Skyline Happenings

History of Robert E. Lee’s property becoming Arlington Cemetery as the dead piled up during the civil war. Commentary by Heather Cox Richardson.

President Donald J. Trump’s proposed triumphal arch would sit at a rotary on the Virginia side of the Arlington Memorial Bridge between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The proposed arch obscures the Lincoln Memorial, built to honor the president who steered the country safely through the Civil War, but perfectly frames Arlington House, the mansion built by enslaved Americans and once owned by Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The arch does not frame the nation’s honored dead, but frames instead the home of the man who led the armies of the Confederacy that killed them.

Secretary of War Edwin Stanton approved the land that had been Lee’s plantation as a national burying ground for soldiers on June 15, 1864. After 32 years in the U.S. Army, Lee resigned his commission and took over command of the Army of Northern Virginia in 1862, fighting across the state.

In early 1864 the U.S. government bought Lee’s property at public auction after Lee defaulted on property taxes, and months later it became the logical place to establish a national cemetery after the U.S. Army under General U.S. Grant began its spring 1864 offensive to crush the Confederate forces once and for all.

As the army advanced the Wilderness Campaign, grinding through the Battle of the Wilderness, the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, Cold Harbor, and on to the siege of Petersburg, the dead piled up.

The Army buried the dead and sent the wounded back to Washington, D.C. Journalist Noah Brooks wrote: “Maimed and wounded…. arrived by hundreds as long as the waves of sorrow came streaming back from the fields of slaughter…. They came groping, hobbling, and faltering, so faint and so longing for rest that one’s heart bled at the piteous sight.” For many, that rest was forever. In the era before antibiotics and modern medicine, the soldiers died in the summer heat.

Cemeteries in the city quickly became overwhelmed and Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs proposed to Stanton that the government begin burials at the Lee property. The National Republican newspaper called it, along with the establishment of a village of formerly enslaved Americans, “righteous uses of the estate of the rebel General Lee.”

By August 1864 the government had buried the bodies of twenty-six U.S. soldiers around the perimeter of Mrs. Lee’s rose garden, and it continued to bury bodies around the house to make sure Lee would never again be able to live there. By the end of the war, more than 16,000 Civil War soldiers were buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

It was there, on May 30, 1868, that the first official Memorial Day ceremony took place. In those days the observance was called “Decoration Day” and was widely celebrated after the war as people put flowers on the graves of the war dead. At the 1868 event, the newly organized Grand Army of the Republic honored the occasion with a speech by then-congressman James Garfield, who had served as a major general and seen action across the war, including at the battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga.

Garfield, who would later be elected president and lose his life to an assassin, told his comrades that the men buried at Arlington had “summed up and perfected, by one supreme act, the highest virtues of men and citizens. For love of country they accepted death, and thus…made immortal their patriotism and their virtue.“

They had fought, he said, to defend the fundamental principle of the United States. Before the war, Garfield said, “[t]he faith of our people in the stability and permanence of their institutions was like their faith in the eternal course of nature. Peace, liberty, and personal security were blessings as common and universal as sunshine and showers and fruitful seasons; and all sprang from a single source, the old American principle that all owe due submission and obedience to the lawfully expressed will of the majority. This is not one of the doctrines of our political system—it is the system itself. It is our political firmament, in which all other truths are set, as stars in Heaven…. Against this principle the whole weight of the rebellion was thrown. Its overthrow would have brought…ruin.”

And so, he said, “[t]he Nation was summoned to arms by every high motive which can inspire men. Two centuries of freedom had made its people unfit no for despotism. They must save their Government or miserably perish.”

For those who had died to defend the nation, he asked: “What other spot so fitting for their last resting place as this under the shadow of the Capitol saved by their valor?”

“Seven years ago, this was the home of one who lifted his sword against the life of his country, and who became the great Imperator of the rebellion. The soil beneath our feet was watered by the tears of slaves, in whose hearts the sight of yonder proud Capitol awakened no pride and inspired no hope…. But, thanks be to God, this arena of rebellion and slavery is a scene of violence and crime no longer! This will be forever the sacred mountain of our Capital….

“Hither our children’s children shall come to pay their tribute of grateful homage. For this are we met to-day.”

Garfield’s grand words obscured the extraordinary human cost of the war to defend the U.S. government. Almost seven years before, on July 14, 1861, at the very beginning of the conflict, Major Sullivan Ballou of Providence, Rhode Island, wrote his final letter to “My Very Dear Wife,” Sarah. Ballou anticipated the First Battle of Bull Run, the first major battle of the war, and wanted to explain why he was willing to give up his life for his country, and what it would cost.

“If it is necessary that I should fall on the battle-field for my country, I am ready,” he wrote. “I have no misgivings about, or lack of confidence in, the cause in which I am engaged, and my courage does not halt or falter. I know how strongly American civilization now leans upon the triumph of government, and how great a debt we owe to those who went before us through the blood and suffering of the Revolution, and I am willing, perfectly willing to lay down all my joys in this life to help maintain this government, and to pay that debt.”

“Sarah, my love for you is deathless. It seems to bind me with mighty cables, that nothing but Omnipotence can break; and yet, my love of country comes over me like a strong wind, and bears me irresistibly on with all those chains, to the battlefield.

“The memories of all the blissful moments I have spent with you come crowding over me, and I feel most deeply grateful to God and you, that I have enjoyed them so long. And how hard it is for me to give them up, and burn to ashes the hopes of future years, when, God willing, we might still have lived and loved together, and seen our boys grow up to honorable manhood around us.”

Ballou fell at the Battle of Bull Run. Sarah never remarried.

May you have a meaningful Memorial Day.