On Hallowed Ground (11 page)

Meigs, the consummate bureaucrat, had outmaneuvered Lee, the consummate strategist, for possession of the high ground at Arlington.
To ensure that he kept it, Meigs took the offensive as the winter of 1866 began, urging Edwin Stanton to make sure the government
had sound title to Arlington. “I respectfully recommend that the title be investigated by the legal advisor of the Government
and that then if not perfect, steps be taken to make it entirely secure,” Meigs wrote. “A portion of this estate has been
set aside as a National Military Cemetery and in it a large number of interments have taken place. Inquiries have been made
lately of members of Congress by their constituents, the bodies of whose kindred repose in this cemetery, suggesting a fear
that the United States may yet restore to the original possessors, the land consecrated by these remains.”
⁵⁶
Meigs would return to this refrain again and again in the years ahead.

For the present, he arranged for reinforcements in the cemetery, where the army of the dead would continue to grow, keeping James Parks and other gravediggers busy at their shovels for months to come. Between December 16 and December 27, 1865, for instance, quartermaster’s crews disinterred 297 soldiers from the wartime graveyard at the Augur Hospital in Alexandria and reburied them on the Lee plantation.
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Other crews made similar forays into the capital, where they cleared temporary cemeteries and transferred the remains to Arlington. Simultaneously, Meigs dispatched Capt. James Moore into the Virginia countryside to locate and rebury tens of thousands of Union soldiers from battlefields within a thirty-mile radius of Washington, from Manassas to the Rappahannock River of Virginia.
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Moore’s squads would take years to accomplish this gruesome assignment, given the rushed nature of wartime burials and the
chaotic state of the battlefields. Conditions at Spotsylvania and the Wilderness were typical.“Hundreds of graves on these
battlefields are without any marks whatever to distinguish them,” Moore reported, “and so covered with foliage that the visitor
will be unable to find the last resting place of those who have fallen until the rains and snows of winter wash from the surface
the light covering of earth and expose their remains.” To further confuse matters, Union skeletons were mingled in trenches
with Confederate bones; skulls and femurs were disembodied and scattered; burial records were often non existent. Little wonder
that few of the dead could be identified: of 5,350 Union fatalities Moore’s crews uncovered at Spotsylvania and the Wilderness,
only 1,500 could be named. Most of these unknowns would be reburied in new battlefield cemeteries close to where they had
fallen, but more than 2,000 would be packed up and returned to Arlington, where Meigs had reserved a place of honor for them.
⁵⁹

There was no way to make sense of the unspeakable losses the Civil War inflicted, but it was possible in the aftermath to
impose some semblance of order—and a degree of solace—by accounting for the loyal soldiers and sailors lost in the recent
tragedy and by giving each a decent burial. Who were they? Where had they fallen? How could friends and loved ones find their
graves? Meigs mobilized the peacetime army to answer these questions, beginning at Arlington. There the first phase of the
restoration process took place, beginning a five-year program to honor hundreds of thousands of Union dead by mustering them
in new national cemeteries across the nation.
⁶⁰

Until Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Meigs had been preoccupied with winning the war—which for him meant supplying troops
with food, weapons, boots, mules, and other essentials. Now that it was over, Meigs called in burial reports from quartermasters
throughout country, tallied them up, and discovered documentation for only 101,736 burials—about a third of the 341,670 estimated
Union war deaths. Faced with this deficit, Meigs renewed his order in October 1865. Special recovery crews from the quartermaster’s
department, headed by Capt. James Moore in the east and by Col. Edmund B. Whitman in the west, began to comb through old battlefields
in Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, in Tennessee and Kentucky, down through the Mississippi valley, across Georgia,
and into crowded graveyards of infamous Confederate prison camps at Andersonville, South Carolina, and Salisbury, North Carolina.
Traveling with clerks, letterers, painters, and lumber for new headboards, the teams gradually converted temporary graveyards
into permanent national cemeteries, scattered from Maryland to Texas. There were seventy-four in existence when the reburial
program finally ended in 1870.
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By this point, the campaign to recover the dead had consumed more time than the war itself.
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Costing $4 million, the program proved to be a lavish mission, but the results exceeded expectations, accounting for 315,555
of the total 341,670 Union fatalities. The remaining casualties were thought to be lost in private cemeteries or obscure battlefield
plots Meigs’s scouts had been unable to penetrate.
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“Such a consecration of a nation’s power and resources to a
sentiment
, the world has never witnessed,” said Quartermaster Edmund Whitman, summarizing the unprecedented care which the United States
devoted to those who never returned from the war.
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While the recovery program went forward, Meigs kept his officers busy collecting field reports for a comprehensive Roll of
Honor, which attempted to list the name, rank, unit, and final burial site for each serviceman killed in the conflict. When
the last names were printed in 1872, the Roll of Honor ran to twenty-seven paperback volumes, eagerly snapped up by friends
and family who had lost loved ones in the war. This printed series, although peppered with misspelled names, duplication,
and gaping omissions, remains one of the most complete records of Union burials, and a tribute to Meigs’s diligence. Publishing
such a roster at government expense was the least a grateful nation could do for grieving relatives, Meigs thought. “All care
for the dead is for the sake of the living,” he wrote.
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“I do not believe that those who visit the graves of their relatives would have any satisfaction in finding them ticketed
or numbered like London policemen or convicts … But if he finds his … ancestor’s name and position in full therein
inscribed he will be satisfied that a grateful country had done due honor to the solider.”
⁶⁶

