Read On Hallowed Ground Online
Authors: Robert M Poole
On Hallowed Ground (44 page)
50
. “Jubilee Among the Contrabands,” The
Evening Star
, Washington, D.C., Jan. 1, 1863, Virginia Room, ACL.
51
. Robert E. Lee to Mary Custis Lee, Dec. 21, 1862,
Wartime Papers,
378–79.
52
. Robert E. Lee, Deed of Manumission, Dec. 29, 1862, Robert E. Lee Papers, Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia.
53
. Robert E. Lee to Mary Custis Lee, Dec. 21, 1862,
Wartime Papers
, 378–79.
54
. Casualty estimates from the Battle of Gettysburg have been closely examined and debated since Civil War days. It would
appear that Lee underestimated his losses, gauging them at about 20,000; in the years since, historians have adjusted the
figure upward, suggesting that Confederates lost as many as 28,000, with Union casualties at 22,000.
55
. James, 5.
56
.
The National Freedman
, March 1, 1865, 60; Green, 276–78.
57
. James, 5.
58
. Green, 278.
59
. Lt. Col Elias M. Greene to Maj. Gen. S. P. Heintzelman, May 5, 1863, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
60
. Ibid.; Jennifer Hanna,
Arlington House: The Robert E. Lee Memorial
(Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 2001), 80.
61
. Maj. Leavitt Hunt, General Orders No. 28, May 22, 1863, NARA RG 92, RG 92, Quartermaster General’s Office.
62
. “General Plans No. 9 and No. 10 VA” for Freedman’s Village, Department of War, Office of the Quartermaster General, AHA.
63
. “Freedman’s Village, Arlington, Virginia,”
Harper’s Weekly
, May 7, 1864.
64
. Lt. Col. Elias M. Greene to Charles Thomas, Dec. 17, 1863, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
65
. Mary C. Ames, The
Independent
(Washington, D.C.), January 6, 1867.
66
. Lt. Col. Elias M. Greene to Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, July 22, 1862, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
67
. “Report to the Executive Committee of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends upon the Condition and Needs of the Freed
People of Color in Washington and Virginia,” Nov. 10, 1864; see also Roberta Schildt, “Freedman’s Village: Arlington, Virginia,
1863–1900,”
Northern Virginia Heritage
, Feb. 1985, 11–23, Virginia Room, ACL.
68
. James, 6.
69
. “Addresses and Ceremonies at the New Year’s Festival to the Freedmen of Arlington Heights and Statistics and Statements
of Educational Condition of the Colored People in the Southern States, and Other Facts,” 1867, 16, Virginia Room, ACL.
70
. Furgurson, 257.
71
. Enoch A. Chase,“The Arlington Case,”
Virginia Law Review
XV, 3 ( Jan. 1929): 207–33.
72
. The
National Republican,
Jan. 12, 1864.
73
. Chase, 207–33.
74
. Robert E. Lee to Mary Custis Lee, Feb. 6, 1864,
Wartime Papers.
75
. Robert E. Lee to Mary Custis Lee, Jan. 24, 1864,
Wartime Papers.
76
. Robert E. Lee to Jefferson Davis, March 30, 1864,
Wartime Papers.
77
. Maj. Gen. Alexander S. Webb, “Through the Wilderness,”
Battles and Leaders
, IV:152–69.
78
. Foote, III: 268, 316. As the Forty Days’ Campaign was starting, Gen. George Meade is supposed to have expressed apprehension
about the coming fight. According to John Hay, President Lincoln’s secretary, Meade worried that the Confederates would “make
a Kilkenny cat fight of the affair.” In Hay’s account, General Grant told Meade: “Our cat has the longer tail.” John Hay,
The Complete Civil War Diaries
(Carbondale: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 143.
79
. Leech, 322–23.
80
. Capt. James M. Moore, “List of papers Accompanying the Report of the Quartermaster General, 1864,”O.R., Series III, Vol.
4, 874–904.
4: FIRST BURIALS
1
. H. J. Conner to Frederick L. Fishback, June 23, 1923, for Robert R. Dye, Superintendent, Arlington National Cemetery, with
selected reports from
Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion
, Part III, Vol. I, AHA.
