Washington DC-Arlington, Lincoln, Washington memorials

We decided to go to Washington DC. I've been before (but it's been more than 10 years), Trent never has. Obviously the kids have not and they probably won't remember a whole lot, but like most other things, we don't wait until they can fully remember before taking them to great places...they can still get a feeling for the place and remember that Mom and Dad thinks that this is something important...which is far more powerful than just telling them we live in a great country. For adults, there is so much to see and learn. For kids, there are wide open spaces to walk around outside and inside the buildings they have enough big, new things to look at and hands-on exhibits to keep their interest. Also doesn't hurt that every museum and memorial was free. The weather was perfect. SUNNY! And in the 70s every day. A little windy the first day, but we were just glad the cloud cover was gone. Had to bring out the sunscreen for the first time this year. Our drive to Reston, Virginia the first day was very nice. We were sad to drive the last leg in darkness because some of the scenery and houses looked really impressive and would have been nice to see in full daylight (and we didn't exactly make the return trip in daylight either). The kids were so giddy the first night it was a little difficult to get them to sleep.

Do you know how Arlington Cemetery came to be? Link here. The land originally belonged to George Washington Parke Custis-all 1,100 acres of it. He was the step-grandson and adopted son of George Washington. He gave the land to his daughter, Mary Lee, who married Robert E. Lee...and I hope we don't need to explain who Robert E. was. Once Robert resigned his post in the US army and took a command in the Confederate's cause, his estate was seen as a strategic location to set up an artillery line-being so high up and able to shoot down any advancements coming from the new capital. Orton Williams was Mary's cousin and suitor to her daughter Agnes and worked as private secretary to General in Chief Winfield Scott of the Union Army. He must have found out about the Union's plans to take Arlington (where Mary Lee still held her residence) and ran to warn her of the impending danger and to leave quickly for a more safe location. She boxed the family silver, and crated George Washington's and G.W.P. Custis' papers and General Lee's files and went to various family plantations...thinking, like most, that this war would quickly be over. Her husband, General Lee, wrote, "I am very anxious about you," he had written her on April 26. "War is inevitable, and there is not 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. The Mount Vernon plate and pictures ought to be secured. Keep quiet while you remain, and in your preparations . . . May God keep and preserve you and have mercy on all our people." (quote found here).

 

After taking a final turn in the garden, she gave the house keys to slave Selina Gray. On May 23, 1861 voters in Virgina approved succession. "Within hours, columns of Union forces streamed through Washington and made for the Potomac. At precisely 2 a.m. on May 24, some 14,000 troops began crossing the river into Virginia. They advanced in the moonlight on steamers, on foot and on horseback, in swarms so thick that James Parks, a Lee family slave watching from Arlington, thought they looked "like bees a-coming." The undefended estate changed hands without a whimper. When the sun rose that morning, the place was teeming with men in blue. They established a tidy village of tents, stoked fires for breakfast and scuttled over the mansion's broad portico with telegrams from the War Office. The surrounding hills were soon lumpy with breastworks, and massive oaks were felled to clear a line of fire for artillery."

Later, to find a place for the more than 1,500 newly freed slaves, they set up a Freedmen's Village at Arlington with frame houses, schools, churches, and farmlands to grow food for the Union army.  "'One sees more than poetic justice in the fact that its rich lands, so long the domain of the great general of the rebellion, now afford labor and support to hundreds of enfranchised slaves,' a visiting journalist would report in the Washington Independent in January 1867."

When the Union decided to heft taxes upon the rebels and charge Mary Lee a sum of $92.07, she attempted to pay through her cousin Philip R. Fendall...because she was too sick to go herself. The commissioners in Alexandria denied the payment saying that she must present the tax in person. They declared the property in default and put it up for sale. The auction was held on a day so cold that blocks of ice stopped boat traffic and the house fell to the sole bidder-the federal government-who paid $26,800 for a property valued at $34,100. Fighting continued far longer than anyone expected, bodies were being piled up with no place for them to be laid...until they decided upon using Arlington.

"The first soldier laid to rest there was Pvt. William Christman, 21, of the 67th Pennsylvania Infantry, who was buried in a plot on Arlington's northeast corner on May 13, 1864. A farmer newly recruited into the Army, Christman never knew a day of combat. Like others who would join him at Arlington, he was felled by disease; he died of peritonitis in Washington's Lincoln General Hospital on May 11. His body was committed to the earth with no flags flying, no bugles playing and no family or chaplain to see him off. A simple pine headboard, painted white with black lettering, identified his grave, like the markers for Pvt. William H. McKinney and other soldiers too poor to be embalmed and sent home for burial. The indigent dead soon filled the Lower Cemetery—a name that described both its physical and social status—across the lane from a graveyard for slaves and freedmen."

"To enforce his orders—and to make Arlington uninhabitable for the Lees—Meigs evicted officers from the mansion, installed a military chaplain and a loyal lieutenant to oversee cemetery operations, and proceeded with new burials, encircling Mrs. Lee's garden with the tombstones of prominent Union officers. The first of these was Capt. Albert H. Packard of the 31st Maine Infantry. Shot in the head during the Battle of the Second Wilderness, Packard had miraculously survived his journey from the Virginia front to Washington's Columbian College Hospital, only to die there. On May 17, 1864, he was laid to rest where Mary Lee had enjoyed reading in warm weather, surrounded by the scent of honeysuckle and jasmine. By the end of 1864, some 40 officers' graves had joined his."

