On Hallowed Ground (16 page)

The first wave of black residents pulled up stakes in the spring of 1888—most of them with trifling payments for their Arlington
property. Lucy Harris received $35 for her house; Martha Smith, a former Custis slave, got $40.34 for hers, along with $3
for the trees and vines she had planted. Her neighbor James Parks, who occupied half of a duplex built in the first days of
Freedman’s Village, received $13.20 for his home, while his brothers Lawrence and William were paid $63.09 and $78.09, respectively.
The unfortunate William Winston, lot 83, got nothing at all. Members of the Mt. Olive Baptist Church were paid $1,040 for
their brick building, which provided seed money for the replacement they would soon raise down the road in Alexandria. The
War Department’s total assessment for the village amounted to $10,936—or $103 per household, far less than the $350 figure
John Syphax had proposed. Congress provided $15,000 to cover payments and some moving expenses for displaced villagers. Many
years later, in 1900, lawmakers authorized another $75,000 to reimburse freedmen and their heirs for the “contraband” taxes
they had been required to pay during and after the war for the support of their impoverished neighbors.
⁹⁸

Meigs watched with pride as Arlington made the transition from pauper’s ground to field of honor. He instituted decorative
improvements, lavished attention on the graveyard’s gates and roads, and made sure that old comrades were buried in grand
military style. When he was not fussing over designs for Arlington, Meigs put his itchy pencil to work sketching plans for
bowling alleys and billiard tables for army posts, where peacetime troops had time on their hands. It was cheaper, Meigs thought,
“to amuse soldiers than punish them for faults resulting from ennui and want of interesting employment for leisure hours.”
⁹⁹

Looking to his own future, Meigs incorporated Arlington into family plans, commandeering a prime corner of the cemetery for
himself and his relatives. His wife, Louisa Meigs, was the first to be buried there, in 1879, occupying a hilltop plot alongside
Meigs Drive. Here, just to the west of Lee’s mansion, where gnarled oaks spread their branches wide to the breezes, Mrs. Meigs
was joined by the general’s father, numerous in-laws, and four of their children, including Lt. John Rodgers Meigs, their
beloved son killed in the Civil War. As quartermaster, Meigs had expressed reluctance to disturb anyone’s grave, but he did
not hesitate to break this rule where his own relatives were concerned, digging them up from Washington churchyards and transferring them to his corner of Arlington. By the 1880s, the Meigs clan far outnumbered any Lees remaining
on the estate.
¹⁰⁰

Even in this moment of triumph, however, the old quartermaster’s influence was waning. When an assassin’s bullet claimed the
life of President James A. Garfield in 1881, Meigs lost a sympathetic executive in the White House and, by extension, his
protection in the higher reaches of the War Department. Power passed to Vice President Chester A. Arthur, who lacked his predecessor’s
war-time experience and showed no particular sympathy for Meigs. The new president ordered the quartermaster’s retirement,
in part to make room for others long overdue for promotion. Still vigorous at age sixty-five and protesting that he was “not
too old to have lost all desire to be useful,” Meigs surrendered his army post in 1882—the same year of the Supreme Court’s
ruling for Custis Lee. These developments must have proven keenly disappointing for Meigs, a diligent officer who had served
with distinction for forty-six years and who had so ardently resisted the Lees’ claims to Arlington.
¹⁰¹

Set adrift for almost six months, Meigs eventually found new work, boosted by highly placed friends on Capitol Hill. In August
1882, Congress named him to design and oversee construction of the new Pension Building in Washington, a sprawling nine hundred thousand dollar project that would absorb the general’s creative attention for another five years.
As was his practice, Meigs left his mark on the new building by incorporating busts of himself, his wife, and his father in
the interior cornice work, among the likenesses of American Indians who glared down on visitors far beneath them. When Meigs
was not immortalizing himself, he plunged into the capital’s thriving scientific community, serving as a regent of the Smithsonian
Institution and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He gathered for regular roundtable discussions with the astronomer
Simon Newcomb, the artist-naturalist Titian Ramsay Peale, the aviation pioneer Samuel P. Langley, and the Smithsonian secretary
Joseph Henry, who used his scientific expertise to concoct a powerful alcoholic punch Meigs particularly enjoyed.
¹⁰²

