On Hallowed Ground (10 page)

That last autumn of the war produced thousands of casualties, but few were felt more bitterly at home than the death of Lt.
John Rodgers Meigs, a son of the Union quartermaster. Lieutenant Meigs, twenty-two, was shot on October 3, 1864, while on
a night scouting mission for Gen. Philip Sheridan in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Accounts varied, with Sheridan saying that
Lieutenant Meigs had been killed by Confederate guerillas disguised as civilians; Rebels claimed later that Meigs had fired
on them first. What ever the cause, Lieutenant Meigs was dead. He was returned with solemn honors to Washington, where President Lincoln, Edwin Stanton, and other dignitaries joined General Meigs for the funeral. Meigs mourned the loss
of his “noble precious son,” saw him buried among relatives in a Georgetown cemetery, and braced for the final clash of the
conflict, which now seemed infinitely less benign than the “great & holy war” he had foreseen at its outset.
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Lee slowly made his way home to Richmond, where his wife and daughters had lived through the last years of war. He arrived
on April 15, 1865—the very morning on which President Lincoln died—to join his family at 707 Franklin Street, a borrowed house
in a burned-out city now occupied by Union troops. Lee handed his faithful war horse, Traveller, to an attendant, acknowledged
cheers from the street, and closed the door behind him.
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His future looked bleak that spring. In the four years—almost to the day—since he had bid farewell to Gen. Winfield Scott
and turned south, Lee had lost almost everything. Arlington, which held thousands of graves, was gone. He owned no other home.
His investments, moderate at best, had dwindled. He was without a job, a prisoner of war on parole, stripped of the right
to vote or to hold public office. And shortly after arriving in Richmond, he received the unsettling news that his old commander
in chief, Confederate president Jefferson Davis, had been captured while trying to flee the country. Arrested in Georgia,
Davis was brought back to Virginia, thrown into military prison at Fort Monroe, and clapped in irons.
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There were rumors that Davis would be tried and hanged for his part in the rebellion.
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Lee faced the same fate. Less than a month after Appomattox, he received word that he, Davis, and other Confederate leaders
had been indicted by a federal grand jury—for treason.
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Among Lee’s adversaries, none seemed keener to make an example of him than Meigs, still indignant over the death of his son
six months before. “The rebels are all murderers of my son and the sons of hundreds of thousands,” Meigs fumed as word of
Lee’s surrender reached him. “Justice seems not satisfied [if ] they escape judicial trial & execution … by the government
which they have betrayed attacked & whose people loyal & disloyal they have slaughtered.” If Lee and other Confederate leaders
escaped punishment because of clemency, then Meigs hoped that Congress would banish them from American soil.
³⁴
He was not alone in these views, which were strongly held by radical Republicans on Capitol Hill and by some newspapers.
At least one of the latter resurrected the old charge about Lee’s whipping Wesley Norris and an unnamed cousin, both slaves,
who had escaped from Arlington before the war.
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But with the prospect of national reunion in sight, other leaders were happy to follow the late President Lincoln’s model
of malice toward none and charity for all. General Grant was one of these. Relentless in battle but magnanimous in victory,
he believed that Confederates would become useful citizens if treated generously. And from the time of Appomattox, Lee set
an example for his former comrades in arms, urging them to put the war behind them, go home, and rebuild their broken country.
“All should unite in honest efforts to obliterate the effects of the war and to restore the blessing of peace,” he wrote.
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This attitude reassured Grant, calmed some of the raw anti-Union feeling in the South, and probably saved Lee from prosecution.
The treason charges against him quietly disappeared, almost certainly because Grant interceded on his behalf with President
Andrew Johnson.
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While the Confederate general avoided the spectacle of a trial, he found it difficult to regain his citizenship. His application
for a presidential pardon, heartily endorsed by Grant, was postponed for weeks, then months, then years. Lee continued to
wait for the presidential reprieve, which never came. The delay might have been intentional, as penalty for his role in the
insurgency, or it might have been an honest mistake caused by bureaucratic error. Lee’s oath of allegiance, signed on October
2, 1865, disappeared into the State Department files for more than a century, finally resurfacing in 1970, when a researcher
discovered the document, duly notarized and fixed with Lee’s faded signature, in a dusty box of documents at the National
Archives. With this legal requirement finally met, Congress restored the general’s citizenship in 1975. President Gerald R.
Ford signed the legislation in ceremonies at Arlington, attended by Robert E. Lee IV and other family members.
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The Lees would spend the postwar years trying—or at least hoping—to regain possession of Arlington, a struggle that continued
their long-distance battle of wits with Meigs. Mrs. Lee, less fatalistic and more outspoken than her husband, felt a growing
sense of outrage about changes at Arlington. The ink was barely dry on the Appomattox surrender when a cousin wrote to Mrs.
Lee on May 15, 1865, urging her return to the plantation. “It is thought well for persons who have property in that part of
the state to be near at hand, that they may take possession as soon as it is vacated … I trust dear Cousin you will be
back ere long at Arlington too. I can not believe that you will be defrauded out of it.”
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Neither could Mrs. Lee, who often gave voice to her feelings, in contrast to her self-possessed husband. “I cannot write with
composure on my own cherished Arlington,” she admitted to one friend.
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She seethed over the placement of Union graves: “They are even planted up to the very door without any regard to common decency
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… My heart will never know rest or peace while my dear home is so used & I am almost
maddened
daily by the accounts I read in the paper of the number of interments continually placed there … If
justice & law
are not utterly extinct in the U.S., I
will have
it back.”
⁴²
Such outbursts probably did the Lees more harm than good, fueling adverse comment in the press and hard feelings among radical
Republicans who had no sympathy for leaders of the rebellion.

