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.
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.