On Hallowed Ground (8 page)

As that historic New Year’s Day approached, a group of former slaves crowded into a school house in Washington to celebrate their imminent freedom. An elderly man named Thornton rose to explain how Lincoln’s announcement would change
old ways: “Can’t sell your wife and children any more! … No more dat!” Thornton declared, his speech rendered in minstrel’s
vernacular by a journalist. “Goin’ to work, I feel bad. Overseer behind me! No more dat! No more dat!”
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Many of the able-bodied went to work for the federal war effort, first as civilian laborers or teamsters, or later as members
of the newly formed U.S. Colored Troops, segregated army units that helped tip the momentum of war in the Union’s favor.

“I desire to do what is right and best for the people,” Lee wrote his wife that December, referring to the slaves. “Any who
wish to leave may do so … They can be furnished with their free papers & hire themselves out … Those at Arlington
& Alexandria I cannot now reach. They are already free & when I can get to them I will give them their papers.” Like other
men of his day, Lee took a paternalistic view toward blacks, which caused him to worry about how they would fare without masters.
“The men could no doubt find homes,” he wrote, “but what are the women & children to do?” Without resolving that question,
he made it clear that any slaves remaining on Lee family property would be expected to work, with the net proceeds of their
labor set aside “for their future establishment.”
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In the deed conveying their liberation, Lee scrupulously listed each of the 196 slaves by name, along with their places of
residence, and ordered that they be “forever set free from slavery.” He signed the deed of manumission on December 29, 1862,
beating Lincoln’s historic declaration by barely three days.
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That winter, when Lee was not basking in the glow of his recent military triumphs, he took a moment to assess his own financial
prospects. They looked anything but promising. His wife was living in a rented house in Richmond. His enemies occupied family
properties at Arlington and Smith Island. Their White House home had burned to the ground as Union forces withdrew from the
peninsula. Only the Lees’ Romancock plantation remained largely untouched by war, at least for the moment. Lee’s meager investments
in Virginia bonds and railroad stocks would soon be worthless. And now the slaves were going. Even though he disapproved of
slavery, the pernicious institution had made possible his family’s sprawling land holdings and the earnings flowing from them.
That affluence was dissolving, along with the old certainties of Virginia’s aristocratic order, in which the Lees had been
leading actors. “I have no time to think of my private affairs,” he confided to Mrs. Lee that winter. “I expect to die a pauper,
& I see no way of preventing it.”
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With nothing to lose, Lee would become all the more dangerous in the months ahead. He provided thousands of new casualties
for the hospitals and cemeteries as the campaign of 1863 unfolded. Emboldened by his success at Chancellorsville in May, but still desperately short of food and supplies, he risked an offensive into Pennsylvania that summer, when both armies squared off near the village of Gettysburg in July. As many as 50,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured in three days of fighting, with Rebels suffering almost 60 percent of the losses. Lee barely escaped across the Potomac River with his reduced and mangled army.
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After the bloodbath of Gettysburg, the Union would gain the upper hand. Robert E. Lee, who had begun to feel the twinges of a heart condition that would eventually kill him, no longer seemed invincible. On his long retreat from Gettysburg, he got the news that his son Rooney, a Confederate cavalry officer, had been captured and jailed by Union forces. And Lee would soon be facing a new Union commander—Gen. Ulysses S. Grant—who was not afraid of him.

Meanwhile, blacks continued streaming into Washington, where about a thousand had been settled in a squalid freedmen’s camp within sight of the Capitol. The congested neighborhood
of shacks and tiny row houses became a breeding ground for disease and disappointment, hardly the paradise the refugees had
dreamed of finding along the Potomac. Although military officials and the newly formed Freedman’s Relief Association provided
food, shelter, clothing—and even schooling—for some of the former slaves, no agency could keep pace with the torrent of new
arrivals.

Poor sanitation and crowded conditions led to an outbreak of typhoid fever in Duff Green’s Row, a squalid street situated
near the site of today’s Supreme Court building. Infected refugees were placed in quarantine there, while those who showed
no sign of sickness were removed to an army camp at Twelfth and O streets, on the northern edge of the city, which became
a new freedmen’s camp. It was described as a mud hole, with one end of the site situated in a former brickyard, the other
in an old cemetery. With barracks crowded, some of the refugees had to make do with tents. The camp’s water, drawn from wells
that were drying up, triggered a massive outbreak of dysentery.
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The refugee population reached an estimated ten thousand by the spring of 1863. Freedmen improvised as best they could. Some
moved into the former slave pens in Alexandria. Others built shanties from scrap lumber and tarpaper on Capitol Hill. A rickety
line of huts, which came to be known as Murder Bay, appeared along the fetid Washington Canal. Outsiders were shocked by what they found in such neighborhoods.

“I have just visited the freemen in their cabins,” said one visitor. “Their sufferings are most heart rending. The weather
is cold; they have little or no wood. Snow covers the ground; and they have a scanty supply of rags called clothes … Government
gives them very,
Very
small allowance of soup. Many will die.”
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Many did. Most of the black refugees had little resistance to scarlet fever, smallpox, and whooping cough. Infants and children
were especially susceptible. Illness claimed at least five lives each day among Washington’s black refugees—probably many more.
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“Exactly how many, no record ever told,” wrote historian Constance McLaughlin Green.
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After medical authorities expressed concern over conditions in refugee camps, Lt. Col. Elias M. Greene, chief of the quartermaster’s
Washington Department, was called to investigate. In May 1863, he proposed a fix that would bolster the war effort, improve living conditions
for former slaves, and enlarge the Union presence at Arlington, already a bustling Federal encampment.

