America's national cemetery was planted in Robert E. Lee's front garden
When Union burial grounds near Washington filled up in 1864, Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs chose the estate of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. The high ground rarely flooded and had fine views, but denying Lee his home likely counted too. Today more than 400,000 people lie there.
The mansion had a grander pedigree still. George Washington Parke Custis, Martha Washington's grandson raised at Mount Vernon, built Arlington House as a home and a memorial to George Washington, finishing it in 1818. His only surviving child, Mary, married a young army lieutenant named Robert E. Lee in 1831. When Virginia seceded in 1861, the estate's heights overlooking the capital became a military prize, and Mary Lee buried family treasures in the grounds before fleeing. Union troops took over that May.
Private William Christman became the first burial on 13 May 1864, a month before Meigs formally authorised interments. The government acquired the land at a tax sale for 26,800 dollars, having refused to accept payment of the 92.07 dollars in tax that Mrs Lee's agent tried to hand over. From 1863 part of the estate also housed Freedman's Village, where formerly enslaved people rented homes, farmed and received schooling; the last residents left in 1900 after Congress settled what was owed to them.
The Lee family did not give up. The heir, George Washington Custis Lee, sued, and in 1882 the Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that the land had been taken without due process. Rather than reclaim a property full of graves, he sold it back for 150,000 dollars in 1883, signing with the Secretary of War, Robert Todd Lincoln.
Burials were segregated until President Truman's executive order in 1948. Herbert Hoover held the first national Memorial Day ceremony there in 1929. In 1992 a Maine wreath maker with surplus stock donated 5,000 wreaths, and a photo of snowy wreathed graves later spread online, inspiring similar tributes across the country. The cemetery now holds roughly 27 to 30 funerals every weekday.
Source: Arlington National Cemetery
