Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial, is linked to two significant figures of American history: it was built by the step-grandson of George Washington, George Washington Parke Custis, and eventually passed on to General Robert E. Additional Documents File size. MIME type. Younger was asked to select the remains of one of four identical caskets. The chosen unknown was transported to the U. Prior to this, the body lay in state in the Capitol rotunda.
Harding presided over the interment ceremony. At the time, there were discussions to create a superstructure over the tomb and, years later in , Congress approved the funds to go ahead with the project and build the engraved, marble monument we see today. Since , this sacred ground has been protected 24 hours a day, days a year, under any and all weather conditions without fail by members of the 3rd Infantry Regiment, also known as the Old Guard.
It is the oldest active duty regiment in the U. Every hour on the hour, a highly choreographed, solemn and powerful changing of the guard occurs as one soldier relieves the other of their post. This ritualized and charged moment is one of the most riveting spectacles you can witness in Arlington National Cemetery and Washington DC. The hallowed grounds of this place continue to resonate with a special power that attracts over three million visitors a year. There are over , buried here to date with some funerals taking place every day.
Every year in December, National Wreaths Across America Day takes place here as well as in over a thousand other national cemeteries in each of the 50 states. Tens of thousands of volunteers mobilize all over the country in a show of honor and respect for our fallen veterans by laying wreaths at the foot of almost a million headstones.
A ride with Arlington National Cemetery Tours is essential to capture the full breadth of this place. As the official and only tour operator authorized to give guided tours of the cemetery grounds, your tour runs on a continuous loop for up to an hour and makes between 7 and 10 stops, depending on the day of the week you visit. Pershing, and the Arlington House.
X We're open. Previous Post Back. President Abraham Lincoln, newly installed in the White House, called up 75, troops to defend the capital. As the spring unfolded, the forces drifted into Washington, set up camp in the unfinished Capitol building, patrolled the city's thoroughfares and scrutinized the Virginia hills for signs of trouble.
Although officially uncommitted to the Confederacy, Virginia was expected to join the revolt. When that happened, Union troops would have to take control of Arlington, where the heights offered a perfect platform for artillery—key to the defense or subjugation of the capital.
Once the war began, Arlington was easily won. But then it became the prize in a legal and bureaucratic battle that would continue long after the guns fell silent at Appomattox in The federal government was still wrestling the Lee family for control of the property in , by which time it had been transformed into Arlington National Cemetery, the nation's most hallowed ground.
Working in Scott's office, he had no doubt heard about the Union Army's plans for seizing Arlington, which accounts for his sudden appearance there. That May night, Mrs. Lee supervised some frantic packing by a few of the family's slaves, who boxed the family silver for transfer to Richmond, crated George Washington's and G. Custis' papers and secured General Lee's files. After organizing her escape, Mary Lee tried to get some sleep, only to be awakened just after dawn by Williams: the Army's advance upon Arlington had been delayed, he said, though it was inevitable.
She lingered for several days, sitting for hours in her favorite roost, an arbor south of the mansion. The general, stranded at a desk in Richmond, feared for his wife's safety. By this time, he almost certainly knew that Arlington would be lost. A newly commissioned brigadier general in the Confederate Army, he had made no provision to hold it by force, choosing instead to concentrate his troops some 20 miles southwest, near a railroad junction at Manassas, Virginia.
Meanwhile, Northern newspapers such as the New York Daily Tribune trained their big guns on him—labeling him a traitor for resigning his colonel's commission in the Union Army to go south "in the footsteps of Benedict Arnold! The rhetoric grew only more heated with the weather. Former Army comrades who had admired Lee turned against him. None was more outspoken than Brig.
Montgomery C. Meigs, a fellow West Point graduate who had served amicably under Lee in the engineer corps but now considered him an insurgent. He urged that Lee as well as Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, who also had resigned from the federal Army to join the enemy, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis "should be put formally out of the way if possible by sentence of death [and] executed if caught. When Johnston resigned, Meigs had taken his job as quartermaster general, which required him to equip, feed and transport a rapidly growing Union Army—a task for which Meigs proved supremely suited.
Vain, energetic, vindictive and exceptionally capable, he would back up his belligerent talk in the months and years ahead. His own mother conceded that the youthful Meigs had been "high tempered, unyielding, tyrannical By mid-May, even Mary Lee had to concede that she could not avoid the impending conflict. She took a final turn in the garden, entrusted the keys to Selina Gray, a slave, and followed her husband's path down the estate's long, winding driveway. Like many others on both sides, she believed that the war would pass quickly.
On May 23, , the voters of Virginia approved an ordinance of secession by a ratio of more than six to one. Within hours, columns of Union forces streamed through Washington and made for the Potomac. At precisely 2 a. They advanced in the moonlight on steamers, on foot and on horseback, in swarms so thick that James Parks, a Lee family slave watching from Arlington, thought they looked "like bees a-coming.
The undefended estate changed hands without a whimper. When the sun rose that morning, the place was teeming with men in blue. They established a tidy village of tents, stoked fires for breakfast and scuttled over the mansion's broad portico with telegrams from the War Office.
The surrounding hills were soon lumpy with breastworks, and massive oaks were felled to clear a line of fire for artillery. The attack never materialized, but the war's impact was seen, felt and heard at Arlington in a thousand ways. Union forces denuded the estate's forest and absconded with souvenirs from the mansion. They built cabins and set up a cavalry remount station by the river.
The Army also took charge of the newly freed slaves who flocked into Washington after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of When the government was unable to accommodate the former slaves in the capital, where thousands fell sick and died, one of Meigs' officers proposed that they be settled at Arlington, "on the lands recently abandoned by rebel leaders. As the war had heated up in June , Congress passed a law that empowered commissioners to assess and collect taxes on real estate in "insurrectionary districts.
If the taxes were not paid in person, commissioners were authorized to sell the land. Robert E. Lee served as the executor of his father-in-law's will and never owned the property. After the Lees abandoned the property at the start of the Civil War, the U.
From the property's heights, rifled artillery could range every federal building in the nation's capital. The estate was seized not to punish the Custis-Lee family, but rather for its strategic value. On May 13, , the first military burial was conducted for Private William Christman. Army, who was responsible for the burial of soldiers, ordered Arlington Estate used for a cemetery. The existing D.
Arlington officially became a national cemetery on June 15, , by order of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. The original cemetery was acres, and has since grown to acres as of early Arlington became a segregated cemetery, just like all national cemeteries at the time, and remained segregated by race and rank until , when President Harry S.
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