If you can see the world in a grain of sand, you definitely should be able to see a nation’s history in the 639 acres of its most cherished veterans cemetery. And so it is at Arlington National Cemetery.
The cemetery was born during the Civil War for reasons both personal and practical. Personal because the Arlington plantation was owned by the in-laws of the traitor Robert E. Lee and turning it into a graveyard appealed to Montgomery C. Meigs, the U.S. Army quartermaster general who had once considered Lee a friend. Practical because as the war progressed, Washington found itself awash in bodies of both soldiers and civilians. Some bodies were even stored on barges in the Potomac awaiting burial.
By 1864, Washington’s civilian population had swelled as a result of a decree issued in the summer of 1861 stipulating that any enslaved person who reached the safety of Union lines would be considered a contraband of war. Thousands came north.
“Contraband is the term for confiscated enemy property,” said Allison Finkelstein, senior historian at Arlington National Cemetery. “Enslaved people were considered property of the Confederacy. Contraband is a dehumanizing term, difficult for us to wrap our heads around today, but it explains why the military took leadership of what was essentially a refugee problem.”
Escapees from the South lived in government-sponsored communities around Washington called Freedman’s Villages. They worked to support the war effort. Individuals who died in those camps were eligible for burial at a military cemetery, which is what Arlington became when William Henry Christman was laid to rest there on May 13, 1864.
Christman, who was White, was buried in what is today Section 27 but was then known as the lower cemetery. (Arlington’s sections weren’t numbered until the 1940s, said Stephen Carney, command historian at the cemetery.) This was also the area the Army selected to bury formerly enslaved refugees to Washington. Some 3,800 would be interred there.
These men, women and children had faced tremendous odds coming north, then landed in a city that was gripped not only by war, but also by deadly disease. Smallpox, cholera, dysentery and tuberculosis were rampant in Washington. Those felled by disease were buried in Section 27.
Why are there so many gravestones etched with just “Child”? Cemetery historian Carney suspects many of them could be stillborn infants. Ric Murphy, co-author of the 2020 book “Section 27 and Freedman’s Village in Arlington National Cemetery,” thinks some could be children who died on their way north with family members.
“As much as we hope children don’t get separated from their parents, often times in time of war, they do,” Murphy said. “The whole thing was just heart-rending all around.”