On Hallowed Ground (15 page)

On the second question, regarding the legality of the 1864 sale, Miller held that the jury had ruled correctly. Mrs. Lee had
attempted to pay the federal tax. She had been refused. The sale was therefore invalid, “as if the tax had already been paid
or tendered,” Miller ruled.
⁷²
“What is that right as established by the verdict of the jury in this case?” Miller asked. “It is the right to possession
of the homestead of the plaintiff … It is absolutely prohibited, both to the executive and the legislative, to deprive
any one of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or take private property without just compensation.”
⁷³

He was. Both sides agreed on a price of one hundred fifty thousand dollars. Congress quickly appropriated the funds.
⁷⁴
Lee signed papers conveying the title on April 24, 1883, which placed the federal claim to Arlington beyond dispute.
⁷⁵
The man who formally accepted title to the property was none other than Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the
Civil War president so often bedeviled by Custis Lee’s father. If the sons of such enemies could bury their differences at
Arlington, there might be hope for national healing.
⁷⁶

More land was needed for new graves, a development that ultimately doomed Freedman’s Village.
⁷⁷
This ragged community of blacks, still clinging to the bottomlands of Arlington after two decades, had outstayed its welcome
on the old estate. Since the onset of war, the federal government and various missionary societies had helped to keep the
refugees alive, doling out rations, shelter, clothing, training, spiritual instruction, and jobs for the former slaves. One
twenty-nine-year-old government laborer, Jerry Savage, was even outfitted with a wooden leg at the village hospital when he
lost his own to frostbite.
⁷⁸
Another refugee, Comilius Camey, age sixty-five, was feeble, friendless, and homeless when he was found wandering in Washington and sent to Arlington for sanctuary in the postwar years.
⁷⁹
Other settlers made the most of their new homes at Arlington; some built additions to their houses; still others built new
homes by the river. They planted vines and fruit trees, dug wells, erected chicken houses, and welcomed a second and third
generation into their families.

“The population appears to be quiet and law-abiding, and free from the vice of drunkenness,” an assistant quartermaster reported
in the 1880s. He counted 124 dwellings, three shops, two churches, a school house, and a population of 763. The community
gave every evidence of becoming a permanent fixture at Arlington.
⁸⁰

But the settlement was never meant to be more than a brief shelter on the road to self-sufficiency. The war was long over
by the 1880s, and many of the freedmen’s once-trim cottages had fallen into decay—something of an embarrassment for a new
capital city striving to be modern.“The village is a picturesque jumble of shanties, few of which are worthy of the name of
houses,” the
Washington Post
reported in December 1887.
⁸¹

The village did nothing to help African Americans, an unsympathetic visitor wrote after the war. “It has but encouraged his
habits of idleness and dependence, and it would seem far better to abandon it as soon as possible, and thus relieve the country
of the heavy load of taxation which its support renders necessary.”
⁸²

Just as the federal effort at Reconstruction ran out of steam in the 1870s, compassion for Arlington’s freedmen seemed to
waver as the hard work of peace continued. The blacks remaining at Arlington were a daily reminder of how little progress
had been made. With no other place to go, freedmen begged for work around the cemetery, where they dug graves, drove wagons,
set headstones, and earned between $1 and $1.75 per day.
⁸³
They haunted the old estate at all hours, tilling their meager plots and looking decidedly unmilitary—this on a site recently
designated as a military reservation encompassing the national cemetery, Fort Myer, and other lands from the original 1,100-acre
plantation.
⁸⁴
Although able-bodied residents worked hard and treasured their family life, some freedmen complained when they were not given
jobs around the cemetery
⁸⁵
and protested to the War Department when they were asked to work ten-hour days.
⁸⁶

“We beleave it to be a violation of the Law and, an injustice to the laboring man,” an Arlington hand wrote anonymously to
the quartermaster in 1869. “Besides very ill convenience some of us have familys in the city and cannot go home after quitting
for it is too late in the evening and too early in the morning for to get over hear in time to go to work … Hear I will
close hoping you will give it ameadate notice.”
⁸⁷
When this appeal landed on his desk, Brig. Gen. J. C. McFerran, a deputy quartermaster, did just that. Fuming that the petitioner
had gone around him, the general won permission to fire any laborer who complained again. “I am satisfied we can get men who
will gladly and willingly work ten hours per day,” McFerran assured his superiors.
⁸⁸
What became of the protesting workers remains unknown, but it was clear that the War Department, which had protected and
cared for the residents of Freedman’s Village for so long, was losing patience with them.

From the Lee mansion where he lived and worked, Arlington Superintendent J. A. Commerford, himself a wounded Union veteran,
took in the tableau of puffing chimneys, inspected the wooded hills around his headquarters, and experienced a
Eureka
! moment: Arlington’s old trees had been going up in smoke, one log at a time, right under his nose. “For the past year,”
he reported to the quartermaster, “some of the colored people who live on the reservation have been in the habit of entering
the cemetery during the late hours of the night for the purpose of getting wood for fuel … It has been suggested that
the most effective way of preventing such thefts is to cause the removal of these people from the reservation.”
⁸⁹
Commerford provided no evidence for his accusation, but he probably needed none. Even without substantiation, his argument
carried the day.

