The Freedmen's Village at Arlington: Camp on a Seized Plantation

In eighteen sixty-three, the Union Army established a village on the grounds of Robert E. Lee's seized estate at Arlington. They had no particular plan for it when they started. Formerly enslaved people had been crossing the Potomac since the first days of the war, escaping to federal lines and needing somewhere to go. The army put them on Lee's land.

The Freedmen's Village grew steadily. At its peak it held approximately eleven hundred residents in a self-contained community with schools, a hospital, a church, and productive farmland. The residents raised crops, practiced skilled trades, and sent their children to the first schools many of them had ever been permitted to attend. The village was supervised by the federal government, which charged residents rent and required able-bodied adults to work for wages, an arrangement that was an improvement over enslavement but not, by later standards, entirely free either. The rent proceeds were supposed to go toward building a fund for residents. Documentation of how those funds were actually managed is incomplete.

The village operated until nineteen hundred. When the federal government decided the cemetery needed to expand across that part of the estate, the remaining residents were evicted. They had been living on that land for thirty-seven years.

Section twenty-seven of Arlington National Cemetery contains approximately three thousand eight hundred graves of Black Civil War soldiers and freedpeople, many from the Arlington village that stood where those headstones now stand. The graves are marked with small headstones inscribed simply Civilian or Citizen instead of military rank, which is how the government distinguished freedpeople from soldiers.

The distinction is visible from the path. Most visitors do not know what it means.