Read On Hallowed Ground Online
Authors: Robert M Poole
On Hallowed Ground (46 page)
41
. “Annual Report of the Secretary of War,” 1866, Virginia Room, ACL
42
. William Syphax to President Andrew Johnson, NARA, General Records of the Department of Justice, Papers of the Attorney
General, in AHA.
43
. “Washington Custis Head of 16 Syphax Families,”
Washington Afro-American,
April 22, 1939, Virginia Room, ACL.
44
.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
, Nov. 18, 1865, AHA.
45
. Hariette C. Gillem Robinet, “Interview with Martha Gray Gillem,” 1963, AHA.
46
. Elizabeth Brown Pryor,
Reading the Man
(New York: Viking, 2007), 448; Thomas 383.
47
. Ibid.
48
. Ibid.
49
. One account of Mrs. Lee’s last visit to Arlington ends with Selina Gray bringing her a drink of water from the Arlington
spring—most probably an apocryphal story, in the view of Karen Byrne Kinzey, former historian for the Robert E. Lee Memorial,
National Park Service. “It makes a nice story, but there is no evidence for it,” says Mrs. Kinzey.
50
. “Mrs. Mary Lee Revisits Her Old Home,”
Alexandria Sentinel,
reprinted June 8, 1874, in The
New York Times
, AHA.
51
. Mary Custis Lee, June 5, 1873, to an unknown correspondent, in Nelligan, 429.
52
. Freeman, I:178.
53
. Bernice-Marie Yates,
The Perfect Gentleman: The Life and Letters of George
Washington
Custis Lee
, (Longwood, FL: Xulon Press, 2003) I: 245.
54
. Washington College was renamed after Lee’s death.
55
. While Custis was at West Point, several months before his father was appointed superintendent, a case of liquor was found
in his room—a violation of the rules, which might have resulted in his expulsion. Custis swore that the alcohol had been brought
to his quarters without his knowledge; he was given eight demerits and survived the incident. Emory M. Thomas,
Robert E. Lee: A Biography
(New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995) 150–52. Before and after this occasion, Custis’s father lectured him on the importance
of temperance. About the same time, Custis revealed to his father that he suffered from dark moods and “melancholy.” The older
man encouraged his son to “shake off those gloomy feelings. Drive them away. Fix your mind & pleasure upon what is before
you … All is bright if you will think it so.” Robert E. Lee to G. W. C. Lee, March 28, 1852, Robert Edward Lee Papers,
VHS.
56
. “Memorial of G.W. Custis Lee, of Virginia,” April 6, 1874, Miscellaneous Senate Document No. 96, 43rd Congress, 1st Session.
57
. Ibid.
58
. Ibid.
59
. Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs to Secretary of War, Jan. 8, 1875, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
60
. Brig. Gen Montgomery C. Meigs to Secretary of War, June 10, 1876, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
61
. G. W. C. Lee to Capt. J. J. White May 4, 1876, in Yates, II:120.
62
. William W. Belknap to Sen. John J. Patterson, May 25, 1874, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
63
. Maj. Oscar A. Mack to Mrs. C. P. Culver, Jan. 18, 1875, reprinted in The
New York Times
, Jan. 29, 1875.
64
. Johnson and Malone, eds.,
Dictionary of American Biography,
8:446–51.
65
. Charles R. Williams,
Diary and Letters of Rutherford B. Hayes,
III:24, in AHA.
66
. Enoch A. Chase, “The Arlington Case,”
Virginia Law Review,
XV, 3 ( January 1929): 207–33. While President Rutherford Hayes sympathized with the Lees, he had the good sense to let the
Arlington case proceed through the judicial system without White House interference. Robert Hughes, a native Virginian and
originally a Buchanan Democrat favoring states’ rights, detested Confederate president Jefferson Davis and, as a prominent
newspaper editor in Richmond, suggested that Virginia consider negotiating a separate peace. After the war, he became editor
of the
Republic
, the first postwar Republican newspaper in Virginia, attended the Democratic National Convention of 1868, and ran as a Republican
for Congress and governor—unsuccessfully—before President Grant appointed him as a federal judge in 1874.
67
. Chase, 215.
68
. Ibid., 217.
69
. Ibid, 219–20.
70
.
United States v. Lee,
106 U.S. 196 (1882).
71
. Chase, 218–19.
