Reviews in American History

On his first Memorial Day as President, Barack Obama sent two wreaths to commemorate Civil War soldiers. The first was delivered to the African American Civil War Memorial, near the U Street Metro stop in the Shaw neighborhood, an overwhelmingly black district in an overwhelmingly black city. The second was sent from the White House across the Potomac River to a very specific area of Arlington National Cemetery, Section 16, specifically set aside for the bodies of Confederate soldiers. In the former case, Obama was the first U.S. President to send a wreath memorializing the sacrifice of black soldiers who fought to end slavery. In the latter case, he continued a century-old tradition, dating back to Theodore Roosevelt, recognizing the sacrifice of white, southern soldiers who fought to preserve it (p. 160). Each case, however, as Micki McElya demonstrates in The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery, is the product of long, complicated histories, and a range of battles involving race, gender, nation, and historical memory.

Throughout this fascinating book, McElya makes a strong case indeed that the struggle over who lived, worked, and was allowed to be laid to rest in Arlington is a powerful window into nearly the full sweep of United States history, particularly from the mid-nineteenth century on. As she writes in her introduction:

Since before its inception as a cemetery during the Civil War, Arlington has been the scene of pitched struggles over the use and shape of the place, struggles that have always been about the larger meanings of freedom, sacrifice, citizenship, honor, state authority, and the nation itself and about which bodies, alive and dead, are most representative, most capable and valuable, and most difficult to lose (p. 10).

These battles were consistently defined by several themes, including the dominant cultural narrative of sectional reconciliation after the Civil War, the establishment and maintenance of a white, patriarchal, and military definition [End Page 497] of national service and sacrifice, and a powerful shift from the bodies of the dead defining the landscape to the landscape itself defining the bodies.

McElya traces these struggles over seven chapters, along with an introduction and conclusion. The chapters proceed largely by chronology, weaving in thematic elements throughout. McElya makes use of a rich array of sources, including archival materials from several relevant collections in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., a number of historical periodicals, and other, more contemporary cultural texts. The entire project is also very well grounded in the secondary literature on history, memory, and the negotiation of meaning over memorials and other contested landscapes.

The first three chapters explore Arlington's long journey to becoming hallowed ground, beginning with land taken from "several Algonquian-speaking Indian communities" and colonized by white settlers to the large plantation bought and maintained by John Custis, stepson to George Washington and father-in-law to Robert E. Lee; from a union-occupied fortress during the Civil War to Freedman's Village; and, finally, from one of a network of national cemeteries to the national cemetery (p. 14). McElya begins her narrative with a long look at the early history of Arlington through the lens of a few key, but lesser-known figures. She takes a number of twists and turns in getting readers there, but ultimately it is worth the wait.

McElya makes a compelling case that while Arlington House was made both famous and infamous by memorializing Robert E. Lee (who never actually owned the plantation), it is Lee's wife, Mary, who is a far more intriguing and complicated figure in the struggle over the meaning of the house and its place in Arlington. In tracing Mary Lee's efforts to maintain and recover the homestead during and after the Civil War, McElya effectively deals with Lee's gendered connections to the landscape without glossing over the clear role of racialized hierarchies in Lee's assertions of her rights to Arlington. An angry letter from Lee, written...