Had the Civil War been avoided, or had Robert E. Lee remained loyal to the United States and fought in the Union army, he may never have been president of Washington College and buried there. His home before the war was Arlington, a hilltop estate near Washington D.C. that originally belonged to Lee’s wife’s family (per History). When Lee, after making his choice to resign from the Union army, was summoned to Richmond to receive a command (per American Heritage), he told his wife to leave their house. He correctly guessed that Arlington would be taken by the Union to prevent any attack on Washington from its high ground.
Arlington estate would, in time, become Arlington National Cemetery. It became so, in part, from an act of spite. Brigadier General Montgomery Meigs, who had once been a friend of Lee’s, despised him for turning traitor. Meigs commanded the troops stationed at Arlington, and as Washington cemeteries became filled with the dead of war, he started having casualties buried on Arlington’s grounds, so that the Lees could never return home without a reminder of the price of war.
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Meigs became one of those buried at Arlington, albeit well after the Civil War, and the cemetery’s reputation changed from a pauper’s grave born of anger to a solemn, historical place. The Lees never did return there, and it’s hard to imagine Lee’s burial there, had it ever been in the cards, as appropriate. But his family did successfully sue to reclaim the house in 1874 — and promptly sold it back to the U.S. government (per the National Park Service).
