Robert Edward Lee, Jr.

Born in 1843, "Rob" was the Lees' youngest son and the sixth child. Like his brothers, Rob was taught to skate, sled, swim, and ride. He seems to have been a typical boy who liked to play. His tastes for food and other habits were relatively simple. When he was a younger child he liked to get into bed with his father in the mornings and talk to him. He and Mildred, the two youngest children and childhood companions, were close to throughout their lives.

Rob was away from Arlington at various boarding schools during for much of the 1850s and entered the University of Virginia and the fall of 1860. He seems to have been the only one of the Lee boys who did not seriously consider a military career before the Civil War.

However, when the war came, in spite of his mother's understandable concern, he enlisted in the "Rockbridge Artillery" as a private in 1862. Before very long he was appointed a Captain and served as aide to his brother Custis.

After the war he returned to Romancock, his inheritance from his grandfather George Washington Parke Custis, and eventually started a private business. He married twice: to Charlotte Haxall (November 1871) and, after her death, to Juliet Carter (1894).

Rob died in 1916. The room most closely associated with him at Arlington was no doubt the boys' chamber, which he may have occupied as a single room much of the time when his older brothers were away and when there were no male guests at Arlington.

In his own memory, perhaps the larger hall (after 1855, the white parlor) stood out. There, the whole family assembled to greet Robert E. Lee, Sr. upon his safe return from the Mexican War in 1848. The junior Lee and his namesake had never seen one another. To his everlasting chagrin, Rob's father did not recognize him and mistakenly embraced his playmate, Armisted Lippit, instead.

Rob recorded his memories of his family and life at Arlington in Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee, published in 1904. This first hand account remains a valuable source of information on day-to-day life at Arlington House. Through Rob and his older brother Rooney, there are over twenty direct descendants of Mary and Robert E. Lee alive today.

Stories

In 1802, construction began on Arlington House. Since then, it has served as a family home, a military headquarters, a national cemetary, and more. On these pages are some of the stories of Arlington House, from the early years to the present day.

The Burke Family

One Arlington slave family immigrated to Africa. In November 1853, emancipated Arlington slaves William and Rosabella Burke and their four children sailed on the Banshee which left Baltimore with 261 immigrants. Some of Custis' slaves, who raised money through the sale of vegetables and flowers, contributed financially to the ACS. Mrs. Custis helped prepare some of the slaves to go to Liberia by teaching them. They needed to be able to read and write and posses a trade to be independent and earn their own living. William Burke, who wanted to go to Liberia, was freed by G.W.P. Custis and apprenticed himself to a blacksmith in Philadelphia just before he immigrated so he could perfect his trade.

A person of superior intelligence and drive, William Burke studied Latin and Greek at a newly established seminary in Monrovia and became a Presbyterian minister in 1857. He helped educate his children and other members of his community. He also took several African children into his home.

Despite the hardships of being a colonist, William Burke was enthusiastic about his new life. After five years in Liberia he wrote the "Persons coming to Africa should expect to go through many hardships, such as are common to the first settlement in any new country. I expect it, and was not disappointed or discouraged at any thing I met with; and so far from being dissatisfied with the country, I bless the Lord that ever my lot was cast in this part of the earth. The Lord has blessed me abundantly since my residence in Africa, for which I feel that I can never be sufficiently thankful."

From Africa, the Burkes corresponded with Mary Custis Lee. The Burkes' letters describing their lives in Liberia show they relied on the Lees to convey messages to and from relatives still enslaved in Virginia, and the letters also reflect affection for their former masters. An excerpt from one of Rosabella's letters describes her family's experiences in their new home.

Letters from Mrs. Burke to Mrs. Lee demonstrate personal warmth between the two women. Mrs. Burke shows concern for Mrs. Lee's health, tells Mrs. Lee about her children and asks about the Lee children. Mrs. Burke refers to her daughter "little Martha" in her letters; "little Martha" was Martha Custis Lee Burke, born in Liberia and named for members of the Custis- Lee family. Repeating her husband's enthusiasm for their new life, Rosabella Burke wrote, "I love Africa and would not exchange it for America."

In many respects, immigrants to Liberia re-created an American society there. Colonists established small communities of people from the same geographic region in the United States. They spoke English and retained American manners, dress, and housing styles. Affluent citizens constructed two-story houses composed of stone basements and wood framed bodies with a portico on both the front and rear, a style copied from buildings in the southern American states from which most of the emigrants came.

Few slaves wanted to immigrate to Africa even to gain their freedom. The soil around the capital Monrovia was poor and the coastal area was covered by dense jungle. Life expectancy of the former slave colonist was less than six years. By 1867, a total of approximately 13,000 former slaves, freemen, and slave descendents had immigrated to Liberia from the United States.

Architecture and construction

The huge columned portico was intended by George Washington Parke Custis to be conspicuous from the city. Mr. Custis wanted a fitting memorial to George Washington and a safe place to display his collection of George Washington's memorabilia, which he called his "Washington Treasures." The facade of the house including both wings is 140 feet. The imposing portico is 60 feet across by 25 feet deep, featuring 8 massive Doric columns, 6 of them on the front. Each column is 23 feet tall and 5 feet in diameter at the bottom, tapering at the top.

The design of the capitals at the top of the columns are called Doric. They are the simplest of the Greek columns. Doric columns were usually fluted. Those at Arlington were not fluted, but smooth, probably because Mr. Custis wanted to save money. The capitals, the entablature and the pediments are made of wood, scored and covered with stucco.

The North Wing, constructed in 1802, was originally 2 stories with a massive single chimney and had a hip roof. (Mr. Custis planned for this to become one large ballroom some day). Later the North Wing was changed to a gable roof, windows were added and the exterior was decorated to match the South Wing. The South Wing was constructed in 1804 with a temporary wall, probably of wood. Obviously, construction of the largest section of the house, the two-story "Middle House" with its impressive portico, was already planned and accommodations were being made for its addition in 1818. In the meantime, the Custis family lived in the North Wing and entertained guests in the South Wing where they displayed the "Washington Treasures."

The original roof was of wooden shingles. Lee had the roof of the "Middle House" covered with slate, and he installed gravel roofs on both North and South Wings in the 1850s. Each wing originally had a parapet, which looked like a decorative railing, across the edge of the roof. Lee also removed those during the 1850s.

Two loggias with arches were added to the rear of the house between 1818-20. Probably by 1845, these loggias were enclosed to make the Conservatory and the Outer Hall Pantry. At the same time, what architects called flanker additions, were added to create entrances to the back halls in the main part of the house. The Lees called their conservatory the "Camellia Room."

The walk-in closets on the landings may have been used as bedchambers when necessary. The servant's stairway continued down into the basement to provide access to the North Wing Basement, but it was removed at some unknown date. It is believed that the main stairs may have also continued to the basement, and were also removed. Before the stairs to the basement from the pantry were constructed, there may have been stairs in the Winter Kitchen to the upper floor of the North Wing.

Remnants of the central heating system installed by Lee in the 1850's are in the basement of the house under the Center Hall. A dairy was located under the South Wing where former slaves stated that milk was stored in a deep, dry well and butter was churned.

The somewhat austere quality of the architecture is relieved by the deft use of the graceful arches throughout the house. There is an exceptionally large arch in the Morning Room in the South Wing.

A water closet was installed in 1837 at the end of the Outer Hall Pantry (enclosed loggia) in the North Wing. Probably, the separate room housing a bath was added at the same time.

There was an octagonal Summer House located in the exact center of the flower garden. It was used for the entertainment of guests on summer nights, and some of the Lee daughters could be found there reading books where the weather permitted.

Other Buildings

Other buildings, which no longer survive, were the traditional plantation outbuildings. Some distance behind from the house on a small hill stood the Stable/Carriage House. Designed like a miniature Arlington House, it also had a Doric columned portico. This structure burned and the cemetery administration built a new office building that looked very similar to the old stable.

On another hill behind the house was an Ice House. Before refrigeration, ice was harvested in the winter from frozen ponds and rivers, then packed in sawdust in an ice house which had well insulated walls. An ice house was more common for a town or city, but wealthy planters might have their own.

The plantation "Outhouse" or "Privy" occupied the same place just north of the vegetable garden where the former Gardener's Tool Shed, a small brick building built in the1920's by the cemetery administration, is now located. It is now the Robert E. Lee Museum and features an exhibit about Lee with artifacts that are not being used in the house interpretation.

The Beginnings of Arlington National Cemetery

On the spring of 1864, as the Civil War entered its third year, the Union Army began an offensive designed to finally crush the Confederate Army. As fighting intensified, Washington hospitals—in many cases, converted churches, public halls, or governmental buildings—were flooded with wounded soldiers, brought up the Potomac from battlefields in Virginia and elsewhere.[21]

Describing the hospitals, Washington journalist Noah Brooks wrote: "Maimed and wounded…. arrived by hundreds as long as the waves of sorrow came streaming back from the fields of slaughter…. They came groping, hobbling, and faltering, so faint and so longing for rest that one's heart bled at the piteous sight."[22] As many of these men died, cemeteries in the city and surrounding areas filled to capacity.

To relieve the desperate situation, the Army started burying soldiers along the northern border of the Arlington estate, approximately one half mile from the mansion-headquarters, in May of 1864.[23]Meanwhile, the office of Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs set about the task of identifying an appropriate place for a new, offical cemetery. Meigs did not have to look very far.

As the Army had occupied Arlington since 1861 and the U.S. Government had legally purchased the property at public auction in January 1864, it emerged as a logical choice. The fact that the land had also been the plantation home of Robert E. Lee probably made it even more attractive to Meigs, who formally proposed Arlington as the site of the new cemetery in a letter to Secretary of War Stanton on June 15, 1864. The same day, Stanton approved Meigs' recommendation and instructed that part of the Arlington Estate, "not exceeding two hundred acres" be surveyed and laid out for the national cemetery.[24]

The Republican press hailed the choice of Arlington. On June 17, the National Republican reported:

The 'powers that be' have been induced to appropriate two hundred acres, immediately around the house of General Lee, on Arlington Heights, for the burial of soldiers dying in the army hospitals of this city. The grounds are undulating, handsomely adorned, and in very respect admirably fitted for the sacred purpose to which they have been dedicated. The people of the entire nation will one day, not very far distant, heartily thank the initiators of this movement…. This and the contraband establishment there are righteous uses of the estate of the rebel General Lee, and will never dishonor the spot made venerable by the occupation of Washington.[25]

Meigs likely appreciated the prediction that Americans would one day "heartily thank the initiators of this movement." He viewed the creation of the cemetery as a means for restoring honor to the property, which he felt Lee had dishonored by resigning from the U.S. Army and leading the Confederate forces.

