How did Arlington become the National Cemetery?
Arlington was for many years the estate of Colonel Robert E. Lee. Lee had graduated at the top of his class at West Point and had faithfully served his nation as an Army Officer throughout the Mexican War and then in Engineering and Cavalry assignments throughout our young nation. At the onset of the Civil War, after first refusing the command of all Union forces, he volunteered his services to his home state of Virginia. During the course of the war, his former estate was seized by the Union Army, which made it a headquarters. In 1864, with Union dead piling up throughout the Washington area, the search for a suitable site for a military cemetery resulted in a recommendation from Major General Montgomery Cunningham Meigs (the Union Quartermaster General) that Lee’s former estate be converted to a burial ground. Meigs, a Southern native, had remained loyal to the Union and reportedly hated Lee for his service to the Confederate cause. Out of the death and destruction of the Civil War,
