The Flood Line

Henry Ashton. Arlington, in the United Kingdom of America. Monday, 9 May 1864.

One tree is older than the house. A single oak on the crest was standing when the house was built, and in 1864, when the Quartermaster-General's men were clearing for the first burials, Lee refused to have it felled. It still stands, a little below the terrace, and no grave has been dug within its reach.

The Universal Register: Robert E. Lee National Cemetery

By the spring of 1864 there was nowhere left in the capital to bury anybody.

The war had been over since the autumn, and the dying had not stopped. I do not think anybody had expected that, though everybody should have. The hospitals on the Axis were as full that winter as they had ever been, with the sick from the camps, and the men who had been wounded in the last campaigns and had taken all that time to die, and the prisoners, and the men who had come home from the south with fevers they had caught there and gave to one another in the wards; and every morning the carts went out from the hospitals to the burying grounds, and every burying ground in the District was full, and the soldiers’ ground by the old asylum was full, and the churchyards were full, and they had begun putting men into the ground two to a grave and then three. I saw a sexton at one of the churches on the hill turn a cart away in February. He was not unkind about it. He simply had nowhere to put what was in it.

The Quartermaster-General wanted ground that was near, and dry, and on the right side of the roads and the weather, and that could be reached from the hospitals in a morning, and there was only one piece of ground that answered. It was across the river, on the bluff, below the Colonel’s house.

I do not know how it was asked, or who asked it. I know that the Colonel knew exactly what the ground was wanted for, because I was in the farmhouse on the crest when the Quartermaster-General’s officer came to him in March, and I heard him say so; and I know that he did not ask for a day to think about it. He said that the ground was not his to sell alone, because it had come to him through his wife, and that he would write to her. That was all he said. The officer went away. A fortnight later the conveyance was drawn.

They signed it in the house, on a Saturday at the end of March, in the hall, which had been shut since the spring of 1861 and smelled of it. Mrs Lee was brought over from wherever she was living that spring, which I did not know and did not ask, in a closed carriage, and carried up the steps in her chair, and wheeled into the hall, where a table had been set out with the deed on it and a lawyer from the capital and a clerk of the Quartermaster-General’s; and the Colonel stood beside her. I was there because he had asked me to be one of the two witnesses. I did not know why he chose me, and I did not ask that either. I think now that he wanted somebody there who would not make anything of it.

The price was a valuation, made by a surveyor from Baltimore whom neither of them had met, of the ground as ground, at what it would have fetched from anybody: so much the acre for the slope and so much for the woods, exactly, with nothing added for whose it had been and nothing taken off for what it was wanted for. I saw the figure. I will not give it to Your Majesty, because it is theirs, and because it does not matter; it was neither a gift nor a sacrifice, and that was the point of it. I do not know what they did with the money. Nobody does.

The Colonel signed first. Then he turned the deed round on the table and held the inkstand, and Mrs Lee signed beside him, slowly, in a hand that had been a very good hand and was now unsteady, because her fingers were bad; and the lawyer witnessed it, and I witnessed it, and the clerk sanded it and took it away. Nobody said anything that I remember. Mrs Lee sat for a while afterwards in her chair, in the hall of the house where her father had lived and she had been married and her children had been born, and looked up the stairs. Then she asked to be taken home, and they carried her down the steps to the carriage, and the Colonel walked beside the chair with his hand on the back of it, and did not let go of it until she was in.

I have read since, in a newspaper, that it was the strangest sale of land ever made in America: that a general sold his own lawn so that the army he served could bury its dead on it, and then went back across the ravine to his fortifications as though nothing had happened. That is exactly what he did. He went back to the farmhouse and read the morning’s returns, and in the afternoon he rode the lines.

He gave me the laying out of it the next day.

He said, “You will want to keep them above the water, Mr Ashton,” and that was the whole of my instructions; but I understood them, because I knew that ground. The estate runs from the bluff where the house stands down a long open slope to the river flats, and the flats flood. Everybody in the capital knows that the river comes up in the spring, and that some springs it comes up a great deal farther than others, and I had drawn that river three times and knew how far it had come in the years I had drawn it. But I had only been drawing it for seven years, and the dead were to be there for a good deal longer than that, and I did not want to set them on ground that the river would come back for in a spring that nobody living remembered.

So I went looking for the highest water anybody had evidence of.

