On Hallowed Ground Read Free

the floor of the old House chamber. Like the country itself, the building was a work in progress. The new House
and Senate wings were not yet finished, and the Capitol’s truncated dome described an iron skeleton on the skyline. New troops
patrolled the city’s thoroughfares and river crossings, set up artillery pieces, established their pickets, and scrutinized
the Virginia hills for signs of trouble. 4
    Lee rode past them, crossed into Virginia, and turned up the road from Alexandria to Arlington, the 1,100-acre family estate
dominating the rolling green landscape just beyond the river. The very sight of Arlington seemed to gladden Lee, who affectionately
referred to the place as “our dear home” or “old Arlington” in correspondence. 5 It was there, he said, “where my attachments are more strongly placed than at any other place in the world.” 6 It was easy to see why: Arlington floated in the hills like a Greek temple, sheltered by old oaks and sprawling elms. Looking
as if it had been there forever, it peered down from its eminence upon the raw, half-finished capital at its feet.
    Although Lee’s father, Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, had been a commanding presence in the formative years of the United
States—a friend and comrade of George Washington, a hero of the Revolution, a governor of Virginia, a member of Congress, a champion of the Bill of Rights—he had left his
son and family with very little aside from his legend. The elder Lee spent impetuously in land speculation, drew little income,
and was finally imprisoned for debt. He fell into ill health. He abandoned the family for the West Indies, where he lived
for several years. He was returning to Virginia in 1818, still broken and poor at age sixty-two, when he died at Cumberland
Island, Georgia. His son Robert, who had been six when his father sailed away, was eleven when word of his death reached home.
    This straitened legacy, combined with Robert E. Lee’s career as a professional soldier, had kept him functionally homeless
for most of his adult life. Living out of trunks, sleeping in tents, lodging in a succession of borrowed houses, he finally
found a home in Arlington—along with a web of domestic, moral, and business entanglements—when his wife, Mary Custis Lee,
inherited a life interest in the estate, along with 196 slaves and a portfolio of scattered Virginia properties, upon the
death of her father in 1857. 7
    That father, George Washington Parke Custis, was the grandson of Martha Washington and also the adopted son of George Washington. Custis had become the designated heir to the Arlington plantation from his biological father, John Parke Custis, who had
been an aide-de-camp to General Washington. The elder Custis died in 1781, before his son was a year old, at which point Washington took charge of the boy. After George and Martha Washington died, Custis was left holding not only the land at Arlington but also some seventeen thousand acres that included two forested
islands and two plantations of some four thousand acres each; known as White House and Romancock, both farms were located
on the Pamunkey River in eastern Virginia. 8
    G. W. P. Custis, a dilettante who dabbled at painting, public oratory, experimental sheep farming, milling grain, ferry operations,
real estate development, and a hundred other business schemes that went nowhere, determined to build a grand dwelling for
himself on the Potomac River. He began construction on a wing of the house in 1802, and in 1804 hired George Hadfield, an
important English architect originally commissioned to supervise the building of Washington’s Capitol, to design his Arlington House. Construction resumed that year, proceeding in fits and starts until the home was
finally finished in 1818. Inspired in part by the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens, the Custis mansion displayed the clean lines
and balanced appearance of a neoclassic edifice, anchored by a prominent