On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery »

Robert M. Poole is an editor and writer whose assignments for Smithsonian and National Geographic have taken him around the world. He is the author of Explorers House:National Georgraphic and the World It Made, and is a contributing editor at Smithsonian. Poole has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Preservation.

Created at the end of the Civil War, Arlington National Cemetery has become a part of the landscape as fixed in the national imagination as the White House or the Capitol building. The mansion at Arlington's heart, and the rolling hills on which it sits, had been the family plantation of Robert E. Lee before he joined the Confederacy; strategic to the defense of Washington, Arlington became a Union encampment, a haven for freedmen, and a pauper's cemetery for soldiers dying in the nation's bloodiest conflict.

With the passage of time, new layers of meaning were added to Arlington, which would become our nation's most honored shrine. More than three hundred thousand rest in Arlington's 624 acres, representing every war the nation ever fought. Each tombstone tells a story, from the Tomb of the Unknowns, so carefully tended today, to the eternal flame at John F. Kennedy's grave to the final resting places of ordinary citizen-warriors sleeping among Arlington's rolling green hills. Their stories, and the cemetery's time-honored rituals—the horse-drawn caissons, the rifle salutes, the sounding of Taps—still speak to us all.

The Washington Post - Fergus M. Bordewich

The central character in On Hallowed Ground, Robert M. Poole's gracefully written, often deeply affecting history, cannot speak. However, Poole succeeds grandly in giving voice to the more than 600 acres of what virtually all Americans consider sacred soil.

Prologue 1

Part I Disunion

1 Leaving Arlington 9

2 Occupation 22

3 "Vast Army of the Wounded" 37

4 First Burials 58

5 A Question of Ownership 76

Part II Reunion

6 "A Splendid Little War" 105

7 L'Enfant's Grand View 119

8 Known but to God 133

9 A Time to Build Up 160

10 "We Are All in It-All the Way" 176

11 The Nastiest Little War 194

Part III The Nation's Cemetery

12 "I Could Stay Here Forever" 209

13 The Last Unknown 230

14 War Comes to Arlington 251

15 Taps 263

Epilogue 269

Benediction 271

Acknowledgments 273

Appendix I Arlington Chronology 277

Appendix II Regulations for Burial 287

Notes and Sources 289

Index 343