For his part, Lee understood this political reality and kept his ambitions for Arlington hidden from all but a few advisors
and family. He conferred quietly with lawyers about reclaiming the property, a matter he was willing to investigate but not
to press openly. “I have not taken any steps in the matter,” he cautioned a Washington attorney who offered to take on the Arlington case for free, “under the belief that at present I could accomplish no good.”
However, he encouraged the sympathetic lawyer to research the case.
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To his elder brother Smith Lee, the general admitted that he wanted to “regain the possession of A.” and particularly “to
terminate the burial of the dead which can only be done by its restoration to the family. I have made no application on the
subject waiting for the action of President Johnson upon my application to him to be embraced in his proclamation of Amnesty.”
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While Arlington remained in limbo, the family searched for a new place to live. Seeking relief from the visitors thronging
their Richmond house, they escaped to Derwent, a friend’s country estate, where they lived through the blazing summer of 1865
in a weather-beaten farm house. The place was stuffy and uncomfortable, but it gave them some rest, and time to consider where
they might resettle. Lee fielded correspondence, and took long rides on Traveller. Toward the end of the summer, he agreed
to a position as president of Washington College, a tiny school with forty students and a staggering debt in Lexington, Virginia. The college, set deep in the Shenandoah
Valley and far from the prickly entanglements of Richmond or Washington, seemed ideal to Lee, who needed honorable work as well as a home. Washington College provided both.
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As students returned that autumn, the Lees settled at Lexington and unwrapped some of the silver plate and paintings they
had salvaged from Arlington. When they unrolled carpets rescued from the plantation, the rugs were too long and had to be
folded at one end to fit their new home.
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Lee found the place comfortable and his work absorbing, but his wife continued to miss her old property on the Potomac. “I
long for the old scenes & old haunts,” she repined to a cousin. “I cannot take root in a new soil—I am too old for that.”
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She still held out the hope that Arlington’s dead could be disinterred, buried elsewhere, and her family home restored.
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We proceeded along a perfect road through a Country so changed that had I not known where I was I should have never identified
it in the world. Not one single tree, not a bush, is standing on either side of the road. The heights from the river …
are lined with fortifications & barracks & freedmans [sic] villages & back in the Country as far as the eye can reach the perfect
desolateness extends. Where the Arlington tract commences large placards are stuck over both sides of the road “Government
Farms—Do Not Trespass” … On the Height the graveyard commences & extends almost to the little stream … The vegetable
garden with its old brick wall & ivy looked just the same, the only thing that did … The flower garden is entirely altered,
made smaller in every way … surrounded by a white paling … Round the paling were the row of graves of which you have
heard. The front looked very desolate, all grown up with church mint & aspens & ailanthus … Not saying who I was, I was
not allowed to enter many of the rooms … I went into the parlour, in which nothing was standing but the old sideboard,
with broken doors … One of the mantels was also broken … I was forbidden to enter Papa’s office … Upstairs I was
permitted to go into my own dressing room “to see the view.” There was nothing in it, nor the hall. I saw several of the servants
in the distance but not wishing to be recognized did not speak to them. Thornton … Cornelius … & Dandridge I think
& Robert. The graveyard commences from the road as it descends the hill & stretches out … acre after acre … I returned
that way over the long bridge to see as much as I could & had I not been so unwell I would have gone over again. It was a
very trying visit, more painful even than I had expected … It was a beautiful bright nice day and the view was lovely
but the whole face of the country so utterly changed that turning my back on the house I could have scarcely recognized a
feature of it.
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Her letter offered little hope for returning to Arlington, in marked contrast with a contemporaneous assessment from her uncle
Smith Lee, who visited the estate in the late autumn or winter of 1865 on what he thought was a clandestine inspection. After
touring the house and grounds, he concluded that the place could be made habitable again and reported this to his brother
in Lexington.
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Smith made the mistake of sharing his views with the cemetery’s superintendent, who dutifully sent them to the quartermaster
general—along with the mystery visitor’s identity.
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“A brother of Genl. Lee (Smith Lee) in a recent visit to Arlington, remarked to the Superintendent, ‘that the house could
still be made a pleasant residence, by fencing off the Cemetery, and removing the officers buried around the garden,’” Capt.
James M. Moore wrote his superiors on December 11, 1865. Moore, detailed by Meigs to look after the cemetery, took occasion
to suggest more burials around the mansion, in keeping with his commander’s goal “to more firmly secure the grounds known
as the National Cemetery, to the Government by rendering it undesirable as a future residence.”
⁵²

Shortly after this memorandum made the rounds, word of Smith Lee’s visit leaked out. Then, in an instance of poor timing for
the Lee family interests, one of Mrs. Lee’s eruptions appeared in the press. She intended getting Arlington back, the
Philadelphia Press
reported, even if she “is obliged to live in the black quarters.” Other newspapers noted that she had been lobbying President
Johnson for the return of Arlington.
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“But among other obstacles she will probably encounter is the fact that 12,000 Union soldiers have been buried upon its soil,”
the Philadelphia paper warned that winter. “Sixty brave officers sleep their last sleep in the grounds which surround the
family mansion … It is of course impossible that the nation can surrender the graves of so many of its defenders to the
leader of armies they volunteered to oppose.”
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One sentence in this news item—the one referring to brave officers—was underlined in the heavy blue pencil Meigs often used
for annotating records, and the clipping placed in the quartermaster’s files.
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