I found some of it on the ground. There were drift lines in the woods along the bottom of the slope, old ones, rotten timber and wrack lodged in the forks of the trees well above where the ordinary floods came; and there was a mark cut on the wall of the old springhouse with a date beside it, in a hand I did not know, from before I was born. I found some of it in the Colonel’s own notes. He had surveyed that whole reach of the river as a young officer, in the ‘thirties, and he had marked on his survey the line of a great freshet that had been told to him then by people who had seen it, and the line was a good deal higher than the springhouse.

And then I went and found the people who had seen it.

The people of the estate had gone. The Colonel had freed his father-in-law’s people by deed in the autumn of 1862, as I have told Your Majesty, on the last day the will allowed; and they had not stayed on the estate, because nothing had been offered them there, and those who had stayed in the district had gone across the river into the capital, into the neighbourhoods that had grown up out of the camps. I went there to look for them. I asked at a church, and at a smithy, and in the end at a cookshop on a muddy street below the canal, and I found an old man named Abel, who had worked the river fields at Arlington for fifty years, and who was sitting on a bench outside the cookshop in the sun with his hands on a stick.

I asked him about the water. He knew. He told me about the great freshet, which had come in a spring when he was a young man, and how high it had come, and which fence it had come over and which it had not, and how they had carried the stock up to the house and had sandbagged the springhouse and had worked three days and nights without sleep; and he told me, without my asking, where the water had come the next time, and the time after that. He drew the line for me in the mud of the street with the end of his stick, the bend of the river and the slope and the fences, and put the highest water a fence above the Colonel’s line, and a long way above the springhouse.

I asked him how he could be sure. He looked at me as if I were a fool, which in that matter I was, and said that he had carried the sandbags.

I asked him his other name, which I do not think I had ever before in my life asked of a man who had been owned, and he told me, and I wrote it in my field book, beside the line he had drawn. It is in my field book still. It is not on the drawing that went to the department, which says only that the sections were set above the highest water of which evidence could be found; and I have thought since that a drawing ought to say where its evidence came from, and that mine did not, and that this is the kind of omission I have been making all my life.

I set the line a fence above his. Every section that I laid out that spring lies above it, and none of them has ever had water in it, and I have been told that none ever will.

The Quartermaster-General’s men came across the river in the middle of April to clear.

The slope below the house was pasture, and it needed only to be marked; but the hollows behind the crest were oak woods, old ones, and the first sections were to run back into them, and the oak had to come down. They were mostly civilian labourers, hired in the capital, with axes and teams; and with them, because there was digging to be done and there was always digging to be done, a detail of the regiment that had dug the Colonel’s works since the winter of 1862, forty men under a lieutenant, with their sergeant. The sergeant was Daniel. I had asked for the detail by its regiment. I had not asked for him, and I want to be clear about that; I do not know whether his lieutenant chose him or whether it was his turn. But he was there, with his spade, on the first morning, and he saluted me, and I returned it, and we did not say anything else that day.

They cut the hollows hard. I am sorry for that now, a little, and I was not sorry then; the woods were in the way of the rows, and the dead were coming whether the woods were there or not. By the end of the second week the hollows behind the crest were stumps and brush piles, and the axe crews had worked up the slope towards the house, and on the Friday they came to the oak.

It stood on the crest a little below the terrace, by itself, a great white oak, wider through the trunk than a man could reach round, and older than the house; it had been standing, the Colonel told me afterwards, when his father-in-law built the house, and had been left standing then for the same reason that I was about to give the order to fell it, which was that it was in the way of something. It was in the way of the second section. I had drawn the section across it. I had not thought about it at all; it was a tree on a drawing.

The axe crew had their ropes on it and the first notch cut when the Colonel rode up from the farmhouse on Traveller.

He did not hurry. He came up along the crest at his usual walk and reined in by the tree and looked at it, and at the notch in its trunk, and at the men with the axes, and at me. Then he said, to the foreman of the crew, quite quietly, “Not that one.” The foreman looked at me. I said, “Not that one,” and the foreman took his crew away to the next.

The Colonel sat looking at the tree a while longer. Then he said, “It was here before the house, Mr Ashton. It may stay.” And then: “Draw round it.” And he turned Traveller and rode back along the crest to the farmhouse at a walk.

I drew round it. And when I went to mark the new line of the section that afternoon, Daniel was standing by the tree with his spade, where his detail was clearing brush at the edge of the hollow, and he said, without being asked, that I would not get a grave within forty feet of that tree in any case, sir, for the roots; that he had dug for posts under oaks like it at Marlfield when he was a boy and had broken two spades doing it. I said that I would keep the graves out of its reach. He said, “Yes, sir,” and went back to the brush. I have never known whether he said it because it was true, which it was, or because he wanted the tree to stay as much as the Colonel did, and had found a way of saying so that a sergeant could say to a major. I think it was both. It generally was, with him.

