Until 1947, the black and white dead, with a tiny number of exceptions, were strictly separated: whites at the top of the hill, blacks at the bottom, in a cruelly symbolic demonstration of the races’ status in Jim Crow America. Black leaders were justifiably infuriated when the cemetery erected a monument to Confederate dead interred there when no such honor was given to the African Americans who had fought and died in the nation’s wars.
Poole fares better in his saddening account of the fate of the thousand or more freed slaves who during the Civil War were settled at Arlington in a deliberate thumb in the eye to the Lees (who later spent years trying unsuccessfully to recover their estate). “The new settlement at Arlington was applauded by those who believed that slavery was a sin and Lee was a traitor,” Poole writes. However, he adds, “Just as the federal effort at Reconstruction ran out of steam in the 1870s, compassion for Arlington’s freedmen seemed to waver.” Beginning in the 1880s, the freedmen and their descendants were unceremoniously expelled as the nation forgot its commitment to the rights of African Americans in the name of reconciliation with the South.
Like the nation itself, Arlington bears the scars of its history, as Poole eloquently shows. Today, black and white, officer and enlisted, male and female, recent arrivals from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Pvt. Christman’s Civil War comrades, lie intermingled on those grassy slopes overlooking the Potomac, in their melancholy democracy of the dead.