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Arlington was originally part of a 1,100-acre estate that John Parke Custis, Martha Washington's son, purchased in 1778. His son, George Washington Parke Custis, built Arlington House (now a yellowing museum in the midst of the cemetery), modeled after a Greek temple, on a plateau overlooking the Potomac River. The estate was inherited by Mrs. Robert E. Lee, Custis' daughter, and was the Lee home until Cavalry Colonel Lee resigned his commission in the U.S. Army and went off to Richmond on April 22, 1861 to take his place as a general officer in the Confederate Army.
The Urgent Problem. During the Civil War, the estate was occupied by Union troops; after the Battle of Bull Run, McDowell's forces retreated to Arlington, where Abraham Lincoln visited the troops. As the war progressed, Washington was turned into an armed camp, its hospitals filled with wounded and dying soldiers. The available cemeteries filled up rapidly, and burial became an urgent problem that weighed heavily upon Major General Montgomery C. Meigs, the Army's Quartermaster General, who was responsible for the military dead. One day, while he was walking in Washington, Meigs encountered Lincoln. The President noted that Meigs was distraught, asked him to go for a ride in his carriage.
The two crossed the Potomac to Arlington. Meigs was impressed by the beauty of the estate and the mansion, but his burial problems and bitterness against Lee suddenly overwhelmed him. Turning to Lincoln, he said: "Lee shall never return to Arlington." A few minutes later, as the two men strolled around the grounds of the estate, they came upon a detail of soldiers carrying the bodies of several of their comrades. Meigs halted the soldiers and asked them where they were going. They were going to the burial ground at Soldiers' Home in Washington. Meigs then turned to an Army captain and said, "Order out a burial squad and see that all the bodies in Arlington are buried on the place at once." He turned to a small terrace bordering the garden beside the mansion. "Bury them here," he ordered. Eventually, the bodies of General Sheridan and Admiral David Dixon Porter, as well as 2,111 unknown soldiers from Bull Run and the route to the Rappahannock River, were buried within a few yards of the mansion—on the theory that the Lees would never again live in a house surrounded by Union graves. They never did, although Robert E. Lee's son, George Washington Custis Lee, successfully sued for recovery of the estate after the Civil War, and then sold it back for $150,000.