Read On Hallowed Ground Online
Authors: Robert M Poole
On Hallowed Ground (5 page)
There was plenty for her to lament in that first springtime of war. With her husband away, her children scattered, and her
health eroding, Mary Custis Lee lived a rootless life, moving from one relative’s house to another, trying to stay ahead of
the conflict. She was cut off from the home where she had been raised, where her marriage had taken place, where she had borne
six of her seven children, and where her parents were buried. Robert E. Lee was greatly attached to Arlington, to be sure,
but for Mary Custis Lee the riverside farm was a part of her essence.
Lee tried to understand. “I sympathize deeply in your feelings at leaving your dear home,” he wrote Mary on the first day
of Arlington’s occupation. “I have experienced them myself & they are constantly revived. I fear we have not been grateful
enough for the happiness there within our reach & our heavenly father has found it necessary to deprive us of what He had
given us. I acknowledge my ingratitude, my transgressions & my unworthiness & submit with resignation to what He thinks proper
to inflict upon me.”
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Lee continued to preach in subsequent letters.
“No one can say what is the future,” he wrote a few days later, “nor is it wise to anticipate evil … There is no saying
when you can return to your home or what may be its condition when you do return …
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I am sorry to learn that you are so anxious & uneasy about passing events … Our private distresses we must bear with
resignation like Christians & not aggravate them by repining.”
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But Mary Lee continued to repine. Nobody could stop her.
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She would not accept the loss of Arlington. Meanwhile, life had to go on. By mail, Mrs. Lee tried to keep Arlington’s cycle of planting and harvesting going forward through a farm manager who still lived on the estate. She continued to agonize about
the George Washington artifacts locked away at Arlington. And she felt responsible for the bondsmen who remained there. She acted as if she was still in charge, writing to Union officers to arrange for slaves to continue living on the plantation, where they grew food and flowers for the market, buried their friends, and lived among an extended family network. Some maintained ties across the river in Washington, which required military passes for those who rowed over for conjugal visits. Toward the end of May, Mary Lee appealed to General Sandford to continue these arrangements. “You have a beautiful home & people that you love & can sympathise perhaps even with the wife of a ‘traitor & a rebel,’” she wrote.
I implore you by the courtesy due any woman & which no brave soldier could deny to allow my old coachman by whom I send this
letter to get his clothes, to give some letters to my manager relative to the farm & c, to give my market man a pass that
will enable him to go and return from Washington as usual, where his family reside. My gardener Ephraim also has a wife in Washington and is accustomed to go over there every Saturday & return on Monday. My old cook has also a wife in the neighborhood, to
allow the servants to go on with their usual occupations unmolested by the soldiers & protected by your authority, also to
allow my boy Billy whom I only left at home to complete some work in the garden to come to me with his clothes as I cannot
use my carriage without his aid & to permit my maid Marcellina to send me some small articles that I did not bring away.
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By the time this letter passed through military lines and arrived at Arlington, its intended recipient had been replaced by
Brig. Gen. Irvin McDowell, an Ohio native, a West Pointer, and one of Lee’s many friends still serving the Union. McDowell,
whose sense of propriety matched Lee’s, went to extraordinary lengths to accommodate his new enemy. He acceded to Mrs. Lee’s
requests about the slaves, offered her safe passage to Arlington if she wanted it, posted guards to protect her overseer’s
house, and pledged that her home would remain “as little disturbed as possible.”
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In a further gesture of respect, McDowell had his tent pitched on the lawn at Arlington, where he preferred to sleep rather
than intrude upon the hospitality of absent owners. His office consisted of an unvarnished table and a plain chair set under
the trees, a Spartan arrangement that impressed more than one war correspondent.
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“He declined occupying his friend’s house,” the
Washington National Republican
reported with approval, “and gave strict orders that the most severe penalties should be inflicted upon any person, officer,
or private found guilty of … defacing the grounds.”