Without mentioning Robert E. Lee by name, Greene urged the War Department to establish a new freedmen’s camp on those lands
south of the Potomac that had “been abandoned by rebel owners and are now lying idle.” He meant Arlington, of course, and
its rich bottomlands. The unused outbuildings and slave quarters on the Lee property, Greene wrote, could easily accommodate
new residents desperately in need of shelter.
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The force of contrabands, males and females, now idle in this city & a dead weight on the Government can be employed to a
very great advantage in cultivating the above lands, raising corn & millet, and cutting hay …

The families need not be separated, as they can still be united and may be fully as well provided for as their present quarters
in this city and at less expense. Besides this there is the decided advantage afforded to them of the salutary effects of
good pure country air and a return to their former healthy avocation as field hands under much happier auspices than heretofore
which must prove more beneficial to them and will tend to prevent the increase of diseases now prevalent among them. I also
propose establishing a large vegetable garden South of the Potomac to be cultivated by the younger Contrabands and others
of them who are unable to do heavy field work. The proceeds of such labor would be considerable …

The arrangements I propose will not only in my opinion conduce to the sanitary & moral improvement of the Contrabands, but
it will save the Government an immense amount of money … I respectfully suggest that the matter should be decided within
the next forty-eight hours. It will be absolutely necessary to commence any farming operations for the present season otherwise
it will be too late to plant.
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Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton approved Greene’s proposal on the spot, and on May 22, 1863, Maj. Gen. Samuel P. Heintzelman
issued General Orders No. 28, directing Greene to take responsibility for all contrabands in Washington, D.C., and Alexandria, to seize Arlington and “all rebel lands, farm houses and tenements thereon, at present abandoned by
their owners … situated south of the Potomac and within the lines of his command,” and to put able-bodied freedmen to
work cultivating “said lands … in such a manner as may be most beneficial to the Government.”
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Freedmen began moving to Arlington that spring. There they would live under the joint patronage of the quartermaster’s office
and the American Missionary Association. The first wave of a hundred former slaves, including some who had belonged to the
Lees, filed into the fields and began sowing wheat and planting potatoes. Some lived in surplus army tents while a village
of simple frame duplex houses took shape along the Potomac River.
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This new Freedman’s Village, where the streets were named for famous generals and political figures, was formally dedicated
on December 4, 1863. A correspondent from
Harper’s Weekly
wrote approvingly about the settlement. It was“quite lively, having a large number of children in it … The principal
street is over a quarter of a mile long, and the place presents a clean and prosperous appearance at all times.”
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It would grow to a community of fifteen hundred, with a hospital, two churches, a home for the aged, and schools for both
children and adults. The latter were trained as seamstresses, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and carpenters. The idea was that
the village would provide a temporary haven for freedmen until they found jobs and established their own homes elsewhere.
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Some did move on, but many refugees stayed at Freedman’s Village for decades, raising children and even grandchildren on
the fringes of the old plantation.

The new settlement at Arlington was applauded by those who believed that slavery was a sin and Lee a traitor. “One sees more
than poetic justice in the fact that its rich lands, so long the domain of the great general of the rebellion, now afford
labor and support to the hundreds of enfranchised slaves,” wrote a visiting journalist, who also found hope and enthusiasm
among the “dusky faces” she encountered in Freedman’s Village.
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Within a few weeks of establishing the new community at Arlington, Lt. Col. Elias Greene declared it a success. “The Arlington
Estate is one of the largest and most fertile of the abandoned farms, has a full supply of good water, [and] is remarkably
healthy,” he wrote. “And being well within the lines of defenses, it secures the safety of the contrabands … The crops
are in fine condition and the farms promise to be very remunerative.”
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Despite Greene’s glowing report, not all of those living at Freedman’s Village enjoyed the experience. Toiling in the fields and workrooms under military discipline seemed, for some, scarcely preferable to slavery. The fresh vegetables freedmen grew were requisitioned for sale in Washington, while many of the farm workers were expected to live on army rations.“Don’t feel as if I was free,” said one woman after a few years in Freedman’s Village. “’Pears like there’s nobody free here.”
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Established residents were suspicious of new arrivals, distrusted as disease-ridden, dirty, and discontented.
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And in the patronizing fashion of the day, missionaries and well-intentioned Union officers took moral responsibility for villagers, hectoring their charges on the importance of cleanliness, godliness, and other virtues. “You must be industrious,” admonished the Rev. Dr. J. George Butler, preaching to a gathering of Arlington freedmen. “I do not wonder that so many of you do not love to work,” said the Lutheran minister. “But when you look over all this grand land—the cities and factories and farms—at all its great wealth—and ask where it came from, there is but one answer. It is the reward not of indolence, but of industry … Your race can never become manly except they work industriously.”
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Many took Butler’s advice, prospered, and established successful lives in Freedman’s Village. Others left Arlington as soon
as they could, creating new communities in Alexandria that thrive to this day. But the majority of black refugees who made
it to the Washington region preferred to stay in the capital. Life could be precarious there, to be sure, but it was less regimented than Arlington—and
perhaps more secure for the long term.
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