The First Military Burials at Arlington National Cemetery
John Reeves is the author of A Fire in the Wilderness: The First Battle Between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee.
The creation of Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia occurred almost immediately after one of the worst days of violence and horror in American history.
On May 12, 1864, during the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, Union troops under Ulysses S. Grant engaged in bloody combat with Confederate forces commanded by Robert E. Lee for almost 24 hours. At the western tip of Lee’s fortifications — forever remembered as the Bloody Angle — the contest was particularly murderous. A reporter for the New York Times wrote, “In this angle of death the dead and wounded rebels lie, this morning, literally in piles — men in the agonies of death groaning beneath the dead bodies of comrades.” The fighting at Lee’s fortifications began at 4:35 a.m. on Thursday, May 12 and finally ended around 3 a.m. on Friday, May 13. Later that Friday, roughly 65 miles away in Arlington, Virginia, the first two Union soldiers would be buried at a new cemetery on the estate where Robert E. Lee and his family had lived prior to the Civil War.
Earlier in the conflict, deceased Union soldiers were buried at the cemetery at the Old Soldiers’ Home, a site three miles north of the White House in Washington, D.C. By May…