The War Department needed more land and welcomed any pretext for evicting the residents now considered to be squatters at
Arlington. Lt. Col. George B. Dandy, newly appointed as deputy quartermaster, seized Commerford’s complaint and bucked it
up the line to Brig. Gen. Samuel B. Holabird, who sent it forward to his superiors with an endorsement: “In violation of paragraph
#138 Army Regulations, amended by General Order #26, Adjutant General’s Office, 1883, civilians are residing upon the Military
Reservation, upon which the Arlington National Cemetery and the Military Post at Fort Myer, Va., are located. This occupation
has continued many years, and since the title of the land passed to the United States by purchase, May 18, 1883, no steps
have been taken for the removal of these occupants, mostly colored people. In consequence of the complaints now made, it would
seem to be proper that they [the freedmen] should be ordered to vacate their holdings, giving them sufficient time for moving
their property to prevent suffering.”
⁹⁰
Within days, Holabird received permission to eject the freedmen. The eviction orders, issued on December 7, 1887, cited pertinent
army regulations: “No civilian will be permitted to reside upon a Military reservation unless he be in the employ of the government
… no permission will be given any one to cultivate any portion of a Military reservation.” The freedmen were given ninety
days to gather their possessions and get out.
⁹¹

This announcement, coming as a most untimely Christmas present, produced a predictable wave of consternation among village
residents, now facing homelessness at the worst time of year. Some complained to the
Washington Post
, which reported a general “feeling of uneasiness … among the colored people of Freedman’s Village occasioned by the order
of the Secretary of War.”
⁹²
A resident named Thomas Owens, who told a Post reporter that he had bought his house at Arlington for fourteen dollars in
1868, still paid the equivalent of thirty dollars a month in free labor at Fort Myer. Lucy Harris, informed of the eviction
order, rooted around in her papers and came up with a receipt showing that she had paid the quartermaster fifty dollars for
her house on October 31, 1868. Now she wondered “if it were really true that they were going to be turned out of house and
home,” the Post reported. The
New York Herald
, still a voice for beleaguered African Americans, took up their cause, warning that Arlington’s “poor, helpless colored men,
women, and children shall be driven out of their little homes next February in the bleakest part of the winter—homes in which
they have lived undisturbed for nearly a quarter of a century.”
⁹³
It was clear that the eviction plans threatened a new controversy over property rights at Arlington.

Facing that prospect, Secretary of War William C. Endicott did what any seasoned bureaucrat would do: he stalled for time
without reversing his decision. He tried to soften the blow by letting it be known, through a reporter at the
Alexandria Gazette
, that the freedmen could stay in their homes until warm weather arrived. And he announced that those owning houses would
be allowed take them apart and move them.
⁹⁴

This gesture did little to mollify the freedmen. “Nearly all of these houses are so constructed, and in such a condition of
decay, as to be useless to take down and move away,” said John B. Syphax, a respected community leader and the first African
American elected to the House of Delegates, Virginia’s legislature.
⁹⁵
Chosen to speak for his neighbors and relatives, Syphax ably outlined their case to the secretary of war. For more than twenty
years, he wrote, freedmen had occupied this corner of Arlington, paying rent, buying houses, working hard, and treating the
place as home. They were encouraged to do so by a succession of federal authorities. “Agents representing the government fully
impressed upon the people the idea that in some way they would come to possess a valid claim to this part of Arlington,” Syphax
argued. The residents had put down roots, he wrote:

About nine years ago, Lieut. R. P. Strong, then commanding at Fort Myer, gave permission to erect a brick church on the reservation,
costing nearly two thousand dollars, and, here again, they were made to believe that their stay would be indefinitely prolonged;
therefore, several houses were built, and the spirit of improvement again revived … Many began to plant trees, and make
such other improvements as their scanty means would permit … Coming from the shades of the past, these people have proven,
in their new condition of self reliance, more thrifty, and less vicious than could be reasonably anticipated … I know
not what may be the purpose of the government, or the pleasure of the Honorable Secretary in the premises, but if it be to
take this property wholly for National use, I most respectfully ask that an appropriation be recommended of not less than
three hundred and fifty dollars a-piece for each owner of a house … Twenty-four years of residence at Arlington, with
all the elements involved in this case inspire the hope that full and simple justice will be done to the weakest members of
this great Republic.
⁹⁶

The lessons of Custis Lee’s recent Supreme Court victory had not been lost on John Syphax or his constituents. If they could
not prevent the evictions at Arlington, at least they might expect compensation for their property. The War Department took
the point. Two days before Christmas 1887, General Holabird ordered his men to survey the village, record any improvements,
and assess the value of each holding. He authorized the purchase of land held by “unauthorized citizens or others as squatters
or for residence, under the color of any permission or otherwise.” Then he ordered that the freedmen’s occupation of the village
be “made to cease and desist.”
⁹⁷