Arlington National Cemetery
Arlington National Cemetery - Washington, DC
Arlington National Cemetery, in Arlington County, Virginia is a military cemetery in the United States, established during the American Civil War on the grounds of Arlington House, formerly the estate of the family of Robert E. Lee’s wife Mary Anna (Custis) Lee, a descendant of Martha Washington. The cemetery is situated directly across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. and near The Pentagon. It is served by the Arlington Cemetery station on the Blue Line of the Washington Metro system.
More than 300,000 people are buried in an area of 624 acres (2.53 km2). Veterans and military casualties from every one of the nation’s wars are interred in the cemetery, from the American Civil War through the military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Pre-Civil War dead were reinterred after 1900.
Arlington National Cemetery and United States Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Home National Cemetery are administered by the Department of the Army. The other National Cemeteries are administered by the Department of Veterans Affairs or by the National Park Service. Arlington House (Custis-Lee Mansion) and its grounds are administered by the National Park Service as a memorial to Lee.
George Washington Parke Custis acquired the land that now is Arlington National Cemetery in 1802, and began construction of Arlington House. The estate was passed down to Robert E. Lee, Custis’ son-in-law, who was a West Point graduate and a United States Army officer. When Fort Sumter was forced to surrender at the beginning of the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln offered Lee the command of the Federal army. Lee demurred, because he wanted to see how Virginia would decide.
When Virginia announced its secession, Lee resigned his commission and took command of the armed forces of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and later became commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. He quickly established himself as an able commander, defeating a series of Union generals, until his final defeat and surrender at the McLean House. Because of this decision and subsequent performance, Lee was regarded as disloyal by most Union officers. The decision was made to appropriate his farm as a graveyard for mostly Union dead.
American military cemeteries developed from the duty of commanders on the frontier and in battle to care for their casualties. When Civil War casualties overflowed hospitals and burial grounds near Washington, D.C., Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs proposed in 1864 that 200 acres (0.81 km2) of the Robert E. Lee family property at Arlington be taken for a cemetery. The government acquired the property for $26,800. In 1877, Custis Lee, heir to the property, sued the government claiming ownership of the land. After the Supreme Court ruled in Lee’s favor, Congress returned the land to him, and then a year later he sold it back to them for $150,000.
Military burials were previously done at the United States Soldier’s National Cemetery in Washington, D.C., but space was filling up. “The grounds about the mansion, We pray for those who lost their lives.”, Meigs wrote, “are admirably adapted to such a use.” Burials had in fact begun at Arlington before the ink was even blotted on Meigs’s proposal.
The southern portion of the land now occupied by the cemetery was used during and after the Civil War as a settlement for freed slaves. More than 1,100 freed slaves were given land at Freedman’s Village by the government, where they farmed and lived during and after the Civil War. They were turned out in 1890 when the estate was repurchased by the government and dedicated as a military installation.
President Lyndon B. Johnson conducted the first national Memorial day ceremony in Arlington National Cemetery, on May 30, 1968.
Arlington National Cemetery is divided into 70 sections, with some sections in the southeast portion of the cemetery reserved for future expansion. Section 60, in the southeast part of the cemetery, is the burial ground for military personnel killed in the Iraq War and the War in Afghanistan. In 2005, Arlington National Cemetery acquired 12 acres of additional land from the National Park Service, along with 17 acres from the Department of Defense that was part of Fort Myer and 44 acres that is the site of the Navy Annex.
Section 21, also known as the Nurses Section, is the area of Arlington National Cemetery where many nurses are buried. The Nurses Memorial is located there. In the cemetery, there is a Confederate section with graves of soldiers of the Confederate States of America and a Confederate Memorial. In Section 27, there are buried more than 3,800 former slaves, called “Contrabands” during the Civil War. Their headstones are designated with the word “Civilian” or “Citizen”.
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