This is the story behind the story of Arlington National Cemetery.

 

The Beginning

A couple of years after he married, John Parke Custis (Martha Washington’s son and George Washington’s stepson), purchased two plantations in northern Virginia to be closer to his mother at Mount Vernon. One was an 1,100-acre tract he named “Arlington.”

John (1754-1781), died prematurely at 26, and his widow sent their youngest daughter and son to be raised at Mount Vernon. When his son, George Washington Parke Custis (1781-1857) turned 21, he inherited his father’s large fortune, including Arlington Plantation. Almost immediately, he began building Arlington House on a hill overlooking the Potomac River and the, not yet finished, city of Washington, the nation’s capital. The build (1802-1818) took longer than expected due to the War of 1812 and the material shortages that followed the burning of the city in 1814.

George W.P. Custis planned for Arlington House to be both visible from Washington City and a fitting memorial to the country’s first president. A place his “Washington Treasures,” as he called his George Washington memorabilia collection, could be safely maintained and displayed.

Did You Know…

• English architect, George Hadfield—who’d worked on the U.S. Capitol building— designed Arlington House. (It was probably inspired by the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens, Greece.)
• Arlington House is one of the earliest examples of Greek Revival architecture in America.

 

Family Home

In 1831, George W.P. Custis’s daughter, Mary, married U.S. Army First Lieutenant Robert E. Lee, and they made Arlington their home.

When her father died in 1857, Mary, his only surviving and legitimate child, inherited the estate, but only for her lifetime. Her father’s will stated that upon her death it should pass to her oldest son, George Washington Custis Lee (1832-1913).

Did You Know…

• Robert E. Lee never owned Arlington, but served as executor for his father-in-law’s will. He took a two-year leave from his army post in Texas to settle the estate.
• In 1859, Robert E. Lee’s oldest son transferred to an army post in Washington, D.C. to care for his mother, sisters, and inheritance in his father’s absence.

 

Civil War

Lee’s decision to resign his Union Army commission on April 20, 1861, and fight for the Confederacy couldn’t have been an easy one. He understood his loyalty to his state (Virginia), meant the home he loved, where he and his family had lived for more than 30 years, would likely be lost to the union because of its strategic location. He was correct.

On the morning of May 24, 1861, the U.S. Army seized the 1,100-acre undefended plantation and hilltop home. Not for revenge, but because its location made it a strategically important place from which to defend Washington, D.C. From its height, every federal building in the capital could be protected with their rifled artillery.

Did You Know…

• Northern newspapers labeled Robert E. Lee a traitor.
• The Army built three forts on the Arlington property: Fort Cass/Rosslyn, Fort Whipple/Fort Myer, and Fort McPherson.
• Union forces stripped away Arlington Plantation’s forest and took as souvenirs items the Lees had left in the mansion.

 

The Cemetery

The federal government had already built on Arlington Plantation a refugee camp—Freedman’s Village—for freed and escaped slaves. But this wasn’t enough for Brigadier General Montgomery Meigs, the U.S. Army’s Quartermaster General and Robert E. Lee’s most ruthless foe.

Meigs wanted to make Arlington as uninhabitable as possible for the Lee family, should they ever return. In 1864, he found the perfect retribution for Lee’s traitorous defection to the Confederacy. Tasked with finding a new Washington national cemetery location, Meigs proposed Arlington, and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton agreed.

Did You Know…

• Montgomery Meigs not only suggested moving recently interred soldiers closer to Arlington House, but had crews scour local Washington battlefields for nameless soldiers. He amassed 2,111 before burying them in a large pit dug at the end of Mrs. Lee’s garden.
• Meigs hatred of Robert E. Lee deepened with the death of his own son on a scouting mission for General Philip Sheridan in 1864.

 

The Sale

The Union Army seized Arlington in 1861. Meigs wanted to see the estate out of the Lee hands forever. A new 1862 law, allowing commissioners to assess and collect taxes in rebellious districts, tried to make that happen. The law stated owners either paid the taxes in person, or their land could be confiscated and sold.

Mary Lee, stuck in Richmond, VA, because of ill health and the war, asked her cousin to pay Arlington’s $92.70 bill for her, but the Alexandria commissioners wouldn’t accept the money. They said it had to come from Mary herself, and since it didn’t, the Lees had defaulted on their debt. Arlington was auctioned off. The only bidder, the federal government, paid $26,800, $7,300 under the estate’s assessed value of $34,100.

 

The Fight

Until their deaths (him-1870 and her-1873), the Lees tried unsuccessfully to recover Arlington. When they were gone, their oldest son picked up the fight to have his inheritance returned. G.W. Custis Lee sued the federal government. He contended the 1864 tax sale was illegal, and his case went all the way to the Supreme Court. In December 1882, the court ruled that the land had been taken without due process and the sale was invalid.

The Lee family had finally won. However, by this time Arlington’s reputation as a treasured national cemetery had taken root, and there was only one viable option for either party. Lee sold Arlington to the federal government for a fair market value of $150,000.

Did You Know…

• Almost 20,000 graves, including 6,000 Union soldiers, would have had to be disinterred and moved had Lee not sold Arlington back to the federal government.
• On March 31, 1883, Robert Todd Lincoln, U.S. Secretary of War and Abraham Lincoln’s son, formally accepted Arlington’s title from G.W. Custis Lee.
• Also in 1883, Meigs reached the mandatory retirement age of 65 and was forced out of the quartermaster’s job. In 1892, he died and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with his wife, son, and father.

 

Summary

Prior to the war beginning, Mary Lee wrote to her daughter the following eerily prophetic words: “I fear that this will be the scene of conflict & my beautiful home endeared by a thousand associations may become a field of carnage.”

What she couldn’t have foreseen was that Arlington would become something far more important—hallowed ground and one of the U.S.’s greatest national treasures.

[For more information about Arlington National Cemetery, read Did You Know This National Cemetery Has Gone High Tech?]