72
. Ibid., 200.
73
. Ibid., 219.
74
. Prior to the sale of Arlington in 1883, the Secretary of War asked Gen. William T. Sherman, then in charge of the U.S.
Army, about the military value of the estate. Sherman replied with characteristic bluntness: “Respectfully submitted to the
Hon. Sec. of War with expression of my judgment that the Arlington Estate is not of the least military value to the U.S.”
William T. Sherman to Robert Todd Lincoln, Jan.12, 1883, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
75
. One begins to suspect a curse on the Lee family. With the ownership question resolved after twenty years, Custis Lee transferred
Arlington’s title to the federal government in 1883, paying a required $150 tax to Alexandria County—a sum promptly embezzled
by the clerk of the Alexandria County Court and not discovered until three years later. The clerk was sent to jail. Memorandum,
George A. Mushbach, attorney for Alexandria Board of Supervisors, to Lt. Col. R. N. Batchelder, April 26, 1883, NARA RG 92,
Office of the Quartermaster General.
76
. Chase, 232–33.
77
. The estimates of the population of Freedman’s Village vary considerably, from a high of 1,500 to some 100 in the initial
colony. The only official figures come from the quartermaster’s census in 1888, when 173 families were counted in a population
of 763.
78
. G. A. Wheeler to Gen. C. H. Howard, undated, but likely c. 1867, in Roberta Schildt, “Freedman’s Village: Arlington, Virginia,
1863–1900,”
Arlington Historical Magazine
VII, 4 (1984): 51.
79
. J. S. Roberts to Lt. Col. William Bube, Jr., Jan. 8, 1867, in Schildt, 49.
80
. Lt. Col. A. C. Card, deputy quartermaster, report to Quartermaster General, March 27, 1888, AHA.
81
. The
Washington Post,
Dec. 7, 1887.
82
. John B. Ellis,
Sights and Secrets of the National Capital
(New York: United States Publishing Company, 1869), 499–500.
83
. Edgar S. Horner, principal clerk, Quartermaster General’s office, to Col. Charles G. Mortimer, superintendent of Arlington
National Cemetery, undated but at least 1895, AHA. Mortimer described payments to laborers Cornelius Syphax, who worked at
the cemetery from 1870 through 1895, and to his brother Ennis Syphax, who worked from 1872 through 1891. Cornelius received
as little as $1 per day and as much as $1.75; Ennis was paid $1 per day.
84
. In July 1872, Secretary of War William W. Belknap declared all of Arlington, including the cemetery, Freedman’s Village,
and Fort Whipple (later Fort Myer) a national military reserve. This might have been an attempt to forestall Mrs. Lee’s recovery
of Arlington—then controversial and much in the news. Although Belknap’s action failed to discourage the Lee family, it provided
a pretext for evicting freedmen from the military reservation fifteen years later.
85
. William Syphax to Sen. Algernon S. Paddock, Aug. 15, 1888, AHA.
86
. Anonymous letter to the Hon. John A. Rollam, May 10, 1869, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
87
. Ibid.
88
. Brig. Gen. J. C. McFerran, report to Quartermaster General, May 11, 1869, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
89
. J. A. Commerford to Lt. Col. George B. Dandy, deputy quartermaster, Nov. 12, 1887, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster
General.
90
. Brig. Gen. Samuel B. Holabird to William C. Endicott, Nov. 17, 1887, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
91
. Ibid.; see also
Alexandria Gazette
, Dec. 6, 1887; The New
York Herald
, Dec. 8, 1887; The Washington
Post,
Dec. 7, 1887.
92
. The Washington
Post,
“The Eviction of the Squatters From Freedman’s Village,” Dec. 7, 1887.
93
. The
New York Herald,
Dec. 8, 1887.
94
.
Alexandria Gazette,
Dec. 6, 1887.
95
. John B. Syphax, born a free man, was the son of Maria and Charles Syphax of Arlington. According to family tradition,
Maria was the daughter of George Washington Parke Custis.
