Read On Hallowed Ground Online
Authors: Robert M Poole
On Hallowed Ground (43 page)
20
. Mary Custis Lee to Mildred Lee, May 5, 1861, D-E Collection, LOC.
21
. Nelligan, 396.
22
. Douglas Southall Freeman,
R. E. Lee: A Biography
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), I: 508.
23
.
The War of the Rebellion: a compilation of the official sources of the Union and Confederate Armies
(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880), Series I, Vol. 2, 39–41, hereafter O.R.; Margaret Leech,
Reveille in Washington
: 1860–1865 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941), 80.
24
. Grace H. Sharp, “Colored Servant of Adopted Son of George Washington,”
The Christian Science Monitor
, Sept. 24, 1924, in AHA.
25
. Richard H. Schneider,
Taps: Notes from a Nation’s Heart
(New York: William Morrow, 2002), 5–12.
26
. O.R., Series I, Vol. 2, 39–42; “The Seventh In Virginia Friday,” The
New York Times
, May 28, 1861;
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly,
New York, June 1, 1861; Furgurson, 93–94.
27
. Maj. Gen. S. P. Heintzelman to Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott, July 29, 1863, in O.R., Series I, Vol. 2, 39–42.
28
. O.R., Series I, Vol. 2, 39–42; Brig. Gen. Irvin McDowell to Mrs. R. E. Lee, May 30, 1861, O.R. Series 1, Vol. 2, 655.
29
. The
New York Times
, May 27–28, 1861; O.R., Series I, Vol. 2, 39–42; Edward W. Emerson,
Life and Letters of Charles Russell Lowell
( Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1907), 207.
30
. Robert E. Lee to Mary Custis Lee, June 9, 1861,
Wartime Papers,
45; Emory M. Thomas,
Robert E. Lee
(New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997), 198.
31
. O.R., Series I, Vol. 2, 39–42;
Pictorial War Record
, Jan. 28, 1882.
32
.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
, June 15, 1861, AHA.
33
. Nelligan, 407.
34
. Mary Custis Lee to Maj. Gen. Charles W. Sandford, May 30, 1861, VHS.
35
. Robert E. Lee to Mary Custis Lee, May 25, 1861,
Wartime Papers
, 36.
36
. Robert E. Lee to Mary Custis Lee, June 24, 1861,
Wartime Papers,
53.
37
. Robert E. Lee to Mary Custis Lee, June 11, 1861, D-E Collection, LOC.
38
. Thomas, 196.
39
. Mary Custis Lee to Maj. Gen. Charles W. Sandford, May 30, 1861, VHS. Mrs. Lee’s “my boy Billy” is Billy Taylor, one of
two slaves who stayed with her throughout the war. The author can find no record of the slave Mrs. Lee called Marcellina;
perhaps she is referring to Magdalena Parks, one of Lawrence Parks’s nine children. Robert E. Lee took slaves with him too—among
them was a man named Meredith, otherwise unidentified; George Parks, a cook; and Perry Parks, a valet. George and Perry Parks,
brothers of James Parks, continued working for Lee after their emancipation, at which point they were paid for their labors.
40
. Brig. Gen. Irvin McDowell to Mary Custis Lee, May 30, 1861, in O.R. Series I, Vol. 2, 655.
41
. The
New York Daily News,
July 9, 1861, AHA.
42
. The
National Republican,
July 12, 1861, AHA.
43
. War Department, “Arlington House,” interview with Mrs. Emma Syphax and Mrs. Sarah Wilson, Dec. 16, 1929, AHA.
44
. Diary of Maj. Gen. S. P. Heintzelman, May 26, 1861, in Nelligan, 401; Karen Byrne Kinzey, interviewed by author, March
7, 2006.
45
. Sketch by anonymous Union soldier, c. 1863, AHA.
46
. Karen Byrne Kinzey, “The Remarkable Legacy of Selina Gray,” CRM 4, (1998), 22.
47
. Furgurson, 105–6.
48
. Furgurson, 116; Leech, 86.
49
. Brig. Gen. Irvin McDowell to Lt. Col E. D. Townsend, July 21 and July 22, 1861, in O.R. Series I, Vol. 2, 316.
50
. Furgurson, 122–3.
