Read On Hallowed Ground Online
Authors: Robert M Poole
On Hallowed Ground (6 page)
While Union troops settled in at Arlington that winter, Confederate president Jefferson Davis dispatched Lee to shore up the
coastal defenses of South Carolina, Georgia, and northern Florida. From his outpost in South Carolina, Lee informed his daughter
Mildred that he had grown a white beard. “It is much admired,” he reported in a Christmas letter in 1861. “At least much remarked
on.”
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He folded some violets into a letter to his daughter Annie and regretted that he could not deliver them in person. Lee’s
thoughts turned toward happier times, and he meditated upon the fate of Arlington.
“Your old home, if not destroyed by our enemies, has been so desecrated that I cannot bear to think of it,” he wrote a daughter.
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Once more he counseled Mary Lee to accept the loss of Arlington. “Our old home, if not destroyed, will be difficult ever
to be recognized,” he wrote from Coosawhatchie, South Carolina, on Christmas day.
Even if the enemy had wished to preserve it, it would almost have been impossible. With the number of troops encamped around
it, the change of officers, & c., the want of fuel, shelter, & c., & all the dire necessities of war, it is vain to think of
its being in a habitable condition. I fear too books, furniture, & the relics of Mount Vernon will be gone. It is better to
make up our minds to a general loss. They cannot take away the remembrances of the spot, & the memories of those that to us
rendered it sacred. That will remain to us as long as life will last, & that we can preserve.
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Twice in this period of his exile, Lee broached the idea of buying Stratford Hall, his birthplace and boyhood home on Virginia’s
Northern Neck, to replace the loss of Arlington. But he soon dropped that idea, and after this flurry of holiday letters,
Lee rarely mentioned either home for the remainder of the war. He was resigned, perhaps, to the new reality. Certainly he
had greater troubles to occupy him as 1862 commenced and the nation got down to the real business of fighting.
Gen. George McClellan amassed troops for his Peninsula Campaign against Richmond, while Union forces began to menace the coastal
defenses around Charleston and Savannah. Lee scurried in to defend the coast, recruiting local volunteers, and building up
fortifications at strategic points along the shore. “Our works are not yet finished,” he reported to the Confederate adjutant
from Savannah in January. “Their progress is slow. Guns are required for their armament, & I have not received as many troops
from South Carolina & Georgia as I at first expected.” He pleaded for more troops and guns.
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While this drama unfolded in South Carolina, Lee received news about the disposition of his father-in-law’s estate, unsettled
since George Washington Custis’s death in 1857. A Virginia court had finally examined the estate’s papers and ordered Lee to disburse the unpaid
balance of his daughters’ legacies and to emancipate slaves from the Arlington, Romancock, and White House estates by the
end of 1862. Lee had planned to sell Smith Island on the Atlantic coast to raise money for the legacies, but shortly after
the war broke out, Union forces had seized that strategically important property, just as they had the Arlington Heights.
“No sales of land can now be made,” an exasperated Lee wrote Mary in January 1862. “The enemy is in possession of Smiths Isd.,
& what I am to do with the negroes I do not know.” Their liberation would have to wait.
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Meanwhile, two of those family slaves continued to travel with the Rebel general. They were Perry Parks, a young Arlington
servant who acted as Lee’s launderer and valet, and a cook known only as Meredith—most probably Henry Meredith or one of his
children from the White House estate. In newsy letters to the family, Lee mentioned both men, conveyed their regards, and
reported on their health. And as cold weather approached, he diplomatically informed Mrs. Lee that he had given his servants
the new socks she had knitted for him. “As I found Perry in desperate need, I bestowed a couple of pairs on him, as a present
from you,” he wrote. “The others I have put in my trunk and suppose they will fall to the lot of Meredith … Meredith will
have no one near to supply him but me, & will naturally expect that attention.”
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Back at Arlington, some of the slaves had difficulty adjusting to the presence of so many troops on the old farm, and to the
inevitable onset of age. Arlington’s elderly coachman Daniel had grown feeble and short of breath; the gardener Ephraim suffered
from typhoid fever;
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Selina Gray was reported to be worn out and forlorn.
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Others simply drifted away to take their chances in Washington or lands beyond.
Their masters were gone, to be sure, but the slaves remaining at Arlington lived in a peculiar limbo, like the thousands of
largely illiterate field hands displaced by fighting or escaped from their masters in the opening stages of war. Slaves from
Confederate states who arrived behind Union lines were termed “contrabands,” a grotesque legal convention that treated runaway
slaves like horses, pigs, or other enemy property.
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Initially unprepared to care for these refugees, some Union forces mistreated them; others tried to ignore them; still others
developed a rough affection for them. When a contraband died at Arlington, a Wisconsin soldier mourned his death, noting,
in the casually racist language of his day, that the decedent had been “treated … more as a companion than a nigger” by
the regiment.
