Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial
By early 1864, the military cemeteries of Washington, D.C., and Alexandria, Virginia, were rapidly filling with war dead. Quartermaster General of the United States Army Montgomery C. Meigs proposed using of the Arlington estate as a cemetery. United States Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton approved the establishment of a military cemetery on June 15, 1864, creating Arlington National Cemetery. Meigs believed that since Lee had committed treason in deciding to fight against the Union, denying Lee use of the mansion after the war was a rough form of justice. Meigs decided that a large number of burials should occur close to Arlington House to render it unlivable. Officers were to be buried next to the main flower garden south of the house, and the first burial occurred here on May 17. Meigs ordered that additional burials commence immediately on the grounds of Arlington House in mid-June. When Union officers bivouacked in the mansion complained and had the burials temporarily stopped, Meigs countermanded their orders and had another 44 dead officers buried along the southern and eastern sides of the main flower garden within a month.
Tanner Amphitheater
The popularity of Arlington as a site for patriotic meetings and Civil War remembrance events soared after the establishment of Decoration Day (later known as Memorial Day). Spontaneous decoration of Civil War graves and the maintenance of cemeteries had occurred since the early days of the war in both the North and the South since the earliest days of the war. John A. Logan, a former Major General in the Union Army, had been elected "Commander in Chief" of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization for Union Civil War veterans. Aware of the growing acceptance of Decoration Day as a holiday, Logan issued a statement on May 5, 1868, calling for "Decoration Day" to be observed nationwide on an annual basis. Logan set the date for May 30, because it was not the anniversary of any particular battle.