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McLean,
Sheridan and the Arlington National Cemetery
By Susan Olling
An important anniversary occurred earlier this month: General Robert E.
Lee surrendered his army to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox
Court House, Virginia in 1865. I’ve given some thought about the
characters and locations in the four-year catastrophe that was the
American Civil War. Lincoln, Grant, Sherman and Lee are among the
most remembered people from that war. Gettysburg, Fredericksburg
and Antietam come to mind when thinking of the fighting. There
are two people, one a civilian and the other a cavalry officer, and one
location from those four years of war that I find most
compelling.
Wilmer McLean seemed to have lived a fairly quiet life in Manassas,
Virginia. At least until July 1861 when his property became part
of the battlefield during First Bull Run. (Around here, it’s
First Manassas; but I learned my American history in the North.)
He moved his family shortly thereafter further south in Virginia where
he thought they would be more safe. For four years, they
were. Things changed in April 1865. Union and Confederate
officers, whose troops had worked their way along both sides of the
Appomattox River, appeared in Appomattox Court House to find a suitable
place for the Army of Northern Virginia to surrender to the Army of the
Potomac. Wilmer McLean’s house was selected. The surrender
took place on 09 Apr 1865. The rebuilt house is part of The
Appomattox Court House National Historical Park, a unit of the National
Park Service.
General Philip Sheridan has pretty much taken a back seat to Generals
Grant and Sherman. In 1864, Sheridan commanded the Army of the
Shenandoah and was under orders to clean out the Shenandoah Valley, the
breadbasket of the Confederacy. The Valley Campaign was a
masterpiece, as Sheridan and his men obeyed those orders to the
letter. We remember Grant’s success at Petersburg, Virginia and
Sherman’s March to the Sea, but the Valley Campaign played an equally
important part in the final defeat of the Confederate States of
America. By April 1865, Sheridan was with Grant’s army and was
present in the parlor of the McLean house when the surrender document
was signed.
The location: an estate sitting on a hill in Arlington County,
Virginia. Arlington House was built by George Washington Parke
Custis in the early years of the 19th century. The mansion, and
the 1100 acres that made up the estate was, in the spring of 1861, the
home of Robert E. Lee and his wife Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee (it
was hers before it was his.). The property was seized by the
federal government in 1861 for non-payment of taxes (going to Richmond
to pay the tax was going to be difficult, as the trip went through
enemy lines). By 1864, all of the military cemeteries in and
around Washington City were full. In that year the Quartermaster
of the Army, Montgomery Miegs, decided to begin burying Union dead on
the acreage that made up the Arlington House estate so that the Lees
would not be able to live there again. This was the beginning of
Arlington National Cemetery. The story might have ended there,
but Custis Lee, the oldest son of Robert and Mary, should have
inherited the property. Custis Lee took his case to court in the
early 1870s. The suits to reclaim the property dragged on for
several years. In the early 1880s, Mr. Lee’s case was heard by
the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices ruled that the federal
government had seized the Arlington estate illegally. The
government was to either return the property to Mr. Lee or pay an
appropriate amount of financial compensation. After all those
years, though, there had been 40,000 burials in the cemetery. Mr.
Lee refused to live on his family’s old estate. Congress paid
Custis Lee $150,000 for the house and the acreage. That sum may
not sound like a large one now, but it was then.
There were programs at Arlington House this past April to commemorate
the events that occurred in the first few days of April 1865. My
husband, Mr. History, and I attended some of these programs.
There were period musicians and dancing, tours of the mansion, and a
short walking tour to graves of some of those Union officers who were
present at the surrender at McLean house. Philip Sheridan is
buried, along with his family, in Section 2 of the cemetery, very close
to the mansion.
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