This made Mary Lee a little mad. 

"I cannot write with composure on my own cherished Arlington," she wrote to a friend. The graves "are planted up to the very door without any regard to common decency....If justice & law are not utterly extinct in the U.S., I will have it back."

She tried to reclaim her home by taking it to court.

"Her proposal was bitterly protested on the Senate floor and defeated, 54 to 4. It was a disaster for Mary Lee, but the debate helped to elevate Arlington's status: no longer a potter's field created in the desperation of wartime, the cemetery was becoming something far grander, a place senators referred to as hallowed ground, a shrine for "the sacred dead," "the patriot dead," "the heroic dead" and "patriotic graves."

Her husband, Robert E. Lee tried to quietly take it back as well, hiring a few lawyers and having them coordinate with his brother, but all efforts were thwarted-mostly due to the dedicated hatred of Montgomery Meigs towards the Lees. A couple more attempts were made to regain the estate, but not until Mary and Robert's son, George Washington Custis Lee (who went by Custis), brought it to the courts once Rutherford Hayes took office was it finally returned to the family-on the basis that the levied tax was wrongfully rejected when a good-faith attempt to pay was made. Even Custis had to take it to court more than once.

"This left few options for the federal government, which was now technically trespassing on private property. It could abandon an Army fort on the grounds, roust the residents of Freedmen's Village, disinter almost 20,000 graves and vacate the property. Or it could buy the estate from Custis Lee—if he was willing to sell it.
He was. Both sides agreed on a price of $150,000, the property's fair market value. Congress quickly appropriated the funds. Lee signed papers conveying the title on March 31, 1883, which placed federal ownership of Arlington beyond dispute. The man who formally accepted title to the property for the government was none other than Robert Todd Lincoln, secretary of war and son of the president so often bedeviled by Custis Lee's father." Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Battle-of-Arlington.html#ixzz1wCKu3DZn

So, a step-relative of George Washington's found herself on the rebel side of a Civil War, lost the estate and had it turned into a National Cemetery to fill the growing need for those who had given their lives to a cause they believed in (and heavily influenced by the desire Meigs had to turn the property of a "turncoat" to the Union into a place uninhabitable should he ever attempt to return). Then, after being re-taken by the Lee family, it was sold to the government, officially and constitutionally this time, to build a National Cemetery for a place to remember and memorialize the sacrifice of so many. 

It's no wonder I thoroughly enjoyed walking through the grounds of this hallowed place. It was nice to read some of the names of the people here and there. This Nation has seen countless people who offered their time and lives for the good of their country. They should have a place where those whom they fought to protect can come and pay respects. It was a worthy cause they undertook, which cost them everything they had. Nice of the Lees to give us all a place to thank them by. 

In this photo, from the place I was standing, every 15 degrees had the tombstones in a military formation.

We walked up the hill to visit the John F. Kennedy memorial and read all his famous quotes chiseled into the stone. I like the first one because it explicitly acknowledges that God is at the helm. And we are not to wait around and hope that He will do all the work for us with no strong effort on our part...while sometimes the only sure reward to come of it is a conscience free of guilt that we did not shrink in the face of our responsibilities. (Could the current Administration say this?!!)

WITH A GOOD CONSCIENCE OUR ONLY SURE REWARD, WITH HISTORY THE FINAL JUDGE OF OUR DEEDS 

LET US GO FORTH TO LEAD THE LAND WE LOVE. ASKING HIS BLESSING AND HIS HELP. BUT KNOWING THAT HERE ON EARTH GOD'S WORK MUST TRULY BE OUR OWN.

AND SO MY FELLOW AMERICANS

ASK NOT WHAT YOUR COUNTRY CAN DO FOR YOU

ASK WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR YOUR COUNTRY

MY FELLOW CITIZENS OF THE WORLD, ASK NOT WHAT AMERICA WILL DO FOR YOU, BUT WHAT TOGETHER WE CAN DO FOR THE FREEDOM OF MAN.

Robert and Mary probably did not envision a bunch of young children running all over the grounds. And the kids were more excited about small walls to jump up on, run across and play over rather than think about the thousands of people who come here for their final resting place.

He genuinely enjoys having her around and she mutually finds the relationship of an advantageous nature.

The tombstones lead to the memorial for women in the service, then you follow the road behind it, over the bridge and you run into the Lincoln memorial. Go to the right and you'll see the Washington memorial.

Several three, four and 1 five star Generals.

Welcome to the Lee's residence...er, The Arlington National Cemetery.

We crossed the bridge and came over to say hello to Honest Abe.

Abraham has a great view.

Washington Memorial was another short walk over.

Kyleigh's hair is a good reflection of the windy day we had.

After this we had lunch at McDonalds and then over to visit the Air and Space museum. A fairly exhausting day with all the walking (kids made excellent use of the stroller...it never experienced much vacancy).
Trent and I had big smiles on our faces most of the day checking out all the historically important or mechanically cool (air and space) stuff to see. Would we do it again with two small children? You bet. Would it be nice to visit on our own and at our own leisure or when the kids are older and we can read more of the info about the things we were looking at? Sure, but we might not be as close as we are right now and it's terribly important to us to take time to become more educated about what has gone before...it helps me to appreciate my present. And gratitude is something that could always use a little more cultivation.