A Place of Division and Reunification

When the Civil War broke out, the Potomac River became the dividing line between North and South. Shortly after Robert E. Lee resigned from the US Army in 1861, Union soldiers seized Arlington House. Sixty years later, a nation still healing from the Civil War built Arlington Memorial Bridge, connecting the Lincoln Memorial to Arlington House. What is now Arlington National Cemetery was once part of the 1,100-acre Arlington Plantation. In 1778, Martha Washington's son, John Parke Custis, bought the land that became Arlington Plantation, and after he later died in the Revolutionary War, the property passed to his son, George Washington Parke Custis. Beginning in 1802, George Washington Parke Custis had the mansion built to memorialize his adoptive grandfather, George Washington, with construction carried out by enslaved and free laborers. Prior to the Civil War, more than 200 enslaved people lived on the plantation, where cabins, workshops, fields, and even a slave cemetery dotted the land, and where a black and white community built homes, raised families, and struggled with questions of loyalty and freedom. In 1831, Mary Custis, George Washington Parke Custis' daughter, married Robert E. Lee in the family parlor. Arlington Plantation also served as a strategic defense for Washington, DC, and the mansion became headquarters for several Union officers. In 1864, the first military burials took place on the property, marking the beginning of Arlington National Cemetery. A 1925 law authorized restoring Custis-Lee Mansion, then used as a cemetery administrative building, to its historic appearance. In 1933, the National Park Service took over management of Arlington House. In 1955, President Eisenhower signed legislation making Arlington House a permanent national memorial to Robert E. Lee. On August 5, 1975, President Gerald Ford pardoned Robert E. Lee after the discovery of Lee's amnesty oath signed in 1865.

Arlington, Virginia · United States