All was in readiness in January 1892 when Meigs, seventy-five, died in his Washington home after a brief bout with the flu. After funeral services at St. John’s Church on Lafayette Square, he made the final
journey to Arlington in high style, accompanied by an Army band and an honor guard of 150 foot soldiers decked out in their
best uniforms. He rode away on clouds of praise. “The Army has rarely possessed an officer who contained within himself so
many valuable attainments, and who was entrusted by the Government with a greater variety of weighty responsibilities or who
has proved himself more worthy of confidence,” read the General Orders from the War Department.
¹⁰³
A caisson bearing his flag-draped casket rattled across the river, up the long slope to Arlington, and across the meadow
of tombstones he had so assiduously cultivated. With muffled drums marking time and guidons snapping in the winter wind, the
procession passed Mrs. Lee’s garden and came to a halt on Meigs Drive. There, in a plot that James Parks had just cleared
for the general, the rifles barked their last salute, Taps sounded over the tawny hills again, and soldiers in blue eased
Montgomery Meigs into the ground.
¹⁰⁴
His burial instructions were precise: workers were directed to seal his tomb with hydraulic cement and leave him to await
the Resurrection.
¹⁰⁵

With Meigs’s death, the old order shifted. Lee and Grant were long gone. So was Jefferson Davis. So was Gen. John A. Logan,
father of Memorial Day. Gone too were the generals whose names recalled the bloody work of Manassas, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg,
and other battles: Hood, Thomas, Hooker, Jackson, McClellan, Stuart, Sheridan, Burnside, Meade. Even the durable William T.
Sherman had joined the silent ranks by February 1891, barely a year ahead of Meigs. One of Sherman’s pallbearers that winter
was Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, eighty-four, who had stood bareheaded in the cold at Sherman’s funeral in St. Louis
out of respect for his old adversary. “If I were in his place and he standing here in mine,” Johnston said, “he would not
put on his hat.” Johnston caught cold and died in short order.
¹⁰⁶
Such displays of magnanimity helped soften hard feelings between North and South. But as the historian Edmund Morris has
observed, it took a new war to heal scars from the old one.
¹⁰⁷

PART II

REUNION

6

"A SPLENDID LITTLE WAR"

THE NEW WAR WAS SPARKED by the fiery explosion of the U.S.S. maine in Havana harbor on the night of February 15, 1898. More
than 260 American sailors, marines, and landsmen were lost in the blast and its aftermath, which came at a delicate moment
in Spanish-American relations. The second-class battleship had been summoned to Havana to evacuate Americans if the unrest
between Cuban colonists and Spanish authorities roared out of control. The
in-surrectos
had been seeking autonomy from Spain for decades, through peaceful protest, armed resistance, and occasional rioting. As
strife continued to roil the island in the 1890s, newspapers such as the
New York Journal
of William Randolph Hearst and the
New York World
of Joseph Pulitzer agitated to expel Spain, free the Cubans, and enlarge U.S. interests in the region, just as other imperial
powers—among them Britain, Germany, Belgium, France, and Italy—were extending their reach into other parts of the world. The
cause of the
Maine
’s explosion was unknown but that did not matter to those clamoring for war.
¹

While Navy divers began the grim business of recovering the burned and mutilated bodies from Havana Harbor, President William
McKinley remained reluctant to mount an invasion of Cuba. The former Union major, who had lived through the carnage of Antietam
and other Civil War actions, counseled restraint until a board of inquiry could establish the cause of the
Maine
’s sinking. Meanwhile, as Hearst and Pulitzer agitated for war and the first
Maine
victims were given temporary burial in Havana’s Colon Cemetery, McKinley tried to soothe jingoists in Congress, explored
diplomatic initiatives with Spain, and sought to dampen militants within his own administration, where his assistant secretary
of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, was spoiling to punish Spain for “an act of dirty treachery.”
²

McKinley demurred. “I don’t propose to be swept off my feet by the catastrophe,” the president told a Senate confidant. “The
country can afford to withhold its judgment and not strike an avenging blow until the truth is known.”
³

Just in case, though, the nation prudently cranked up its rusty war machinery, with McKinley hoping it would not be needed.
The regular Army, shrunken to a force of less than 30,000 by peacetime, made hasty plans for boosting troop strength and appointing
officers, while the navy scoured European ports for surplus ships. Congress approved $50 million for war preparations on March
8, 1898. When the bill was reported to the House of Representatives that day, a Rebel yell pierced the decorum of the chamber
and all eyes turned to its source, a wiry little man with a pointed white beard who stood all of five feet two inches in his
boots—Rep. Joseph Wheeler, sixty-one, a Democrat representing the Eighth Congressional District of Alabama.
⁴