No grave has been dug within its reach. I do not think any ever will be.

The first of them came across the river on Monday the ninth of May.

They came in two wagons from the hospitals on the Axis, over the bridge and up the road to the crest, in plain coffins, with their names chalked on the lids; and the detail had dug the first row the week before, along the top of the first section, below the terrace, where I had marked it, a straight row of graves with the earth heaped beside each one, and a chaplain was waiting, and the Quartermaster-General’s lieutenant with his book. There were eleven that morning. Eight of them were white soldiers of the Crown. Two were rebel prisoners who had died in the hospital on the Axis where my brother had lain. And one was a private of one of the Black regiments, from the camps below the town, who had died of a fever in the same hospital the week before.

The lieutenant with the book came to me when the wagons were unloaded. He was a young man, very correct, from somewhere in New England, and he had his orders and his book and his list, and he asked me, with the list in his hand, where the coloured soldier was to go. He did not mean anything by it. He meant, I think, that there was a question about it, which there was; there was a question about it everywhere in the Army that year, and nobody had settled it, and nobody had told him. He was asking whether there was to be another row, at the bottom of the slope, or at the edge of the woods, or somewhere else.

I want to tell Your Majesty exactly how I answered him, because I have been praised for it since, by people who suppose that it was a decision, and it was not.

Daniel was standing at the end of the row. His detail was there to fill the graves when the chaplain had done, and he was standing at the end of the row with his spade, at attention, as a sergeant stands when an officer is near, looking at nothing; and the lieutenant had asked his question within ten feet of him, in an ordinary voice. And I found that I could not say anything, with Daniel standing there, except what I said. I said, “The next grave in the row.” The lieutenant wrote it in his book. And the private of the Black regiment was buried in the next grave in the row, between a corporal from Ohio and a rebel from North Carolina, and the chaplain read the same service over all three, and the detail filled the graves.

I should like to say that I thought about it, and decided it, as an officer ought to decide things. I did not think about it at all. I said it because I could not have said anything else with Daniel standing at the end of the row, and if he had not been standing there I do not know what I would have said. I set that down because it is true, and because I have come to think that a good many of the right things that were done in the war were done in that way, by men who could not face somebody, and that it is no great credit to them, and that the things were right all the same.

Nobody ever asked the question again, at Arlington, while I was there. The rows went on down the slope, and the dead went into them in the order in which they came across the river, soldiers of the Crown and rebels and Black soldiers and white, and over each of them the carpenter put up a painted board, all of one pattern, with his name and his rank and his regiment and the date, and nothing else, because there was no time to put anything else and nobody could think of anything else that ought to be put. What will be done about the rebels when the boards rot and have to be replaced, I do not know. Somebody will have to decide that, one day, and I hope it is not decided by a man who cannot face anybody.

When the detail marched off that evening, Daniel fell them in at the end of the row and marched them down the road to the river, and did not look back at me, and I did not expect him to.

In the same year the Colonel was raised to the Lords.

He was made a viscount, Viscount Lee, plainly, with no place after it, which I was told he had asked for himself and which nobody had ever asked for before. He did not tell me so, or tell me why. He did not tell me anything about it at all; I read it in the newspaper, like everybody else, and when I congratulated him at the farmhouse door he thanked me pleasantly and asked me whether the third section was drained. The newspapers in Richmond were very angry. They said that it was the price of his treason, paid at last, and they printed the title with a black border round it, and I was told that it was read aloud in the taverns of King George County as a joke. I believe it was meant in the capital as an honour, and I believe the ministry knew perfectly well how it would be received in Virginia, and did it anyway, and that the Colonel knew both those things and accepted it for a reason that he never gave to anybody. I have my own idea of the reason. I will keep it, as he kept his. Whatever he thought of it, he rode the lines the next morning, as on every other morning.

I go back to Arlington sometimes, in the evening, when my work allows. I stand on the crest below the terrace, by the oak, and look down the slope at the rows going down towards the river and stopping, a long way above it, at the line that an old man drew for me in the mud with the end of his stick; and across the water at the city, with the Axis running up from the river to Charter Hill, and Parliament House at the top of it, and Columbia Palace at the far end, which is the view that the Quartermaster-General wanted and the reason the ground was chosen. It is the finest prospect of the capital that there is. The dead have it now. I think that was the Colonel’s idea, though he never said so; and I think it is the only thing in this account that I am certain was right.