However, the Quartermaster General was not convinced that the cemetery was necessarily permanent, fearing that the end of the War might allow the Lees to resume control over Arlington and potentially remove the graves on the property. In hopes of preventing such from occurring, Meigs wanted to place graves as close to the mansion as possible. Doing so, he felt, would make the house uninhabitable. In his original proposal to Secretary Stanton, Meigs specified:

I have visited and inspected the grounds now used as a Cemetery upon the Arlington Estate. I recommend that interments in this ground be discontinued and that the land surrounding the Arlington Mansion, now understood to be the property of the United States, be appropriated as a National Cemetery, to be properly enclosed, laid out, and carefully preserved for that purpose, and that the bodies recently interred by removed to the National Cemetery thus to be established. The grounds about the Mansion are admirably adapted for such a use.[26]

Though Meigs' initial proposal to Stanton and subsequent orders to officers at Arlington clearly spelled out the Quartermaster General's intentions, the cemetery did not develop quite as he envisioned. At first, most of the burials were made some distance from the mansion. As Meigs recorded later, many of the officers quartered in the mansion were uncomfortable with the idea of living in the middle of a graveyard, "It was my intention to have begun the interments nearer the mansion, but opposition on the part of officers stationed at Arlington, some of whom used the mansion and who did not like to have the dead buried near them, caused the interments to be begun in the northeast corner of the grounds near Arlington road. On discovering this on a visit I gave specific instructions to make the burials near the mansion. They were then driven off by the same influence to the western portion of the grounds."[27]

Meigs continued to push the issue and, after considerable effort, finally got his wish. In August 1864, 26 bodies were buried along the perimeter of Mrs. Lee's rose garden within a few yards of the mansion.[28] But, as evidenced by a December 1865 letter from one of Meigs' assistants, the location of new graves remained a very important issue to the cemetery's creator for some time to come as he sought to further solidify the cemetery's roots at Arlington.

This letter, directed to Major General D.H. Rucker, the Chief Quartermaster of Washington read, in part: "The Quartermaster General….some time ago, expressed his regret, that the interments have not been made in close proximity to the Arlington House…. as to more firmly secure the grounds known as the National Cemetery, to the Government by rendering it undesirable as a future residence or homestead. There being more than a thousand interments yet to be made, the views of the Quartermaster General can now be carried out."

To underscore the urgency and importance of burying the dead close to the house, the Assistant Quartermaster closed his letter by relaying the following story: "A brother of Genl. Lee (Smith Lee) in a recent visit to Arlington, remarked to the Superintendent, 'that the house could still be made a pleasant residence, by fencing off the Cemetery, and removing the officers buried around the garden.'"[29]

Smith Lee's appraisal obviously alarmed the Assistant Quartermaster and undoubtedly also Meigs himself. Both practically and symbolically, the possibility of Robert E. Lee and his family returning to the mansion on the hilltop at Arlington which literally looked down upon the capital city of the United States did not sit well with those in charge of creating the cemetery. To further ensure that this did not happen, Meigs ordered the construction of a tomb for unknown Civil War dead in the rose garden in April 1866. The remains of 2,111 unknown soldiers, recovered from battlefields in the vicinity of Washington, were sealed in the vault.[30] They joined some 15,000 other Civil War casualties who had already been laid to rest at Arlington.

As it turned out, the Lees would never return to live at Arlington again. Whether influenced by Meigs' efforts to make the mansion uninhabitable or not, Robert E. Lee and his wife decided not to pursue regaining the title to the mansion after the War.[31] Instead, the former Confederate General and his family settled in Lexington, Virginia where he spent the last five years of his life as the President of tiny Washington College. While the family was later compensated for the estate, the Lees would never again reside on the property.[32] Meigs got his wish and the Cemetery became a permanent feature at Arlington.

References

[21] Herbert Mitgang, ed. Washington, D.C. In Lincoln's Time: A Memoir of the Civil War Era by the Newspaperman Who Knew Lincoln Best by Noah Brooks (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 16-17.

[22]Mitgang, 16-17.

[23] The grave of William Christman, a Private from the 67th Pennsylvania is the oldest military grave at Arlington. Christman was laid to rest on May 13, 1864.

[24] Letter, Sec. Edwin M. Stanton to Quartermaster Gen. Montgomery Meigs, June 15, 1864. Copy in Arlington House archives. Original at National Archives, Records of the War Department, Office of the Quartermaster General, National Cemeterial Files.

[25] National Republican, June 17, 1864

[26] Letter, Quartermaster Gen. Montgomery Meigs to Sec. Edwin M. Stanton, June 15, 1864. Copy in Arlington House archives. Original at National Archives, Records of the War Department, Office of the Quartermaster General, National Cemeterial Files.

[27] Memorandum, Quartermaster Gen. Montgomery Meigs, April 12, 1873. National Archives, RG 92: Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General, Records relating to functions: Cemeterial, 1829-1929. General correspondence and reports relating to national and post cemeteries ("Cemetery file"), 1865-c. 1914. Antietam, MD-Arlington, VA, Box 6, NM-81, Entry 576.

[28] James Edward Peters, Arlington National Cemetery: Shrine to America's Heroes, 2nd ed. (Bethesda, MD: Woodbine House, 2000), 23.

[29] Letter, Col. J.M. Moore to Maj. Gen. D.H. Rucker, Dec. 11, 1865. National Archives, RG 92: Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General, Records relating to functions: cemeterial, 1829-1929. General correspondence and reports relating to national and post cemeteries ("Cemetery file"), 1865-c. 1914. Arlington, VA, Box 7, NM-81, Entry 576.

[30] Peters, 23.

[31] Peters, 28. According to Peters, the Lees' decision not to pursue the title of the property was probably more influenced by Lee's belief that to do so would heighten sectional hostilities and hamper the Reconstruction process, rather than concerns about the graves on the property.

[32] After Robert E. Lee and his wife died in the early 1870s, their oldest son, Custis Lee, brought suit against the U.S. Government in attempt to regain title to the estate. In 1882, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in Custis Lee's favor. He was compensated $150,000 in exchange for the property, thereby ending any legal claim the Lees had on Arlington.

Christmas at Arlington

For the Lees, "home for the holidays" meant Arlington at Christmas. Robert E. Lee felt this was a time when families should be together and, whenever possible, he and his family returned to Arlington to share the season with Mary's parents. Lee's occupation as an Army Engineer favored winter vacations, when the work was shut down by weather. Frequently, hardships of travel and health had to be overcome to reach Arlington at Christmas.

Despite these challenges, Robert was away from Mary at Christmas only during the war in Mexico from 1846-1849 and in 1860 when he was stationed in Texas. Starting in 1831, the first year of the Lees' marriage, Robert was at Arlington 20 out of a possible 30 Christmases while the family lived there--a phenomenal record for a soldier on active duty for all those years.

The observance of Christmas at Arlington was most immediately influenced by the deep religious convictions of Mrs. Custis and Mr. Custis' love of George Washington, Mount Vernon and all associations with that house that had been his home until his Grandmother, Martha Washington, died in 1802. The fact that the Washingtons had chosen the Christmas season 1758-59 to be married made their wedding anniversary, January 6th an important part of the Arlington celebration.

Christmas at Arlington began on December 17, when Mr. Custis had the greens brought in. The pine, ivy, holly and myrtle filled Arlington and were kept fresh through the twelve days of Christmas. Mistletoe was suspended from lanterns and arches. Any unsuspecting loiterer, found beneath, was required to forfeit a kiss. On Christmas Eve, Mr. Custis supervised the placement of the yule log. A piece of the log from the previous Christmas was used to ignite the highly decorated log of the new season. This old Norse and Anglo-Saxon custom was an important part of the Arlington Christmas celebration.

Christmas day itself began with 'Christmas gifting' of family members, guests and servants followed by morning prayer and breakfast. Then, weather permitting, the family attended services at Christ Episcopal Church in Alexandria where Robert and Mary had worshiped since childhood. After exchanging season's greetings with town friends and family the carriage would return to Arlington in time for the feast. The celebration continued until Robert had to return to duty in January.

As the Lee family grew with the births of seven children between 1832 and 1846, Christmas at Arlington became very child oriented. Books, dolls, boots, skates, and a tool chest were among the gifts exchanged on this day.

Christmas 1846 found Robert E. Lee away from his family and Arlington at Christmas for the first time in 15 years. From his tent near a small Mexican town he wrote to Custis and Rooney on Christmas Eve:

"I hope good Santa Claus will fill by Rob's stockings tonight that Mildred's, Agnes's, and Annals may break down with good things. I do not know what he may have for you and Mary, but if he only leaves for you one half of what I wish, you will want for nothing. I have frequently thought if I had one of you on each side of me riding on ponies, such as I could get you, I would be comparatively happy."

Robert wrote separately to 'My Dearest Mary' on Christmas Day and he described his Christmas dinner. The table was decorated with pine and oranges and bottles of wine. The feast featured roasted turkey and chicken and, among other good things, eggnog. He had made use of the Mount Vernon flatware which Mr. Custis had sent with him. It was placed at the Commanding Officer's place and admired by all. He continued to remember with Mary the Christmases they had shared.

"We have had many happy Christmas' together, and this is the first time that we have been entirely separated at this holy time since our marriage, and though I have been absent on two or three other occasions on the day itself, yet have not been far distant and always arrived during the holy days. We have therefore nothing to complain of and I hope it has not interfered with your happiness, surrounded as you are by father, Mother, children and dear friends. I therefore trust you are well and happy and that this is the last time I shall be absent from you during my life. May God preserve and bless you till then and forever after is my constant prayer."

This family, like many others, would not be reunited until the end of the war. Their next Christmas together would be celebrated between assignments for Lee, in 1848, at Arlington.

Christmas 1849 found the Lees settled in Baltimore where Robert was working on the construction of Fort Carroll. They returned to Arlington for every Christmas until 1852. The celebrations were grand, as Lee described in a letter to his eldest son, Custis, who was absent in 1851.

"We came on Wednesday morning. It was a bitter cold day, and we were kept waiting an hour in the depot at Baltimore for the cars, which were detained by the snow and ice on the rails. We found your grandfather at the Washington depot, Daniel and the old carriage and horses, and young Daniel on the colt Mildred. Your mother, grandfather, Mary Eliza, the little people and the baggage, I thought load enough for the carriage, so Rooney and I took our feet in our hands and walked over . . . .The snow impeded the carriage as well as us, and we reached here shortly after it. The children were delighted at getting back, and passed the evening in devising pleasure for the morrow. They were in upon us before day on Christmas morning, to overhaul their stockings. Mildred thinks she drew the prize in the shape of a beautiful new doll; Angelina's infirmities were so great that she was left in Baltimore and this new treasure was entirely unexpected. The cakes, candies, books, etc., were overlooked in the caresses bestowed upon her, and she was scarcely out of her arms all day. Rooney got among his gifts a nice pair of boots, which he particularly wanted, and the girls, I hope, were equally pleased with their presents, books, and trinkets.

Your mother, Mary, Rooney, and I went into church, and Rooney... skated back along the canal (Rooney having taken his skates along for the purpose,) and we filled his place in the carriage with Miss Sarah Stuart, one of M.'s comrades, Minny Uoyd was detained at home to assist her mother at dinner but your Aunt Maria Fitzhugh brought her and Miss Lucretia Fitzhugh out the next day, and Wallace Stiles and his brother arriving at the same time, we had quite a table-full...

