I’m here with Robert Poole who is the author of On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington
National Cemetery. Welcome to the Archives, Bob. Thank you very much, glad to be here.
Talk a little bit about your research. I tried to approach the project as if it was a biography
of a place and that place happened to be Arlington. It’s front-loaded with the Civil War because
so much that happened at Arlington was formed by that tragic conflict. The research is from
all over but the great core of it is from the National Archives here in Washington.
Letters from families, saying, “What happened to our son, what happened to our brother,
he went off to war, we never saw him again. Could you please help us find him.” In the
process of your research, were there surprises for you? You know, I assumed that it had always
been the case that we brought people back from overseaes conflicts. That didn’t really
happen until there was a public outcry, again through letters from parents, from sons, from
brothers, saying, “What happened to my family member? He disappeared. You sent him to Europe,
bring him back. I want him home.” You also made use of three of our presidential libraries.
I did. I went to the JFK Library in Boston. I have a chapter on the JFK funeral. Which
was a huge event, not only for our nation but for Arlington Cemetery. Before the JFK
funeral there were three million visitors to Arlington each year. One year after it,
seven million visitors. The number of requests for burials at Arlington, because everyone
had seen the Kennedy funeral on television, the requests went from something like 4,000
a year to 7,000 a year. I think my favorite story in your book, the character who I’m
most close to now, is William Henry Christman. He didn’t have any particular thing about
the Union, or about slavery, or you know any of the things we associate with the fighting
of the Civil War. He signed up because his family needed the money, they were losing
the family farm. So he joined the Union Army. He never saw a day of battle. He died of peritonitis
in May 1864 and became the first military burial at Arlington, May 13, 1864. Did you
ever see William Henry Christman’s enlistment form? I did not! Here it is, with his signature
on the bottom. And his mother’s, his mother filed for his pension. In order to qualify
for a pension you had to prove relationship, so she submitted, this is the last letter
he wrote to her. This is wonderful. Before he died. So he is buried in Section 27. It’s
on the fringes of what was then an 1,100 acre plantation belonging to the Lee family, the
Robert E. Lee family. General Montgomery Meigs, when more bodies were available for burial,
he made sure they were buried around the Lee mansion. He wanted to make it so that the
Lee family would not be able to come back to Arlington after the war. Across the lane
there’s another part of section 27. You find tombstones which have a shield on
the face, and it’ll have a name, it’ll have a unit number and under that it will
say, USCT, United States Colored Troops. Fought as segregated units with white officers. Segregated
in life, segregated in death. That was the reality of the time and you see that walking
through, wherever you go in Arlington today. Everywhere you go you see the values of society
reflected. It’s a time capsule. Thank you Bob. I’m honored to be here, thanks very
much.