Was the Arlington national cemetery stolen?

Answer 1

Well, it was "confiscated". Arlington was an estate with a large home owned by the wife of General Robert E. Lee. Mrs. Lee was a granddaughter of Martha Washington and had inherited Arlington. Arlington House is today called the "Custis-Lee" mansion and sits atop the hill above where president Kennedy is buried. He had visited the house a few months before he was murdered and had admired the view, and said what a lovely place it would be to be buried.

Arlington is just across the Potomac River from Washington D. C., in a part of Virginia taken very early in the Civil War by the Yankees. The Quartermaster General of the US Army was Montgomery Meigs. He was responsible, among other things, for seeing to it that Federal soldiers killed in the Civil War were buried. Existing cemeteries were soon full, and Meigs was feeling vindictive himself, because his own son had been among the Federal soldiers who were already dead. So Meigs issued an order "confiscating" Arlington as the property of an enemy of the US, for use as a cemetery. Burials of Federal troops began on the grounds. The crews doing the actual interments began by burying fallen soldiers in fields far from the house. Meigs visited his new cemetery and was infuriated by this. He chewed out the burial crews and gave them explicit orders that fallen Yankees should be buried all over the lawn of the house, and right by the foundations of the house. He thought this would make it impossible for anyone to ever live in the house again (and no one has). If he considered how the families of the fallen soldiers might have felt about this use of the bodies of their loved ones, there is no record of it.

After the war was over General Lee filed a claim with the Federal government over this "confiscation" of Arlington. He was ignored. Finally, many years after General Lee was dead, the Federal government did pay something to his heirs for Arlington.

Federal troops had also burned another historic home belonging to the Lee family, called the "White House", on the Pamunkey River in Virginia. This home had been inherited by one of General Lee's sons. George Washington had married his wife in the "White House". The area where it was located came under Union control. For a time Yankee generals protected the house and used it as a headquarters. When reverses drove the Yankees away, they could not contain themselves and burned it to the ground.