2
. Enoch A. Chase, The
Sunday Star
, (Washington, D.C.), Nov. 4, 1928, 5.
3
. Capt. James M. Moore, Extract No. 3, in annual report of the operations of the Quartermaster General’s Department, Brig.
Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs to Edwin M. Stanton, Nov. 3, 1864,
The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Sources of Union and Confederate Armies
(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900), Series III, Vol. 4, 874–905.
4
. Conner.
5
. Conner.
6
. Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs to Edwin M. Stanton, April 11, 1873, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
7
. George W. Dodge, “The Rose Garden at Arlington House,” The Arlington Historical Magazine,
Arlington Historical Society
, Oct. 1990, 20–21.
8
. Dodge, 20–29.
9
. Capt. James M. Moore to Brig. Gen. D.H. Rucker, Dec. 11, 1865, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General; MCM Papers,
LOC.
10
. Dodge, 20–29.
11
. Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, Diary, June 9, June 10, 1864, MCM Papers, LOC.
12
. J. Howard Avil, “United States National Military Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia,” 1903. Other versions of Avil’s account
were repeated in subsequent publications, including the
Sunday Star
, May 27, 1923, and the book Washington,
City and Capital,
from the WPA American Guide Series, 1937. These accounts, and others based on them, erroneously record Confederate Pvt. Levi
Reinhardt as Arlington’s first military burial.
13
. Roberta Schildt, “Freedman’s Village: Arlington, Virginia, 1863–1900,”
Northern Virginia Heritage,
Feb. 1985, 17; “First Interment in Arlington National Cemetery,” copy of memorandum, Quartermaster General’s File CMGME-C
687, June 16, 1959, AHA
14
. Meigs makes no note of visiting Arlington with President Lincoln, nor does the quartermaster credit him as coauthor of
the idea for a national cemetery—both of which Meigs would have been likely to mention in his wartime journal or his voluminous
correspondence. Lincoln first enters the Arlington story after Meigs’s death, when the general’s granddaughter recalls a conversation
between the two men. Lincoln supposedly asked Meigs about Arlington’s fate, and Meigs is said to have replied: “The ancients
filled their enemies fields with salt and made them useless forever but we are a Christian nation, why not make it a field
of honor?” (MCM Papers, LOC).
15
. Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs to Edwin M. Stanton, June 15, 1864, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
16
. Edwin M. Stanton, June 15, 1864, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
17
. “A Great National Cemetery,” The
Washington Morning Chronicle,
June 17, 1864.
18
. Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs to Brig Gen. D. H. Rucker, June 15, 1864, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
19
. Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs to Edwin M. Stanton, April 12, 1874, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General. Meigs,
a naturally industrious man, kept a furious pace throughout the war, providing his army not only with burial services but
also with horses, shoes, food, overcoats, ammunition, and warships. He accomplished this with admirable efficiency and little
evidence of waste or corruption. A man in a hurry, Meigs dashed off his orders with few pauses for punctuation, a style I
have retained when quoting his correspondence.
20
. Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs to Edwin M. Stanton, June 16, 1864; Brig. Gen. D. H. Rucker to Brig. Gen. Montgomery C.
Meigs, July 8, 1864, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
21
. Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs to Edwin M. Stanton, June 16, 1864, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
22
. Ibid.
23
. Brig. Gen. D. H. Rucker to Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, July 8, 1864, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
24
. Dodge, “The Rose Garden at Arlington House,”
Arlington Historical Magazine,
Arlington Historical Society, Oct. 1991, 57–59.
25
. Ibid.
26
. At least two other enlisted men found their way into Mrs. Lee’s garden, but their presence can be explained. Pvt. Monroe
Bradley of the 187th New York Infantry, buried in the garden on Dec. 5, 1864, was put there by accident—someone had mistaken
him for a lieutenant; when the error was discovered, he was allowed to stay. Pvt. Adolph Ahrens, killed in the Battle of Second
Manassas on Aug. 29, 1862, was buried near the battlefield and later exhumed to rest by his brother, Lt. Louis Ahrens, 4th
New York Cavalry, buried in the garden in April 1866, after the war. Dodge, Oct. 1990, 44; Oct. 1991, 54.
