Read On Hallowed Ground Online
Authors: Robert M Poole
On Hallowed Ground (4 page)
With little fanfare, Lee emerged from Arlington on Monday, April 22, and climbed into his carriage.
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Dressed in a black suit and a black silk hat, he disappeared down the long gravel driveway, past the greening fields where
slaves bent to their work, and down past the brown Potomac with its silver countercurrent of shad pushing upstream to spawn,
right on schedule. Lee made his way downstream toward the Alexandria train station, which bustled with passengers and buzzed
with war talk. He pressed through the crowd and boarded the car for Richmond, where he had been summoned for an interview
with Gov. John Letcher. There on April 23, 1861, Lee accepted command of Virginia’s military and naval forces, with the rank
of major general.
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From that moment Arlington was lost.
WHEN LEE RODE away from arlington in april 1861, he left behind not only a choice piece of real estate but also one essential
to Washington’s defenses. It did not take a military genius to appreciate the strategic importance of the old plantation, where the heights
climbed more than two hundred feet above the surrounding countryside. Any artillerist occupying that position could easily
harass troopships plying the Potomac River, blow up the capital’s bridge crossings, and lob shells at the most tempting target
of all—the White House, its roof peeking from the green fringe of trees just across the river.
There was no way that war planners in Washington were going to cede the high ground of Arlington to enemy forces, and within days of her husband’s departure, Mary Custis
Lee received notice of the Federals’ intent. A young Union officer friendly to the family came rushing into the Arlington
mansion in early May, urging Mrs. Lee to prepare for her evacuation. “You must pack up all you value immediately and send
it off in the morning,” Lt. Orton Williams told her. Since he was one of Mrs. Lee’s many cousins and worked as secretary to
Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott, she took the warning seriously.
1
That night she and her daughters supervised some frantic packing by slaves, who put the family silver in boxes for transfer
to Richmond, crated the papers of George Washington and G. W. P. Custis, and arranged Lee’s files in a separate box. Mrs. Lee gathered up some Washington memorabilia for shipping, stowing the larger pieces—his campaign tent, a punch bowl, and crates of Washington’s Cincinnati china—in the mansion’s basement.
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After the night of organizing her escape, Mary Lee tried to get some sleep, only to be awakened just after dawn by Orton Williams,
who returned with word that the Union advance upon Arlington had been delayed.
3
Although he stressed that occupation was inevitable—merely postponed—Mrs. Lee took the respite as an excuse for lingering
several more days at the home she had known since childhood.
4
She wrote newsy letters to her daughters, gossiped with visiting friends, and lamented the pushiness of South Carolina and
other states so eager for war.
5
She savored the time remaining at Arlington and sat for hours in her favorite roost, a garden arbor to the south of the mansion,
where spring flowers were making a luxuriant start on the season. Their promise of renewal seemed mockingly out of place as
the country hurried toward conflict.
“I never saw the country more beautiful, perfectly radiant,” she wrote to Lee. “The yellow jasmine in full bloom and perfuming
the air; but a death like stillness prevails everywhere. You hear no sounds from Washington, not a soul moving about.”
6
In that lull before the clash, General Lee sat stranded at a desk in Richmond, feverishly mobilizing Virginia’s forces, or
ganizing his blankets and camping kit for what he expected to be a long season afield, and worrying about his wife’s safety.
Effectively immobilized by arthritis, she had grown feeble in recent years, which only heightened her husband’s concern. He
tried to prod her into leaving.
“I am very anxious about you,” he wrote on April 26. “You have to move, & make arrangements to go to some point of safety .
. . War is inevitable & there is no telling when it will burst around you.”
7
A few days later he wrote again: “When the war commences no place will be exempt … You had better prepare all things for
removal, that is the plate, pictures, & c. & be prepared at any moment. Where to go is the difficulty.”
8
The newspapers added credence to Lee’s fears. On May 10, the
New York Daily Tribune
reported that a volunteer regiment of New York Zouaves would soon “encamp on Arlington Heights” under the command of Col.
Elmer E. Ellsworth. “His men are at once to erect tents and prepare for out-door life,” said the
Tribune
. “At this prospect they are delighted.”
