“The creation of one of America’s most sacred spaces occurred immediately after one of the worst days of violence and horror in the country’s military history.”
By John Reeves
AT 4:35 A.M. on May 12, 1864, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant launched an assault against the center of General Robert E. Lee’s line just outside the strategic town of Spotsylvania Court House.
The deployment of Lee’s forces at this location jutted outwards, resembling a “mule shoe,” a feature also referred to by the men as “the salient.” The fighting here on May 12 would be nonstop for nearly 24 hours.
At the western tip of Lee’s fortifications—forever remembered as the “Bloody Angle”—the contest was especially murderous. On the morning after the slaughter there, a reporter covering the war for the New York Times wrote:
“The scene of the conflict, from which I have just come, presents a spectacle of horror that curdles the blood of the boldest. The angle of the works at which Hancock[1] entered, and for the possession of which the savage fight of the day was made, is a perfect Golgotha. In this angle of death the dead and wounded rebels lie, this morning, literally in piles—men in the agonies of death groaning beneath the dead bodies of comrades.”
The correspondent concluded: “The one exclamation of every man who looks on the spectacle is, ‘God forbid that I should ever gaze upon such a sight again.’”
The combat at the salient that had begun at 4:35 a.m. on Thursday, May 12 finally ended around 3 a.m. on Friday, May 13. Later that Friday, roughly 65 miles away in Arlington, Virginia, the first two Union soldiers would be buried at a new cemetery on the estate where Robert E. Lee and his family had lived prior to the war. The creation of one of America’s most sacred spaces occurred immediately after one of the worst days of violence and horror in the nation’s history.
The founding of the new cemetery at Robert E. Lee’s Arlington estate had been the idea of Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meigs. Many years after the war, a member of the Meigs family reported that President Abraham Lincoln had asked his quartermaster general what should be done with Arlington in the spring of 1864. “Why not make it a field of honor?” Meigs replied. “The ancients filled their enemies’ fields with salt and made them useless forever but we are a Christian nation, why not make it a field of honor.”[2]
Prior to the establishment of Arlington National Cemetery, Union soldiers that died in local hospitals were buried at the Old Soldiers’ Home, a site three miles north of the White House in Washington, D.C. By May 1864, roughly 8,000 soldiers had been buried at the asylum. On May 13, 1864, however, the cemetery at the Old Soldiers’ Home had reached capacity and “the Secretary of War directed that a new site be selected on Lee’s farm, at Arlington, Va.”
The first burial at Arlington, on May 13, 1864, was of Private William Christman of the 67th Pennsylvania Infantry. Christman, a farm laborer during peacetime, was only 20 years old. He had enlisted on March 25, 1864, but never saw combat. On May 1, he was diagnosed with the measles; he died on May 11 at Lincoln General Hospital in Washington, D.C.
It’s not surprising that the first burial at Arlington died of sickness. Soldiers were two times more likely to die of an illness than from a battlefield wound, during the Civil War. The second burial on May 13, Private William McKinney, also died of illness. McKinney had been admitted to an Alexandria, Virginia, hospital with a diagnosis of pneumonia, and died on May 12, 1864. A former sawmill worker, McKinney had joined the 17th Pennsylvania Cavalry on March 16, 1864. He was only 17 years old.
All of the first graves at Arlington were dug by one of Lee’s former slaves, Jim Parks, who would later recall the spot where, as Grant’s spring campaign continued, “coffins had been piled in long rows like cordwood.” Parks was also a young man at the time just like the soldiers he buried. Each of the early graves received a pine headboard, painted white with black writing. Later the wooden headboards would be replaced with marble gravestones.
On the day after the first two burials, one Private William Blatt received a traditional internment ceremony at Arlington. Blatt had been mortally wounded during the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House. In the midst of a daring assault on May 10, Blatt was shot in the head. He died, while being taken from a wharf along the Potomac River to Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C. He became the third burial at Arlington.
Private William Reeves would be the fourth. He had been shot in the cheek during the opening moments of the Battle of the Wilderness on May 5. He was transported to Stanton General Hospital in Washington, where he died of a secondary hemorrhage at 4 a.m. on May 13 just one hour after the fighting at the Bloody Angle had subsided. Today, Blatt is remembered as the first battlefield casualty to be interred at our national cemetery. Private Reeves, who was wounded five days before Blatt, was the second.
The New National Military Cemetery at Arlington was officially sanctioned by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton one month after the first burials in a letter to Meigs on June 15, 1864. He ordered his quartermaster general to set aside 200 acres “to be immediately surveyed, laid out, and enclosed” for the purpose of the cemetery. “The bodies of all soldiers,” Stanton wrote, “dying in the Hospitals of the vicinity of Washington and Alexandria will be interred at this Cemetery.”
On the same day, Meigs wrote Stanton recommending that the interments at the northeast corner of the estate “be discontinued and that the land surrounding the Arlington Mansion now understood to be the property of the United States, be appropriated to the National Military Cemetery.”[3] Meigs added —in a sentence that would have angered Robert and his wife Mary Lee—“the grounds about the Mansion are admirably adapted to such a use.” He intended that Robert E. Lee and his family would never live in their home at Arlington again. They never did.
John Reeves is the author of The Lost Indictment of Robert E. Lee: The Forgotten Case against an American Icon. Watch for his forthcoming book Raging Fire in the Wilderness: The First Deadly Clash Between Grant and Lee. You can follow him on Twitter at @reevesjw
[1] Major General Winfield Scott Hancock commanded the Second Corps at the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House.
[2] Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), p. 312.
[3] The first burials were situated at the northeastern corner of the estate—about a ten-minute walk from the Lee mansion.
