The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery by Micki McElya (review)

Over 4 million people annually visit Arlington National Cemetery, clicking photographs of John F. Kennedy's gravesite, the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and the National Mall from the heights at Arlington House. In the cemetery gift shop, they can purchase its histories. Most are flashy coffee-table books that inspire patriotic sentiment by relating the narratives of the military dead who came to lie in the cemetery's pristinely ordered rows of graves. Yet Arlington National Cemetery's history, symbolism, and meaning is far deeper and more nuanced than any of the gift-shop books relate. Today, it is America's most hallowed grounds, but it began as a plantation sanctified by the sweat, tears, and blood of slaves and then by the sacrifices of Union soldiers willing to die to destroy such monuments to American slavery.

Meticulously researched and engagingly written, Micki McElya's The Politics of Mourning considers the many layers of Arlington's narrative, revealing how the cemetery is not only a place of remembrance but one of erasure and repurposing as well. At the heart of her analysis is the incongruence between the memory of Arlington—the purposeful creation of a narrative that encapsulates the breadth of American history in order to promote national pride—and the history of Arlington—a broader and more inclusive story that, if given the respect deserved, provides "an opportunity to expand the contours of the honorable and brave, not diminish them … an opportunity to forge a vision of national belonging and identification that is dedicated to remembering through reckoning, rather than forgetting" (11).

The public began visiting Arlington in the 1850s, when it was one of Robert E. Lee's plantations (actually belonging to his wife, Mary Custis) and home to hundreds of slaves. In many ways, postbellum Lost Cause history so powerfully transformed the narrative of those late antebellum years with myths of the faithful slave and benevolent paternalism that interpretation at Arlington House today continues to echo those themes. McElya masterfully disabuses us of accepting those notions, however, uncovering Lee's brutal use of his slaves and punishment of runaways. The irony, then, is that Arlington House today is a memorial to Lee when it actually belonged to Mary and was the permanent home for hundreds of African Americans. Even before Arlington's appropriation as a cemetery, blacks and white women were erased from the landscape.

The thrust of the book is that, as America's most sacred space, Arlington plays a central role in defining who is honorable in life and in death. The early erasure of blacks and white women, then, portended poorly for their inclusion among the honorable. The story of how the plantation became a cemetery, much of which will be familiar to scholars of the era, populates the landscape with honorable burials, pausing on occasion to note the segregation of graves for U.S. Colored Troops (officially catalogued as "contraband") alongside those for slaves and freedpeople, efforts to extricate Confederate remains from graves of unknown soldiers, and rules against the burial of wives with their husbands. Even as Montgomery Meigs worked to expand the cemetery's symbolic purpose by relocating into Arlington the remains of soldiers from earlier wars, the continued exclusion of others narrowed the definition of honor. McElya emphasizes this point by noting efforts to remove Freedman's Village, which had arisen at Arlington during the war, displacing people who viewed the landscape as their homes.

The history of Arlington is not just about who was or was not interred there. McElya makes a convincing argument that the politics of mourning are important to understanding Reconstruction-era policy toward freed-people's communities, the passion of Radical Republicanism, the rising role of tourism at the turn of the twentieth century, and the monument campaigns of early twentieth-century America that culminated in sectional [End Page 683...