51
. Mrs. Annice Baker, daughter of Selina and Thornton Gray, The
Evening Star
, Washington, D.C., Dec. 11, 1950, in Virginia Room, ACL.
52
. Leech, 102.
53
. Furgurson, 121.
54
. Leech, 107.
55
. William T. Sherman,
William Tecumseh Sherman: Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman
(New York: Library of America, 1990), 199.
56
. Leech, 112–13.
57
. Alan T. Nolan,
The Iron Brigade: A Military History
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 31–32.
58
. Robert E. Lee to Mildred Lee, Nov. 15, 1861,
Recollections,
38.
59
. Robert E. Lee to an unidentified daughter, Dec. 1861, in
Personal Reminiscences, Anecdotes, and Letters of General Robert E. Lee,
ed. J. William Jones (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1875), 385.
60
. Robert E. Lee to Mary Custis Lee, Dec. 25, 1861,
Wartime Papers
, 95–96.
61
. Robert E. Lee to Gen. Samuel Cooper, Jan. 8, 1862,
Wartime Papers
, 101–2.
62
. Robert E. Lee to Mary Custis Lee, Jan. 28, 1862,
Wartime Papers
, 107–8.
63
. Robert E. Lee to Mary Custis Lee, Oct. 7, 1861,
Wartime Papers,
79.
64
. The author has included family names for the Lee slaves when they appear in the record, but some, such as Daniel the coachmen,
are referred to only by their Christian names in official documents. Many of the Lee slaves who lived long enough to be emancipated
had their full names recorded in the deed of manumission, signed by Robert E. Lee, Dec. 29, 1862, and recorded in the Office
of the Court of Hustings, Richmond, Virginia, Jan. 2, 1863. AHA.
65
. Martha Custis William to Mary Custis Lee, June 13, 1861, July 25, 1862, AHA.
66
. Furgurson, 102.
67
. Nolan, 33.
68
. Ibid.
69
. Leech, 141–42.
70
. Adj. Gen. Lorenzo Thomas to Col. J. P. Taylor, Jan. 2, 1862, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
3: “VAST ARMY OF THE WOUNDED”
1
. Letitia Jones to Mary Custis Lee, undated, Mary Custis Lee Papers (1835–1917), Mss 1 L5144a-1334-1336, VHS.
2
. Mary Custis Lee to Mrs. E. A. Stiles, March 8, 1862, AHA.
3
. Edwin M. Stanton to Charles A. Dana, Feb. 2, 1862, in Benjamin P. Thomas and Harold M. Hyman,
Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 146.
4
. Robert E. Lee to Mary Custis Lee, April 4, 1862 in
The Wartime Papers of R .E. Lee
, Clifford Dowdey and Louis H. Manarin, eds., (New York: Bramhall House, 1961), 142.
5
. Emory M. Thomas,
Robert E. Lee
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), 230.
6
. Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E.
Lee: A Biography,
(New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1936), II: 594.
7
. David W. Miller,
Second Only to Grant: Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs
(Ship-pensburg, PA: White Mane Books, 2000), 139.
8
. Shelby Foote,
The Civil War: A Narrative
(New York: Random House, 1958), I:418.
9
. Miller,137.
10
. Maj. W. Roy Mason, C.S.A., “Origins of the Lee Tomatoes,” in Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Buel, eds.,
Battles and Leaders of the Civil War,
(1887–88; reprint: Se-caucus, NJ: Castle, 1982), II: 277; Freeman, II: 252–55.
11
. Thomas and Hyman, 217.
12
. Freeman, II: 254.
13
. Foote, I: 516.
14
. Jari A. Villanueva, “24 Notes That Tap Deep Emotions,”
www .west-point.org/taps/Taps.html;
Richard A. Schneider,
Taps: Notes From a Nation’s Heart
(New York: William Morrow, 2002), 8–15. Accounts differ regarding the artillery exchange that produced the first military
funeral at which Taps was played. Most sources agree that the shots were fired from Battery A of the 2nd Union Artillery;
others credit Battery B, 3rd Artillery.
15
. Brig. Gen. Montgomery Meigs to Charles Meigs, July 8, 1862, MCM Papers, LOC.
16
. Richard Wheeler,
Sword Over Richmond
(New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 344.
17
. Brig. Gen. John W. Ames, U.S.V, “In Front of the Stone Wall at Fredericksburg,”
Battles and Leaders
, III:123–24.