I need not describe to you our amusements, you have witnessed them so often; nor the turkey, cold ham, plum pudding, mince-pies, etc. at dinner. I hope you will enjoy them again, or some equally as good..."

From 1852-1854, Colonel Lee's position as Superintendent of the Military Academy at West Point required the elder Lees' presence during the holidays, so they were away from Arlington for Christmas. In 1856, Lee was absent from the Arlington Christmas celebrations once again after he was transferred to Texas with the Second United States Cavalry. However, his thoughts were with his wife and children, as he wrote to them from afar:

"The time is approaching when I trust many of you will be assembled around the family hearth at dear Arlington, to celebrate another Christmas. Though absent, my heart will be in the midst of you, and I shall enjoy in imagination and memory, all that is going on. May nothing occur to mar or cloud the family fireside, and may each be able to look back with pride and pleasure at their deeds of the past year and with confidence and hope to that in prospect. I can do nothing but hope and pray for you."

Again, only a few days before Christmas, he wrote:

"I have been recalling dearest Mary the many happy Christmases we have had together, and the pleasure I have enjoyed with you, your dear parents and the children around me. I ought not therefore to repine at an occasional separation from you, but be grateful for what I have had, and be prepared to keep this solitary and alone My prayers and thoughts will be with you and all will receive my fervent salutations. I hope nothing will be omitted that I could have done, to make each one happy."

Lee was back at Arlington for Christmas in 1857, on leave from the army to manage the affairs of the Arlington plantation, in the wake of Mr. Custis's death. Duties connected with the estate would keep him at Arlington through Christmas the following year.

In the spring of 1860, Lee returned to Texas and stayed there through the following winter. As Christmas, 1860 approached, Mrs. Lee's health and the unsettled state of national affairs precluded any thought of her going West. With the election of Abraham Lincoln in November, South Carolina seceded. Concern for the future of the Union was reflected in Colonel Lee's Christmas greeting:

"Although you anticipated a quiet Christmas, I hope it was a happy one to you all, and that you were filled with gratitude for the many blessings that surrounded you. Although distant, my heart and thoughts were ever present with you and my prayers were offered for Heavens choicest benefits for you all.... Here we are far removed and get the essence of all disunion movements from the New Orleans papers.... I am particularly anxious that 'Virginia should keep right, and inauguration of the Constitution, so I would wish that she might be able to maintain it and save the union.'"

Unfortunately this was not to be and, as it turned out, Christmas of 1860 would be the Lee family's last at Arlington. As Virginia was on the verge of secession in April 1861, Robert E. Lee resigned from the U.S. Army and the family left Arlington for good shortly before the estate was occupied by U.S. Army troops in May 1861.

Text by Agnes Mullins, former Curator, Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial

Robert Edward Lee

Over the years, Lee's military career kept him away from Arlington much of the time. However, the house and its occupants were very important to him and he regarded the estate as his home. In the 1850s he began to play a more important role in the affairs at Arlington, taking over some financial matters for his father in law, George Washington Parke Custis. After Custis' death in 1857, Lee took leave from the army to act as executor of the Custis estate and manager of Arlington and the other Custis lands. Though Arlington House never belonged to Lee (it belonged to his wife), he was the effective master of Arlington after 1857. Between 1857-1861, he attempted to reorganize the slaves into a more efficient labor force, cleaned up the grounds, hired a new overseer and supervised the planting of crops. He also oversaw extensive rebuilding around the plantation. He virtually rebuilt the overseer's house at the farm and the stable west of the mansion. He also fixed the roof of the mansion and took out a fire insurance policy on the mansion and the barn.

Lee and his wife took different attitudes toward a number of matters, and neatness was one of them. Lee was disciplined, punctual, precise, and a very careful dresser who was fond of social functions. He liked parties, the theater, and the company of women. He was courtly and genial with equals and courteous and hospitable to strangers. He preferred things to be orderly and clean. In all these habits and tastes he differed from his wife. But they were a devoted and congenial couple.

Lee was well informed and a reader. He was a capable engineer and an excellent military officer. Like other members of the family, he was also a devout Episcopalian. Confirmed in 1853, with his daughters Mary and Annie, he was very interested in the church and religious publications. Generally his habits befitted a good churchman. He did not use tobacco or much alcohol. A very handsome man, Lee was 5 feet 10 inches tall, with the athletic physique of a fine horseman.

Lee's presence at Arlington lent gaiety and vigor to the atmosphere. As a father he was firm but genial with his sons and gentle and a trifle indulgent with his daughters. His association with Arlington House was perhaps less intimate than that of his wife, but it was close. In his room on the second floor he wrote out his resignation from the United States Army in the wee hours of April 20, 1861, thereby giving up a long career for an uncertain future.

The Power of Place

As part of an impassioned speech delivered at the 1826 meeting of the American Colonization Society, George Washington Parke Custis declared slavery "the mightiest serpent that ever infested the earth." Custis, a wealthy planter and grandson of Martha Washington, viewed the enslavement of humans as the "unhappy error of our forefathers." Yet Custis himself owned many slaves, and continued to hold them in bondage until his death in 1857. The construction of Custis' stately mansion, Arlington House, and the graceful lifestyle it symbolized would not have been possible without the use of slave labor. Custis' ambivalence concerning slavery reveals the moral and psychological dilemma that many 19th Americans, including some slaveholders, associated with the institution.

Nearly 150 years after its abolishment, slavery remains a complex and often painful subject for contemporary audiences. In 1995, an exhibit on plantation life at the Library of Congress, which featured images of slaves, so disturbed some black employees that the exhibit was cancelled. In a similar vein, 1,100 members of the Southern Heritage Coalition demanded the removal of the Superintendent of Gettysburg National Military Park after he stated that slavery might have been a cause of the Civil War. Historians and educators employed at museums and historic sites have encountered substantial obstacles in their attempts to establish meaningful dialogues on the history of slavery and race relations in the United States. At times, adult audiences find the subject of slavery so painful that they are reluctant to engage in the very discussions that should occur in the nation's historic places.

Dialogues on slavery often prove far less emotional for young audiences, and yet children are seldom targeted for inclusion in such conversations. In recent years, the interpretive staff of Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial has made a concerted effort to introduce the subject of slave life to children, who may represent the audience most ready to discuss the realities of slavery. Two of the site's educational programs have proven remarkably successful. One of the cornerstones of the "Parks as Classrooms" program for elementary grades is to educate children about slave life at Arlington. The success of these programs can be attributed to three factors: the importance of introducing the subject of slavery to students at an early age; the use of the physical structure of the house itself to encourage critical thinking; and the interactive component of the program which allows children to arrive at their own conclusions about slave life.

Individual educational programs have been developed for kindergarten-second grade children and third-fifth grade students. The program for the younger pupils consists of a guided house tour and a hands-on activity, some of which replicate tasks that slaves would have performed. Both components allow students to compare and contrast the day-to-day experiences of the Lee children and the slave children. The same approach is used for the third-fifth graders, who are expected to draw more sophisticated conclusions about the slave/owner relationship. At the conclusion of the program, students are taken inside one of the original slave quarters so that they may contrast the physical living conditions of the Lee family to those of the slaves.

Throughout the guided tour, the physical structure of the house provides a constant reminder of the day-to-day experience of the house slaves. As students tour the oldest wing of the house, which was primarily a work area, they must navigate low doorways, a narrow staircase, and dark passageways that demarcate the areas of the house associated with the slaves. The large open hearth and heavy cookware found in the kitchen speak volumes about the difficulties slaves experienced as they prepared food. When students contrast the dark, steep stairs used by the slaves to the graceful family staircase, the polarity clearly demonstrates the social and racial hierarchy that existed inside Arlington's walls. At the conclusion of the program, the children tour one of the original slave quarters. The cold and dampness that penetrate the cramped, spartan rooms provide palpable evidence of the daily living conditions of the Arlington slaves.

After the house tour, students engage in hands-on activities that provide them with yet another opportunity to draw conclusions about slave life. The younger students replicate tasks that would have been performed by slaves, such as scrubbing clothing on a washboard and carrying and stacking wood. Engaging in such work for even a short period of time impresses upon children the vast amount of physical labor slaves exerted on a daily basis. The third-fifth graders participate in activities that require a greater degree of critical thinking. Those who take part in the food preparation program are expected to draw conclusions about the division of labor that existed between the slaves and their owners in the daily preparation of meals. By participating in tasks that replicate the work carried out by slaves, students arrive at an understanding that the lifestyle Arlington House symbolized could not have existed without the presence and labor of slaves.

Throughout the program, the children are encouraged to draw their own conclusions about the nature of slavery as it existed at Arlington. The contradictions voiced by George Custis in the 19th century provide thought-provoking questions for contemporary audiences. Students are exposed to both the typically laborious nature of the Arlington slaves' existence as well as the more unusual aspects of their condition. The Custis and Lee families provided their slaves with a rudimentary education, spending money, and specialized medical care. Complex relations between owner and slave are also examined. For her slave Selina Gray, Mary Custis Lee arranged an elaborate wedding ceremony, which was conducted by an Episcopal priest in the same room where Mrs. Lee herself had been married. As students attempt to reconcile the inherently exploitive nature of slavery with examples of humane treatment that existed at Arlington, they begin to realize that some of the questions raised during the program have no answers.

Student response to the programs has been extremely positive. Many of them display great excitement at the opportunity to learn about slave life. The power of place is critical, and for many students the highlight of the experience is their visit to the slave quarters. Their reactions to the program have included comments such as "I liked it when you showed us the slave quarters" and "I really liked to see the place where the slaves lived and the kitchen where they cooked." By engaging children in dialogues about the nature of slavery at an early age, historians and educators can provide a comfortable environment in which this sensitive subject can be discussed. Ironically, the programs are directed at a youthful audience, but often provide a rewarding and educational experience for adults who visit during the school tours.

Future efforts to include children in conversations about slavery and race must be given serious consideration, for such efforts will undoubtedly result in a generation of adults less ill at ease with the subject. Historic places provide a tangible link to the past, and thus offer unique educational experiences that cannot be replicated in a classroom. In their recent study The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life, Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen discovered that nearly 80 percent of those surveyed believe museums and historic sites represent the best opportunity for Americans to learn "real" history. Historians and educators at these places must be willing to develop innovative methods to ensure an environment in which enlightenment about complicated historical issues such as slavery can occur. Reaching out to the youngest members of their audience may prove an excellent first step in the process.

Karen Byrne is the site historian at Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial. This article was orginally published in the U.S. Department of Interior's Cultural Resource Management Vol. 23, No. 3, 2000.

George Washington Parke Custis

Born in 1781, George Washington Parke Custis was the grandson of Martha Dandridge Custis Washington through her first marriage. After his natural father, John Parke Custis, died in 1781, G.W.P. Custis went to live at Mount Vernon where George and Martha Washington raised him as their own son. During his childhood, Custis became very attached to his stepfather, George Washington. In 1802, Custis started the construction of Arlington House on land that he had inherited from his natural father. When completed in 1818, he intended the house to serve as not only a home but also a memorial to his stepfather, George Washington. In 1804, Custis married Mary Lee Fitzhugh. The two had four children, but only one, Mary Anna Randolph Custis, survived.

