Arlington’s Beautiful National Cemetery

When the Civil War dead needed burying, Robert E. Lee’s former estate was the perfect spot. It’s now an essential American experience.

A few weeks ago I wrote the first story in a series about cemetery landscape architecture, focusing on Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. It’s the first purpose-designed cemetery in America where the dead repose in a garden setting. Paths and narrow roads, water features, small gardens, and heirloom trees surround monuments and memories. Mount Auburn’s blissfully arranged, though not ordered. The way of all flesh is, of course, the realm of nature. Mount Auburn comes to us via the English garden tradition, where the sculpted wild rules.

Today I’ll write about Arlington National Cemetery (“Arlington”). I spent most of the day there on July 4. It’s the country’s flagship military cemetery, with 400,000 veterans buried in a 640-acre site. Visiting Arlington is an essential experience, not only for Americans but for foreigners. It’s somber, since sacrifice isn’t by nature cheery. It’s uplifting, too, and not a history lesson but a deep tutorial taught by the dead. And it’s beautiful.

Arlington is inspired in part by Mount Auburn, but it’s a creature of the U.S. Army and of Washington, in good ways. Burial there is free and open to veterans. Grave-marker design is famously limited to simple white-marble slabs. Arlington expresses Pierre L’Enfant’s vision of Washington. It’s an ordered landscape with thousands of trees, many rare, but few gardens. The cemetery has ordered road networks, rigorously defined sections, and lots of views to L’Enfant’s city. L’Enfant, not a veteran, is buried there on a high point and would have the best view were he looking out, not up, and were he living and not dead.

Mount Auburn is a creature of the 1830s. It was a project of the new Massachusetts Horticultural Society. Transcendental philosophy is a way of thinking, but it’s also a design strategy. It’s art, nature, and the afterlife. Mount Auburn’s still very active, but the look is Neoclassical and Gothic Revival, the two anchor styles of antebellum America.

Mount Auburn was the country’s first public garden, but it addressed a practical problem. Boston, so rich and powerful that it was already called the Hub — of the universe — the new London, and the shining city on a hill, was up to its haughty brow with the bones of the dead. City cemeteries, even where the rich lay, were as packed as slums. A commodious cemetery in what was then the country gave the dead room not to breathe but to moulder.

Arlington descends from Mount Auburn in two ways. Like Mount Auburn, it addressed a practical problem. By 1863, the midpoint of the Civil War, the Union dead, from bullets or disease, were in the tens of thousands and growing. War-zone embalming was expensive and impractical. Makeshift graveyards near battlefields weren’t satisfactory. They were messy and disorganized. A perfunctory burial was what rebels got, if Union soldiers were doing the digging.

As Grant’s big, robust army chased Lee’s depleting one across the Rapidan River, then the James River, bodies piled high. Battles in early 1864 were awful. Union dead, as a general proposition, were gathered in Fredericksburg and sent to Washington. With so many battles near Washington, cemeteries there were pressed.

Lee is the key to Arlington’s story. His wife, Mary Anna Randolph Custis (1807–1873), inherited the thousand-acre estate, called Arlington House, from her father, Martha Washington’s grandson, in 1857. She’d grown up there. Lee (1807–1870), her cousin, and the son of Revolutionary War hero Lighthorse Harry Lee, lived there off and on, when not in military service. The Lees raised a big family there, and Lee ran the Custis agriculture empire in the 1850s.

Lee made his choice in 1861 — “If Virginia stands by the old Union, so will I. But if she secedes . . . then I will follow my native State.” That left the Custis estate at the doorstep of the Union capital. On May 14, 1861, alerted that Union troops were about to seize the place, high point that it was, Mary packed up the house, along with a ton of Washington archives and artifacts, and fled. “Northern soldiers who profess to reverence Washington,” she wrote in a note posted on the front door, “forbear to desecrate the house of his wife, now owned by her descendants.” She signed it “a granddaughter of Mrs. Washington.”

In the time of her father, who was Martha’s grandson, the Arlington House site was less a plantation and more of a stately home. The Custis family owned thousands of acres of land farmed by slaves. There was some farming at Arlington House, but the land mostly was a sprawling, elevated green space designed in an English style with a formal garden and a grove of oak and elm trees. As English precedents go, it’s Stowe-and-Stourhead Lite. There were never follies or grottoes, for example.

Technically, Mrs. Lee lost the estate in a tax delinquency in 1864. We all know how Scarlett O’Hara paid the taxes on Tara, but Mrs. Lee, in her 50s, not at her comely best, and already married, lacked many of the arrows in Scarlett’s quiver. The Feds knew they needed cemetery space and realized they now owned the Lee estate, adjacent to D.C., high and dry so no risk of corpses floating away. Good drainage is essential in running a cemetery.

General Montgomery Meigs (1816–1892) was then the quartermaster of the Union army. He was the master of supplies, and of efficiency, and an unsung hero of the Union’s military triumph. He was an engineer, too, and would have considered himself a landscape architect had the profession existed. He saw in the Arlington estate the potential for a grand military cemetery. That the land was Lee’s home was the ultimate comeuppance to a traitor.