9
A few days later, the same paper revealed that General Scott was planning to place “a powerful park of artillery” on the
hills of Arlington.
10
Lee nudged his wife once more. “You had better complete your arrangements & retire further from the scene of war,” he wrote.
“It may burst upon you at any time. It is sad to think of the devastation, if not the ruin it may bring upon a spot so endeared
to us. But God’s will be done. We must be resigned.”
11
By this time Lee almost certainly knew that Arlington would be lost—at least in the war’s early stages. He had made no provision
to hold the heights there, choosing instead to concentrate his limited troops on a line some twenty miles to the south of
Washington, near an important railroad junction at Manassas, Virginia. With that in mind, he boosted the state’s militia from 18,400
troops to 40,000 in a matter of weeks, shored up Virginia’s coastal defenses, and scoured the country for field artillery
pieces.
12
He consulted with an obscure colonel named Thomas J. Jackson—not yet Gen. Stonewall Jackson—about raising forces in the Shenandoah
Valley.
13
He coordinated the defense of Harper’s Ferry with Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, a prickly but esteemed colleague who had recently
resigned as quartermaster general of the Union Army. Amid these developments, Lee heard the distant rumble of northern newspapers,
which were training their big guns on him—labeling him an ingrate and a traitor “in the footsteps of Benedict Arnold!”
14
Reality was taking hold. With the capital braced for an attack, President Lincoln called for another 43,000 troops in May.
15
The rhetoric grew warmer with the weather. Former Army comrades who had admired Lee now turned against him. None was more
outspoken than Montgomery C. Meigs, a fellow West Point graduate who had served amicably under Lee in the engineer corps but
who now considered him a traitor who deserved hanging. “No man who ever took the oath to support the Constitution as an officer
of our Army or Navy … should escape without the loss of all his goods & civil rights & expatriation,” Meigs wrote that
spring. Singling out Lee, Joseph Johnston, and Confederate president Jefferson Davis, Meigs urged that they “should be put
formally out of the way if possible by sentence of death & executed if caught.”
16
Meigs and Lee never met on the battlefield, but Meigs proved to be one of Lee’s most implacable foes in the months and years
ahead. He stepped into the quartermaster’s post on May 15, after the incumbent, General Johnston, went south with Lee. Meigs,
a demon for hard work and efficiency, quickly began to mobilize for a conflict he viewed as a life-and-death struggle for
the nation’s soul. Born in Georgia but raised in Philadelphia, Meigs had a strong sense of duty, a flair for the dramatic,
and a well-earned reputation for honesty in an arm of the service plagued by corruption and mismanagement. Tall and straight-backed,
he projected an intimidating, no-nonsense image, a man with a firmly set jaw, hooded eyes, and the bulging forehead his contemporaries
took as a sure sign of braininess. His fearsome appearance sometimes frightened his own wife. “He looks so dreadfully stern
when he talks of the rebellion that I do not like to look at him,” Louisa Meigs confided to a relative.
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His own mother conceded that, when young, Meigs had been “high tempered, unyielding, tyrannical … and very persevering
in pursuit of anything he wants.”
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Those traits would serve him well in his new job.
Toward the end of May, even Mary Custis Lee had to concede that the gathering storm could not be avoided. She supervised servants
while they took down the curtains, rolled up the carpets, and packed up the wine cellar. She bequeathed care of the family
cat, a big yellow male named Tom Tita, to George Clarke, a slave who appreciated Tom’s mousing skills. Her motivation in leaving
Arlington, she told a daughter, was to spare her husband further apprehension. “I would have greatly preferred remaining at
home & having my children around me,” she wrote, “but as it would greatly increase your Father’s anxiety I shall go.”
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Then she made an eerily accurate prediction: “I fear that this will be the scene of conflict & my beautiful home endeared
by a thousand associations may become a field of carnage.”
20
She took a final turn in the garden, entrusted the keys to Selina Gray, a much-respected slave who served as Arlington’s housekeeper,
and followed her husband’s course down the long, winding driveway. Like others on both sides of the conflict, Mrs. Lee believed
that the storm would pass quickly and that she could return to Arlington in a few weeks. In reality, it would take twelve
years.
