History of Arlington Cemetery

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History of Arlington Cemetery
By: Robert M. PooleDate:May26 , 2011

A month before Arlington officially became a national cemetery, the burials began there. It was an act of improvisation born of necessity to process the war’s carnage before it became a public health or a public relations nuisance. More than a touch of vengeance was involved too, courtesy of Brig. Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs.

 

While some details of Arlington’s transition from plantation to cemetery remain obscured by the confusion of war and the passage of time, there is no doubt about the first soldier laid to rest on the Lee estate: That honor belongs to Pvt. William Christman, twenty-one, of the 67th Pennsylvania Infantry, buried on May 13, 1864, just as Lee and Grant plunged into their blistering Forty Days’ Campaign. The private’s grave was situated in a poorly drained sector of Arlington, down among the low hills skirting what was then the Alexandria-Georgetown Pike. This far corner of the estate was out of sight of the mansion, where Union officers lived and worked. Not wishing to have the view marred by new graves, they directed the first burials well away from the house.

 

James Parks, the family slave who had witnessed Lee’s departure in 1861, was still living at Arlington when the initial wave of war casualties appeared there. He went to work digging the cemetery’s first graves, struggling to keep pace with the long rows of coffins that appeared each morning, stacked in the hills “like cordwood,” as he recalled it. These burials took place in the Lower Cemetery, which describes a location as well as the social status of those destined for the potter’s field, the place meant for poor enlisted men such as Private Christman.

 

Like others who would join him in the Lower Cemetery, Private Christman was felled by disease instead of a bullet. He developed measles and died of peritonitis in Washington’s Lincoln General Hospital on May 11, 1864. A farmer newly recruited into the army, Christman never knew a day of combat. He was committed http://www.commandposts.com/2011/05/history-of-arlington-cemetery/