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.
Arlington National Cemetery mismanagement controversy
On December 22, 2011, Army officials released the report mandated by Congress in December 2010. The report stated that cemetery officials had completed photographing and documenting every burial marker at Arlington and double-checked the photographic records against the cemetery's 500,000 paper records (which had also been scanned and were now available electronically). The double-checks revealed that records regarding 64,230 (about one-quarter) of the cemetery's 259,978 burial sites contained "discrepancies" that required additional investigation. Arlington National Cemetery officials said in the report that they believed these problems were minor, such as typos in names or dates of death, and that another six months would be needed before these discrepancies could be resolved. Army officials said this did not necessarily mean that remains are buried in the wrong graves, but could not rule it out. The report also found that many burial and management records from the American Civil War period are missing, many headstones are in such disrepair that they cannot be read, and that significant changes in burial procedures over the years have made it difficult to maintain records and keep track of burials.