21
One month to the day after Lee took command in Richmond, the voters of Virginia were presented with a referendum for secession.
To nobody’s surprise, they ratified the ordinance by an overwhelming margin—more than five to one.
22
Within hours of that mandate, on May 23, 1861, columns of Union forces streamed through Washington and made for the Potomac River. They gathered at major bridge crossings and boat landings as night descended. Then at precisely
two a.m. on May 24, some 14,000 troops began crossing the river into Virginia.
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They advanced in steamers, on foot, and on horseback, and in swarms so thick that the slave James Parks, watching from Arlington,
thought they looked “like bees a-coming.”
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Col. Daniel Butterfield of New York, who would soon father a bugle tune known as Taps, rode at the head of his 12th New York
Infantry Regiment, the first column across the Long Bridge.
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The moon lit their way, rippling the Potomac in opalescent streaks, flashing on new bayonets, shining on the silently marching
boys from Michigan and New Jersey who followed the New Yorkers across. Col. Elmer E. Ellsworth, commanding the 1st New York
Zouaves, piled onto a steamboat with his men and sailed toward Alexandria. This dandified regiment of firemen-soldiers was
hard to miss, decked out in their red pantaloons, tasseled caps, and white spats and brewing for a brawl. Up on the heights
of Arlington, Lee’s mansion brooded over this opening movement of the war, cast in cold silver light.
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It took most of the night for the soldiers to complete their crossing, whereupon they spread along the roads, established
cavalry pickets at the bridges, secured major railroad junctions, and began digging entrenchments.
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A Union wave spilled into Alexandria to establish control over the port. Arlington changed hands without a whimper. The Union
soldiers who took the heights had instructions from General Scott to leave the Lee family alone if any were still in residence.
None was. Maj. Gen. Charles W. Sandford, commanding the combined New York militia, found the heights undefended and the family
vanished. A score of slaves remained, having nowhere else to go and bewildered about their sudden change of status, which
placed them somewhere between their promised freedom and their residual duty to old masters. To guarantee the mansion’s security,
Sandford moved into Arlington House and established his headquarters there.
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Despite the best efforts of General Sandford, nobody could shield Arlington from the vicissitudes of war, which began to transform
the plantation from its first day of occupation. Thousands of men in blue were already settling into the rhythms of camp life
when the sun rose over Arlington on May 25. Just behind the big house, a tidy village of tents sprouted; soldiers stoked breakfast
fires; messengers scuttled across the portico of the mansion with papers from the War Office. Junior officers lounged on the
mansion’s front steps, smoking, gossiping, and drinking in the incomparable sight of a springtime capital in full bloom.
29
By early June, the Confederate capital was relocated to Richmond from Montgomery, Alabama, when Virginia formally joined the
Confederacy. This required Lee to transfer his command to the new government. He became a brigadier general and chief military
advisor to Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president.
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Meanwhile, the Arlington plantation was being made over into a citadel, with new roads carved into the hillsides and breastworks
burrowed into the heights. The air thumped to the sound of axes as some of Arlington’s massive oaks were tumbled, clearing
a field of fire for artillery.
31
“All that the best military skill could suggest to strengthen the position has been done,” a newspaper reported after several
days of Union occupation, “and the whole line of defenses on Arlington Heights may be said to be completed and capable of
being held against any attacking force.”
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The attack never materialized, unless one counts the fusillade of reproach that Mary Custis Lee poured down upon those now
occupying her property.
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“It never occurred to me,” she scolded General Sandford, “that such an outrage as its military occupation to the exclusion
of me & my children could ever have been perpetrated by any one … I am left homeless & not even able to get or send to
Alexa. [Alexandria] where my funds are deposited to obtain means for my support … The whole country is filled with men,
women, & children flying in terror.”
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Unlike her stoic husband, who favored understatement over hyperbole, Mrs. Lee had inherited her father’s flair for the dramatic,
which grew more pronounced under stress. Her pen flew across the pages of her letters, the words slanting harder as she warmed
to her outrage. She underscored key points with a slash of the pen.