Arlington National Cemetery
Arlington National Cemetery is the largest cemetery in the United States National Cemetery System, one of two maintained by the United States Army. More than 400,000 people are buried in its 639 acres in Arlington County, Virginia.
Arlington National Cemetery was established on 13 May 1864, during the American Civil War after Arlington Estate, the land on which the cemetery was built, was confiscated by the U.S. federal government from the private ownership of Confederate States Army general Robert E. Lee's family following a tax dispute over the property. The cemetery is managed by the U.S. Department of the Army. As of 2024, it conducts approximately 27 to 30 funerals each weekday and between six and eight services on Saturday, or 141 to 158 per week.
In April 2014, Arlington National Cemetery Historic District, including Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington House, Memorial Drive, the Military Women's Memorial, and Arlington Memorial Bridge, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
History
19th century
In 1802, George Washington Parke Custis, the grandson of George Washington's wife Martha through her first marriage, began building Arlington House on a property, Arlington Plantation, that he inherited from John Parke Custis, his natural father, following his death. Custis went to live at Mount Vernon where George Washington and Martha raised him as their own son.In 1804, Custis married Mary Lee Fitzhugh. They had four children, but only one, Mary Anna Randolph Custis, survived into adulthood. On 30 June 1831, she married future Confederate States Army general Robert E. Lee.
In 1818, Arlington House was completed. Custis initially intended the house to serve as a home and memorial to George Washington, his foster father, but Washington died on 14 December 1799, before construction began. Custis' will granted a life inheritance of the house to his wife, allowing her to live at and run Arlington House for the rest of her life but prohibiting her from selling any portion of it. In 1826 Custis acknowledged Maria Carter Syphax as his daughter and freed her, along with her 10 children and provided them with 17 acres of the Arlington Plantation. Following his wife's death, Arlington House, then known as the Custis-Lee Mansion, was passed on to her eldest grandson, George Washington Custis Lee.
American Civil War
In April 1861, following the Confederate States Army bombing of Fort Sumter in the Battle of Fort Sumter and the Union army's subsequent surrender of the fort, the American Civil War was launched, and Virginia promptly seceded from the Union. Virginia's secession left the national capital of Washington, D.C., directly across the Potomac River from Arlington Plantation in what was then Virginia's Alexandria County, highly vulnerable to Confederate attack and occupation. Realizing this, on 15 April, President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers from around the Union to help defend the capital.On 20 April, Robert E. Lee, embracing the cause of Virginia's separation from the Union, resigned his U.S. Army commission to lead Virginia's separatist armed forces. The following year, on 1 June 1862, Lee was appointed commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, the Confederate Army's primary military force.
When the Civil War commenced, American military personnel who died in battle near Washington, D.C., were buried at the United States Soldiers' Cemetery in Washington, D.C., or Alexandria Cemetery in Alexandria, Virginia. By late 1863, however, both cemeteries were nearly full.
On 3 May 1861, General Winfield Scott ordered Brigadier General Irvin McDowell to clear all troops not loyal to the Union from Arlington and neighboring Alexandria. On 7 May 1861, however, the Confederate-aligned Virginia militia captured Arlington and Arlington House. With Confederate forces occupying the high ground of Arlington, the neighboring national capital in Washington, D.C. was left vulnerable to Confederate Army attack.
Despite not wanting to leave Arlington House, Mary Lee believed her estate would soon be recaptured by Union soldiers. On 14 May, she buried many of her family treasures on the grounds, and then left for her sister's estate at Ravensworth in present-day Fairfax County, Virginia. Some of the personal property she buried included family portraits that were stolen by Union soldiers. McDowell occupied Arlington without opposition on 24 May.
On 16 July 1862, the U.S. Congress passed legislation authorizing the U.S. federal government to purchase land for national cemeteries for the purpose of burying military dead, and placed the U.S. Army Quartermaster General in charge of this program.
Beginning in 1863, the federal government used the southern portion of the land now occupied by the cemetery as a settlement for freed slaves, giving the land the name "Freedman's Village". The government constructed rental houses that 1,100 to 3,000 freed slaves eventually occupied while farming of the estate and receiving schooling and occupational training, both during the Civil War and after its end.
In May 1864, the Union Army suffered large fatalities in the Battle of the Wilderness. Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs ordered a review of eligible sites for the establishment of a large and new national military cemetery. Within weeks, his staff reported that Arlington Estate was the most suitable property in the area. The property was located at a relatively high elevation and was typically free from floods capable of unearthing graves, and it was aesthetically pleasing. An additional factor in its selection was likely that it was the residence of Robert E. Lee, a leader in the Confederate States Army, and denying Lee use of his home during and following the war was advantageous to the Union.
On 13 May 1864, William Henry Christman was buried at Arlington Cemetery, close to what is now the northeast gate in Section 27, even though Meigs did not formally authorize establishment of burials until the following month, on 15 June 1864. Consistent with the practices of many cemeteries in the late 19th century, Arlington Cemetery maintained segregated burial practices. On 26 July 1948, however, U.S. president Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which formally reversed this practice.
In 1864, with the Civil War still ongoing, the Union acquired Arlington Cemetery for $26,800,, after the property was placed for tax sale. Mrs. Lee did not appear in person for the tax sale, but sent an agent, who attempted to pay the $92.07 allegedly owed in property taxes,, which had been assessed on the estate. The Union government, however, turned her agent away, and refused to accept the tendered payment. The Washington Chronicle described the Freedmen's Village at Arlington in an article published in September 1864 and recorded at that time, "This cemetery is at present divided into the upper yard and the lower yard. The upper yard contains fourteen hundred graves, and the lower twelve hundred. These graves are marked with wooden slabs, with the exception of one marble slab in the upper and one in the lower yard. As we passed by it, a cortege of five ambulances, containing nine coffins, moved by. Some of the coffins were draped with our colors. The cemetery is as yet enclosed with a wooden fence."
