Robert E. Lee and the History of Our National Cemetery

by

       M. Richard Maxson

      Major General Henry Lee III, Revolutionary War hero known as “Light Horse Harry” married his second wife, Anne Hill Carter on June 18, 1793 while Governor of Virginia. After Lee retired from the governorship in December 1794, she followed him to his Lee family holdings in northern Virginia. Misfortune and mismanagement plagued him and he was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1809 and move to debtor's prison where he remained for one year. Soon after his release  Harry and Anne Lee and their five children moved to a small house on Cameron Street in Alexandria, Virginia. It was short-lived as Henry Lee, Robert E. Lee’s father, died from injuries sustained during the civil unrest in Baltimore, Maryland in 1812.

      Left with six children and no husband for support, Anne Lee's family was often supported by a relative, William Henry Fitzhugh, who owned the Oronoco Street house and allowed the Lees to stay at his home in Fairfax County, Ravensworth. When Robert was 17 in 1824, Fitzhugh wrote to the Secretary of War, John C. Calhoun, urging that Robert be given an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point.

      Lee entered West Point in the summer of 1825 and became an officer. While home in the summer of 1829, Lee had apparently courted Mary Custis whom he had known as a child. Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee was the only surviving child of George Washington Parke Custis, George Washington's step-grandson and adopted son and founder of Arlington House, and Mary Lee Fitzhugh Custis, daughter of William Fitzhugh and Ann Bolling Randolph Fitzhugh. She had known her third cousin, Robert E. Lee, from childhood; her mother and Robert's mother were second cousins, and Lee's father Henry had delivered the eulogy to a crowd of 4,000 at George Washington's 1799 funeral. They were married on June 30, 1831. Intermarriage was a tradition with most of Virginia’s ruling families, and Robert would eventually marry a distant cousin, Mary Anne Randolph Custis, the great-granddaughter of George Washington’s wife, Martha, an heiress of several plantation properties.

      The family lived at Arlington but being a military officer, Robert was hardly there. Mrs. Lee inherited Arlington House from her father after he died in 1857. The estate had long been the couple's home whenever they were in the area during her husband's military career. For 30 years the leaves made Arlington their home and raised a family there.

      As the winds of war began to swirl and because of his ties to Washington and his own military genius, Lee was offered command of the union army. Those times were different as the states were individually were much more independent. Lee was a Virginian first and as the army formed to invade his home state, Lee resigned his commission and left Arlington for Richmond never to return.

      The United States army occupied Arlington on May 24, 1861. At first became a military post for the defense of the capital but as the war ground on and casualties mounted, Washington's cemeteries filled up. Montgomery Meigs, the quartermaster general, and Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war, detested Lee as a traitor and saw double opportunity by turning Arlington into a union cemetery. They acquired hundreds of acres in new land for graves while also foreclosing Lee's return after the war. On May 13, 1864 Private William Christman was the first soldier interned at Arlington. Thousands more would soon join him, fixing Arlington as the new national cemetery, or so it was thought.

      Lee's son inherited the family claim to their old farm. He was himself a confederate officer but his name nonetheless reflected the nation's deeper roots at Arlington. George Washington Curtis Lee also known as Curtis petitioned the Congress to no avail for the return of his family's property and then sued in Federal Court to evict the army Army as trespassers.

      The United States vs. Lee worked its way over the years to the Supreme Court, which upheld believe family's claim. Fortunately for the government, the nation, and the soldiers laid to rest in Arlington, Curtis was noble in victory, asked only for just compensation. In 1883 he deeded the land back to the government in return for $150,000. The secretary of war who accepted the deed was Robert Todd Lincoln, the son of Abraham Lincoln. After the final act of reconciliation between the first born sons of the great president and his famed rebel antagonist, Arlington's dead could rest in peace for eternity.