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In more elegant terms, another member of the Iron Brigade expressed genuine admiration for the refugees: “The contrabands
are the only people we can depend upon,” he wrote. “They tell us where the Secesh are—never lie to us—wish us God speed—and
are of great use to us.”
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The Union eventually recruited former slaves in their war effort: the blacks dug entrenchments, buried horses, made bricks,
drove wagons, grew food—and generally got paid for it. As both armies crisscrossed Northern Virginia and more slaves streamed
north across the Long Bridge, Union forces often assumed responsibility for their well-being—in part, to keep them from helping
the enemy, in part for humanitarian reasons. More than a few contrabands were surprised, upon finally reaching Washington, to be ushered into the Capitol Prison, not because they were accused of any crime, but because that was one of the few places
Union forces could offer them food, shelter, and protection in a crowded city seething with Confederate sympathizers and racial
tension.
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Although a few of Arlington’s house servants had been given the rudiments of education, most of the estate’s slaves were illiterate,
unskilled, and poor when they got their first glimpse of the Promised Land. Until they could support themselves as free men
and women, the slaves of Arlington became wards of the Union Army, under orders issued in 1862. In one of his last acts as
secretary of war, Simon Cameron decreed that Union officers had the obligation to care for the slaves, an act of charity that
would profoundly shape the future of Arlington.
“The Secretary of War directs that such of the old and infirm negroes of the Arlington estate, Va., as may be unable to provide
for themselves, be furnished such articles of subsistence as the officer commanding at Arlington, for the time being, may
approve & order,” Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas wrote on Cameron’s behalf. “The estate, which is now in the possession of
the Government, was, it is understood, charged by its former owner—the late Mr. Custis—with the care of these old people who
have no other means.”
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With a stroke of his pen, Simon Cameron had solved the problem that had been vexing Lee in faraway South Carolina—
What I am to do with the negroes I do not know
. More significantly, the document asserted the Union’s first claim on Arlington, a sense of ownership that would deepen
as the war ran its long, sanguinary course.
THROUGH THE FIRST YEAR of the civil war, mary custis lee lived a precarious existence, nursing her arthritic condition and
fretting over the famous husband she had not seen since April 1861. Two of her sons had also joined the Confederate Army,
with a third soon to follow. They would be on the firing line when Federal troops renewed their campaign for Richmond in the
spring.
Uncertain about where the season’s fighting would erupt, Mrs. Lee finally settled on her son Rooney’s White House plantation
as 1861 drew to a close. The farm, a four thousand–acre spread nestled among the pines on Virginia’s languorous Pamunkey River,
had been an important family holding since Martha Washington’s day. Located some twenty miles northeast of Richmond, the property seemed to offer a reasonable haven from the war. Placed
well away from Manassas, it was situated far north of the James River, the most likely aquatic approach to the Confederate
capital. Surrounded by two daughters, a daughter-in-law, her only grandson, relays of visiting relatives, a few servants,
and a thousand family associations, Mrs. Lee felt safe on the plantation, which provided a transitory sense of well-being.
She rode out the winter, writing letters, knitting socks, and collecting the news that drifted down from the Potomac. Most
of it was disheartening.
Letitia Corbin Jones, one of Mrs. Lee’s many cousins, had managed a recent reconnaissance at Arlington, probably gaining access
through her brother Roger, a Union officer. She reported to Mary Lee in an undated letter, which appears to be from early
in the war.“I write dear Cousin feeling that you would like to know what I could tell you about Arlington,” Miss Jones wrote.
She continued:
The Thefts & depredations there have been going on from the beginning … You may be sure that what ever we can do for your
interest, we will do, but I fear it will not be much … Everything had been ransacked—I suppose there was not a paper or
a letter, that had not been pried into—the Loft was in dire confusion—at one time the Soldiers used to sleep up there . .
. Selina [Gray, house keeper] searched in vain for your handsome parlor curtains—but they were gone—and now, no doubt they
are adorning some of the Yankee’s houses … The Union people say that they are in fine Spirits & that the South is nearly
subjugated & that the war will soon be ended.
She closed by reporting that federal authorities planned to use Mrs. Lee’s house as a hospital—a rumor never realized.
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“I do not allow myself to think of my dear old home,” Mrs. Lee wrote a friend that spring. “Would that it had been razed to
the ground or submerged in the Potomac river than [to] have fallen into such hands … Poor Virginia is pressed on every
side.”
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Indeed it was. The federal army had grown from 16,000 to 670,000 in the past year. Some 60,000 Union troops had interposed
themselves between Manassas and Washington, while others were scoring wins on the western front. Better equipped and numerically superior to the Confederates, the Union
had won recent victories in Kentucky under an obscure general named Ulysses S. Grant. About the same time, Rebels had been
forced to abandon western Tennessee, and they had lost Fort Columbus, their most advanced position on the Mississippi River.