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Selina Gray, the formidable Lee slave who held the keys to the mansion, reinforced McDowell’s orders. She patrolled the property
brandishing a ring of keys like a weapon, warning soldiers to keep their hands off the family’s possessions.
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But neither she nor General McDowell could effectively monitor the thousands of men encamped at Arlington that spring. With
no battles yet to fight and time on their hands, they found other diversions—they shot the farm overseer’s pet chickens and
rabbits, threatened slaves, and broke into the mansion’s locked rooms for a look around.
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John Chapman, Company K, 25th Pennsylvania, penciled his name on a beam in the attic, where his scrawl remains visible to
this day. Another warrior slouched in a bedroom with his feet on the furniture, a scene immortalized in a sketch, “The Civil
War—Roughing It at Arlington.”
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Other marauders rifled through boxes for war souvenirs, making off with some of the irreplaceable George Washington relics, including pieces of Mount Vernon china. Upon discovering these treasures were missing, Selina Gray promptly reported
the losses to McDowell, who collected the remaining artifacts and sent them to the Patent Office in Washington for safekeeping, where they remained for the rest of the war.
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Such gentlemanly behavior was not unusual at this stage of the Civil War, which remained civilized in its opening months.
Until the real bloodshed began, new soldiers acted as if they were on holiday, enjoying the camaraderie of life in camp and
the thrill of artillery practice, which rattled the mansion’s windows and echoed down the river. A few jittery Union men took
potshots at an experimental observation balloon as it loomed threateningly above Arlington, much to the dismay of Professor
Thaddeus Sobieski Coulincourt Lowe, who was flying on behalf of the Union.
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Despite such moments of excitement, the early months of the Civil War were calm ones, with room for brother officers to treat
one another with exaggerated courtesy, even across enemy lines. This was about to change.
The heat of summer built in Washington, producing the menacing black clouds and rumbling storms characteristic of the season. Horace Greeley, the prominent editor
of the
New York Tribune
, added to the atmospheric disturbances with calls for a Union attack on the Confederate capital, where the insurgent Congress
was convening in July. “Forward to Richmond!” his newspaper thundered. “Forward to Richmond!” boomed other papers and politicians,
taking up the call for a quick end to the rebellion. “Forward to Richmond!” cried the soldiers in blue who shouldered their
muskets and tramped down the drive from Arlington, General McDowell leading the way. With flags rippling and brass bands glinting
in the sun, they headed south for Manassas, gateway to the Confederate capital.
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James Parks watched them go. Before the month ended, he heard the shudder of big guns announcing the first major engagement
of the Civil War on July 21, 1861. That is when some 32,000 Federals under McDowell ran headlong into 32,000 Confederates
under Gen. Pierre G. T. Beauregard just outside the village of Manassas. McDowell’s troops got the upper hand that morning.
“We drove them for several hours,” McDowell reported, “and finally routed them” across a creek known as Bull Run. But the
battle turned later that day, when Generals Joseph Johnston and Thomas J. Jackson pounded into the fray with 10,000 reinforcements.
Jackson, holding one end of the Confederate line, earned his nickname, “Stonewall,” that Sunday. The Rebel counterattack shattered
Union resolve. In the confusion of the afternoon fight, inexperienced Federals fired into their own lines, miscarried orders,
and finally fell apart. The bluecoats raced for home, leaving a trail of haversacks, cartridge cases, and dashed expectations
in their wake, and there was nothing General McDowell could do to stop them.
“The larger part of the men are a confused mob, entirely demoralized,” he reported from Fairfax Courthouse that afternoon.
“Many of the volunteers did not wait for authority to proceed to the Potomac, but left on their own decision,” he wrote the
next day, as the extent of the rout became depressingly evident.
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Although the casualties from Manassas were shocking for the time—with 418 Union killed, 1,011 wounded, 1,216 missing; 312
Confederates dead, 1,582 wounded, 12 missing—they were infinitesimal compared to the slaughter to come.
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Back at Arlington, Selina Gray had heard the thud of artillery tolling the hours of July 21 and wondered who was winning.
