Confederate Memorial (Arlington National Cemetery)
Arlington National Cemetery was established in June 1864 as a cemetery for Union (United States of America) Civil War dead. The first military burial at Arlington (a white soldier, William Henry Christman) was made on May 13, 1864, close to what is now the northeast gate in Section 27. However, formal authorization for burials was not given by Major General Montgomery C. Meigs (Quartermaster General of the United States Army) until June 15, 1864.
Confederate Memorial (Arlington National Cemetery)
On June 5, 1899, Lewis and other Confederate veterans sent a petition to President McKinley asking that the Confederate dead at Arlington be disinterred and reburied in a "Confederate section". McKinley approved of the idea. Former Confederate Brigadier General Marcus Joseph Wright (by 1898 an agent of the War Department collecting Confederate war records) drafted legislation to approve the reinterments, and Senator Joseph Roswell Hawley (a former brevet major general of volunteers for the Union) introduced it in Congress. Congress approved the bill in 1900 and authorized $2,500 for the plan, which specified that the reburials occur near the field where Spanish–American War dead had recently been interred. McKinley signed the bill into law on June 6, 1900. A list of the dead at both Arlington and the Soldiers' Home was published so that families who wished to do so might remove their loved ones' remains from Arlington and reinter them closer to home.