Arlington House
George Washington
Parke Custis, aged three, inherited eleven hundred acres of land overlooking
the
Potomac River, when his father, the
stepson of General George Washington, died in 1781.
Young “
Wash”
and his sister “Nelly” were raised at
Mount
Vernon by George and Martha Washington.
Upon reaching legal age in 1802, the young
man began building a lavish house on a high hill overlooking the
Potomac which was to be not only his house but a living
memorial to George Washington (who died in 1799).
Originally the name “
Mount
Washington” was considered for the house, but in the end it was
named after the Custis family estate in the
Virginia tidewater area and became known as
“Arlington House”.
The house took
sixteen years to complete.
Custis married and
had one daughter, Mary.
Mary Custis, one
of wealthiest heiresses in
Virginia,
fell in love with a penniless soldier, Robert E. Lee.
Although Lee came from a prominent family, at
the time of his birth there was no family fortune left.
Lee had only his army pay and his person to
offer a bride.
One afternoon, while
taking a break from reading aloud from a novel by Sir Walter Scott, Lee
proposed to Mary.
Mary’s father
reluctantly agreed to the marriage.
In 1857 Custis
died.
His will allowed Mary to live in
and control Arlington House for the duration of her life, at which point the
house would pass to her eldest son, George Washington Custis Lee.
Mary and Robert E. Lee lived in Arlington
House until 1861 when
Virginia
seceded from the
Union and Lee went south to
join the Confederate army.
Union troops
moved into
Virginia
in May, 1861, immediately taking up positions around Arlington House.
Two forts were built on the estate including
Fort Whipple
(now
Fort Myer) and Fort McPherson.
The property was confiscated by the federal
government when property taxes were not paid in person by Mrs. Lee. The
property was offered for public sale
Jan. 11, 1864, and was purchased by a tax commissioner for
"government use, for war, military, charitable and educational
purposes." More than 1,100 freed slaves were given land around the house,
where they farmed and lived during and after the Civil War.
At this point Brigadier
General Montgomery C. Meigs, commander of the garrison at Arlington House (and
Quartermaster General of the Union Army) enters the picture.
Meigs and Lee had served together many years
earlier as military engineers on the
Mississippi River.
Lee was a 1
st Lieutenant and Meigs
his subordinate, a 2
nd 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.
In any event, t
asked
with finding additional burial grounds for battle casualties, on June 15, 1864, Meigs wrote
to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton that “the grounds about the mansion are
admirably suited to such a use.” Meigs himself 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. The entire Rose Gard
en was
dug up and the remains of some 1800 soldiers recovered from the Manassas
Battlefields buried there in a huge burial vault.
Such an unusual positioning of graves was
malicious.
Meigs intention appeared to
be to prevent the Lee family from ever again inhabiting the house.
By the time the Civil War ended, more than
16,000 Union soldiers were buried on the grounds of the estate.
Ironically, Meig’s own son, John, was killed in
October 1864 and sent to
Arlington Cemetery for burial.
The Grave of John Meigs
Neither Robert E. Lee nor his wife ever set foot in Arlington House again.
General Lee died in 1870. Mary Custis
Lee visited the grounds shortly before her death in 1873, but was overcome by
emotion and unable to go inside the house.
After the death of his parents, George Washington Custis Lee claimed
that the house and land had been illegally confiscated and that, according to
his grandfather's will, he was the legal owner. In December 1882, the U.S.
Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, returned the property to George Washington Custis
Lee, stating that it had been confiscated without due process.
Would the dead have to be transferred to a new site?
General Lee's son diffused the crisis by
selling the house and land to the government for its’ fair market value.
Arizona’s Superstition Mountains are mysterious,
forbidding, and dangerous. The
Superstitions are said to have claimed over five hundred lives. What were these people looking for? Is it possible that these mountains hide a
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Men? Join us as we recount a fictional
story of the Superstitions and then look at the real history of the legends
that haunt these mountains in our new book: Gold, Murder and Monsters in the Superstition
Mountains.
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