Impressive political juggling ensued. Union brass ensconced in the Lee mansion didn’t want dead people as neighbors. A squatters’ town of freed slaves had already developed. Meigs pushed, and William Christman (1844–1864), a Union enlistee from the Poconos in Pennsylvania who died of measles, was the first burial, on May 13, 1864. Christman said he was a farm laborer when he enlisted. He got a $300 bonus, paid over time. He sent the money to his parents. Within weeks of his burial, thousands more occurred.

Christman’s marker set a standard for Arlington, more or less. It’s a marble marker, upright and narrow, with the embossed letters “Wm. Christman” in an arch and, at the base of the arch, “PA.” For his state. His age — 19 — tops the arch, noting he was too young to die. That’s it. The text is set in a minimalist Gothic Revival badge. Christman’s grave is in what used to be the Lees’ rose garden.

It’s a mistake, and I never focused on this in past visits to Arlington, to think that all the graves are marked so simply. Until a few years ago, families could select larger monuments if they paid for them and agreed to support their maintenance in perpetuity. I thought about Arlington as an egalitarian cemetery where the dead are equally treated, and buried in regimented rows, as they died and arrived.

That’s not what happened. On the hill ascending to the Lee mansion — prime real estate — lie generals and admirals, with big, boring monuments. “Blocks of stone for blockheads,” I thought. Though I respect the military, I imagine that the climb up the pole isn’t greased by brains and sparkle. Mount Auburn is the final home for Boston Brahmins, lots of blockheads among them, but the monuments have style. That Boston has better taste than Washington is an irrefutable truth.

Arlington Cemetery, like the military, was a hierarchy but, unlike the military, only until the last few years. Now, thanks to a good change in the rules, no big clunker monuments are allowed.

For the past 20 or years or so, the marble for Arlington’s signature, simple gravestones comes from a quarry in Danby, Vt., about 20 miles north of my home. There’s a wide swath of marble running, I swear, from around my front yard to Rutland. My land was never cultivated. It was forested, then clear-cut in the 1830s and used for sheep pasture. A shovel in the ground usually hits marble, in boulder form. Over the years, my husband has dug tons. It’s not marquee marble. The good stuff’s in Danby, of Carrara quality. Arlington uses a marble called Imperial Danby, mined in a specific part of the quarry. It’s a white/gray marble with soft gold veins. It polishes to a buff finish that doesn’t gleam.

The marble is sent to a monument maker who has won a competitive contract to supply markers to all veterans’ cemeteries.  They cut stone quarried in Danby to the VA’s specifications: 13 inches wide, 4 inches thick, 42 inches high — 18 inches of which sits underground. The top curves. Making them is a mix of computer graphics, sandblasting, and hand finishing. Each weighs about 240 pounds.

I’m showing Jennifer Matthews’s marker, since her death and that of six other CIA agents in Khost in Afghanistan in 2009 was a defining moment in our botched adventure there. A suicide bomber, a physician at that, pretended to be an informant. Matthews (1964–2009) and her colleagues welcomed him without even the basic check we’d experience from the TSA at an airport. Matthews had been the counterterrorism chief at the London CIA station. The new — and false — recruit was her project. The Jordanians had vetted him. Matthews was an al-Qaeda expert but . . . a lot of book knowledge isn’t always a useful good. I knew about Matthews since I’m an educated, informed citizen.

Matthews’s marker is succinct. She’s listed as a civilian, with dates of her birth and death, the place of death — Afghanistan — and the date December 30, 2009. I didn’t look for her. I walked to Section 60, the 15-acre graveyard for the dead from the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascos. The Danby marble marks waste after waste of lives.

There’s a style manual for Arlington stones. Name, rank, dates of birth and death, branch of service, and significant awards are standard. What Arlington calls “an emblem of belief” can go above the dead person’s name. Crosses, Stars of David, and 60 or so other symbols are fine, but, please, no black brimstone crosses, even if you served on the Warren Court. Earl Warren’s there, by the way, as is his brother William O. Douglas. Blackmun, the abortion czar, John Paul Stevens, and Ginsburg are there. Douglas’s marker is perpendicular to every other stone in his section. “O” is for oddball, it seems.

The standard rule requires the placement of markers in regimented rows, like a formation of soldiers. Arlington rules allow for a two-line family endearment, such as “loving husband.” If a spouse is buried there, he or she can get a callout, but that’s it.

The font for the markers looks like Optima Bold. It’s a sans-serif type that swells, ever so, at the bottom. It’s a 1950s type, so a bit fat, but based on the letters on Trajan’s Column in Rome, which are a bit lean. It’s easy to read.

Why am I writing about cemeteries? I think I’m the only art historian who’s ever dug a grave. I rose in politics the old-fashioned way, after countless door-to-door campaign visits, toiling on my local finance board, planning and zoning commission, and cemetery association. That’s long before I went back to school to get my Ph.D. My first patronage job was as the town cemetery’s bookkeeper.

I was in college, in the early ’70s. I sold plots, scheduled burials, and operated a backhoe. In a pinch, I could and did dig a hole, a hole that needed refinement but, hey, I wasn’t on a career path. So I learned politics not from the ground up, but subterraneanly up. And made $50 a month, got lots of fresh air, battled frost heave, and ended a mole infestation via chemicals sure to have invited a “hazmat” designation, had that existed then.

On Saturday I’ll write about the renovation of Arlington House, where Lee and his family lived. I’ll also write about monuments, including the tombs for the unknown soldiers.