Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.
Disunion hit home swiftly for Robert E. Lee, the Virginian colonel who spurned President Lincoln’s offer to lead the Union forces just before the Civil War broke out. Lee, as everyone knows, went on to lead the Confederate army. Less well known is that, soon after he sided with the South, he also lost his home.
The mansion, then known as Arlington House and today as the Custis-Lee Mansion, sits on a hilltop across the Potomac from Washington, amid what is now Arlington National Cemetery. The area around it had been occupied by Union forces in May 1861, and soon after they decided to commandeer Lee’s house itself. Orchards on the vast expanse of Arlington acres were clear-cut to make room for roads and telegraph poles. Union soldiers drilled on land that had been tilled by enslaved people for generations. A nameless number who died at the First Battle of Bull Run were later buried on the grounds in a not-so-subtle message that their blood was on Lee’s hands (though he did not lead troops into the Civil War’s first engagement). Lincoln himself rode over to the barracks and tents at Arlington to shore up soldier morale after the devastating Bull Run loss.
But the occupation’s principal significance was its symbolism. Cherished land in Yankee hands was a Confederate nightmare — even more so when word got out that William Tecumseh Sherman was given his general’s command in one of the mansion’s parlors. Indeed, the seizure struck a strikingly personal and visible blow to Lee, a figure fast developing a larger-than-life reputation in the South.
Arlington House was the center of Lee’s prewar life: he and his betrothed were wed under one of its arches, and his wife gave birth to six of their seven children there. But the house had a national significance as well. Finished in 1818, it was built to honor the legacy of George Washington, an ancestor by marriage of Mrs. Lee (Martha Washington was Mrs. Lee’s great-grandmother, a fact she never let Yankees “thieves” forget). Moreover, Mrs. Lee’s maiden name, Custis, was synonymous with great slaveholding wealth. She never got over the blow of packing and leaving her inherited family property, built by her father, George Washington Parke Custis. She owned the house, not her husband: in fact, the Confederate general’s name was not on the deed. By law, the property went directly from Mrs. Lee to the federal government, for the price of $26,800. As Mrs. Lee left for good that spring of 1861, she defiantly placed the house keys in the hands of a trusted slave, Selina Gray.
Lee was more resigned about the occupation of Arlington House than his wife: “It is better to make up our minds to a general loss. They cannot take away the remembrances of the spot and the memories of those that to us render it sacred.” To a daughter, he wrote, “I should have preferred it to have been wiped from the earth, its beautiful hill sunk, and its sacred trees buried, rather than to have been degraded.”
Meanwhile, Union forces went about putting Arlington House and its grounds to practical use. The “Freedman’s Village,” a thriving community and school for free blacks, was constructed on the Arlington estate in 1863. School was a radical concept in a time and place where enslaved people were rarely educated to become literate. Arlington, antebellum America’s best address, became a symbol of emancipation. As if to prove the point, the brilliant Bostonian abolitionist Julia Ward Howe composed the searing verses of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” after visiting the Arlington wartime encampment.
As Civil War casualties mounted, Lincoln’s trusted military aide, Montgomery C. Meigs, decided to “encircle” Arlington house with bodies of war dead, deliberately burying some Army officers in Mrs. Lee’s flower garden and the modest slave quarters. Each grave was but a few steps away from the front door. Meigs, a raging creative mind in a quartermaster general’s uniform, actually knew Lee from a prewar Army engineering project. In conversation with the president after the high-water mark of Gettysburg, Meigs was inspired to suggest Lincoln transform the beautiful plantation by the river into a place of remembrance, a “field of honor.” Meigs’ son died in the war, giving the thought a touch of personal pathos. The president, anguished about the rising death toll, immediately approved the idea. Meigs himself is buried at Arlington.
Seizing Arlington made sound military sense, largely for the property’s strategic heights overlooking Washington. More importantly, banishing the antebellum Lee-Custis family from their perch was an extraordinary political move for Lincoln. He was, after all, a stranger to town and country up against a celebrated warhorse. Nevertheless, it would take years, and hundreds of thousands of lives, for the president to win his fight. And yet in a way, to this day the argument goes on, frozen in neoclassical marble, as the lofty Lee mansion and the gleaming shrine of the Lincoln Memorial stare at each other from opposite sides of the Potomac.
Sources: Elizabeth Brown Pryor, “Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters”; Noah Andre Trudeau, “Robert E. Lee”; Roy Blount Jr., “Robert E. Lee: A Life.”
Jamie Stiehm, a journalist, is writing a biography of Lucretia Mott.