#4: Custis Lee Gives Up Arlington

After the Supreme Court ruled that Custis Lee was the legal owner of Arlington and the US Government was forced to give the property back, how did it end up back in government hands? 

This week's ghost of Arlington is:

1.  Army First Lieutenant John Meigs, the 22-year-old son of the father of Arlington National Cemetery, General Montgomery Meigs (Section 1, Grave 1-SH)

For more information, including links to stream the show, visit the GoA website: https://www.ghostsofarlingtonpodcast.com 

Transcript

Episode 4: Custis Lee Gives up Arlington

Before we begin this week, I want to take a moment to thank everyone who has listened up to this point. As a new podcasted, it is exciting for me to see downloads continue to come in for each episode. If you have enjoyed what you have heard so far, it would mean the world for me if you 1.) recommended the show to your friend – the best advertising for a podcast is word of mouth, and 2.) if you would take a moment out of your busy to day to review the podcast on  Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Amazon Music, Stitcher, Spotify or whichever service you stream podcasts from. And if you would like to interact with the show directly, you can find it on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, of on the show website at www.ghostsofarlingtonpodcast.com. Finally, I spent the last two weeks in an online training course I wasn’t particularly looking forward to and I want to give a shout out to the great instructors and everyone in the class – especially Kurt and Raj who kept me going with our sometimes irreverent 3-way text chain. I don’t have time to thanks everyone by name but you all know who you are and good luck with the next phase! With all that out of the way, welcome and thank you for joining me for Ghosts of Arlington - Episode 4: Custis Lee Gives up Arlington. <PLAY INTRO> Last week, we covered how Custis Lee, the eldest son General Robert E. and Mary Custis Lee successfully regained the legal ownership of the Arlington Plantation after his parent’s deaths. I feel I should start with an apology up front, this week’s episode is going to be a little shorter than usual, but I wanted to wrap up the cemetery in the 19th century before jumping ahead to the 20th century.

Now that Custis had his property back, the federal government had a few options going forward: It could abandon Fort Whipple, evict the Freedmen, relocate 20,000 graves, and vacate the property – or it could buy the estate, assuming Custis was willing to sell. He was absolutely willing to sell; regaining Arlington had been a matter of principle, but Custis, who had once again followed his father’s footsteps – this time as president of the soon-to-be renamed University of Washington and Lee, had no intention of moving back to Arlington. The two sides agreed on a price of $150,000 (about $3.5 million today) and Congress quickly appropriated funds for the purchase. Lee officially transferred ownership of the property to the government on April 25, 1883 – an act that placed the federal claim to Arlington beyond dispute. Ironically, the man who formally accepted the title to the property was Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the American president so often bedeviled by Custis Lee’s father. If the sons of such enemies could bury their differences at Arlington, there might be hope for national healing. 

By the time all questions of ownership had been settled, Fort Whipple had been renamed Fort Myer and with the arrival of Major General Philip Sheridan in 1887, Myer became the nation’s premiere cavalry post. Sheridan, the newly appointed commander of the Army, expanded the stables, moved 1500 horses to the site, and began using them for funerals, parades, and other ceremonies around the capital. The neighboring cemetery, originally allocated 200 acres, continued to grow as Civil War veterans continued to age and die. Arlington started as the final stop for destitute and unknown soldiers, but quickly became the place for a veteran to be buried. Distinguished Union generals, including Philip Kearney, Abner Doubleday, and William Rosecrans competed for prominent burial space around the Lee mansion. 200 acers soon proved insufficient and a planned expansion doomed the Freedman’s Village. This ragged community of former slaves was still clinging to the bottomlands of the estate two decades after the invitation to relocate to the property – but it was never meant to be more than a temporary stop on the road to self-sufficiency. Without presenting any evidence, the Army claimed that the residents of the village had been illegally entering the cemetery after dark for the purpose of obtaining wood for fuel and ordered those still living in the village to vacate their holdings within 90 days. Though it took more time for the final occupants of the Freedman’s Village to depart, depart they did. The only evidence that remains of their presence today are the headstones of their friends and family who were left behind: Danella Warris – civilian; Betsy Hunter – civilian; Juley Fitzure – civilian; Stephen Young – civilian; Frank Dockett – civilian; Ben Johnson – civilian; and hundreds of other known and unknown civilians interred in Arlington’s lowlands. 