96
. John B. Syphax to William C. Endicott, Jan. 18, 1888, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
97
. Brig. Gen. Samuel B. Holabird to Lt. Col. A. C. Card, Dec. 23, 1887, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
98
. Lt. Col. A. C. Card to Brig Gen. Samuel B. Holabird, March 27, 1888, with “Valuation of Property in Freedman’s Village,
1888,” NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General. The “contraband tax” was long an annoyance for freedmen at Arlington,
where each was assigned a job, paid $10 per month, and assessed $5 per month to help former slaves unable to work. The tax
was suspended in 1868 when the Freedmen’s Bureau was dissolved.
99
. Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs to F. T. Hodgdon, Feb. 18, 1881, in Risch, 490.
100
. Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs to William W. Belknap, Aug. 5, 1871, NARA RG 92, Office of the Quartermaster General.
101
. David W. Miller,
Second Only to Grant: Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs
(Shippensburg, PA: White Mane Books, 2000), 272.
102
. Ibid., 272–90.
103
. The
Boston Daily Globe,
Jan. 3, 1892.
104
. “Former Custis Slave to Sleep in Death in Arlington Estate,” The
Evening Star
(Washington, D.C.) Aug. 22, 1929.
105
. The
New York Times
, Jan. 3, 1892; The
Washington Post,
Jan. 4 and 5, 1892; Miller, 261–90; Pryor, 314–15.
106
. Stanley P. Hirshson,
The White Tecumseh: A Biography of William T. Sherman
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1997), 388.
107
. “It took a war to heal the scars of war; attack upon a foreign power to bring unity at home,” wrote Edmund Morris in
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
(New York: Modern Library, 2001), 654.
6: “A SPLENDID LITTLE WAR”
1
. Barbara Tuchman,
The Proud Tower: A Pportrait of the World Before the War, 1890–1914
(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966), 55–56.
2
. Margaret Leech,
In the Days of McKinley
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), 168.
3
. Ibid.,168. Roosevelt, disgusted by McKinley’s dithering, famously declared that the president had “no more backbone than
a chocolate éclair.” Leech, 169.
4
. Morris, 631–33; Leech, 168–69; A. C. M. Azoy,
Charge! The Story of The Battle of San Juan Hill
(New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1961), 24–25.
5
. Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, eds.,
Dictionary of American Biography
, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930) 20: 50–52. Sherman, an admirer of Wheeler’s fighting abilities, is reported to
have said after the Civil War that Wheeler should be given a command in any future conflict. The
New York Times
, April 27, 1898.
6
. Tennant S. McWilliams, “New Southerner Abroad: General Joe Wheeler Views the Pacific and Beyond,”
Pacific Historical Review
47, 1 (Feb.1978): 123–27.
7
. Sam Hanna Acheson,
Joe Bailey, The Last Demo
crat (Manchester, NH: Ayer Publishing, 1970), 91.
8
. Leech, 228–29; Johnson and Malone, eds.,
Dictionary of American Biography
20: 51.
9
. More than a century after the
Maine
’s sinking the cause of the ship’s explosion remains uncertain. An official investigation by the late Adm. Hyman Rickover
reported in 1976 that spontaneous combustion in the vessel’s coal bunker probably set off an adjoining magazine; a later study,
commissioned by
National Geographic
magazine, relied upon before and after computer models in its study of the
Maine
, but the journal’s report, in February 1998, did little to solve the mystery, concluding that it was possible—but not provable—that
the explosion was sparked by an external source. Not enough evidence has appeared since to draw a definitive answer in either
direction.
10
. Leech, 228–40; Morris, 626–44; Joseph Wheeler,
The Santiago Campaign,
1898 ( Boston: Lamson, Wolffe and Company, 1898), 3–4.
11
. Like other distinguished cavalry officers—among them J. E. B. Stuart, Philip Sheridan, and Fitzhugh Lee—Joe Wheeler was
a West Point cadet when Robert E. Lee was superintendent there. Graduating in 1859, Wheeler was brevetted as a second lieutenant,
served the Army for two years, and resigned his commission in 1861 when the Civil War began.
12
. Wheeler, 4.
13
. Leech, 162–93.
14
. The
Indianapolis News,
June 28, 1898.
15
. The
New York Tribune
, “Old Glory’s Leaders,” quoted in The
Atlanta Constitution,
May 7, 1898, with similar stories praising the appointment of Wheeler and Fitz Lee from The
Philadelphia Times,
The
Brooklyn Citizen,
The
Newark Advertiser
, and The
Philadelphia Inquirer;
see also The
New York Times
, April 27, 1898.