06/16/2026
On this day in history: 1864 – Civil War; Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s Arlington home is made into a national cemetery.
Arlington National Cemetery Facts:
1. Robert E. Lee's home at Arlington is now the United States most hallowed ground.
2. The house was built by George Washington's adopted grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, son of John Parke Custis who himself was a child of Martha Washington by her first marriage and a ward of George Washington.
3. Custis built the mansion as a living memorial to his grandfather George Washington. a significant portion of the mansion was used to store George Washington memorabilia that Custis was acquiring with regularity.
4. Custis and his wife, Mary Lee Fitzhugh, lived in Arlington House for the rest of their lives and were buried together on the property after their deaths in 1857 and 1853. Under the terms of her father's will, Mary Anna Custis was given the right to inhabit and control the house for the rest of her life. Mary was the wife of Robert E. Lee.
5. During the middle of the Civil War, the U.S. Government confiscated Arlington when property taxes were not paid. The Lee's had tried to pay the taxes on time, but the federal government would not except it...they said Lee had to come there in person to pay the tax.
6. By 1864, when the increasing number of battle fatalities was outpacing the burial capacity of Washington, D.C., cemeteries, Union General Montgomery C. Meigs, a southerner from Augusta, Georgia, choose Lee's home at Arlington to start the new soldiers cemetery, and out of bitterness ordered that the first graves start just a few feet from the Mansions front steps. His intention was to render the house uninhabitable should the Lee family ever attempt to return. This was a a gesture to humiliate Lee for siding with the South.
7. After the war, Robert E. Lee, or his wife, never attempted to publicly recover control of Arlington House. The couple also never returned to the home that George Washington Parke Custis built and treasured.
8. After Lee's death in 1870, his son, George Washington Custis Lee, claimed the land was illegally confiscated and that, according to his grandfather's will, he was the legal owner. In December 1882, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, returned the property to Custis Lee, stating that confiscation of the property lacked due process. The ruling could have required the exhumation of all of Arlington’s dead (17,000 graves), but instead Lee’s son officially sold the property to Congress in 1883 for $150,000 (equal to $3,271,364 in 2017).
9. Arlington remains the only national cemetery that serves as the final resting place for soldiers that have fallen in every single American war. It is estimated that over four hundred thousand men and women have been laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery.
10. The year before his death, on May 1, 1869 Robert E. Lee visited U.S. Grant at the White House soon after Grant took office. On his way there the train that Lee was riding past by Arlington House. Lee who was reading a news paper glanced out the window at his old home in the distance for a few seconds and then continued reading his paper.
"It is better to make up our minds to a general loss. They cannot take away the remembrance of the spot, and the memories of those that to us rendered it sacred. That will remain to us as long as life will last, and that we can preserve."
Robert E. Lee (In a letter to his wife, over the loss of their home at Arlington)
