On Hallowed Ground The Story of Arlington National Cemetery

by Poole, Robert M.

• ISBN13: 9780802715487
• ISBN10: 0802715486
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-10-27
• Publisher: Walker Books

Summary

The story of how Arlington National Cemetery became a venerable monument to service and sacrifice.On Hallowed Groundopens with the long-delayed funeral of four servicemen, brought home for final honors at Arlington National Cemetery almost forty years after they disappeared in Vietnam. To understand how this tradition of extraordinary care for our war dead began, Robert Poole traces the founding of Arlington Cemetery on what had been the family plantation of Robert E. Lee. After resigning his commission in the U .S. Army, Lee left Arlington to command the Army of Northern Virginia. Arlington, strategic to the defense of Washington, D.C., became a U .S. Army headquarters and a cemetery for indigent Civil War soldiers before Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton made it the new national cemetery.Initially, there was no honor in being buried at Arlington; this began to change after the war, as the Union gathered thousands of hastily-buried casualties from nearby battlefields and reinterred them at Arlington, where they received the honors of a grateful nation. But the rites, rituals, and reverence associated with Arlington evolved over the next hundred years, paid through the blood of those who fought in the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II , the Korean War, the Cold War, Vietnam, Desert Storm, and Iraq and Afghanistan.Robert Poole paints an intimate, behind-the-scenes picture of the history and day-to-day operations of Arlington National Cemetery, America's most sacred ground.

Author Biography

Robert M . Poole, former executive editor of National Geographic, is the author of Explorers House. He is a contributing editor at Smithsonian and has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Preservation. He lives in McLean, Virginia.

Table of Contents

Prologue	p. 1
Disunion
Leaving Arlington	p. 9
Occupation	p. 22
"Vast Army of the Wounded"	p. 37
First Burials	p. 58
A Question of Ownership	p. 76
Reunion
"A Splendid Little War"	p. 105
L'Enfant's Grand View	p. 119
Known but to God	p. 133
A Time to Build Up	p. 160
"We Are All in It-All the Way"	p. 176
The Nastiest Little War	p. 194
The Nation's Cemetery
"I Could Stay Here Forever"	p. 209
The Last Unknown	p. 230
War Comes to Arlington	p. 251
Taps	p. 263
Benediction	p. 269
Acknowledgments	p. 271
Arlington Chronology	p. 275
Regulations for Burial	p. 285
Notes and Sources	p. 287
Index	p. 341
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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