As the dawn of the 20th century approached, the cemetery expanded to 400 acres, while General Meigs watched with pride as his cemetery grew from a pauper’s field to a field of honor. Meigs incorporated Arlington into his family plan. After his wife passed away and was buried near the gate leading to Fort Myer, he relocated several late family members, including his son, Lieutenant John Rodgers Meigs, himself a Civil War casualty. By the end of the 1880s, the Meigs clan far outnumbered any Lees remaining on the estate. Back in episode two, I mentioned that General Meigs openly despised General Lee and all the other Rebels, who he viewed as nothing more or less than traitors. With this enmity he did all he could to make a postbellum Arlington uninhabitable for the Lee family. This hatred grew even more during the final autumn of the war. Though he was inexperienced and only 22 years of age, General Philip Sheridan had appointed Lieutenant John Meigs as the chief engineer of the Army of the Shenandoah because the young man knew all the important roads and streams west of the Blue Ridge Mountains and, like his father, was a talented mapmaker. On October 3, 1864, during a nighttime scouting mission, John and two aides were returning to camp when they came upon three men. It was raining and the men were wearing coats that obscured their dress. John misidentified these men as Union colleagues, when in fact, they were not. There are varying accounts of what happened next. Sheridan wrote that the young lieutenant was killed in an ambush by Confederate guerillas after he refused to comply with the men’s demands that he and his companions surrender. A man later claiming to be have been one of the rebels on the scene said that Meigs pulled a gun and fired on them. Either way, the result of the confrontation was the same: John was dead, found on his back with a bullet wound in his head, another in his heart, and a pistol nearby. When General Meigs heard the circumstances of his son’s death, he concluded that John had been murdered and had not died in a fair fight. He wrote in a pocket diary that his noble and precious boy was a martyr in the cause of liberty. President Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton were among the many dignitaries who mourned with General Meigs at his son’s funeral in Georgetown. When word reached Meigs that Lee had surrendered the following April, he fumed that “the rebels are all murderers of my son and the sons of hundreds of thousands… Justice seems not satisfied [if] they escape judicial trail & execution… by the government which they have betrayed.”  

Meigs never truly moved on after the death of his son. His resentment over the defection of former friends and colleagues continued to grow after the war. He offered a $1000 reward for information about his son’s killers, fixing his obsession on several guerillas. The man who Meigs blamed most was Colonel John Mosby – known as the Gray Ghost – who commanded the irregular Confederate cavalry around the Blue Ridge Mountains. He thought of the killers as infamous villains who had committed murder on a country road. For his part, Mosby disputed any notion of murder and said John Meigs had died in a fair fight at a hard time. <quote> When they came to the Shenandoah Valley to win glory in the Northern Army, they could not have expected to engage in the pastime of killing us without running the risk of getting killed themselves. They took their chances: we did the same <end quote>. When Meigs transferred his John’s body to Arlington, he commissioned a poignant sculpture depicting his son’s body as it had been found, sprawled out on the ground, and placed it atop the young man’s grave marker. Photos of this sculpture can be found on the podcast’s website.

General Meigs will be the subject of the next week’s episode, so I don’t want to say much more at this time, but I will finish today noting that when Montgomery Meigs died, the old order shifted. Lee and Grant were long gone. So was General John A. Logan, the father of Memorial Day. Gone, too, were the generals associated with Manassas, Chancellorsville, Sharpsburg, and Gettysburg: Hood, Hooker, Jackson, McClellan, Sheridan, Burnside, and Meade. Even the durable William T. Sherman had passed, barely a year before Meigs. One of Sherman’s pallbearers, Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston, at 84-years old, stood bareheaded on a cold winter’s day during Sherman’s funeral service. When asked why, Johnston replied that if Sherman were in his place and Johnston was being lowered into the ground, Sherman would not put his hat on. Johnston caught a cold and died shortly thereafter. Such displays of magnanimity helped soften hard feelings between North and South, but it would take a new war to fully heal the scars from the old one; a war we will get to once we properly lay General Meigs to rest. 

Remember, if you are interested in seeing photos associated with the people we talked about today, visit the show’s website at: www.ghostsofarlingtonpodcast.com.  And as always: “Fear not death for the sooner we die, the longer we shall be immortal.” <PLAY TAPS>