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

Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery traces the founding of Arlington National Cemetery by examining the geographical landscape—most notably the enslaved population that served as its first occupants—and the politicized military climate that shaped burial policy, defined national mourning, and determined who was to be buried, honored, and nationally remembered. While 1864 is the official date given for the founding of the cemetery, McElya, like any good researcher of cemeteries, takes her start date from the earliest land ownership and land use on which the cemetery still stands. Constructed in 1778 under the ownership of his father, John Parke Custis, George Washington Parker Custis (also adopted grandson of first president George Washington) first established a plantation that housed Custis’s immediate family along with enslaved men, women, and children as a “shrine to George Washington . . . broadcast[ing] his family’s lasting significance to the nation and its leaders in the capital.” To this, McElya is quick to point out that it was the enslaved women of the plantation who kept and preserved the land on which Arlington National Cemetery currently sits, and have “molded the land there, buried their dead . . . their sweat blood and tears had already sanctified that ground long before 1864.” From the beginning to the end, the author challenges the origin of Arlington, but, more important, challenges the narrative put forth of who should be nationally honored and memorialized.

McElya’s research illustrates how the national cemetery reflects a narrowed and purposefully limiting view of American identity. It is an identity that negates the condition of African Americans and puts forth a more reconciliatory national character of black and white. What the author is resisting is the notion that death became the great equalizer for those who lost their lives serving this country. Their headstones might be the same, but if one peers closely enough, the military dead are bordered off and segregated in interment and memory. Once the Civil War ensued and the United States Colored Troops (USCT) fell as casualties of war, they were given segregated burial in the commonly called “Lower Cemetery.” “Buried at the far northeastern edge of the plantation,” McElya paints the spatial and racial segregation of these fallen heroes, as “[the USCT] joined other black people who died in [the] Washington-area and perhaps a few from Freedman’s Village [reconstructed living and working quarters for black persons in Union custody at Arlington], thus initiating the racial segregation of the national cemetery that persisted well into the twentieth century.” The “Lower Cemetery”—initially labeled “Contraband Cemetery” because during the war years, when enslaved persons under Union possession were branded contraband—was equipped with a black sexton and continued the racially bordered burial practices of slavery. All black people regardless of military status, service to one’s country, or heroic act were interred in this segregated site. McElya brings this point home by saying that not only were 600 Confederate soldiers buried within Arlington’s principal cemetery but also that the Lower Cemetery was utterly disregarded during Decoration Day (the ceremonial decorating of military gravestones). By simultaneously using slavery and the politics of war, the author uses death and burial to show how the contours of race greatly affected the origin and existence of Arlington National Cemetery.

Midway through the book, McElya questions for whom Arlington is a national cemetery and carries this theme to the end. For example, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, established in 1921 with the elaborate ceremonial burial of an unknown American World War I soldier, is turned into a teaching moment about national exclusivity. African Americans were segregated in military service and discriminated against during these war years. Yet the celebration of the unknown World War I hero is positioned as memorial for national belonging for our hero. McElya puts it within this context, forcing readers to understand the whiteness that undergirds the patriotism. McElya even brings up...