27
. Dodge, Oct. 1990, 20–50.
28
. Capt. James M. Moore, in O.R., Nov. 3, 1864, 902–5.
29
. MCM Papers, Oct. 3, 7, 11, 1865, LOC; David W. Miller,
Second Only to Grant: Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs
(Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Books, 2000), 95, 241–42.
30
. Douglas Southall Freeman,
R. E. Lee, A Biography,
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), IV:155–64; Emory M. Thomas,
Robert E. Lee: A Biography
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995) 368–69.
31
. Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds.,
Dictionary of American Biography
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930) 5:130.
32
. Jefferson Davis was never brought to trial. After two years in jail, he was released in May 1867 on bond. He lived another
twenty two-years, dying at age eighty-two. He never asked for a pardon. Johnson and Malone, eds.,
Dictionary of American Biography
, 5:130.
33
. Freeman, IV: 202–03.
34
. MCM Papers, April 11, 1865, LOC; Miller, 253.
35
. Wesley Norris’s account of the whipping, published by the
National Anti-Slavery Standard
on April 14, 1866 (AHA), came seven years after the event, but it gives details of his escape from Arlington with a sister,
Mary Norris, and an unnamed cousin, in 1859. He recounted that Lee hired an Alexandria County constable named Dick Williams
to capture all thee runaways and return them to Arlington, which is confirmed by Alexandria County records. What cannot be
independently verified is that Lee ordered Norris and his cousin to be whipped and brine poured into their wounds as Lee watched.
Before the war, when the original charge appeared in the anti-slavery
New York Tribune
, Lee told one of his sons that he would not dignify the report with a response; after the war, when Wesley Norris’s firsthand
account was published, Lee indignantly denied that he had ever mistreated slaves or soldiers, but did not say whether he considered
whipping runaway slaves to be mistreatment. In her excellent biography of Lee,
Reading the Man
(New York: Viking, 2007) Elizabeth Brown Pryor makes a strong argument, though not a conclusive one, that Norris’s charges
were credible. “Wesley Norris gave his interview after he was freed, when he had nothing to hide, gain or fear,” she writes.
But there was one motive for Norris’s testimony—retribution against his former owner, at a time when Lee was recently defeated
and legally vulnerable. What can be verified is that Lee punished Norris by hiring him out to a plantation farther from freedom
in Hanover County; that Norris escaped to the North in January 1863; that he worked for Union troops during the war; and that
he returned to Arlington after the war, where he worked as a laborer in the new national cemetery.
36
. Robert E. Lee to Gov. John Letcher of Virginia, undated, in
Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee,
ed., Robert E. Lee Jr. (McLean, VA: IndyPublish.com, 2002), 112.
37
. Lee was covered by President Johnson’s general amnesty declaration of December 25, 1868, which allowed treason charges
against Lee and other Confederates to be dropped on Feb. 15, 1869; Thomas, 370–71; Freeman, IV, 203–07.
38
. Cynthia Gorney, The
Washington Post
, Aug. 6, 1975.
39
. Cornelia Jones to Mary Custis Lee, May 15, 1865, Mary Custis Lee Papers, VHS.
40
. Mary Custis Lee to Philip Fendall, undated, in Elizabeth Brown Pryor,
Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters
(New York: Viking, 2007), 445–46.
41
. Philip Bigler,
In Honored Glory, Arlington National Cemetery: The Final Post
(St. Petersburg, FL: Vandamere Press, 1999), 29.
42
. Mary Custis Lee to Emily Mason, April 20, 1866, K. M. Rowland Letters & Autographs, Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond,
VA.
43
. Robert E. Lee to J. S. Black, Jan. 13, 1869, D-E Collection, LOC.
44
. Robert E. Lee to Smith Lee, Jan. 4, 1866, Robert Carter Lee Papers, VHS.
45
. Thomas, 374–75.
46
. Lee,
Recollections
, 140.
47
. Mary Custis Lee to Florence Marshall, June 27, 1868, AHA.
48
. Pryor,
Reading the Man
, 445–46.