Custis derived his living from large inherited estates, worked by many slaves, though he was a poor manager and his properties were not very profitable. He devoted most of his energies to other activities, many and varied including painting, playwriting, music, oratory, and promoting the improvement of American agriculture. None of his endeavors were marked by great or lasting success. He frequently held celebrations, special programs and other social events which attracted thousands of visitors to the Arlington estate over the years. Regarding himself as the heir to the Washington tradition, Custis collected and displayed, a large number of Mount Vernon relics at Arlington. He was always eager to comment on the collection and the Washington legacy for famous guests and curious strangers.

Custis saw his daughter marry Lt. Robert E. Lee at Arlington in 1831. Robert and Mary Anna came to call Arlington home and Custis was a prominent figure in the lives of the seven Lee children. In his later years, Custis did not stray far from Arlington. He made his will in 1855, and he increasingly relied on his son-in-law, Col. Lee, to handle his tangled business affairs. Until his death, Custis retained his old bedchamber in the north wing of the mansion, where he died after a short illness on October 10, 1857.

The Syphax Family

Charles Syphax married another Custis slave, Maria Carter. Both had been Mount Vernon slaves where they had worked as household servants. Maria Carter Syphax was the daughter of Airy Carter, a slave maid of George and Martha Washington and later George Washington Parke Custis. In 1826, Mr. Custis gave Maria Carter Syphax and her children their freedom and a seventeen-acre plot within the Arlington plantation. The Syphaxes had ten children who lived as free persons on the estate. According to Syphax family tradition, George Washington Parke Custis was the father of Maria Carter Syphax.

The descendants of Charles and Maria Syphax, beginning with their children, have held positions of leadership in the business and community life of Arlington County. Their son, John Syphax, who was born free and educated in Washington, D.C. schools, became a property owner in Arlington County. He held several elective offices including supervisor of the Arlington Magisterial District, delegate to the General Assembly, and justice of the peace.

His brother, William Syphax, served as Chief Messenger of the Department of Interior. He was also a leader in the effort to establish public high school education for African Americans in the Washington, D.C. school system. Many Syphax descendants still live in Arlington County.

Mildred Childe Lee

Mildred ("Milly," "Precious Life") was the baby of the family and was named after Robert E. Lee's sister Mildred (Lee) Childe. She was at home most of the time until she went away to boarding school at Winchester, Virginia in autumn of 1860. The youngest child, she was a bit spoiled and willful. Her father once complained that she always wanted something. Yet, if able, he gave her everything she wanted.

She had some difficulties with her mother in the spring of 1861, for making a fuss over a bonnet at a time when the Union was breaking apart, her home was in danger, and her father's career in jeopardy. But she was a bright spirit and a lively cheerful person. She had brown hair and rather plain features. She was not pretty and had a tendency to plumpness but her father thought she brought light into a room when she entered it, and she often did surprising things that delighted him.

Like Agnes she was very fond of her pet chickens and the family cats. She took music lessons but evidently did not practice very hard. She loved the flower garden and she had her own individual plot which she planted with the help of Harry Washington Gray, one of the slave children on the estate. Mildred, too, read novels, religious books, and enjoyed singing hymns.

Mildred was very close to her father after the war and was quite lonely when he died. Of the other children, she was closest to Rob, her childhood companion. Mildred never married although she longed for companionship. She traveled widely in the 1870's and 1880's, but did not seem to enjoy it much.

On March 26, 1905, Mildred died in New Orleans and was interred in Lexington with other members of her family. The room with which she was most closely associated was the girls' bedroom where she kept her things and had play tea parties for her dolls, Jenny Lind and Angelina.

A Letter From George Custis

Document 1162

My Dr Mr. Ball

I have read your letter & am glad to find that you are well & things getting on at Arlington. Do give proper directions about the Fodder as it will be very valuable this year. I do not think anything will be done in selling land till the Rail Road is laid off. I expect to leave this on Monday next the 19th for New York, stay there on Tuesday & Wednesday & go to Baltimore on Thursday & on Friday to be in the City, 11 o'clock cars so I shall wish Daniel to come over with the carriage on Friday the 23rd & if I am not there then on Saturday the 24th. He must not mind the weather. This is my present plan if nothing happens to prevent me. I will write you so as for you to get the letter on Tuesday the 20th.

Truly my D'Sir

Yr friend & Svt,

George W.P. Custis

Robert Ball Esq.

To be given to Daniel from Arlington

Eleanor Agnes Lee

Agnes or "Wig" was the third of the four Lee daughters and the fifth of seven children. She was born in 1841. Agnes spent much of her time in reading, studying, playing piano and in working in her garden. She did little housework beyond taking care of some of her own things or straightening up Annie's. Agnes kept a fascinating journal during her childhood years, later published and entitled Growing Up in the 1850s.

Before going away to boarding school in 1855, she and Annie had a tutor, Miss Sue Poor, from whom they learned music, English composition, French, and probably arithmetic. For a time she helped to instruct the Arlington slaves by conducting a Sunday evening school for them and by instructing individual children before and after breakfast.

Agnes took a lively interest in the changes made in the house especially the refurnishing of the large hall in 1855. She loved Arlington dearly, but admitted that, compared to West Point, it was hardly clean and neat. She was religious and was confirmed in the Episcopal Church in 1857.

Agnes was a charming and attractive young lady, and there is some evidence that she felt a romantic attachment to Orton A. Williams, her mother's young cousin and a frequent visitor at Arlington, just before the Civil War. Her father is said to have frowned upon the romance because he regarded young Williams as too unsettled to marry.

People in Lexington after the war found her somewhat reserved and aloof. In part this may have been due to the tragic death of Orton Williams in 1862, and to her own serious illness in 1865, which according to her father, left her steady and regular but without "velocity." Considered her mother's favorite daughter, Agnes never married and died from typhoid fever in October 1873, at the age of 32.

Slave Quarters

Located in back of the main house are two rectangular buildings, which are set at right angles to the house, forming a small service court. These buildings, the two surviving slave quarters which housed slaves who were the house servants of the Custis and Lee family, have three rooms each, and have stone foundations with rough stucco walls featuring Greek Revival architectural details. It is thought that Hadfield also planned these buildings. The stone well is located between one of these structures and the North Wing of the house.

The Summer Kitchen was located in the North Slave Quarters and housed the carriage driver, Daniel and his son, Daniel in one room. George Clark, the long time plantation cook, and his assistant lived in another room. The "Summer Kitchen" was located in a basement of this building, but was filled in at some point and no longer exists.

The South Slave Quarters housed Selina Gray, Mrs. Custis's personal maid and trusted housekeeper. She, her husband and their eight children lived in one room with a small loft where some of the children slept. The loft was accessible by ladder and the crawl-space attic had a ceiling only high enough for small children. There were no windows in the attic.

The middle room in the South Quarters building was used as a Smoke House where hams and other meats would be hung from the ceiling to smoke and cure. The third room in this building housed other slaves that worked in the Custis-Lee household.

There was a slave School House located in the grove of trees behind the flower garden and roughly where the Old Amphitheatre of the National Cemetery is now located. Slave field hands lived in log cabins, mostly in the southern end of the plantation, but none of these cabins have survived.

George Washington Custis Lee

There appears to be less information on his personal habits and tastes than about some of the other members of the family. He was a fine horseman, though not the equal of his younger brother Rooney. Studious and painfully shy in the company of women, he never married. Photographs show him to have been tall and handsome, with dark hair. He rather resembled his father.

Letters to him from his parents suggest that he took part in family activities and was warmly regarded by his brothers and sisters. He was certainly generous and devoted to them. As the eldest son, he was to inherit Arlington at his mother's death, but did not seem interested in running the estate and offered to surrender his share of Arlington to his father in 1858.

In May 1861, Custis resigned his commission in the U.S. Army shortly after Virginia voted to secede from the Union. During the Civil War he attained the rank of Brigadier General, C.S.A., serving as aide-de-camp to President Jefferson Davis of the Confederacy. Though Custis spent most of the war working in Davis's office, he volunteered to take his younger brother Rooney's place as a prisoner of war so that Rooney could come home to be with his dying wife in 1863. After the war he was a professor of military science and engineering at Virginia Military Institute, and in 1871 succeeded his late father as President of Washington College (now Washington & Lee University).

Following the death of his mother, in 1873, Custis brought suit against the U.S. Government in hopes of gaining compensation for Arlington after its seizure during the Civil War. After a long court battle, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Arlington had been illeagally seized and Custis regained title to the property. Knowing that he could not live at Arlington and operate it as a plantation estate, he sold the title back to the U.S. Government for $150,000.

Custis Lee died at Ravensworth in Fairfax County, Virginia in 1913. His association with the rooms at Arlington was primarily with the boys' chamber upstairs and with what Mrs. Lee in 1861, called his "office," presumably the end room in the south wing.

In-Depth website

There appears to be less information on his personal habits and tastes than about some of the other members of the family. He was a fine horseman, though not the equal of his younger brother Rooney. Studious and painfully shy in the company of women, he never married. Photographs show him to have been tall and handsome, with dark hair. He rather resembled his father.

Letters to him from his parents suggest that he took part in family activities and was warmly regarded by his brothers and sisters. He was certainly generous and devoted to them. As the eldest son, he was to inherit Arlington at his mother's death, but did not seem interested in running the estate and offered to surrender his share of Arlington to his father in 1858.

In May 1861, Custis resigned his commission in the U.S. Army shortly after Virginia voted to secede from the Union. During the Civil War he attained the rank of Brigadier General, C.S.A., serving as aide-de-camp to President Jefferson Davis of the Confederacy. Though Custis spent most of the war working in Davis's office, he volunteered to take his younger brother Rooney's place as a prisoner of war so that Rooney could come home to be with his dying wife in 1863. After the war he was a professor of military science and engineering at Virginia Military Institute, and in 1871 succeeded his late father as President of Washington College (now Washington & Lee University).

Following the death of his mother, in 1873, Custis brought suit against the U.S. Government in hopes of gaining compensation for Arlington after its seizure during the Civil War. After a long court battle, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Arlington had been illeagally seized and Custis regained title to the property. Knowing that he could not live at Arlington and operate it as a plantation estate, he sold the title back to the U.S. Government for $150,000.

Custis Lee died at Ravensworth in Fairfax County, Virginia in 1913. His association with the rooms at Arlington was primarily with the boys' chamber upstairs and with what Mrs. Lee in 1861, called his "office," presumably the end room in the south wing.

People

<!-- breadcrumbs/this site includes... begin --> people includes: George Washington Parke Custis Robert Edward Lee Mary Anna Custis Lee George Custis Lee Mary Custis Lee William Lee   Anne Carter Lee Eleanor Agnes Lee Robert E. Lee, Jr. Mildred Childe Lee Slavery at Arlington

The Arlington House story is a fascinating collection of events, personalities, relationships and so much more. As one of our interpretive goals at the park, we are trying to bring this rich story to visitors over the internet and will be regularly posting additional narratives on various subjects. Discover the people, places, and stories of Arlington House on these pages.  Check back often for updates.

