On Hallowed Ground (13 page)

But the Kentuckian asked for a great deal more—far more, indeed, than the Senate was prepared to consider. “Now what is the
character of this proposition?” asked Sen. Waitman Thomas Willey, a Republican from West Virginia. “It is that the Congress
of the United States shall deliberately inquire whether the remains of the sacred dead should not be disturbed in their repose
and scattered we know not where. Is there anything more insulting to the sense of the country and to the sense of the Senate?”
²⁶

For more than an hour, colleagues answered Willey’s question in the negative. Sen. Charles Sumner, Republican of Massachusetts,
recalled that he had been present at the birth of Arlington National Cemetery in 1864, when the late Edwin M. Stanton had
signed orders establishing the burial ground.
²⁷
It had been Stanton’s express intention, Sumner declared, to put the property beyond the Lee family’s reach. “He said he
meant to bury those dead there in perpetual guard over that ground,” Sumner said,“so that no person of the family of Lee should
ever dare to come upon it unless to encounter the ghosts of those patriots. It was in that spirit that that ground was set
apart. Now, as I understand, it is proposed to take up those remains and to give over the ground to the family of the traitor.”
²⁸

Sen. James Warren Nye, a Nevada Republican who had been particularly close to President Lincoln, described Mrs. Lee’s petition
as “an insult to all the dead who fell in the mighty struggle for the Union … Disturb these dead, and for what? To make
room for a traitor’s widow.”
²⁹

A battered McCreery tried to withdraw his resolution—to no avail. His opponents insisted on a vote, and the Senate rejected
the petition, fifty-four to four. In the process, the debate helped to elevate Arlington’s status: from a potter’s field created
in the heat and desperation of wartime, the cemetery was becoming something grand, a ground hallowed in the national imagination,
symbol of sacrifice and honor. Senators wanted the place preserved for “the sacred dead,” “the patriot dead,” “the heroic
dead,” home of “martyrs” and “patriotic graves.”
³⁰
Nobody was going to yield that piece of ground without a fight. Meigs’s preemptive occupation of Arlington was working.

The old plantation the Lees had known became less recognizable with each passing year. Carved up for various uses during the
war, Arlington remained so after it, with the four hundred–acre Freedman’s Village and government farms sprawling through
the bottomlands, a semicircle of forts guarding heights to the north and west, and, of course, the two hundred–acre cemetery
dominating the plantation’s heart, where the old forest disappeared and graves took its place.
³¹
Although the number of troops at Arlington declined in the postwar years, a strong contingent of soldiers stayed on at Fort
Whipple; one of six Civil War forts at Arlington, Whipple was eventually renamed Fort Myer, which covers 256 acres of the
original property today.
³²

The cemetery continued to grow, with more than sixteen thousand graves in place by 1870. Weeds moved in, the mansion leaked,
and burial mounds sagged as coffins decayed. Wooden headboards rotted and fell away. The Grand Army of the Republic, which
had become a powerful voice for veterans, complained about Arlington’s slovenly appearance, and the quartermaster’s department
responded, refilling slumped grave plots, buying burros to pull new mowing machines, tidying paths among the tombs, and patching
up the old house, which would continue to spring leaks for years to come.
³³

By the mid-1870s, the first white marble headstones began to appear at Arlington, where they replaced the wooden grave markers
from the war years. The old wooden headboards had been cheap, costing about $1.25 to $1.50 each, but they had to be painted
regularly and lasted no more than five years. With his usual attention to detail, Meigs calculated that it would cost $1 million
a decade to replace the wooden headboards at Arlington and other national cemeteries. He suggested a solution: outfitting
each tomb with new tablets made from galvanized iron, at a cost of about two dollars each; they would last for decades instead
of years, saving replacement and maintenance expenses.
³⁴

“One of these will be placed at the foot of every grave and will remain when the wooden headboards decay and perish,” Meigs
proposed. Several hundred of the iron markers were produced at the Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois and set up in various national
cemeteries, but they proved to be unsightly and difficult to read, and they won little praise from anyone but the frugal Meigs,
who blocked the adoption of costly marble or granite replacements for several years.
³⁵

