On Hallowed Ground (18 page)

With this encouragement, two former Civil War enemies rolled up their sleeves and went to work on the legislation. Brig. Gen.
Marcus J. Wright, a Tennessean who had fought for Confederates in the western theater, drafted a bill for the reburial program,
while Sen. Joseph R. Hawley, a Connecticut native brevetted major general of Union volunteers, introduced the measure on Capitol
Hill.
⁵⁰
Their bill provided two thousand five hundred dollars for disinterring Confederates in the Washington area and furnishing each with a new pine coffin and a prominent plot at Arlington, hard by recent burials from the Spanish-American
War. In the brotherly spirit of those times, this legislation sailed through Congress without objection. President McKinley
signed the bill into law on June 6, 1900, and the first interments were made the next year.
⁵¹

Under the new statute, the secretary of war was directed to provide Confederates with “proper headstones” at Arlington, which
meant that for the first time they would have marble or granite markers equal to those erected over Union graves. The Rebel
tombstones, like the Union ones, would be thirty-six inches tall, ten inches wide, and four inches thick, but unlike the Union
markers, which were rounded on top, each Confederate stone came to a point. A popular myth, repeated down through the years,
held that Confederate markers had angular tops to discourage Yankees from sitting on them; in truth, the pattern was probably
intended to give southerners’ tombstones a distinctive look, so that they could be distinguished at a glance. Like the design
for Confederate markers, the pattern of burials in the new section was also unique: instead of being arranged in the long,
regimented lines characteristic in other parts of Arlington, the Confederate tombstones were planted in concentric circles,
forming ever-widening rings around a central point, like ripples on a pond. In this and other ways, the design reflected the
South’s ongoing struggle to find its proper place in the nation, while standing proudly apart from it.
⁵²

Once unwelcome at the national cemetery, grizzled southern veterans realized how far they had traveled when they arrived to
celebrate Memorial Day at Arlington in 1903. There they walked among the neatly tended graves of more than 400 reburied comrades,
marked by gleaming new tombstones and decorated with fresh flowers from the White House, courtesy of none other than Theodore
Roosevelt, the nation’s new president. Old Confederates reciprocated the gesture, marching over the hills to Mrs. Lee’s garden,
where they left a floral tribute at the tomb of the Civil War Unknowns, their message spelled out in a display of blossoms:
“In the Spirit of Fraternity.” The phrase, borrowed from McKinley’s Atlanta speech, was heartfelt, but it would take generations
to cleanse the last dregs of bitterness from the Civil War.
⁵³

The old animosity, always simmering just beneath the surface, boiled over again in 1906. The occasion was a funeral at Arlington,
where Fighting Joe Wheeler, McKinley’s partner in reuniting North and South, was to be buried. Having retired to live with
a sister in Brooklyn, Wheeler lost his last battle to pneumonia at age sixty-nine. He was given a hero’s send-off in New York,
where some sixty thousand spectators braved a cold January rain to bid the little general farewell. They stood six deep and
bareheaded along Broadway to watch Wheeler’s casket pass by, draped in both Confederate and Union flags and trailed by the
black horse, now riderless, that had served him through the Cuban campaign. Among the honorary pallbearers was Gen. Frederick
Grant, son of the late president.
⁵⁴
After services at St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue, Wheeler’s remains were returned to the caisson, conveyed
to Jersey City, and transferred to a train for Washington.
⁵⁵

There an honor guard of Spanish-American War veterans was waiting for him. They kept vigil through the night at St. John’s
Episcopal Church, to be relieved by regular Army sentinels the next day. Men from both wars crowded across Lafayette Square
for afternoon services, which became so full of well-wishers that the overflow spilled into the streets. Milling about outside,
former enemies murmured greetings, recalled old battles, and shuffled into line when Wheeler emerged for his last parade,
a solemn mingling of aging men in blue and gray, of gleaming horses and creaking leather, inching along Pennsylvania Avenue,
across the river, and up the slope to Arlington. Each mourner wore a white carnation in memory of the late President McKinley,
who had handed out such flowers to White House visitors, and who had made it possible for these old foes to march together
again.
⁵⁶