Jim Parks

Arlington House was home not only to the Custis-Lee family, but to the sixty-three slaves who lived and worked there as well. One of those slaves was Jim Parks, known as “Uncle Jim” later on in his life. Without him, the story of Arlington would be incomplete.
 

James Parks was born sometime in the year of 1843 to Lawrence Parks and Patsy Clark. As a field slave, Mr. Parks rarely saw the inside of the great mansion, but he did remember what happened outside the house. He recalled George Washington Parke Custis, the owner of Arlington, playing the fiddle for dances held in the pavilion near the river. He remembered little about Robert E. Lee, Mr. Custis' son-in-law, but he could name the Lee children from youngest to oldest.

Jim Parks also had vivid memories of the deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Custis. Of Molly Custis, he stated that she died "four years before Major Custis went, too." Lawrence Parks, father of Jim Parks, was one of the pallbearers for Mrs. Custis' funeral. Present at the burial of Mr. Custis in 1857, Jim Parks remarked on the division of the races: "We were standing with the other black folks apart from the white folks, when they laid Mr. Custis beneath his own trees not far from the great house that stands today overlooking the Capital City," quoted from the 1928 Sunday Star article written about Jim Parks.

At the beginning of the Civil War, Jim Parks was eighteen years old. By May of 1861, the Lees had moved to Richmond, Virginia, leaving the slaves and overseer at Arlington. This was the time when people believed that the bloodshed from the war would fit in a lady's thimble. Jim Parks witnessed the aftermath of the battle that would change everyone's minds. He saw Union soldiers streaming over the old road near the present location of the Iwo Jima Memorial running towards Washington after the first battle of Bull Run. Following that defeat, the Union army entrenched itself on the grounds of Arlington building fortifications. Jim Parks helped construct Forts McPherson and Whipple, which is Fort Myer today.

In 1864, two hundred acres of the Arlington estate were set aside as a cemetery for the Civil War dead. Jim Parks stopped building forts and began digging graves. In 1929, he showed the Sunday Star reporter where "coffins had been piled in long rows like cordwood." He eventually prepared the grave of Quartermaster general Montgomery Meigs, who was responsible for converting Arlington into a cemetery.

Jim Parks married twice and fathered twenty-two children. He continued to work at Arlington Cemetery until 1925. That year Congress voted to restore the mansion to its 1861 appearance, which was the last year the Lees had lived on the estate. Partly from the accounts of some of the house slaves and partly from the 1853 Lossing article published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, the interior of the mansion was restored. The exterior was neglected until 1928 when Jim Parks gave his account of the layout of the plantation to Lieutenant Colonel G. Mortimer, quartermaster for the Marine Corps.

Jim Parks gave specific locations for the wells, springs, slave quarters, slave cemetery, dance pavilion, old roads, icehouse, blacksmith shop, and kitchens. Mr. Parks stated that all of his grandparents and parents were buried in the slave cemetery. At the time the article was written, the Department of Agriculture was in the process of uprooting the sacred ground for a farming area. It is not known what happened to the bodies interred in the slave cemetery.

When Jim Parks died in August of 1929, he left behind one of the few slave accounts on record from which Arlington House was restored. His testimony provides a more complete record of the people who inhabited the plantation: the slaves and the Custis-Lee family. The only person buried in Arlington Cemetery who was born on the old plantation, Jim Parks was laid to rest with full military honors: a fitting tribute to a man whose life linked Arlington's past and present.<!-- #EndEditable -->
 

 

Religion at Arlington

Religion was an integral part of the lives of the Arlington House inhabitants. All family members were devoutly Episcopalian and were faithful members of the congregation at Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia. Mrs. Custis, the matriarch of the family, made sure that religion was central to the lives (at least externally) of every person that lived on the plantation, including the family's slaves. Personal papers, such as letters and journals of various family members document the importance placed upon religion by members of the Custis and Lee families. For this prominent Virginia family, religion influenced all aspects of life.

Mrs. Custis' Christian practice was a high priority in her life and this certainly impacted her interactions with those around her. The family routinely began each day with breakfast followed by morning prayers and then Bible reading (perhaps from the great Lee family Bible that waits in the Family Parlor even today). Often they would end their day the same way. Mrs. Custis— and later her daughter, Mrs. Lee— would often hold prayer meetings in that room as well. The truly unique aspect of these times that the family set apart for religious observances is that their slaves were invited and encouraged to participate in them alongside the family.

There still hangs on display an original piece of artwork in the Family Parlor that illustrates the significance of religion to the family. On the East wall of the room is a large painting of The Virgin Mary and the Christ Child, painted by a cousin of Mrs. Custis, Captain Williams. Even as a young man, Williams was said to be an accomplished artist. The prodigy saw the original of this painting while in Italy during the 1830s. Impressed, he copied it meticulously and then presented it to the Custis family upon his return to the United States. Most likely because this room was the focal point of the family's religious lives, it was accordingly hung in the Family Parlor.

Mrs. Custis and her daughter, Mrs. Lee, had very strong opinions on slavery—the most controversial issue of the time period—which would later change the course of the Lee family's life. Their opinions on slavery (along with their opinions on most everything) were primarily influenced by their religious convictions. Christianity teaches that all human lives are important and should thus be valued equally. This belief then affected the way that the family interacted with their slaves.

Despite the fact that it was illegal to educate slaves, Mrs. Custis and Mrs. Lee gave their own the opportunity to learn to read and write. The common belief of other Virginians was that slaves would become too independent if instructed how to read, and that education might lead to an insurrection; but the women of Arlington felt that it was much more important for their slaves to be able to read the Bible for themselves than for the family to be concerned about over-educated slaves.

These beliefs even impacted the slaves' schedules. Every Sunday afternoon, after the family attended services around 10am, Annie and Agnes Lee would hold Sunday school classes for the slave children in the dressing room connected to their bedroom. Mr. and Mrs. Custis also instructed that a chapel be built for their slaves not too far from Arlington House itself. The building was originally intended to serve as a school building for the slaves, but Mr. Custis received no response to his request to hire a school teacher. Instead of letting the building sit unused, Mrs. Custis had it used as a chapel for the slaves of Arlington and any others interested in attending services. The spirituality of her slaves was so important to Mrs. Lee that when she and Robert were at Fort Monroe—where the couple was stationed immediately after their marriage—and their slave Cassie was not allowed in the chapel on base, Mrs. Lee decidedly held Sunday school for the girl at home.[1]

Mary Anna Custis began to strengthen her religious commitment in the summer of 1830, shortly after her engagement to Robert E. Lee. It was a very emotional experience for her. While grateful for her new position in respect to God, she also experienced a large amount of internal conflict. She felt that she was undeserving of this newly discovered grace; her sinful nature was much more apparent to her during this time as she often lamented about her worldliness and vanity. A journal that she began during her engagement period very eloquently describes Mary's religious beliefs and feelings, highlighting her constant desire to be more obedient to God.

She was confirmed on October 5th, 1831. Her new religious outlook on life highlighted her fiancé's lack of religious fervency. In several journal entries, Mary worries about Robert's spirituality and the fact that at this point religion was not as important to him as it was to her. Mary once wrote to Robert: "That God may protect & bless you & above all things may turn your heart to Him is my unceasing prayer for you."[2] Devotedly, Mary prayed that her husband would have a spiritual awakening similar to hers until one July day in 1853.

On July 17 of that year, Lee was confirmed by the Reverend John Johns at Christ Church with two of his daughters, Mary and Annie, alongside. Lee's decision to be confirmed was a joyous, relieving answer to the many prayers his wife had prayed over the course of twenty years. From that point on there was a marked difference in the way that Lee made life decisions. With firm conviction, Lee began to pray and read his Bible daily. He began to go to church regularly—a routine that his religiously committed mother had ingrained in him from day one.[3] Now, as a grown man with grown children of his own, religious beliefs impacted his decisions not only in his personal life but in his military career and during his tenure as a college president as well. He "had come to [Washington College in] Lexington as much a missionary as an educator."[4] Lee weighed his decisions in light of the question: "what was his duty as a Christian and a gentleman?"[5] Truly, his creed of doing that duty was acted upon even in the most challenging of social situations.

Religion was a very powerful force in the lives of the men and women that lived in Arlington House through much of the nineteenth century. Individually as well as collectively, their beliefs guided their interactions with their slaves and aided them in making almost any kind of decision. Any thorough examination of the lives of the Custis and Lee families cannot ignore the fact that, without their religious beliefs, they would have been a very different family remembered in a very different way.

Notes

[1] John Perry, Lady of Arlington, Multnomah Publishers, 2001, 87-8

[2] John Perry, Lady of Arlington, Multnomah Publishers, 2001, 74.

[3] Charles P. Roland, Reflections on Lee, Stackpole Books, 1995, 24.

[4] Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee, Macmilan Publishing Company, 1961, 564.

[5] Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee, Macmilan Publishing Company, 1961, 586.

Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee

The Lees married in the family parlor at Arlington House June 30, 1831. Their marriage produced seven children, six of them born in the dressing room adjoining the Lee's bedroom, according to family tradition. From all appearances, the Lees had a warm and loving family life.

Mary Lee's own correspondence and a diary kept by her daughter, Agnes, paint a vivid picture of her personality. Though sometimes criticized for her housekeeping by her husband, she was a gracious hostess and enjoyed having frequent visitors at Arlington. An artist like her father, she painted delicate landscapes, still on view in the house. Mary was also an avid gardener like her mother. She loved roses and grew 11 varieties in her flower garden at Arlington House. As a young girl, she selected the second floor bedroom which looked out onto her flower garden. She and Robert used this room as the master bedroom after their marriage.

Preferring to spend her time in domestic pursuits, Mary was not interested in the social scene of Washington, but being well educated, versed in both Greek and Latin, she frequently discussed politics with both her father and husband. She also kept abreast of new literature by reading and discussing many books. Her superior education and cultural interests made her eminently qualified to take on the job of editing and publishing her father's Recollections, a collection of news articles and reminisces of life at Mount Vernon with the Washingtons that he periodically contributed to the National Intelligencer. For years friends had urged Mr. Custis to publish these recollections but he had put it off. Mary Lee began the task shortly before her father died in 1857, and it occupied her for over two years. The book, Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington by His Adopted Son, George Washington Parke Custis, with a Memoir of the Author by His Daughter, was published in 1860.

Closely following her mother's example, Mary Lee was very religious. She and her family attended an Episcopal church near army posts where ever they were stationed, and when they were at Arlington, the Lees usually attended Christ Church in Alexandria—the same church that both Mary and Robert had attended in their childhood. Mary followed the Custis family tradition of having family prayers after breakfast and each evening in the family parlor.

Again following the example of her mother, Mary Lee taught Arlington slave women to sew, read and write. Advocating the idea of eventual emancipation, Mary wanted to ensure that all of the enslaved people would be able to support themselves when they were freed.

