On Hallowed Ground (45 page)

53
. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
, July 17, 1865.

54
. Meigs placed the number of officers in the garden at forty-five—not the sixty reported by the
Philadelphia Press
. Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs to Edwin M. Stanton, June 10, 1867, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.

55
. The
Philadelphia Press
, Dec. 28, 1865 in NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.

58
. Mark C. Mollan, “Honoring Our War Dead: The Evolution of the Government Policy on Headstones for Fallen Soldiers and Sailors,”
Prologue,
35, 1 (Spring 2003). As soon as the war ended, Meigs issued an order on July 3, 1865, for Army and Navy officers to provide
him a list of all servicemen buried during the war. The directive was largely ignored in the rush of demobilization and shrinking
of troop strength. Meigs reissued it in February 1866.

62
. Drew Gilpin Faust,
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 236.

63
.
Annual Reports of the Quartermaster General for the Year 1870
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1870), 68; Edward Steere, “Genesis of American Graves Registration, 1861–1865,”
Military Affairs,
12, 3 (Autumn 1948): 149–61.

70
. The
National Intelligencer,
in Bigler,
Honored Glory
, 30.

73
. Miller, 63–67, 273–77, 287. Work on the Capitol dome continued in fits and starts through the war until Dec. 3, 1863,
when Freedom was finally hoisted into place, to the accompaniment of cannon salutes from every fort in Washington. Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington:
Village and Capital,
1800–1878 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 268.

75
. David C. Sloane,
T
he Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), cited in
Arlington National Cemetery: Master Plan,
1998, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Baltimore District, 36.

76
. George W. Dodge,
Arlington National Cemetery
(Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia Publishing, 2006), 49; see also James Edward Peters,
Arlington National Cemetery: Shrine to America’s Heroes
(Bethesda, MD: Woodbine House, 2000); Philip Bigler, In Honored Glory.

5: A QUESTION OF OWNERSHIP

1
. Douglas Southall Freeman,
R. E. Lee: A Biography
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936), IV: 256–57.

2
. “Reconstruction Evidence,” The
New York Times
, Mar. 28, 1866, 1; Freeman, IV: 256–57. Lee’s reservations about black suffrage were soon made obsolete by ratification of
the Fifteenth Amendment, which guaranteed African Americans the right to vote. The amendment was ratified March 30, 1870,
a few months before Lee’s death. Virginia was the eighteenth of the twenty nine states to accept it.

3
. “Gen. Lee’s Testimony,”
Chicago Tribune
, Mar. 30, 1866, 2.

5
. Although Lee avoided a return visit to Arlington, this did not keep one creative
New York Tribune
reporter from imagining that the general had been spotted there in the dusk, “a lonely figure standing at the foot of a tree
… It was Robert E. Lee standing in the street that passes through the middle of his old estate.” Reprinted in
The National Intelligencer
, Feb. 22, 1866.

7
. Lee,
Recollections,
291–92. Gen. Lee does not refer specifically to Arlington in his account of the July 1870 meeting with Francis L. Smith,
but a son reports that this was the object of their conference and the reason for Gen. Lee’s pessimistic assessment in his
letter of July 15, 1870. About the same time, Gen. Lee makes oblique reference to his Arlington deliberations in a letter
to his eldest son, G. W. C. Lee. “I will tell you what I have been able to accomplish in reference to … Arlington when
we meet,” he wrote on July 22, 1870. “It is not much but would take me too long to write.” Robert E. Lee to G. W. C. Lee,
Robert E. Lee Papers, Duke University.

9
. When Union and Confederate forces clashed at the Battle of First Manassas, John Logan was one of the few congressmen who
grabbed a musket and rushed to support Federal troops. He subsequently raised a volunteer regiment from Illinois, was twice
wounded in the war, and served with distinction until removed from command near the end of hostilities. Allen Johnson and
Dumas Malone, eds.,
Dictionary of American Biography
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), 11: 363–64.

10
. John A. Logan, commander in chief, Grand Army of the Republic, General Orders No. 11, May 5, 1868, in “Memorial Ceremonies
at the National Cemetery, Arlington Virginia,” May 30, 1868, ( Washington, D.C.: McGill & Witherow, 1868), 5–6.

15
. Ibid. While General John Logan’s May 5, 1868, designation of Decoration Day is generally considered to be the first national
memorial event, David W. Bright, in
Race and Reunion
(Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2001), 65–70, suggests that Decoration Day had its origins in Charleston, SC. There, on
May 1, 1865, some 10,000 citizens, most of them former slaves, marched through the war-battered city and spread flowers on
the graves of 257 Union soldiers buried at the site of a Confederate prison camp. Like other Rebel camps, this one was infamous
for inhumane conditions—most Union deaths there were caused by exposure, neglect, or disease.

16
. Michelle A. Krowl,“In the Spirit of Fraternity: The United States Government and the Burial of Confederate Dead at Arlington
National Cemetery, 1864–1914,”
The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
111, 2 (2003): 151–186; see also Frederick Kaufman to E. D. Townsend, May 3, 1872, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster
General; Frederick Kaufman, “Report to Quartermaster General,” January 1884, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General;
“Dead of the Old North State,” The Washington
Post
, Oct. 4, 1883; “The North Carolina Dead,” The
Washington Post,
Oct. 15, 1883, 1; “Laid in Their Native Earth,” The
Washington Post,
Oct. 18, 1883, 2; “The Arlington Dead,” Historic Oakwood Cemetery, Raleigh,
http://www.historicoakwoodcemetery.com/stories_arlington.asp.

17
. Edward Steere, “Shrines of the Honored Dead: A Study of the National Cemetery System,”
Quartermaster Review
, 1953–1954, 19; Monro MacCloskey,
Hallowed Ground: Our National Cemeteries
(New York: Richard Rosen Press, Inc. 1968), 39–41; Erna Risch,
Quartermaster Support of the Army: 1775–1939
(Washington D.C.: Center of Military History, 1989), 466–67.

24
.
Congressional Globe,
Dec. 12, 1870, 41st Congress, 3rd Session, 53. One can imagine that, had he been alive, Robert E. Lee might have deflected
his wife’s foray into the highly charged political atmosphere of the day.

25
.
Congressional Globe
, Dec. 13, 1870, 41st Congress, 3rd Session, 73–74.

28
.
Congressional Globe,
Dec. 13, 1870, 41st Congress, 3rd Session, 79.

32
. Jennifer Hanna,
Arlington House: The Robert E. Lee Memorial, Cultural Landscape Report
(Washington D.C.: U.S. National Park Service, 2001), 91–92.

34
. “History of Government Furnished Headstones and Markers,” U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, April 12, 2008,
http://www.cem.gov/cem/hist/hmhist.asp;
Mark C. Mollan, “Honoring Our War Dead: The Evolution of the Government Policy on Headstones for Fallen Soldiers and Sailors,”
Prologue,
35, 1 (Spring 2003); Steere, 16–17; MacCloskey, 37–39; Risch, 467.

39
. Roberta Schildt, “Freedman’s Village: Arlington, Virginia, 1863–1900,”
Northern Virginia Heritage,
Feb. 1985, 10.

40
. Enoch A. Chase, The
Sunday Star
(Washington, D.C.), Nov. 4, 1928.