“I am still of the opinion that the best monument for this purpose yet contrived is the small rectangular block of cast iron,
galvanized to protect it from rust,” Meigs wrote in his annual report of 1868. “It is not costly, it is easily transported,
is not an object of plunder. With wages of stone cutters at $5 a day, the cost of 320,000 headstones properly lettered would
be a very great charge upon the treasury.”
³⁶

Even as the old wooden headboards decayed and fell away, Meigs held out for his metal markers until 1873, when pressure from
the Grand Army of the Republic prompted Congress to appropriate $1 million for a nationwide headstone replacement program.
The legislation called for “durable stone of such design and weight as shall keep them in place when set.” It was left to
Secretary of War William W. Belknap to develop a design, which was soon announced. The new tombstones would be fashioned from
granite or white marble, cut four inches thick, ten inches wide, and a yard long; markers in northern latitudes were made
taller by six inches to withstand frost; each tombstone, slightly rounded on top, displayed an incised shield with a grave
number, the name of the deceased, his rank, and his home state. Since the first of these markers appeared at Arlington, few
modifications have been made to their simple, elegant design. Belknap also decreed a design for the individual tombstones
of unknown soldiers, sailors, and marines, who received granite or marble blocks six inches square, two feet six inches tall,
and planted so that six inches of stone appeared above ground; each would be inscribed with a number keyed to the cemetery’s
registry. By late in 1873, the quartermaster had arranged contracts for the first of Arlington’s new headstones, which ground
crews began planting with the spring of 1874. The headstone replacement program, like the reburial campaign before it, made
a vital point—that Union servicemen had lived and died in a noble cause, which earned them a place of honor in the nation’s
cemeteries.
³⁷

The same was not true for the freedmen, slaves, and Confederates who remained segregated at Arlington. There was no provision
for replacing their grave markers in the legislation of 1873, which was construed to apply only to the Union dead. Meanwhile,
the Lower Cemetery suffered from neglect: the grass ran rampant, graves collapsed, and so many headboards rotted that the
cemetery superintendent suggested in 1877 that they be tossed out entirely, without replacement. Relatives could find loved
ones from records in the cemetery office, said James Gall Jr. “The grounds would be much improved in appearance and the cost
of maintaining them materially reduced,” he told superiors. His idea was overruled by the War Department, but it would take
several years before Arlington’s freedmen, slaves, and Confederates received their own permanent headstones, which were thinner
and less substantial than those in the main cemetery.
³⁸

Just downriver on the plantation, a thousand former slaves were still living in Freedman’s Village after the war, making their
temporary refuge into a permanent community. Many had no other place to go. Although barred from owning houses at Arlington
during the war years, many managed to buy them afterward; many rented plots of five and ten acres for a nominal fee. A platoon
of thirty soldiers from the 107th Regiment of the U.S. Colored Troops kept order in the village, while preventing outsiders
from harassing residents.
³⁹
Former slaves such as James Parks continued to live and work at the cemetery, where he would prepare the ground for the famous
and the obscure for decades to come.
⁴⁰
Other freedmen worked as cemetery gardeners, laborers, and teamsters. Many grew their own produce for markets in the capital,
as they had done in plantation days.
⁴¹

One prominent black family even managed to peel off a 17 ½-acre parcel from the Lee estate as soon as Union victory was ensured. In a case that got a good deal of attention in its day, William Syphax, an Arlington native and a messenger for the Department of the Interior, petitioned President Andrew Johnson for title to the land. In his appeal, dated May 11, 1865, Syphax argued that Arlington’s first master, George Washington Parke Custis, had given the land to his mother, a former slave named Maria Syphax, at the same time that he freed her.