During her adulthood, Mary developed severe rheumatoid arthritis and became increasingly debilitated as she grew older. To help with the pain, Mary and her family often visited many spas and springs that were reputed to improve health. In letters to her husband, she tried to downplay her illness, but it took its toll as the years passed. By the 1850s Mary organized her daily routine so that she climbed the stairs only twice each day, coming down in the morning and going back up at bedtime. Upon the outbreak of the war, she was walking with difficulty and by the end of 1861 she was confined to a wheelchair—no doubt due to in part to her nomadic existence, moving from plantation to plantation, and the stress of not knowing what was happening to her husband and sons.

Mary and her daughters moved between several family plantations before settling in Richmond where they spent most of the War. Although confined to a wheelchair and in nearly constant pain, she worked hard to support her husband and the Confederate war effort. Throughout the war, she and her daughters knitted socks for Confederate soldiers, which she sent to her husband by the hundreds to distribute to his men.

After the Civil War, Mary accompanied Robert to Lexington, Virginia where he became the president of Washington College, later named Washington & Lee University. Arlington was very important to her and she never quite got over its loss. "Life is waning away, and with the exception of my own immediate family, I am cut off from all I have ever known & loved in my youth & my dear old Arlington I cannot bear to think of that used as it is now & so little hope of my ever getting there again. I do not think I can die in peace until I have seen it once more."

Mary Lee did visit Arlington a few months before her death in 1873. Unable to get out of the carriage, one of her former slaves, brought her a drink of water from the well. "I rode out to my dear old home but so changed it seemed but a dream of the past—I could not have realised (sic) it was Arlington but for the few old oaks they had spared & the trees planted by the Genl and myself which are raising their tall branches to the Heaven which seems to smile on the desecration around them."

Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee died on November 5, 1873 at the age of 66. She is buried next to her husband on the Washington & Lee campus in Lexington, Virginia.

Freedman

On April 16, 1862, Congress passed legislation freeing all slaves in the District of Columbia. Blacks from Virginia and elsewhere flocked to the city in search of work and shelter. Already struggling to meet the needs of their impoverished residents by the fall of 1862, the modest freedmen's camps which the Government had erected in the city were overwhelmed after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing all slaves in the Confederate states January 1, 1863.[9] Overcrowding and steadily deteriorating conditions in the Washington camps drove military authorities to look to create a new camp for "contrabands," outside of the city.[10]

Removed from Washington and occupied by the Union army since with start of the Civil War in 1861, Arlington emerged as a sensible choice for the new camp. On May 5, 1863, Lieutenant Colonel Elias M. Greene, chief quartermaster of the Department of Washington, and Danforth B. Nichols of the Amercian Missionary Association officially selected the Arlington Estate as the site for Freedmen's Village, which they intended to be a model community for freedpersons.

As Greene wrote to Major General S. P. Heintzelman in 1863, the creators believed that the open air would improve the health of the freedmen and have other benefits: "There is the decided advantage afforded to them of the salutary effects of good pure country air and a return to their former healthy avocations as field hands under much happier auspices than heretofore which must prove beneficial to them and will tend to prevent the increase of disease now present among them."[11]

Within a few weeks, 100 former slaves settled on the chosen site, located about one half mile to the south of the Arlington mansion.[12] The following December, Freedmen's Village was officially dedicated with a ceremony attended by members of Congress and other notables.

The symbolic power of transforming part of the Confederate General's plantation estate into a community for freed slaves likely served as a motivation for Greene, Danforth and other Washington officials in charge of creating the village.[13] For many abolitionists and some in the Government, Robert E. Lee, as the leading Confederate General, came to personify slavery and unrealized freedom for millions of blacks in America. The use of his home as a camp for freedpersons was, thus, thought to be very appealing and appropriate by many in the north.

The local Republican press recognized that the location of Freedmen's Village was no accident. Under the headline, "Gen. Lee's Lands Appropriately Confiscated" the Washington, D.C. Morning Chronicle cheered:

General Robert E. Lee, who commands the army of rebels, is fighting to enslave the black man. To accomplish this hellish purpose, he kills the loyal soldiers of the nation, and attempts the destruction of the nation's life. In view of this fact, a happy thought has occurred to the Secretary of War which it gives us pleasure to record….He ordered Col. Green to organize the Freeman's Village… upon the Arlington estate.[14]

As it developed, the design and layout of the village were intended to create a climate of order, sobriety and industry, consistent with the War Department's goal of making the former slaves self-sufficient.[15] An 1865 plan of the settlement shows a very organized community with over fifty residences, a hospital, kitchen/mess hall, school house, "old people's home" and laundry, amongst other structures, neatly arranged around a central pond. As noted and illustrated in Harpers Weekly, many of these structures were already in place in the spring of 1864.

While the physical layout of the village may have developed in line with the ideas of the community's creators, the nature of life at Freedmen's Village proved to be a great departure from this vision. The War Department intended for the Village to be a temporary refuge where residents would be taught vocations and receive a basic education before leaving to find work elsewhere. Quickly, however, population boomed as residents became attached to the community.

The village turned into a semi-permanent settlement and the government developed facilities and infrastructure to support the several thousand residents.[16] Able adult tenants who did not have work elsewhere worked on the government farms which occupied the acreage surrounding the village at Arlington. In exchange for their work, the laborers were paid ten dollars per month, half of which they were required to pay to a general fund to maintain the village.[17]

Some residents came to resent the strict policies and rigid lifestyle which was enforced upon them by the Army and, later, the Bureau of Refugees, Freemen and Abandoned Lands, which took over administration of the village in 1865. The issue of property rents became a particularly divisive one. To help support the village, officials from the Freedmen's Bureau imposed a rent on the tenants. Some freedpersons viewed this rent, which ranged from one to three dollars per month, as an unnecessary burden in their quest to gain self sufficiency and protested by refusing to pay the required sum.[18]

Rent collection became a serious problem as an inspector complained in his May 1866 report to General C.H. Howard, who oversaw the activities of the Freedmen's Bureau at Arlington: "The directions from these Head Quarters requiring all parties renting land on the farm and occupying tenements at Freedman's Village to pay their house rent monthly in accordance have not been obeyed. Twenty-three of these tenants live at the village but few of which have paid any rent though it was due from all the first of the current month."[19] Despite difficulties rents became a constant of life in the village over time.

Tension over rents was only a precursor to other, more serious, issues which residents faced later. As early as 1868, the Federal Government attempted to close Freedmen's Village. The movement to disband the village grew stronger in subsequent years as the property at Arlington became more and more desirable for development and public support for the freedmen's community there waned. Utilizing their newly-acquired rights, the residents organized politically and successfully delayed disbanding efforts for a number of years.

Even by the late, 1880s when eviction was inevitable, the residents continued to fight, electing a committee to petition the Government regarding their unique situation. John Syphax, whose mother had been a slave at Arlington, was chosen to present the committee's views to the Secretary of War.

In a letter to the Secretary in 1888, Syphax asserted that the freedpersons at Arlington should be compensated for the improvements which they had made to the property, and requested a settlement of $350 for each homeowner on the estate. He closed his letter with the following statement, simultaneously reflective of both the improved political rights afforded to African Americans following the Civil War and the gulf which still existed between black and white Americans: "Twenty-four years residence at Arlington, with all the elements involved in this case inspire the hope that full and ample justice will be done even to the weakest members of this great republic."[20]

The Government would eventually compensate the residents $75,000—the appraised value of the dwellings on the property in 1868 and the contraband-fund tax which had been collected during the Civil War—in finally closing Freedmen's Village in 1900.

In spite of the issues and challenges which faced residents, and the eventual closure of the village, living at Freedman's Village was the first experience of a life out of bondage for thousands of African Americans, including a number of the former Custis slaves. Here, on the grounds of a plantation estate that had been built and maintained by the labor of enslaved blacks, residents began a new phase in their experience which they had a heightened measure of control over their lives. With legal rights and freedoms these people could, at least partially, determine their own destinies.

In that sense, the experience of the community's residents, in finally realizing some of the promises of American freedoms while living at Arlington was an appropriate precursor to what the Arlington estate would become; a national memorial ground remembering the sacrifices of thousands who sacrificed tremendously to defend the very freedoms which the freedmen first experienced on the Arlington grounds.

References

[9] Joseph P. Reidy, "Coming form the Shadow of the Past: The Transition from Slavery to Freedom at Freedmen's Village, 1863-1869," The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 95, No. 4 (October 1987), 405-406.

[10] Camp Barker, the main camp for refugees in Washington, averaged 25 deaths per week in 1863, due primarily to outbreaks of disease such as scarlet fever, measles, and whooping cough. At Freedman's Village, the mortality rate dropped considerably—to two per day. See Reidy, 407 and Roberta Schildt, "Freedman's Village: Arlington, VA, 1863-1900," The Arlington Historical Magazine, Vol. 7, No. 4, (October 1984), 15.

[11] Letter, Col. Elias M. Green to Major Gen. S.P. Heintzelman, May 5, 1863. National Archives, RG 92: Records of the Office of the Quartermaster General, Records Relating to Functions: Cemeterial, 1829-1929. General Correspondence and Reports Relating to National and Post Cemeteries ("Cemetery File"), 1865-c.1914. Arlington, VA. Box 7, NM-81, Entry 576.

[12]Schildt, 11.

[13] Commenting on this point, Joseph Reidy argues: "The irony of former slaves building a life of freedom on the Lee family's property tasted sweet to Washington officials and northerners in general." See Reidy, 417.

[14] Morning Chronicle, June 17, 1864.

[15]Reidy, 411.

[16] "'We have a claim on this Estate,' Arlington from Slavery to Freedom," (Department of Interior, National Park Service, 2000), 7.

[17]Reidy, 411. See also, "We have a claim on this Estate…," 8.

[18]Reidy, 413.

[19] Letter, M. Clark. to Gen. C.H. Howard, May 31, 1866. National Archives RG 92: M1055, Roll #6, Records of the Assistant Commissioner for the District of Columbia, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, 1865-1869, Letters Received, May-Oct. 1866, 14100-2419.

[20]Letter, John Syphax to Sec. W.C. Bodicott, Jan. 18, 1888. Copy printed in Freedmen's Village: Arlington, Virginia, 1863-1900, (Arlington, VA:ArlingtonPublic Schools, 1983), 62-64. Original at National Archives.

Anne Carter Lee

Born in 1839, Annie Lee was generally a less outspoken individual and a less dominant personality than her sisters. She was close to Agnes and to her father. Black-haired with rich, dark coloring, she was much like her father. She was a gentle, pious person who devoted much of her time to giving religious instructions to the slave children on the estate, using the room now restored as the playroom for that purpose.

Annie was never strong and her father worried that the housekeeping would be too much for her physically. As a child, she lost her sight in one eye after an unfortunate accident with a pair of scissors. Like most of the family, she was fond of both cats and dogs.

Annie died in 1862, at the age of 23, after contracting typhoid fever at Jones Springs, North Carolina. The room most closely associated with Annie was the girls' bedroom which she shared with Agnes and Mildred.