In the East, Gen. George McClellan had been methodically amassing troops and supplies for his springtime advance on Richmond.
Then, according to Abraham Lincoln’s new secretary of war, the real fighting could commence.
“We have had no war,” Edwin M. Stanton told a sympathetic editor as 1862 began. “We have not even been playing war.”
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That would change under Stanton, a shrewd, robust, snub-nosed, magnificently bearded Ohio native who spoke of sweeping aside
the rebellion with “fire & sword.” Stanton’s Old Testament combativeness, coupled with his superhuman work ethic, endeared
him to President Lincoln.
Stanton and Lincoln prodded the cautious Gen. George McClellan to move his troops down the Potomac River and out into the
Chesapeake Bay that April. The time had arrived for the Young Napoleon’s much-anticipated Peninsula Campaign. With a force
that grew to 100,000, McClellan slogged his way toward Richmond, rolling back a force of 800,000 Confederates as he went.
Rebels abandoned Yorktown on May 4, Williamsburg on May 5, and Norfolk on May 9. At the other end of the peninsula, Robert
E. Lee, monitoring developments from his office in Richmond, realized that the Union tide was aimed straight for Mrs. Lee’s
refuge on the Pamunkey River, where that tributary swirled into the York River.
“I do not pretend to know what they will attempt or what they can accomplish,” Lee wrote his wife that spring. “One of the
probable routes … is up the Pamunkey. Should they select that, their whole army & c. will land at the White House. To
be enveloped in it would be extremely annoying & embarrassing, and I believe hundreds would delight in persecuting you all
for my … sake … I think it better, therefore, that you should all get out of the way.”
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It was time for Mrs. Lee to move again. On her way out of her son’s house, she posted a note on the door:
Northern soldiers who profess to reverence Washington, forbear to desecrate the home of his first married life, the property of his wife, now owned by her descendants.
A Grand-daughter of Mrs. Washington
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With her daughters Annie and Mildred in tow, Mrs. Lee made her retreat, this time to a friend’s house in Hanover County, a
few miles to the northwest of the Pamunkey River estate. It was not long before McClellan’s army took over the White House
plantation, transforming it into a bustling depot. The old farm became, in the words of a correspondent traveling with the
army, “a fair rival of New York, Philadelphia, or Boston in the extent of its coastwise commerce. Steam and sail vessels continually arriving and departing, extensive wharves, with
cargoes constantly unloading, … and all the hubbub and confusion of a large port.”
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The estate’s pine forests were cut for lumber, which workers hammered into coffins—much in demand, not because of fighting
but because typhoid fever, yellow fever, and other diseases had joined McClellan’s march up the peninsula.
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Amid his preparations, McClellan still found time for chivalry. He ordered his troops to respect Rooney Lee’s White House
property—and he meant it. As his predecessor Irvin McDowell had done at Arlington, McClellan established his headquarters
outside and posted guards around the house to discourage scavengers.
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When one of his officers shot a Lee family pig, McClellan confined the soldier to his tent until he wrote a letter of apology.
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And when advancing Federals overtook Mrs. Lee again, surrounding her new sanctuary in Hanover County, McClellan had her brought
to his headquarters, offered his condolences, issued traveling papers, and dispatched her through his lines for Richmond.
Her carriage traveled under a flag of truce.
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The fraternity of officers who had studied at the U.S. Military Academy and fought the Mexican War together was still capable
of such gestures. But a growing number of hard-liners in the Union war effort—among them Montgomery Meigs, William T. Sherman,
and Edwin M. Stanton—had little use for such gallantry. In Secretary Stanton’s view, total war would bring the crisis to a
speedy conclusion.
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His brand of realism would trump McClellan’s gentlemanly code as the war dragged on and the bloody reality of the conflict
became apparent.
Meanwhile, Mary Custis Lee made it safely through the blue ranks and into Confederate territory, where her husband was waiting
to greet her. He was shocked by her transformation. In the fifteen months since he had seen her, she had become, at age fifty-three,
an old lady. She would soon be confined to a wheelchair.
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Lee settled her in Richmond, where she remained through most of the war, and went out to face Gen. George McClellan, whose
troops were pressing close to the Confederate capital—so close, in fact, that by the end of May, Union soldiers could hear
the city’s church bells pealing in the dusk.
The chimes were soon interrupted by the bark of muskets and the wallop of artillery, which ushered in a furious season of
fighting for control of Richmond. The first of these battles, known as Seven Pines or Fair Oaks, opened on May 31, 1862, producing
11,000 casualties in a single day. One of those casualties would change the course of the war: when Confederate Gen. Joseph
E. Johnston was severely wounded that evening, Robert E. Lee took his place as field commander of Confederate forces in Northern
Virginia, an assignment he would keep for the rest of the conflict. After a year of watching from the sidelines, Lee plunged
into the fray.