“In the year 1826, the late Mr. G. W. P. Custis manumitted my Mother and her children,” William Syphax wrote, “and at his
death my father became free by the terms of Mr. C’s will. At the time my mother was freed Mr. Custis gave to her, for the
use of herself and heirs, a small parcel of land … lying on the outer boundary of the Arlington tract, where my parents
continue to reside … My parents have no written evidence of this gift of land made to them by Mr. Custis, but can establish,
by parol evidence, the facts herein alleged.”
⁴²

This narrative evidence proved convincing: Maria Syphax was, in the terms of those times, a mulatto with strong Caucasian
features; unlike most other slaves, she had been raised in the Custis mansion, playing with Mary Custis (later Mrs. Robert
E. Lee); she had been singled out for preferential treatment by George Washington Custis, who freed her and her children three decades before arranging to free his other slaves. He had given property to
no other slaves, and for years had allowed the Syphax family to use their corner of Arlington as if they owned it. Within
the Syphax clan, it was understood that Maria had been not only a slave of George Washington Custis—she was also his daughter, from a union with a household servant of Martha Washington’s named Airrianna Carter.
⁴³

It took a year for the Syphax case to work its way through the federal bureaucracy, but the petition was finally granted on
June 12, 1866, when President Johnson signed legislation awarding the small Arlington tract to Mrs. Syphax. Newspapers, happy
to poke fun at Custis family history, had a field day with the story. “It happens that this colored man (Charles Syphax) is
a half-brother to Mrs. General Robert E. Lee, and grandson of George Washington Parke Custis, who was a stepson of George Washington!” reported
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
. “That is quite a parentage, is it not? … It is also asserted that Mrs. General Lee has, in all, some forty half-brothers
of the same sort in and around Washington.”
⁴⁴
Forty was probably an exaggeration, but there were, in fact, more than a few children of mixed race on the Arlington plantation,
with many claiming ancestry in the Custis line. “We’re all colors, from white to dark brown,” said one such descendent. “Nobody’s
black.”
⁴⁵

If Mrs. Lee worried about this aspect of family history, she kept her own counsel. Her views on race, like her late husband’s,
were far from simple. She held a strong prejudice against African Americans, whom she derided at one time or another as lazy,
idle, and untrustworthy. They were the “pets” of northern do-gooders, she said.
⁴⁶
Yet alongside these beliefs, she maintained tender feelings about many of those blacks she knew, exchanging news with former
servants who had emigrated to Liberia and inquiring after the fortunes of those remaining at Arlington. Her correspondence
with Selina Gray, the former housekeeper who had watched over the mansion since 1861, is particularly affectionate.

Like others who had lived at Arlington, Mrs. Gray knew of Mrs. Lee’s attachment to her home and kept her apprised of changes
there. “It is a most lovely place now,” Selina Gray wrote in 1872, but “so changed you wold hardly know it … The whole
of it is rented to the freemen. They have little huts all over that beautiful place … Your things at the time of the war
was taken away by every body.” One artifact of old Arlington remained, however: a rosebush Mrs. Lee had planted by her mother’s
grave in the hills behind the house. Mrs. Gray clipped a bud from the plant and folded it into her letter that autumn, along
with this wish: “I trust I may see the day yet when you all will have Arlington.”
⁴⁷

Mrs. Gray betrayed no hint of bitterness toward her former owner, although she admitted that she “under went a great deal
to stay at Arlington as long as I did having so many inferior persons to contend with … But I am very happy that I have
got a comfortable home of my own now … a bout half way to Alexandria. We have 10 acres of land.”
⁴⁸

Whether the two women met again is unknown, but Mrs. Lee did manage a farewell visit to Arlington, early in June 1873.
⁴⁹
Accompanied by a friend, she rode up the long hill in an open carriage at eleven a.m. and toured the estate until two P.M.,
stopping from time to time to take in the scene. She never emerged from her coach, but asked for a drink of water at the Arlington
spring; someone brought it to her, along with a handful of flowers. Then she was driven away.
⁵⁰
“My visit produced one good effect,” Mrs. Lee wrote a friend later that week. “The change is so entire I have not the yearning
to go back there & shall be more content to resign all my right in it.”
⁵¹
She died in Lexington five months later. She was sixty-five.