Arlington House: The Plantation Turned Cemetery
Near Dc Northern Virginia, Washington, D.C.
Robert E. Lee crossed the Potomac on April twenty-second, eighteen sixty-one, and did not return to Arlington House for the rest of his life. He had resigned his commission in the United States Army two days earlier. Union troops occupied the estate within weeks.
Arlington House had been built between eighteen oh three and eighteen eighteen by George Washington Parke Custis, Martha Washington's grandson, on eleven hundred acres of Virginia hillside overlooking the capital. Custis enslaved one hundred ninety-six people. Lee, who married Custis's daughter Mary in eighteen thirty-one, inherited control of the estate upon Custis's death in eighteen fifty-seven. Under the terms of Custis's will, the enslaved people at Arlington were to be freed within five years of his death. Lee contested the timeline and used their labor through the full five years.
In June of eighteen fifty-nine, three enslaved people at Arlington attempted to escape: Wesley Norris, his sister Mary, and a cousin. They were recaptured in Maryland and returned. What happened next is documented in two conflicting primary sources.
Wesley Norris later dictated an account, published in the National Anti-Slavery Standard in eighteen sixty-six, stating that Lee supervised the whipping personally and ordered additional lashing when the overseer paused. Lee, in his correspondence, denied supervising the whipping. The National Park Service, which interprets Arlington House today, presents both accounts as documented primary sources. The historical record contains the contradiction without resolving it.
When Lee left for Confederate command in April eighteen sixty-one, the Union Army moved into Arlington House within days, using it as a headquarters. The Lee family attempted to pay property taxes in eighteen sixty-two, but a wartime law required payment in person by the owner. Mary Lee was ill and sent a cousin instead. The federal government rejected the payment and seized the property.
Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs, a former friend of Lee's who viewed his defection as an unforgivable act of treason, ordered burials to begin on the Arlington lawn specifically to prevent any future Lee claim to reclaim the estate. The first military burials at Arlington National Cemetery began in May eighteen sixty-four.
The grounds now hold over four hundred thousand graves. The house sits above them, looking down at the capital it once overlooked from Virginia.