William Henry Fitzhugh "Rooney" Lee

Rooney, so nicknamed to distinguish him for his cousin and contemporary Fitzhugh Lee of "Clermont," Fairfax County, was the Lees' second son, born in 1837. He was one of the liveliest and most likable of the Lee children. He was adventurous and as a child evoked his father's praise couched in jest. Lee referred to him as "too large to be a man, too small to be horse" and believed he needed a tight rein. When he was eight years old, Rooney cut off his the tips of the forefinger and middle finger on his left hand while playing with a set of straw cutters.

Rooney's adventures during the 1850s kept him away from Arlington much of the time. He entered Harvard in 1854, one of the three Virginians at the school. At Harvard, he was popular and quickly fell in with Boston society. He demonstrated his athletic prowess, pulling an oar on the Harvard crew. He did not remain at Harvard to graduate, however.

In 1857, with the aid of General Winfield Scott, he secured a commission and fought in the campaign of 1858 against the Mormons. When the fighting was over, however, he became bored and by 1859 had given up the army and married Charlotte Wickham. Rooney and Charlotte settled down to farm the White House, the estate on the Pamunkey River in New Kent County, Virginia he had inherited from his grandfather, George Washington Parke Custis.

In 1861, Rooney joined the Confederate Army as a calvary officer under J.E.B. Stuart. Perhaps having the most illustrious career of any of the three Lee sons, Rooney was captured by Union troops at his wife's family home in June 1863, while he was there nursing a thigh wound sustained at the Battle of Brandy Station. He was taken to Fort Lafayette, New York as a prisoner of war and spent eight months there before returning to the Confederate Army in an exchange. During the war Rooney lost his young wife and both of their children.

After the war, Rooney returned to the White House estate. In 1867, he married Mary Tabb Bolling and they eventually had several children. He must have been much impressed by the daily routine he had learned at Arlington when he was growing up. For long after the Civil War, when the days at Arlington were dim memories, he still maintained the old regimen of evening tea, prayers before breakfast and at bed time, and Sunday evening hymn singing. Rooney Lee died in 1891.

Through Rooney and his younger brother Rob, there are over twenty direct descendants of Mary and Robert E. Lee alive today.

Mary Custis Lee

Mary, the Lees' eldest daughter, was born in 1835. She shared a bedroom with Mrs. Lee's young cousin Markie Williams, but was away from Arlington much of the time on extended visits to friends and relatives. She was a large-eyed child who grew into a young woman regarded with some awe by her younger siblings who called her "Sister" rather than Mary. She had beaux who courted her in the flower garden at Arlington and a wide circle of friends, but there is scant reference to the role she played in the daily activities at Arlington.

Although she was the oldest daughter, there is little indication that she assumed many of the household responsibilities. After the death of her grandmother in 1853, it was not Mary, but Markie Williams, who came to Arlington to take care of George Washington Parke Custis when Mrs. Lee had to be away with her husband.

Mary has been characterized as bright, willful, intelligent and cultivated, but she seems to have been somewhat of an outsider to the affairs at Arlington. By traveling, skating, riding and taking long walks, she stayed away from the house. She refused to help with the housework or to accompany her mother and sisters on their summer visits to the resorts. She was most outspoken and regarded by her sisters as bossy and self absorbed. In Mary's later years, travel became almost a fulltime occupation. She filled a scrapbook with visiting cards of European and Middle Eastern nobility and was in Germany when World War I began. Mary never married and died in 1918.

Slavery at Arlington

From its earliest days, Arlington House was home not only to the Custis and Lee families who occupied the mansion, but also to dozens of slaves who lived and labored on the estate.

For nearly sixty years, Arlington functioned as a complex society made up of owners and slaves, whites and blacks. To some observers, on the surface, Arlington appeared as a harmonious community in which owner and slave often lived and worked side by side. Yet an invisible gulf separated the two, as slaves were the legal property of their owners. The enslaved possessed no rights, could not enter into legally binding contracts, and could be permanently separated from their families at a moment's notice. The contributions of the Arlington slaves have been a vital component of Arlington House's history from the beginning.

In 1802, the first slaves to inhabit Arlington arrived at the estate with their owner, George Washington Parke Custis. The grandson of Martha Washington and adopted grandson of George Washington, Custis had grown up at Mount Vernon, as had many of his slaves. Upon Martha Washington's death, Custis inherited her slaves and purchased others who belonged to his mother, Eleanor Custis Stuart. In all, Custis owned nearly 200 slaves and as many as 63 lived and worked at Arlington. (The others worked on his other two plantations, White House and Romancoke, located on the Pamunkey River near Richmond, Virginia.)

Once at Arlington, the slaves constructed log cabins for their homes and began work on the main house. Using the red clay soil from the property and shells from the Potomac river, they made the bricks and stucco used in the walls and exterior of the house. The slaves also harvested timber from the Arlington forest, which was used for the interior flooring and supports. Day to day, the slaves were responsible for keeping up the house and laboring on the plantation, working to harvest corn and wheat which was sold at a market in the city of Washington.

Some slaves had very close relationships with the Lee and Custis members, though these relationships were very much governed by the racial hierarchy which existed between the slaves and slaveholders. Mr. Custis relied heavily on his carriage driver, Daniel Dotson, and Mrs. Lee had a very personal relationship with the head housekeeper, Selina Gray. As Mary's arthritis increasingly restricted her activities through the years, she depended on Selina for assistance with basic tasks. A reflection of their relationship, Mrs. Lee entrusted Selina with the keys to the plantation at the time of the Lees' evacuation from Arlington in May 1861.

There is evidence that some slaves at Arlington had opportunities which were not widely afforded to slaves elsewhere. Mrs. Custis, a devout Episcopalian, tutored slaves in basic reading and writing so that each could read the Bible. Mrs. Lee and her daughters continued this practice even though Virginia law prohibited the education of slaves by the 1840s. Mrs. Custis also persuaded her husband to free several women and children.

Some of these emancipated slaves settled on the Arlington estate, including Maria Carter Syphax who lived with her husband Charles on a seventeen acre plot given to her by the Custises at the time of her emancipation around 1826.

While such allowances may have improved the quality of life for the Arlington slaves, most black men and women on the estate remained legally in bondage until the Civil War. In his will, George Washington Parke Custis stipulated that all the Arlington slaves should be freed upon his death if the estate was found to be in good financial standing or within five years otherwise. When Custis died in 1857, Robert E. Lee—the executor of the estate—determined that the slave labor was necessary to improve Arlington's financial status. The Arlington slaves found Lee to be a more stringent taskmaster than his predacessor. Eleven slaves were "hired out" while others were sent to the Pamunkey River estates. In accordance with Custis's instructions, Lee officially freed the slaves on December 29, 1862.

In 1863, Federally-supported Freedman's Village, a camp for former slaves, was established on the Arlington estate, south of the mansion. Over the next 30 years, many freedman, including some of the former Custis slaves, established permanent homes in Freedman's Village where they learned trades and attended school. Though Freeman's Village closed by 1900, the contributions of the former slaves who worked to build and shape the Arlington estate are not forgotten. Some settled locally and many of their descendants still live in Arlington County today.

The Lee Family Evacuation

Robert E. Lee's pacing could be heard from downstairs. He had retired to his bedroom where the internal struggle between loyalty to state or nation would be decided. Eventually the pacing ceased. When the footsteps resumed Lee was descending the stairs, holding two letters. He handed the letters to his wife saying, "Well Mary, the question is settled. Here is my letter of resignation, and a letter I have written to General Scott."

Within five days of departing for Richmond Lee wrote his wife, "War is inevitable, and there is no telling when it will burst around you….You have to move and make arrangements to go to some point of safety which you must select." As the weeks progressed and Union forces began concentrating in Washington it became more apparent that Mrs. Lee would have to prepare her House for evacuation.

Mrs. Lee had no intention of permanently abandoning the House and was slow at first to act upon her husband's advice. In a letter to her daughter Mildred on May 5, she stated, "I would not stir from this house, even if the whole northern army were to surround it." On May 11, she referred to her husbands worries. "Were it not that I would not add one feather to his load of cares," she would have remained at Arlington come what may.

In the end, however, it was Robert E. Lee's concerns and a report of immediate occupation that drove her to evacuate. The warning shot across the bow came in early May in the form of Orton Williams, a cousin who came to Arlington House with alarming news. He warned Mrs. Lee that she must pack up her valuables immediately as the Union army was preparing to cross the Potomac and occupy Arlington in a matter of hours.

Though Orton's warning turned out to be a false alarm, it was an event that crystallized the need to prepare the house for an orderly evacuation. Mrs. Lee's arthritis restricted her role in the physical work of preparing the house for evacuation but she supervised the hasty preparations. The family silver was packed away along with the personal papers of George Washington, her father George Washington Parke Custis and her husband Robert E. Lee and were sent to Richmond.

Mrs. Lee informed her husband of the evacuation's progress on May 9, 1861. "I suppose ere this, dear Robert, you have heard of the arrival of our valuables in Richmond. We have sent many others to Ravensworth & all our wine & stores, pictures, piano etc."

Six days later, on May 15, 1861, Mrs. Lee entrusted the keys to the house to Selina Gray, the chief house slave, and the Lees left Arlington. The family headed first to the White House Plantation and eventually on to Richmond. Selina and the rest of the Arlingtons slaves were to run the estate as though the Lees were to any day return.

On May 23, 1861 Virginians voted 96,750 yay, 32,134 nay, in favor of secession. The next day, the United States Army crossed the Potomac and occupied the defensible ground around Washington, including the Arlington Estate. Arlington House itself was not immediately occupied by Union forces.

A few weeks after her family's evacuation, Mrs. Lee corresponded with the Union army commander General McDowell and he assured her that the house had not been occupied and that he would do his utmost to protect it. He could not make similar assurances about the 1,100 acres which surrounded the house. Fortifications were constructed, military roads built and trees cut down to clear lines of fire.

Such actions were redoubled as the Union Army reorganized after its defeat at Manassas in July 1861. By the war's end, two forts, Whipple and McPherson, stood on the northwest portion of the Arlington estate and three other forts were constructed to the west and south of the estate.

With the illusion of a short war shattered at Manassas in the summer of 1861 the necessities of war trumped McDowell's earlier assurances to Mrs. Lee regarding Arlington House. The enlarging the Union army's staff and strengthening the defensive lines around Washington required that Mrs. Lee's house could not be allowed to go unused by the Union Army. Eventually, Union officers took up residence in the house and Mrs. Lee's home was transformed into a military headquarters.

In a letter to his wife on Christmas Day 1861 Lee commented upon the changes war would likely bring to Arlington. "As to our old house, if not destroyed, it will be difficult even to be recognized. Even if the enemy had wished to preserve it, the change of officers, the want of fuel, shelter etc, all the dire necessities of war, it is vain to think of its being in a habitable condition. I fear too, books, furniture & the relics of Mt. Vernon will be gone. It is better to make up our minds to a general loss. They cannot take away the remembrances of the spot, & the memories of those that to us render it sacred. That will remain to us as long as life will last, & that we can preserve."