In the low-slanting light of that winter afternoon, Wheeler was laid to rest with full military honors—and with a final dash
of the controversy. Most of his old comrades from the Confederacy endured the afternoon’s ceremonies without complaint, but
several felt compelled to stay away in protest. In a final show of loyalty to the old flag, Wheeler was buried in a Union
section of the cemetery, where he would lie among such famous enemies of the South as Philip Sheridan, George Crook, and Edward
Ord. Their graves held the territory in Section 2, southeast of the Lee mansion and beyond the view of the new Confederate
section.
⁵⁷

This struck some diehard Rebels as a betrayal.“Ex-Confederates Angry,” read the
New York Times
headline on the eve of Wheeler’s funeral. “The Confederates say that Wheeler’s fame was won chiefly as a Confederate soldier,”
the paper’s correspondent wrote,“… and that his brief experience in the Spanish war should not overshadow that part of
his record which made him famous.” Despite this, Wheeler’s family went forward with his funeral plans, which placed him among
Union men who had come to admire the pint-sized general and his instinct for national healing. His grave would be marked by
one of Arlington’s tallest obelisks, which still casts its long shadow over neighboring tombstones.
⁵⁸

7

L'ENFANT'S GRAND VIEW

BY THE DAWN of the twentieth century, arlington had matured into something more than a Civil War cemetery; it had become a
national symbol for sacrifice and honor, a rallying point for veterans, for ordinary visitors, and for solemn ceremony. And
for those with an eye for landscape, it was seen as valuable open space in an increasingly cramped capital, an extension of
the engineer Pierre L’Enfant’s grand vision for Washington.

The brilliant French soldier and engineer fought alongside George Washington and Alexander Hamilton in the Revolutionary War. He had befriended and impressed both men with his energy and talent. Brevetted
a major of engineers in the American army, L’Enfant made the United States his adopted country and won Washington’s commission to create a new capital alongside the Potomac in 1791.
¹

L’Enfant pored over maps with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, explored prospective building sites with President Washington, and picked a location for the nation’s new Congress House on Jenkins Hill—“a pedestal waiting for a monument,” in L’Enfant’s
phrase. Over the objections of both Jefferson and Madison, L’Enfant placed the President’s House more than a mile away, emphasizing
not only the splendid river views but also the modest standing of the executive branch in the new republican order. He sited
the Capitol so that it would gleam in the afternoon sun and offer a wide prospect to the Potomac, down through a mile-long
park L’Enfant called Grand Avenue; this space would become the National Mall. Between streets, shady avenues, and traffic
circles, L’Enfant sketched in parks and public spaces, which covered almost two-thirds of his plan for the city, giving it
a welcoming, wide-open aspect. He persuaded President Washington to enlarge the capital so that it could grow, as L’Enfant put it, “proportioned to the greatness which … the Capitale
of a powerful Empire ought to manifest.”
²

His plan, submitted to President Washington in August 1791, was magnificent, but implementing it proved difficult for the temperamental Frenchman, who had little patience
with small-minded people who failed to share his vision.
³
When a powerful landowner built a new house where L’Enfant intended to place New Jersey Avenue, the engineer indignantly
demolished the structure, earning a scolding from the president of the United States. “In future,” President Washington told his old friend, “I must strictly enjoin you to touch no man’s property without his consent.”
⁴

Deaf to diplomatic suggestion and impervious to criticism, L’Enfant continued building like a man possessed, digging canals,
raising aqueducts, opening a quarry, and erecting new bridges without waiting for permission to do so. He seldom worried about
cost. He eventually billed the government $95,500 for his services, which Congress had estimated to be worth $3,000. After
less than a year on the job, L’Enfant was encouraged to find work elsewhere. He did, but the pattern was set: he would continue
to win commissions, dream big, and watch his schemes crash on the shoals of his own extravagance and unbending aesthetic standards.
⁵
Bitter, aging, and all but forgotten in the capital he had fathered, he stalked the halls of Congress, looking for the big
payoff that never came. He was surprised at this fate. “I had … fortune, friends, and relations who generously supplied
all my wants,” he wrote late in life. “They are no more—all have perished and with them my fortune and friends.”
⁶

One friend remained, however—Thomas Digges, an old patron who was pained to see the great designer facing his last years in
such lonely, threadbare condition. He invited L’Enfant to live on the family estate at Green Hill, Maryland, which the Frenchman
had designed in better days. Still sketching away on new projects, he died there, leaving an estate valued at forty-six dollars.
He was buried in the Digges family plot with nothing to mark his grave but a red cedar, a few miles downriver from the imposing
city he had envisioned but never could manage to build.
⁷

L’Enfant might still be sleeping in obscurity if not for a group of well-placed architects and city planners who rediscovered
the engineer and restored his reputation as the twentieth century opened. One of these was Daniel H. Burnham, the visionary
designer who helped launch the “city beautiful” movement with his plans for the White City, centerpiece of Chicago’s Columbian
Exhibition in 1893.
⁸
Burnham had grown alarmed at the haphazard development of Washington, a worry shared by Sen. James McMillan of Michigan, chairman of the Senate District of Columbia Committee; Charles F. McKim,
a prominent New York architect who supervised restoration of the White House in 1902; Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., landscape
designer and conservationist; and Glenn Brown, secretary of the American Institute of Architects, the influential professional
organization, which had recently moved to Washington and taken over historic Octagon House.
⁹

Burnham and company could see that the late Frenchman’s plans for Washington had been swept aside as the capital matured, sprawled, and began to swallow the nineteenth-century city of grand vistas and
carefully placed buildings. By 1900, the Treasury Department was blocking the Pennsylvania Avenue axis L’Enfant intended to
link the White House with Capitol Hill; the Library of Congress had taken over space L’Enfant had foreseen as parkland; the
Washington Monument was built a few hundred feet out of kilter, away from the point at which L’Enfant had sight lines intersecting from
the White House and the Capitol; the War and Navy Building boxed in the executive mansion from its western side, casting the
president’s quarters in shadow and interrupting the intended reach of New York Avenue; and the great gray hulk of the Pennsylvania
Railway depot squatted across the National Mall, now cluttered by railroad sheds and hissing trains. New government buildings
were under construction on both sides of the mall, threatening to encroach upon the space L’Enfant had envisioned as the cool,
green nucleus of his design. The reform-minded architects dusted off L’Enfant’s old plans, enlarged upon them, and used them
to thwart future assaults on the federal city’s aesthetic integrity.
¹⁰

Their blueprint for the future, unveiled as Washington’s second century began, came to be known as the McMillan Plan to honor the senator who introduced legislation for a new federal
parks commission.
¹¹
Published in 1902, the plan would shape the city’s development for years to come: It proposed a regional park system with
an expanded National Mall at its heart, relocated the Pennsylvania Railroad depot from the Mall to the new Union Station northeast
of the Capitol, sketched plans for a new government office complex to be known as the Federal Triangle, opened public spaces
on land reclaimed from the Potomac River, and envisioned a Lincoln Memorial to anchor the southern terminus of the mall and
pay homage to the man who saved the Union. The plan also endorsed the long-proposed—and yet unbuilt—Memorial Bridge to provide
ready access to Arlington and connect Lincoln’s monument to Lee’s mansion, symbolically pulling North and South together again.
¹²

“The interest excited by the drills at the cavalry post, the superb views from the heights, and the feelings of patriotism
awakened by the vast field of the hero dead … all call for such a treatment of the entire reservation as shall not diminish
but rather enhance the effect produced on the visitor,” the panel reported. Then the group took aim at the jumble of oversized
tombs proliferating in the officers’ section at Arlington, which was decried as pretentious.
¹³

Instead of erecting such grandiose tombs, the McMillan Commission urged, Arlington should strive for a look of dignified simplicity,
such as that evoked by the plain white tombstones marking the graves of enlisted men and former slaves in the Lower Cemetery.
“Nothing could be more impressive than the rank after rank of white stones, inconspicuous in themselves, covering the gentle,
wooded slopes, and producing the desired effect of a vast army in its last resting place,” the report said. “Those spaces
reserved for … officers and their families, however, exhibit all the heterogeneous forms which disturb those very ideas
of peace and quiet which should characterize a spot sacred to the tenderest feelings of the human heart. In particular, the
noble slopes toward the river should be rigorously protected against the invasion of monuments which utterly annihilate the
sense of beauty and repose.”
¹⁴

Like other recommendations the commission floated that year, the proposed ban on self-aggrandizing monuments would eventually
be adopted at Arlington—but not for decades. In the meantime, the McMillan group and a coalition of city leaders moved to
rebury their patron saint, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, on the heights at Arlington, where he would soon have the best view of
Washington at his feet.
¹⁵

Cheered on by newspapers editorialists, local historians, and French ambassador Jean Jules Jusserand, Congress voted the nation’s
long-overdue tribute to L’Enfant on May 27, 1908, when lawmakers approved his transfer to a choice spot at Arlington. For
good measure, Congress set aside one thousand dollars for the cost of exhuming the Frenchman and providing him with a headstone
befitting his new status.
¹⁶
A few months later, Henry B. F. Macfarland, president of the Commissioners for the District of Columbia, the city’s congressionally
appointed governing body, informed the secretary of war that a new gravesite had been chosen for L’Enfant at Arlington, “in
front of the Mansion … at the top of the slope, on a line with the monument erected to General Sheridan and the flagstaff
… overlooking Washington.” Macfarland assured the War Department that, in keeping with guidelines from the McMillan Plan, L’Enfant’s new marker would
be discreet, not a shaft to rival Sheridan’s showy plinth, “but rather a monument low in height.”
¹⁷
Aided by professionals from the American Institute of Architects, Macfarland chose a spot for L’Enfant’s new grave a few
steps to the east of Lee’s mansion, where the Marquis de Lafayette, another Frenchman and Revolutionary War hero, had gazed
across the river during a visit in 1825 and pronounced the vista the greatest in the world.
¹⁸

Arrangements for L’Enfant’s disinterment were complete by April 11, 1909, when orders went out from the quartermaster to D.
H. Rhodes, the Arlington landscape gardener who had repatriated thousands of the war dead from Cuba and the Philippines a
few years before.
¹⁹
He gathered a team of laborers, assembled the proper equipment, collected a new casket and metal shipping case, and drove
into the Maryland countryside, arriving at the Digges farm on April 22, 1909. Accompanied by local officials, a Washington Post reporter, and descendants of Thomas Digges, Rhodes found his way to the cedar marking L’Enfant’s grave. In the eight
decades since the engineer’s death, the tree had matured into a “very fine specimen” in Rhodes’s practiced view, but it had
insinuated its roots into L’Enfant’s grave, complicating his disinterment. Rhodes got permission to chop down the tree, accomplished
this, and set his crew to digging.
²⁰
As soon as they put spades to earth, it seemed to trigger a celestial reaction: a spectacular thunderstorm rolled in, with
sheets of rain and spears of lightning scattering the burial party.
²¹
Just as drama and disruption had marked L’Enfant’s course through life, so it was now.

But not for long. After twenty minutes, the skies cleared and Rhodes’s men resumed digging. They found L’Enfant four feet
down, reduced to a few inches of discolored mold, two pieces of bone, and one tooth—nothing more. An undertaker cleaned the
meager remains and placed them in the casket. Rhodes wrapped the box in a silk American flag.
²²
They transferred L’Enfant to a vault in a nearby cemetery, where he would rest until his funeral on April 28, 1909.
²³

On the morning of that day, a military detail arrived to escort the Frenchman to the Capitol Rotunda, where L’Enfant lay in
state until noon, an honor Congress had previously conferred upon only eight people, three of them presidents. L’Enfant was
the first foreigner to receive the privilege.
²⁴
President Taft and Vice President John Sherman traveled to Capitol Hill to pay their respects, as did Jules Jusserand, the
French ambassador. “This impressive ceremony today,” he said by way of benediction, “is more than enough to recompense for
all that Major L’Enfant did for the country he loved so well.”
²⁵

When Jusserand finished, soldiers bore L’Enfant from the Rotunda, down the long Capitol steps, and out into the April sunlight.
They eased him onto a caisson pulled by six bay horses, and the cortege moved down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the White House,
through Georgetown, and across the river to Arlington, accompanied by cavalry, two military bands, a battalion of army engineers,
and a long procession of mourners who converged on Lee’s mansion.
²⁶

After a brief Catholic service and the sounding of Taps, soldiers prepared to lower L’Enfant into the ground, but before they
could do so, a man stepped from the crowd, unpinned a gold medal with a blue ribbon from his coat, and reverently laid it
on L’Enfant’s casket. The man was Sen. Augustus Octavius Bacon, Democrat of Georgia, and the medal, in the form of an eagle
crowned by laurels, was from the Society of the Cincinnati, a fraternal order for French and American officers of the Revolutionary
War and their male descendants.
²⁷
L’Enfant had not only been a member of the society; he had designed its original badge, won George Washington’s imprimatur for the prototype, and sailed to Paris in 1783 to oversee the first badges cast.
²⁸
Somewhere along the way, L’Enfant had lost or sold his own Cincinnati medal. Senator Bacon had noticed and made amends, and
this time the decoration stayed with the Frenchman.
²⁹