How Arlington Cemetery Came to Be

[Algernon Moncrieff]

By the spring of 1864, Washington's temporary hospitals were overflowing with sick and dying soldiers, who began to fill local cemeteries just as General Lee and the Union commander, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, began their blistering Forty Days' Campaign, exchanging blows from Virginia's Wilderness to Petersburg. The fighting produced some 82,000 casualties in just over a month. Meigs cast about for a new graveyard to accommodate the rising tide of bodies. His eye fell upon Arlington.

The first soldier laid to rest there was Pvt. William Christman, 21, of the 67th Pennsylvania Infantry, who was buried in a plot on Arlington's northeast corner on May 13, 1864. A farmer newly recruited into the Army, Christman never knew a day of combat. Like others who would join him at Arlington, he was felled by disease; he died of peritonitis in Washington's Lincoln General Hospital on May 11. His body was committed to the earth with no flags flying, no bugles playing and no family or chaplain to see him off. A simple pine headboard, painted white with black lettering, identified his grave, like the markers for Pvt. William H. McKinney and other soldiers too poor to be embalmed and sent home for burial. The indigent dead soon filled the Lower Cemetery—a name that described both its physical and social status—across the lane from a graveyard for slaves and freedmen.

The next month, Meigs moved to make official what was already a matter of practice: "I recommend that...the land surrounding the Arlington Mansion, now understood to be the property of the United States, be appropriated as a National Military Cemetery, to be properly enclosed, laid out and carefully preserved for that purpose," he wrote Stanton on June 15, 1864. Meigs proposed devoting 200 acres to the new graveyard. He also suggested that Christman and others recently interred in the Lower Cemetery should be unearthed and reburied closer to Lee's hilltop home. "The grounds about the Mansion are admirably adapted to such a use," he wrote.

Stanton endorsed the quartermaster's recommendation the same day.

Loyalist newspapers applauded the birth of Arlington National Cemetery, one of 13 new graveyards created specifically for those dying in the Civil War. "This and the (Freedmen's Village)...are righteous uses of the estate of the Rebel General Lee," read the Washington Morning Chronicle.

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-arlington-national-cemetery-came-to-be-145147007/#qsLel1uiHHV0RXVC.99

[Laughing Mirror]

1. Interesting story

Thanks.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

4. I became familiar with the story after seeing Ken Burns' "The Civil War"

..which should be required viewing for most Americans.

We're a nation that remembers September 11th and December 7th (and they should be remembered), but has largely forgotten September 17, 1862.

[COLGATE4]

2. Arlington was specifically chosen because it was

Robert E. Lee's home. What better place to bury Union dead than on your opponent's homestead.

[Algernon Moncrieff]

3. The war dead were placed where they belonged... at Lee's door