United States v. Lee (1882)
With local cemeteries in Alexandria County and Alexandria filling rapidly with war dead, Quartermaster General of the United States Army Montgomery C. Meigs proposed using of the Arlington estate as a cemetery. The first burial there was made on May 13, 1864. United States Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton approved the establishment of a military cemetery on June 15, 1864, creating Arlington National Cemetery. By the end of the war in April 1865, more than 16,000 people had been buried at Arlington. In September 1866, a memorial and a burial vault (containing the remains of 2,111 U.S. and Confederate soldiers who died at the First Battle of Bull Run, Second Battle of Bull Run, and along the Rappahannock River) were buried in Lee's former wildflower garden on the mansion's east side beneath the Civil War Unknowns Monument, a memorial to honor unknown soldiers who had died during the American Civil War.
List of memorials and monuments at Arlington National Cemetery
In 1778, John Parke Custis purchased a tract of sylvan land on the Potomac River north of the town of Alexandria, Virginia. This land became the Arlington Estate. In time, his granddaughter, Mary Anna Randolph Custis, inherited the estate. She married Robert E. Lee, an impoverished lieutenant in the United States Army, in June 1831. With the outbreak of the American Civil War on April 12, 1861, Robert E. Lee resigned from the United States Army and took command of Virginia's armed forces on April 23. Mary Custis Lee fled the house on May 17, and Union troops occupied Arlington Estate and Arlington House on May 24.