Alexandria National Cemetery

On May 24, 1861, Gen. Winfield Scott ordered eleven regiments of Union troops from Washington, D.C., across the Potomac River, where they captured Arlington and Alexandria. After their defeat in July at Manassas, Virginia, the Union Army began constructing fortifications to protect the capital city, with Fort Albany, Battery Rogers, and Fort Ellsworth near Alexandria anchoring the southern end of Washington's defenses, and the city became an important Union base of operations. The influx of troops to Alexandria created a need for military hospitals, and thousands of sick and wounded Union soldiers were treated there throughout the Civil War at Madison House Hospital, Old General Hospital, Sickel General Hospital, and Slough Barracks General Hospital, along with a large convalescent camp for recovering soldiers discharged from the hospital. Beginning in March 1863, the federal government actively recruited black men for the Union Army, and a few months later the War Department created the Bureau of United States Colored Troops (USCT), whose regiments fought in battles and engagements from Virginia to Texas; in February 1864, L'Overture General Hospital, designed by the Quartermaster Department, opened in Alexandria for the treatment of black soldiers and civilians. Because many soldiers died despite the numerous medical facilities, the federal government acquired 4 acres adjoining the city cemeteries in 1862 to bury the dead, and the burial ground, initially known as Soldiers Cemetery, later gained a Second Empire-style lodge of Seneca sandstone and a matching stone wall in 1871. Today, Alexandria National Cemetery is the final resting place of about 4,000 individuals, including 280 USCT soldiers, and a simple boulder monument with a bronze plaque, erected in 1922, honors four civilian employees of the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corp. who drowned in the Potomac River on April 24, 1865, while pursuing John Wilkes Booth, President Abraham Lincoln's assassin; their graves are near the monument.

Alexandria, Virginia · United States