The diminutive congressman, first elected in 1891, was known as “Fighting Joe” Wheeler from his days as a hard-hitting Confederate
lieutenant general of cavalry. Ranging from the Mississippi across Georgia and up through the Carolinas, Wheeler joined in
more than two hundred engagements, had sixteen horses shot from under him, was wounded three times, and earned the respect
of both William T. Sherman, whom he had plagued incessantly, and Robert E. Lee, who placed Wheeler on a par with J. E. B.
Stuart as a cavalry officer.
⁵

After the war and Reconstruction, Congressman Wheeler worked as hard to reconcile North and South as General Wheeler had labored
to thrash his Union enemies.
⁶
At the mere suggestion of a new conflict, Fighting Joe was one of the first to volunteer for army service. Within a day of
the
Maine
explosion, the Alabaman dashed off a letter to President McKinley. “In case of any trouble with Spain,” Wheeler wrote, “remember
that my tender of services is on file at the War Department.” Wheeler also made sure that the Associated Press and other news
organizations knew that he was ready to saddle up again.
⁷

McKinley, who embraced sectional reconciliation as a goal of his administration, knew that the reformed Confederate’s loyalty
was genuine.
⁸
He filed away the congressman’s letter until the
Maine
investigation could run its course, which it soon did. On March 25, 1898, messengers arrived at the White House with a report
from the board of inquiry. The board’s findings proved to be tantalizingly inconclusive: The doomed battleship had touched
a mine. This had set off two shipboard magazines, which caused the
Maine
to explode and sink. But the report found no evidence that Spain or its agents had planted the mine or was responsible for
the tragedy.
⁹
Despite this, the nation’s fever for war—stoked by sensationalist newspapers, by expansionists on Capitol Hill, and by growing
public desire to avenge the
Maine
disaster—could not be chilled. Congress declared war on April 19; McKinley ordered a Cuban blockade on April 22; Spain declared
war on April 23; and McKinley summoned Fighting Joe Wheeler to the White House on April 26.
¹⁰

The president offered the veteran cavalryman a commission as major general of volunteers—one of only fifteen positions of
that rank. It was an appointment calculated to make other southerners feel welcome in the new war. “General,” McKinley told
Wheeler,“I have sent for you to ask if you want to go, and if you feel able to go.” Wheeler was not only willing but eager
to wear the Union blue again.
¹¹
“I replied that, while I was sixty-one years old,” he recalled, “I felt as strong and capable as when I was forty, or even
much younger, and that I desired very much to have another opportunity to serve my country.”
¹²

Wheeler went home to pack for the Spanish-American War, while McKinley doled out other key military appointments—including
a new set of major general’s stars for Fitzhugh Lee, another former Rebel officer and the nephew of the late Robert E. Lee.
Fitz Lee was particularly well acquainted with conditions in Cuba, where he had served as U.S. consul general since Grover
Cleveland’s administration, monitoring the unsettled conditions that had led to war. Indeed, it could be said that Lee was
inadvertently responsible for the new conflict—or at least the excuse for it—for it was he who summoned the
Maine
to Cuba to show the colors and to evacuate stranded Americans if need be.
¹³

The news that these two prominent Confederates would be fighting under the old flag won almost universal praise. “There is
no longer a North or a South in the old sense,” the
Indianapolis News
reported. “It is but a memory.”
¹⁴
The
New York Tribune
commended McKinley’s conciliatory gesture: “Even a year ago such appointments … would have been almost impossible. A
common enemy has removed the last vestige of proscription. The southerner is as anxious to defend the country as the northerner,
and some anxiety is expressed in the south lest the war end before the old Confederates have the chance to march under the
Stars and Stripes.”
¹⁵

No soldier yearned more to do so than Fighting Joe Wheeler. After some quick drilling in Georgia, he disembarked with his
troops in Cuba and led almost a thousand men into the first major land action of the Spanish-American War. On June 24, 1898,
Wheeler urged his troops through the sweltering jungle from Siboney and into the hills at Las Guasimas, where they were soon
engaged in a brisk exchange with well-entrenched Spaniards.
¹⁶
The defenders finally gave way to a dogged American assault, prompting the old Confederate to forget where he was: “We’ve
got the damn Yankees on the run!” Wheeler whooped.
¹⁷