Restyling his force as the Army of Northern Virginia, he took the fight to McClellan, chasing him across the swamps and rivers
of the peninsula as spring turned to summer. He stripped Richmond’s defenses to beef up his own lines, divided his forces
in the face of McClellan’s superior numbers, and attacked against the odds.
In a week of engagements around Richmond known as the Seven Days, which commenced on June 25 and ended on July 1, Union and
Confederate forces remained in almost uninterrupted contact, often fighting at close quarters, with the result that 35,984
men were killed, wounded, or captured in a single week. The Federals lost 15,849, the Confederates 20,135. The Rebels had
the worst of it, to be sure, but Lee had made Richmond secure, shattered Union confidence, and driven McClellan from the peninsula.
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One of the lasting legacies of that muddy summer was the soldier’s lullaby we know today as Taps. Though details of its origins
differ, the song is usually credited to Brig. Gen. Daniel A. Butterfield, a New Yorker commanding the 3rd Brigade of the Union’s
5th Army Corps. As McClellan retreated and Butterfield gathered his men in camp on the James River, he grew irritated at
the army’s standard lights-out tune known as “Scott’s Tattoo,” named for the former army chief Winfield Scott and in use since
1835. It signaled soldiers to prepare for the day’s final roll call. Butterfield found the tune too harsh, “not as smooth,
melodious and musical as it should be.” So in July of 1862, he summoned Oliver W. Norton, his twenty-three-year-old bugler,
and asked him to make changes in the song as the brigadier listened. Freely admitting that he could neither read nor write
music, Butterfield made his alterations by ear, putting his bugler through the paces until the tune sounded right. Norton
took up the story:
After getting it to his satisfaction, he directed me to sound that call for Taps thereafter in place of the regulation call.
The music was beautiful on that still summer night, and was heard far beyond the limits of our Brigade. The next day I was
visited by several buglers from neighboring Brigades, asking for copies of the music which I gladly furnished.
Thus was born the famous twenty-four-note call, known as “Butterfield’s Lullaby” or Taps, which spread throughout the Union
Army, crossed enemy lines, and was entered in the Confederate Mounted Artillery Drill manual by 1863. The new tune was first
adapted as a funeral song in the summer of the Peninsula Campaign. As opposing armies exchanged artillery fire near Harrison’s
Landing, an unknown Union cannoneer was killed that July. Comrades prepared to bury him and fire the customary three-volley
salute at graveside. But with enemies in such close proximity, Capt. John C. Tidball of Battery A, 2nd Union Artillery, feared
that an outburst of musketry at close quarters might trigger more bloodshed. So he called for his bugler and asked him to
sound a soothing new lights-out tune known as Taps, which seemed a fitting farewell gesture—and the first recorded instance
of the melody being played over a soldier’s grave. The practice caught on at funerals and spread informally through the Army,
but it took decades for the song to become official—it appears in the U.S. Army Infantry Drill Regulations for the first time
in 1891.
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With deaths mounting on the peninsula, hope for an easy war faded in Washington. “We have had a terrible reverse on the Peninsula,” Montgomery Meigs confided to his father as McClellan hurried his army
out of Lee’s reach.
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The season’s events made it clear that the nation was, to borrow Edwin Stanton’s phrase, “playing war” no longer. This reality
was attested by a Confederate colonel’s description of the scene from the Peninsula Campaign, as the fog lifted following
the Battle of Malvern Hill. The morning revealed “an appalling spectacle … Over five thousand dead and wounded men were
on the ground in every attitude of distress. A third of them were dead or dying, but enough were alive and moving to give
the field a singular crawling effect.”
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That scene would be repeated at intervals in the months ahead—at the Battle of Second Manassas, at Antietam Creek in Mary
land, in the tangled woods around Chancellorsville, below the heights of Fredericksburg, Virginia—as blue and gray armies
traded blows, each striving for a knockout punch. Most of the victories of 1862 went to Lee, culminating in the frigid weeks
before Christmas at Fredericksburg, where the armies massed along opposite banks of the Rappahannock River. There Lee watched
thousands of Union soldiers cross the river and charge uphill where his men, entrenched above town, mowed down wave after
advancing wave of Federals. Caught in the open between the river and the town, Union troops lay flat on the ground to avoid
getting hit. “At one point the exposure was absolute,” a Federal officer recalled, “and stillness as absolute was the only
safety. A slight barrier was afterward formed at this point by a disposal of the dead bodies in front, so that the dead actually
sheltered the living.”
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Observing the slaughter, Lee was at once delighted and disgusted. “It is well that war is so terrible,” he famously said
that day. “We should grow too fond of it.”
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