Like others in the capital, she worried that the fighting might surge north and roll over her in a mighty wave. She remained
awake all night, listening for the rumble of guns and watching for telltale flashes of light on the horizon. She was dressed
to flee at a moment’s notice, grateful that there was a full moon to illuminate her exodus, if it came to that.
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The morning brought not the sight of Rebel regiments overrunning the capital but the sorry spectacle of the Union’s humiliation.
In the drizzle of that Monday, a panic-stricken Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside galloped up to Willard’s Hotel in Washington, handed his horse to a groom, and went inside. Someone noticed that the general had lost his hat.
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Embarrassed and exhausted soldiers straggled alone or in ragged groups back to their camp at Arlington. Covered in soot and
soaked from the rain, these scarecrows flopped down on the wet grass and promptly fell asleep, just as their comrades were
doing on the sidewalks and lawns of Washington that day, the next, and the next.
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General McDowell passed among his bewildered men, and returned to his tent on the Arlington hillside. There he began the dreary
business of writing the reports of his inglorious campaign. Over the scratching of his pen, he might have heard the unmistakable
sizzle of a career about to go up in flames—his own. The same politicians and editors who had clamored for a quick strike
at Virginia now blamed McDowell for the debacle; this, despite the Ohioan’s insistence beforehand that his raw recruits were
unprepared for such an offensive. Now he was labeled incompetent, and it was whispered that he had been drunk throughout the
melee at Bull Run.
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“It was one of the best planned battles of the Civil War,” Gen. William T. Sherman concluded later, “but one of the worst
fought.”
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McDowell was made subservient to Gen. George B. McClellan, the bantam Napoleon who replaced him as commander of Union forces
in Virginia—and who would soon absorb Winfield Scott’s duties as general in chief as well. Although McDowell was no longer
in charge of Union operations in Virginia, he kept his tent at Arlington and continued working there. His influence was waning
as 1861 drew to a close. With McDowell and Scott in eclipse, the old plantation was losing two friends who had tried to make
the terrible business of war a bit less brutal.
In his own way, so did George McClellan. He insisted on protecting Confederate property, much to the consternation of Army
colleagues including Gen. Montgomery Meigs, Gen. William T. Sherman, and other realists who favored total war. McClellan and
others wanted to avoid offending loyalists in the South, an attitude that also made him reluctant to take a stance against
slavery. In his view, the war was being fought not to emancipate slaves but to preserve the Union, which was also then President
Lincoln’s view.
When McClellan took command of Union forces at Arlington, he seldom worked there, preferring to keep house across the river
in Washington. He lobbied the War Department for more troops and supplies, restyled his command as the Army of the Potomac, and ringed
Washington with a new system of forty-eight forts, batteries, and earthen redoubts.
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He drilled his troops to perfection, preened at the head of numerous parades, gave frequent champagne-and-oyster luncheons
for influential friends, and made elaborate preparations for an offensive that was much discussed but painfully slow to start. Over the misgivings of President Lincoln and the War Department, McClellan proposed to strike Richmond from the side instead of the front. Rather than approaching through Manassas, he would sweep down the Chesapeake Bay and westward up the riverine approaches to the Confederate capital. This crab-wise advance took the war away from the capital’s doorstep, coincidentally relieving pressure on Arlington.
Nonetheless, the grounds around the mansion were soon flattened by the passage of a thousand boots, and more of the magnificent
oak forest disappeared with the first chill of autumn 1861, as soldiers from Indiana and Wisconsin waded into the woods, brandished
their axes, and built winter quarters on the heights, where a raw collection of log stables, cooking houses, and cabins outfitted
with mud chimneys appeared on the skyline. These western soldiers of the Iron Brigade, whose ranks included farmers from Scandinavia,
Germany, and Ireland, were unimpressed by the anemic eastern landscape, which one of them described as “cussed poor country
… I would not live here if i [sic] had the best farm in the country.”
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