Such outbursts of enthusiasm were as music to those serving under Wheeler. Among them was Lt. Col. Theodore Roosevelt of the
Rough Riders, who had given up his post in the McKinley administration to organize his famous volunteer regiment; he pronounced
his pugnacious little general “a regular game cock.”
¹⁸
Another officer, watching disparate companies fighting as one in Cuba, noticed how the experience erased regional and racial
distinctions: “White regiments, black regiments, Regulars and Rough Riders, representing the young manhood of the North and
the South, fought shoulder to shoulder, unmindful of race or color, unmindful of whether commanded by an ex-Confederate or
not, and mindful only of their common duty as Americans.” The officer who said this was Lt. John J. “Black Jack” Pershing,
who had earned his derisive nickname while commanding African Americans of the 10th Cavalry in the Indian Wars. Rejoining
the unit in Cuba, Pershing led them into fierce fighting on San Juan Hill and around Santiago. Not only did his Buffalo Soldiers
hold their own there—five of them earned the Medal of Honor.
¹⁹
Even so, it would take half a century and two more wars to desegregate the armed forces of the United States.
²⁰

The Spanish-American War ended quickly. Spanish forces withdrew from Cuba on July 17, 1898, ending four centuries of colonial
rule and giving the United States a new foothold in the Caribbean. At the same time, American troops seized Puerto Rico with
little resistance; Commodore George Dewey routed Spain from the Philippines; Guam was ceded as U.S. territory; and Hawaii
was annexed to round out American’s holdings in the Pacific. Summing up, John Hay, then U.S. ambassador to Britain, marveled
at the ease with which these acquisitions had been snapped up. “It has been a splendid little war,” he wrote to his friend
Theodore Roosevelt in July 1898, “begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored
by that fortune which loves the brave.”
²¹

In a matter of months, the United States had established itself as a world power with a new stake in international affairs,
a condition that would exact unimagined responsibilities, and a great deal of blood, in the century to come.
²²

Nonetheless, if nothing else the Civil War had taught that each fatality was a loss to be reckoned, a name to be recorded,
a comrade to be buried with appropriate ceremony. This attention to detail grew out of the massive federal effort to recover
and reinter almost 300,000 of the Union dead between 1865 and 1870. That program set new standards for diligence and raised
public expectations for those who had sacrificed all for the nation.
²³

Few better understood the importance of honoring fallen warriors than President McKinley, who had seen battle firsthand and
realized the agonies of losing comrades among the Civil War’s thousands of unknowns. In that conflict of long marches, moving
fronts, and hurried battlefield burials, months or years had elapsed between the deaths of soldiers and the effort to recover
them, a major factor in the extraordinary number of Civil War graves without names on them. To avoid this outcome in the new
conflict, McKinley ordered specialized teams to Cuba and Puerto Rico as soon as the fighting ended, so that each battlefield
grave could be quickly found, fixed with a marker, and if possible its occupant identified.
²⁴
Less than a week after the guns fell silent on San Juan Hill, Congress appropriated funds to disinter and repatriate the
remains of all Americans who died in the war.
²⁵
This recovery program set a significant precedent for the United States, which for the first time pledged to bring dead servicemen
home from overseas instead of burying them on foreign soil if their next of kin requested repatriation.
²⁶

Brig. Gen. Marshall I. Ludington, the quartermaster who oversaw the global repatriation effort, realized the historic importance
of the new policy,“probably the first attempt in history where a country at war with a foreign power has undertaken to disinter
the remains of its soldiers … and bring them by a long sea voyage to their native land for return to their relatives and
friends, or their reinterment in the beautiful cemeteries which have been provided by our government.”
²⁷

To begin the homecoming process, the War Department dispatched D. H. Rhodes, a landscape gardener at Arlington and inspector
of national cemeteries, to provide a full accounting of the dead from America’s splendid little war. Arriving in Cuba in August
1898, hot on the heels of departing Spaniards, Rhodes slogged over a hundred miles of backwoods trails, and through swamps
and abandoned hospital camps, surveying gravesites every day for five weeks. It took some detective work, since most graves
were crudely marked with sticks, stones, broken tiles, bits of tin, strips of boxes—whatever was handy at the time of burial.
“In many cases,” Rhodes said of the burial sites, “these had become covered with vines, weeds, grass, etc., rendering the
grave difficult to be found, even when only a few feet distant.” Working across the island, Rhodes discovered 654 graves of
U.S. soldiers and civilians associated with the war, clearly marked the sites, and kept meticulous notes for each. He managed
to identify 141 of the dead on the spot from well-marked graves, interviews with army comrades, uniform insignia, and, in
more than a few instances, from ginger ale bottles containing slips of paper identifying the deceased—probably left by burial
crews.
²⁸