The site of the first burials at Arlington National Cemetery, June 1864. Image: National Archives.
The creation of Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia occurred 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 war.
Earlier in the war, 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 1864, roughly 8,000 soldiers had been buried at this asylum. President Abraham Lincoln had access to a cottage on the grounds of the Old Soldiers’ Home, and spent considerable time there from 1862 to 1864. On May 13, 1864, however, the cemetery at the Old Soldiers’ Home had reached capacity and “the Secretary of War directed that a new site be selected on Lee’s farm, at Arlington, Va.”
Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs previously agreed that Arlington—an 1,100-acre estate situated across the Potomac River from the nation’s capital—would become the New National Military Cemetery, where soldiers who died in Washington area hospitals would be buried in the aftermath of the Wilderness Campaign. A graduate of West Point, Montgomery C. Meigs had worked and socialized with Robert E. Lee before the war. The efficient and talented quartermaster general became a bitter foe of all secessionists once the fighting began, however.
The first two burials at Arlington took place on May 13, 1864, the exact day the Soldiers’ Home cemetery had filled up. There would be six more burials on May 14, 1864. By the end of June 1864, there were 2,600 Union soldiers interred at Arlington. In her classic book Reveille in Washington, Margaret Leech wrote, “The cemetery at Soldiers’ Home was full, and at Arlington fresh graves began to blot the green acres which surrounded the mansion of Robert E. Lee. While death rattled across the Long Bridge, every incoming steamer carried its consignment of corpses.”
Below are more details on the first eight burials at Arlington National Cemetery. All of the first graves at Arlington were dug by one of Lee’s former slaves, Jim Parks, who would later recall the spot where, as Grant’s campaign continued, “coffins had been piled in long rows like cordwood.” Parks was also a young man at the time just like the soldiers he buried. Each of the early graves received a pine headboard, painted white with black writing. Later headboards would be replaced with marble gravestones.
The list of first burials at Arlington. Image: National Archives.
MAY 13, 1864
Private William Christman, 67th Pennsylvania Infantry
The first burial at Arlington, on an especially unlucky Friday the 13th, was of Private William Christman of the 67th Pennsylvania Infantry. Christman, a farm laborer during peacetime like so many Civil War soldiers, was only twenty years old. He had enlisted on March 25, 1864, but never saw combat. On May 1, he was diagnosed with the measles; he died on May 11 at Lincoln General Hospital in Washington, D.C. While Christman had been in the hospital, his regiment, the 67th Pennsylvania, had been outflanked on the early evening of May 6 during the waning hours of the Battle of the Wilderness, while serving as part of Brigadier General Truman Seymour’s brigade.
Image: by author.
Private William McKinney, 17th Pennsylvania Cavalry
The second burial on May 13, Private William McKinney, also died of illness. This isn’t surprising. Soldiers were two times more likely to die of an illness than from a battlefield wound, during the Civil War. McKinney had been admitted to an Alexandria, Virginia, hospital with a diagnosis of pneumonia, and died on May 12, 1864. A former sawmill worker, McKinney joined the 17th Pennsylvania Cavalry on March 16, 1864. He was only seventeen years old. It’s very likely that William’s father, John D. McKinney, attended the funeral at Arlington.
Image: by author.
MAY 14, 1864
Private William Blatt, 49th Pennsylvania Infantry
Blatt was mortally wounded during the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House on May 10, 1864. While participating in Colonel Emory Upton’s famous assault, Blatt was shot in the head. Still alive, he was transported to Washington, D.C., but eventually died at the Sixth Street Wharf, before he could be taken to Armory Square Hospital. More than half of Private Blatt’s regiment suffered casualties during the attack on May 10. Today, Blatt is remembered as the first battlefield casualty to be interred at our preeminent national cemetery.
Image: by author.
Private William Reeves, 76th New York Infantry
Within moments of the beginning of Grant’s Overland Campaign on May 5, 1864, a Minie ball tore through Reeves’ left cheek and exited his right cheek. He was eventually transported to Washington, D.C., and admitted to Stanton General Hospital on May 11. Just one day later, Reeves suffered a secondary hemorrhage. Surgery proved unsuccessful and Reeves died of exhaustion at 4:00 a.m. on Friday, May 13, eight days after he had been shot in the Wilderness. He was only nineteen years old. I write about the experiences of Private William Reeves, during and after the Battle of the Wilderness, in my book A Fire in the Wilderness: The First Battle Between Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee.
Image: by author.
Private Peter Rawson, 1st New Jersey Infantry
Rawson, who came from a poor family, was marked “absent, sick” by his unit on March 25, 1864. He died in Carver Hospital in Washington, D.C.
Private William Starks, 5th New York Cavalry
Starks was eighteen when he enlisted on March 30, 1864 in New York. According to regimental records, he died at Camp Stoneman in Washington, D.C., on April 20, 1864.
Private William Gibbons, 5th Michigan Infantry
Gibbons enlisted at age thirty at Pontiac, Michigan, on February 4, 1864 and joined his unit at Camp Bullock, near Brandy Station, Virginia, on March 9, 1864. He died of disease on April 22, 1864 at Lincoln Hospital in Washington, D.C.
Henry Smith, Civilian Employee, Quartermaster General’s Office
Smith had been working as a teamster before his death on May 14, 1864.
SECTION 27
Section 27 today. Image: by author.
The first burials at Arlington, at the far northeast corner of the estate—in what became known as Section 27—would soon become the site where African American civilians and soldiers were buried. Quartermaster General Meigs would demand that white soldiers be buried closer to the Lee mansion in the future. By mid-1867, there were 3,450 African Americans buried in Section 27. Only a relative handful of white soldiers—Christman, McKinney, Blatt, Reeves, and the others listed above—remained alongside them.