In 1866, The Old Bell Church, led by Rev. Robert S. Laws, was founded. After Freedman's Village became part of a military reservation, the government asked the villagers to leave. In 1887, however, some still remained, and John A. Commerford, the Superintendent of Arlington National Cemetery, asked the U.S. Army's Quartermaster General to close the village on the grounds that people living in it had been taking trees at night from the cemetery for use as firewood. The Quartermaster General and the Secretary of War then approved Commerford's request.
''U.S. v. Lee''
In 1874, George Washington Custis Lee sued the U.S. federal government, claiming ownership of the Arlington Cemetery grounds. On 9 December 1882, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5–4 in Lee's favor in United States v. Lee, concluding that the U.S. government seized Arlington Cemetery and its surrounding grounds without affording Lee due process.Following the U.S. Supreme Court decision, Congress abided by the Supreme Court ruling, and returned the estate to Lee. By this time, however, Lee was less interested in obtaining the property than in receiving cash compensation for it. On 3 March 1883, Custis Lee sold it back to the U.S. government for $150,000 at a signing ceremony with then Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln. The land then became a U.S. military reservation.
20th century
In 1900, the last remaining residents of the Freedman's village departed after the 56th United States Congress appropriated $75,000 to settle the U.S. government's debts to them. With limited space but large numbers of KIAs from World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War, along with natural deaths from high-ranking military officials, the need for additional burial space at Arlington Cemetery became a challenge and priority to the U.S. government.On 30 May 1929, U.S. President Herbert Hoover conducted the first national Memorial Day ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery.
In October 1991, John C. Metzler Jr., Arlington Cemetery's superintendent, implemented a $1.4 million plan to clear a former parking lot to create additional space that would accommodate approximately 9,000 additional grave sites.
Wreaths Across America
In 1992, the Worcester Wreath company in Harrington, Maine, had a surplus at the end of the Christmas holiday season. Recalling a boyhood trip to Arlington National Cemetery, company founder Morrill Worcester donated 5,000 wreaths to the cemetery to honor the cemetery's dead with the help of volunteers and a local trucking company. In 2005, after 13 years of similar donations, a photo of snowy gravestones covered with wreaths at the cemetery received widespread circulation on the internet. Thousands of people called Worcester Wreath Company, wanting to replicate the wreath-laying service at their own veteran cemeteries. In 2014, volunteers were able to place wreaths in all sections of the cemetery for the first time.On 22 February 1995, officials of the U.S. Department of Interior and the U.S. Department of the Army signed an agreement to transfer from Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial, to the U.S. Army a part of Arlington Woods, which was located in Section 29 of the National Park Service at Arlington National Cemetery between Arlington House and Fort Myer. The property transfer, which involved of NPS land, was intended to permit superintendent Metzler to start expanding the cemetery beyond its existing boundaries.
In September 1996, Arlington Cemetery received the authority to transfer of woodland from the National Park Service-controlled Arlington House in 2001, of land in 1999 from the DoD that was the site of the Navy Annex building, of land in 1999 from the Department of the Army that was part of Fort Myer, of land from Arlington County's Southgate Road right-of-way in 2004, and just under of land from Fort Myer in 2005.
On 23 September 1996, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1997 authorized the Secretary of the Interior to transfer to the Secretary of the Army all of the land in Section 29 that was within an "Arlington National Cemetery Interment Zone" and some of the land in the Section that was within a "Robert E. Lee Memorial Preservation Zone".
On 5 March 1998, the National Park Service, a component of the Department of the Interior, informed the National Capital Planning Commission that it wanted to transfer only to the cemetery, rather than the that the 1995 agreement had described. In response, Metzler stated: "I was surprised. But we will continue to work with the Department of Interior and see what happens."
On 12 July 1999, the National Park Service published a Federal Register notice, announcing the availability of an environmental assessment for the transfer. The EA stated that the Interment Zone contained the oldest and largest tract of climax eastern hardwood forest in Arlington County. This forest was the same type that once covered the Arlington estate, and had regenerated from trees that were present historically. A forestry study determined that a representative tree was 258 years old. The Interment Zone was also determined to contain significant archeological and cultural landscape resources, in addition to those in the Preservation Zone. The EA described four alternative courses of action.
In contrast to the National Park Service's March 1998 statement to the National Capital Planning Commission, the 1999 environmental assessment stated that the preferred alternative would transfer to the cemetery approximately, comprising most of the Interment Zone and the northern tip of the Preservation Zone. Another alternative would transfer to the cemetery the Interment Zone, while keeping the Preservation Zone under NPS jurisdiction. The EA concluded: "Public Law 104-201 directed the Secretary of the Interior to transfer to the Secretary of the Army jurisdiction over the Interment Zone, which is the plan in Alternative 3. Adoption of any of the other alternatives would require legislative action to amend the existing law."
In 1998, a Congressional proposal to expand the cemetery onto land that the Navy Annex and Fort Myer then occupied led to concerns that Arlington County officials had not been properly consulted, leading to the withdrawal of the proposal. However, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2000, which was enacted into law during October 1999, subsequently required the Secretary of Defense to transfer administrative jurisdiction of the Navy Annex property to the Secretary of the Army. The Act required the Secretary of Defense to demolish the Annex's buildings and prepare the property for use as part of the cemetery, while requiring the Secretary of the Army to incorporate the Annex property into the cemetery.