On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery

Created at the end of the Civil War, Arlington National Cemetery has become a part of the landscape as fixed in the national imagination as the White House or the Capitol building. The mansion at Arlington's heart, and the rolling hills on which it sits, had been the family plantation of Robert E. Lee before he joined the Confederacy; strategic to the defense of Washington, Arlington became a Union encampment, a haven for freedmen, and a pauper's cemetery for soldiers dying in the nation's bl…