Free On Hallowed Ground by Robert M Poole Page A

awoke to find a neighborhood lot
filled with the naked bodies of soldiers awaiting their appointment with the undertaker, protests were raised. Such incidents
gave rise to indignant newspaper articles and to complaints from relief societies, which campaigned for better treatment of
the nation’s soldiers, living and dead, during that hectic year of 1862. Chaplains rallied at the Washington YMCA to call attention to another scandal: ordinary soldiers were being sent to their graves with no religious rites to mark
their passage. The War Department would eventually correct this oversight, even if it meant that a lone, overworked minister
had to dash around the cemetery all day murmuring a few lines of scripture over forty or fifty fresh burials. 41
    With deaths from the Peninsula Campaign filling Washington’s private graveyards to the bursting point, Congress responded with a new law creating the first military cemeteries on U.S.
soil. 42 On July 17, 1862, President Lincoln signed the omnibus bill, which empowered him to purchase new cemetery grounds “whenever
in his opinion it shall be expedient … for the soldiers who shall die in the service of the country.” 43 As a result of this legislation, fourteen military cemeteries came into being by the end of 1862, among them plots at the
Military Asylum, later known as the Soldiers’ Home, in Washington, D.C.; in Alexandria, Virginia; and in Annapolis, Maryland. Eleven other national cemeteries were opened in Kansas, Illinois,
New York, Kentucky, and other states; most were situated on military posts or adjacent to supply depots. 44 New York’s Cypress Hills National Cemetery, in Brooklyn, was established expressly for Confederate prisoners of war, their
guards, and Union soldiers who died in the city’s hospitals. 45
    The Soldiers’ Home in Washington was a soothing place to spend eternity. Situated on three hundred acres in the hills skirting the city, the reserve afforded
cool breezes, sweeping views, and a refuge from the push and shove of war. Some 150 disabled warriors, many of them veterans
of the Mexican campaign, lived on the site, shuffling between the main residence building, an infirmary, and a dining hall—all
set in deep, peaceful shade. The government had purchased the place with funds furnished by Gen. Winfield Scott, the durable
old Mexican War hero, who had demanded a $100,000 tribute from local authorities when his army seized Mexico City in 1847. 46
    By the time of the Civil War, the Soldiers’ Home had become a favorite destination for city dwellers in need of fresh air—most
famously for President Lincoln, who began commuting the three miles between the White House and his suburban retreat in the
summer of 1862. There he would relax at the Anderson Cottage in the evening, sitting on the porch in his slippers, reading
aloud from Shakespeare and other favorite books, swapping yarns with visiting friends, and finding some relief from the pressing
business of war—relief, but no escape. Even in these shaded hills, he slept among the fresh graves of soldiers he had sent
to their deaths. Week after week the wagons, piled with caskets, creaked into the cemetery, where workers were kept busy digging,
burying the dead, and setting new headboards in place. The graveyard was filling. 47
    So too was the capital, which bloomed from a village into a small city in the war years. Many of the newest citizens were
soldiers, officers, and government workers, but the war also triggered a flood of black refugees into Washington. In April 1862, when President Lincoln signed the first Emancipation Proclamation, freeing just those slaves in the capital,
about 14,000 blacks lived in Washington; of these, about 4,200 were the fleeing slaves known as contrabands. By the war’s end, the capital’s black population would
swell to as many as 40,000. 48 This later surge—made up of slaves sweeping into the capital on foot, in buggies, and in farm