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Brigadier General Montgomery C. Meigs (above), commander of the garrison at
Arlington House and Quartermaster General of the Union Army, who
may have had a grudge against Robert E. Lee, was tasked
with finding additional burial grounds for battle casualties. Meigs and Lee had served together many years earlier as
military engineers on the Mississippi River.
Lee was a 1st Lieutenant and Meigs his subordinate, a 2nd
Lieutenant. Did Meigs bear Lee a
personal grudge? Some historians think
so, or perhaps he was just embittered by the war itself, or by Lee’s defection
from the Union army. Meigs wrote to the Secretary of War stating that “the grounds
about the mansion are admirably suited to such a use.” Meigs reported his “grim
satisfaction” of ordering twenty six Union dead to be buried near Mrs. Lee’s rose
garden in June, 1864.
Meigs had graves
dug right up to the entrance to the house. This was malicious. Meigs intended to prevent the Lee family from
ever again inhabiting the house. More
than 16,000 Union soldiers were buried on the estate’s grounds. Ironically,
Meigs’ own son was sent to Arlington Cemetery for burial.
Neither Robert E. Lee nor his wife ever set foot in Arlington House again. In
1882, the U.S. Supreme Court returned the property to the Lee family, stating
that it had been confiscated without due process. General Lee's son sold the
house and land to the government for its’ fair market value.
A quick look at women doctors and medicine in the
Civil War for the general reader. Technologically, the American Civil War was
the first “modern” war, but medically it still had its roots in the Middle
Ages. In both the North and the South, thousands of women served as nurses to
help wounded and suffering soldiers and civilians. A few women served as
doctors, a remarkable feat in an era when sex discrimination prevented women
from pursuing medical education, and those few who did were often obstructed by
their male colleagues at every turn.
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