c.2026, University of North Carolina Press $27.95 246 pages
The tombstones line up at attention, like the soldiers beneath them once did.
Thousands of fallen warriors, in fact, lay as far as you can see in this hallowed place, on these hallowed grounds. Arlington National Cemetery is known for honoring its dead. And as in the new book “Arlington: An African American History” by William A. Blair, it was once a home for the living.
In the year 1802, following the death of George Washington, the great man’s adopted grandson, George Washington Parke Custis moved his household to the top of a bluff near Washington, DC. The eleven-hundred-acre tract there was only part of what Custis had inherited; at age 21, he’d received thousand of acres, and somewhere around two hundred slaves.
He brought fewer than half of them with him to that land, later called Arlington.
Once the house was built, Custis set about running a “gentleman’s farm that allowed the owner to dabble in a variety of agriculture pursuits,” mainly crops of vegetables and flowers grown by the “unfree” people there. These were people who lived, ten at a time, in cabins of up to 350 square feet, and who worked in either Custis’s fields or his house. Custis was said to be a loose manager, allowing certain smallliberties for his slaves, careless with paperwork and money management.
When Custis died, his property passed to his children; his son-in-law, Robert E. Lee, became the executor of Custis’ estate, which was messy. By then, rumors claimed that Custis’s “unfree” people were to be freed, but the courts denied Lee’s efforts and there was a rebellion. Lee reportedly ordered a whipping for three people who tried to escape.
That story, true or not, continued to follow Lee after the Civil War.
By then, a thriving community had been established on Arlington grounds, a secure home for former slaves, refugees, their families, and a resting place for their dead, who lay today in a segregated section in hallowed ground…
In both his introduction and his final words, author William A Blair mourns the loss of history on Arlington’s grounds, and the wrong done to the people who toiled there. You will, too, when you read “Arlington: An African American History.”
While this is absolutely an account based in fact, documents, long-done interviews, and public record, Blair’s narrative often feels like a novel, as he makes the “unfree” people at Arlington come alive, starting decades before their emancipation. Readers are given a good timeline for their everyday lives, and for Freedman’s Village, which came later and is now little more than dust. The outrages that happened to make it so are still vivid in Blair’s telling, and the rest of the story, one that takes us almost to the twentieth century, will make you sad.