In January 1862 a Wisconsin soldier's description of the Arlington house rang true to Lee's prediction. "The grand old southern homestead of Arlington, with its quaint and curious pictures on the wall, its spectacular apartments, broad halls and stately pillars in front, was an object of especial interest; but, abandoned by its owner, General Robert E. Lee, who was using his great power as a military leader, to destroy the Government he had sworn to defend, it was now a desolation. The military headquarters of McDowell's division was in the Arlington House, which was open to the public and hundreds tramped at will through its apartments."

Arlington would never be the same.<!-- #EndEditable -->

The Gray Family

Selina was the personal maid of Mrs. Robert E. Lee and the two enjoyed a very close relationship. In 1861, under the threat of union occupation, the Lee family evacuated Arlington and Mrs. Lee left the household keys, symbolizing authority, responsibility and her trust to Selina Gray. Locked away inside Arlington House were many of the "Washington Treasures." These pieces were cherished family heirlooms that had once belonged to Mrs. Lee's great-grandmother, Martha Custis Washington, and President George Washington.

The United States Army assumed control of the Arlington Estate on May 24,1861. Later, U.S. Army officers occupied the house. When Mrs. Gray discovered some of the treasures had been stolen, she confronted the soldiers and ordered them "not to touch any of Mrs. Lee's things." Gray alerted General Irvin McDowell, commander of the United States troops, to the importance of the Washington heirlooms. The remaining pieces were sent to the Patent Office for safekeeping. Through Selina Gray's efforts, many of the Washington pieces were saved for posterity.

Union Occupation: 1861-1865

On May 24, 1861, in the wake of Virginia's decision to secede from the Union, thousands of U.S. Army troops marched across the Potomac River to form a defensive perimeter around Washington, D.C. Units commanded by Major General Charles W. Sandford occupied the Arlington Heights and troops set to work fortifying the area around the vacated mansion home of Robert E. Lee and his family.

Within a matter of days, the first entrenchments were in place[1] and Sandford took up residence in the house, describing his decision to do so as a safekeeping measure: "Finding the mansion vacated by the family, I stated to some of the servants left there that had the family remained I would have established a guard for their security from annoyance; but, in consequence of their absence, that I would by occupying it myself, be responsible for the perfect care and security of the house and everything in and about it." [2]

Concerns for preserving the house and grounds at Arlington would fade following the Union defeat at First Manassas a few weeks later. After the retreat from Manassas, efforts to fortify the area intensified. Many acres of the Arlington Forest were cut, as timbers were needed for Army structures and entrenchments.[3]

Describing the scene at Arlington in a letter to his wife, one Union soldier wrote: "I would like to draw you a picture of how it looks here, but I can't. But I will sum it up by saying desolation and ruin. There seems to be plenty of men, guns, cannon, music, horses, wagons, and mules and tents in sight, which is about all that can be seen…. The fences are gone and the country around here is all stumped over and trod down… Such is a short sketch of the place where I now live. Ain't it pleasant?"[4]

General Irwin McDowell and his staff officers occupied Arlington House and used the house as a headquarters building. The Army constructed additional housing for officers near the stables to the west of the mansion and altered existing farm structures along the river for use as an army corral and veterinary facility. Additionally, many other canvas and wood structures were erected on the property to accommodate the soldiers, animals and equipment of the war effort.[5]

In order to ensure passage of troops and communication between the Fort Whipple, built on the Northwest portion of the estate, and several other forts constructed in the vicinity, the Union army cut several roads and paths through the Arlington Forest.[6]These roads were also served a strategic purpose in providing an alternative route of retreat from the headquarters in Arlington House should Confederates advance on Carriage Drive, the lone passage up to the mansion prior to the War.[7]

As these physical changes turned over Arlington, at least some of the Union soldiers stationed on the property stopped to consider the significance of the place where they camped. As a Wisconsin soldier wrote of Arlington House in 1862, "The grand old southern homestead of Arlington, with its quaint and curious pictures on the wall, its spectacular apartments, broad halls and stately pillars in front, was an object of especial interest; but, abandoned by its owner, General Robert E. Lee, who was using his great power as a military leader, to destroy the Government he had sworn to defend, it was now a desolation. The military headquarters of McDowell's division was in the Arlington House, which was open to the public and hundreds tramped at will through its apartments."[8]

Some, like this man, seemed to consider the changes at Arlington to be Lee's punishment for his decision to follow Virginia when it seceded from the Union. Such an attitude was not uncommon as many in the Union army viewed Lee as a traitor who had acted dishonorably in resigning his U.S. Army commission at the start of the Civil War. Thus, for these people, the transformations at Arlington were Lee's just fruits. Subsequent developments on the estate during the War would only contribute to such a feeling, as the Government looked for new ways to use the Arlington estate.

References

[1] V.P. Corbett's "Sketch of the Seat of War in Alexandria and Fairfax Co.," dated May 31, 1861—just one week after Union forces crossed the Potomac—shows three New York regiments (the 7th, 8th and 25th) camped on the Arlington Estate and entrenchments in place to the north and south of Arlington House. See "Sketch of the Seat of War in Alexandria and Fairfax Co." by V.P. Corbett, Library of Congress, American Memory Collection.

[2] The War of the Rebellion, A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Vol. II. (Washington:Government Printing Office, 1880), 38. Report dated May 28, 1861.

[3] Jennifer G. Hanna, "Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial Cultural Landscape Report," (Department of Interior, National Park Service, 2001), 38.

[4] Mark H. Dunkelman, "Camp Seward on Arlington Heights: A Yankee Regiment's First Stop in Dixie," Arlington Historical Magazine 10, no. 2 (1994): 11.

[5] Hanna, 29.

[6] Road construction began almost immediately as indicated in Major General Sandford's report on the operations at Arlington dated May 28, 1861: "During the 26th, I completed my examination of the roads and woods in the vicinity of Arlington and near the position of the Fifth and Twenty-eighth Regiments, and upon consultation with Capt. W.H. Wood, of the Third U.S. Infantry, concluded to change the position of those regiments to a point more capable of support from the Eighth on the left and form the Sixty-ninth on the right, and to cut a road through the woods in a direct line from the outposts in the rear of Arlington House to the new position on the Leesburg road. This road is now in the course of construction." See The War of the Rebellion, A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Vol. II. (Washington:Government Printing Office, 1880), 39.

[7] Hanna, 51.

[8] Rufus Dawes, A Full-Blooded Yankee of the Iron Brigade (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 33.

In-Depth Webpages

On May 24, 1861, in the wake of Virginia's decision to secede from the Union, thousands of U.S. Army troops marched across the Potomac River to form a defensive perimeter around Washington, D.C. Units commanded by Major General Charles W. Sandford occupied the Arlington Heights and troops set to work fortifying the area around the vacated mansion home of Robert E. Lee and his family.

Within a matter of days, the first entrenchments were in place[1] and Sandford took up residence in the house, describing his decision to do so as a safekeeping measure: "Finding the mansion vacated by the family, I stated to some of the servants left there that had the family remained I would have established a guard for their security from annoyance; but, in consequence of their absence, that I would by occupying it myself, be responsible for the perfect care and security of the house and everything in and about it." [2]

Concerns for preserving the house and grounds at Arlington would fade following the Union defeat at First Manassas a few weeks later. After the retreat from Manassas, efforts to fortify the area intensified. Many acres of the Arlington Forest were cut, as timbers were needed for Army structures and entrenchments.[3]

Describing the scene at Arlington in a letter to his wife, one Union soldier wrote: "I would like to draw you a picture of how it looks here, but I can't. But I will sum it up by saying desolation and ruin. There seems to be plenty of men, guns, cannon, music, horses, wagons, and mules and tents in sight, which is about all that can be seen…. The fences are gone and the country around here is all stumped over and trod down… Such is a short sketch of the place where I now live. Ain't it pleasant?"[4]

General Irwin McDowell and his staff officers occupied Arlington House and used the house as a headquarters building. The Army constructed additional housing for officers near the stables to the west of the mansion and altered existing farm structures along the river for use as an army corral and veterinary facility. Additionally, many other canvas and wood structures were erected on the property to accommodate the soldiers, animals and equipment of the war effort.[5]

In order to ensure passage of troops and communication between the Fort Whipple, built on the Northwest portion of the estate, and several other forts constructed in the vicinity, the Union army cut several roads and paths through the Arlington Forest.[6]These roads were also served a strategic purpose in providing an alternative route of retreat from the headquarters in Arlington House should Confederates advance on Carriage Drive, the lone passage up to the mansion prior to the War.[7]

As these physical changes turned over Arlington, at least some of the Union soldiers stationed on the property stopped to consider the significance of the place where they camped. As a Wisconsin soldier wrote of Arlington House in 1862, "The grand old southern homestead of Arlington, with its quaint and curious pictures on the wall, its spectacular apartments, broad halls and stately pillars in front, was an object of especial interest; but, abandoned by its owner, General Robert E. Lee, who was using his great power as a military leader, to destroy the Government he had sworn to defend, it was now a desolation. The military headquarters of McDowell's division was in the Arlington House, which was open to the public and hundreds tramped at will through its apartments."[8]

Some, like this man, seemed to consider the changes at Arlington to be Lee's punishment for his decision to follow Virginia when it seceded from the Union. Such an attitude was not uncommon as many in the Union army viewed Lee as a traitor who had acted dishonorably in resigning his U.S. Army commission at the start of the Civil War. Thus, for these people, the transformations at Arlington were Lee's just fruits. Subsequent developments on the estate during the War would only contribute to such a feeling, as the Government looked for new ways to use the Arlington estate.

References

[1] V.P. Corbett's "Sketch of the Seat of War in Alexandria and Fairfax Co.," dated May 31, 1861—just one week after Union forces crossed the Potomac—shows three New York regiments (the 7th, 8th and 25th) camped on the Arlington Estate and entrenchments in place to the north and south of Arlington House. See "Sketch of the Seat of War in Alexandria and Fairfax Co." by V.P. Corbett, Library of Congress, American Memory Collection.

[2] The War of the Rebellion, A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Vol. II. (Washington:Government Printing Office, 1880), 38. Report dated May 28, 1861.

[3] Jennifer G. Hanna, "Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial Cultural Landscape Report," (Department of Interior, National Park Service, 2001), 38.

[4] Mark H. Dunkelman, "Camp Seward on Arlington Heights: A Yankee Regiment's First Stop in Dixie," Arlington Historical Magazine 10, no. 2 (1994): 11.

[5] Hanna, 29.

[6] Road construction began almost immediately as indicated in Major General Sandford's report on the operations at Arlington dated May 28, 1861: "During the 26th, I completed my examination of the roads and woods in the vicinity of Arlington and near the position of the Fifth and Twenty-eighth Regiments, and upon consultation with Capt. W.H. Wood, of the Third U.S. Infantry, concluded to change the position of those regiments to a point more capable of support from the Eighth on the left and form the Sixty-ninth on the right, and to cut a road through the woods in a direct line from the outposts in the rear of Arlington House to the new position on the Leesburg road. This road is now in the course of construction." See The War of the Rebellion, A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series I, Vol. II. (Washington:Government Printing Office, 1880), 39.

[7] Hanna, 51.

[8] Rufus Dawes, A Full-Blooded Yankee of the Iron Brigade (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 33.