18
. Thomas, 271.
19
. Robert E. Lee to Mildred Lee, Dec. 25, 1862,
Wartime Papers,
381.
20
. Lt. Col. Richard B. Irwin, U.S.V., “The Administration in the Peninsular Campaign,” Battles and Leaders, II:436.
21
. Robert E. Lee to George W. Randolph, July 12, 1862, Wartime Papers, 231.
22
. Ernest B. Furgurson,
Freedom Rising:
Washington
in the Civil War
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 191.
23
. “Requests Relating to Missing Soldiers, 1863–76,” NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
24
. Furgurson, 190–92; Margaret Leech,
Reveille in Washington
:
1860–65
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941), 204–16.
25
. Walt Whitman, Prose and Poetry (New York: Library of America, 1982), 720–21.
26
. Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington: Village and Capital,
1800–1878
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 261; Whitman, 737. “Every family has directly or indirectly some representative
among this vast army of the wounded and sick,” Whitman wrote in The
New York Times
, “Our Wounded and Sick Soldiers,” Dec. 11, 1864.
27
. Eastern Branch is known today as the Anacostia River. The Washington Canal, filled in long ago, now forms the northern
edge of the national mall.
28
. Walt Whitman to his mother, Louisa Van Velsor Whitman, June 7, 1864, in John Burroughs,
Whitman: A Study
( Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1904), X:43.
29
. Leech, 207–8.
30
. As the war progressed, military hospitals improved.
31
. General Orders No. 75, War Department, Sept. 11, 1861, cited in “History and Development of the National Cemetery Administration,”
Department of Veterans Affairs, National Cemetery Administration, Feb. 4, 2006, 1.
32
. Capt. James M. Moore to Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, “Extract from annual report of Capt. J. M. Moore, assistant quartermaster,
U.S. Army, for the year ending June 30, 1865,” in
The War of the Rebellion: a compilation of the official sources of the Union and Confederate Archives
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880), Series III, Vol. 4, 317–22.
33
. Dog tags, more formally known as identification tags, did not come into widespread use until 1913, when the Army published
its first regulations requiring them. All U.S. combat soldiers were wearing aluminum identity disks by 1917; the tags took
on the familiar oblong shape—and the canine associations—by World War II.
34
. Untitled notes in NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
35
. Capt. Richard W. Wooley, “A Short History of Identification Tags,”
Quartermaster Professional Bulletin
, Dec. 1988.
36
. Furgurson, 192–93.
37
. Whitman, 714. “The wounded men often come up broke,” wrote Whitman, who gave patients gifts they could not otherwise afford—apples,
writing paper, candy, tobacco, and sometimes small sums of money, “bright new ten-cent and five-cent bills … about the
best thing I could do to raise their spirits, and show them that somebody cared for them.” Whitman, 749–50.
38
. Leech, 207.
39
. Furgurson, 192–93.
40
. R. B. Bonteene to Capt. J. M. Moore, Jan. 10, 1865, “Requests for Information Relating to Missing Soldiers,” NARA RG 92,
Office of the Quartermaster General.
41
. Leech, 207; Montgomery C. Meigs to Edwin M. Stanton, June 16, 1864, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
42
. The first permanent cemeteries on foreign soil were established in 1850, for burial of U.S. soldiers from the Mexican
War. Brig. Gen. Monro MacCloskey,
Hallowed Ground: Our National Cemeteries
(New York: Richards Rosen Press, 1968), 19–20.
43
. Ibid.
44
. “History and Development of the National Cemetery Administration,” Department of Veterans Affairs, National Cemetery Administration,
Feb. 4, 2006, 1–3.
45
. “Cemeteries—Cypress Hills National Cemetery,” U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, June 30, 2006.
46
. Furgurson, 189.
47
. Furgurson, 189–90; Doris Kearns Goodwin,
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 454–55; Leech, 302–3.
48
. Green, 277.
49
. Felix James, “The Establishment of Freedman’s Village in Arlington, Virginia,”
Negro History Bulletin,
33, 4 (April 1970). Lincoln’s 1863 order did not apply to slaves living in Maryland or other border states for politi cal
reasons; it was feared that such action might drive border states to join the rebellion. In addition, Lincoln’s authority
for the order arose from his claim of extraordinary wartime powers, which applied only to those states at war with the Union.