Decades after the war, government clerks were still trying to assess its human cost by collecting hospital records, muster
rolls, casualty lists, and other official documents in a Washington office, where information about each Union veteran was distilled on an individual index card. Army scriveners were poring
over these cards upstairs at Ford’s Theatre in 1893 when the accumulated weight of people and paper brought two floors crashing
down in a cloud of dust, adding another twenty-one casualties to those killed by the Civil War, according to historian Drew
Gilpin Faust.
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At least five of the victims, who had survived the shot and shell of battle only to be dispatched by the accident at Ford’s,
were buried with honors at Arlington that summer.
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When General Meigs finally received word, on September 21, 1866, that recovery crews had gathered in the last of the unknowns
from Manassas and other nearby battlefields, he asked that a large shipment of them be sent to Arlington for reburial. He
set laborers to work excavating a huge pit just to the southwest of Mrs. Lee’s garden. Twenty feet deep and twenty around,
it was to be a mass grave, which the quartermaster intended as Arlington’s first memorial to unknown soldiers.
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A reporter came to witness the mass burial. “A more terrible spectacle can hardly be conceived than is to be seen within a
dozen rods of the Arlington mansion,” the
Washington National Intelligencer
reported. “Down into this gloomy receptacle are cast the bones of such soldiers as perished on the field and either were
not buried at all or were so covered up as to have their bones mingle indiscriminately together. At the time we looked into
this gloomy cavern, a literal Golgotha, there were piled together, skulls in one division, legs in another, arms in another,
and ribs in another, what were estimated as the bones of two thousand human beings.”
⁷⁰

—September, A.D. 1866.
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The solemn gray memorial, a boxy structure surmounted by a quartet of Rodman guns and a crown of round shot, launched Arlington’s
long tradition of honoring unknown soldiers, a military ritual that would be refined with each new war.
⁷²
By his placement of this monument, Meigs was erecting another barrier to the Lees’ return. Other motives—including a sense
of duty and a particular passion for design—also may have inspired his gesture, typical of much that the quartermaster initiated
on the Lee estate.

The abstract concept of honor found physical expression in these busy postwar years, in which Meigs gave vent to his aesthetic
urges at Arlington. This was nothing new for the quartermaster, who was fascinated by design and architecture. Like Lee, he
had joined the elite engineer corps after West Point, but unlike Lee, Meigs continued to design and build things, putting
his stamp—and quite often his name—on prominent public structures all over the capital. He supervised designs for the National
Museum on the mall, the multiturreted red brick edifice now known as the Arts and Industries Building of the Smithsonian Institution;
for the Cabin John Bridge, the world’s largest masonry span when completed in the 1860s; and for the Washington Aqueduct, which conveyed fresh water to the capital before and after the war. Meigs also supervised the expansion of the
Capitol building in 1853, with its new dome and statue of Freedom, a project jointly commissioned by Meigs and a Mississippi
senator named Jefferson Davis. Perhaps his best-known design was the Old Pension Building, now the National Building Museum,
with its grand atrium, its frieze of Union soldiers marching off to war, and its fifteen million bricks; this made it the
world’s largest brick building when completed in 1887, earning it the derisive nickname “Meigs’s Old Red Barn.” After Gen.
Philip Sheridan toured the sprawling building with its proud designer, Sheridan could find only one fault: “It is fireproof,”
he joked to his old friend.
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If such criticism discouraged Meigs, he did not show it. After the war, he turned a creative eye upon Arlington, where the
rolling hills and grand views offered an irresistible canvas for his artistic impulses. Before many others, Meigs viewed Arlington
as an important element of Washington’s future landscape design.
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In 1870 he even consulted Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., the country’s preeminent landscape architect, about the look of Arlington.
Olmsted counseled restraint. Arlington, he said, should be “studiously simple … to establish permanent dignity and tranquility”
and to guard against “ambitious efforts of landscape gardeners.”
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Meigs largely ignored this advice. His own sense of design was rooted in Victorian tradition and enhanced by the flourishes
of the Gilded Age, which caused Arlington’s austere hills to sprout with new ornamented monuments, layer-cake mausoleums,
hefty stone markers, granite urns, and any number of obelisks. Not all of these were placed there by Meigs, but they were
the reflection of an exuberant time when bigger meant better—before official standards constrained the size or taste of markers
in the cemetery. If his family could afford it, a lowly lieutenant’s tombstone could overshadow and outweigh a colonel’s marker
in the next row. Several stone angels materialized around the Lee mansion, one brandishing a trumpet; another, an anchor;
another, a spray of roses. Officers had their military exploits chiseled into the lids of their crypts; one soldier had accomplished
so much and was so cramped for space that he was forced to end his own epitaph with an anticlimactic“etc.” Most idiosyncratic
was the marker chosen by Lt. Wallace F. Randolph, an artillery officer who had a twelve-hundred-pound Napoleon cannon hauled
to Arlington to indicate his resting place. Such eccentricities were tolerated at Arlington until the twentieth century, when
new regulations were finally imposed—to preserve space as well as aesthetic standards.
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When General Meigs finished his monument to the Unknown Civil War Dead, he focused on other embellishments at Arlington, where
he raised the Temple of Fame to George Washington and famous Civil War generals; established a wisteria-draped amphitheater large enough to accommodate five thousand people;
designed the Sylvan Hall, composed of living maples laid out in the pattern of a cathedral nave; and erected a massive red
arch at the cemetery’s entrance. The arch honored one of the war’s least effective—but most popular—generals, George B. McClellan.
Like much of what Meigs built, the McClellan Arch was ornate in the Victorian style, with flourishes of gold leaf and effusions
of patriotic poetry carved into the gate: