On Hallowed Ground (19 page)

It took another two years for L’Enfant’s monument to be finished.
³⁰
Thirty-five architects entered a competition for the design, which was won by William Welles Bosworth of New York. He produced
drawings for a chunky Beaux Arts marble shaft decorated with oval panels and draped with swags.
³¹
Reviewing the design for the American Institute of Architects, president Cass Gilbert and secretary Glenn Brown recoiled
at Bosworth’s proposal. “I could not approve the design selected by the jury either as a suitable design for the purpose or
as the best design of those submitted,” Gilbert wrote. Leaving nothing to chance, he and Brown came up with a simpler plan,
presented it to Bosworth, and urged him to adopt it. “If a monument had been erected to L’Enfant at the time of his death,
by his friends in Washington, it would have been a cemetery monument of that period,” Gilbert wrote, suggesting an understated memorial “colonial in type—a
table tomb, with the Plan of Washington on top, and the remains in the ground below.” Bosworth swallowed his pride and embraced the revision. He produced blueprints
for a table top tomb precisely like the one Brown and Gilbert prescribed.
³²

That problem was resolved, but one last controversy remained. When plans for the tomb were presented to the quartermaster
in November 1910, an alert officer noticed a problem: the architects had erroneously listed L’Enfant’s rank as “Major, U.S.
Engineer Corps,” when in fact the Frenchman had been a captain of U.S. Engineers and brevet major of the Continental Army.
Distinctions of rank mattered little to ordinary civilians but carried great weight with military professionals. They knew
the difference between temporary titles, such as L’Enfant’s majority, and permanent rank; their daily status, not to mention
their paychecks, depended upon precision in such things. To make matters worse, L’Enfant’s graveyard promotion had already
been committed to stone. The monument was scheduled to arrive at Arlington in less than a month, followed by President Taft
and a retinue of high-powered officials expected for the springtime dedication.
³³

“Inasmuch as the inscription has already been cut,” assistant quartermaster George Ruhlen reported to the secretary of war,
“these discrepancies cannot be remedied without disfiguring the monument. For this reason, and owing to the further fact that
the circumstances under which the monument is to be placed in Arlington National Cemetery are entirely different from those
affecting monuments of other officers interred there, this office recommends approval of the design and inscription in accordance
with the copy herewith submitted, this case not be taken as a precedent.”
³⁴
The War Department took this face-saving advice, the monument arrived, and the cream of Washington society turned out for a formal unveiling on May 22, 1911. From the portico of the Lee mansion, where chairs had been set
up for distinguished visitors, President Taft led the speakers that afternoon:

All Americans who take pride in the Capital and its development … must feel deep gratitude to L’Enfant for what he did
… and must rejoice that now, 86 years after his death, the time has come when we are paying him just tribute in sight
of the city that he designed, in a place full of tender memories for the nation, a beautiful estate dedicated to the patriotic
dead, furnishing a terminal—and a proper terminal—for the design of the future of the city of Washington. L’Enfant will now lie here appropriately in state and in rest, with the gratitude of the nation he served so well.
³⁵

On this day of celebration, Taft avoided mention of the confusion over Captain L’Enfant’s rank, just as he did not call attention
to the error permanently chiseled into line nine of the engineer’s tombstone, which lists the year of his birth as 1755, when
in fact he was born in 1754.
³⁶

Even with these distractions, L’Enfant’s arrival at Arlington helped balance the years of neglect he had suffered, while bringing
attention to the new breed of architects such as Glenn Brown, who saw it as their mission to civilize the nation’s cities.
“This is the first tribute to a City Planner and is worth the attention of the country,” Brown wrote to the editor of
Harper’s Weekly
to generate interest before L’Enfant’s tomb was dedicated in 1911.
³⁷
In addition to advancing the ambitions of fellow designers, the Frenchman’s ascension also marked Arlington’s emerging status
as the nation’s most esteemed war memorial. Begun as a graveyard for destitute soldiers, it had expanded to receive all Civil
War veterans a few years later. Then it grew to accommodate those who fell in the fight with Spain. And with the reburial
of L’Enfant and those who had served in earlier wars, it became the place to honor all of America’s conflicts—past, present,
and future.

From his new grave overlooking the capital, L’Enfant held the heights for comrades who had fought and bled in the Revolutionary
War, as he had done. Just over the hills behind him, another fourteen long-dead warriors, disinterred from Washington and transferred to Arlington in 1905, claimed space for all who perished in the War of 1812.
³⁸
Other graves belonged to soldiers from the Mexican-American War (1846–48). All were mingled in Section 1 of the cemetery—also
known as the officers’ section—where Montgomery Meigs, Abner Doubleday, John Wesley Powell, and distinguished Civil War veterans
already slept. Their close-set tombstones, situated on six rolling acres near the Fort Myer gate, told of the nation’s troubled
birth, its violent coming of age, and its precarious survival in a hostile world.
³⁹

One such grave marker, worn and discolored by time, belonged to Gen. James McCubbin Lingan, a Marylander who had fought alongside
L’Enfant and Washington in the War of Independence, in which he was wounded and jailed on a British prison ship. He finished the Revolution as one
of the war’s most respected officers. Years later, he attracted attention for his opposition to the nation’s next great conflict,
the War of 1812. He never fought in the later war, but he sacrificed everything for it, becoming perhaps the first American
to die for the First Amendment.
⁴⁰

A few weeks after the United States declared war on Britain in June of 1812, Lingan turned up in Baltimore to defend Alexander
Contee Hanson, publisher of the
Federal Republican and Commercial Gazette
. A Federalist like Lingan, Hanson ardently opposed the new war and forcefully said so in his paper—even after a mob of pro-war
Baltimoreans stormed Hanson’s office, wrecked the presses, and tore down the building. Hanson defiantly kept printing from
another site, informing readers that he would continue to criticize President James Madison’s ill-advised war. Goaded into
action by the paper’s inflammatory stance, Hanson’s neighbors took to the streets on July 27 and 28, promising violence. When
bricks started flying toward the publisher and his friends, Hanson shot into the mob, killing at least one man and wounding
others. The enraged crowd chased him, Lingan, and a handful of supporters into the city jail, where the men sought protection.
The crowd broke in, dragged Hanson and others down the stairs, beat them mercilessly, and left them for dead.
⁴¹

When rioters turned on Lingan, he ripped open his shirt. “Does this look like I am a traitor?” he cried, revealing an ugly
bayonet scar from his Revolutionary service. This gesture inflamed his attackers, who beat him to death. They tried to do
the same to Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, a Revolutionary hero, father of Robert E. Lee, and a defender of Hanson. Beaten
to a pulp and left for dead, Lee survived, but he was “as black as a negro, his head cut to pieces without any hat or any
shirt but a flannel one which was covered with blood,” according to an eyewitness. Crippled and partially blinded, Lee never
really recovered. For his part, Hanson played dead until friends managed to cart him away. He survived the war and won election
to the U.S. Senate.
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Within days of the Baltimore riots, Lingan’s broken body was quietly returned to a private cemetery in Georgetown. The chief
orator at his funeral was none other than George Washington Parke Custis, an ardent Federalist and master of the newly built Arlington estate. It was said that Custis spoke so movingly
that it prompted crying from “old warriors who had almost forgotten how to weep.” In the same spirit of delayed homage that
led to L’Enfant’s enshrinement at Arlington, Lingan’s body was recovered from Georgetown in 1908, ushered over the river,
and recommitted to earth to the sounds of brass hymns, rifle salutes, and stirring oratory.
⁴³

That same year, a middle-aged naval commander named Robert E. Peary struggled toward the North Pole, the Arctic grail that
had eluded him for more than two decades. Although his previous forays into the ice had claimed seven of Peary’s toes and
much of his fortune, this time he hoped finally to plant the Stars and Stripes at the top of the world, not only to win fame
for himself but also, as he put it, “for the honor and credit of this country.”
⁴⁴
Such patriotic talk was not unusual in those self-assured times, when John Philip Sousa took the Marine Band to play packed
houses, the Navy’s Great White Fleet toured the world on a prestige-building cruise, and Teddy Roosevelt unashamedly foresaw
“a new century big with the fate of mighty nations.”
⁴⁵

Mighty nations such as the United States established territories in the Philippines and the Caribbean, linked the oceans
by means of a new Panama Canal, and embraced figures such as Peary, who returned to a hero’s welcome in 1909, claiming to
have reached the North Pole.
⁴⁶
While these patriotic initiatives unfolded, the country reached into its past to restore the memory of figures such as L’Enfant
and ventured abroad to reclaim the patriarchs of key national institutions.

In this nationalistic spirit, Gen. Horace Porter, a famous Union officer appointed U.S. ambassador to France in 1897, devoted
part of his European assignment to searching for the lost grave of John Paul Jones, patron saint of the Continental Navy.
It took Porter six years to find what he believed to be Jones’s grave just outside Paris. The remains were removed, examined
closely, and shipped home in July 1905 under naval escort, accompanied by Rear Adm. Charles D. Sigsbee—he of the U.S.S.
Maine
catastrophe. Sailing up Chesapeake Bay in fine July weather, Sigsbee brought his squadron safely through to Annapolis, where
Jones was encrypted at the heart of the U.S. Naval Academy, in a chapel tomb described as “one of the most ornamental and
elaborate … in America.”
⁴⁷
A similar patriotic impulse inspired the retrieval of James Smithson, benefactor of the national museum, in 1904. The Smithsonian
Institution assigned its most famous regent, Alexander Graham Bell, to escort Smithson’s bones from Italy; President Roosevelt
ordered the warship Dolphin to accompany the funeral convoy from New York; and the museum’s English-born benefactor was seen
into a specially commissioned sepulcher, which still guards the entrance to Smithsonian headquarters today.
⁴⁸
By exalting such figures from the past, the country emphasized virtues considered essential to its future.

Ceremonies for L’Enfant, Lingan, Jones, and Smithson attracted considerable attention in their day, but virtually no controversy.
So many graves were being emptied and shifted that the burst of funerary activity came to appear almost normal. The Civil
War had hardened the quartermaster’s office to moving dead armies from one place to another, while the Spanish-American War
had taught that it was possible to recover compatriots from overseas, often under appalling conditions, with efficiency and
dignity. Hardly anyone noticed when Congress first considered L’Enfant’s disinterment in 1905; the bill sailed through with
only perfunctory debate and no hearings.
⁴⁹
If the cause was patriotic and handled with tact, such moves produced little fuss.

The pause between wars allowed time for such refinements at Arlington, where workers relocated graves, paved new roadways,
reseeded grass, and built new stone walls to replace wire fences as the twentieth century began. Down by the river on land
once worked by freedmen, the Agriculture Department took over some four hundred acres, plowed test plots, developed new crops,
and experimented with plants introduced from abroad. Rows of fresh tombstones appeared in the section of Arlington dedicated
to nurses from the Spanish-American War, a part of the cemetery where the women still occupy most of the real estate. Meanwhile,
the cemetery’s durable gardener, D. H. Rhodes, fine-tuned the landscape around the mansion, digging up Mrs. Lee’s garden,
grading the ground smooth, and planting new roses as a backdrop for the graves of Union officers. Around the edges, Rhodes
created a flower border spelling out the names of famous soldiers in blossoms, a medium he also employed to display a running
total of Unknowns at Arlington.
⁵⁰

By 1902, the army issued new regulations for its standard headstones, making them more durable, taller, and wider than before.
It also adopted more prominent markers for the graves of unknown sailors, soldiers, and marines—in place of the small square
stone blocks issued before 1903, the unidentified dead of the future would have standard marble slabs like others at Arlington,
with “Unknown” curving across the stone face.
⁵¹

Even in times of peace, however, Arlington was never far from the memory of war or the prospect of a new conflict. The summer
of 1908 brought the sound of sputtering airplane engines drifting over the cemetery, which combined with cheers from more
than two thousand voices late on the afternoon of September 17. A rickety biplane slid down the tracks at Fort Myer, hovered
uncertainly over the grass a few moments, and lurched into the sky at precisely five fourteen p.m.
⁵²