, https://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/explore.

[2] Robert M. Poole, On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery (New York: Walker, 2013), 11.

[3] Robert E. L. deButts, Jr. “Mary Custis Lee’s ‘Reminiscences of the War.’” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 109, no. 3 (2001): 301–25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4249932.

[4] Poole, On Hallowed Ground, 15.

[5] PRYOR, ELIZABETH BROWN. “‘Thou Knowest Not the Time of Thy Visitation’: A Newly Discovered Letter Reveals Robert E. Lee’s Lonely Struggle with Disunion.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 119, no. 3 (2011): 276–96. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41310749.

[6] Robert E. L. deButts, Jr. “Mary Custis Lee’s ‘Reminiscences of the War.’” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 109, no. 3 (2001): 301–25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4249932.

[7] Robert E. L. deButts, Jr. “Mary Custis Lee’s ‘Reminiscences of the War.’” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 109, no. 3 (2001): 301–25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4249932.

[8] Poole, On Hallowed Ground, 27.

[9] 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.

[10] Poole, On Hallowed Ground, 52.

[11] BESTEBREURTJE, LINDSEY. “Beyond the Plantation: Freedmen, Social Experimentation, and African American Community Development in Freedman’s Village, 1863–1900.” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 126, no. 3 (2018): 334–65. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26478281.

[12] Poole, On Hallowed Ground, 53.

[13] Metzler, John C. “The Arlington National Cemetery.” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C. 60/62 (1960): 224–30. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40067227.

[14] Chase, Enoch Aquila. “The Arlington Case. George Washington Custis Lee against the United States of America.” Virginia Law Review 15, no. 3 (1929): 207–33. https://doi.org/10.2307/1064614.

[15] Metzler, John C. “The Arlington National Cemetery.” Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C. 60/62 (1960): 224–30. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40067227.

[16] Poole, On Hallowed Ground, 58.

[17] Poole, On Hallowed Ground, 59.

[18] Poole, On Hallowed Ground, 60.

[19] Poole, On Hallowed Ground, 64.

[20] Moore to Rucker, Dec. 11, 1865, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.

[21] Poole, On Hallowed Ground, 82-83.

[22] Chase, Enoch Aquila. “The Arlington Case. George Washington Custis Lee against the United States of America.” Virginia Law Review 15, no. 3 (1929): 207–33. https://doi.org/10.2307/1064614.

[23] Poole, On Hallowed Ground, 92.

[24] Chase, Enoch Aquila. “The Arlington Case. George Washington Custis Lee against the United States of America.” Virginia Law Review 15, no. 3 (1929): 207–33. https://doi.org/10.2307/1064614.

[25] Poole, On Hallowed Ground, 93.

[26] Rodriguez, Alicia. “New Meaning for an Old Wall.” Landscape Architecture 90, no. 1 (2000): 22–25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44671967.